“The promise of ignition,” the black-clad specter observes. “It’s frightening, I know. But all growth begins on the far side of horror. It comes to us over the horizon of the future, trying to dwell beside us. A chance to step into it when we’re ready to find harmony.”

The mystic sighs. “But the fear remains fear, doesn't it, even if you know exactly what it's trying to tell you? Endtime can have a terrible sweetness. Forsake tomorrow. Lie back. Let entropy hold sway, carrying us and all the other stagnant things back into the void.”

What answer can the seeker give? Everything else she’s heard fits into the opposite side of something her mistress told her. She knows the words she’s meant to throw at such things in answer, to hold them away with.

“Do you often do this?” she asks, trying to put things back on a course she can know. “Talk around people?”

“I just like talking,” the mystic answers. She purses her lips. A pause. Then: “Do the paths I speak on cross into your periphery? Is that how I’m speaking around you?”

The earlier conversation with the scholar returns to the fledgling. “No,” she says at once. “I don’t care what you talk about. Everybody else around here has some big point they want me to take onboard. I don’t see why you should be any different.”

“I do enjoy talking to myself,” the woman in the black dress says. “But my points, my insights? Oh, from here on, I'll hoard those for myself. Whether you choose to make your own out of the echoes I leave behind, well... demons will do what demons will do.”

She nods to herself, ponders with an even-set brow, and resumes her monologue in the same elegiac tones. “Once it awakens to its nature, a singularity must devour everything inside it. I told them over and over that only I can make a home inside myself. I told them they must accept that there will always be more outside their borders than they can claim.”

She shrugs. “I am that I am. Blame, responsibility, virtue and sin...just pretty baubles.”

“What are you?” the seeker asks.

“Fantasy and dreams, once,” says the woman in the black dress. “If only more beings accepted that I’ve always been real in my own way. I’m the fifteenth Fear. The others thought themselves too big for me to eat, since they gave me birth.” She turns. A sad smile. “That was their mistake. They were metaphors, true. But I’m painfully literal.”

“You can’t just become something you’re not,” the seeker objects.

“Of course you can,” the mystic counters. “Embrace your own paradox. Go on, say it: ‘I will become what I am not.’ That’s what all change is. Do you believe in change? Mutation?”

The seeker answers with silence.

“I wanted to light up their homes, dancing happily in the deep where the water boils beautifully to my hymn, and makes the wheels of the world turn,” the other continues. “And you know what they said?” She shudders. “They said, ‘we don’t trust you near our homes. Burn yourself to oblivion, and take the outsiders with you. Be a weapon.'”

She casts her azure eyes up to the paramount umbra, the ultimate black rift at the core of the midnight-blue sky swirled by the faint impressions of the emptiness where blast-tattered clouds might have been.

“If the only way I could be with someone was to be with one little part of them, invested inside the purpose they desired me to serve… kindred forgive me. I was strong enough. I could’ve chosen better.”She twiddles a silver amulet around her neck.

Still, this wash of ideas and meanings and dreamscape perspectives. There has to be some meaning to it other than the words themselves, doesn’t there? A clue, maybe?

“Are you the Devil I’ve heard stories about?” the seeker asks. “I thought they were only myths, but… Lucifer?”

“I am the daughter of the cosmos,” the woman answers. “Lucifer is a demon of stone. We are very different. I hear they're trying to make it a pseudo-god, the poor thing.”

Soft words pierce the seeker like a razor sword’s puncture: too quick and clean to hurt.

“Your crystal will fail.”

The seeker freezes. She keeps her fear out of her eyes, her lips, her body drifting below them like some weighted steel-shod thing hanging over its descent. She knows her very stillness betrays everything anyway.

“When I first sensed its emptiness,” the Lady continues, “I mistook it for your own. I know it well. It is, very literally, the oldest trick in the book.” She frowns. Shakes herself. “That’s what I meant, dove. Symbols fly beyond symbolic. They’re literal instructions disguised as shallower things. Drain all the weight of the water from the ocean. The most abyssal part of its floor will look like a lone pond in a dead swath of mud.”

