Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
• Recollections of an Alternate Past •

Book Three

Escape From Exile - OR - 
Confusion and Contraction - OR - 
How To Get Out Of Hell

A Novel by

Teel McClanahan III

Modern Evil Press

Phoenix

ISBN: 978-1-934516-45-4

eBook Edition

Copyright © 2006 by Teel McClanahan III

Some Rights Reserved.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, entities and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

Published by Modern Evil Press, Phoenix, AZ

ISBN: 978-1-934516-45-4 (E-Book)

 

• for love, lost •

 

“We’ve been expecting you.”

“I’m sure you tell everyone they’re expected down here.” Trevor’s face gave nothing away, and his mind was as closed as he could make it. “Get people thinking about all the things they ever felt guilty about, get them to maybe show you the best tools to torture them with?”

“Oh no, no, no, Trev. We’ve no need for such tricks. Those who find themselves in my realm after death are more than willing to torture themselves more effectively than such brutal techniques could yield. You, Trev, are the first of our kind to lead a life deserving of my...” the figure seemed to be studying a large crystalline globe affixed atop a cane he was holding as he paused in apparent deep thought, “special attentions. I see that one of your traveling companions is quite the troublemaker.”

“We’ve been having a fairly trying day, as I’m sure you’re aware. It’s only natural that his energy is still high. But what harm could he do to your forces in your own realm? Surely he is powerless against them.” Trevor smiled as he spoke, sure that one member or another of his party must be having quite some meaningful effect for it to be brought to their attention - the imagined destruction of unreal creatures and fantasy constructions would be no cause for concern.

The dark figure’s reaction neither denied nor confirmed Trevor’s suspicions. “Of course. Just a lot of noise and fury, meaningless as a summer breeze. Your companions are safe, Trev. Come, let us speak in comfort.”

Suddenly, and with a sensation almost entirely like the inverse of disappearing and reappearing someplace else, Trevor found himself seated comfortably in a large, well-worn highback leather chair which stood before a fireplace large enough to have a nice stroll through. Trevor thought to himself that it had felt quite like he had remained still and the huge room, the pair of chairs - for his host was sitting in a nearly identical chair opposite him, both of them turned to face the fire and each other by half - and the chilly atmosphere that suddenly surrounded him in stark contrast to the sulfurous heat which had been scalding him from head to feet an instant before were all made to appear around them, as though this room were not so much a place or location as it was a conceptual construction of the moment. In the cool air of the room, the rolling waves of heat from the fireplace seemed somehow welcomed, despite the raw pain of heat they had just escaped and the still-too-intense odor of brimstone burning Trevor’s nose and eyes.

“Nice contrast. What’s next, fried ice cream or good-devil bad-devil?”

“Oh no, nothing of the sort, Trev. Nothing so crude. My manipulations will be right out in the open. You will know that what you are doing is what I want and you will know why, but...” The dark eyes examined Trevor from across the room as though seeing some important detail for the first time, “...I see now that you haven’t figured out what your place in this world is yet, or who you really are. What we have in common that brings you to my attention. No trouble, of course. In fact, it may make you an even more valuable asset, now that I consider it.” The sinister face of Trevor’s companion seemed to go unfocused, staring beyond the distance as he calculated the ramifications of his unexplained discovery. Nary half a second later, Trevor’s eyes were locked again in his piercing gaze, but it had been long enough for Trevor to see that something about him had caught the dark stranger by surprise.

“If he can be surprised, he can be beaten,” Trevor thought as silently to himself as he could. “I don’t know what he’s talking about, what we have in common, but for everything he knew before I arrived, he wasn’t aware that I don’t know. He is certainly not as omniscient as I’d feared.” Trevor responded verbally, not pausing long enough to allow the other to resume his rambling or to raise his suspicions. “You consider me an asset already, do you? I have a feeling that I could leave your realm of my own volition at any time, with or without your consent - why should I stay here and allow myself to be used by a man who isn’t even polite enough to introduce himself? That’s not the best foot forward, now is it?”

“I know you’re smarter than that, Trev. Surely you already know who I am. Such trivialities, such pleasantries, are they really necessary between two such as us?”

There was a long pause, as though the figure sitting across from Trevor were actually expecting a response to his question, but Trevor sat silently, holding his gaze steadily. Finally and at once, as though rehearsed or signaled somehow, both men stood up at once and stepped toward each other, arms stretched out ahead of them. When they met before the fire after what may have been the ten paces of a shooting duel played out in reverse, they clasped hands, right in right and over that left in left, four hands gripping for a single up and down motion, a single ‘shake’.

Without any of the four hands’ firm grip relaxing at all, the dark resident of this fiery realm spoke, “I am Satan. That is to say, I am accuser, deceiver, snake, dragon, and pride. There are a thousand thousand other names used to describe me in each of a thousand different tongues in terms so diverse that a thousand times a thousand different beings can each think about me in a personal way that makes sense to their own minds, but there’s no need for me to go into such formality, I hope. You, Trev, may call me Old Scratch, or just Scratch, if you like. Most don’t like the feel of the name Satan rolling off their tongues. At least, not when I’m actually around.” Their hands rose and fell a second time, a second ‘shake’, this time with a brilliant popping flash of light bursting from between their crossed arms like some exaggerated sort of handflash.

“Thank you, Satan. As you’ve already referred to me as Trev several times, I would be glad to have you continue to do so. It’s what most of the people I’ve met in the last year have called me, and I’m quite comfortable with it.” Their hands, still clasped, raised and fell a final time, the handflash-like burst of light coinciding this time with the breaking of contact at the bottom of the ‘shake’ but flashing a light bright enough that Trevor thought he could see through the facade of the room and the false vastness of the scorched landscape outside it to the truth of this place - or at least to the next layer of lies - in that penetrating light. He didn’t pursue it, being sure he would have the time to investigate if it were necessary.

“But that isn’t really your name, is it, Trev?”

“No more than Satan is yours, and no more than the meaningless formality of exchanging names in closed hands would entice me to stay here any longer than I need to.”

“I certainly never thought it would, or wouldn’t I have introduced myself formally as soon as you walked through my doors?” Satan’s smile was sinister, but to someone without experience seeing him it may have seemed to be his normal, relaxed state of being. “You’ve never stood on formality or followed tradition blindly before, so don’t try to tell me you’d see me in any better light if only I’d danced that useless dance for you. You’re swayed by logic, emotions, authority figures, and selfishness and you’d just as soon change the way you think about Satan because of a little handshake as you’d change it because your toast landed butter-side-down.”

“I’ve fought in a butter battle or two in my time, and I’ll probably take on another and another if I believed in my cause enough. But you’re right that this isn’t one of those times, or even close.” Trevor turned and returned to his seat, which seemed to be the cue for Old Scratch to do the same, and then began again, “and while I realize that there’s no way to know from a handshake whether you or any other being of this realm is who they claim to be - at least not while they’re still in this realm, their home, a place not only the source of most of their power, but which is suffused with that power through and through - it is still a comfort to look you in the eye and tell me you’re who I thought you were.”

“If I’m not who I say I am, you’ve just admitted that my guise has worked on you, and maybe I’ll let my guard down to you. If I am the accuser I claim to be, you’ve just revealed a weakness in yourself that I may not be able to resist exploiting - or you’ve pretended a weakness you hope I’ll focus on while you work against me with your other hands. And on top of all that, you’re still complementing me and my realm, buttering me up quite effectively, I might add.”

“A little something you might, too, be lying about.” Trevor continued speaking, but turned his head and gaze to face the fireplace. He had noticed its intricacy as soon as the room had appeared, but he had done what he could to appear unimpressed as well as unobservant, paying it only the attention one might give to a dog curled sleeping in the corner of a room; Trevor kept it always in the corner of his eye lest it wake, charge toward him, and attack in some way. Now that he could do it casually, as the verbal repartee itself had turned to the casual and amusing, Trevor observed the strangeness of that fireplace in detail.

The fireplace itself was vast, larger than the bedroom Trevor had occupied in his parents’ home in every dimension, but taller and wider than its depth, and with no discernible edges or corners beyond the four sharp, straight edges defined by the hearth and mantel which surrounded the outer lip of that gaping maw. The hearth appeared to be as solid and smooth as a single slab of polished stone, but in the shifting light cast from the fire beyond, it gave Trevor the impression he was looking at the surface of a viscous dark fluid flowing constantly into the depths of the fireplace, never dropping off or stopping, merely receding into and under the flames in one smooth flow. That the flames were not fed or drowned by it and did not rock on or sink into this surface were ideas that could not have coexisted in Trevor’s mind with the other visual clues of that hearth’s fluid nature if he had witness that single aspect of the fireplace just a week earlier, perhaps as recently as an hour earlier when he had been utterly joined with the eight chained men in a single archival mind. Trevor was certain that a thoughtful glance at that juxtaposition would be enough to cripple Nirgal or Jurrin’s mind, and while he had certainly not yet grasped but a tiny fraction of what those shared minds had contained, he seemed possessed of a new and natural ability to separate and segment ideas in his mind, keeping conflicting or contrary ideas from confronting each other without losing the ability to know and think of them both simultaneously. It was like a fractaline conceptual corpus callosum had been grafted into his mind, allowing complex and meaningful connections to be made between concepts and thoughts that needed to remain otherwise segregated in order to remain functional and independent, just as the physical corpus callosum of the brain strings the left and right sides of the brain together even as it keeps them separate.

The mantel of the fireplace surrounded the other three sides, framing the opening and meeting the hearth at geometrically perfect right angles. Trevor knew somehow that they were perfect, he could see it at each of the four corners as though his eyes or his mind or whatever was being used to sense the fireplace had a built-in compass. Except that the more attention Trevor paid to the perfection of those angles the more he became aware that any device made by human hands would be inadequate to accurately measure the perfection before him. The thickness of each mark of degree would have to be wide enough for the human eye to detect, and the ninety degrees of each of these corners - Trevor didn’t know how he could know but he knew it was absolutely true - were more accurate than the width of the narrowest line that the human eye could measure by. It required some considerable force of will for Trevor to draw his eyes away from one of those interior corners without landing immediately on another, and another measure of restraint to keep his face and eyes relaxed and casual as he spoke with the devil across the room. Trevor counted himself lucky that the mantel was wide enough along all three edges and in sharp enough an angle from the light of the fire that the four outer corners were draped entirely in dancing and flickering shadows and greasy, blurry light and he was unable to fix his eyes upon them and face eight sticking points instead of four.

Those wide lengths of decorative framing which surrounded the utter deepness of the fireplace appeared to be carved impossibly from a single continuous piece of some wood Trevor had never before seen. He thought at first that it was darker than anything in the room, perhaps darker even than the shadows it seemed to lean outward and into, until he made out the grain of the wood in long, unbroken curving lines which were darker still than the wood appeared as a whole. Those grain lines seemed to Trevor to be positively sucking light from the room; they were not just taking in every last photon that was sent their way, but also drawing others off course to be absorbed into their endless hunger and absolute intensity of an absence of visual character within their borders. Somehow, just as he seemed to be able to measure the accuracy of the angles of the corners of the mantel, Trevor knew from sight alone that the wood was heavy, dense wood the like of which had never been worked by living human hands or tools, and would probably be approaching diamond’s ten thousand on the Vickers Hardness Test. Yet its entire surface, yard after yard of nearly impervious wood, had been carved into a relief of the most intricate detail and delicacy. Trevor’s relief that the fireplace was the room’s only source of light extended beyond the hiding of the outer corners of the mantel, but to the story that would have been laid out for his mind to try to absorb from each careful bite taken from the wood of that grand frame.

Once in a while he made out a figure, grotesque in appearance or apparent action to a level not even dreamt of in his or Sunshine’s memories, and he was glad that the dancing rays of light from the fire did not linger to elucidate the coherence and narrative that Trevor suspected would become horrifyingly clear if the entire panoply of grotesqueries were revealed simultaneously.

Despite all these distractions and details, nothing Trevor could see outside the fireplace - including the room, the mantel, the hearth, and Señor Diablo himself - was as interesting to the eye as what filled the fireplace as its fire.

There were no logs, no wood, no fuel to give rise to the flames. There were no flames either, really. What Trevor saw when he looked into the fireplace, casting its nervous, twitching light and shadows throughout the room, was shaped like a fire, and it moved like a fire, but it was clearly not actually a fire. The fire-that-was-not-a-fire reached into the room in a perfect four-dimensional representation of the shape of a fire, with the bulging, crisscrossing masses at its base which ought to have been logs or some other fuel source - the fireplace seemed of the scale to take entire unprocessed logs as firewood, and the size and shapes of that part of what Trevor saw only supported the idea. Rising up from those log-shaped volumes of not-really-logs were extended volumes of space which leapt and swelled and shrank in all four dimensions including that zero’th dimension, which is not height not width nor depth but time, just as an actual fire would, had there been actual logs actually burning. As Trevor watched and as he and the deceiver spoke at length, it was not that the shape of the thing filling the fireplace was exactly the shape of a fire which most fascinated Trevor’s mind. It was what he saw filling that shape that captivated him, rapt.

Looking into the fire-that-was-not-a-fire was a little like looking through a window. Sometimes Trevor felt that if he were to take a photograph of a single still instant of that fire-not-a-fire, it would look like there was a fire-shaped hole cut clean through the back of the fireplace revealing the fire-swept wastelands beyond that strange and sudden wall. Other times the very voluminous nature of the thing pushed such thoughts aside; he could clearly see that this shifting not-quite-mass was surrounded by - not cut out from - the four solid walls of the fireplace. The fire-not-a-fire was enough not-a-fire that it did not bellow smoke to be swallowed by a chimney, and parallel to the terrible flowing hearth was a solid unedged ceiling; the fireplace held the fire in a box missing only one side, and Trevor suspected rightly that an unseen box-side held the fire-not-a-fire from escaping into the room.

The idea of a fire shaped hole in the wall that seemed implied by what Trevor had first thought was an unmoving perspective of the exact landscape he had been standing in not long before was broken with any one focused look - it was clear that whatever he was seeing through the strange 4D lens of the fire-not-a-fire was a populated landscape, not the starkly empty one he had first seen Satan standing proudly in. The same heat was there, the same flaming, scorched countryside remained, and the same sense of desolation Trevor had felt upon arrival was projected through with startling clarity, but in addition to all that, and nearer because it was the foreground to that background of pain, were what Trevor began to realize must be the tortured, mangled, twisted and broken, burnt, flayed, and desiccated souls of the damned. And their tormentors.

Through the unsteady window of the virtual flames and logs, the light and heat and emotion of the scene playing out somewhere else in Hell fell flickeringly on every surface it could reach. The noise and the odors were not passed on and instead the vision of pain and humiliation Trevor could see just on the other side - the inside - of the shifting surface of the fire-not-a-fire seemed to give off the sounds of an actual fireplace as though the sounds were a part of a fire’s shape, and to give off that same pervasive odor of burning sulfur that seemed to be a part of everything in Hell whether there was any way for it to hold of give off any odor at all.

The tortured souls were almost indescribably tortured, and almost certainly uncountable. Trevor could make out the details of the suffering of any individual he selected even briefly with his eyes even though the view through the fire-not-a-fire seemed to be a wide-angle one which must have shown not less than a million different souls in heaps and heaps on heaps of terror in eternity from one end of the insane fireplace to the other, and yet he knew without whatever new force had been feeding him information lately that what he could see was less than one percent of a thousandth of the number of souls currently residing in Hell in constant agony. He gazed on into the fire, picking out as many of the tortured and their torturers - sometimes with both roles performed by a single player with a captive audience - as he and the snake spoke, and he tried not to make it obvious he was anything more than disinterested in everything around him, keeping his face flat and even. He knew the dragon would want something, and he knew what was at stake. Trevor even knew what a disadvantage he had in this matter, and as he began to speak, to draw out pride’s plan, he studied the fireplace and its fire-not-a-fire with as much disinterest as he could muster.

“A little something you might, too, be lying about. Trying to give me a sense of pride for any small thing I might have done, trying to give yourself a toehold in my being with the pride that brought you to your own fall, so long ago. Don’t you think I’m smart enough to be able to learn from the mistakes of others? From your mistakes? At least as much as is necessary to know when I’m being turned against myself with words that sound like praise.”

“Can you fault me for testing you? For feeling out the edges of your intelligence, the borders of your understanding?”

“No more than I ought reasonably to fault myself for underestimating the breadth and scope of the control you show over everything within your realm. I tried to warn my companions before we opened the door, but my warnings, which went farther than my companions were ready for, did not go nearly far enough.”

“Nor could they have, if your warnings did not keep them from entering my realm altogether.”

“I still do not see a way we could have escaped or even been located after all that had occurred. During the course of events I absorbed quite a bit of history and information about the church whose doors we used to reach Hell, and among them was the sure knowledge of their failsafe systems. In the event of catastrophic destruction of only one half of any of the established mirrored churches, the other half was sealed completely from the physical world, to become a tomb and perfection device for any believers trapped inside. It was believed that such a situation would destroy the balance between each pair, since they could no longer mirror each others’ every action, and following whatever course they were already on, would be on the ‘fast track’ to either Heaven or Hell.”

“Ah, but getting into Hell is much easier than getting into Heaven.”

“As they had realized, I’m sure, when you agreed to open up a door into Hell from each of their dark churches, and Heaven would not even return communication.”

“You make it sound like I installed revolving doors to Hell in all the major cities around the globe, and you know I’ve done no such thing. The closest you can get to having unfettered entrance to Hell from anywhere on Earth is through death’s door, and that’s only a metaphor.”

“I know that, and you know that, so I don’t know why you belabor the point. The doors you agreed to offer were one-way doors which were only available in the event of one of these catastrophic unbalancings. If the dark church were the one to be destroyed rather than the light, those inside had no aethereal door by which they could gain access to Heaven - their only option, being totally cut off from the physical world, was fasting and praying and repenting until they died of natural causes and hopefully got to Heaven by the natural course. Which is why I was glad, when the church really started coming down, that it was the light church coming down - there’s no way out of a sealed light church.”

“Is a one-way door into Hell any better? Have you ever heard of anyone coming back from eternal damnation?”

“One or two, but that’s irrelevant, because none of my party was sent to Hell for eternal damnation.”

“Well, have you ever heard of anyone who wasn’t damned intentionally going to Hell? Other than yourself and your traveling companions, of course.”

“Of course, of course, and ...” Trevor paused, and it was unclear whether he was trying to think of someone who fit the dark one’s description or he was simply trapped in the perfection of a real ninety degree angle, “No. Not off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone else. A few to Hades, but we both know Hell and Hades are different realms entirely.”

“True, true. And Hades is a snap to get out of, and might be better run by the dog at the door. At least Cerberus can’t offer to let you and your already-dead friends leave if you just don’t look back or just pass some other simple test; all Cerberus can do is bark, bark, bark.”

Trevor didn’t laugh at the demon’s weak joke or look away from the fireplace, but continued speaking. “Being crushed by falling stone or trapped in a cathedral cum coffin as the alternatives, walking live and ready to fight into Hell is certainly a preferred option. Especially considering the value you let me know you placed on me, not a moment into my stay here. If I have or can do or be something you want or need, I’ve got a place to stand while we negotiate my terms.” Trevor didn’t need to mention that he’d noticed a moment of surprise as well, but he knew deep down that it might be possible to out-maneuver the deceiver at his own game, and that thought added a healthy dose of confidence to his voice as he spoke.

“Of course. Your terms. I’ve had some time to consider what you would ask for and what you would consider fair, and I’d like to make you an offer before you say anything at all. If it pleases you, fine, and if you want to make revisions, negotiations will begin. I suspect though, that you’ll be pleased with all the terms.”

“I’m listening.” Trevor was still staring into the fire, almost through it, tallying and memorizing every face and essence he witnessed there as they palavered.

“I would like to challenge you to a duel of sorts, the details of which I will discuss in a moment. The important part is the wager over the duel. It will all be drawn out in the contract, but the gist of it is this: If you win the duel, you’ll be granted the power to release your traveling companions from Hell, along with anyone else you’d like. If I win the duel, you will not be allowed to leave Hell, and will be forced to remain here for an unspecified period of servitude.”

“My companions aren’t of any value to you. One of them isn’t even really a person. If I am forced to stay here, you must let them go.”

“You’re being unreasonable! You’re asking me to reward you for losing the duel.” Satan sounded playfully exasperated at this, “But that isn’t how duels work, you see, the winner is rewarded and the loser is not. If I am the winner, I am rewarded with your staying in Hell. If you are the winner, you are rewarded with the power to free your companions.”

“Ah, but I have not agreed to duel at all.”

“And yet I know that you will, because there is no other way for you to free your companions from Hell. Hell is mine, and they are here. If you want to buy them a get out of Hell free card, you’ve got to go through me.”

“I could leave right now, gather information, reinforcements, and come back through one of the many other passages into Hell to rescue them.”

“If you leave and come back to Hell with a raiding party you’ll only make my position stronger, putting more people you care about and were responsible for into my grip.” The seven-headed dragon who would one day perch before the womb of the Sun Woman to try to eat her child before it could enter the world chuckled from where he sat. “If, on the other hand, you agree to the duel now, you’ll at least have a chance of winning, and losing will only trap the four of you in Hell.” He had stopped, but then seemed to remember something pleasant, a smile stretching out over his teeth, “For now.”

“How can I trust you, deceiver? How can I trust your contract? How can I trust that the duel will be fair? How can I trust that when I win, you will do as you have promised? You, who created all forms of magic and witchcraft and cosmetics. You, who lied to Eve in the garden, who has been lying to the world ever since. You are the greatest deceiver in the history of the Universe, for you even convinced God that you loved Him before you turned on Him.”

Even as he spoke these accusations evenly but forcefully into the cool air of the room, Trevor’s eyes did not blink or shift from the fire-not-a-fire, did not face the one he was now himself accusing. Except that as soon as the monosyllable ‘God’ slipped Trevor’s lips, Old Scratch’s cool, dark eyes locked him in their gaze, a floating pair in the foreground of the foreground of the fire-not-a-fire, blazing out their fury. It was hard to think of this denizen and lord of the Lake of Fire as having a cool to keep, but as he responded accuser to accuser, his voice conveying a calmness even as it seethed, it became clear that the Fallen One had lost his cool. Trevor had felt a slight brush of contact made with his carefully guarded mind as the eyes had appeared, but the contact seemed much more casual than the vision of anger floating before him could have been, and was blasted from his thoughts as soon as the voice began bellowing: “You’ve gone too far, you impudent little brat. You may have been taught a story or two about the way things came to be as they are, but you’ve stepped out of bounds now, you’ve crossed the line into unfamiliar territory.” Satan’s voice was coming from where his body still sat, tense, across the space of the fire from Trevor, but it also seemed to be conveyed in the modulation of the crackling and roaring sounds of the fire around those disembodied eyes, and in increasing volume from the air that filled all the space around every inch of Trevor’s being. As the volume of the voice rose and surrounded him, Trevor knew that this voice was getting deep into his bones, where it would linger and corrupt. “I do love God! I’ve always loved God! I never lied to Him, I never turned on Him. I just did what needed to be done, what He wouldn’t or couldn’t do on His own; I was trying to help! It was never my vision, it was always, always what God wanted, even when He wasn’t around to ask! Even when He wasn’t around to give orders, I loved Him and served Him.” Satan’s voice was beginning to recede, and Trevor couldn’t be sure whether he was hearing the devil’s voice cracking, or just crackling as it receded - but still projected - from the fire, and as his eyes faded from visibility there as well. “When the others stopped getting orders, when He stopped showing up for longer than He’d ever been gone before, they turned to me for guidance. I was so close to Him, I loved him so deeply and so well, so much more than any of the others. They came to me, and all they wanted was to know how to serve Him, what He wanted them to do.” The snake’s voice was now barely above a whisper, sourced only from the crumpling body in the chair opposite Trevor, and he finally turned from the fire to look at the one he was listening to so carefully, to see the down-turned face and strain to hear him speak over the roar of the fire-not-a-fire. “I didn’t raise an army up and try to take over Heaven, I never thought I was better than Him, not to this day. All I ever did was love Him. All I did was try to help the others to love Him, and in his absence, when they came and begged me, asked me how they could serve Him, I told them what was in His heart, and they knew what to do. One after another, again and again they came to me and I did what I could to share my understanding of God with them, to show them how they could know God’s Will without receiving a direct order from Him.” The voice of this Old Scratch now fell well below a whisper, his lips no longer parted and his lungs no longer pushed air, but somehow Trevor could still understand him as he finished his tale. “When God returned, when He revealed Himself I should say, for He can never really be gone, everything changed. God is proud and vengeful and stubborn. I love Him, and I love His pride, and I love His vengeance, and I love His stubbornness. When He decided that I was trying to take His place, when He decided that I had learned too well of Him, had become too proud of myself and had turned the others to follow my own command, I didn’t deny it. I love Him. When He decided to cast me into the Lake of Fire, this pit of damnation, I didn’t complain. I love Him. When He learned later on that He’d leapt to conclusions, when He saw that I had only been teaching the others to love Him as I do, and He was too stubborn to admit He had made a mistake, I didn’t say a word, I didn’t fault Him. I love Him. I never tried to convince Him of my love, and I never turned on Him. You...” The Prince of Darkness now appeared to be weeping into his own hands as though he had suddenly found himself with the first being in all these thousands of years who he could open up in front of, and even as he cried out with his mouth, his words continued into Trevor’s mind. “...you and I... I can’t say... I mustn’t tell you, but you and I and He have something in common, and... somehow I couldn’t stand to have you... to have one of us... believing the lie, the propaganda... I can trust you. I know I can. And after a while, I guess it won’t really matter how much I told you, not after the duel... but you must know that I loved Him, I love Him, and I’ve always served Him as best I could. And now you’re here, and I...” Now even the mental voice broke down crying, and Trevor turned back to the fireplace, giving Satan time and space to let it all out, not even knowing where to begin, whether to comfort or scold him. Worse, Trevor wasn’t even sure whether this was all just a trick, an act, meant to get his sympathies and fool him into agreeing to the duel, the contract, and whatever horrible loopholes and snares had been lain down in it. Everything Trevor had read from Old Scratch had seemed to indicate that he was genuinely feeling the way he appeared to be feeling, and there was no trace of falsehood that Trevor had been able to detect during his story. Still, the deceiver had been playing this old game for millennia, and might be more convincing than even the twins had been before he’d discovered the wicked truth about them. Trevor took advantage of the time the accuser was sobbing to try to weigh his options and decide a course of action.

