RE: Monarch

I wanted one the moment he mentioned it and peppered him with questions. I’d never heard of them before because they were extremely niche. All but the most expensive globes were limited to a handful of seconds, though they could be overwritten. And of course, most importantly, despite rumors that powerful demons steal memories from a memory globe, this was largely believed to be myth—ruining my hopes of using that to get around the written and verbal restrictions of the loop. Despite living in the enclave over a year, it surprised me that I’d never heard of such a thing.

I apologized to Jorra for the way I’d treated him. He apologized for, and I quote, “choking the asshole out of me.” There was still an air of awkwardness between us, the sort that always follows after friends who have just fought, but he followed me to the surface caves to practice, ribbing me good-naturedly about how it wasn’t fair that I’d hidden my second awakening. In truth, I forgot that he wasn’t aware of it in this reset. It reminded me that I needed to be careful. Relieving similar events meant it was easy for things to bleed, and if I did something out of continuity to the wrong person it could easily cost me a reset.

We practiced for hours.

The lack of sleep and endless midnight sessions had begun to pay off. My air magic was now on the level of a red infernal’s. I was able to exude enough air mana to weave spells consistently, though it still cost me far more than it should have.

I chalked that up to the still healing inscription limiting my regeneration. It felt almost parasitic—or rather, like a constant leak that mana escaped from every time I casted. It bothered me that my power was still a shallow vestige of what I’d managed the night of the attack. I’d been able to lift two demons simultaneously and throw them with enough force to break through a shallow wall. Now, I could barely lift a small glass bottle

I glared at it fiercely, hoping it would relent. What was the point of all this work if I couldn’t do something as simple as lift a tincture. An empty one at that. It floated on a cushion of air, wobbling back and forth like a ship in a storm. I knew that, realistically, my power would not develop enough to be a deciding factor on its own within the current loop.

Well, it could have, potentially. If I took the Great Black Beast’s advice to stop caring about those around me, and was willing to just run the loop repeatedly and allow the enclave to be overrun, doing nothing but focusing on my magic, maybe it would have been possible within a few cumulative years.

But I didn’t have the stomach for doing that without knowing for certain that there wasn’t an invisible countdown somewhere I was expending every time I died.

So, if brute forcing it wasn’t an option, I needed to get creative. What I’d managed in Mifral’s estate was significant, but very limited in how it restricted me to powders. Most alchemy required a liquid base and some sort of catalyst. If I could lift the tincture itself that would solve both my problems. But of course, my precise control wasn’t that good yet.

Jorra waved his arms at me excitedly, crouching at the edge of the mineral pool. I gave up on the air magic for the moment and walked over to him. He pointed excitedly at a small patch of ice on the lake. My eyebrows shot up. That had never happened before, even after the heist. At first, it almost seems random, puzzling me. Then I thought about it. We’d been working on precision control a lot this reset. Maybe Jorra was more likely to break through if I pushed him to work on the small, more minute elements of his magic, versus the big—but ultimately dumb—displays of magic he was typically prone to.

I’d need to keep it in mind.

Eventually, Jorra got bored and returned to the house. I poured over a few different texts, struggling to translate the demonic. My demonic was slowly getting more competent.

There was an element to all this I’d previously completely ignored. I knew a lot about the asmodials. They were warmongering, violent, and ultimately sadists with secondary talents for information gathering. I knew their hierarchies were relatively simple: lesser, greater, and arch-fiend—the arch-fiends themselves being relatively rare, never exceeding thirteen but often far less. At the top of the hierarchy was the prime evils, monsters so elusive they were seen once a century.

What I knew next to nothing about was their relationships with other legions.

For the most part, things were strained. The asmodial legion had been decimated nearly fifty times over the last hundred years, the nearest legion to that the leraje legion at thirteen decimations, maintaining a distant second.

The asmodials had warred with literally all twelve primary legions at some point in time. In terms of power structure, there were four that sat at the apex: The decarabia, malthus, cemeries, and the asmodials. Cemeries and Malthus often acted as allies to the asmodials, as much as any demon can be expected to act as an ally, while the decerabia reined supreme and isolated. The number of infernals who had bound a decerabia could be counted on one hand twice.

The malthus often took the form of armored skeletons, while the cemeries were partial to the forms of monstrous insects. Spiders, Mantises, and flies were all common but there were other, rarer forms. Most interestingly, the decerabia were rumored to have borrowed their appearances from celestials, and claimed to be the direct descendents of fallen celestials themselves.

