Author: Tower Curator

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Devon stalked around the prison courtyard, staring at the ritual circle drawn out where there had once been a basketball court. Eva’s treatment circle. Likely the very final one. He doubted that it was truly necessary. Taking a sample of her blood and examining it with a few spells, Devon had found nothing human about her. He couldn’t be sure if it had been her actions during the ritual—which he hadn’t seen with his own eyes—or if Void had interfered after pulling her down to Hell. Or perhaps it was merely some sort of metastasis. In the time since the last treatment, Eva’s body could have cannibalized itself in a benign or even beneficial manner. The whole reason for the delay had been because her body hadn’t been stable at the appointed time for her treatment.

However, this was his project. Though it had encountered a great number of bumps along the road, he intended to see it through.

If Eva didn’t require this final treatment, then it would harm her no more than Catherine had been harmed by her own experiments. Not that Devon was particularly concerned for Eva’s well-being.

Devon glanced to the side. A young boy sat in a wheelchair, arms and legs atrophied to the point where they were little more than skin stretched over his bones. Devon didn’t know exactly what was wrong with the boy. Some disease that kept his body from properly processing food and nutrients. He didn’t know the boy’s name. Frankly, he didn’t want to know. His biggest failure in Eva was becoming far too personable with her. Though he thought of her as a test subject, that had merely been a title he had attached to the person.

This boy was nothing but a test subject.

Truly, Devon didn’t know if he would survive. His health, despite his emaciation, was better than that of the other subject Devon had brought in not so long ago. Not by much. The treatment, especially the first treatment, was harsh. Eva had come though alright as a stroke of luck; hale and hearty, her only problem was that she had run away from home—police tended to worry more over healthy people than those already on Death’s doorstep. An easily remedied problem by simply ordering her to attend school and to not raise suspicion much.

So he already had a potential new subject lined up. Since tying up the mess with the Powers, summoning demons was once again possible. He was free to summon entirely new demons with no relation to or even knowledge of Eva. Or anyone around Brakket for that matter.

But first, Eva.

Devon scowled as he stared at the three– No– Four demons. Catherine knelt in one circle. For the other two slots, Devon hadn’t bothered with summoning any demons. The carnivean took one spot. The waxy ruax took the other, forced into its place by Devon’s domination. He didn’t want to use the ruax, and hadn’t used any dominated demon for any previous treatments, because of the concentration it took to keep it sitting still. Concentration he could be using to watch Eva.

There wasn’t all that much to watch. At the end of her previous treatment, Eva had the beginnings of horns poking out of her forehead, right around her hairline. Two bumps on her back that might have been the sprouting of wings had manifested as well. As of right now, several minutes into the ritual, neither had changed much at all. Her hair, short though it was, still covered what might be horns. Nothing had poked through yet. Her back was utterly smooth without even the hint of budding bat wings.

Again, Devon wasn’t sure whether that was the machinations of Powers, something with the ritual involving Powers, or even Eva herself. For all Devon knew, Eva had been capable of sprouting horns and wings for months and simply hadn’t noticed. Just as Catherine hid them from view while masquerading as a human, Eva could be keeping them suppressed.

Which all cycled back into his conclusion that Eva wouldn’t become a proper demon until she thought of herself as such completely and thoroughly. An idea Devon had considered was that she had nubs of horns simply because she thought that her treatments should have some alteration to her physical features. Her teeth and tongue were definitely inhuman, but they were different. Something easily hid simply by not opening her mouth.

Her eyes would have been a different matter entirely. Devon had been expecting them to change and had even gone out of his way to get her contact lenses that she could use to hide said changes. Unfortunately, he hadn’t seen how that played out. Her eyes had been plucked from her skull and eventually ended up replaced by the carnivean’s eyes.

All the more reason to try again on a less adventurous test subject. Though to be true to the original tests, he would have to use the original treatment circle. However, it would be far easier to keep a test subject contained for two years while he used the version developed with Catherine’s aid rather than the one he had started Eva out on several years ago.