✯ ✯ ✯

From the moment Trevor had put his hand on the door leading to Hell, Jurrin had been ready for a fight. Watching the other three disappear before his eyes even as he was surrounded by an empty and desolate, burning and twisted Hellscape only put him more on his guard. He stood, sword at the ready, listening intently to the rolling silence of heat rising blisteringly up from the near-molten surface of this place. He turned his head side to side and peered with his mind’s eye behind him and even though he could not see or sense a single point of actual movement between himself and the horizon in every direction, his muscles remained tense, his sword raised to strike.

Slowly, everywhere around him, among the deformed and twisted spikes and jagged peaks and rocks and crevasses and all of them glowing between red-hot and white-hot and the air slithering upwards with heat distortion, the demonic hordes began to come out of hiding. They were just as glowing-hot, and perhaps more twisted, more jagged, more hard and horrible than the environment they were naturally camouflaged to disappear into, and each and every one that began to move towards Jurrin’s battle-ready stance moved with a calculated and deliberate speed of near-stillness. They could see immediately that this new one was a danger, not to be feasted upon greedily like most that appeared before them, dazed and without understanding or defense, but to be approached with deliberate stealth and caution, en masse. If you had been looking at it happening all around him, you might think that Jurrin’s presence in this accursed place (or perhaps his still-shining armor or his gleaming sword) was causing it to curl up at the edges and peel apart. Every outcropping of rock and every other horrible feature of this landscape appeared to be lifting and moving and slowly curling and shifting inward, all drawn improbably towards the place where Jurrin was standing as though by some strong magnetic field.

Except they each moved slower than the heat-ripples rising all around them and distorting what Jurrin could see, and he wasn’t able to detect any motion at all. Thousands upon thousands of grisly beasts with only the worst of intentions gradually worked their ways closer and closer and closer to Jurrin’s battle-hardened blood-thirsty form. They were so unlike any living or moving thing that Jurrin had ever witnessed that they were invisible in their land simply by holding a comparable color in their own hides like giant, evil, carnivorous chameleons. As they drew nearer and nearer, Jurrin was holding his breath to try to hear them, to hear anything, and in that still silence they finally pounced, dozens at once in the air and hundreds more running along the ground close behind, signaled by the sudden rapid motion, trying to get their own taste of this new, shiny thing before it was gobbled up completely by the others.

They moved as much faster than fast as they had moved slower than slow on approach, and in nary an instant Jurrin’s upright form was replaced by a blurring, roiling mountain of swarming creatures the same color as the landscape. If someone had not seen Jurrin standing there before and glimpsed this sight during the three full seconds it was sustained, they might not be able to discern that there were individual creatures at all, but instead see a literal mountain with a reversed flow of molten stone working its way towards the peak of the deformed hill from every direction, as far as the eye could see. After those three seconds, however, the illusion of order and incongruous peaceful flowing would be shattered.

A muffled scream broke through the nearly-silent chattering and hard-slapping of tough hide on tough hide and bony protrusion against spiny outgrowth that was the only noise the clamoring beasts made at the height of their fury, and a rippling outward wave swept across the surface of the reverse-volcano of heaped and crawling monsters. Then another ripple of back-forced bodies arced across from the opposite face of the dogpile, and another, and then the would-be mountain became a time-lapse-photography movie of a mountain of sugar melting in the rain.

The monsters on the surface couldn’t tell what was going wrong, they just knew that no matter how quickly they crawled across the backs of their kind, they weren’t making progress towards the prey they had lost sight of anyway. The ones in between hadn’t been too pleased with their place in the great and deepening hill of crushing, clawing, hungry beasts all seeking the same meal, smashed, as it were, between a horrifying monster and a demonic Hellspawn, but now they found themselves being nearly torn apart as the beasts below them disappeared or slipped backwards or both and the crawling things above them just kept trying to head forward. Every one of them had jutting herring-bone-like extrusions as hard as petrified antlers coming out of their limbs and bodies in a seemingly random way, extraneous dangling limbs that did nothing but get in the way and cause pain, and rough, bumpy, bulging, hides with ridges and holes and crevasses in patterns as unique as the lives that had led to them, and in a situation like this, they all got caught on each other. They all got caught on each other, and with the bodies working above and below in opposite directions, the ones in between were torn apart, some losing their skeletal outgrowths with wet snapopping sounds and lightning strikes of pain rippling through their bodies while others were less fortunate, literally being ripped limb from limb or being exploded out over every other being in their crushed vicinity in a putrefied, oozing mess.

Then there were the most immediately unfortunate - though perhaps the most fortunate, in the end - of the creatures who attacked Jurrin, those closest to him. As soon as the first wave leapt at him, he flicked the facial shield of his armor down with a strong but rapid motion of his neck, covering the only exposed part of his flesh before the brimstone-fire-hot beasts coalesced on his body. The first to reach him had either terrifically terrible aim, or a terribly terrific self-sacrificing intelligence, for it managed to self impale on Jurrin’s backwards-extended sword with the full length of its body a mere fraction of a second before Jurrin would have swung it wide through the bodies approaching from his front, and only another fraction of a second more before the rest of the leaping monsters reached him. Their claws and oversized mandibles and extruding, antler-like bones and growths clanged and grasped at Jurrin, trying to tear into his strange shiny exoskeleton, and dozens of arms and legs and tails and a few unidentifiable limbs worked to wrap themselves around him to hold on, to hold their place next to the fresh meat so they wouldn’t be brushed aside by the others trying to do the same.

The limbs, the bony bits, the claws, the mouths, and even a few of the monstrosities’ heads unfortunate enough to come in contact with Jurrin’s armor began to dissolve. Exoskeletons and spiny extrusions that had been strong and sharp enough to be used to gore and eviscerate victims for all their long and violent memory were turned to soup just for clanging against Jurrin’s armor. Limbs, the limp and useless and the unbelievably strong and limber alike, dissolved from a solid to a runny liquid of nearly the same glowing amber color of the rest of the monsters and the landscape they had trod upon and now melted onto. The liquefaction seemed to be rapid and spreading, not from creature to creature, but within a creature touched so that even the lightest contact with the furthest and least useful twisted, horned, spiny bone outgrowth against the armor first liquefied the outgrowth, then whatever part of their misshapen body it had been connected to, and spread out and up and down and in and out from there until the thing was nothing more than a snot-like, runny mess working its way over and in between and under the beasts which had not yet reached Jurrin’s armor. The entire process from first contact to total dissolution seemed to take about a second.

The one that had got onto Jurrin’s sword had somehow not quite had enough force to slide all the way down the blade to brush against Jurrin’s armor, and even as the entire first wave of attacking things turned to goo all around him, Jurrin’s sword remained encumbered and useless. Luck was not working entirely against him in this crazy place though; at least he was still standing. If the creatures on one side of him had jumped a half-second sooner than those on the opposite side or if he’d relaxed his battle-ready stance even an iota or if he’d swung his sword out in front of him, stopping even just part of the force of those flying in from that direction, he would have been knocked off balance in that first instant, knocked as flat as the jagged ground would have allowed, and defenseless. He may even have drowned in the rush of liquefied monsters that would surely have flowed down all around him. Luckily for Jurrin, he was not knocked down, and the melting monsters were running down and away from his face and mouth instead of up and over them. He knew his armor had been enchanted to carry an ethical charge of its own long ago, and that it had been worn by his own great-great-grandfather Phelleea the Righteous during every step of his knighthood, but he had never suspected that such a powerful residual righteousness as this might cling to its frame after all this time. For a second or two, Jurrin just stood there, marveling at how efficiently the armor destroyed his attackers and trying to imagine how it might have been possible for every tale of do-gooding he had heard ascribed to Phelleea the Righteous might have actually been true - it would take at least as much positive ethical charge as was rumored to have extended Phelleea’s life to so blaspheme these Hellspawn monsters with such finality.

He wanted to just stand there a while, let them come, let them feel the righteous justice his armor would deal out merely by touching each horrible thing in turn, but before long he realized he was completely buried in monsters, couldn’t see a light other than the monsters’ glow, and the weight above him was threatening to crush him, armor and all. The ones that reached him turned quickly to liquid, but there seemed to be more and more clambering across the backs of those nearest to him all the time, replacing the melted monsters faster than they could slip slick out of the way. Jurrin finally snapped out of his frozen stance, and tried to swing his sword to cut through the amassing beasts, but it hardly budged, stuck in that first leaping creature. He inched his sword down to pull the encumbering corpse towards his shoulder plate, hoping that its effects remained effective on the dead, and then suddenly he could move his sword with ease.

Jurrin swung the weapon in a long, strong arc, his sword easily dissecting everything in its path, slicing them into pieces ahead of him, brushing the arms of his armor against those collapsing in from above, and driving outward against the crush. At the end of the sweep, Jurrin was just about where he’d started, but he turned and raised his sword through the clawing, clanking, and otherwise noiseless creatures, then swept the sword again across in front of him, this time in the opposite direction, with a similar effect. He was destroying them faster than he could have expected to with his sword alone, but there were so many of them so feverishly fighting to get to him that they could not see the decimation he was creating and he still couldn’t see the light beyond the crush. He just kept swinging and turning and trying to keep his footing in the liquid remains of his kills, now shin deep. For what seemed like too long a time he kept this up; liquefying those that came close enough to reach him, slicing up those that came within range of his sword before they got too close, and hoping that he would be able to get a little ahead of this cavalcade of enemies.

Then, almost all at once, he could see the light. Not the light of day, but the ambient yellow-orange glow that Hell seemed to have radiating out of the emptiness that passed for sky here, and that was almost as good. The monsters seemed almost to be swept away from him on a receding wave or fast-moving tide and Jurrin realized that in a way, they actually were - the downward force of the ones that had crawled up and up and up had only worked to slide those underneath them out and away on the slick goo that had been their own kind only moments before but that now pooled to above Jurrin’s knee where he stood. The slimy residue of the destroyed creatures was now chunky and thicker all around him as though a psychotic butcher/warlord had made a battlefield stew with the sliced-up bodies and strewn organs of those truly unfortunate beings which Jurrin had rendered inert with his blade.

The tide of melted monsters was receding from his legs and he was uncovered, but what he saw now did not please him at all; there were thousands of thousands of the creatures rushing towards him. They filled all the space he could see in every direction in what seemed like an infinite garishly deformed and burning-hot plain of pain and suffering, points of motion, a sea of motion, excited and hungry creatures stretching from horizon to horizon, three hundred and sixty degrees around him, all the motion working its way toward center. The things closest to him were just regaining their feet - or whatever they had to move along on - and seemed ready to lunge back towards this strangely still-untouched shiny visitor, pressed upon by hordes of encircling mob-members which appeared identical to Jurrin in such numbers despite their unique features, just as a large enough crowd of people begins to make everyone look quite the same. He raised his sword again and was about to scream out a traditional battlecry of Phelleea the Righteous when suddenly, everything stopped.

Perhaps not everything, but when one was outnumbered literally a million to one and the million stop all at once like the frozen frame of video on the TV screen when you pause a DVD, it’s statistically insignificant that the one happens to remain mobile. Jurrin looked around, checking for some sort of trick, some sign that they had only slowed down to the speed slower than the ripples of heat in the air - but the air was no longer rippling! Jurrin could see the wavering distortions between himself and distant points of interest, but the distortions were totally unmoving, as though fixed in space. Air and Fire behaving like Earth. He stood in wonder, trying to understand what he was seeing without diverting his attention from his own safety and the sword in his hands, should everything return to speed without warning.

On the heels of whatever had stopped the rampaging creatures, quickly following, Jurrin heard a voice that seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, “...special attentions. I see that one of your traveling companions is quite the troublemaker.” The voice seemed to come from inside his head about pounded on his ears all at the same, and then stopped just as suddenly as the hordes of monsters just beyond arms’ reach. He didn’t understand it at all; not why it had come to him, whose voice it was, or what it had to do with the mess at his feet, now seeping well within his armor and soaking hot and wet into his pants and filling his boots and socks, liquefied creatures squishing in between his toes.

He didn’t need to understand it. The next thing he knew, the tortured and blisteringly hot landscape which had been filled with equally tortured but easily slain terrorizers as far as the eye could see in every direction was replaced with what appeared to be a cell designed for solitary imprisonment of magically adept criminals. The space was nearly eight feet along each edge, a cube of smooth surfaces with rounded edges and corners, a single unbroken surface of pillow-soft material that Jurrin didn’t have to test to know would not be penetrated or even scratched by the sword he still carried. There was no apparent light source, no furniture, no fixtures, nothing in the room but Jurrin, the clothes and armor on his body, and the sword still clutched tightly in his hands. He reached out with his mind and with his magic and confirmed that he could not effect anything beyond the edges of that pale, soft, singular surface surrounding him. He lowered himself to the pale, soft floor, relaxing against one of the lower too-round-to-really-be-a-corner corners without taking off a single piece of armor or releasing his sword. He did lift the visor of his helmet after he sat, revealing his face as he muttered to himself, “At least my socks are dry.”

✯ ✯ ✯

When Trevor had knocked on the big double doors that he said would lead to Hell, Nirgal, Trevor’s Gollum, and Jurrin were standing several paces behind him, but as the doors opened - like blast doors opening on a fiery furnace, even the first slim crack of opening gave way to a hard burst of hot, expanding air - they opened into the church, towards them, and Trevor stepped backwards into line beside the other three, waiting for the slow, heavy barricades to finish their nearly casual-seeming grinding to openness. The windswept contents of that other world had begun to spill out through the opening as though they had been eager to escape Hell, then rattled quickly to a halt still within the grand arcs described by the path of the doors as they realized that the world on the other side of those doors was now a part of Hell as well.

The four remaining members of the botched or irrelevant rescue party stepped forward at the same time and pace, and while they certainly did not hook their elbows together and sing and dance their way into the yellow-hot realm before them, neither did Trevor try to exert his leadership by staying in the lead or giving instructions as they crossed over into what had always been Hell. As soon as they were through the doorway, Nirgal turned to see whether it had simply disappeared, and was shocked by what he saw for only a second before he began half-stumbling backwards across unfamiliar and precarious terrain to try to get a better view. The entire dark church was standing there, its front doors blocked open.

Nirgal had never seen this church from the outside before - none of their party had seen it, coming in though the fulcrum point of the magical protection that ought to have kept anyone from appearing inside the double church, and only then because of the strong link of sex magic between Trevor and Hannah, not to mention their shared labor pains. He’d had some clue of its size from the interior, but the idea of seeing the entire building at once, if only he had the right vantage, suddenly drove Nirgal to turn away from it and run in the other direction, looking for higher ground. The other three, who had stood transfixed by the church which had been transported as wholly as its remains allowed to wherever in Hell they now found themselves, did not think to move until they saw and felt Nirgal running away from the dark, evil structure. They were running away from the huge, dark building not to seek a better vantage from which to admire the church, they were running away from something that frightened them in a way they would not have believed was possible if it were not churning away in their guts as they turned tail and ran, and they happened to go in the same direction as Nirgal in pursuit of a more defensible position.

To get an idea of what they were feeling, imagine you’ve just stepped intentionally into Hell, the flaming furnace, the lake of fire, the pit of eternal damnation, filled to the brim and overflowing with every evil thing in creation that ever lived, plus all those evil beings who gave them the idea in the first place. Now imagine that an ancient-looking gothic cathedral was the place you’d considered more safe than Hell before stepping into Hell itself, and that the gothic cathedral in question, when held up as such against the raw, elemental, pervasive evil that permeated every square inch of Hell, appeared to be the more dark, evil, and malevolent of the two options. Hell, which threatens to combust the clothes right off your back in an instant but somehow staves off this destruction, that same Hell which represents the dumping ground of every cosmically evil noun that ever existed, seems like a welcoming hearth and home next to this dark church.

An idea occurred to the Gollum as he caught up with Nirgal on an elevated cluster of glowing-hot stones, and he muttered it under his breath, “Perhaps the church wasn’t transported here just to move us, but because it somehow deserves to be here on its own.”

“What was that?” Trevor asked the Gollum, but the Gollum just shook its head and smiled quietly to itself, and Trevor didn’t pursue the thought.

They all gathered on the slightly raised area that Nirgal was enjoying the view of the church from, and tried to take in their surroundings. “So this is Hell, eh?” They nodded all around. “Can any of you sense anyone out there? Not just with your mind, but visually or any other way?” They shook their heads and made dissenting noises back to the group. “What now?” The Gollum put its back to the church so it could stand in Nirgal’s line of sight and face him, had an expectant look on its face.

Trevor turned slowly to face it and said “I don’t know. I thought we’d be greeted immediately or find ourselves plunged into chaos, fear, and pain. Maybe both. But walking into an empty space, I did not expect.”

Nirgal spoke softly, not even taking his eyes off the church to see whether he spoke the truth until after he’d said it, saying “If this is Hell, where are all the damned souls? Shouldn’t it be crowded here?”

The Gollum nodded to Nirgal, whose eyes had flicked directly from the church to meet its eyes as he finished asking. “If Hell is finite and physical in space, then yes, it ought to be quite crowded, considering the number of dead who never met even a single religion’s guidelines for escaping it.” Trevor continued where the Gollum had stopped.

“But if Hell has at least one dimension which is not finite in nature, then it could only ever seem crowded if those in charge wanted it to. I have the feeling that there are many different layers of existence here, one overlapping another and another in a boundless succession so that a smallish space of, say, thirty-five thousand two hundred and ninety seven square miles, when given infinite latitude in a higher-order dimension, seems both vast and is actually infinite.”

Nirgal frowned at the Gollum that wore Trevor’s face, not turning around to frown at the original Trevor. “First of all, we haven’t studied higher-order dimensions yet, so I don’t know anything about them, and everything you’re saying is coming out gibberish to me. Second, since when is thirty-five thousand however many miles a small space?”

The Gollum responded, instead of Trevor. “Consider that the surface area of the Earth is somewhat larger than one hundred and eighty-three million square miles. Even if you remove the approximately three quarters of that which is covered by ocean, there are about forty-six million square miles of surface area above water on Earth.”

“Most of that has never been occupied by sapient beings, in all our history. It’s mostly empty. Life bunches up together. Did you know that nearly half of of all humans live within less than one hundred miles of an ocean?”

The Gollum continued speaking, almost ignoring Trevor’s questionable statistic, aware that it was more like 120 miles for the first 50%. “Regardless of population density, the surface area above water on Earth right now is almost one thousand three hundred times as spacious as the thirty-five thousand two hundred and ninety-seven square miles Trevor suggested. Quite small, indeed.”

“I suppose it’s just a matter of perspective, but ... if we were in a land that large, could we see the edges of it from the middle, or would it stretch beyond the horizon?”

“The horizon is an artificial barrier created by the curvature of the surface you’re viewing. If Hell’s thirty-five thousand plus square miles were wrapped around a sphere and you stood on it... you’re what, about six feet tall?”

“I had a growth spurt.”

“But six feet, right?”

“A little over that.”

“Fine, if you were standing up on this supposed sphere with a surface area of thirty-five thousand two hundred and ninety-seven square miles at a height of six feet, you’d probably only be able to see about ... a third of a mile, maybe eighteen hundred feet before the rest was obscured by Hell’s curvature.”

“A third of a mile? That sounds way too small.”

Trevor cut in to answer, “No, I think he’s right... I mean, I’m not the best at running square roots in my head, but a sphere that small, yeah. About a third of a mile.”

“Well what is it on Earth? How far am I used to seeing?”

“About three miles at sea level. That’s roughly ... eight and two thirds times farther.”

“Really only three miles?”

“It varies all over the planet, depending on local features, altitude, irregularities in the curvature of the Earth, and perhaps most troublesome of all is pollution. If the air is clear, you can see farther than if it’s dirty. All my math is based on relatively clear air.”

“Does Hell even have air?”

“We’ll assume it does, since we’re all in Hell now, and we’re all breathing.” The Gollum paused, pointing out towards the edge of where the yellow-orange glow of the sky met the crags and crannies and jutting outcropping land features. “Also, look across there, straight out. Do you see the way everything ripples and waves in your vision?” Nirgal nodded, seeing the distortion as if for the first time. “That’s an effect in the air caused by the heat rising off the surface of Hell. The light gets distorted by the currents of hot air, you see?”

“Yeah, alright, air. What else would I be breathing? But that distortion, would it have the same effect as pollution on our ability to see farther?” Nirgal seemed to be beginning to grasp all these concepts in a meaningful way at last.

“That’s definitely a possibility, and it relates to my next question. How far do you suppose you can see, in any direction from where we are now?”

“At least as far as I can on Earth. Maybe farther.”

Jurrin spoke up, briefly adding his two cents to the discussion instead of just standing silent as they babbled nonsense. “A lot further. I’d guess at least twice as far.”

Trevor agreed, and the Gollum continued the discussion, “So if you know you can see at least three miles, and perhaps as far as six or more, and if we assume for a moment that the surface area of Hell is the thirty-five thousand two hundred and ninety-seven square miles we’ve been using in all our examples, would you say Hell, like Earth, is a spheroid shape?”

“If that surface area is correct, no. It couldn’t be. Plus...” Nirgal was looking across the edge of the horizon from left to right and back again, examining it carefully before he spoke, “Plus, I don’t see any curvature. I’ve been places near as wide and flat as this one on Earth, and you can see the curvature at the horizon. Well,” Nirgal laughed nervously, correcting himself, “not flat, exactly, just ... free of hills and other such.”

“No problem, Nirgal, I’m sure we all understood, and I’m glad you noticed. No, from the looks of it, and from the math we’ve considered, Hell is not curved into a sphere like the Earth. If it were, to have a horizon as flat and far as that, it would have to be...”

Trevor finished the Gollum’s sentence for it, “larger than the Sun. Probably larger than a red giant. Assuming, of course, that we’re all still the same size we were on Earth. If by some process those who visited Hell were reduced to a thirteen-hundredth of their normal size, Hell could be that tiny sphere we were disproving and still look this big.”

“But we’re not smaller, are we?” Nirgal was pretty sure about it, but didn’t rightly know how to know.

“No. But how can we tell? What would have to have changed about us to keep our bodies, our clothes, and all our possessions complete and still reduce our size by over three orders of magnitude?”

Jurrin spoke grumpily, sounding as though he thought their discussion had been pointless to begin with and had now gone well off-track, “The empty space within our every atom and sub-atomic particle would have to be reduced in the exact same proportions across every element being shrunk. Are you going to get around to a point, or are we going to be standing around here gabbing all day?”

“I don’t think there’s such a thing as day and night in a place like this, Jurrin,” Trevor responded in a tone of mock-helpfulness.

“But he’s right about the only way to safely shrink us without simply removing matter altogether. Even if it’s done by magic, to shrink something is to remove the space within each atom, and to enlarge it it to add space. Otherwise a complete restructuring must be done, and a human body would not resemble a human body once the necessary changes for continued survival and functionality were made to support a tiny or large body. But if every atom in the body has its internal emptiness modified by exactly the same amount, and if every atom passing in and passing out of that body is modified in the same way, the current structure is sustainable, the organs continue to function, and you don’t die immediately. But there is one noticeable side effect of this process which takes quite a bit of getting used to and can be just as dangerous as less mathematically sound methods of growth and shrinking. Can you guess what it would be?”

“Is it ... something about proportional ethical charges, or something like that?” Nirgal had missed the mark this time, but Jurrin was more than happy to catch him up.

“The mass stays the same.”

“...but the volume changes. So you’d be bigger or smaller, but a significantly different density. Wouldn’t that throw your sense of inertia off?”

“In a way, that’s the symptom exactly. Your mass stays the same, and mass and inertia are effectively the same thing, so your inertia remains the same whether you’re a millimeter tall or a mile tall. It takes the same amount of force to make the same amount of motion, only now your density is way off. Imagine trying to move something less than a millimeter in length that weighs two hundred pounds. Its weight would pull it through most of the things you just thought about holding it in. Instead of the roughly two to four pounds per square inch you put on every surface you stand or walk on at full size in Earth’s gravity, you’d represent about one hundred and twenty-nine thousand pounds of force per square inch. There aren’t a lot of substances that could handle that much pressure, even on only a millimeter-wide space. Do you suppose this,” he kicked at a jutting chunk of red-hot rock, and it broke off and shattered into a few large chunks and a lot of small ones, “is hard enough stuff to take that much force?”

“No, no, of course not. So we’re not shrunk, Hell isn’t a planet or otherwise curved into a sphere shape, and it’s infinite in at least one of the dimensions in which it exists.”

