Chapter 1 – Hell is Boring as Hell
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Hell is a terrible place. I'm sure you've heard stories about it. But the reality is, as often the case, much worse. Unless you're a follower of most mortal religions, then you probably believe in a bunch of terrible nonsense... I swear, only mortals could imagine a place where they will be tortured indefinitely after death and scare their children with it. Don't get me wrong: many demons would love to torture a mortal, or two, or a hundred. But there are no mortals in Hell...

No, Hell is mostly an endless war. War and faction politics, which is just threats of war. But the worst part is, if you don't die in the first few hundred years, it gets incredibly boring: there is a finite amount of slaughter, treason, dismemberment, rape, and cannibalism one can enjoy in their lifetime. Unless you're a Wraith demon, of course, and you get off on killing and then hate-fucking anything that moves - they have the most fun in Hell.

But I'm not a Wraith demon, which is why I jumped on the first summoning ritual of sufficient strength and matching requirements and was pulled to the middle plane, where mortals live and, according to some of my acquaintances, the most fun is.

I was expecting to appear in some spacious stone-laid ritual chamber surrounded by cultists in dark robes, with candles all over the place, and maybe a few sacrifices. But instead, I was standing in a small wooden shack, no more than 5 feet across, lit by a single torch in a sconce. I looked down, there was a carefully drawn summoning circle that occupied most of the room. It was drawn with chalk. I always thought that you needed to draw it with blood, but maybe that was just another mortal quirk and not an actual requirement to summon a demon. Speaking of mortals... My eyes fell on a single person in the room: she looked like a human girl, pretty small, around 13 years old. She laid on her back near the circle, not moving, but breathing. It looked like she had exerted herself while performing the summoning ritual and lost consciousness. I wondered how she could've succeeded at all when I noticed small shards of a red stone lying beside her. I stretched my arm to try and grab them but was met with an invisible wall surrounding the summoning circle.

There are a few ways to bring a demon to another plane, one of which is a summoning ritual. It is a complicated spell, with many parts, and its complexity increases with the power of the demon you want to summon. One of the reasons is that you simply need more mana to bring a stronger being to another plane, so you need a bigger and more intricate spell circle to channel this mana through. Another is that the summoning ritual was created with multiple fail-safe mechanisms in it to ensure the summoned being follows the orders of the summoner, and these mechanisms also need to be scaled accordingly. One of them is the barrier calculated to withstand the power of the summoned demon (or other summoned being, you can do it with a lot of creatures) before it's properly bound. Another one is the contract spell, which places restrictions according to the summoner's wishes.

But since my summoner was unconscious, I was stuck in the barrier for the time being. I didn't exactly have any urgent matters, but just sitting in a tight place wasn't my preferred pastime. I gave the girl a better look, as much as I could see from inside the barrier. She was pale and pretty thin and had chestnut hair down to her shoulders. She wore a plain well-worn black dress and was barefoot. She looked more like a lost child than a mage capable of pulling someone from another plane of existence.

After a few minutes, the girl twitched lightly and opened her eyes. She sat and looked around like she was lost and sleepy at the same time. She laid her eyes on me and suddenly screamed with a high-pitched voice. Without standing up she crawled as far away from the circle as possible to the shack's corner and covered her head with her hands. I didn't need any powers to know she was scared of me, fear was pretty much universal across all planes and creatures, except undead. What was she expected when she performed a ritual? A Hellhound puppy? I sighed mentally and knocked on the barrier with my claw, making a glass-clicking sound.

"Release me", I calmly told her.

The girl looked at me with one green eye and hid back in her hands, trying to make herself even smaller. I should probably try to be as less threatening as possible if I want to leave the summoning barrier without returning to Hell. I looked at my hands which were made out of the thick semi-transparent shadow, the same shadow all my body was made of. That probably won't work like that. I willed my shadows to take the form of a similar human girl, then I adjusted it to not be her twin. I became slightly bigger to appear a few years older, someone who I thought could be read as a young adult, changed my hair to be shorter and black, and matched the color of my eyes. I adjusted my facial traits to be sharper and more serious. I didn't know what girls in this day and age wore, so I just copied my summoner's dress and made it deep purple, almost black, and tightened it up to my figure for ease of movement. My raspy voice probably also didn't help, I altered it too. I never tried to become human before, but infiltration and change are some of the main aspects of most Envy demons, so it wasn't really a big deal and took me only a few seconds.

"Hey, what's your name?" I asked the girl with a voice an older girl might have.

That seemed to work, the girl gave me another glance and didn't hide right away. Instead, she looked me over carefully and seemed to relax a little.

"A-amelia", she replied quietly, still shaken.

I gave her a slight smile. "Now, Amelia, why don't you remove the barrier and let me out, so I could stretch a bit? It's pretty cramped in here."

Amelia shook her head from side to side. "The book said I should never do this until you promise to do as I say!"

"And what book would that be?"

She pulled out a book that she was hiding behind and showed it to me. It was a brown leather-bound book, written in Common on the front was "Demon summoning from Aasmo'g to Zurbulon for novices and advanced." Both the name and the scope of the book sounded ridiculous, it is impossible to even list all the demons in such a small tome. But the girl seemed to at least be aware of the basics.

"Where did you get that?"

The girl hesitated for a moment but then replied. "I took it from the evil mister! This and the crystal."

I pointed to the shards on the floor. "This crystal?"

The girl nodded. So the crystal probably amplified her abilities or provided all the mana needed for the summoning spell to work. It was still impressive, though. She shouldn't be able to pull it off without lots of training.

"Who taught you how to use magic, Amelia?"

The girl shook her head. "I've seen the evil mister use it from the book. I stole the book and his crystal."

I nodded, so she was just talented or lucky. "Good. Then why don't you tell me what you need, and I'll see if I can make it happen."

The girl straightened herself and sat straight. She looked into my eyes with a little less fear this time. "Please, miss, help me kill the evil mister and save my friends!"

 

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