Slowly, the ritual circle wound down. The light in the lines of the circle started to dim and peter off. None of the demons looked altered at all, not that the three of them should have changed.

The moment the ritual finished, Devon uttered a few words and banished the ruax back to Hell. It had served its purpose well enough over the past few months, but the strain on Devon’s mind while he was dominating it simply wasn’t worth the effort anymore. The only reason he had put up with it as long as he had was because he hadn’t been able to summon a replacement. That and the solitary confinement building offered breaks where he could release his domination and rest for a short time.

He considered banishing the carnivean as well.

Later. Its… dismissal from his services would need a bit of care due to their contract.

Instead, Devon stalked around the circle. Though his focus was on Eva, he paid a little attention to Catherine as the succubus got to her feet.

“I can’t tell the difference between now and before the ritual,” she whispered as she moved closer to Devon.

“Eva didn’t get stronger? More demonic?”

“I didn’t say that.” Catherine crossed her arms, curling her fingers over her elbows. “Would you notice the difference before and after dumping a glass of water into an ocean?”

Devon ran his fingers through his beard, making an idle note that he should shave or at least trim it one of these days; it was starting to get out of hand. In the center point of the ritual circle, Eva lolled around. Still conscious, which Devon found slightly surprising. Treatments usually made her pass out. It looked like a precarious thing though, as if she could topple over at any moment.

For a few moments, he just watched her struggle with herself. She slowly stabilized into a more lucid state. Her eyes grew sharper and the stubs of her limbs sprouted black blood to support her. It took several minutes, but she eventually clambered to her feet.

“Any changes?” Devon asked as soon as she looked steady enough.

Rather than answer, she moved one of her liquid hands to her forehead and started caressing it. Not the horns hidden in her hair, but just above her eyebrow like she had a headache. “A bit woozy,” she said, taking in a deep breath of air. “Did it finish properly? Or did you interrupt it.”

“No interruptions.”

“Oh good. I was a bit concerned that you had stopped it out of fear for my wellbeing. Glad I didn’t die again.”

Devon narrowed his eyes, glancing aside to Catherine only to receive a shrug. “That was a concern?”

“Had I passed out fully, yes.” Eva shook her head and pulled her hand away from her head. Somehow, she managed to avoid leaving a big streak of blood running down her face. “Still no natural wings,” she said with a halfhearted glance behind her back. “Or tail or horns, for that matter.”

“Feel any different?”

“Not particularly,” she said, rolling her shoulders and cracking her neck. “Aside from the headache. That will probably go away on its own, right?”

“Probably,” Devon grumbled. His earlier theory looked like it was right. For a moment, he considered asking her if she could try to grow wings and such, but eventually shook his head. “Blood,” he said simply. There were still a few tests to do before he completely signed off his research.

Eva held out her arm. A narrow cylinder stretched out of her wrist, roughly the same size as a vial. With her other hand, she plucked it off and tossed it to Devon. “Break it open if you want liquid blood.” Her arm had no evidence that anything had come from it, returning to the slowly churning black liquid that it had been since her return from Hell.

It was a neat trick, but… “I prefer blood untouched by your blood magics.”

“Not a single drop of my blood is ‘untouched’ right now. Nor will it be for the foreseeable future. You’ll just have to make that work.”

Devon grumbled under his breath, but pocketed the false vial anyway. He had expected something like that. The way she used her blood as limbs meant that there wasn’t much in her that couldn’t be used.

“So when is my next treatment? Three months? Or another long delay?”

“Next treatment?” Devon curled his lips back into a sarcastic smile. “What next treatment? You’re done. Congratulations. You’re a demon, Eva.”

“What– But– That can’t– I don’t even have horns,” she finally said after sputtering for a minute. For emphasis, she waved her hand around just above her head.

“I can see the obvious, girl. I expect they’ll grow in over time—perhaps all at once far off into the future.”

“I don’t feel like a demon. I’m just… me. Shouldn’t there be some big… I don’t know. Something.”