“Right.”

“But that still doesn’t answer my first question.”

“Which one?”

“Where is everybody?”

“Maybe they’re invisible, and decided not to let us see them because you three ... or two... whatever! Because you’re so boring,” Jurrin said gruffly.

“They’re probably just on another level of Hell. If our guess about the size of Hell and that its infinite dimension is one of a higher order, there could be an infinite number of levels. Unique levels of Hell for souls of different sorts, don’t you see? Also, even if this level of Hell were populated, its denizens could be just out of sight, a dozen, a hundred, or perhaps as much as two hundred, miles away from where we are now.”

“Where did you get all these measurements for Hell, Trev? Is it from something Sunshine knew?”

“Parts of it are from Sunshine, parts from others who have shared with me, and some of it was my own hard research, but none of it’s really certain,” said the Gollum. “I don’t want to get into detail about it right now, but if it proves true or comes up while we’re here, I’ll burst it all into your mind.”

Trevor spoke up next, “For now just assume we’re right unless you see something to the contrary. Hell is finite in three-dimensional space like everything else you know, it’s locked in time as well, but it exists in an infinite number of versions across a higher-order dimension.”

“And probably we happened upon a level of Hell that is either entirely unpopulated or very sparsely populated so far. We don’t know how they do things around here, so it’s possible no one even knows we’re here. A couple of people die every second back on Earth, so a group of four at once might go unnoticed.”

“But we aren’t dead.” Nirgal tried to sound as matter-of-fact certain as he could, but it still came out sounding a little frightened. In the heat of battle he had been together and focused enough to nearly match Trevor’s own ability, but in the calmness afterward, he turned right back into that same nervous schoolboy Trevor had met for the first time less than a year before.

“No, we aren’t exactly dead, but we aren’t exactly living, either. We’re in Hell, a realm that’s supposed to be exclusively for the dead, and considering the uninvited intrusion, I doubt they’re going to be eager to let us leave.” Jurrin was marginally more amicable, but still sounded morosely pessimistic to the rest of them.

“Well, we’ve got a few choices about how to proceed. We can try to locate someone or something in this realm and hope we can communicate well enough to find out whether there’s a way out or maybe that they know someone or something which knows a way out. We can stay out of sight of anything and everything we see and try to find one of the eleven widegates of Hell, which ought to be just a matter of heading to the edge of Hell and traveling along that edge until we come to a widegate. We can attempt to summon Satan or some other major demon where we are, and hope they’ll work with us when they arrive. Or we could just stay here for eternity in torment and pain. Unless anyone else has any suggestions?”

“I can’t think of any, Trev. I probably wouldn’t have remembered the widegates, myself. Good thinking.”

Jurrin was practically guffawing out his words, “A widegate? All we have to do is find a widegate and go out? Do you have any idea what holds the widegates shut?”

Trevor nodded, “I do. That isn’t my primary concern if we select that option, though. My primary concern is how to close the widegate again once we open it. According to legend, no widegate, once opened, can be closed until the twelfth gate is opened, and the twelfth gate doesn’t even exist unless all eleven gates are already open. Aside from the fact that screwing any step of that process up could trigger the true end times for our world and the fact that our group of four is vastly undereducated about the widegates very existence, there’s still the matter of which direction the nearest edge is in and the possibility that all eleven gates are not collocated across all the infinite levels of Hell.”

“Not to mention the hordes of demons and wretched souls that would almost inevitably escape by the same route we would take if we opened even one of the widegates. We would get back to Earth just in time to watch it be devoured by the denizens of Hell.” The Gollum, who may not even be allowed to remain alive long enough to see their return to Earth, still cared about it. It was inescapably in the Gollum’s nature to care about whatever Trevor had cared about up to the point it was given life, and Trevor seemed to care, somewhere deep down, perhaps, for the survival of Earth. At least, that is, until he saw his daughter with his own eyes, alive and well, and held her in his arms, the Gollum mused silently to itself.

“Alright, it sounds like we’re all opposed to the idea of locating and opening a widegate to get out of Hell. What do you think of our other options? Try to communicate with locals, or try to summon the powerful ones?” Trevor had only paused for a brief moment, not long enough for the others to respond, before he continued, “Oh, yeah, or stay in hell for eternity. Can’t forget that one.”

“I think we’re more likely to be able to overcome a minor demon or corrupt soul than one of the powerful,” said Jurrin thoughtfully, “though I wouldn’t mind having a story to tell about meeting Satan or Mammon or Azael in person when we got home rather than some local putz of a demonic magistrate.”

“I doubt that any trapped soul would know the way out at all, or they wouldn’t be trapped in Hell anymore, would they?” Nirgal seemed to be going over their options as one might pick out a CD to listen to on a relaxing Sunday afternoon; casually, playfully, and with no weight of the danger that every one of their options represented. Whether this was a result of his having come internally to terms with the fact that when every outcome was bleak it did no good to feel bad about choosing among them or a result of his having slipped that one last step over the edge and into the abyss of insanity where even death was as meaningless as the outcome of a game of checkers was not apparent. “So we’ve got to find a demon of some kind if we want to get out of here at all. I think Jurrin’s right that we could probably overcome a minor demon if we worked together, even in their own realm, but I doubt that the minor demons really have access to the sort of escape route we’re looking for. We’re not just here in spirit or in a new body given to us for the afterlife, we’re here in our actual bodies, our only bodies and we need to have them with us when we return to Earth.”

“While that is either a fairly short-sighted or highly bigoted view of non-corporeal existence and completely at odds with the very helpful men and women of the Wolyd Centre, I would definitely like to arrive with my body intact,” Trevor agreed. The Gollum stayed silent for a few moments, hoping the subject of its own continued existence wouldn’t come up so early in their adventure, and the conversation moved on naturally.

“So I think we ought to try summoning one of the major demons,” continued Nirgal, “maybe not Satan or Azael or Ilbis or Mammon or any of the big names, but...”

Trevor cut Nirgal off suddenly, “Wait, what did you say? Which demons?”

“Uhh... I uhh... Satan and ... Mammon and Azael... and ... I don’t know, didn’t Jurrin say Beelzebub?”

“No, no, the other one, it’s on the tip of my tongue! You said part of its name... come on! Who was it?” Trevor was really getting exasperated over the matter of whatever demon he thought Nirgal had mentioned.

Nirgal was beginning to sweat heavily, and had he not been wracking his brain to try to dig out the stub of information that Trevor was practically falling to pieces over, he might have wondered why he hadn’t already been sweating heavily under his wizard’s robes in an atmosphere that felt to be above the boiling point of water. “Was it...” he paused uncertainly, looking at his toes, scrunching them shut, pressing on his temples, “Was it Ilbis?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Trevor was jumping up and down and shouting, and he practically pounced on Nirgal to give him a hug. “That’s it! I remember what she said to activate the book, and that’s it! That’s all we need, I’m sure of it. From the minds of the chained men at the end, I absorbed a lot of information I haven’t even come close to comprehending yet, but with that name, it... It’s like a key, and as soon as I thought of the two words Kay had said, my memories opened up. This is great!”

“What’s great? What is it?”

“This level of Hell is definitely reserved for the most dedicated members of the dark sides of the pairs. There’s a particular demon they worked with to get the churches linked to Hell and to secure an entire dedicated level for themselves, and I know his true name! He’ll have to do whatever I tell him, and I know he can create portals between Hell and Earth. We’re saved. This is it.”

“I thought we were going to vote,” said Jurrin in a tone that seemed neither greedy nor upset.

“Sure, fine, no problem. I vote we contact the demon in charge of this Hell and force him to conduct us safely back to Earth. Who agrees?”

“I don’t see why not,” replied Nirgal, “if the true name works the way you imply it will, we just have to be cautious of what we say to him.”

“Then I suppose it doesn’t matter what I think, does it?” proclaimed an exasperated Jurrin, throwing up his arms.

“If you’d like, I can cast an additional vote for the plan Trev has suggested, and you can feel even more disconnected from the process.” The Gollum used an appropriately jokey tone, trying to lift Jurrin’s mood to no effect. “I’d thought that since I was clearly only a copy of Trev, we must share the same vote; a thought which also helps prevent the possibility of a tie.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure it’s a brilliant plan. Everything Trev has suggested so far has worked out perfectly, right?”

No one bothered to give Jurrin a response; there was none to give. They were going to summon the twins’ demon contact and all they could do was try to be ready for unexpected twists. None of them wanted to return to the dark church from whence they had come, and neither did they have to verbalize that position; everyone knew. They would summon the demon right where they stood, and play by ear.

Trevor and the Gollum stood across an open space of about eight feet, facing each other. Nirgal and Jurrin stood out of the way, but near enough to be able to assist if something went wrong. Without a warning or a countdown of any kind, Trevor and the Gollum simultaneously called out the true name of the demon, “Tetralix Ilbis!”

The still air which had separated the two versions of Trevor instantly swirled into fevered motion, a cyclone of stingingly hot air spinning into being between them, tail dancing wispily just above the hard stones on which they all stood, a growing funnel of heat and dust and powerful forces brought together in opposition rose up and up and up into the yellow-orange glow, reaching further into whatever was above them then their eyes were able to make out through dust-blown squints. The twisting funnel of rising air spun faster and faster until the bits and chunks of sand and dust and rock that were caught up in it began to catch fire. These improbably flaming bits of stone drew horizontal or rising and spiraling lines of light across their retinas, and then they began to fly out of the twister at incredible speeds, hurtling through the air like meteorites and catching apparently sterile stones on fire wherever they hit. Whatever maelstrom they had summoned was actually setting the fields on fire despite the fact that nothing could ever have grown in this desolate landscape to burn; its demonic fire was intense enough to combust bare rock.

The whirlwind spun in place between the apparent Trevor twins, ever throwing its tiny, improbably fire-spreading grains of sand and pebbles, and after it seemed to have settled into a sustainable configuration, neither shrinking in size nor growing in intensity, a voice came from the wind. It was not the sort of voice they had expected. It was addressing them in a form of the ancient runic poetry that Nirgal had been studying so adeptly of late, and it sounded quite like it had somehow managed to cast each odd syllable with a cockney English accent.

Nirgal stepped forward as though made suddenly brazen by the need for his singular ability among them to comprehend the phonemes of the ancient runic poetry and respond in kind. Without missing a single beat, and there was definitely a beat resolving out of the strange sounds the demon had made, Nirgal began barking out his response with a matching but not identical rhythm. As soon as his mouth closed, the voice of the demon resumed, belting out the incomprehensible syllables of the callback duet faster than before without losing its careful rhythm in what the other three recognized as a challenge of sorts. They couldn’t guess at what the song was about, or even whether it was an entirely ancient song or an improvised one based on an ancient formula, but as stanza after stanza of the song bounced back and forth between the demon and the boy, the speed of it went up and up and up as though imitating the way the whirlwind had risen into the bright sky above. Faster and faster they went, each iteration similar in structure to the one before it but different enough that until the verses were so fast that neither singer paused between their own verses to hear the other’s, the spectators - for that is what Trevor, Jurrin, and the Gollum had become - could tell that it was not simple repetition at speed but dozens of unique phrases carefully but rapidly enunciated in a hypnotizing fractaline pattern of sounds within and below sounds.

Then just as fast as the first lines had been followed by the second, it was all over. Nirgal shouted quickly to the others, “It’s done! Just relax, and he’ll send us back!” He wasn’t sure whether they’d heard him, but they didn’t try to run as he watched the twister lift and shift and set down on each of them in turn. First Trevor, down with the spinning tail widening to envelop him from heat to foot, then up again with nothing in its wake. Then Jurrin, armor-clad and sword at the ready for whatever enemy he thought might await him on the side of the living. Next was the Gollum that bore an uncanny resemblance to Trevor, down came the spinning air, concealing him, then up again and nothing stood where the Gollum had been. Finally, the conscious twister, this demon, shifted over Nirgal’s head and began to descend.

The air at the center of the thing was eerily calm, but the walls of spinning debris were frighteningly near, so that he closed his eyes and mouth to keep out the dust while the return trip took place, even though he knew it would last only about a second in all. Suddenly Nirgal felt the sensation that he thought must be the feeling of traveling from the next world backwards; it felt almost like the inverse of what disappearing and reappearing did. He had his eyes closed as it happened, so he couldn’t see it, but it felt like the hot air of the bare stone plains that had been made into a conflagration of rock and the twister itself were disappeared at the same instant that cool, still air and solid ground under his feet were suddenly appeared all around him. It felt as though he hadn’t moved at all. Nirgal did not question this sensation at all; how was he to know what it was supposed to feel like to pass, living and breathing, out of Hell and back into life on Earth? He suspected that his little quartet might be the first four to ever experience such a thing, and as he opened his eyes to the room he was in and felt an odd sensation like the entire thing was not quite right, more a projection than a real place, Nirgal shook his head sharply and decided he must just be disoriented from the trip. “This isn’t a projection, this is the lobby of the Wolyd Centre,” Nirgal thought to himself, “see, there’s the other three, looking just as disoriented as you feel. Relax. You did a good job, it’s over for now.” Taking his own advice, Nirgal began to feel the tension that had seized him about four stanzas into the whirlwind demon’s song - as it had become faster and more improvised than he had known he could respond to correctly - melt away, out of his neck and shoulders and face, and a feeling of great relief suddenly washed over him. Nirgal smiled, approached the other three he had helped save from eternal Hellfire, and they all walked into the Centre together happy and relieved.

They all helped Jurrin strip out of his blood-and-guts-baked-on-by-the-heat-of-Hell armor he wore before stripping themselves down and showering in four separate private rooms of the Wolyd Centre, luxuriating in the cool of the water a good, long time. Somehow, the Gollum had known that it had nothing to fear from the water, that it was not made of mud as long as it still had life, and it enjoyed the experience more than any of the others, aware that it was not long for this world, no matter how their debriefing went. No one bothered the four returned soldiers, no one asked what had happened, no one even asked if they had wounds that needed dressing; they were left to clean themselves and rest for as long as they needed, and the peace and quiet had a chance to sink and settle into them as they slept and slept and slept.

Mere moments after Nirgal’s eyes opened to a private hospital room on par with any single double at a four-star hotel, a nearly invisible wisp of a nurse pushed a cart in through the door. Nirgal could smell the hot breakfast she was wheeling towards him, and he sat up immediately and greeted the nurse, “Good morning, Nurse...”

“It’s Yolida, honey, and a good morning to you, too. Feel free to call me Lida, all the girls do.”

“Lida, it is a genuine pleasure to meet you, the bright spot of my morning, I suspect, second only to the first bite of food to reach my mouth since I escaped the fiery furnace alive.”

“Oh dear, oh dear!” If the ghostly nurse had had any blood in her, she would have been blushing a glorious hue, and Nirgal thought she seemed to turn from a pale white-grey to a pale pink-rose shade all over, but he couldn’t be sure in the bright light of day streaming in through the wide windows. “I do hope it’s more than the smell of crisp bacon that wakes you up so, honey. Let me just cover that up for you for now,” she said as she lifted the breakfast tray onto his lap, her barely tangible fingers noticeably brushing against the erection tenting his blankets as she drew the tray up to hide the enormous bulge. When she grasped the size of it, almost literally, she seemed to go a shade or two deeper red, from pink-rose to rose-red, and managed to continue, “I can come back and take a close look at that after you finish your breakfast if it’s ...” she managed to make a throat-clearing sound, and Nirgal was too distracted by the prospect of hot food and a hot nurse to wonder whether the nurses of the Wolyd Centre projected the idea of the sound of their voices into their patients’ minds or actually used their skill at manipulating matter to vibrate the air and create actual speech, and whichever it was, Lida was an expert, “eh-hem, if it’s still swollen, that is. I can think of a couple of things we could try to get the swelling to go down.” She winked a sly wink in his direction, then turned to leave, pushing the cart in front of her ethereal body and swaying her ghostly hips wide and wide again.

As she reached the door, Nurse Yolida - that’s Lida to you, sugar - turned her translucent head back to Nirgal who sat transfixed and frozen on the bed, caught by the sensual shifting of her virtual hips as a deer gets caught by the glow of oncoming headlights. “You’ve got to eat, love. Remember that bacon you almost jumped out of bed for?” Nirgal looked first down with a dazed expression at the plates stacked high with his favorite breakfast foods which the sexy nurse had set out and uncovered for him, then back to Lida. “You’ve got to get your strength up, honey. Can’t have you passing out under ol’ Lida right before the big meeting upstairs.” She pronounced it as a single word, “O’Lida”; closer to her real name by one sound, removed from the actual idea of revealing her age by another. She disappeared through the door without waiting to see if he’d dug in, but she thought she heard the sounds of a teenager scarfing down food like he had someplace to be start through the door as she closed it.

Nirgal was famished, and ate the food laid out before him with a brazen disregard for the long-standing tradition of thorough mastication, nearly choking to death on a chunk of sausage and then on a bite of rye toast not two minutes later. He wasn’t primarily motivated by the prospect of ... whatever the nurse had been flirting on about, exactly, as he didn’t know exactly what sorts of activities a woman in her condition was capable of. Rather, Nirgal seemed to have been brought alive by his sheer usefulness in the course of the raid on the churches and then their escape from Hell, and he feasted hungrily, as though the food before him was sweet mother’s milk, the first food to touch his lips in this new life.

At school he had few friends - no, only one real friend among the student body, and that was Trevor. Even though Nirgal had been added to the school’s dodgeball team he’d felt like he was only there because of Trevor’s help, separate from the team off the court even though he played a vital role in every game through his own talents and skills and got along well with everyone on the court and in the locker room. He came from a not-quite-poverty-poor family, and everyone seemed to know it just by looking at him. They knew it, and they treated him differently because of it, and Nirgal knew they did. He had always felt excluded before Trevor showed up, and it didn’t get much better after that, since Trevor was such a natural outsider; a lot of the students who wanted to meet him, to hang out with him, to find out what this local celebrity was like in real life also feared him in greater measure. Lately it hadn’t been unusual for students to approach Nirgal just to ask questions about Trevor, sometimes when Trevor was standing right next to him, but once they had their answer or a refusal to answer it was as though Nirgal became invisible right before their eyes, fading from existence. Even when he excelled at something, as he had done with ancient runic poetry and then on the dodgeball team, it had gone unnoticed by his fellow students. Nirgal had felt like he was meaningless and unimportant, a useless lost cog in the vast machinery of the world.

He had felt that way even as Trevor dragged him into the messy business of his kidnapped daughter and the twins. Even as he was made one of only four elite magicians to make up the frontal assault on the mirrored churches and their dark power, he had felt like he had no place being among them. Like he was simply Trevor’s beloved pet, brought along for good luck and nowt else, and even put in charge of one of their most important defenses in a most demeaning way - Nirgal had had no conscious control over the most powerful area effect ever to erupt from his mind and will. Except that then the gargoyles had begun to fall, and suddenly Nirgal learned that he wasn’t just a waste of skin after all.

After the gargoyles had begun to fall, right up until the moment he had been returned safely to the Wolyd Centre, Nirgal had been a vitally important member of a team of winners. If he hadn’t been there, the twins might had had their babies, or at least might still stand to rise against the single-minded. If he hadn’t been with the four who had gone to Hell in an evil cathedral - a much fancier conveyance than a hand basket, but it doesn’t much matter if the destination is the same - even though Trevor had been the one who could summon and command a major demon, it had been Nirgal himself who had communicated with it in the complex sing-song of the ancient dueling poets, winning its favor and explaining their course in a way its ancient mind could comprehend. Trevor may have absorbed all the inside and archival knowledge of the dual church, but he could never have parsed it in time to deal with the whirlwind.

As Nirgal scooped up the last few morsels of food from the plates on the tray in front of him, he finished going over the recent events in his mind, and he felt proud of himself, just himself, for the first time he could remember. He had not been standing in the shadow of the greatness that Trevor and Jurrin represented, he had been standing beside them, fighting side by side as equals. What a wonderful feeling, to finally realize your own self-worth. He breathed in, and the air was sweet and refreshing. He looked out the window and the day was warm and inviting. He thought about the day ahead of him, of getting to tell the story of everything that had happened in his life since he’d left this place last, and he puffed up with eagerness.

Nirgal set the breakfast tray carefully aside and then leapt haphazardly out of the bed, the dwindling remains of his erection’s possibilities forgotten completely as he tore off the pajamas he couldn’t even remember putting on as he’d stumbled along the edge of consciousness toward the bed. He looked in the closet and the dresser and found that his own clothes had been brought in from home, and quickly dressed in his favorite outfit, comfortable, sturdy, and fashion-neutral enough that it would never go out of style.

Nirgal actually sang to himself as he dressed, a light and happy song about the sunrise and the blooming flowers of the morning he’d learned from his own independent studies of ancient runic poetry’s musical history. The melody he hummed, but the incomprehensible-to-most-ears syllables of the long-dead-but-now-alive-again song’s lyrical poetry he quite nearly belted out. It was a song of rejoicing and looking happily forward to the bright days ahead, but Nirgal sang it unconsciously at first, not even aware he’d started humming the tune before he’d even finished his breakfast. He finished dressing, double-checked he had everything he might need in his pockets, and on his final inspection in the mirror before going out the door, realized he was singing aloud.

Nirgal lowered his voice to a level he was sure wouldn’t penetrate through the walls to the adjacent rooms where his compatriots-in-arms might yet be sleeping, and finished the final stanza of the song before stepping out into the hallway, where he was met with thunderous applause from those with hands, and hoots and whistles from those without, ol’ Lida among them. There were shouts of “nice song” and “way to go Pavoratti” and “if it’s good enough to get you out of Hell, it’s good enough for me” and even a couple requests to “sing us another verse!” Just a day earlier, Nirgal would have taken every single comment, every clap and whistle and hoot as a jibe, and would have felt like the lowest creature on the face of the earth, thinking that everyone in the hospital had heard him or heard about him singing and had come to make fun of him. This morning, puffed up with pride, Nirgal heard everything as genuine praise, and only puffed up more. He even sang the gathered crowd a short two-stanza poem that most would never know was a traditional winner’s gloating song in the now-so-distant past, and received another round of applause before semi-politely excusing himself to be debriefed, not realizing that everyone he was supposed to be meeting was there in the crowd.

Luckily for decorum, as soon as Nirgal disappeared around a corner and beyond their line of sight, ol’ Lida, who had taken the sort of route to get to him that made it seem nice to be non-corporeal sometimes, grabbed Nirgal and pulled him into another of the private rooms. He could barely see her in the bright light of the room. She seemed to have been drawn in outline with curling streams of thin white smoke, and he couldn’t make out her delicate features with his eyes, only the broad, voluptuous curves as in a silhouette he would never be able to forget. Invisible as she may have been, he could feel her hands on him with no trouble at all; her strong, gentle grip had been more than enough to pull him into the room and tight against her bosom. He couldn’t have seen the bosom if he’d looked, but the sensation was exactly right, exactly as he’d known her embrace would have been in the flesh. If Nirgal kept his eyes closed, he would have no reason to believe he was with anything other than a beautiful, corporeal woman who was too hot for him to hold back, except for the obvious reasons like his youth, inexperience, and general social ineptness that naturally flowed from and helped support the excluded nature of his social life. Nirgal didn’t want to keep his eyes closed, though, he wanted to see the woman, see everything there was to see about her, and give himself over to the pleasurable new experiences she was already dragging him into.

He wanted to see her, and he knew what he needed to do. From where he stood in the doorway, lips locked in a deep soul kiss with an unseen partner, Nirgal reached out with the mental forces he knew he could command and closed the room’s curtains completely. The room had been unoccupied and brightly lit by the sun so no lamp or other light source penetrated the dim stillness of the room but the light that crept in around the border of the curtains. In the dim light, little ol’ Lida lit up considerably, very nearly glowing, but still more of an outline than a woman, and he wanted his first sexual experience to be more like sex and less like a vivid masturbatory fantasy. She was floating backwards toward the bed, pulling him shuffling along without so much as reducing the passion or intensity of that hot, wet kiss.

He wanted to break free for a moment, and at the same time he never wanted to have less contact with Lida, only more. Still he wanted to be able to see her properly, to create the right atmosphere for what was to come, and his first idea, nearly the last conscious thought he would have before leaving this room, required his mouth to be free to speak for a second or two. He tried pulling his face back, away from Lida’s, but she had a hand on the back of his head and only pressed him tighter against her. He spoke to her mentally, gently, a lover’s soothing voice is what he’d hoped to hit on, saying, “I just need my mouth for a few seconds, and then it’s yours.”

The hand on the back of his head was instantly gone. Not removed, not pulled back; she was not corporeal, and had simply stopped projecting a hand into the space behind Nirgal’s head. He pulled his head gradually out of the kiss, planting a few quick parting pecks on lips he could feel but not really see, and took in a deep breath. His right arm moved up, off Lida’s generous backside to point in the direction of the window, and his left hand massaged her nearly-transparent yet more-than-well-endowed right breast as he worked, savoring the sensation and trying desperately not to lose his concentration. He spoke an impromptu, modified version of the mud-gollum poem he had already re-worked to create his mudballs before, hoping beyond hope that it would have the desired effect and not simply fill the room with thick mud or worse. Whether by luck or by his apparently inherent skill, Nirgal might never know, the effect of the modified poem had been exactly as he had intended; behind the drawn curtain a just-thick-enough layer of dark mud flowed down the entire wide picture window, completely obliterating the sunlight that had been sneaking around the edges of the curtains and into the room. As they fell backwards onto the soft Queen-sized bed, the room was plunged into near-total darkness. A quick toss of a mudball at the door they’d come in through made short work of the light-leaking crevasses on three sides of the door. As his mud worked its magic on the insistent light, Nirgal closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on an effect that Trevor had tried to show him several times for use in dodgeball games, and which he had never quite been able to complete. This morning, just as the last of the light winked out of the space below the door, Nirgal managed to complete the effect, and time within this room was no longer running along the same timeline as the time outside the room; they would have plenty of time to themselves, and he would still be able to reach his meeting at a reasonable time, perhaps only as though he had been stopped in the hallways to sing a stanza or two for some passing nurse or specialist. Time was slowed nearly to a stop, and the room was lightless. Nirgal’s eyes dilated all the way to the edge of his vision, exposing the sensitive black-and-white-seeing rods of his retina to the only light-source in the room, Lida.