I scratched my head. I had no idea what a celestial was, other than the fact that they were similar to my folk’s belief in the mythical angels and valkyries. Then again, I hadn’t exactly believed in demons either, before one ended up eating me whole.

I scowled.

It would be an exaggeration to say that I missed Kastramoth. He was an asshole by any measure. But at least the hulking beast was straightforward. I knew what his motivations were. He wanted to feast on the flesh of his enemies, and not be slaughtered in return. The asmodials wanted…

Well, what did they want? Violence? To prevent the portal from being opened?

A thought occurred to me. I’d been looking at the scepter solely as the source of my double and ignoring its most basic trait. A magical object of great value. According to Nethtari, magical objects often formed the basis to demonic contracts—they were similar to dragons in that, while gold was also hoarded, magical objects were held in much higher esteem due to their rarified status as collectables. The rarer the object, the higher the worth, that is obvious, but to demons the ramp up was exponential.

I’d experienced the asmodial’s fetishism of violence first hand. They enjoyed it as easily and naturally as a laborer might enjoy a meal after a long day’s work. I wondered, not for the first time, if they would have worked me over so thoroughly if I’d been an infernal, rather than a human. Perhaps there was a source of novelty that factored into it.

The scepter, gold, and he promise of violence on a large scale with no reprisal. Would that be enough to tempt an entire legion of demons to turn against their master?

Perhaps.

Enough of my mana had returned. I stood, and took out my irritation on the straw men across the lake. I found that if I surrounded the projectile with a slight breeze it was possible to artificially focus the spell, leading to a stronger impact.

I was breathing hard, about to give up for the day when the hair on the back of my neck began to rise. Thinking back, I have no idea what tipped me off. Maybe the air in the chamber changed somehow. Maybe I caught a glimpse of a shadow in the reflection of the pool.

Or maybe, I’d spent enough time in the presence of beings that wanted me dead, people and monsters alike, to develop a sense for it.

I spun, and before I could get the sword out of my sheathe a man in a dark hood tackled me into the shallow pool, immediately soaking us both. With one red hand, he pressed me down into the water, and with the other he held a simple black iron dagger.

In the precious few seconds before I hit the bottom of the pool, it flashed through my mind how bad the situation was. The assassin had been watching for some time. He had waited for Jorra to leave and for me to fully expend my mana, and then struck.

He outweighed me by probably fifty pounds. In my panic, I’d grabbed onto the blade with both hands. White hot pain sliced through my fingers as the tip of the knife entered my chest excruciatingly slowly.

I released a hand, called the spark and pressed it to the gauntlet of the arm that pinned me. It fizzled out. My eyes widened, and I nearly breathed out my remaining air in surprise. Rosewater.

A halo of black began to grow around my vision. I tried again, this time holding the spark to his exposed hands. The fire took root. He shrieked and swore, tearing the knife away. I felt a sickening, tearing sensation and saw the pinkie and ring finger of my left hand floating away.

A burst of anger escaped from me. My body had only just been restored, and now this.

My assailant was struggling to smother the fire when—disoriented and waterlogged—I managed to crawl to him, closing the distance between us and put my dagger through his leather boot and twisted it savagely, opening a hole. Then I set the blade of the dagger alight. The fire danced down the dagger to the flesh beneath, and the hole was wide enough that the rose water soaked armor could not prevent it from burning from the inside out.

The infernal screamed, and swatted me away with a panicked backhand that made my teeth hurt.

He jumped around and grabbed at the boot. If he’d retained the capacity to think, he likely would have realized that all he really had to do was leave the boot on and smother the gouged hole. Demon fire spread quickly, but it still required a decent amount of air to do so. Instead, he did what was possibly the worst thing he could have done. He took the boot off.

The fire spread up his leg. I reached out with my ruined hand and my vision grayed as I coaxed the flame. The result was horrifying. His leg served as an ignition point to the rest of his body, which burned much more slowly due to the treated armor.

He fell to the ground and writhed. I struggled to my feet and walked over to him, clutching my robe against my bleeding wound. Some part of my mind considered lowering the fire to a minuscule amount and questioning him, but the idea brought litany of painful images to the forefront of my mind and made me ill.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to ask him anything. His cowl had fallen backward and the answer was written all over his face, even as he moaned over his ruined leg.

Shear had tried to kill me.

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