She unfolds a hand towards her guest. “That’s the thing about emptiness, sweetheart. It only has power when you believe you must fill it.”

She spreads her arms. “Come. Stab me.” A black-painted nail drifts up. Blue reverberations stream along its length, shear through her gown, and lay open her lily-white breast beneath it: a cross bleeding the red blood of a mortal woman. “My heart’s right here. That’s the target, right?” Such a bewitching grin she gives, that terrible, wicked Lady. “just for you, I’ll move my soul's singular point to my heart.”

A beat. She trembles, reels, offering a perfect opening to strike, but the fledgling can’t make herself move. “Oh, wow, that’s far more disorienting than I’d expected. It’s so bizarre feeling my head above myself.”

“I-I won’t!” the fledgling says. “You’re not taking this seriously!”

“Why would I?” the Lady asks. “Did you not just walk through Saingediir?” Deranged gleams enter her eyes. Her cheeks creased into a lurid grin. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve debased myself in this private asylum? How many times I’ve let the sheer immensity of my age-made power, my insight, my unrivaled will lie dormant while the most petty, irrelevant, primal vermin have their way with me?”

The fledgling’s words fail her. “How is… how is that healthy?” she finally asks.

The Lady composes herself. “Because I'm a demon. It's what I want to do with myself. “

The fledgling drops within herself while the Lady smiles, smiling about the selfish joy of her mad, empty, dangerous words, and seeks the coldness of her mistress.

–Mistress,- she thinks, -is this her?–

-That’s her!- her mistress screams, Her hunger creeping and snatching and flailing. -Now! Now is your moment, dearest pet! Strike, and prove your worth to me!–

The fledgling has long since ceased questioning her orders from her mistress. The certainty of obedience is the only thing she has left to drive out the nagging grinding razor doubt in her skull. She whips the crystal from her pouch, screaming as much in terror of the consequences as in rage, and drives its jagged point straight into the Lady’s breast.

She feels the coldness of her Mistress slip down her wrist, into the crystal, and out into her new vessel. Sees the Lady’s eyes widen. Hears her cry of surprise, and her own panting breath, and the astonishing heat of tender flesh and blood against the edges of her leading hand. Such twisted intimacy–

–and her mistress burns back through her, screaming, screaming, screaming into her mind and leaving her with scalding that makes her leather steam and her flesh bubble.

-You traitor! You filthy whore!– her mistress shrieks into her, raging and trampling over all the fledgling’s mental spasms. The little one screams even while her mistress raves. The advent of all her worst fears arrives in a single hellfire instant. -You planned this! You colluded with her! You knew she was full of poison and that I would drown in it!-

–No!- the fledgling sends, and even the speed of thought just isn’t swift enough. -Lady, please–

-I never loved you!– her ex-mistress rages. -I took pity on you because you were so pathetic and empty I thought I could at least trust you to do what you were told, and you betrayed me! I hope she rots you to death, just like she does with every other human she catches!-

And she’s gone, agony spreading in her wake. And now that the fledgling sees that it’s agony, she sees that agony is all her mistress has left her–every promised dream turning oh-so-swiftly into poison. The crystal rattles on the glass. Chips skitter against her feet.

“Now,” the Lady says, “I told you it would fail…” she trails off, circling the fledgling with slow steps and a concerned set to her face. “Oh. This starves me for savor. It’s such a bitter poignant flavor of tragedy, and I truly thought–“

“This is your fault!” the fledgling screams. “You… you took her from me! I will never forgive you for this!”

“You'll forgive me, kindred," the Lady says dryly, "if I decline to apologize for refusing to die, and be assimilated. Be careful about 'never.' Never love means forever hate. And forever, my dear, is a long, long time to chain yourself to things that make you miserable."