“What. Want a birthday party?” Devon snorted. “I don’t do parties. Ask the succubus. She’ll be happy to oblige.”

Eva blinked and glanced towards Catherine, who blinked and glanced towards Devon. Both spoke at the same time.

“What?” “What.”

“Perhaps not a birthday party, but I expected you to be ecstatic over Eva. Aren’t you wanting to use her in your own treatments?”

A certain hunger lit up in Catherine’s eyes as she slowly nodded her head. Looking back to Eva, she said, “That is a good point. Perhaps later, however. After everything, I think I’ve earned a few days rest. Besides, I might have to devise something special for Eva. Yes,” she said, starting to walk away. “Something special indeed.” She snatched up her cell phone from where it lay on a chair just outside the treatment circle.

Devon turned, not quite to follow her—she was heading back towards the women’s ward building. He only stopped when Eva called out to him.

“Wait! Where are you going?”

“Back to my building,” he grumbled. “I’m not abandoning you. Not just yet. If you have any problems, I’d like to know about them before I get too invested into another test subject,” he said as he wrapped his hands around the boy’s wheelchair handles.

Eva, who had hand outstretched from when she had called to him, let it drop to her side as Devon started wheeling the boy away. She stayed right in the center of the circle, just standing there. Even the carnivean passing by to follow after Devon didn’t cause any reaction in her.

He turned once, then twice until he reached the iron door to his cell block. He had to step around the wheelchair to open the door before returning back to the other side to push it through. Annoying, but his newest test subject couldn’t run away so long as it was bound to a wheelchair.

All the while, he considered Eva’s situation. Plans ran through his mind, possibilities and variables as well. Had he missed anything important? Was there a need to do another treatment? Some of his questions would be answered after he finished examining Eva’s blood, but for the moment, he couldn’t think up any reason to speak with her again barring sudden problematic developments in her physiology.

“Is that what’s going to happen to me? Are my arms and legs going to be like that?”

Devon blinked. It took him a moment to realize where the noise was coming from. The boy. His test subject. “No,” he said. Immediately, he regretted his words. If, as he had all but confirmed with Eva, the transformation was at least partially mental, he shouldn’t be coloring its expectations with absolutes. He probably shouldn’t be speaking to it at all, but he had already broken that rule. “Or rather, probably not.

“But who knows. Demons come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and… materials.”

— — —

Brakket City wasn’t the sort of place that normally drew much attention. It was hardly qualified for its name. Brakket Town was even too big. Located in the middle of nowhere Montana with a population rivaling the most rural of farming communities, it had but one attraction to entice people to visit. Brakket Magical Academy. Brakket Academy or simply Brakket for short.

For the school was the city.

Though given a scholarship that covered many necessities of school life, the students also brought in outside funds. Some things simply weren’t covered by the school. The students acted as a lifeline. Their outside money didn’t allow the city to thrive, it wasn’t enough for that, but it gave the city an intravenous drip while the school administrators worked out a proper revitalization plan.

That plan had probably almost succeeded. With the publicity Brakket had received from the tournament between magical schools, they could have avoided scholarships the following year. Tourism would have grown. Especially from mundane humans expecting to see something supernatural.

Eva leaned back, sitting on a chair in the middle of her domain at the center of Brakket City. A very abandoned city. With the ‘attacks’ and twelve deaths, including four mundane humans, people were giving the city a wide berth. It probably wouldn’t last. Anderson didn’t seem the type to give up. Not with how much he had invested into the school in the first place.

However, the city was silent for the moment.

A silence Eva enjoyed.

There were no necromancers kidnapping, dissecting, and torturing her. No nuns patrolled the streets, looking like they wanted to take her out behind a barn and put her out of her misery. Zombie-like demons weren’t chasing after her and absurdly powerful demons weren’t making everyone’s lives miserable. Demon hunters stayed away, too afraid to enter after so many of their kind had met their end within the city limits. The tournament—a surprisingly less annoying event when stacked up with everything else that had happened—was still going on, just not around Brakket.

