17. STEP FOUR: ENCOURAGE ALLIES TO COOPERATE

Kihrin’s story

The moon Jhyr

The day of Vol Karoth’s escape, midday

I’d be lying if I said that I knew delving deep into the mind of an elder demon was a mistake the moment I’d done it.

Because I’d known before I’d done it.

It was just that I didn’t realize how large a mistake it was. My only salvation turned out to be one of logistics: the souls that comprised the demon’s gestalt core were so condensed, compacted, and cellular that they could no longer be treated as individual elements. They had to be treated as a whole, which meant I wasn’t washed away in a tidal wave of memories and personalities.

I would’ve been. Anyone would’ve been. I’d miscalculated the number of souls involved. Given these were the toughest of the tough—the catastrophe-level demon princes—I’d expected thousands. I’d prepared myself to shut out most of the voices to concentrate on just a few souls and hopefully find out what I needed.

But it wasn’t thousands. It was billions.

And yes, they’d been human.

Shortly on the heels of discovering how to open portals into parallel universes came the well-intentioned “let’s send people there” because we’d known our own universe was dying. Not in a cataclysmic apocalypse, mind you. No, our universe was just old. Everything was winding down, and eventually—in a few billion years—would settle to a slow, dark halt. Humanity intended to survive—just somewhere else.

We hadn’t brought everyone with us; we couldn’t bring everyone with us. But it’s not like we’d been leaving the rest of humanity to die—the universe had been old, but not a corpse. Could it really be considered abandonment when they still had something like twenty million lifetimes ahead of them?

I don’t think any of us had considered that time might move at different speeds between that universe and this one. That humanity would indeed survive for long enough to watch the beginning of that black wave come tumbling down. The aging stars, the expanding distance, the quickening time. Humanity must have been staring down the slow dissolution of existence or the hope that some spark would set off a rebirth they’d never live to see. Calling it an apocalypse of ice or cold wasn’t even correct. It was stillness and oblivion. No motion anywhere, down to the tiniest levels.

Well.

Humanity did what we always do: we found a way to survive.

Material bodies became a problem, so they shucked those away like rice hulls. Humanity ascended, but it wasn’t an ennobling, divine juxtaposition of mind and souls. Humanity ascended, discarded their bodies, and became a thousand times crueler. Where they had once waged wars over land and water, now they did so over stars, galaxies, and the last, tiniest scraps of energy.

Making a bad situation worse.

By the time they’d started cannibalizing each other, I doubt much about them existed that could be called human any longer. Those with the strongest wills, the worst resentment, the greatest ferocity, devoured the rest. The sentient life of entire planets numbering in the billions became single individuals, hunting each other. Humanity condensed, transformed from a race spanning galaxies to a few thousand horrifying demons.

Demons who yearned for and hated what they’d lost.

I couldn’t tell if they’d followed us deliberately. The demons’ memories were scattered and barely organized. Maybe they’d just felt along the cracks of their reality the way one might search for the edge of a door in the dark. Maybe some well-intentioned fool had tried to reach backward from our world to theirs, guided by an excess of nostalgia, and had accidentally opened up an exploitable weakness. Maybe the trail had always been there, demons pouring through the one open window we’d left behind us.

I yanked my mind away as soon as I had my answers. Believe me, if I could have scrubbed my brain clean with vinegar and soap, I would have. I settled for ripping the demon’s soul away and tossing it back in with the others. And then it was the usual: ignoring their howls for revenge, the demands for redress, the mocking insults, the angry threats.

“Be quiet,” I snapped, “or I’ll find out what kind of tsali stone a demon makes.”1

That shut them up. For the moment.

One thing was certain: I needed to find Thurvishar.

We had a problem.