100: THE DEMON QUEEN
(Janel’s story)
Janel wasn’t sure how long she’d been in the box.
It wasn’t a normal box. It appeared as a tunnel made of black ice. It had no exit, just a series of looping, meandering paths that branched off and around and back into each other. It was a maze, and she had no idea how she’d gotten there.
But the pattern was always the same. She’d find herself on top of that glass pyramid, being tortured by Suless repeatedly. Then she’d find herself in the box. She was reasonably certain none of it was real. The more she looked at the walls of her magical prison, the more she became convinced that they were only a metaphor for ice. This was something else.
A gem, perhaps.
She tried to discover a way out, but the walls had been strengthened against every attack she could devise. This had been built, carefully and deliberately, precisely to imprison a soul, upper and lower, and keep it locked in place. Suless had done this to her, to keep her out of the way while Suless used Janel’s body. And then, when Suless had time, she would once more try to pry the secret to becoming a demon from Janel.
To travel between the Twin Worlds at will, to be able to make a body for herself at will. No one would ever capture Suless again.
Janel found herself wishing she actually was a demon. She’d be able to escape. Unfortunately, the price for that escape would be the possibility that Suless would gain access to that knowledge too. It was a bit of a quandary.
In the end, she decided there was no help for it. Every time Suless tortured her, she lost a little more of her lower soul, her tenyé power—if she didn’t do something soon, she’d soon end up in a position where she couldn’t do anything at all.
She stopped trying to find an end to the maze and instead sat down and concentrated on what she could do in this monotonous landscape. What were the laws she had to work with? Was there anything that might resemble a loophole to be found within them?
After an unknowable amount of time, Janel realized that her body was … discretionary. Fungible. Malleable. She could pick apart the pieces of herself, examine them from every side, and recombine herself. As she did this, she began to realize that certain pieces were … not missing, exactly. No, not missing. But suppressed, cordoned off. Bits of her pulled off, wrapped up in string, and tucked away somewhere else, connected but never touching the rest of her. She began to pluck at the string and then began using that string to map out the fullness of the maze.
With the string pulled away, she once more had access to all of herself.
She’d lived five whole lives before the first time Xaltorath had found her. The first very long, and the following lives very short. The genders had varied. In between those breaks, she’d gone to the Land of Peace, which had not in those early days been so much a cordoned area under a goddess’s control, but simply the lands closest to the spring where all souls eventually went to be reborn. Each time she’d been there, she’d eventually grown bored enough to want to start over.
Then Xaltorath found her. On two separate occasions, and each time just as Janel had started remembering her previous lives, Xaltorath had ripped off another piece of her and tied it up with metaphoric string. Not a gaesh, not technically. Her souls were still all in the right place.
Then came Elana, when Xaltorath had found her a third time and had, instead of adding string, ripped the bindings all away so she remembered everything.
And what she had done had been to excise S’arric from Vol Karoth. She’d accepted her death afterward, content that at least she’d be with him, but Doc—passionately obstinate Doc—hadn’t let her die. So she’d stayed alive awhile longer, fifty years or so, give or take, and at least tried to make a little bit of a difference in the world. If she’d remembered what she’d done to S’arric, the way of it, maybe she’d have taken a different route—but she hadn’t. Xaltorath had stopped by to visit once more. Eventually, Elena died, this time of old age instead of childbirth. She stayed in the Land of Peace a long time after that, because S’arric was there, still recovering.
Atrin, of all people, had been helping him.
And then the Eight Guardians had shown up, asking for volunteers. When S’arric’s was the first hand raised, how could hers not be the second? She hadn’t expected Atrin’s to be the third, but it was, and there’d been some consolation to that. She’d looked forward to a new start.
So she let herself be reborn, not remembering a thing. What she hadn’t counted on was Xaltorath. That Xaltorath would want to enforce her ignorance, wipe her memories each time the walls would start to break down.
Xaltorath, Janel realized, was scared of her.
Around the time she came to this conclusion, she noticed the light. It was bright and large and close. It shimmered through all the facets and crags of the gemstone tunnels around her, like looking at the sun through a veil of black water. A beacon. Something she could target, if only she could escape her prison.
It called to her, practically shouted her name, desperate to draw her attention.1
But she couldn’t leave the caves. Or could she? Did the gem she was trapped inside really stop her from crossing the Veil? It would have stopped a normal soul. Of that she was certain. But Janel’s hadn’t been a normal soul in thousands of years. Xaltorath had lied so many times. The demon had nothing to do with what Janel was. She had tried to corrupt Janel, absolutely, but she had only taken from her. Suless was lamentably right; Xaltorath hadn’t turned Janel into a demon.
She’d been a demon from the start.
Janel passed through the Veil. Technically, she died, but technically, she died every night. She was good at it. As soon as she was on the other side, she followed the light and found her way home.
(Suless’s story)
“We’re leaving,” King Kelanis had whispered to Suless, and even she had to admit that seemed like the wisest course of action.
Kelanis had been utterly convinced that they would win this, but that was before Doc had resurrected the Star Court and certainly before Valathea had made her case. Suless had already known which way this was going to go, and she didn’t much care if Kelanis survived it or not. She did, however, very much care if she did.
That’s why she’d convinced him to bring in the army. The vané weren’t the most gullible people, but was she not the queen of treachery? It wasn’t so difficult to spin a story to the soldiers, to convince them of the necessity of their orders. Wasn’t he Terindel the Black, after all? Wasn’t Khaeriel in league with Quur? The Star Court could only be imposters, the tricks of an evil prince who still resented that he had never been king. Kelindel’s propaganda about his brother, Terindel, suited her needs nicely.