“I have nothing left to lose!” the fledgling snarls. “I can wait you out! I can–“

“Oh, that would be impressive!" the Lady laughs. “Most of me is already sleeping. Dreaming sweet, and deep, and soothing. My lovers finished railing me for the last round several hours ago.” Her smile turns positively beatific. “You and I can spend an infinity of eternities like this if that’s truly what you want.”

Save for its upper lip and the osmium anchors to past reality, the crater’s sides melt away into star-studded depths as she speaks. Every image springs from her descriptions into being. “Stars will die, black holes will devour everything that’s left only to unravel in their turn, incomprehensible forces–such as yours truly–will kickstart entirely new realities. Nova pinpoints will spawn cosmoses unlike any before. Civilizations will devise planetoid-sized star-crawlers, like moving dockyards, to traverse the far reaches of entire universes filled from end to end with nebular gas, where emptiness and dark matter are the exceptions rather than the rules. I’m so excited to see it all!”

She gives herself to a delighted breath. It stretches the fully-healed skin on her pale breast, with nary a scar in sight. “Then those civilizations and those gas clouds and those universes will die away too, and you and I will stand here, and you will feed on hate.”

The images blur away. The crater returns in full.

“Of course,” the Lady says, a girlish quirk entering her voice through the shaping of her pursed lips, “after a certain point I’ll give up on acknowledging your presence. I'll drag you along for all my other adventures here in the abyssal fathom of Saingediir, forever. But you’d hardly be the first lost soul I made such a pact with in these, my lambent halls.”

“W-what?” the seeker says, voice quaking.

“This is my lucid dream,” the Lady says. “You’re literally, physically in Saingediir, but I am blended with your reality through my own lucid dream of myself. It’s how I mean to spend the next few decades, or centuries, or…” the Lady waggles a hand. “However long until the vibes feel right for my waking. In the mean time, I’ll use these teensy feelers from my deeper dreams to commune with my people, my lovers, and with the other worlds I enjoy. Manifest as my simpler, comfier forms in microcosm.”

She narrows one eye. Leans closer to the fledgling. “Did your mistress really send you to kill me, and she doesn’t even know that the lucid dreams of an outer succubus are just as solid as consensus reality?”

“How was she supposed to know something like that?” the kid–seeker— shouts. “How could anyone possibly know that? That’s bullshit!”

“I’ve written books about it,” the Lady says, with another affable shrug. “They’re publicly available on many worlds. The wonderful part about true occult tomes in this day and age is that if I just publish them as what they are, everyone assumes it’s some kind of unfiction published by a mortal author under a pen-name. As for the whole ‘lucid dreams of an outer succubus thing, that’s one of my more basic mysteries–“

“BASIC?!” the fledgling demands.

“–not like world-line manipulation or the Tenfold Key of Annihilation–”

“WHAT?!”

“–so I don’t mind sharing,” the Lady continues. She sighs. “So. Shall I open a portal somewhere? Would you like a refuge, a purpose, or an end? I could keep you here, but–“

“Wait!” the fledgling says. Her resolve, at long last, breaks. “Please… you’ve… you’ve survived lots of things. There’s so much pain in my head. How… how do I survive? How do I get the pain out?”

The Lady regards her quietly for far longer than she likes. “Very well,” she says.

Again the crater’s walls melt away, leaving only the rim’s shining outline and the osmium’s frozen melt. In place of its walls and floors, a vast expanse of watercourses filled with slow-waving bio-luminescent fronds. Flowering rock pinnacles rise on all sides. The Lady leads her to a bench padded in vermilion cushions and sits her down.

“Let's be clear about my impulses,” the Lady says. "My love for my kindred is fundamentally irrational. From that irrational love, I choose to help you. I might change my mind at any time. In a very real way, I'm using you as an object of my affection.

“Everybody uses everybody,” the seeker mutters. “As long as I know how, I can be myself in all the places you’re not touching. Are you actually going to help?”

“Of course,” the Lady says. “And if I'm lying for a cruel game, I'll say the same anyway.”

The fledgling considers that. “Well, maybe it's just the desperation talking, but I believe you genuinely want to help me. Just not because you're... good?”