Of course, the Powers that be were leaving the city alone as well.

Eva was surprised about that last one. She kept expecting Void to whisper something to her. Maybe promises of power, maybe offhanded insults. Maybe just a quick question about how her day was going.

Her mind remained utterly silent to outside influences.

So Eva leaned back in her chair and stared at the stars with a tall obelisk glowing bright red at her back. She could live out at the prison. Devon and Catherine were both there. But she didn’t really want to. Devon wasn’t a good conversationalist. In fact, with how he had simply walked away from her after her final treatment, she figured that he would be far less willing to entertain her than ever before. Catherine might be more willing to talk, but it would probably revolve around rituals or games.

Eva still didn’t understand the latter and she had been involved with quite enough rituals for a few lifetimes. If Catherine needed help, she would be willing, otherwise Eva intended to stay far away from that branch of magic.

Without any company she wanted at the prison, there was no reason to stay. Her domain could provide anything she wanted at a thought. So long as it was on Earth, she would abuse it to the maximum extent possible.

In order to further that abuse, Eva had started pouring magic into the obelisk once again. She doubted that there would be another sudden explosion of Hell merging with Earth. In pouring magic into the obelisk, she could feel her domain slowly expanding. Her island along with it.

It served two purposes. First, it let her control her surroundings farther out. Eva held no doubts that the current peace would last only as long as other people let it. If she controlled the entire city, it wouldn’t matter how many demon hunters got brave enough to show up or how many necromancers decided that her eyes would make great reagents. Once they stepped on her domain, she would be free to deal with them as she saw fit.

Secondly, Eva could entirely revitalize Brakket City on her own. Obviously, Brakket wasn’t the most ideal of locations for her to attach her domain. She would have preferred Florida, some larger city with plenty of distractions. Until she figured out how to move it, Brakket would have to work. She would make it work. People would be free to live anywhere within her domain. She could build buildings, create food, and so on and so forth. Eva might be a little sneaky about it; food appearing on people’s tables might freak them out. It wouldn’t be much trouble to create a store that endlessly resupplied itself with a variety of products—clothing, food, tools, and anything else she could think of—managed by a construct of her design. She wouldn’t even need it to be permanent. Just something to get people back into town. From there, she could hire real people.

The peace wouldn’t last. Nothing could remain copacetic indefinitely. Eva was counting on it not lasting. She needed bloodstones until her heart healed and for that, she needed people. While she could leave and head to Chicago, Detroit, or anywhere else she was likely to find valid targets for bloodstone creation, she was hesitant to leave.

Arachne would be back. One day, Arachne would be back. The first place she would check for Eva would be in her domain.

Until then, Eva lay back in her chair and counted the stars. She could wait. Arachne would be back. She would wait right here.

END

>>Author’s Notes 010<<

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Finally

Blood flowed out to fill the vacancy where Eva’s legs used to be. Enough time had passed that she could form nearly full legs with the amount of blood that she had. They might have been slightly thinner than Arachne’s legs, but that wouldn’t impact their ability to carry her around in the slightest. After a few more days, she should have enough blood for a proper set of arms and legs.

Eva glanced to the side of her leather seat—modeled after the most comfortable chair in Brakket Academy’s lobby—and checked the time. Seven days since she awoke and began her work on the obelisk.

Aside from the chair, a tall grandfather clock was the sole decoration on her island domain. That she had created, anyway. Obviously the obelisk still stood not far from her chair and the little tree without leaves was still around. She hadn’t tried doing anything with the latter; and for the former, she was still pumping as much of her domain’s magic into it as she could.

Nothing else existed as far as her eyes could see. She hadn’t bothered recreating the alternate women’s ward building. Shelter didn’t do much here. It wasn’t like she would suddenly be caught out in the rain. Eva highly doubted that it would rain in her domain without her permission. Same with wind or temperature. Nothing would change unless she wanted it to change. Not needing to sleep or eat, she didn’t have much use for a bed or kitchen.

