"Huh." I brush my thumbs across the fiber-sheet as though I'll polish it down to some hidden layer of clarity. "Okay." After several paragraphs of combat data and cited after-action reports--oh, hey! There's me again!--it ends with the only sentence that matters.

"Devote yourself to the following question:

Who are you without the Cobalt Immortals?*

*If you do not have an answer, find one. Manifest it in your lifestyle. Simply saying it is not good enough. We regret to inform the subs that 'Nothing' is not a valid answer."

"Wow." I scratch the bases of my horns. "Okay. You're serious, huh, you old bitch?"

No answer.

 I stand by myself atop a plinth overlooking a picturesque part of Saingediir: a network of canals overrun by pulsating creepers. Heaped corpses stain the dark waters with such vibrancy. The directive puts me in a contemplative mood, and it's in that mood that my gaze drifts to a behemoth corkscrew construct of pale marble in the distance. It winds up, up, up to the seam where blue glows seep down to tint Saingediir's nightmare sky.

I've never left this part of Machrae Diir except to gun someone down. I wear the chosen colors of its Lady and I've stood as a defender of its people, yet... I don't even know what the contemporary universe is. Except recoil at my shoulder and the sexual gallop of killing. Ever since I returned from oblivion, I've just fought and fought and fought.

"Huh." I slump to a seat with my legs dangling over the drop. My toe-claws clutch the plinth's sides. Nothing complicated here. I don't even have to leave Machrae Diir. Everyone knows who the Immortals are. I could've sworn I heard a rumor that Lady K "The Bitch Herself" Urwollust even did something like this a few decades back. So go on, Maj. Just go up there and say, "I'm a traumasucc who needs to remember tenderness."

I'm not really a traumasucc, whatever that is, but it feels close enough. So... right.

Tension becomes pink lava-sweat streaming down my arms.

Any second.

Simplest thing in the world. Drop down. Walk for a while.

I'm already lounging in one of the most dangerous parts of Machrae Diir. I plan on journeying to some of the safest. All I have to do is start.

My hands, held straight out at my sides, clench on the plinth-top.

Here's a strange vignette: a succubus with violet hair and a thicket of ridged black horns sits fear-frozen atop a plinth overlooking a maze of gory ends, and broken banners, stirred by water so full of dark soil that it looks like a flow of ink.

She feels this image sink in.

The clarity of it shatters all the images in her mind: all the images of a knowing smile, blood-spatters on her chin, the delight of inhaling embers from someone else's pyre. A small thing huddled, alone, in the most desolate place she knows, and still afraid to leave.

Is this... is this the Maroj the others keep talking about?

"Hey..." my voice is a tiny shard of sounds that feel stolen from someone else. "Hey, what the fuck... what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck..."

I never got over anything. I never healed. It was all dissociation. Colonal Dazug was right. I threw myself into the Immortals hoping I would get Kai's attention, and she'd teach me what it meant to smile and sing and flutter my eyelashes again.

Huddling tighter atop the plinth. Knees drawn up. I've cried over things here and there.

I can't remember ever crying for myself before.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" I whimper, and--and I'm not talking to myself? I'm not. I'm talking to half-remembered shadows, goading smiles, nudges and winks and one power-performance after another. "I didn't want to become this."

I clutch my shoulders and rock. "I wanted to be happy, I wanted to be held, I wanted to be loved,  you... you FUCKING SOCIOPATHS!" And then, moments later. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..." And no matter what I say, time refuses to ferry me elsewhere. I'm still here. Alone, riding out the shock-front of my own past actions. Even if I could rewind time, all this would still have happened to me.

I can never rewind myself.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry I used you to burn myself!" Those words, ragged and screeching, roll out over the silent dead and echo back from the cratered facades of phantasmal monuments. Underneath their echoes, one last thing trickles out in a ragged whisper. "I just wanted someone else to die with me..."

If Kai used me, then I used her too. We all used each other. None of us should've seized the kind of power or responsibilities we did, none of knew what were doing. We were all unstable, impulsive, so unbelievably violent and full of self-hate and pain. We should've...

... but what else was there? How could any of this have gone any differently? No one else cared, no one was coming to save us.

I tried the dance for a while after my rebirth. Running to one person after another who promised me they knew exactly what they were doing, that they knew how to make it easy, that their special secret gimmick would be the one to fix me.

I can't find any hate in me anymore, any judgment. It's all a big, stupid, desperate tragedy. Maybe it WOULD be better if creatures like me, demons like me, just stayed dead. But I don't want to, and that's the end of it. Still...

Still, I'm so fucking scared.

I'm so wracked by tremors that I snag one of my legs when I drop down from the plinth, and collide face-first with the ground. I've seen tremors like this, just once.

Just before Kairliina's first retreat to the Sarcophagus, the one just after she defeated Seurchraig. I was on guard the day she saw off an emissary from some other demons. An emissary who sneered and postured and threw her weight around, an emissary who wouldn’t stop spewing her disdain for our “craven Lady,” about how we “hide away in that petty dimension while braver demons die.” I know now why Kai trembled like that.

Please don't make me fight again. I'm so tired. Please…

My feet are running, faster and faster and faster. All the shadows look so sharp and cold and dark. I hug myself.

An adept of the Deep Power... the Immortals keep their promises.