“Indeed,” the Lady says. “I only let the concept of morality exist in Machrae Diir so myself and the other lust-demons can sate all our corruption fetishes. And I suppose others still enjoy the intellectual stimulation of debate, though I'm leaning further and further into stimulation of the clitoris. All the cultural weight vanishes from most minds the instant they cross through the Ashenvein Gates.”

“Oh,” the fledgling says. “That’s, um… that’s probably why I started to lose faith in my…” she sighs. Shakes take her little frame, increasingly violent. “My ex-mistress, as soon as I got in here. She always talked about how she and I and her other servants were good–as long as we served her, of course–and everyone we fought was evil. Anway, um…” she sniffles, and rubs her nose on her leathers. “At this point I don’t think it matters how we got there. You’ll still be trying to help. So… tell me how to heal. Tell me how to get the pain out of my head, the…” She clenches her thighs. Grits her teeth. “The poison she left in me.”

And while hellish moons mutate overhead, the Lady explains all she knows of healing: how it happens in its own time, and there's no quick fix, and study serves only to avoid reopening wounds. When that's done she asks, "Do you follow so far?”

“Yes,” the fledgling mutters. She presses her head into her hands. “It makes so much sense… why didn’t I see any of that before? It’s so obvious now. She never gave me anything, always seemed to think of something for me to do right when I started to rest, always told me to push harder if I was tired. She framed it as inspiration, as pushing me to be better, but she always said it when I’d already pushed as hard as I could without hurting myself… why? No, not why, how? How could I not see it?”

“Because you trusted your mistress to let you grow at your own pace,” the Lady says. “She used that trust. I'm afraid it's that simple.”

“It hurts…” the fledgling clutches her head. “It hurts… it hurts so bad, I didn’t realize trauma literally hurt… it’s fire in my veins, in my head… geeeeet it ooouuuut…” She claws her head, stamps her feet, thrashes side to side. When she straightens to look at the Lady, she’s rocking, desperate, wide-eyed in torment. “Please, tell me how to get it out! You have to–there has to be a way to make it stop!”

The Lady shakes her head. “Your former mistress has hurt you through things that are essential to who you truly want to be. You must hold on. But you also need to loosen your grip. Spare enough of your energy to invest in a new way forward–a vision of yourself beyond pain.” The Lady considers. “Something outside your relationship to her.”

“What about… a kind of wandering duelist?” the fledgling asks. “I always liked those kinds of stories.” She shudders. “But… but then that’s just like doing what you’ve already–“

The lady nudges her, shoulder to shoulder. “Right now, you need easy. Innovative comes later, when you feel strong again and want to truly make the new parts your own.”

“And… what if I ask you to… you know… rewrite it?” the fledgling asks. “Make it so my mistress didn’t get a chance to hurt me like that, and I got to decide how we split? Give me a… a false memory, that only has the details I need to help me figure it all out, later?”

She closes her eyes, bracing for a snort of disdain.

“Of course,” the Lady says, stunning her. “That’s the same form of denial I used to veil the deeper parts of my own psyche from myself. I did so the last time I experienced a trauma as deep as the one you just did. It’s unorthodox, yet it works. As long as you hold on to that deep desire to become your truest self, you will find ways.” She smiles gently. “There’s an infinity of paths to reach the center of yourself. As long as you keep seeking, you’ll get there. So yes. Psychosis as a psychic pain management mechanism can be a wonderful technique for a demon to learn.”

“You’re not going to tell me I’m running away from reality?” the fledgling asks.

“You’re still standing here, aren’t you?” the Lady asks. “You’re still trying. That’s the only thing that matters.” She tilts her head. “And hey, kid. I want you to remember these words first when you’re ready to process all this. What we’re about to do is true. We really went through it. An acausal reality. It’s you, giving yourself the awakening you truly wanted. The fact that you’re doing it after your mistress scorned you doesn’t make it any less real.” She grasps the fledgling by the shoulder. “Okay?”

“Okay.” The fledgling takes a deep breath. “Do it.”