Of course, she hadn’t been idle for a full week. Eva had conducted numerous experiments in an attempt to escape Hell; most of her experiments revolved around teleportation. So far, she hadn’t been able to force herself into the tunnel of flesh that normally ferried her between her prison and the Brakket dormitory.

Obviously. Or she wouldn’t be inside her domain.

It wasn’t just that they were unsuccessful, but any attempt at teleportation worked instantly. One moment she was seated in her chair, the next she was falling on the ground on the opposite end of her island having forgotten to make legs first. She didn’t pass through any tunnel. The world didn’t fall away to reveal that blinding white place she saw when Zoe teleported her. Neither did she feel even the slightest sensation of movement like she did after blinking. She was just there.

Unless she tried to teleport outside her domain. In that case, it simply failed. No headaches or running into brick walls like had happened on occasions where she had tried to teleport out of anti-teleportation wards. Just nothing at all.

But now, finally the obelisk was reacting. She had been thinking about diving into another demon’s domain if it stayed inert for much longer.

She stood. The hardened soles of her blood feet pressed into the sand as she walked closer to the obelisk. Moving closer, she could feel an air of magic about it. Much like how wards felt, though far less directed and controlled. At times, the obelisk felt almost full of magic. Only for it to feel vacant a moment later. No matter how full it felt, Eva had never stopped pressing magic into it. Some of that fluctuation might be the magic leeching into the air.

It wasn’t like the ambient magic would harm her. Her domain absorbed it all without issue when the magic haze got far enough away from the obelisk.

While most of the island’s sand was lighter in color—not quite the earthy yellow of normal sand, it was a bit grayer than that—the sand immediately around the obelisk was a darker hue. And it was spreading. Grain after grain of the tan sand turned dark.

A crack echoed off the nothingness in her domain. In an instant, the black sands covered every inch of her island.

Her attention, however, wasn’t on the sand anymore. As soon as the dark sand spread out beneath her feet, she noticed a set of bodies and quite the assortment of rubble appearing around her domain. Four bodies, to be precise. Three demons and a human. One looked like a reject from a wax museum. Another was human save for the thick tentacles on her head. The last demon was the most traditionally demonic of the three, complete with wings, horns, and a spaded tail.

But Eva ignored them for the moment, squatting down near the human. Garbed in a trench coat, he had a long beard that had been a goatee at one point. He really needed to shave it down. A bit of red blood matted it against his face, but the injury wasn’t too severe. He had no internal bleeding, just a fresh cut on his forehead and a couple of bruises. She reached over and poked him in the shoulder. “Devon?”

His eyes snapped open. With a hiss of pain, he closed the one on the same side as his cut. Getting blood in the eye wasn’t much fun. Eva had some first hand experience. His still open eye darted about, only staring at Eva’s face for a moment before glancing over her shoulder towards the obelisk, then around everywhere else as he propped himself up on his elbow.

“Thought you were in Hell,” he said as he pressed his fingers up against his cut.

“I am in Hell. Or… I was in Hell…” Eva trailed off as she glanced around once again. No matter where she looked, she couldn’t see the waters. Buildings had replaced much of her sandy beach. Buildings that looked an awful lot like a bomb had just gone off in the middle of the street.

Then there was the sun in the sky. She had tried to make one earlier, not long after making the grandfather clock, but it hadn’t worked. She wasn’t quite sure why. Perhaps it was because of how difficult it was to visualize the distances between the Earth and the Sun. Either way, there was one up in the sky now, although it was slightly obscured by a few winter gray clouds.

However, all was not normal. While there was a proper sky and buildings—was that a pizza parlor?—the ground was still sand. The obelisk still stood tall not far away. The little tree without leaves was just beyond that.

She slowly stood, conjuring up a set of clothes using her domain’s magic—she hadn’t bothered before, but probably should now if she was back on Earth. Conjuring a black skirt and a white button-up shirt worked perfectly. So did providing a couch identical to that of the women’s ward for Devon to rest on. Yet she could see down the sandy street, past the blown-out buildings. This was definitely Brakket City.