In the total darkness Nirgal had created, Lida’s spectral body now glowed bright enough to give off a “bloom” of light beyond the quite sharpened edges, softening her newly crisp features into a rare beauty. She rolled them over and perched over top of Nirgal and as he studied her, she began carefully stripping his clothes off, folding and stacking them with her mind without so much as a flicker in the apparent solidity of the body kneeling tantalizingly above him like some sort of radioactively-glowing ghost.

He could still see through her in a way, but she was there in three dimensions now instead of a hazy two. Her facial features now had volume and showed a character and beauty that had only been hinted at by the faint wisp of her that was visible in a lighted room. Nirgal could look into her eyes, see the thin dark circumferences at the very edges of her irises where they met the whites of her eyes, he could see the subtle variations in brightness that outlined the sharp flower-petals which radiated out from her pupils, and he could even detect the tiniest specks shining in the rich complexities of her irises, adding a depth of beauty to her eyes that a solid swatch of hue could never convey. By focusing his eyes at a different depth, Nirgal could see right through Lida’s eyes to the back of her head and with concentration, on anything in between. The entirety of Lida’s long-gone physical body was represented here for Nirgal to see, each projected cell glowing with its own light, visible to any who looked at it directly. He played around with his eyes’ focal point as she fiddled with the long and complicated laces on the boots he had selected - they were like the official dodgeball boots in enough ways that they were mistaken for part of his uniform on a daily basis, but there were some good design choices made in the dodgeball boots that Nirgal liked to have on his feet every day, and he had saved up and bought these boots special - and he found he could set his eyes to show him something like a creepy x-ray, her skeleton glowing out to his eyes more visibly than her skin or other features. He could pinpoint the internal organs she had once actually possessed, taking in the contours of her intestines and the smooth curves of her kidneys before highlighting upon the brightly-glowing reproductive organs nestled above the point where her softly-glowing legs met.

Even as it happened to him, Nirgal realized that it was probably not a particularly normal response for a man to have, but it happened anyway, and he liked it - the sight of good ol’ Lida’s reproductive organs suspended within her as in the “Invisible Woman” anatomy playset or the plastic models found in doctors’ offices brought Nirgal immediately to a fully aroused state. He loved seeing her, head to toe, the graceful curves of her body, her hips and ass and thighs a beautiful exclamation of her feminine nature, the gently sagging curves of her large breasts with her nipples nearly doubling as plumb bobs as they drooped were proof that this woman had been made for motherhood. For reproduction. For sex. Somewhere in between the door’s closing and the bed, the projected uniform Lida had been wearing had ceased to be there, and Nirgal was glad to see that Lida had retained her naturally advanced body shapes instead of tweaking her representation into some barbie-doll-like contrivance. She had wrinkles, she had scars, she had cellulite, her breasts were no longer firm and pointy and full, and her belly curved out nearly farther then her breasts extended from her ribcage above it. Nirgal could even make out a subtle, and only faintly more glowing than the glowing skin surrounding, cluster of stretch marks on each side of her once-truly-huge belly.

All these details he noticed and adored and admired, but in every way that she resembled a fertility goddess externally, it was that internal proof of femininity, the cradle of all fertility nesting within her and within his sight that turned him on the most. That her breasts had been quite literally life-giving to her child or children made them more wonderful and powerful and erotic than any pert, perky teenager’s pert, perky, unsuckled breasts; the young woman’s breasts were like the caterpillar, uninteresting and useless until the woman who wears them transforms one day, one birth day, from being merely a life to becoming a true life-giver, becoming a bright and vibrant butterfly, a bastion of love for her child. That her belly had carried her child or children within her gave it a power and beauty and magnificence that no belly, flat or fat, scarred, marked, or blemish-free can share without first giving up its old place, its old firmness and smoothness, to give another life a safe place of its own. Her hips, seeming wide enough to bear out a dozen beautiful crowning kings into the world, are the fulcrums of her strength, and stand guard around the true palace of her femininity. Still, with every detail of Lida’s life worn and shown to him in a glowing, glittering map of beauty and poetry, it was that internal system, obscured in most women by the opacity of their flesh and blood and bones, that captured Nirgal’s attention and engorged him with the blood and desire he needed to become one with her as men and women were meant to do.

As she crawled back up along the length of his now bare body from the foot of the bed until she was face to face with him again, Nirgal’s eyes remained intent and focused right through the top of her head, down her neck, past her heart and lungs and so much falderal, to the things that excited him the most. He gazed at them, taking in their unique beauties and recalling their names from some medical illustration or sex-ed book seen long ago. Her mons pubis, covered in a dense foliage of darkness peppered with grey, calls out to the center of his palm knowing that when they meet, his fingers will meet the rest of the neighborhood with just the right amount of reach, and wouldn’t that be just the most neighborly day this beautyhood has seen? Then that forest of salt and pepper - still mostly pepper - runs on, following the twin paths of her labia majora down and around the ‘neighborhood’ like matching hedgerows bordering a secret garden of delights. His tongue craves a leisurely stroll along the paths of those hedgerows and practically throbs in anticipation of discovering the secrets and delights of her ‘garden’. The delicate folds of her labia minora have, with age, softened silkily like the rest of her skin and have come to resemble the inward curving petals of a rare orchid in bloom whose sweet scent and nascent nectar he cannot wait to take in. Her clitoris, barely hiding behind that prepuce (nee foreskin, nee frenulum) of less-sensitive skin, already becoming engorged with passion as her ischiocavernosus muscles begin to contract before her slow trail of kisses has even passed Nirgal’s knobby knees, and he looks forward to the chance to tease her garden’s bud into the daylight where it can be worshiped as it deserves to be. Then her vagina, that beautiful, complicated passage and portal to life and to ecstasy, with the bulbocavernosus muscles just outside and ready to clamp down and to tremble, her vagina itself an experienced (quite nearly trained) muscle group, with rhythms and strengths all its own, feminine strength within feminine strength creating an undeniable attraction for its complementing partner of masculine strength upon masculine strength. That attraction is like a more powerful and subtle version of electromagnetism, drawing strong opposing forces inevitably together to discover their unique fit, and it, along with his own ischiocavernosus muscles, is what has polarized his masculinity, lending it strength and driving it outward, away from his foundation of masculinity and toward her cradle of feminine power. Stronger than even that attraction is her cervix, the true corridor through which life is either granted or denied access to her uterus - that first home to all mankind, at home in every woman - unblocked in Lida by mucous because there is no risk of infecting a body which does not exist, the Jacob’s Ladder of her interconnected femininity is free of all impediments to oneness. He examines her fallopian tubes as they reach out and up and turn inward on each side of that uterus of hers which has been the womb of another, and the curves they follow are like fractaline expressions of the greater curves of her body, each doing its part, taking its shape from the curved surface that is what female means and means what female is, seeing all this while she spends slow, wet affections on his own external physical vestige of femininity; his nipples. Those curves, those tubes beside tubes (the fallopian beside the ovarian arterial) that feather and finger and terminate as fimbriae and reach out for more curves besides; these ovaries curve around too, inside and out, creating, maturing, and releasing the tiniest curves, which are her eggs, to those fimbriae to be collected and passed back down this Jacob’s Ladder which carries messages of hope and possibility both up and down - or at least it did while Lida still had a corporeal body. For Nirgal, the level of detail of Lida’s pseudo-physical manifestation was more than satisfying enough for now, though he certainly looked forward to the time when his erotic misadventures would involve a whole and healthy version of this Jacob’s Ladder of femininity he had just climbed the length of in his mind and with his eyes, where there was a chance his messenger sent up and a messenger sent down would meet at just the right place on the rungs that would begin a transformation like that of a butterfly in their ladder’s bearer.

Nirgal finished his focused musings just in time to pull the focus of his eyes out of Lida’s crotch and all the way back to meet her proximate gaze as she, smiling more broadly than seemed quite reasonable, sank herself down onto him at both ends, swallowing his rigid member below and his tongue above as she did. As soon as Lida’s eyes were closed for the kiss, Nirgal turned his wide-eyed gaze back down and through her body, to watch his thickness penetrate, separate, and fill those glorious organs of femininity she so deliciously rendered for him from her bodiless mind.

The physical sensations of it were nearly overwhelming on their own, that first thrust of slick heat enveloping his unpracticed and overstimulated virgin organ was like nothing he had imagined; it was so much better than Nirgal had expected it to feel that he didn’t know how to feel. That first stroke was by no means the last, of course, and with each long piston-like push and pull of Lida’s experienced (quite nearly trained) vagina on and off of Nirgal’s steel-hard corporeal and sensitive Magnum-XL-qualified cock, the level of control he had over his autonomic responses was tested an additional notch toward the impossible end of the scale, just from the physical sensations alone. Complicating the matter somewhat were his newfound pride and his recently discovered erotic fetishization of motherhood, femininity, and the entire reproductive process within the female body. Nirgal had never been proud of himself before, and he certainly didn’t want to dash that so-far-short-lived sensation against the rocks by prematurely ejaculating or being a bad fuck.

(The possibility of the latter crossing his partners’ minds at all, Nirgal would discover as life went on for him after this strange and convoluted experience passed by the wayside, had a lot more to do with whether they could accommodate - and enjoy - what he had to offer or not. Lida, for example, being non-corporeal, had certain advantages over corporeal women, not the least nor the greatest of which was her ability to adjust the depth and tension and sensitivity of her own genitals to suit the variances of each partner’s own genitals. Had Lida actually been the one riding Nirgal like an out-of-control carnival ride that day, the fact that he had basically just lay still while she took care of her own business might have been more a blessing than a bad fuck, since he’d had no idea how to wield the battering ram stuck between his legs just yet. Other women, the ones with physical bodies unaccustomed to Nirgal’s brand of hugeness down below, would consider him a bad fuck no matter what he had done, how gentle and slow and sensitive or hard and rough and selfish he had been, and even if he had never penetrated them with “the old third leg”, if they couldn’t handle the size the rest didn’t matter, he was a bad fuck in their eyes - and usually the eyes of their friends as well, whether they’d had a taste for hugeness or not.)

Beyond the intensity of the raw physical sensations which would already have overwhelmed most other teenage boys’ minds, beyond his pride and his desire to save face even with this non-corporeal nurse he’d never met before today, there was his new erotic fetish to be considered. In fact, due to the intensity and suddenness of this fetish on the scene and the fact that he happened to be being fucked by a glowing, translucent woman upon whose internal organs he could focus his attentions, thereby seeing them with clarity and relatively independently of the appearance of the rest of the woman’s body, Nirgal’s new fetish was what ended up distracting him from his own body’s signals and the pressure of trying to remain proud of himself, even in this area of total inexperience. He simply lost himself, his perception of this Lida’s reproductive organs glowing white and three dimensional and interacting in realtime with his own massive testimony to the towering bludgeon that masculinity had become, shining stark against the blackness that surrounded Nirgal and this chain of creation which bounded up and down and up and down with a rhythm that he would have cursed as impossible to follow right up until the moment he understood it.

Then, with the nature of the rhythm understood, his perception of the cluster of glowing organs became fixed, and the rest of the world was the new askew. With new clarity, Nirgal felt he could make out each and every glowing cell of the projection and watch it perform its designed function as an individual unit with a duty to the whole, and in the intensity of the moment it didn’t occur to him that it was unusual for the human eye to be able to see such tiny structures and motions. So without so much as a wonder, that’s what he did, his eyes and mind taking in wide swaths of visual information at once, then analyzing and decompressing it in the background while he focused on the next cluster or layer of cells. The information, the visually observed progress and potential of each cell and its place in the community of these organs, expanded into Nirgal’s mind at an amazing rate, and as he was working his eyes up and down and left and right and his focus nearer and farther away, he found a few interesting things out about this fortress of feminine power. The most interesting of which to him was that these glowing organs - which were projected by a powerful mind unconsciously from some stored, perhaps genetic, memory of its body - were so occupied with his masculine connection to their feminine power that they responded to his thoughts as though they were projected by his own mind.

When Nirgal saw cells laying dormant and wondered what their activity had been, they sprang to life to show him. Wondering about the scale he could effect change on as well as whether those changes were in his mind’s eye or actual, Nirgal thought to the vagina about what a ripplingly powerful orgasm would look like on a cellular level and was rewarded with Lida’s screams and convulsions, above and somewhat beyond his tunneled perceptions, as well as with exactly the cellular parade he had asked for, unfolding before his eyes. He watched each muscle group contract rhythmically, watched individual cells pulling hard one against another, exerting energy and increasing in heat and a few even pulled hard enough to tear free from their neighbors or die outright. This increased level of interaction from within the tunnel vision that had been created by falling totally prey to his erotic fetish for motherhood and fertility was like a door into summer, suddenly some part of Nirgal realized that he could witness the entire chain of interaction along the complex ladder of organs that was the only thing left in the world he could really see. He projected his request to the entirety of the femininity before him, an echo of it even reaching and effecting all the cells of Lida’s projected body which were not strictly reproductive in duty, guiding them gently to ensure a healthy bodyscape for babymaking, and watched in awe as his desire started a process that had been long dead to the real Lida, and longer dead to the one who posed as her above him. Lida, unaware she was being impersonated, did not notice anything at all, though stirrings of slow activity beyond her control began to take place in the imagined cells of her projected body. The impostor, even if she had been sensitive enough to notice such a thing, as Lida most certainly would have been if it had happened so quickly within her, was completely consumed with the act of lovemaking which had so long been denied her and had this day been thrust back upon her. She sensed nothing.

Which was all to the good, since she couldn’t have done anything to stop the process Nirgal had begun brewing within her; he had merely tipped the first domino, just a little nudge, and the rest was inevitably begun on the process it had been so carefully designed for, drawn along naturally and only unusual in the speed at which it occurred. Which is to say that the glowing, mentally generated projections of (see also: imaginary) ovaries released an ovum that had not even been present before Nirgal’s request and was ready for the fimbriae to seek out before this Lida was wracked by her second orgasm. Lida’s second orgasm seemed to have been triggered by Nirgal’s own orgasmic ejaculation of thousands healthy sperm against the unplugged opening of her cervix, and had the effect through its rhythmic contractions of turning her cervix into a sort of pump, drawing his sperm-loaded semen up and up and into her glowing uterus. By the time her orgasm - but not her wild ride of Nirgal’s perplexingly still-rigid protrusion - had subsided, the ovum which had been released was being shuttled along her fallopian tube at an unheard-of rate by glowing cilia that seemed desperate to do their part to ensure that the entire process of life creation was displayed before Nirgal’s eyes could be turned away.

Nirgal watched in amazement as the seeds of life within his own white ejaculate, lighted only by the soft glow of Lida’s own white projections of cells all around it, suspended now by a force almost independent from this Lida’s mind and already most of the way up the ladder of organs his sperm must pass to reach their goal, began their blind swimming, tails whipping energetically to seek that single ovum. Whatever rules applied to corporeal cells didn’t appear to apply to these glowing projections, and many functions seemed to occur all at once rather than over the course of days or weeks, and instead of a trip of hours or days, the gem-like ovum was spat out of the fallopian tubes in mere minutes, suddenly awash and surrounded by Nirgal’s eager sperm. The glowing subject of Nirgal’s utterly focused attention seemed to have decided that the urgency of the situation would not allow the time required for his sperm to reach the ovum as they normally would, in the ampulla of the fallopian tubes, and had thus also saved the time a fertilized ovum would require to reach the uterine lining. To Nirgal, such efficiency quickened his heart rate with the effectiveness that a rapid and passionate undressing in the stumbling race to a bed would do for most, and he felt certain that the object of his affections was not really the particular reproductive organs remembered by this non-corporeal woman’s mind, but the focused representation of elemental femininity made real as it was drawn through the eager lens of Nirgal’s mind, imbuing whatever lifeless and imagined structures this Lida had once had with the full power of a fertility goddess.

In the split second before a fully capacitated sperm broke through the crowd and through the zona pellucida in much the same way Nirgal’s rock-hard manhood had made its way into Lida’s depths by shifting and forcing the surrounding organs aside to make room, it occurred to Nirgal that as soon as this force of femininity, this channeling of an elemental fertility goddess through his mind and power and into the woman above and around him, was finished with her need of him, his erotic fetishization of motherhood, fertility, and the very cells that composed the female reproductive organs would either be stripped of him completely or left a hollow and unsatisfying shell that only remained to remind him of how erotic lovemaking had once been for him, and he feared that loss of worshipful respect and tried to grasp at it with his mind and make it truly his own rather than a mere side-effect of the presence of raw feminine power streaming through his mind. But then Nirgal saw that single sperm break through, witnessed the acrosome reaction he was too ignorant to know was just as accelerated as the rest of the feminine cells’ actions and reactions, and as he saw his sperm’s nucleus et al flow into the waiting ovum, he was pushed over the edge to orgasm again.

This time it was not some distantly observed phenomenon, brought on involuntarily by his body’s reactions to the evolutionarily enhanced sensations of lovemaking, more real to him in the glowing reality outside his more-than-man-sized tool than in the chemically induced pleasure his body was trying to feed him on the inside. This time it was in every aspect of his being and amplified by the fertility goddess’s presence in his mind reacting to the reality of the lifemaking that had taken place, an orgasm not only of the body with its electric and chemical descriptions of pleasure, but of the mind and of the essential living nature deeper within, a celebratory tsunami of thoughts, memories, associations, dreams, and all the flotsam and jetsam that floated on the currents of his mind and was now brought together in a mentally blinding overload of positive thoughts and emotions, and beyond that it was a primal shout of triumph into the cold darkness, a proud noise amidst the engulfing silence of entropy and emptiness that signified another victory of life and of order over chaos and death. This time, Nirgal passed out.

In the hours that followed before their private room returned to the same timeline as the rest of the Wolyd Centre, this Lida and Nirgal went through nearly every position and configuration of bodies that was practical or reasonable to attempt with only a single corporeal body present. The neighborly caress and garden stroll that Nirgal had imagined as he had been undressed played out as he watched a tiny, strange cluster of cells move along with the lumbering gait of normal corporeal cells. He could see that it glowed with the same light as each of this Lida’s projected cells, but it did not seem to be translucent as the rest of her; it was a combination of their aspects. Soon enough, Nirgal could feel the tides of feminine power receding from his mind, the clarity of vision that had been granted him to witness each cell of the feminine in detail waned too, and the sense of eroticism that fertility and the reproductive organs themselves had represented faded almost entirely from his conscious mind. He had been able, before being thunderstruck by a literally mind-blowing orgasm and passing out, to shift some of the respect and glorification of those changes in the female form which are brought about with motherhood, but only in part, and the rest was lost to his subconscious mind and his rapidly fading memories of being used firsthand by an ancient goddess. The final stroke of it, a sudden absence of that presence that he sensed this Lida had not been aware of at all and which he would soon be unable to recall, came at the moment the tiny cluster of cells was finally implanted into the goddess-formed endometrium, and somehow, he knew it was so. This Lida yelped at that very instant, and between the shock of that and the pain of loss that would quickly fade, Nirgal halted his tongue’s tangling with her soft, glowing flesh, and for a moment wondered whether she had felt that new life taking root in her or was just having another of her seemingly endlessly available minigasms.

“Don’t stop now, sugar,” she moaned down to him, “I think your tongue is finally getting the hang of it, and I’m willing to bet there are hidden depths of talent in that mouth muscle that you’ve never even dreamed of! You can get up off the cold floor and take a seat right here on my face, if you like, honey. I could show you a thing or two.”

He did as she suggested with only passing reluctance, and that had been more about missing the goddess which had been penetrating his being in a particularly unfeminine way that he now found he missed. A hollowness that faded with time, just as any direct contact with the true gods and goddesses always did from human minds. Soon enough, Nirgal was exploring her strange, glowing and translucent body as any teenage boy would explore his first lover, rather than with the strictly directed thoughts and actions that had taken his virginity and given it to an impostor. He would never consider and never know just when he had begun to be influenced - as early as the breakfast-tray molestation, or as late as the first moment his eyes drew out her reproductive system from the other bits and bobs inside her glowing form, or some time in between or even much earlier, during the battle at that last cathedral he might not have noticed an invader grappling into his mind - because he would not remember any influence; Nirgal would remember what his body had felt, what his ears had heard, what his eyes had seen - even down to the cellular level - but the goddess would not be in his memory. His “first time,” the exhaustiveness of their creativity casting most of his adult sexual life in a vanilla-flavored shadow, which would begin feeling like a form of rape by the end of the day as various facts and lies were revealed to him, would settle eventually into being a warmly remembered experience, infused with rightness because it had been so right for him as it happened, regardless of what that Lida’s intentions or motivations may have been. That and the strange offspring he’d spawned, really, but that would not re-enter Nirgal’s thoughts for quite some long time.

They continued on, burning up far more calories than she’d presented him for breakfast, and nearly coming to the end of his strength before he sensed that their private timeline was soon to re-join the main one at the point it had been separated. They showered quickly; he cleaned his front and she cleaned his back and she had nothing to clean. They dressed almost as quickly; her uniform appeared instantly upon her non-existent body with a perfect fit, and after he’d pulled on his pants she laced up his boots while he got everything else in order. Finally, with a single phrase of runic syllabary he’d used more than any other, he dispelled the mud from the window and the door. Lida went over to the window and drew the curtains back to let in the day, still frozen for a moment in that strange distance between separated timelines, and spoke softly, “I’ll go out another way, honey. We don’t want to give them any ideas by walking out of a private room together, you see. I’m sure I’ll see you around the center, though.” He nodded to her in agreement, but couldn’t shake the feeling that she would decide to go out the door after all. As soon as he saw the petrified bird outside the window return to its former course, Nirgal stepped out the door, not waiting to see if his intuition had been right.

He took his time strolling to the conference room which a mental note he’d woken up with had told him they would be meeting in, and was caught up by the Gollum on his way to the same meeting. They walked together the rest of the way with matching smiles on their faces but sharply contradicting feelings flowing just beneath the surface of each. Nirgal was beaming with pride and confidence, sexual conquest and sexual pleasure. The Gollum suspected he was literally walking toward his own execution chamber, and his mind and heart raced with conflicts and contradictions and memories of his nasty, brutish, and short life and to all the other vast memories he seemed to have perfect copies of from the lives of Trevor and Sunshine and Kay and Elle and the entire archival history of the twinned. Nirgal felt his life was just beginning to begin, and the Gollum felt his life was about to reach its end. Still, they both smiled as they approached the conference room, and they both smiled at the men and women and minds they met inside.

The four who had returned were seated around one end of a long wooden table, and Nirgal and the Gollum seemed to be the last to arrive, sitting in the only remaining empty seats, across the end of the table from Trevor and Jurrin. It was not exactly a meeting of The Board, but most of the members of The Board seemed to be present. There were also several heads of departments of the Wolyd Centre present, and a few people Nirgal didn’t recognize at all but who carried themselves as though they were heads of state or otherwise in positions of real power. Nirgal didn’t see anyone he recognized from the Second Wave, and wondered whether any of them had survived.

“Thank you for joining us, gentlemen,” said a voice Nirgal didn’t recognize which came from someone who was apparently seated on the same side but the opposite end of the table he was, and thus impossible to see. The conference room’s doors closed. “We’re all quite eager to hear what you’re probably quite eager to tell, but I think we should begin by getting you up to date on the situation as it stands now.” The lights went down and a sort of a slide projector was switched on, painting onto a screen hung on the wall almost directly over Nirgal’s left shoulder, just beyond the end of the table, an aerial view of the destroyed ruins of the cathedral where their climactic battle had taken place, in startling detail.

What remained standing in this image was identical in every way but the shade of the stone that composed them to the dark cathedral, now in Hell, which had so captivated Nirgal with its beauty. He’d known that the walls and roof of the light church had been coming down all around them, and had almost been crushed to death by the rubble, but it had all been from inside the structure, and in that mad rush of adrenaline that seems to blur and erode the memories. Seeing the scale of the destruction sent a chill down Nirgal’s spine. Then the image shifted, gave a wider perspective, a context for the destruction, and Nirgal heard a gasp. He didn’t think he was the one who gasped, but he couldn’t really be sure and be shocked at the same time.

The wider view of the rubble placed it within spitting distance of the White House. Nirgal had been as ignorant as any of them about the worldly location of that final confrontation; they had appeared not in a location relative to a map or the globe of the Earth, but relative to a particular well-hidden person. Nirgal’s mind raced, wondering how many people had seen the evil threefold flying up out of the crumbling church, whether Sophie’s inhuman body had been discovered by the mundane, what other arcane secrets were uncovered in the wreckage they’d left behind, and what was now at stake. His racing mind recalled a few of the shouted words from the one who had allowed both his moles be uncovered for nothing, that the twins had had their best defenses outside and easily defeated, and Nirgal examined the image on the screen but did not see any evidence of a battle, let alone the obvious black scarring always left in the wake of a proper magical battle. Nirgal tried to figure out what this could mean; he had definitely seen daylight pouring in through the crumbling walls and roof of the cathedral, so at least that much had happened in broad daylight - if that image was of the same church, if that image could be trusted, then how could the twins have posted defenders outside their church without drawing the attention of the national guard? How could that lanky man and Feagan have been through the battle they appeared to have gone through without leaving even the smallest trace to be recorded?

