It tore not through me, but through the ribbons and cords that extended between me and the individuals just outside the buildings.
I saw what was happening, and felt only stark horror at the realization of just what it meant.
The back window. Through the spiderweb. With the flare gun, I could break the web.
I ran for it, giving it my all.
I didn’t make it.
■
“Stop, Alexis!” Ty shouted. He grabbed at her arm, pulling hard.
Alexis stopped dead in her tracks.
“You remember what we agreed to, right?” he asked.
She was panting, she looked bewildered.
“Abandon the mission,” Rose said.
“But-” she started.
“Wait for the fires to die down, abandon the mission,” Rose said.
“But-” Alexis said.
She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.
She wasn’t even sure what she was supposed to say.
The others joined them. The Knights and Tiff. Watching the smoke rise. Watching a sparrow travel a confused path through the sky.
Rose settled a hand on Alexis’ shoulder. “We can’t do anything more here.”
7.x (Histories)
Demons of the First Choir are the counterpoint to the forces that brought the universe into being. There is no telling the damage they have done, but Bartholemew Peck’s Abyssian suggests a dark possibility, that the universe as we know it might be the leftovers of something far vaster. That the materials and elements that gathered to form stars and planetoids are merely the crumbs of a feast.
If this were true, it would be the demons of the First Choir that did the feasting.
Though it’s scarcely more than speculative fiction, it illustrates the nature of the First Choir for the seventh of our nine chapters here. They devour. They take. The vectors by which they act take all forms that we know to destroy things – tooth, claw, bludgeon, coil, frost, and even forces such as lightning and flame, which might well seem ironic for the Choir of Darkness.
The thing to note, however, is that these beings annihilate. In this, they are distinct from the other choirs. In this chapter, you will read of Caacrinolaas’ venom, which slowly but surely eradicate a man’s entire being. You will read about Shabriri’s lantern, which scours one’s sight away, and her bell, which peals with such force that it irrevocably destroys one’s hearing.
Above all, you will read about the consequences. The aforementioned venom forces the victim to destroy all relationships to others by unforgivable means if he does not wish them to be inflicted with the secondary effect after he is entirely removed from the world, this effect being a pining so intense that they will never move of their own volition again, only staring into the distance. Shabriri’s blindness and deafness ultimately leaves one so unable to see or hear that they will perceive absolutely everything that doesn’t exist in that space and time, as their eyes and ears are opened ever wider to true void.
The focus of this text remains the identification of that fine line that separates demons from those Others which are foul but not true fiends. In this, I must stress key points.
Unless otherwise noted (as in the Lonely Man’s subsection), that which is destroyed can be replaced, but it cannot be retrieved. While the demon itself might appear to grow, spawn, create, or manifest, I would posit that this is an illusion. The things that might appear to come to pass are a casualty of other damage, some of which might be beyond our scope of understanding.
Effects, connections, ideas, hallucinations, ideas, and whatever else might seem to be created by the demons of this choir are, I would suggest, purely the effect of reality or other forces distorting to fill the void.
A ‘statue’ left in the place of a destroyed man (See Bazuili, below) is not created by the demon, nor by transmutation, but other forces filling the resulting vacuum. In this case, it is the nearest available force of substance -the ground- seeking to repair the damage, at reality’s behest.
The cacophonous aria that follows the victims of the mote Tobu-Bōkyaku is not the demon’s cry, nor a signature, but the only sounds that remain to the victim after the being has made its passage through the victim’s ear canals.
A chaotic and tumultuous morass of connections remain after Coronzon destroys a group of people by addressing them thrice, but again, these connections should be said to be the fallout. Remove a stone from a wall, and the stones around it will fall to a new configuration. Those stones may face undue stresses, and the gaps will exist between them, but the gap nonetheless exists.