They left quietly along with Miyane and joined the troops waiting outside. The archers. The flamecasters. The shield mages. Wizards and warriors who could, at a word, flatten the Parliament of Flowers and pepper every single person inside with a thousand poisoned arrows.
Which was exactly what she was going to make sure King Kelanis ordered them to do.
They’d crossed behind the main barrier when Suless felt it happen. Felt the spells she’d cast trigger and the pure, certain knowledge of it all seep into her. She smiled. Janel had done it. She’d actually done it. That glorious little bitch.
“So that’s how it’s done,” Suless whispered, her voice a combination of triumphant and reverent. She turned to the king. “May I see that dagger?”
Kelanis raised an eyebrow, but plucked the dagger from his belt and handed it to her hilt first. “What do you want it for?”
“Oh, a minor chore.”
Suless grabbed the dagger by the hilt, reversed it, and plunged into her heart.
Kihrin raised an eyebrow. “This is what Senera was talking about, you know. There’s no way you actually have an account from Suless.”
“True,” Thurvishar agreed. “That one was what I like to call ‘an educated guess.’”
(Janel’s story)
Janel fell to the deck, gasping, a pain ripping through her chest, fire spreading out through her veins. She had moved to repossess her own body, but found it vacant—and dying. Suless must have known Janel wouldn’t just abandon this body. She’d left a parting gift.
Janel reached up to her chest and felt the dagger still there. She couldn’t breathe. Each movement felt like a brand seared across her body. The world was beginning to darken, but she knew that if she simply pulled the dagger out, she’d die at once. She wasn’t ready for it. That bitch had known she wouldn’t be. And so Suless bought herself time to escape.
“Suless? Veils! What have you done—” Kelanis’s voice cut off with a gurgling noise.
Someone started screaming.
Janel couldn’t let herself be distracted. She put her hand around the hilt. As she pulled the dagger free, she concentrated on closing the wound immediately, using the tenyé from the dagger to power the energy she needed. She felt muscle fibers reknit, the pain turn to a dull burning and then a sting. The dagger disintegrated in her hand as she stood, flakes of ash falling to the ground.2 She felt better. Not perfect, but her heart would keep beating, so that was something.
Now Janel could pay attention.
She’d been wrong, though; Suless hadn’t been trying to escape at all.
Ahead on the walkway, appalled soldiers backed away from the king, while the queen screamed in horror. The king stood wide-eyed, head twisted at an unnatural angle, limbs akimbo. His bones broke and re-formed even as Janel watched, snapping and cracking like he was a doll made of twigs twisted by a child’s angry hands. Something writhed under Kelanis’s skin, which melted and tore. If there was any mercy in the universe, he was dead by that point.
Kelanis didn’t fall. His body continued twisting. Something pushed its way through him, breaking skin, rising up in a shower of gore. The blood made it difficult to see exactly what she looked like, but Janel took it on faith she would be pale-skinned and beautiful, white as snow. Her other, more distinctive features hadn’t yet developed, but Suless was brand new to this.
What’s the difference between a human and a demon?
Time.
Janel couldn’t help but shudder, looking at the god-queen turned demon. She recognized Suless now, recognized her in a way that had been impossible before Suless had taken this final, irreversible step. She wasn’t an identical match—Suless had only eaten a single soul, after all, and not the multitudes of demons, gods, and immortals she might have consumed in a different future—but her core, foundational nature was familiar to Janel. So familiar.
Janel wondered how many thousands of years it would take before Suless dispensed with her birth name and started calling herself simply by her self-anointed title: Queen of Demons.
Xaltorath.
Maybe in this timeline, Suless never would. Xaltorath already existed here, after all. But now Janel understood why Grizzst’s Binding of the Demons hadn’t worked on Xaltorath—because Suless hadn’t been a demon when he’d performed it.3
“Oh, Suless,” Janel said, “you may think you’ve escaped your enemies this way, but I wonder if you have any idea how little tolerance Xaltorath will have for your existence. She won’t regard you as some long-lost sister—you’re competition.”
The god-queen looked at her hands and began to laugh. “Xaltorath? Pfft. She’s not ready for me. None of you are. Thank you, my dear. This is better than I could have dreamed. I hope you don’t mind if I devour your soul next. Though I’m not asking permission.”
Janel just smiled. Suless had no idea.
A dozen guards moved forward as the archers fired.
Suless threw the arrows aside with a gesture while she pulled herself upright, smiling, and waited for the guards, the wizards, all the rest, to attack too. She grinned with satisfaction as she regarded Janel. “Let’s do this, my daughter. I’m so going to enjoy the slaughter—”
Suless spasmed forward, surprised, as a razor-sharp tentacle, lined with spikes instead of suckers, erupted from her chest, while another tentacle wrapped around her throat and ripped.
The woman who looked like Miyane pulled her tentacles back into normal hands so quickly that Janel would have missed it if she hadn’t been looking directly at her.
“Okay,” the mimic said. “I’ll start.”
Janel raised an eyebrow at the mimic. “Talon?” She only knew the mimic by reputation, but considering what she’d just witnessed, she couldn’t imagine who else this could be.
“They’ve assassinated the king! Arrest them!” someone behind them yelled. The vané probably weren’t sure exactly what had just happened, but “arrest everyone and sort it out later” seemed like a sensible first step.
“Oh, I’m so pleased to be recognized,” Talon said. “Now, let’s run!”