The image shifted again, pulled out from the rubble of the cathedral another step to reveal that the image was from the cover story of a newspaper article. “WHITE HOUSE PRAYS FORGIVENESS” stood across the page in tall black letters, and Nirgal began reading the snippets of the text of the article which were visible above the fold. It spoke of the construction of a new, more secure bunker for the Executive Staff to retreat to if they could not drive, fly, or run off the grounds to safety when the White House become a clear target of a future terrorist attack. It had been underway for months, the mostly-missing article explained, and they’d followed all appropriate safety and construction regulations when tunneling under the church according to someone whose name was on the other side of the fold. Someone was quoted as calling the collapse of the church a tragedy, and Nirgal didn’t think one particularly needed a reliable source to declare such destruction a tragedy. Nirgal was trying to figure out the mid-sentence start of the next column of text when another voice began to speak.

“That photo and story hit newsstands across the country the morning after you went out, and that version of the story simply reprinted over and over again, word for word as trusted news. Tourists, press, and just about anyone not on the Executive staff has been kept at least a mile from the scene of the so-called accident, and planes haven’t been allowed to fly over that area for years. There are blocks in place to prevent our directly appearing anywhere within the off-limits area, remote viewing comes up with nothing, and astral projectors are running into something they equate to a solar wind, keeping them out, too. This image may be real, it may be doctored or even entirely faked, but it’s the only evidence we were able to find that you’d ever found a target to try to strike.

“Before you ask, the Second Wave have not been heard from since the day you all went out. Not a word or a thought or even evidence that they ever reached a single destination has been found. Our people went to the location you disappeared to from here in the Wolyd Centre, but found only an empty lot - there was no church standing there, and public records show there never has been.

“Which brings us to the next unexplainable thing we need to tell you. The girl Kay, the one that Trev and Ms. Charming brought to the Wolyd Centre at the beginning of the chain of events that set this all in motion, she’s gone. As gone and unfindable as Hannah, but disappeared from right here in the Wolyd Centre. The staff recalls that she was here, that she was under constant supervision, but there’s no record she was ever here on the books and no one can pinpoint when the last time anyone saw her was. Not after your search party left, that is. There’s no record of her or her sister Elle at your school, either, no enrollment records, no classwork, no passed notes in any students’ possession to or from either girl, nothing.

“Ms. Charming showed us where their house had been, but it’s just a vacant lot now. You and Ms. Charming both indicated that Elle died traumatically in that home, and dozens of nurses and doctors recall bringing her body back, but ... there’s no trace of death on that lot at all. Even if there had been a house two weeks ago, since removed by some unknown force, there’s an energy that death leaves behind, and there’s no indication that anyone has died within half a mile of there in the last hundred years. Or at the location you originally disappeared to, in case you were wondering. No trace of death at all.”

“That can’t be!” Nirgal couldn’t hold himself back. “I killed dozens of them myself! Jurrin... Jurrin stood over a heap of corpses as tall as any of us! The blood... There must be a trace! You must be looking in the wrong place!”

“Calm down, boy. You aren’t in any trouble, we’re just trying to get you up to date with the facts as we see them.”

“Well it doesn’t sound like you see very much.” The Gollum’s voice was more somber than rude, though he didn’t turn to face the origin of the voice in the still-dark room. Another voice piped up, as though it had been waiting for the Gollum to speak.

“But we do see you, creature, and we do not see Sqrat, who left with your group. It is my opinion that the matter of this change in personnel be the first that you address. The disappearance of a trusted member of The Board occurring simultaneously with the first known appearance of a true gollum in the lifetime of anyone present--”

“Ah-hem,” a projected thought interrupted from somewhere near the ceiling.

“Yes, yes, within the lifetime of any of the living who are present, but that’s beside the point, Norfin, because you never actually witnessed a gollum. You may have been around when men were still able to create them, but that is certainly not relevant now. What is most relevant is that Trev, who we all agree is at least rumored to possess powers great enough to perform such a conjuration, could not have conjured this gollum. What we most want to know is this:”

The speaker paused, as though to add gravity to the seriousness of their question. “Whose life is that creature living? Was Sqrat sacrificed in some sick tribute to Trev’s unassailable pride? Did you give up a real man’s life in whatever secret cabal you’ve attended these past weeks and months? And for what! To create this mud-born abomination in worship of some prophesied god-child?”

“That’s quite enough,” a feminine voice interrupted, somehow without defending the four of them in the slightest. “Give them a chance to answer.”

“It was me,” replied Nirgal, but softly, as though ashamed of his accomplishment.

“Impossible!”

“How could you kill Sqrat? You’re a monster! You’re worse than Trev!”

“I didn’t kill Sqrat! You’ve got it--” Nirgal was interrupted almost before he began.

“Then he can still be saved! You’ve just got to disenchant or rename or whatever you do to reverse this monstrosity’s existence, and tell us where you’re hiding Sqrat’s body! Do it! Do it now! What are you waiting for?”

“I...” Nirgal stammered. “You... Uhhh...”

“It’s alright, Nirgal, I was expecting this.” The Gollum was looking directly at Nirgal, all trace of a smile erased from his countenance. “I know they haven’t got the details quite right, but it’s obvious that my existence frightens them.”

“That’s no reason to kill you.”

“But as long as I live, it kills you.” Somehow the angry, urgent voices of the conference room did not interrupt them as they spoke.

“Not literally. Just potentially. What’s the harm in letting you go on for another few hours, or a few days?”

“What if you’re supposed to accomplish something important in the final hours or days of your life, but you come up short because you let me enjoy a dodgeball game or a walk barefoot through soft grass? We don’t even know how long I’ve already been alive.”

“Of course we do! It can’t have been more than a day since I conjured you.”

“Nirgal, didn’t you hear what they said? You left here months ago. Not yesterday. Months ago. Nothing we thought happened appears to have happened. No churches, no battles, no mountains of bodies, no death. Maybe no Hell. Maybe everything we experienced was some sort of trick that began and ended with that phrase the missing girl we thought was Kay gave us. Maybe it’s something worse.”

What had been built of Nirgal’s pride was being torn down, not brick by brick but as though by a wrecking ball. Nothing he’d accomplished was real, and even the gollum he’d thought was a major achievement was evidently a major problem for the more experienced people here. “Maybe. I mean... I...” Nirgal searched for the right words, some response that truly reflected how he felt. “I don’t know what I mean. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Look at it this way, Nirgal; I was never really meant to be alive. I’m like a puppet. I know I don’t feel like a puppet, but ...” The Gollum breathed a deep breath that may even have been a long sigh. “...but I know what I am. I’m mud. Earth and water, animated by your life, Nirgal. Every breath I take is one you won’t. I only seem real and independent because I’ve been given Trev’s name, a copy of his mind. Without you two propping me up, I’d only be a mess to try to get out of the carpet.”

“But what about everything that’s happened? What about your memories of what we went through? How are we going to be able to work out what really happened without you?”

Neither one of them seemed to notice the continued silence from the rest of the room, or even from Jurrin and the real Trevor. Likewise, the fact that their silence was in opposition to the evidence being presented them regarding the involvement of Sqrat as a sacrifice went unnoticed. Once the idea was presented, the Gollum’s standing expectation of imminent dissolution did the work of creating a reality, and the shadowclad figures around the table didn’t need to say a word.

“That’s easy enough. Not really even a question, is it? I’ll just remember everything into your mind. Trevor’s mind, too, if only to give him a frustratingly doubled memory of the whole thing.”

“He’s absorbed other people’s whole lives. I’m pretty sure he absorbed the combined memories of the entire doubled church. Why would a day’s worth of your memories be frustrating?”

“Well, I know what his memories are like, and I know what other people’s memories feel like in his head... It isn’t the same. As memories are made, they’re filtered through the understanding and background of the person creating them. They’re even in the context of that person’s variant sensory systems, so that the memories of someone with color blindness would never be confused with the memories of someone with so-called-normal vision. A woman’s memories are more different than that from a man’s. You must have some idea of this; you’ve experienced a little mentalism yourself.”

“I still don’t understand why your memories would be any more problematic than what Trev’s already absorbed.”

“Because the context is identical. Our bodies are identical in every meaningful way, our basis of experience, our memories and experiences and prejudices and senses are all the same. I experienced everything exactly the same as he would have if he were me, with none of the slight differences that help you feel one memory is yours and another is not. I’ll admit that the distinction wasn’t obvious to me a year ago, but with experience comes clarity and understanding and when I touched Kay and Elle’s minds, I couldn’t help but see the differences - and they had shared everything their entire lives.”

“You never did any of that. You didn’t exist a year ago.”

“Which is part of my point. I know on the most shallow level that I have only existed briefly, but unless I’m thinking about it, I’m Trev, and I always have been.” The Gollum searched Nirgal’s face for understanding. “Which is why my memories are going to screw with him. He won’t be able to tell them from his own. Not easily. It should be like he was in two places at once. I’m very curious about what it will be like, so I’m sure that he is, too.”

Trevor nodded silently. Nirgal and the Gollum were looking only at each other. Nirgal seemed still to be looking for some way to avoid doing what he felt would be murder, going along with the conversation to kill time while he tried to think. The Gollum seemed to be trying to lighten the mood of the situation with trivialities. The rest of the room seemed almost not to be breathing.

“So,” the Gollum continued, “I’ll remember everything to you two, and then you can ... disspell me. It’ll be easier if you come into my mind, unless you don’t think you’ll be able.”

“No, no,” Nirgal was shaking his head in protest, saying no to the implication of help as well as the idea of what they were about to do, “I can do it. I think I’m still linked to Trev, so I’ll bring us all together.” Nirgal closed his eyes, unaware that his head was still softly shaking back and forth in silent protest, and reached out to the Gollum’s mind, connecting to it easily. The running narrative of thought was very conscious of his presence, encouraging Nirgal with positive, uplifting messages.

Then he felt in his own mind for the braided tether of links that Trevor had made before they’d first set out. One thread was broken, the one that had triggered the Blinding Light, but there were still a bundle of links intact. Nirgal didn’t know what most of them were for, and as he reached out along the tether, he didn’t think about their purposes. He barely thought about the fact that the tether didn’t appear to be reaching toward Trevor, sitting across from him, before his mind was overwhelmed with a powerful image of impossible fire.

Impossible fire with a pair of dark eyes floating within.

A voice boomed into Nirgal’s consciousness, “You’ve gone too far, you impudent little brat.”

“I didn’t do anything yet!” Nirgal tried projecting his thought out to the eyes and voice accusing him, but they continued as though they weren’t even aware of him, speaking over him, and he heard “...but you’ve stepped out of bounds now, you’ve crossed the line into unfamiliar territory.”

The voice went on, and Nirgal didn’t try to respond. What had seemed to be accusations directed at him were quickly revealed to be something else. Nirgal didn’t know what else. The Gollum, still connected to Nirgal’s mind, just observed silently; it was more aware of what it was seeing, but still didn’t know the whole truth. Neither one would have believed the truth after what they’d been experiencing since the doors to Hell first opened, but that didn’t stop them from getting a first-hand view of Satan’s breakdown. Even when Trevor’s vision turned from the fire to the mysterious dark figure weeping in the towering chair and flickering light across from him, Nirgal and the Gollum didn’t realize what they were seeing, but the Gollum knew enough to realize what this vision meant.

Without relinquishing his link to Nirgal, and thus to the real Trevor, the Gollum spoke aloud to those gathered in the conference room. “This is all a lie. None of you, none of this is real. And you’re not Trev.” The Gollum turned its head to face the Trevor across the table from him, and as their eyes met, without warning, without a sound or a gesture, the Gollum created absolute destruction in that being, then a former being. There was no flash of light, no bang, not even the normal popping sucking noise that would occur if a being had ceased to be and the air had rushed in to fill the space it had taken up. There was nothing - one moment there was what appeared to be Trevor, the next there was nothing.

And the link, Trevor to Nirgal to the Gollum, was not broken.

“Where is he, Nirgal? I can’t quite get a fix on his location to disappear us to.”

The dark figures around the table were becoming less clearly defined, oozing somehow into the shadows filling the room, and they were rising and moving toward the end of the table. As they approached Nirgal and the Gollum menacingly, they seemed to leave trails of darkness so thick and clinging that it appeared that they hadn’t so much stood from their seats as stretched themselves up and across the room like hundreds of pounds of horribly putrefied and possessed silly putty. The dark, oozing masses approached, but hesitated inches away from the two of them as though waiting for instructions.

“I don’t know. It feels like he’s right next to us and far away at the same time.” Nirgal was exasperated, freaked out by the imminent danger that had erupted out of the reversal of a reversal of his possibly-imagined fortunes, and was nearly screaming, “I have no idea where to go.”

“Wait, that’s it, they told us! I told us! Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?”

The dark figures were coalescing around them, absorbing the room, melting into the table, melting into each other, coming up even from underneath them to within only a few inches. Nirgal was cowering and shaking, ready to go along with whatever the Gollum said, hoping it would get them out of harm’s way.

“Just hang on.”

As if that were their cue, or as though they’d finally received the signal they’d been waiting for, the encroaching dark forces swept in towards the space the two figures suddenly weren’t occupying. There was a moaning, squelching, screaming outburst as they collapsed upon each other in failure, but Nirgal and the Gollum never heard it.

✯ ✯ ✯

Almost as soon as Trevor’s two companions appeared in the room, it changed. The fireplace vanished. The chairs, the floor, the walls, all disappeared. The devil was suddenly composed and together and confident. The four of them were all but instantly within a gymnasium not unlike the one that Trevor and Nirgal had played hundreds of dodgeball games in over the course of the school year. The stands were empty, it was just the four of them at that moment, and the five of them in the next, as Jurrin appeared, sitting in the corner still armor-clad. He stood quickly and approached them at the center of the court.

“Separating you obviously did not work out as I’d planned.”

“Why did you want Nirgal to destroy me?” The Gollum addressed the question to the dark figure it knew both the power and weakness of, not with an accusing tone but with earnest interest. It knew that whatever answer it received would probably not be strictly true, but it was still hoping for something that could at least be believed.

“That wasn’t the point at all. We couldn’t care less about you; you don’t even have a soul of your own. We were just working to put Nirgal through a few extremes. A rollercoaster of experiences and emotions to build momentum as a foundation for future grief, you understand.” The devil’s tone was nothing but detached professionalism. Nirgal’s eyes dilated wide with emotion, but he tried to stay calm and digest the information he was receiving. He had nearly realized that he was still in Hell, but he was having trouble letting go of the experience of their escape and the meaning of everything that happened after that. “Playing off his pride and envy, gluttony and lust, and then twisting them into guilt, self-doubt, deception, and even self-sacrifice. We thought Jurrin would be right at home with an environment of wrath, violence, and vengeance, and if not for that accursed armor he managed to wear right into Hell he’d be unrecognizable by now, deformed and twisted inside and out by his own violent nature. Nirgal required a more delicate treatment, and you, gollum, were just a tool we tried to use against him.”

“I almost believe you. So why are you telling so much truth?”

“I’ve made an arrangement with Trev, and it’s in all our interests that you trust me.”

“I haven’t agreed to anything yet.” Trevor remained dispassionate, clinging to the image of Old Scratch crying into his own hands and the memory that he had been certain that Trevor had known something he really did not. He remembered that this creature of power was fallible.

“Which is why I’d like your friends to trust me. To help me convince you that you should duel me. Not that it will take much convincing once they know the stakes.”

Trevor could practically feel Jurrin agreeing already. The Gollum spoke again, “We aren’t going to fall for your tricks. You’ve already seen that.”

“Yes, yes, I allowed myself to become too involved in negotiations with Trev. I ought to have been more involved with your deception. I would never have missed such an obvious problem as a pre-existing link between Nirgal and the real Trevor when trying to pass some damned soul off as the same. I apologize with the shoddy production values of your experience. A VIP such as yourself ought to have received more careful handling for at least the first perceived year.” A slight trace of a smile crossed the snake’s eyes - but not his lips - as he spoke the next sentence. “Of course, depending upon the outcome of the duel, and definitely if there is no duel, we will get a second chance to ... handle you appropriately.”

“Trev, what’s he talking about? What’s this duel?” Nirgal was still off balance from the encounter in the conference room, not minutes removed from this new challenge.

“Some manipulation of Satan’s. I haven’t--”

The Gollum interrupted him, scorning Nirgal, “How do you know this isn’t another trap? Are you sure that’s even Trev? What did he tell you?”

“He... He...” Nirgal stood abashed, stammering. “he told me...” Nirgal turned back to the one he had been so certain was really Trevor this time, and almost attacked him with his words. “Who are you? Tell me who you really are!”

“I’m Nirgal,” said Trevor.

“What are you trying to do, Trev?” The dragon seemed flustered, “Tell him the truth,” he turned to implore Nirgal, “I don’t know why he’s saying that. I’m not deceiving you about this. That’s really Trev!”

Nirgal heard the accuser’s voice as incomprehensible buzzing. He could feel anger growing within him, heat rising from his core, flushing his face. “Tell the truth. Tell me who you are!” He sent a mental blast at the figure standing before him, a hurried form of the sort of mental algorithm used to get automatic, honest mental votes, this one with the same query he shouted out again, “Who are you?”

The mental response was concurrent with the spoken response, “I’m Nirgal,” and “myself,” and Nirgal didn’t know which was which at first.

The deceiver cleared it up for him, “Is this some sort of game, Trev? He knows you aren’t him. If you screw this up, both of them will be stuck here forever. Could you stand to return to Earth knowing you’d doomed your best friend to eternal torture?”

Satan’s words barely registered with Nirgal; just enough that he knew that Trevor had repeated himself verbally and given a different honest answer. “But you can’t be Nirgal, because I’m--” Nirgal stopped himself mid-sentence. He spoke normally now. “You couldn’t possibly be Nirgal. Alright, then. I know who you are.”

“What have you done now, Trev? Am I going to have to erase his memories and put him through some real agony because you wouldn’t answer a simple question honestly?”

“That won’t be necessary, Satan.” Trevor knew that whether it was because of this fragile emotional state the devil seemed to be in, because he really was that much more ignorant than he pretended, or whether this was all just part of a larger, stranger deception, Trevor could take at least some control of the situation by manipulating the fallibility Old Scratch continued to display. “Nirgal’s just a little upset about what you were doing to him. He’s only human. You’ll have to give him some time to recover.”

“Of course, fine,” pride shook his head resignedly, “does anyone else have an outburst?” He paused, “No? Alright. The terms of the duel.”

He had their attention. “Trev, alone among you, can escape Hell under his own power. He can leave at any time. He could have escaped already, and he knows it, and he knows how.”

“How?” Trevor only shook his head at Nirgal’s question, his eyes saying “not now.”

The snake continued, “You two, well, you three I suppose... You can not. Even though you did not arrive in Hell by the normal means and are still alive, and despite the coincidence that you cannot really be killed while in Hell, right now there is only one being that could release you from Hell. Right now, that is me.” He paused to allow this to sink in. “Now, I have offered to duel Trev. The details are unimportant at this stage, but the wager is this: If he wins the duel, he will be granted the power to release you from Hell along with anyone else trapped here that he chooses. If he loses the duel, he will himself be trapped in Hell for an unspecified period of service. I guarantee that I will give Trev more than a fair chance to win the duel, and as you may have surmised from our surroundings I am even willing to make the medium of our challenge an area of his unique expertise.”

“Dodgeball.” This was the first word out of Jurrin’s mouth. It was more an incredulous statement than a question.

“If he prefers. It is up to Trev. He could choose swords or pistols or chess or Texas Hold ‘Em or global thermonuclear war or competitive synchronized swimming or any other thing that occurred to him and I would agree. Dodgeball seemed quite the natural choice, though.”

“You need a team for dodgeball. One on one matches are basically sudden death.”

“Teams could be formed. Four on four if you like, or we could supply you with the best players from among the damned to flesh out your team.” Now the accuser’s lips smiled without his eyes joining. “Figuratively speaking, of course.”

“Pretending for a moment that I would agree to this proposed duel, what are the details you keep refusing to go into?”

“I haven’t been refusing them, merely avoiding unnecessary complications before you agree. For example, there is the matter of the contract I mentioned.” The devil reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved what appeared at first to be a simple folded legal document, blue pages and white, not more than a few sheets thick. The Prince of Darkness drew the document out and towards Trevor, and the farther it was from his pocket the more it changed character. A simple folded brief, then an unfolded binder-clipped document of perhaps a hundred pages, then a spiral-bound legal-sized document of perhaps three hundred pages, and as its weight descended into Trevor’s outstretched hands it seemed to be a stack of five or six hundred pages drill-punched at the top and held together by capped metal rods that extended in upside-down ‘U’ shapes above the tops of the pages. Without flipping to the end to see the page number, Trevor knew immediately how thick this contract was, definitely more than six hundred pages of tiny, cramped text in incomprehensible legalese.

“Obviously,” the seven-headed dragon continued, “trying to discuss every clause and coverage of the contract would only serve to cloud what ought to be a very simple decision. I won’t stop you from taking as much time as you’d like to examine the contract - it’s mostly boilerplate from every contract used in these parts - and I’ll even go ahead and point out a few key areas that I’m sure you’ll find troubling or questionable,” hundreds of tiny colored ‘flags’ appeared along the edges of the contract, pointing out various sections throughout the document that might be of particular interest. “The solid red flags relate to mentions of your soul, the rest are color coded by this legend.” Satan handed Trevor a two-sided document with three columns of descriptions on each side, and perhaps two hundred different flags were detailed there for him. “But no matter how much time you waste on examining that contract, remember the simple nature of the wager: If you choose not to duel, you can leave Hell at any time, but your companions are damned forever. If you duel and win, you will be able to free your companions. They have no other way out.”

“And if I duel and lose then even I lose my chance to leave. And if you’re lying about the entire matter, anything could happen.”

“Sure, but what have you really got to lose?”

“What have you got to gain? As far as I can tell, the only outcome by which you profit is in my signing this contract and then, if the duel has any bearing on reality at all, if I lose the duel. Every other outcome represents something you already have or a situation where you lose what you have. So I must be pretty valuable to you.”

“Or at least more valuable to him than these two are now,” corrected the Gollum. “Think about it, Trev. He’ll probably never get another chance to trap you here, never have the leverage he has now, but there’s certainly a good chance that these two, if returned to life, would end up in Hell at the end anyway. We’ve all committed murder, and by some accounts that’s more than enough to put them here. Every outcome is in his favor.”

“Every outcome is in his favor,” Trev repeated. He closed his eyes in thought. His brow lowered, creased. “But if he’s telling the truth, if I agree to duel him and I win,” Trev opened his eyes again, still looking at the Gollum, “they get to live their lives a while longer. If I do nothing, or if I lose, their lives may as well already be over. They’re here because of me. I have to agree, and it all has to be true, and I absolutely have to win. There’s no other option.”

The Gollum nodded gravely.

With a flutter, the flags sticking out the sides of the contract changed, most of them simply vanishing entirely, and the legend in Trevor’s hand was blank on both sides except for a single flag, a single description: Black flags with the corners cut off in a point like an arrow referred to places that required an initial or signature. As though it had been there the entire time, Trevor sat down at the desk placed incongruously on the dodgeball court when none of them had been paying attention. It was like a school desk, a chair and writing surface integrated, and Trevor set the huge contract down in front of him.

The devil stepped over to him with a unique device in his hand. Trevor watched as the accuser pulled up two sections of the ornate metal shell of the slender cylinder like wings lifting out from one end of the device, and driven my this action, at the other end of the tapered shaft, a sort of needle seemed to extend out. He quickly understood, even before the snake spoke, “By your leave,” and Trevor turned out his left arm, palm up on the table, hitching up his long sleeves with his other arm to expose the inside of his elbow. The Prince of Lies lowered the device that didn’t precisely look like a syringe down to Trevor’s arm and it seemed to affect some sort of pull on his veins; they pulsed fat to the surface of his skin, apparently eager to meet the metal.

Trevor didn’t look away or flinch as the decorative silver tool pressed its tiny tube into his waiting vessel. He kept his eyes on the motion of the dragon’s hands as he pulled up and away on the extended wings while holding the shaft down into Trevor’s vein, and observed that the silver shell was perforated enough that he could see the line of brilliant red rise up through its core, making the abstract representations there seem somehow more sinister. At the end of the pull there was a thin line of red from top to bottom, and Old Scratch gently pulled the needle from Trevor’s skin. A single, tiny drop of red bulbed at the point of entry, but no blood flowed somehow. Satan’s distinguished hands pressed the wing-like extensions back down and the needle-like protrusion withdrew. He pressed the device back together in a piston-like motion and as he reached the end of the motion, with a click, the familiar tip of a fine-line ball-point pen appeared where the needle had been.

Despite what had just clearly happened, what they knew it really was, the device in the devil’s hand looked as though it could be nothing more than an expensively adorned pen. Its purpose appeared singular and clear. Trevor took it when it was offered, and began working his way through the contract before him, signing and dating and initialing where indicated by the black, pointed flags. The others just stood silently observing, listening to the rasping whispers of the pages made so loud in the largeness of the gymnasium, considering the situation alone with their thoughts as events moved forward outside their control.