Or some deep delusion she had subconsciously built in her domain.

Frowning, she stepped away from Devon as he started fussing with his eye and approached Catherine. It took more than a poke in the shoulder to wake Catherine up despite her lack of apparent injuries compared to Devon. Dumping a portion of her arm’s blood onto the succubus as one might dump a bucket of water over a sleeping person worked well enough. She started coughing and sputtering as if Eva had gotten it in her mouth and nose despite taking care not to.

Eva pulled back as much blood as she could. It wasn’t a hundred percent of it all, Catherine’s skin and other contaminants prevented that, but it was enough to form her arm back into its proper shape without any noticeable deficiencies.

“Oh my head,” Catherine groaned, flopping over on her back and pressing the palms of her hands to her brow. “I feel like… like someone took the most magically potent wine, filled it with even more magic, then bashed me upside the head with the bottle.”

“How would you even know what that feels like?”

Catherine moved her hands just long enough to shoot Eva a glare. Apparently realizing how undignified and ungraceful she was being, she shot up, moving to a sitting position then standing. She didn’t stay standing for long. Catherine wobbled back and forth, almost toppling to the ground until Eva caught her.

“Are you alright?”

“Were you not listening a moment ago?” she asked with a mild groan. “I’m surprised I’m alive.”

“None of you look particularly hurt,” Eva said as she glanced around. Devon’s small cut aside, everyone looked hale and hearty to her sense of blood. At least, everyone except for the ruax looked normal. It was a bit difficult to get a read on the waxy demon.

Not wanting to hold on to the surprisingly heavy succubus forever, Eva conjured up another chair. The sands around them rose up and formed into a soft leather. Lightly nudging Catherine sent her falling into the seat. One of her wings bent slightly in a way that made Eva wince, but Catherine just leaned forward, rearranged herself, and leaned back again with her wings pressed tightly against her back.

There she sat, once again moving her hands up to rub her forehead. Devon was doing the same thing not far to the side. Maybe he wasn’t fiddling with his cut after all, maybe he had a headache as well. Eva considered waking up the two other demons before realizing that she really didn’t like the carnivean all that much and the ruax would be better off asleep until Devon was feeling positive that he could fully control her.

Unless the ruax was the cause of their headaches. But… no. The ruax’s face was pressed into the sand, half buried even. Devon had said that she required eye contact to work her debilitating ability.

If the ruax did wake up and wasn’t under Devon’s control, Eva was fairly confident in her ability to contain or kill it. With the area around her acting like her domain, as evidenced by her clothing and the seats she had created, she had tools at hand.

Tools that Catherine stared at with a curious look on her face. Her fingers traced over the top of the leather armrest as she inspected its surface. Without any warning, she dug the sharp tip of her nail into the leather and peeled it back to reveal a padding underneath. She plucked some out and stared for a moment more before her red eyes flicked towards Eva.

“What did you do?”

Eva blinked. There was a harsh accusation in Catherine’s voice. If anything, she would have expected a note of thanks for the seat, but apparently that wasn’t a concern at the moment. So Eva shrugged. “Made you a chair. Thought you might want somewhere comfortable to sit rather than the sandy ground.”

A jolt ran through Catherine as she turned to look over the edge of the chair. Eva followed her gaze, but found nothing other than the sand. The obelisk, now dark and back to its smooth obsidian, was the next object of Catherine’s scrutiny. Then the tree, until she finally looked down the road towards Brakket Academy, though the school building wasn’t actually visible from the street.

“We’re in your domain,” she said with a slight note of fear in her voice.

“Something like that, I assume.”

“How? It shouldn’t be possible?”

“Why not? Ylva’s domain was connected to Earth for a year or more. And then there was my dormitory room a while ago. It got connected on accident roughly when the sky first turned purple.”

