Machrae Diir, the Mad Demon's Dimension.

Kdalthach Carogdem, the Galespire Sanctum in the lattice-fashioned city of Zul.

Unsiiliar Heights, the Azure Diamond Sarcophagus, the Mutagenic Exclusion Zone, the Rift of Recompense, Saingediir Fathom.

And I thought a shotgun mattered.

Mile after mile of skyscrapers wrought from creaking dark iron. Here and there stands one with blue plasma streaming down its sides, casting off lightning into the night.

"Quite nearly all of Machrae Diir is empty space," handmaiden explains. That's it. That's her only name. Her tail flicks. "It's bigger right now, of course, and there's a lot more going on, but we tried not to melt your mind when you first came here. Mostly succeeded."

"W-what do you mean, 'when I first came here?'" I swallow nerves. "I'm doing that right now."

"Yeah, for you. For us, decades have passed since I first met you."

I skid to a halt. "What."

"Outer demons like the Lady and I, we don't experience time the same way humans do," handmaiden says. She splays her claws to the midnight air. "For us, it's more like a collaborative story we tell among ourselves. Flipping back and forth at will."

"So... you exist at all points at once?" I ask.

"Eh." She waggles a clawed hand. Blue rays split the air and shadows. "Not quite. A number of different points, yes, with varying amounts of weight. Solidity? Presence. A lot of it has to do with how foregone a conclusion is." She pats my shoulder. "Sorry, kid, but you're pretty open and shut at this point in your life. Don't get me wrong, the journey still matters, just... you and your timelines don't introduce enough uncertainty to stop us from existing forward of and around you."

I recognize the surrealness I'm feeling: it's like the time I got insanely drunk and binged a bunch of anime back to back. Started seeing it all as metaphor for things that were actually happening. Like visions. "This isn't what Machrae Diir actually looks like, is it?"

"Mostly not," handmaiden agrees. "I'm walking the continuum of the dimension-in-totality. You're at the lowest level of the easing-in. Structural resemblances, a few early aesthetic primers, and just a few hints of collapse in reality's supposed laws to get your psyche growing." She grins, embarrassed. "Lovecraft was a shit, but he was right about that part. It's easy to look at some neat art somebody did on..." she flaps a hand at nothing, "whatever social media ooks like these days, and say 'oh, yeah, I totally comprehend that,' but actually experiencing it... hell, folks break for life from way simpler stuff than that."

"And... if I just barged in?" I ask.

A lightless blue fire ripples over her fangs. "We'd have watched the true realm tear your soul apart, and laughed about it."

A cold hollowness in my head. There’s something I'd have shouted against that, once. A talisman of words to hold away the consequences she describes. Can't remember its name. If I died, I would have died. That would have been me. Nothing to say.

I can’t remember why I thought I needed to hold that idea outside myself. It’s not so hard to carry now that I don’t feel like carrying it makes me a failure.

On we walk. We walk while I fall into the drunken warmth of dreams. We walk while forests of mutant radio antennae grow from the streets. We walk while a labyrinth grows in the dark skies above. In every set of passageways, we are walking above ourselves.

We walk until the last of my thoughts bleed into the stillness. We walk until my eyes start to dart and strange sounds drift out of my mouth, then cease being strange. It’s strange that I didn’t make them before. Little warbles, long trills, curious cooings.

These things make me happy. These things make me… me.

Handmaiden waits when I chase the impulse to scrabble up a monolith of dark stone. My claws grow longer while I scramble around from face to face, peering at the cyan glow of the runic circuits cut into its sides. When I perch, and smirk, and weave red fire over my hands, she grins knowingly until I toss the globe at her. Then she opens wide and swallows it whole. It detonates in her stomach, making her light up inside, and we laugh.

We walk until I flick my tongue out and freeze, seeing its forks and realizing for the first time that they’re mine, that they belong to me. I wander to the nearest wall of an old temple, all glossy obsidian slopes and channels full of flowing, molten gold. Diamonds inlaid into the sigils mark it from its topmost tower, to the furthest sprawl of its terraced offshoots. I stick my tongue out, and see how my fangs are growing in, and how my horns have begun to sprout in little nubs from the dark hair atop my head.

I keen. Sad that I spent so long hurting because I wasn’t yet me. Happy I’m finally here.

We walk while my horns grow up high and long and bladed with their points aimed right at the sky, while my wings sprout from my back. Handmaiden waits while I take a test flight through a chasm of half-gravity, where starship hulls float deep in lightning-lashed debris fields. I laugh and I hug myself and I spin with joy, and when I alight beside handmaiden I hug her and she hugs back.

Things squirm in the seam between the horizon and the horizon mirrored above it. Spiny shapes silhouetted by discordant coronas, moving mountainscapes of cosmic abomination. They terrify me by their size, by the distant clamor of their titanic minds, and the horrible omens of the sickly stars hovering in the dimensional skies behind them.

And I feel comforted, and strangely safe in my fear, because wherever frightening things have a home… that’s where my home is, too.

Handmaiden leads me to a little cottage. It rests at a low point in the vast construct-cliffs and split city streets overlooking the Rift of Recompense: a divot in the cliffsides extending to a precipice where pulsating pink flesh merges with the stone. A thatched roof and a doorway of dark stone. A kitchen, a living room, two bathrooms, one bedroom.

My human days are a distant dream now, and bittersweet. Maybe someday I’ll go back, gliding into the past, to reclaim what joy I can.

For now the hurt is far away, and numb.

For now I take a chair through the sliding door to the little balcony sprouting off my bedroom. I wrap myself with a manifest memory of a lost blanket I used to wear like a cape every day when I was a little girl, and I gaze sleepily at the blue radiance lighting up the mists of the Rift from the place where it glows, far far below.

One more denizen of Machrae Diir, home at last.