They didn’t try to stop him, but neither Jurrin nor Nirgal would have taken the devil’s side. They didn’t want to stay in Hell forever, but they didn’t trust the deceiver. They knew they’d do everything in their power to help if they were allowed to participate in the duel; the proposed dodgeball game. Even Jurrin had decided that the small possibility that Trevor’s offspring had survived their strange aborted birth forced him to attempt to get back to Earth to find and destroy them, knowing that for now it meant helping Trevor escape from this everlasting trap. The Gollum still didn’t believe it ought to be allowed to continue to exist much longer, but it knew that assisting the real Trevor to free his friends might be why it had lasted this long already, and with Trevor’s full mind and memories to draw on, it knew that this was the only viable option. Finally Trevor reached the final page, the pen-like device in his hand nearly to the end of its reservoir of ‘red ink,’ and looked hard at the last two signature lines before signing and dating the top one of the pair.

He pulled up the wing-like sections at the end of the pen just as the devil had, exposing the long needle that had hidden within it. Old Scratch already had his arm bare and ready, extended in Trevor’s direction, and Trevor did not hesitate. He pushed the tip of the needle into the engorged vessel it had drawn forth, burying it into his arm at just the right angle to stay in the vein, then Trevor pushed the plunger of the pen-syringe down, forcing the final drops of his own blood into Satan’s blood flow. Trevor had not intended any harm or malice, he had simply done what he knew to be the right thing to do just as easily as he had understood that he really had no choice in accepting or rejecting the devil’s manipulations; this is how things had to be.

Still, the accuser yelped and growled in pain, fighting the urge to pull his arm away, grimacing and bearing the searing fire that worked its way up and down and along his internal circulatory infrastructure in a way that seemed somehow more intense than the fires of Hell ever were. He was shaking as Trevor took the next step, drawing the plunger back to draw out Satan’s blood, and he nearly wept again after the needle was removed. Trevor flipped down the wing-like extensions that had turned the pen into a plunger, pushed it back down and together, clicking the pen tip back into place. The blood-ink in the shaft was a red so dark it appeared nearly black, and almost seemed to be swirling. Trevor placed the pen in the deceiver’s trembling grip and turned the contract to face him.

There was a moment of hesitation.

Satan seemed almost too eager for this to believe that it was all really happening, and he paused for what felt to all of them like well too long to be considered reasonable.

No one else moved, waiting to see what the dark figure might be waiting for.

Then in a flourish of nervous speed, the hand swooped down and signed and dated the document with symbols of a pattern that none present recognized. The blood-ink was almost indistinguishably similar to the black printed on the page, but as soon as the pen was lifted, both signatures there seemed to shoot up swirling lines of fire, their two-dimensional profiles extended straight up like curved walls of light, flickering and fluttering along their tops for what couldn’t have been more than a second before returning to normalcy as simple signatures on paper. Satan returned the contract to his pocket, it’s reduction to a document small enough to consider such a thing made much more rapidly this time. Scratch handed the pen back to Trevor without a word, and it disappeared into one of his coat pockets. Trevor stood up and - not like it had disappeared, but like it had never been there - the desk was gone.

“So.”

“So. Dodgeball?”

“Full teams. Who do you have available?”

Satan handed Trevor a small sphere of light from nowhere, and it disappeared into Trevor’s hand, transferring to his mind the roster and playing history of every damned soul in Hell who had ever set foot on a dodgeball court, professional and amateur alike. “Alright. I’ll need a few minutes to speak with these three and to put together a team. You can select from the remaining players, or from your demons, or you can play alone. I will win, there is no doubt in my mind, and you will do what you have promised.”

“I will do what I have promised. I am bound by the same contract you are. Take your time. Let me know when you are ready.” Satan walked across the court away from them, and sat in the stands about halfway up at the far end, an unreadable expression on his face. Something like glee, but terrible, suspicious, and something else. Only the Gollum noticed it, and he didn’t try to understand it, only to remember it.

“Jurrin, are you with us? Can you play?”

“I wasn’t exactly MVP, but I was on the high school’s team when I attended, and at NRL University. It’s been a while, but I’d like to do my part to get us out of this.” Jurrin was lying through his teeth and Trevor and the Gollum both knew it, but they also knew there was no way to stop him from playing, and that he sincerely wanted to get out of Hell, so would do his best.

“Alright. The other players available basically represent the best of the best teams that ever played, and two of them helped finalize the basic gameplay while they were alive. I’m going to form a team that will be able to work together though, rather than just the best individual players, so Satan will almost certainly have Karnikophe and Sturitsky.”

“They’re here?”

“And you’re passing on them?”

“Yes. They aren’t team players. They’ll work against Satan no matter which side they’re on at the time. You’ll see. Teamwork will be the key to success here.”

“So who are we getting?”

“Don’t worry about it. Most of them are women, and you’ve never seen them play. I just hope they’ll still be good enough after all the time they’ve been down here. I’d hate to end up with a team too ravaged by torture to play a good game.” Trevor paused briefly, took a slow breath, and concluded, “It doesn’t really matter what I say to you right now, we won’t have the chance to practice, we won’t have a chance to get to know how to work together, we won’t know how our opponents usually play, and no matter what else happens, we absolutely must win this match.”

After that, everything seemed to move in fast forward, everything too intense for the details to stick. Suddenly the players Trevor had decided on were on the court, and introductions were made all around but very few names were retained one to the other. A couple here, another three players there, had played together in life. Before reunion hugs were finished on their side, Satan’s team appeared on the other side of the court like a dark storm cloud gathering suddenly above the horizon.

A few of them had been professional dodgeball players, but Trevor and Jurrin and a few of their new teammates recognized that most of them were dark, evil wizards and magicians whose lives had more than made them deserving of their place in Hell. It was instantly clear that there were at least three true threefolds on the opposing team, their combined energies practically crackling with negative ethical charge. Not a team of experienced dodgeball players, but a collection of the most powerful forces of evil ever sent to Hell and a couple of hot-headed dodgeball players to hold things together.

The first game of the match started before they knew it, and was over almost sooner. Not through some trick or time manipulation, but because it was just too fast-paced, too intense, too disorganized and dangerous to seem anything but brief. If Trevor, Nirgal, and Jurrin had been killable or if any of the other players on either team had not already been dead, the usually unused statistic of mortality per team would have been factored into the game’s scoring. None of the players on the devil’s side were holding back even an ounce of their destructive, desecrating dark magic, and by the end of the first game, Trevor’s team had also thrown caution to the wind.

This was not a normal match. This was a battlefield. No one could die. Fatal injuries were quickly but painfully repaired. Non-fatal injuries crippled players and sprayed blood through the air until someone who knew how could spare a second to heal them. Clothes were torn and burned and punched through with tiny holes from high-speed projectiles, stained with blood, and some fell to pieces. The court itself was pockmarked with holes and scorch marks and broken boards and fallen limbs and strips of clothing not recovered in the rush to keep playing. Ankles were twisted catching in holes and slipping on puddles of blood and tripping over lost fingers and feet and a few fleshless bones. Anyone not recovering or helping someone recover from hits and slips and accidents hurled whatever they could as fast as they could at their opponents.

It practically rained lightning on both sides the entire game; each side possessed experienced forkers, casting and splitting and dividing bolts of energy that coalesced into balls before dropping at near the speed of light across the court. Players were switching sides so fast it became quite quickly reasonable that neither side had had much time to become acquainted with their own teammates. Everyone just tried to throw as many various balls at the other side as they could, no matter which side they had started on - the feeling that there was a lot more at stake here than just winning or losing a simple game was palpable and driving. Quite a few times players were swapped one side to the other fast enough to be struck by effects of their own creation.

When the final buzzer of the first game sounded, fewer than half the players had been benched and the score calculation was complicated enough that a manual accounting would have taken days. There was no clear Condorcet winner, but Trevor’s team had won by a series of small margins. Almost faster then the court could reset - the floor was cleaned and restored to its original playable state, the players’ uniforms and ‘bodies’ were made whole and healthy again, the air was cleared of smoke and stink and sweat, and everyone was returned to their starting teams - the buzzer sounded again, and the second game began.

If anything, the second game went faster than the first one, was more deadly, more damaging, more malicious. Somehow though, Trevor was able to begin to get a handle on the pace of the game. Where he hadn’t had the time to really pay attention to what individual players on Satan’s side had been doing in the first game, even when he was on their side, Trevor was now able to watch the devil himself play the game like any normal man might have. Creating balls and throwing them, ducking and dodging and blocking incoming balls, trying to recover gracefully from inevitable strikes that hit him, still giving his all when converted to Trevor’s side, the snake didn’t seem to be doing anything but his best within the normal bounds of the game - he wasn’t even using the sort of life-threatening, body-destroying, not-strictly-balls of magic that the most evil of the players on his own team were using. Trevor was doing the same thing, trying to play a fair game with chaos all around him, and almost began to trust the deceiver before the second game’s ending buzzer went off. This time, with margins even closer than in the first game, pride’s team had pulled out a narrow victory.

As the court reset and his team was re-united, Trevor shouted out audibly - and with a tactile ferocity as his words pressed the air against their skin - “WE MUST NOT LOSE THIS GAME!” They all understood, they all agreed, they all knew that there was more at stake here than even the wager that Satan had spelled out, and even if they didn’t know what the full ramifications of victory would be, they all knew that their continued existence in any form might depend on their performance in the next twenty minutes. The last echo of Trevor’s growlingly intense outburst coincided with the starting buzzer of the third game - there really was no time to recover or even to think between the games - and suddenly both sides were in motion again. The ‘particles’ of magical balls so densely filled the air of the gymnasium that it virtually became an emulsion.

This time the action was nothing short of blurred with speed. No one playing could really see what was going on at all, everyone was moving faster than they ever had before, and they only hoped their thrusts and blocks and area effects would do some good since they couldn’t see to aim or even see their success or failure in the hazy uncertainty of rapid motion. Trevor, Nirgal, and the Gollum were more blurred than most as they used their time-contraction techniques to step outside the normal flow of time, and still the game seemed nearly too fast for them. About half way through the final game, though it seemed to be no time at all to Trevor, Old Scratch began to project his voice directly into Trevor’s mind.

“It’s almost over.”

Trevor dove into a roll to keep his face from being chewed off his head by a ball of what appeared to be thousands of gnashing teeth that hurtled through the air from the dragon’s side of the court, narrowly missing a man-sized hole in the floor to his right as he recovered his footing.

“Soon, you will be trapped in Hell. Forced into servitude. Responsible for untold suffering and infinite pain as you do what Hell requires.”

Moving slightly faster than the lighting balls that fell all around him only because of the alternate time flow he occupied, Trevor narrowly avoided a conversion only to be struck hard by a fireball so hot it might have really been composed of a plasma, and pinwheeled on one foot from the force of the blow. The negative impression of a sphere was missing from his arm and shoulder, vaporized by the furious thermal energy of the striking projectile. Trevor’s left arm was temporarily useless, and he tried to respond to the devil in thought as he restored his body to wholeness. “I am going to win this game, this match, this ridiculous duel of yours, and I am going to free my companions from your grip. I will not be yours to control.” Satan’s voice continued in Trevor’s mind as though he had not heard the response; as though what Trevor asserted was meaningless.

“It is not personal. If another like us had reached my realm in such a manipulable position, they would have stood in your place. I am not doing this to hurt you, but out of love. You will understand soon enough.”

Trevor could see that the blurred form of the accuser was playing as though there were nothing unusual going on, this monologue taking up no apparent concentration. Trevor’s response had distracted him nearly enough to be torn in half by a trio of sharpened, oblong balls that spun independently and around a common center in a plane parallel to their general direction of motion across the court and perpendicular to the floor, a swirling saw blade that would take a player out of the game while they recovered and score at least three hits against them at once. Potentially a lot more, if each ‘saw ball’ struck more than once in its course through the player’s body. He tried to focus on winning the game, he hoped his double, his enemy-turned-compatriot and his friend would be able to play hard enough to win their freedom, and Trevor couldn’t help but be distracted by the voice that continued its soliloquy in his head.

“At least the meaning of all those prophecies will either become clear or be ruled out as the knowledge that you indefinitely serve in Hell spreads to the living. No more speculation about your place in the world once your place is established in the underworld. And you really will be able to free your living companions. That was true enough.”

Every player’s vision was cut off as someone’s area effect pulled all the light from the room and even the lightning storm arcing back and forth overhead was dulled to indeterminate dark grey streaks on a marginally darker background. Most of the players could still operate without using their eyes by using extended senses, but things were certainly made more difficult for the duration of the effect. Now instead of trying to hit and to dodge objects and beings blurred by speed, all the players were more fully separated from the strength of sight and had to rely on their other abilities and ingrained skills. Trevor sent a syllable of thought to Nirgal that they’d worked out to mean that he needed total defense so he could concentrate, and without waiting to feel for Nirgal’s response, Trevor set to work to locate and counter the area effect. As he did, the seven-headed dragon’s voice continued to echo through his mind, calm and confident.

“From what I know of your background - a background I now realize you yourself do not know - you will probably find a more elegant solution to your entrapment in Hell than I ever could have conceived. I would love to see you escape the grip of this contract within a human generation or two; it would be a real triumph of will, of your mind over the requirements of Hell. Try not to give up hope.”

Trevor was beginning to feel that Señor Diablo’s mental speech had the taste of a goodbye, but having managed to dispell the blinding darkness effect just in time to be struck by three simultaneous lightning balls that had missed Nirgal’s attempts to defend him, Trevor was distracted by his conversion. He knew he couldn’t play with any less skill on the opposing team or it would effect his scoring, but Trevor needed to be on his own side to win. He hoped for lighting to strike him again, and played his best as the clock ran down. There was a massive scoreboard on the wall, but unlike normal high school level games, the math to comprehend the numbers displayed on it was not something Trevor could do in his head while focused on a game with the eternal damnation of souls he had led into Hell at stake. He didn’t know how close the game might be, but he knew it was down to the final seconds as he found himself converting back to his own side of the court.

“Thank you for this, Trevor. I’m not going to leave you unprepared for the task ahead of you. The next thing you feel hit you will be nearly every memory and thought I’ve had since I was assigned to Earth millennia ago. Then, by my calculation, you’ll feel the misery of victory and the realization that it didn’t matter who won or lost the duel; only that you played my game.”

Trevor saw a ball of light no bigger than the cue ball in billiards and similar in pale color arcing towards him from where the devil stood stock still, untouched by the maelstrom of activity swirling around him. Trevor stood just as still, just as untouched by the remaining effects of the game, and watched the ball of light approach him with inescapable momentum.

“Our paths may cross again, someday.”

The ball of light struck Trevor square between the eyes and absorbed into his consciousness.

“May it be on better terms.”

The end-game buzzer sounded, the match was over, all balls in motion disappeared.

“Thank you and goodbye.”

Old Scratch vanished.

✯ ✯ ✯

Trevor had indeed been granted the power to free his companions from Hell, as promised. He had also been trapped in Hell, forced into an indefinite period of servitude, as promised. Trevor had been told that one would be the outcome if he won and the other would be the result of a loss, but per the terms of the contract he had signed, the same thing would happen to Trevor whether he won the duel or lost it. He had been manipulated, he had known he was being manipulated, but he had not guessed at the scope of the trap.

Trevor had agreed in a binding contract to take over Hell entirely from Old Scratch, and to fulfill all the responsibilities and requirements expressed and implied in the former dark prince’s long history at the helm of the pit of damnation. There was much more to it, there were endless details in the six hundred and sixty-six page contract they had both signed in blood, but the main point was that at the conclusion of their duel, ownership and control of Hell would transfer completely to Trevor. And as the final buzzer had filled the air of the gymnasium, and as the former ruler’s memories of its long history, and the events leading up to it in Heaven and on Earth before, poured out into Trevor’s mind, Old Scratch had disappeared, freed from his loving obligation to Hell by the entrapment of another to take his place.

With Satan’s memories and thoughts Trevor also acquired Satan’s love of God and felt first-hand the conflicted and emotionally taxing crush created by that love and its history. Trevor completely understood Satan’s earlier breakdown within the first moment after he had taken over the role of Satan for himself. He also understood why there had been nothing for the dark one to lose in opening himself up before Trevor - Trevor would soon know all there was to know about him, no secrets between them.

If Trevor had not been fast on his toes, if he had been granted the knowledge of and responsibility over Hell but not the power to control it, if he was not already getting ridiculously used to dealing with one new challenge after another, with absorbing and adapting to one absorbed mind on top of another, if any number of things had gone wrong or caught him off guard, there might have been chaos in Hell that day. Instead, almost instantly after the former devil had disappeared, so did every damned soul that had been playing on either side, shifted through a higher-order dimension to the various planes of Hell where each soul belonged. Nirgal and the Gollum asked almost at once, “What happened?”

“We won. Sort of.” Trevor was trying to figure out how to clarify what had happened.

“What do you mean? Where’s Satan? Do we get to leave now?”

“I uhhh... Yeah, I can get you out of Hell now. No problem.”

The Gollum, who knew Trevor better than any of them, said “What aren’t you telling us?”

“I got more than I bargained for. The duel, the dodgeball game, all of it was just a misdirection, a distraction from what was really going on. Old Scratch has gone home, he’s back where he belongs at God’s side.”

“So who’s in charge down here if he’s gone?”

Jurrin was two steps ahead of Nirgal, “Haven’t you figured that out yet? Trev is. What did you think he needed that thick a contract for?” Jurrin wasn’t sure whether he should be glad that he might be allowed to go back to Earth and hunt down Trevor’s offspring while Trevor remained in Hell or whether he should be worried about the damage Trevor could do in his new position.

Trevor pulled the contract out of his own coat pocket as though it had always been there and handed it over to Nirgal. “I know everything it says now, and why, but take a look at it, see if you could have worked out even that most basic idea without a thousand years’ experience in contract law. It doesn’t matter, I knew the risks of signing a contract proffered by the devil, and that there wasn’t another option that might have freed you from this place. So you return to Earth and I’ll rule Hell with all the love Old Scratch once did. It’ll be as though nothing has changed down here. I can even take on his appearance,” and Trevor did, transforming into an exact replica of the former Prince of Darkness, “and the demons and the damned may never know a change has occurred.”

“We can’t let you do that, Trev.” Nirgal was flipping through the contract as though to find some way to get Trevor out of it, “there’s got to be another way.”

“There isn’t. And I don’t want there to be. Satan gave me all his memories and experiences since being assigned to Earth and ... I know why he was here. God didn’t exactly force him into damnation, it was more of a ... request. The accuser had the ability to disobey, just as a child has the ability to disobey a parent who has grounded them or assigned them an unpleasant chore as punishment for something. He didn’t disobey, though. He loved God so much that he always wanted to do whatever God asked. He loved God unconditionally, self-sacrificingly, and until God suggested that as long as the work was done by someone qualified to carry it out, Old Scratch didn’t need to be the one to do it, he never considered trying to leave Hell.”

“Wait.” Nirgal’s brow furrowed. “This was all God’s idea? Trapping you in Hell to be the new devil was part of God’s plan?”

“In a way, yes.”

“God is fucked up.”

“In her own way, yes. There’s something more to that, something the snake didn’t share with me, memories from before he came to Earth... Something I need time to figure out. But I think it explains why God behaves the way she does.”

“She? God is a woman?” The incredulity in Nirgal’s voice would have been well tempered had he been able to remember his encounter with a true goddess not long before. That a god, or someone calling themselves God, might be feminine would seem the most natural thing to him if he could recall the sensation of embodying a feminine fertility goddess. The modification of his memories had been rapid and complete, and even having been raised in a form of matriarchy, Nirgal’s ingrained thoughts on the nature of God were masculine.

“Of course. She is the creator, the mother of all existence, right?”

“I guess so, but...”

“Don’t worry about that part, Nirgal. It’s no more important than that I’m the Prince of Lies now. What’s important is that you return to your lives. Considering the price I’ve paid, it’s the least you can do.”

“Are we in a hurry? Do we have to abandon you here so soon? How’s time work down here?”

“No, no, no hurry if you don’t want to hurry. Time doesn’t actually exist in Hell. Not in any conventional or linear way. Things take as long as those perceiving them believe they need to take... sort of. With relation to the outside world, it’s as though all the time in Hell, all of eternity, was just a single instant of time. Except that all the time in the world outside Hell intersects with that single instant of time at once. The intersection of Hell’s time and the world’s time is like a prism where everything gets mixed up together.”

“Does that mean you could send us back to Earth in what we consider to be the past or the future?” The Gollum was trying to conceive of all the possibilities that this model of time might represent with little success.

“Yes and no. Part of the problem has to do with the idea that while time is generally linear and forward-moving in the world you came from, it is largely based on perception and belief here in Hell.” Trevor drew naturally on Old Scratch’s long experience with these complications as he tried to explain. “At the point of intersection, the two overlap. So all the souls that would eventually reach Hell could have arrived at the same instant, at the beginning of Hell’s time, but on the translation from linear time, their belief that they arrived in Hell in a linear fashion has dictated that they do, in fact, arrive in a linear fashion. Likewise, the few souls that have left Hell for the outside world, because of their own belief in linear time, have always found themselves re-entering the linear time stream at the instant they left it - no matter their intentions. If there were some sort of natural law that governed it, some conservation of information that kept knowledge of the future from reaching the past or some conservation of energy that kept energy holes from forming in the linear timeline, that would be one thing, and perhaps less frustrating, but there isn’t. Your own unconscious mind will return you to Earth at the instant the door to Hell was opened.”

“What about location? Will we be in the wreckage of that church, or underground somewhere?”

“That’s one aspect you do have some control over, the same as you can appear and disappear through space normally, you can control where you appear in space upon returning to Earth. But because you can, I’d like to suggest that you take the ‘scenic route’.” Trevor made finger quote-marks in the air as he said ‘scenic route’. “You’d be surprised how many routes into Hell stand open and unguarded. With my consent, and only because of the unusual way you entered Hell will it be possible, but there’s a particular route I’d like you to take to get out. When you’re ready to leave I’ll take you most of the way there.”

“What are we supposed to tell everyone? How can we explain this?”

“You won’t have to, Nirgal. I’ll share everything with my Gollum, and he’ll share it with Ms. Charming. She’s on The Board, and an excellent communicator, not to mention that she stands in my defense.” Trevor was addressing Nirgal’s concern, but his eyes were on Jurrin as he said this. “It should be made clear that I didn’t wrest power over evil from the devil. That this isn’t some stepping stone on the way to taking over the world or destroying life as they know it. I was tricked into giving up my own freedom to be able to free you.”

“What about everything before, with Hannah and your daughters and the churches?” Nirgal, after all that had happened, was back to his insecure self. He was not looking forward to having to face the most powerful people in his civilization without Trevor by his side.

“I’m sure they’ll want to hear your version of events, Nirgal, but most of it can be covered effectively by the same means. The Gollum will have two perspectives on all that has happened, plus the background that Satan transferred to me, and he can give Sunshine as much or as little as she needs. This really doesn’t have to be difficult. As far as my daughters are concerned, the forces that prevented their birth are not malevolent. I am confident that they will be safe for the time being.”

“All time being equal, I’d like to leave as soon as possible. I don’t relish the thought of spending more time in Hell - or with you - than I am required to.” Jurrin sounded irritated and on the verge of fury. “Unless you’re going to hold me here against my will, I’d like to leave sooner rather than later, and I have no interest in the scenic route.”

“Certainly, Jurrin, you may leave at any time. I will gladly remind you that you will not have a head start on Nirgal and the Gollum, no matter how long they stay here with me - you will all reach Earth in the same instant you left.”

“I’m not a fool, Trev.” Jurrin’s voice was practically growling now, “I understood you the first time.” He rolled his eyes. “The powers above may be fools, but not me. Appointing an inexperienced hothead of a teenager to rule the underworld. You can be sure I’ll have my ethical charge balanced far to the positive before I finally let go; you’ll not be in charge of my afterlife, Trev.”

Trevor held back his emotional reaction. “Whatever you want, Jurrin. You can leave at any time. It’ll be like a leapfrog disappearance. Imagine a circle with everything that ever exists at the center, a radius of infinity and a circumference of zero. Imagine you’re standing on the edge of that circle and first try to disappear outside the circle, then as soon as you’re gone, try to disappear directly to the center. You’ll end up where and when you’re supposed to be.”

“What a load of nonsense.”

“It’s that or the scenic route.”

“Fuck you.” And Jurrin was gone. Whether he had managed to visualize the circle and escape Hell or had just thrown himself to some other level of Hell, Jurrin was no longer in the gymnasium with them.

“Okay. So. Gollum, would you like to read my mind now, or later?” Trevor seemed almost cheerful once Jurrin was gone.

“I’d like to do a full synchronization, actually. Share minds both ways, get us both up-to-date.” The Gollum had a small, sly smile and shot a wink to Nirgal that he totally failed to catch.

“Sounds good to me. Direct mental, or balls?”

“If we create persistent balls, Nirgal can join.” The Gollum seemed to have Nirgal’s attention, but only in part, as though he were thinking hard about something in the back of his mind. “Nirgal, would you like to join us in a three-way mental synchronization? It’ll be good practice for embedding your thoughts and memories in an external substrate.”

“Uhhh... sure,” and without another word, a small but growing pinhole of light formed a few inches from the skin of his nose, between his eyes.