“Ylva was given permission, was she not?” Eva winced slightly but nodded her head; Ylva’s domain being connected to Earth had been her fault even though it turned out alright in the end. “Your room at the dormitory was given permission by the school, even if it was a vague sort of permission. The other demons residing there were given specifically worded housing permits to prevent them from connecting domains. The same went for me when I was working for Martina.

“Nobody gave you permission for the middle of a street.”

Eva blinked and stared a moment as her mind churned. “A street is public property, isn’t it? I don’t need permission to use it as I see fit.”

Really, Eva didn’t have a clue what was going on. She was taking things in stride as she usually tried to do. If Void decided to drop an obelisk into her domain that let her forcibly connect to Earth as thanks for her fixing everything, she wasn’t going to complain.

Complaining might make it take its gift back.

However, public property seemed like a good explanation. At least, it did until Catherine started shaking her head.

“It doesn’t work like that. If it did, every demon who ever got summoned would have covered the Earth with their domains long ago.”

“Have you ever tried?”

“I… well, no,” she said slowly and with a slight uncertainty, quickly adding with a glare, “Because it wouldn’t work. How did you even get here? Was the remnant of Hell always your domain?”

Eva blinked and stared around again. Remnants of Hell were what they were calling the bits of land left behind when demonic enigmas died. And this one… Ah, she thought, recognizing her surroundings. She had missed it the first time because it looked like a bomb had gone off, but one of the blown out buildings was clearly the pizza shop she had killed an enigma near.

She was about to answer that no, it hadn’t always been part of her domain and it must have been her charging the obelisk that connected it, but that wasn’t accurate, was it? “Shortly after killing the enigma here,” she said to Catherine, “I walked up to the sand and pulled out a metal bar.” Holding her hand to the side, the sands jumped up, forming into the cold iron that could be found everywhere in her prison, mostly on doors to cells.

“So it was always yours,” Catherine mumbled, closing her eyes and pressing her hands to her head once again.

“I guess. Didn’t really think about it at the time. Neither do I know how it happened, so don’t bother to ask. More importantly,” Eva said, pausing a moment as she turned her gaze upwards. She had noted before, but just wanted to make sure. There were no purple streaks lining the skies, no giant eyeballs crying out enigmas, nor any lightning bolts or earthquakes. Not since she had arrived, anyway. “How are things around Earth?”

“Tedious,” Devon grumbled the instant Eva asked. “But that describes life in general. It’s always an awful bore. If you’re asking about Life, also tedious, though in a different manner.”

“A large number of enigmas have yet to be terminated,” Catherine said. “Though I don’t know what he thinks is tedious. He hasn’t lifted a finger to help. Most of the work is being done by Ylva and her nuns.”

“Her nuns?”

Catherine shrugged. “Not sure what she did with the ones who disagreed with her.”

“Ominous.”

“I’m not crying over it.”

“Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.”

“Lynn completed her research. Killing enigmas permanently is a possibility now. With their semi-shared memory, the Elysium Order are the best cleanup specialists for enigma-related matters at the moment.”

“Except the damn demon ones.”

“Except them, yes,” Catherine said tersely. “We hope you don’t mind, but the prison is something of a zoo these days. Killing the demonic enigmas still results in remnants of Hell spawning around their bodies so we needed to contain them. The prison worked the best given it was already set up to handle a few and we knew how to handle more. Although…” Catherine trailed off as she looked around the sandy area of the street. Eva could almost see the gears grinding in her head.

“Don’t even think about it,” Devon snapped. “You’ll wind up making an even bigger mess than this.” He waved his hands around, splattering a little blood from his fingertips over his seat. Not that it mattered. Eva could easily remake the seats blood free later. “I expect messes from Eva, but you’ve always been tidy.”

“Hey!”

Devon ignored Eva’s outburst, continuing to glare at Catherine. “We continue with our original plan. Gather them up then use a transference circle to make them someone else’s problem.”

“If my domain had a connection point on Earth, we could simply throw them into the waters of Hell and be rid of them,” she said as casually as if she were discussing the weather.