Half-conscious teleports turn me into fractured snapshots: darting through a shattered belltower, sprinting across a broken-keeled battleship, clambering over a fractal giant's bones. Up the spiral-tower, up the marble towards the blue glows with the wind rushing in my ears. Around the last turn and over the swirling cold beneath my feet, the horizon bending over the platform’s lip. It expands from what’s right in front of me to an avenue of symbol-streaked balustrades overlooking interconnected gutters, strange creepers, beasts of slime and tentacles and eyeless naked maws squirming in the rift of blue light behind me.

And... and this is the Lambent Quarter, right?

All these stately towers of smooth-cut dark blue stone. Ascending tiered rows, artificial hills of cubism. The rare occupied apartment, penthouse, or library with lights in its windows glowing gold, pink, silver, red, and green.

I am a faint tottering silhouette of my own psyche by the time I stumble to a stop beneath a neon sign declaring, "Desdemona's Paradigm."

I don't know this place. I don't know the patrons.

I just know I feel like I should be here.

I freeze in the doorway.

All these horned figures, the heady mix of perfumes and alcohol and musks. Shimmering sheer gowns and heaving bosoms and fire-light smiles. Of course it's a hangout bar for succubi. And sure, I'm a succubus, but... but I'm the bad kind.

I'm the monster out of the stories. The love that kills. I feed on blood and play with the guts of screaming mortal things. I'm not the fun kind of wrong. I'm just wrong, and I shouldn't exist, and I'm afraid they'll reject me because I know it's what I deserve.

In the end, it doesn't matter. I've stood staring too long. A hush settles. One after another, pairs of slitted eyes turn to me.

A cleared throat.

"I can leave if you like," Kairliina says softly, from her chosen spot in a corner chair. "There are other clubs, and--"

"I'm sorry." I don't bother trying to look composed. Tremors, shakes and all, I step further inside. "I'm just sorry for trying to use you. I'm sorry for lying in the barracks and telling myself stories about who you were, I'm..." I avert my eyes. "... sorry that when I met you, I expected you to just magically reveal yourself as the idea of you I used to masturbate... I'm sorry I used to masturbate to my idea of you..."

The Overlady... no. No, I really don't think Kairliina's the Overlady right now, or the Prime Immortal, or anything besides a concerned fellow succubus.

Still, she stands. "Maroj Fezzlen... apologize for the way you invoked Haksaema, first."

I squeeze my eyes shut. "I'm sorry, Kairliina. I'm sorry for tainting your stars."

"Open those eyes, little devil." Kairliina waits until I open them. "Look at me."

So I do, shivering harder and harder. I expect that cold fury I saw in Saingediir. Instead I see only calm, and sadness.

"Maroj..." Kairliina wraps herself with her wings. "Have you talked to another succubus the entire time you've been here? Do you know anything about us?"

"I know you're better people than me," I mutter, averting my eyes.

"All the girls in the room who have murdered at least triple digits, raise your hands," Kairliina says. She waits until every other hand goes up, claws glittering. Then she raises hers, too. "Maroj, please refrain from calling me a person. I'm happy to be subhuman. Virus that thinks, she/it pronouns. These days I only possess a soul when I'm dreaming. Otherwise I want all that I am manifest in my form's essence, you know? Nothing held back in some astral other-place. And, well..." she trails off, motioning to the other succubi.

I contemplate all those hands and deflate. Now the only thing I feel is foolish.

"And for the record, Maroj?" Kairliina shrugs. "I'm always pleased to know someone finds me alluring enough to masturbate to. No apology needed for that."

We stand a few feet apart, neither quite looking at the other. A sense of wanting to hug, of how much easier it would be to abandon hope of finding answers. Sink into a mindless tumble of mantling wings and quaking breaths and tails wrapping around each other.

It's too early for that. I'm sure Kairliina could handle that. I'm too tangled up.

"There's no way to make it work, is there?" I ask. "That's what the change is about. Any ex-Immortals who stay in Machrae Diir. We can't keep doing Immortal things anymore."

Kairliina eyes the floor. "Yeah. You don't need the reasoning, right?"

I tail-hug myself. "I'd rather not. And I know, um... I need space from you. Not because you did something wrong, just..."

"Yeah." She sighs. "You've got far too many emotions about me which I had no part in creating. And, well... I refuse to take an exact census, but it feels as though there are somewhere around a hundred thousand denizens in Machrae Diir now. That's just, um..." she shrugs. "It's just too many. Even I can't have personal relationships with every single demon here, I... well." She clears her throat, Kairliina drifts away to get another drink.

I'm left facing fifteen succubi I've never met, and the incubus bartender.

"Hi, uh..." I wave half-heartedly to a star-field of staring slit-eyes, every color of light. "I'm Maroj. And I..." Sniffling. Sobs I could never control. "I don't know who I am anymore."

Silence. Staring.

Then the nearest succubus rises smoothly, sets her drink aside, and approaches to offer me her hands. "Maroj, it's good to meet you," she says. "I'm Vost." She smiles, so very gently. "And I accept you, sister."

I put my hands in hers, and break completely.

One by one, faster as I slacken into their arms, other succubi gather--a cocoon of shadowed forms comforting the ghost of a little broken devil who just wanted to be loved.

"You're still here," Vost whispers as I cling to her. "It's okay, sweetheart. You're still here."