“Alright then,” said the Gollum, and a golf-ball-sized sphere of shimmering memories formed all at once before him.

Trevor didn’t say anything as he constructed a cluster of spheres ranging in size from that of a marble to the size of a healthy ostrich egg, each glowing more or less in various hues of off-white. Around the time Nirgal’s snowballing sphere reached the size of a large grape, Trevor’s cluster of shifting light collapsed into itself to form a single sphere, swirling with all the different hues of its components like one of those novelty glass balls filled with colored water and fine aluminum powder that Trevor had seen at certain gift shops at the mall. Neither Trevor nor Nirgal’s spheres changed much after that.

The three of them were standing in a sort of triangular circle, and all at once the three glowing balls of memory rotated counter-clockwise until they were positioned in front of new faces, where they stopped. Reaching out with their minds, the three of them connected with the floating stored memories before them, absorbing everything they had to offer. When all three of them were done, the three spheres rotated around again, positioning themselves before the final mind in their journey, and the absorption was repeated. Finally, the three spheres began moving again in a clockwise direction, but faster and faster, not stopping after a third of a turn but picking up rotational velocity until they separated out of the circle of light they were forming and crashed into the heads they had been spawned by. This last effect was mostly for show, but Trevor had always had a good sense of showmanship, and liked to add flare to even the most basic of proceedings.

“You had sex with who?” Trevor had somehow missed this detail in Satan’s memories, but couldn’t avoid it in Nirgal’s.

“I uhhh... I don’t really know.” Nirgal’s face flushed red. “Not who I thought it was, anyway.” He concentrated on the copy of the devil’s memories that Trevor had shared with him to try to work out the cast of his experience, and his face fell from embarrassment to sad horror. “If I’m remembering your memory of Satan’s memories right, it must have been a succubus.”

“The damned soul of a succubus, actually. It’s not uncommon for the long-dead to agree to play along with the torture of the more-recently-dead, apparently. It gives them a temporary reprieve from their own tortured afterlives, and only those well beyond the rebellious stage of their damnation are even considered.” Trevor paused, considering the history and details of this and similar procedures that were common in Hell. “Old Scratch was pretty sophisticated, actually. The fact that he was distracted by his imminent departure is probably what allowed that damned succubus to get out of hand with her former nature within her assigned role. The details you remember, though... That’s very strange. I’ll have to check on her later on, see what she remembers herself.”

“Probably just having the time of her afterlife,” replied the Gollum, “she hasn’t had sexual contact since she got to Hell, you know.”

“Of course not. Is there a better way to torture the soul of a creature whose entire life revolved around her sexual conquests than to deprive her of the ability to have sex?”

“Sure. Force her to have sex endlessly with ugly, unskilled, unendowed partners without allowing her to feel, taste, smell or hear anything, and without giving her the ability to move or react, even through experience or instinct. Pair her with the damned souls of former casanovas, men whose sense of being comes from being attractive and being able to sexually pleasure women; force them into these hideous, useless, uncoordinated forms and make them have endless sex with an unfeeling, unmoving, unresponsive partner.”

“Well, if you can think of it, I’m sure I would have thought of it eventually. We’re the same person, after all.”

Nirgal disagreed, “Not exactly. It’s living my life, remember? It’s only got your mind.”

“Well, we’re the same in every way but our actual source of life, then. Do you suppose it makes a difference?”

“It makes a difference to me,” said Nirgal, almost defensively, “every breath he breathes... Wait... Is that true here?”

“What do you mean?” asked the Gollum.

“I mean, if all the time in Hell is really just an instant, does the fact that all the time the Gollum lives is being subtracted from the end of my life matter? No matter how much time he spends here, it will never be more than an instant, right?” Nirgal was smiling, feeling clever again for the first time since he’d walked into that lie of a conference room.

“That certainly seems to make sense. Based on everything the former deceiver shared with us about the nature of time in Hell.” Trevor found himself thinking of himself as the deceiver more and more, and the one that came before him, the one who had trapped him in this role, as ‘former’. “So you’ve probably only lost the amount of time that passed between his creation and the end of the battle at the churches, plus however much time it takes for you two to convey the relevant information to Sunshine.”

“Not more than a few hours,” said the Gollum, “What a relief. I’ve felt I was stealing your life from you this entire time, but as long as I stay here, my continued existence doesn’t subtract from yours at all.” The Gollum took a contented, relieved breath.

“You’re missing something important,” insisted Nirgal, excitement overtaking his features, “You’re both the same person! Don’t you see?”

“You just told us we weren’t the same person, and you were right.”

“But you are the same person. Gollum, what’s your name?”

“You know my name is Trev’s name. You carved it into me.” The Gollum didn’t know where Nirgal was headed, and wished he would get to the point.

“And whose blood flows through your veins?”

“Trev’s, I suppose. At least, it was Trev’s when I was created. Some of it must have been replaced by natural processes by now.”

“Sure, but the organs replacing it are Trev’s organs, too. When I gave you Trev’s name you became a functional duplicate of Trev, inside and out, mentally, physically, and emotionally. Right?”

Trevor could see by the white of Nirgal’s knuckles around the object in his hands that what he suspected about Nirgal’s point was almost certainly correct, but he remained silent while the Gollum fought to grasp it.

“Right. I breathe your breaths into Trev’s lungs, I think Trev’s thoughts, fine. Would you just tell me what I’m missing?”

Nirgal thrust the huge contract he still held with one hand out to the hairless copy of Trevor, pulling the pages back to reveal the final page of the document with his other hand. “So whose signature is that?”

“Trev’s. We both saw him sign it.”

“But if you had signed it, if you’d used the blood from your veins and the signature of your hand, would the signature be any different?”

“No, but--”

Nirgal continued, “And would the contract be any less legally binding if you had been the one who had signed it?”

“No, but it would bind--”

Nirgal didn’t wait for the Gollum to complete his sentence, “And if there’s no difference in the binding nature of the contract regardless of which of you had signed it or whose blood was used, is there any way to say which one of you is actually bound by the contract? You know the full details and meaning of every page, Gollum, does it make any differentiation that would make this contract only bind a particular copy or version of the entity which signed it thereupon?”

“No, but--”

But Nirgal didn’t need to cut the Gollum off this time. The Gollum had no argument. Nirgal was right. It was brilliant and depressing and life-saving, all at once.

“Only if it’s what you really want,” said Trevor solemnly. “You’re me, but you’re your own being, too. I know you’ve been eager to be dispelled, to save Nirgal’s life, but as long as you’re in Hell you aren’t taking away from his life. If you return to Earth, you’ll get your chance to sacrifice your very existence for his, but while you stay here, you can live forever.”

The Gollum seemed to be considering the matter, and Trevor continued. “Weirder still, because of the nature of time in and out of Hell, if you take the responsibility for my contract now and I return to Earth and live my life, then when I die and return to Hell--”

The Gollum tried to disagree with that, “You’re not going to end up in Hell, and we both know it.”

“None of that. Think about who’s in charge, not to mention the fact that when I die I’ll already be in Hell because you’ll be in Hell.” Trevor had had a head start on thinking about this while Nirgal had still be explaining the basic concept to the Gollum. “So I’ll go live my life, and when I die and come to Hell I can take over from you. Then you can return to Earth if you like, and if you do, you’ll return to the same instant you left, right? You won’t miss a thing. And if we can work out how to do it, I might be able to return to Hell at the instant I left it, upon my death, and you won’t have to rule in Hell at all.”

“That’s not the problem, and you know it. With all of Satan’s mind in mine I can’t help but love God’s requirement that this job be done. You know how it feels, too, or you wouldn’t be so eager to return to Hell to see it through.”

“I know, and I can’t help it. Same as Satan, though, I know that as long as the job is getting done by someone I can trust to do it right, I feel alright leaving it.” Trevor wondered how Nirgal felt, if he was torn by the same desire to watch over the proper management of Hell and a desire to live his own life. Not only that, but about what Nirgal would think about his first sexual experience now that he knew that it was false in more than a couple of ways. Trevor supposed that Nirgal was not much alone in at least that aspect of it - many people find that their first time was surrounded by lies - his own experience with Kay and Elle had certainly not been borne out of honesty.

“Alright, so let’s say I agree to take over Hell for you, Trev, what happens next?”

“I guess Nirgal and I return to Earth. If we’re right and you’re able to take responsibility for a contract I signed, I’ll be able to leave Hell. If we’re wrong and I have to do it all myself then I’m as trapped here as any of the damned.”

“At least the damned don’t actually have to stay in Hell until the very end,” added Nirgal in a helpful tone before he realized that his observation was not exactly uplifting. He continued anyway, more moderately, “you can pardon them, or they can be destroyed, like the ones who touched Jurrin’s armor.”

“And I don’t really have to stay through to the end, either, Nirgal. Not any more than Satan did. The Gollum will take part of the responsibility, and perhaps another will come along someday to take my place.”

“You’re right, I didn’t mean to...”

“I know, Nirgal.” Trevor put his arm around Nirgal’s shoulders reassuringly, “This isn’t exactly the sort of situation we’re used to dealing with. Despite the extraordinary events that have been surrounding us lately, we’re really only high school students.”

“Sure, but two thirds of us are also the ruler of Hell, we all worked together to destroy an entire religion in a single day, and I don’t know how closely you were paying attention during the match, but look at those numbers,” Nirgal said, indicating with a gesture the wall of scores and calculations regarding the dodgeball games that had put the fate of the damned in the hands of a teenager, “If the world knew you’d played a match like that, and against Satan himself, they’d forget all about the tied match from the co-ed game.”

Trevor tried to comprehend the figures and charts glowing in red from floor to ceiling on the wall of the gymnasium. To the trained eye, these figures would tell the entire story of all three games with more detail than any one - or two - players could recount from their own memory. Calling on powers he could no longer remember the origin of - his own ability, something he’d learned in class, something Sunshine had learned, something from the double-church and its long history, or even some power of Hell or of Satan himself - Trevor reached into the empty air between himself and the scoreboard and plucked forth a photograph of the entire tableau. Every glowing number and graph on the wall was clear and crisp in the image, as was the still-damaged floor, streaked with blood and littered with limbs from the final game, the three of them standing there facing the scoreboard, Trevor’s arm around Nirgal’s shoulders, everything in stunning detail. Trevor handed the photograph to Nirgal, saying “You hold on to this, in case I don’t make it out of here. See what they say.”

“Well,” Nirgal gulped audibly, “they probably won’t actually forget about the tied game.”

“I know, Nirgal. But we should still have a record of this game. Our memories, the contract, and this photo. The actual contract can’t leave Hell any more than I can.” Trevor grinned, “Which means that a perfect copy of it should be able to leave Hell without incident.”

Nirgal was still holding on to the original contract, and Trevor took it from him, returning it to his coat pocket. He nodded to the Gollum and they both pulled the left side of their coats open at once to reveal the top of the contract sticking out of both coats.

“Would you believe we’re wearing the same coat, Nirgal?” asked the Gollum.

“Literally the same coat,” continued Trevor, “Not a duplicate, but a trick of time manipulation?”

“I’d believe pretty much anything you told me, Trev.” Nirgal didn’t even try to figure out what they were talking about, how they could both be wearing the same coat at the same time, or how that related to the two copies of the contract in the coat’s pocket. “On the first day I met you, just before lunch you said you were ‘not feeling well’ when you were struck down by a major magical attack that ought to have killed you and might have killed quite a few other students if they’d been less careful. Before we entered the first church, before the first battle really began, you told me I just needed to get warmed up, and minutes later I was using spells more powerful than anything I’d ever even seen. After that easy massacre you told me I could do something that had not been accomplished in thousands of years, and in seconds this new life had been created,” Nirgal gestured toward the Gollum, who nodded. “You told us we were going to Hell, you said we would all be fine, and here we are, safe and ready to go home. Not to mention that we kicked Satan out of Hell with a soon-to-be-legendary dodgeball game and found a way to fulfill his contract without preventing you from living a normal life. If you told me you were more powerful than God I probably wouldn’t doubt it. Saying that you two are wearing the same coat at the same time, able to take the same object out of two versions of the same pocket at once, is like telling me you know how to snap your fingers.”

“If I discover I’m more powerful than God herself I’ll be sure I have something more interesting to tell you at the same time. Wouldn’t want to lose your interest.” Trevor squeezed Nirgal’s shoulder, pulling him closer before releasing him. “But for now, what say we take that scenic route? I know it won’t be as interesting or surprising as it would have been if you hadn’t absorbed all the snake’s memories, but it should still be an interesting experience.”

“I can’t wait.”

“I’ll follow you most of the way up,” said the Gollum, “I’d like to stay together as long as possible. I’m going to be down here on my own for a while, I think.”

“Not really on your own. Every damned soul that ever lived is available for your companionship,” reminded Trevor, “Which includes quite a few interesting and worthwhile individuals who would be more than happy to chat with you if it meant a break from otherwise everlasting pain.”

“You know some of the most interesting souls trapped here were suicides. They torture themselves, and consistently turn down or ignore offers for temporary reprieves.”

“So snap them out of it. Engage them in intelligent discourse. Convince them that all the time they thought they’d been in Hell was just a coma-induced dream, and that their suicide-induced coma has been broken. What else are you doing?”

“You know what I’ll be busy with. You’re looking forward to it, too. And I know I won’t really be on my own, but Nirgal’s our only real friend, and he’ll be with you in the land of the living.”

“But remember that after I live my life and return to Hell in death you’ll be returning to Earth at the moment you left, the same moment we’re returning to now.” Trevor didn’t understand how his duplicate could think so differently from him about such simple concepts. “There’s this time for you, but then you won’t be missing a thing. You’ll be by our side on the other side.”

“Maybe.” The Gollum tried ineffectively to hide that his opinion on the subject did not allow for his return to Earth, but the others let it slide. “You’ll know before I do, of course. Anyway, let’s get going.”

At a thought, Gollum shifted their plane of Hell to one in which the gymnasium was not there. This was the most common form of transportation used by the ruler of Hell and the most powerful demons, and was how the various shifting environments they had each experienced had changed. Rather than creating a room or a gymnasium or even an illusion of the same around them, rather than disappearing them through three-dimensional space to some location where such a place existed already, they simply shifted through the unbounded higher-order dimension of Hell to a plane where such a place not only existed but existed where they were already located. Having infinite planes allowed for such arrangements to be possible and reasonable. The plane that they now found themselves on was effectively an unadulterated one.

It was over eight hundred fahrenheit degrees. The air was thickly layered with the smell like rotten eggs of the burning brimstone all around. The ‘sky’ above seemed to have a yellow-orange glow, but was only marginally brighter than the glowing-hot stone of the ground beneath their feet and the flowing rivers of molten rock that divided the land. What land was solid was twisted and jagged and was almost as painful to look at as it promised to be to cross. There seemed to be no end of it, though the Gollum knew that his earlier discussion about the size of Hell had been more accurate than it probably ought to have been considering his verifiable knowledge at the time. Now this fiery place, this barren place, this pit of pain and anguish, this horrible eternity was his home and his kingdom. As they all looked up, straight up into the glowing yellow-orange distance above them, only the Gollum wondered whether his never leaving Hell might keep Nirgal alive forever, and what a terrible thing that might be. What he did not know about the history of the one he was and was not, what the Gollum would slowly work out from the contextual clues and otherwise meaningless information tucked within the cracks and corners of the devil’s memories and what Trevor would find out all at once and all too soon, related directly to an understanding of that very thing.

As they lifted off the scorching surface of Hell, floating higher and higher into Hell’s rapidly thinning atmosphere, the Gollum forgot that line of thought for a time, instead enjoying the sensation of timelessness that floating up and up and up in a cloudless sky with an indistinguishably shrinking landscape below created for them. None of them spoke as they rose, up and up and up, even as the glowing yellow-orange shifted to orange, then to orange-red, then to red and through darker and darker shades or red all around them. They didn’t speak when the temperature cooled below five hundred degrees or even below the two hundred and twelve degrees that had kept their sweat as steam almost continuously since the doors to Hell had opened to Trevor’s knock. As the edge of the sky drew nearer and nearer on all sides, even when it was inevitably clear that they were moving up within a vast funnel or cone shape, the three young figures only communicated non-verbally. When the walls were within a few hundred feet of them and nearly black, the air almost cold around them, and the surface of Hell was invisibly far below them, a distant, fading glow rather than a solid surface they had been standing on, they considered how to say goodbye.

By then they could all easily make out the writhing shapes of demons and damned souls crowding over the walls around them like some horrible infestation of mutant insects and deformed monsters and they knew they would soon be able to make out the edges of the pit in the darkness above them. Their intention to leave by this direct route - the route that had always been available to Trevor but not to the others for reasons he could not yet understand - had held it looking out at the instant in time they had reached Hell together. If she sun had been shining, they would have noticed the true proximity of the door between worlds much sooner, but the stars in the sky above were indistinguishable at great distances from the glistening skins of the creatures clinging to the surface of the passage, and the three boys were nearly at the threshold before any of them spoke.

“I guess this is it,” said Trevor ineffectually. As soon as the words left his tongue he wanted them back, but he couldn’t think of something better to say.

“I guess so,” echoed the Gollum, equally tongue-tied.

Nirgal didn’t even attempt to speak. He took Trevor into his arms in a huge, hearty, floating hug between friends. After just the right amount of time, Nirgal released Trevor, turned to the Gollum, and drew him into another hug. The second hug was somehow more sincere, more full, more meaningful and thankful than the first. Finally they separated and Trevor and the Gollum took Nirgal’s wise cue and embraced each other in a warm physical word of goodbye.

Then as Trevor and Nirgal continued their upward journey without looking back, the Gollum began his way back down to the surface of Hell, his eyes not shifting away from his two departing companions.

✯ ✯ ✯

Trevor and Nirgal emerged from the pit into the cool, fresh night air and looked around and around to recalibrate, to regain their bearings. Just as they had known from the dark prince’s memories that they would, they had returned to Earth on their own high school campus. By the time it occurred to either of them to look down into the pit to see if they could see the Gollum, their view had been negated. Like the skin of a soap bubble re-closing after some small thing emerges from it, their ability to see back along the expanding cone-shaped opening that the pit represented the termination of was sealed off by their passing beyond its threshold, and only darkness could be seen there now.

They heard noise coming from the nearby gymnasium, and Trevor and Nirgal approached it curiously wondering who would be at school so late at night. Rhythmic sounds like a musical back beat penetrated the walls, and a low sort of white noise accompanied it. There was light shining around the edges of the doors, broken presumably by the moving shadows of passing feet. They approached cautiously, their bodies still somewhat tensed and battle-ready after all their recent excitement. Neither one of them thought to peek mentally through to the other side of the doors before reaching out to open them.

What greeted them on the other side of the doors would have caused them each days or weeks of anxiety if they had known it was coming and had the opportunity to thoroughly consider appropriate preparations for facing it. Some of the entities they saw inside the school’s transformed gymnasium had been working to put together this culminating event for months, some had been in rigorous physical training to be fit for the challenges they now faced, and others had spent hundreds or thousands of dollars outfitting themselves with the gear and attire they felt they required to see the night through. Trevor and Nirgal were caught totally by surprise, and they nearly fled the scene at once.

“Trev!” A voice shouted out from among the assembled masses, “We didn’t think you were going to make it!”

Other voices joined in the notice of them as heads turned and bodies stopped moving.

“It’s almost midnight.”

“What’s he wearing?”

“I heard he died.”

“Who’s that with him?”

“Where are the twins?”

“Do you think he’ll dance with me?”

“He looks like he’s already seen the End of the World!”

“Does it smell like eggs to you?”

The murmuring voices continued, and as the harmless nature of the gathering they had interrupted sunk in, Trevor realized that he ought to change his clothes before going any further into the gym. He thought for a moment, and without so much as a flickering instant to disappear and reappear in changed clothes and with cleaned skin and hair, Trevor was wearing a classic tuxedo as seen in the early 1900’s. Its lines were all straight and long and seemed to make him look taller and thinner than he was. The jacket was single-breasted, with satin lapels and had long tails. The tie was a simple straight self-tied black linen bow. He also carried, rather than wore, a tall black top hat.

Upon seeing Trevor’s sudden change, Nirgal realized that he ought also to redress himself. Nirgal actually disappeared and reappeared a moment later, returning in a more traditionally modern style of black-tie formal wear. With everyone’s eyes on Trevor, no one seemed to notice Nirgal and his change at all, and Nirgal knew he was really back home at last. He settled quickly into his comfortable role as Trevor’s nye-invisible, nearly forgettable sidelong companion.

As the students asked overlapping unanswered questions, each one trying to speak over top of the others, chaperoning teachers tried to work their way through the dense encircling crowd to reach Trevor and make sense of the chaos. “Everyone get back! Give him room!”

Trevor was pleased to see that Feagan was not among those in charge here, but realized before long that due to the nature of time continuity, Feagan had only followed the lanky stranger out of the crumbling church a minute or two before Trevor had walked into the End of the World Ball, and that had been somewhere on Earth where the sun was still shining. As Mr. Tauer and Mrs. McCallum’s faces emerged from the rabble, Trevor thought of Ms. Charming. He wanted to let her know what had happened, but when he reached out with his mind to contact her, she wasn’t there. Trevor created a pea-sized, pearl-colored sphere of a message for Sunshine, then plucked a bluebird out of thin air and told it to “Take this message to Sunshine Charming III, bluebird. She’s probably inside the Wolyd Centre.” The bird plucked the floating pearl-like thought from the air and flew out the still-open doors behind them.

“What was that about, Trev?” asked Mr. Tauer, “Something to do with your uhh... Special project?”

Not knowing how much anyone here knew about what he was supposed to have been doing all day, Trevor only nodded confirmation as he changed the subject. “I can’t answer everyone’s questions at once. Actually, I can’t answer most of these questions, right now. What does everyone think happened with Kay and Elle? They aren’t going to be named Queen, I hope.”

“How did you?!” Mrs. McCallum seemed to have expected Trevor’s having been voted King of the End of the World to remain a secret, and she shot a scornful look at Nirgal. Nirgal was just surprised that anyone had noticed he was there at all, and forgot to feel guilty for revealing the truth.

“That’s not important. I just want everyone to have a good time tonight, alright, and if you name one or both of them Queen it will become very awkward for everyone. From the sounds of things, people were expecting us to show up together.” Trevor spoke frankly, knowing that between the general noise and confusion and the small word-scramble effect he’d surrounded the four of them in, no one in the crowd would know what he was saying. “Is there a runner-up? Don’t tell me who it is, just nod... alright. Go with the runner-up, that’s your new Queen. But midnight is half an hour away, so don’t worry about it too much.” Trevor had been taking in the decorations, modifications, and additions to the gymnasium that had been created for the ball, and his eyes seemed to have locked on a stage that had been built at mid-court under the scoreboard wall and the unattended instruments that told him that the badly-DJ’d music he was hearing was not the only entertainment there tonight. “Where’s the band? On a break?”

“Yeah, yes,” Mr. Tauer was good at directing a classroom discussion, but not the best at handling all the details of a hurrah of this size. Trevor could see a couple more adults giving up on standing watch at the corners of the room and approaching the tight swell of bodies that Mr. Tauer and Mrs. McCallum had been unable to break up. “They’re on a smoke-break.” He pointed straight up, as though they might be hovering just under the ceiling, “We made them take it outside, told them to stay at least fifty feet up.”

“Second hand smoke kills, you know,” concluded Mrs. McCallum.

“Sure, fine, but I need one of you to go get them back in here now.” He mentally broke the word-scrambling effect. “I’ll be over there,” and as soon as his arm had extended out to point at the stage long enough to get the collective heads of the entire graduating class and their dates to turn in that direction, Trevor was standing on the stage with a microphone in one hand and the other pointing back at the audience.

The force of moving bodies was like hundreds of iron filings caught in a magnetic field that suddenly reversed polarity along a line between where he had just been standing and where he was now standing. The crowd as a whole would have looked more like a strange amoeba from the band’s height above them if not for the roof of the gymnasium blocking their view - a seemingly contiguous blob let go of one wall and slipped wholly over to the perpendicular wall, wrapping its innumerable ‘feet’ around the variegated edge of the stage that had been retrofitted out from the wall. Trevor stood quietly, microphone in hand, and waited for everyone to calm down and stop moving around so much and quiet down enough that he didn’t really need to use the microphone at all.

“Good evening, everyone!” A cheer and applause broke out, and Trevor gestured downward with both hands, his palms outspread and parallel to the ground, trying to get them to quiet down again. They quieted, not as much as before, but enough for Trevor to be heard over their whispers. “I hope you’re all having a good time tonight. I wanted to thank all of you personally for inviting me to join your little get-together tonight, but thanking you all at once seems like it might save a few hours for partying, so here goes: Thanks, everyone! You guys are the best!”

Trevor’s own skill at ‘working a crowd’ would not have even got him on stage if he’d never met Ms. Charming in the first place - back before that strange day changed his life, Trevor hadn’t much known how to talk to a single person with real charisma. With everything he’d learned and absorbed since then, not to mention the seemingly endless fascination he’d retained in the minds of many of his classmates throughout the school year, Trevor’s public speaking ability was more than sufficient to distract this crowd from what he couldn’t say.

“Now, I know you have a lot of questions for me, but I think that with finals finally over, we’ve all had enough of questions for a while. What we really need right now is to forget all about questions and answers and passing and failing and getting into the college of our choice. What I think you’ll all agree we need right now is to let it all hang out and party like there’s no tomorrow. This IS the end of the world, right?”