To which Devon scoffed. “Even if that would be significantly less troublesome than a transference circle, which it isn’t, it is also wholly unnecessary now.” He waved his arms in a wide circle around him again. “Eva’s domain will suffice. We can disconnect it later.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, there are no waters around.”

Devon opened his mouth, then snapped it shut as he slowly scanned around the street. As soon as he had finished, he looked back to Eva with an accusatory glare.

Eva spoke before he had a chance to berate her for something she probably had no control over—though, being her domain, she probably had more control over it than anyone else. Maybe she could make a small pool somewhere just to toss enigma bodies into.

“As cute—or disturbing—as it is to watch you two playfully argue with each other, I really am more interested in the goings on outside this street.” She ignored both their glares and continued. “Where is everyone else?”

“Gone.”

“Evacuated.”

“Brakket is abandoned.”

“Not likely to reopen anytime soon.”

“Your obelisk,” Devon thumbed over his shoulder, “scared most everyone away.”

“Anderson was quite upset given all the work he put into the tournament and the academy. Quite the embarrassment,” Catherine said with a vicious grin.

Eva snapped her head back and forth between the two, staring at each until the other began to speak. When it seemed that they weren’t going to continue their routine, she blinked. “Juliana? Shalise?”

“Both gone. Don’t know where they are,” Catherine said with a shrug. She was starting to get a little more animated, leaning forward and stretching out her wings. Perhaps her headache was going away. “I assume they both went home to wherever they lived before attending Brakket.”

Devon, on the other hand, still cupped his face in his hand, barely looking towards Eva even while speaking to her unless he really felt the need to glare. “Which I find concerning. If the girl truly has one of the seventy-two in her head–”

“She does.”

“Then who knows what kind of trouble they are getting themselves into.”

“Better to cause trouble away from us than live around here.”

Devon opened his mouth, but hesitated, considering Catherine’s words for a moment before he ended up nodding his head in agreement. “Can’t argue with that.”

“Zoe,” Catherine said, “is still around. She spends the nights either at the dormitory or her office. A few mage-knights wander around along with a few members of the Elysium Order. I’d be watching out for them if I were you. You’re obviously not an enigma, but they get jumpy sometimes.”

Good news. Zoe was still around. While Devon grumbled and Catherine was mildly helpful, Zoe would help her get in touch with Juliana, Shalise, and everyone else. Before handling the Avatar of Life, she hadn’t had much of a chance to ensure that everyone was alright. Catherine wasn’t mentioning any deaths, but she just might not care enough.

“Right. Going to visit Zoe then. Come find me when you two are feeling better.” She started to walk away, only to stop as a thought occurred to her. A small table built itself up between the two of them with a few glasses of water sitting on top. Sand had formed the water which Eva found somewhat strange, but shrugged her shoulders. It probably wouldn’t hurt either of them. Shalise and Lynn had drunk and ate things provided by her domain for months in the former’s case. Neither had turned out wrong in the end.

With them having a bit of water in case they needed it, Eva took off in a light sprint towards Brakket Academy. She considered blinking, but didn’t want to accidentally leave her legs behind in front of Devon and Catherine. Old-fashioned walking would have to do.

The moment she crossed over the threshold where sand met asphalt, something felt wrong. Just a queasiness in her stomach. Another step and she felt her foot starting to erode away as water splashed against it, dissolving the blood. A quick thought hardened the liquid all the way up to her knees as Eva scowled at the sight before her.

Gone was the asphalt of the street. Before her lay a black void, stretching on for eternity, filled with the familiar waters that surrounded her island.

She turned back to find Devon, Catherine, and the other demons still right where she had left them, along with the half-destroyed buildings in the immediate vicinity of the obelisk. Grinding her teeth together, Eva took a few steps back from the waters of Hell. The sky went back to a sky familiar to Earth. The rest of the street reformed behind her.

Stepping onto the asphalt, her foot plunged straight through as the street wavered like a mirage, splashing into the waters of Hell once again.

“Great. Just great.”

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