The crowd was hooked, they hooted and cheered approval and “Right” and “Yeah” and Trevor knew it wasn’t what you said that got people’s attention, it was how you said it that mattered. Like encouraging or discouraging a dog, the message was all in your tone, parsing, and pace. Trevor saw what he presumed was the band floating in through the doors ahead of Mr. Tauer and proceeding in his direction over the heads of the raucous crowd. He raced through his mind to try to decide what song would best carry their energy and keep their minds off the potentially depressing stories he would inevitably have to share with someone before too much more time passed.

Almost as though it had picked itself from his memory without his help, a song came to mind, up-beat and meaningless. As the musicians took their places around him, donning their instruments and readying to play, Trevor communicated the song he wanted to them. Two of them had never heard it, had never heard of They Might Be Giants at all, but Trevor had listened to his copy of Miscellaneous T until the CD literally wore out, and he had no trouble passing each of them a flawless memory of how the song was played. He tried to be quick, and Trevor had just barely managed to get the opening notes beat by the drummer and played by the keyboardist before the crowd’s energy had a chance to lower from a roar to a disconnected rabble.

Everyone’s ears perked up.

After a few bars, when Trevor’s voice joined the building music with the bass and guitar, the audience cheered. “Don’t, don’t, don’t let’s start,” Trevor sang out, “This is the worst part.”

“Could believe for all the world that you’re my precious little girl...” and the crowd was moving to the beat, and a few who knew the song just cheered out louder as Trevor continued to sing and the band continued to play. “...I’ve got a weak heart, and I don’t get around how you get around...”

The beat was fast and the crowd was moving, spreading out, taking the room they needed to bounce to the beat. “...When you are alone you are the cat you are the phone, you are an animal...” Trevor was bobbing his head to the beat himself, a smile on his face as he sang out surprisingly in tune with the musicians. “...mean nothing more than meow to an animal...” Even the students and dates and chaperones who had never heard a note of the song before found themselves enraptured by Trevor’s happy-go-lucky rendition and the incongruous appearance of this teenager in a hundred-year-old formal fashion singing a bouncy pop song that seemed to be about nothing more than that smile on his face. “...but don’t try to stop the tail that wags the hound.”

With a little mental urging, Trevor had most of the audience singing along with the next lines:

“D, world destruction”

“O-ver an overture”

“N, do I need”

“Apostrophe T, need this torture?”

“Don’t, don’t, don’t let’s start...” and the song continued with everyone dancing or hopping and bopping about, some with partners and most alone, the last couple of weeks’ strangeness with Trevor and his girlfriends pushed out of their minds by the relentlessly happy beat.

“No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful,” Trevor sang knowingly, “Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful.” His eyes belied a deep understanding of the words that most of these ears would fail to process, “They want what they’re not and I wish they would stop...” the band played their hearts out, fueled by Trevor’s charismatic but odd performance almost as much as they were by the audience’s energy and response. This local band, with two graduates from this year among them, had never experienced anything like it before, had never heard an audience sing along with one of their songs the way they sang along with Trevor.

“D, world destruction”

“O-ver an overture”

“N, do I need”

“Apostrophe T, need this torture?”

“Don’t, don’t, don’t let’s start...” the crowd, like most crowds and mobs, had a shorter memory and lower intelligence the larger and more connected it grew. Where the individual graduates had questions aplenty for Trevor, as the song played on and they became more connected by the beat and the energy building in the room, their collective thoughts became less complicated and challenging. Even the chaperones, losing focus and allowing their bodies to move to the beat of the music, forgot they were supposed to be supervising the teenagers they had begun to dance along with.

“I don’t want to live in this world any more,” Trevor was barely paying attention to himself anymore, trying to figure out why he’d picked this particular song, “I don’t want to live in this world...” It was a particularly odd selection after having risked so much to do what he thought would allow him to return to living in this world. Trevor had an intuition that it related somehow to a detail or contextual inference he wasn’t seeing clearly in the former devil’s memories. He finished the song without a drop in energy, but he felt inside that he was no longer emotionally involved in his performance. Before the final notes of the song could wind down to nothing, Trevor made sure that the band transitioned smoothly into another high-energy, low-thought song, probing their minds gently to see what they could pull off on their own.

He found a song that they had been practicing and toying with the idea of playing but had almost - not not entirely for certain - decided would be too clichéd to play, and as the final beats of Don’t Let’s Start pounded out for eight seconds after his final word, he convinced/induced them to play it. The drummer was suddenly pounding out rapid-fire machine-gun blasts of beats and Trevor shouted into the microphone “Here’s to the end!” just before the band’s normal singer could begin singing.

“That’s great it starts with an earth-quake, birds and snakes and aeroplanes...” and Trevor tossed his mic into the air and dove out off the stage onto the crowd, “...eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn, world serves its own needs...” and the crowd was more than able to surf Trevor’s ridiculously formally dressed form over their heads and around above the crowd as they rocked to the beat of R.E.M.’s It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine). Even where the density of dancers diminished and a normal crowd-surfer would fall to his pain, the extra help that years of magical training had embedded in the hands and minds of the graduating seniors kept him sometimes literally afloat until he reached the edge of the assembled rockers and curved gently down onto his feet.

Looking back over the crowd he could see that several others had been lifted up to surf the waves of arms and energy that pulsed through the throbbing body of the mob, powered by the frenetic pace of a song that hadn’t had much coherent meaning when it was recorded in the late eighties and meant even less to the non-mundane, especially in the modern world almost twenty years later. Still, a few of the words that came through clearly seemed in touch with the theme of the ball, and Trevor felt that he’d effectively deflected a potentially problematic situation. Trevor’s throat was a little hoarse from shouting and singing, but at least he was no longer the center of attention.

Trevor made his way to the refreshment table and poured himself a glass of the bubbling, smoking red punch available there. If he had been to a party or dance with bubbling red punch as recently as nine months before that night, he would have thought the effect related to harmless dry ice in the bottom of the punch bowl. While he trusted that the ‘fruit punch’ would be safe enough for everyone when supplied at an official school function, Trevor was keenly aware that it probably had intended effects more interesting or severe than simple refreshment and enjoyment. After all he’d been through in the last couple of weeks, Trevor didn’t even hesitate before lifting the opaque liquid to his lips and quaffing the meager six ounces afforded by the stylized glasses in a single open-throated motion. He refilled his glass, grabbed and filled a second and turned around just in time to hand the second glass to an attractive young woman Trevor did not recognize just as she stepped within his reach.

“You were great up there, Trev.” The young woman smiled warmly and stood closer than strangers usually stand. Trevor wondered whether he ought to remember her from a common class or extra-curricular activity of some kind, but his mind had absorbed more new knowledge since he’d last left campus than even most non-corporeal Mentalism specialists absorbed in their lifetimes and he hoped that that was why he couldn’t recall her nearly symmetrical, smooth-skinned face.

“Thanks, but it was nothing. I was just trying to get everyone back in the swing of things.”

“You did more than that,” her hand briefly touched the inside of Trevor’s elbow as she continued, “the ball didn’t have much swing in its step before you showed up.”

Now Trevor felt sure that he either knew this young woman or she was very, very forward, and he didn’t want to go on too long without revealing his possible lapse of memory. “You’ll have to excuse me for this, but I’ve had a pretty hard week and I can’t remember --” he paused to exaggerate running his eyes over her face and figure as though trying comically to remember her, “-- what was your name?”

The young woman giggled, her hand lifting automatically to the edge of her tiny mouth in an endearing gesture. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to confuse you. We’ve never met.” She extended her arm the short distance to put her right hand next to his and Trevor automatically lifted it halfway up to his lips as he leaned the other half over and raised his eyes to meet hers, pausing in expectation of her introduction. “My name is Kaerelene. Kaerelene B’vough. Pleased to meet you, Trev.”

“I’m pleased to meet you too, Kaerelene,” and Trevor closed his eyes and gently touched with only the lightest contact of his lips the soft skin of her hand. “Are you a student here? I don’t remember seeing you around campus.” He returned to standing as he released her hand to her, and they both sipped at their drinks.

“Well, I actually graduated mid-year, last semester was my last semester.” Her smile now took on a character of coyness or false modesty. “And when we attended at the same time I spent most of mine in the library or the labs doing special research. I was on a sort of self-paced curriculum.”

“What was the focus of your study?” Trevor had begun his query with genuine interest, but before the sentence had finished spilling from his lips and tongue, her clues had led him to find everything there was to know about her from Ms. Charming’s memories. He tried to turn his faux pas to his advantage with a single syllable exhaled as appropriately as the Principal’s namesake, “Charm?”

Kaerelene giggled demurely and, smiling, gracefully allowed herself to be led onto the dance floor, their emptied glasses vanishing back to the table clean and dry. “In a manner of speaking, yes.” Her skill at being led around a dance floor was significantly stronger than Trevor’s skill at leading her, but like so much else, it came back to him from a place he’d never been and saved him the embarrassment that a high school dance is supposed to generate in everyone who attends. “But I gather you already know quite a bit more about my studies than I’d admit to in public. The way you’re talked about, I’m surprised my charms are working on you at all.”

“Did it occur to you that I might not mind the charms and graces of a beautiful young woman such as yourself?”

“What about Kay?” The tone of Kaerelene’s voice made it clear that her concerns were not genuine and that she knew that he would not expect them to be. “I heard about how your saved her life.”

“She’s not the person I thought she was,” he played along verbally as their feet stepped in time with the music and their eyes stayed locked with each other across the narrowing space between them, “and she’s not quite the person she thought herself to be, either. Though,” Trevor’s voice paused a full measure as their bodies kept a different kind of conversation going between them, “I suppose you probably heard about that part as well, Kaerelene.” Their faces were less than inches apart as the music transitioned to a strange sort of techno-tango and their bodies’ ministrations followed the change quite naturally.

“It’s like the band read my mind.”

“That was me,” Trevor had intercepted her mental command to the musicians for this particular music without her knowing - he had put in a polite request for the same music only moments earlier - and with the multi-mind camouflage techniques he’d so recently absorbed, Trevor effortlessly made her believe her commands had been taken individually by each member of the band as though their minds had submitted easily to force. The intensity of the back and forth of their steps stepped up as Kaerelene discovered that she could no more command the minds of the students around her than penetrate Trevor’s mental defenses.

“Now why would a man of your stature, power and magnetism react so defensively to a pretty young thing like that?” Kaerelene’s voice was becoming breathy. A normal man wouldn’t know whether she was trying intentionally to be seductive or was growing weary from the fast pace and deep intensity of their dancing. Without even having to read her mind, Trevor knew that she was merely trying to appear weak before her real aggression began, to keep him off guard. It was literally a textbook technique. “Have you been betrayed by some deceitful young woman you thought you could trust? Is that why you’re so guarded?”

“And what is it you’re really after, then, that you search so intently for a foothold into my mind and for unwitting allies on every side?” Trevor managed to avoid breaking out in a sweat from the exertion and intensity of the dance because he’d spent the day quite literally in the fires of Hell. Kaerelene’s perspiration was not entirely the result of trying to keep up with him physically, but she did not allow the risks she felt looming to manifest on her face or falter her feet. “What do you want with me, Kaerelene?”

“Why, only to be with you, the same as every girl at school.” Separation and intimate nearness, a flurry of perfect steps and a pregnant pause, forward, backward, they danced in harmony without either one resorting to mental cues to keep in step. “You’re suddenly available. Of course I want to at least try to win you over while I’ve got this chance.” Trevor believed her, but did not drop his guard. He really had been burned too badly to let someone in so easily, even though he wished on some level that he could. “Especially since we’re about to be named King and Queen of the ball,” and as was correct for the dance at that exact moment anyway, they both turned their heads to face the same direction - the direction of Mrs. McCallum mounting the stairs of the stage with the crown and tiara floating close behind her - and then away and back again in time with the music.

“It’s you? Is that how you knew...”

“About Kay and Elle?” The music came to an end, and as the dancers around them turned toward the stage, Trevor and Kaerelene’s bodies remained pressed against each other, their breath hard and fast in what little space there was between their moist lips. “A lady never...”

Her whisper was drowned out by feedback and then a too-loud throat clearing noise from Mrs. McCallum as she began, “Ladies and gentlemen,” and the crowd was quiet again in eager anticipation of the crowning of the King and Queen of the End of the World Ball.

“It’s been a long journey for all of us,” Mrs. McCallum began her speech, “and we could never have made it here without each other. All of you have made me, and the rest of your teachers --”

There was a terrible noise, a feeling like all the air in the gym compressed and relaxed and compressed again all around them, and the entire roof of the building exploded up and out into the night sky above and into smaller and smaller chunks before it began raining down again into the gym and all over campus like a sort of stone hail. As graduates and better, everyone there was more than well enough equipped to avoid injury, the stone and steel and wooden shrapnel landing, crushing and piercing into the hardwood floor instead of their shoulders and heads.

Every face was looking up but two, and Trevor didn’t need to look up to know the three figures floating overhead. Kaerelene would have looked up if she had not been held frozen in Trevor’s soft gaze, if she had been aware that the world had continued outside of his arms, his breath, the warm embrace of his enchanting eyes and that look in them of hope, of attraction, of the possibility of happiness in this world, with her. The three figures descended, and as two of them were recognized by the assembled crowd a gasp rose to meet them. Trevor moved in and kissed Kaerelene, soft and perfect and open and unguarded, and she was present enough to kiss him in return, present enough to be lost in his kiss. As if under their own control, the crown and tiara that had been about to clatter to the ground behind Mrs. McCallum floated across the room, turned appropriately, and settled softly on the heads of the only two people who had not been distracted by something much more like the end of the world than the ball had been expected to see. As they touched down, an unseen clock rang out midnight and everyone in attendance - distracted from their distraction back to what they had been waiting to see - broke into applause and cheers as the King and Queen of the End of the World Ball kissed a long, slow, passionate kiss the like of which Trevor had experienced quite recently in time but what seemed quite long ago in his experience, and which once again changed the life of the woman whose lips his touched.

“Don’t let me interrupt your little celebration,” the lanky leading gentleman floating overhead belted out, apparently upset that he had not become the evening’s main attraction with his unexpected and explosive entrance. “I can wait a few moments before I kill you.”

Not one to be cowed by threats, Trevor did not immediately break off the kiss. His classmates couldn’t make up their minds about whether to watch the kiss, the intruders, or their chaperones’ reactions for clues as to how to react themselves. Then the kiss finally began to wind down, ending with gentle pecks, his lips not wanting to give hers up entirely, until Kaerelene herself disappeared entirely. Trevor looked up, directly into the eyes of the tall man who must have come almost directly from the church’s implosion to the school, and as he did so, he noticed Ms. Charming appear in the corner of his vision, a bluebird fluttering away from her and dissolving into the night sky above.

“What are you thinking?” insisted Trevor, taking an impertinent tone to try to maintain some semblance of an upper hand. “You couldn’t get to my daughters. You sent me to Hell and I took the place over and still had time to make it to a high school dance. And if you’re thinking that Heaven can hold me, I’m pretty sure I’ve got an inside man up there, too. Why don’t you just give up now and go back to playing with scarantulas or whatever it is you do for fun?”

“You’ve been to Hell and back and you still have no idea what’s going on, do you?” The long, slim figure was practically racked with diabolical laughter, shaking in the air above. “They must be getting better at doing total mind wipes, but from what I’ve seen I have a pretty good idea of why they exiled you.”

“Does talking in riddles make you feel more powerful?”

“How much more clear can I get, Trev? You’re a criminal. You were exiled to Earth to protect the rest of the universe from the obvious threat you represent. They wiped your mind clean and planted you among the humans in the hope that you wouldn’t get out of hand.” The floating figure gave Trevor a sideways look akin to incredulity, “the devil didn’t explain any of this?”

Trevor’s head rocked unconsciously back and forth, saying no for him though he held his tongue. This was what had been missing from Old Scratch’s memories, what he’d been referring to when they’d first met, and Trevor wanted to know the whole story, but didn’t want to have to turn to his enemy to learn it. Still, he didn’t have much choice.

“It’s true. You and I, God and the Devil, a pair of the twins who knew better than to be around when you arrived and thousands of others, we’re all alike in our imprisonment on this backwards little planet. For one crime or another we’ve been found to be too disruptive to be allowed to remain in the universe at large and from the way you’ve been behaving since you first tapped into your true nature you’re one of the most disruptive I’ve seen. I should have killed you the first morning after you impregnated that innocent human child.”

“If you still think you can kill me, why are you bothering to tell me all this?” Trevor was searching the memories of the multitudes of minds and histories that were now crowding his head, searching for some corroborating evidence of what this dangerous character purported to be the true nature of his life, but there was so much, so much, so very much memory to sift through and most of it untouched for decades in the minds it originated from.

“I am killing you by telling you, Trev. I’m waiting here to see how long it takes them to tear you from this fragile form, wipe your mind again and put you back someplace that will hopefully keep you out of my way. You aren’t supposed to know any of what I’m telling you, but maybe you need to know a little more before they notice.”

“If they, whoever ‘they’ are, are so quick to kill me and wipe my mind just for knowing that they already have, why haven’t they come for you? You obviously know more than you’ve told me, and so did Señor Diablo. How have you escaped the repercussions you wait so eagerly to see carried out on me?”

“To begin with, I haven’t taken over, destroyed, or thrown into upheaval three exile microcosms, as you’ve done in the last year. They know they can’t keep our true natures from distorting the world around us, so they allow us to lead whatever bizarre lives we like as long as we keep to ourselves.” He waved an arm broadly before him to indicate the sea of faces staring up at him. “This culture you’ve stumbled into was started generations ago by long-dead exiles, and their fingerprints are still all over it, right down to their obsession with measuring the so-called ‘ethical implications’ of their every action.

“The culture you stormed into and massacred was an outgrowth of the loving connection between two identical twins, only one of which was a criminal exiled to this world. They’ve drawn countless humans into their bizarre alternate views of the world, but they kept mostly to themselves, so there was no need to stop them.

“And Hell. That’s one of the oldest, started before they really began policing our effect on the humans, and it shows. Heaven and Hell have worked their way into the consciousness of nearly every culture in the world, and if they hadn’t been so singularly separate from life itself, they might have been purged several administrations ago. But as you must surely know if you’ve taken over Hell as you’ve said, the denizens of Heaven and Hell aren’t allowed any regular means of contact with the world.

“Speaking of which, how did you get out of there if you’re in charge? It took the devil millennia to find someone stupid enough to take over his role there.”

“I’ve still got a trick or two up my sleeve. Of course, I have to wonder what’s taking your ‘them’ so long. You got here within minutes, and you’re what, some petty criminal? Maybe a thorn in their side yourself? Are they waiting for me to take you out? Maybe even waiting for me to destroy a couple more of your so-called microcosms they’ve wanted disappeared anyway?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. They’ll be here. Everyone here knows too much, it’s a potential disaster for their precious prison planet, they’ve got to extract you, wipe this lot out, and maybe slap me on the wrist for not taking you out sooner.”

“What, you’re on their side now? A turncoat?”

“Not in so many words, but you won’t be the first misbehaver I’ve assisted them with.”

“So nice to know I’ve been misbehaving. You’d think the warden would have told me what the rules are if I’m expected to live by them.” Trevor could feel the fabric of space and time opening up behind him and to his right in a sort of intuitive, sub-experiential way that must have been inherited through a memory-set he’d taken on recently. It was unlike any sensation that had ever crossed his subconscious, and he wondered if what the man had said was about to turn out to be true, if he was about to die, lose all these memories, lose so much that wasn’t remembered by any other living soul. He maintained eye contact with the hovering threat in front of him but did not see any indication that what was going on behind him was visible to those eyes.

“If I knew your crime, I’d tell you what you’d done to deserve to have everything taken away from you, then as now. That would get them here that much faster, of course, but none of my sources were able to peek through the cover-up that hid your exile from the universe. It must have been something worse than the rest of us, something that deserved a more severe punishment...” His long face went slack. Trevor thought that whatever force was growing behind him must have been perceived, but the moment of silence stretched and stretched and he didn’t want to give anything away by reacting or turning to see. He stood stock still.

“...no,” continued the dazed-looking face of the once-menacing dark wizard, “you couldn’t be...” Trevor sensed the substance of space and time around him virtually sigh with relief and knew that the violence behind him must have ceased.

A young woman’s voice confidently came to them from the exact spot Trevor expected it to, and hearing that voice brought a sudden calm to his whole being, every voice and memory in his head suddenly in harmony and every fiber of his being suddenly at ease. “He very much could be. Now and quite literally forever.”

In the dark stranger’s palpably silent failure to respond, the thousands of small sounds of fabric sliding across fabric, across skin, of hair and hanging jewelry rearranging, of every head but Trevor’s changing focus from the sky above to the figure standing just behind Trevor’s peripheral vision on his right-hand side was audible to the point of assault instead of faint enough to forget to sense; a cacophony where inaudible whispers belonged. People began to hold their breath to keep from interrupting the tension and anticipation so clearly about to coalesce into an unknowable conclusion before their very eyes.

“The question isn’t whether you can kill him, because you can’t.” Her voice was confident, assured, almost disruptively youthful. “It’s whether they’ll continue with the masquerade that they could ever hold or punish him after they learn how he brought us here.” Her left arm reached out and up and came gently, lovingly, to rest on Trevor’s right shoulder blade, her fingertips only softly curving with the barest beginning of his shoulder as she put her hand on him in a gesture they had shared so many times before. It was a gesture his whole heart remembered at once without letting his mind in on the story, and Trevor’s eyelids shuffled shut in complete contentment, the muscles of his neck relaxing, releasing his head from its skyward gaze, his diaphragm allowing his lungs to let go the air they’d been holding captive since the last word he’d spoken. Everything that he’d thought had gone before became as dust brushed away to reveal the treasured, secret surface so long lost below; Trevor felt wholly at home.

Beginning to realize the depth of his irrelevance as the pieces of the puzzle came together quite literally before him but unable to reconcile the obvious truth within the structure of self-importance his mind had wrenched and carved itself into through the years of his imprisonment, the dark and powerful exile found a thorn of inconsistency to stick in his own side, distracting himself from the idea that he’d destroyed his own house of cards by coming out of the shadows to face Trevor head-on. “What do you mean by ‘us’?” His response, in a tone that was meant to be scathing but came out almost trembling, was directed solely at the woman; he was ignoring Trevor in equal measure to his being now ignored, but not because he was at peace. The prisoner addressed her because some part of him knew with certainty that there was nothing he could ever do to stop Trevor in his tracks or alter the direction of his inescapable flow through history. He addressed her because addressing Trevor suddenly didn’t seem wise at all. “Trev didn’t exile himself, he was brought by force. I personally spoke to the officer of the court that delivered him here. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“There is more going on here than you know, perhaps more than I know, but I was not mistaken. When I said ‘us’ I referred to myself and the other one he brought here despite every power the court and the rest of the universe could put between us. The other one is my sister,” and without missing a beat or a breath or opening his eyes or touching her mind, Trevor continued her sentence, her thought, saying “my daughter,” and just as fluidly the sentence was completed, “myself,” by a third figure that no one had noticed slipping through reality to stand behind and to the left of Trevor until she was lifting her right arm to place her right hand on his left shoulder blade in a reflection that created a symmetry of support behind the wearied warrior. The woman on the right continued as though all the words had been hers, “We were brought here by the same force that the denizens of the universe found so repellant as to exile Trevor to this place and me to another, but the strange circumstances of our surrogate mother’s seizure by a cult of colocation created something unexpected.

“The intention of the force brought to bear was to return me to Trevor despite all odds and obstacles; his wife, carried across space and time and the boundaries of beingness by the power of his love in the form of an impossible daughter. Then, when those greedy doubled madmen brought their own forces into play, another new life was created from the whole cloth of the literal incarnation of our love for each other before I had come to fully inhabit it.” The stranger, Sunshine standing on the sideline, and a few others that were aware enough of the rest of the story to follow along, felt their eyes widen and their jaws drop with the strange truth revealing itself in their minds. “There is no way you will ever understand the intensity and the beauty and the unique love... There is nothing that will fit in your limited perception of reality which can ever shadow the experience of a mother sharing the inside of a womb with her own daughter, growing and experiencing every moment of development first-hand in harmony with a child created out of your own unstoppable, unconditional love. You probably don’t even know what it means to love. No mother or father or brother or sister, no woman or man or beast has ever held your heart for so much as a moment, has it? All you know how to love is your own empty pursuit of power, isn’t it?”

“I watched... I watched you being born...” Nirgal’s half-breathed muttering was heard by every eager ear around, “...it couldn’t have been half an hour ago...”

The crowd’s attention was slowly becoming fragmented and scattered. Some people kept their eyes on the three figures overhead, two of whom most had seen before and either trusted and now felt betrayed by or had suspected and now felt triumphant in their former paranoia.

Some people kept their eyes on Trevor and the two women with him; a strangely familiar sight, this young man with two nearly identical and alarmingly beautiful young women, but altogether different from the trio they’d grown familiar with.

A few people were looking at, moving toward, and even beginning to question Nirgal about what was going on; he was simultaneously the one in focus here they least expected to be at the center of world-changing events and the one they considered most approachable and addressable. It was as though the immediacy of events still transpiring had slipped their minds as they reached out to their classmate for answers.

Sqrat was trying to think of a place to disappear to that would be far enough away and secret enough that maybe they wouldn’t come after him right away, and Ms. Charming had recognized the look on his face of a trapped animal just waiting for an opportunity to scurry away and had incanted a powerful location-tracing encha