We’re predisposed to finding patterns in chaos. That is all this is.
This idea forms the basis for the rule I propose on distinguishing these demons from those which are merely destructive fiends, and on understanding and managing the aftermath.
When the First Choir takes away from existence, nothing is created to replace it. At best, we find a pattern in the chaos that is left behind.
– Excerpt from ‘Classifying Others: Fiends and Darker Beings’, by R.D.T.
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Isadora – 2:41 PM
Smoke billowed.
Even being here was hard for her. The wrongness of the being within the factory made her very being ache.
Still, it was best if she was sure to witness this.
He was trying so hard.
She’d gutted him to buy him time. Inversely, she’d given him karma to support him, and it had led him here. Would it take away his remaining time?
Riddles.
She had yet to fully grasp the way the world worked.
She could only support the world, to ensure that things kept working, that the clock was wound, and efficiently deal with those forces that would stop things from operating as they ought to. Some was natural to her, an instinctual drive to attack the ignorant. Other parts were her personal character at work. She wanted to learn, to understand.
As a result, she existed wholly for the riddle. Puzzling out reality as reality was understood, framing it, supporting it. When she asked someone a question, she challenged them to either justify their relationship to this fathomed reality, or to die.
Everything in the context of the asked and the answered.
The demon within the factory, by contrast, was unanswerable.
And the Thorburn diabolist?
He begged the question, so to speak.
The Fool in the Tarot deck frequently depicted a boy with a dog at his heels, staring at the sky while he walked blithely off a cliff, burdened only by a bundle on a stick. The diabolist had admitted a relationship to the card.
No single detail was quite right, but much as something might appear similar if one were to unfocus their vision…
The young diabolist walked with the sparrow at his shoulder, eyes on the windows without looking through the windows, walking forward as if he were afraid to stop. His burden here was the gas containers.
No, he was burdened not just by the gas containers, but by some notion of responsibility.
A man, when facing death, aspires to finish what he started.
What had the custodian of the Thorburn estate started? What drove him?
She knew he sought to do good and to vanquish evil, and she could surmise that both good acts and the existence of evil had touched him deeply.
The Fool card was akin to the ace. Depending on the game being played, it was often the lowest card or the highest. Valueless or highly valued. Powerless or powerful.
It all depended on context. He sought to kill the demon, and he would either catastrophically fail or succeed.
This Fool sought to slay the metaphorical dragon. He felt his own mortality, which was quite possibly her fault, in part, and now he rushed to finish the task he’d set for himself. To better the world.
The Fool was wrought with air – the clouds he gazed at, the void beyond the cliff, the feather in his cap, even the dog could often be found mid-step, bounding, just above the ground.
He was a Fool wrought with a different element. The familiar didn’t quite fit for the departure from the air, but the traditional dog didn’t conjure ideas of air right off the bat either.
What was he wrought with? That was another question that begged an answer.
He sent his servant dolls and ghosts inside, then passed through the threshold.
Others wished people luck, she gave it to him, transferring it from reserves she’d saved for special events.
The demon roused, and she could feel it, even through the boundary. She stood, and retreated as the demon made its true dimensions known, flexing within the factory, seeping into cracks and through rubble.
Halogen lights cast bright shafts through open windows.
People passed jugs of gasoline through open windows and the tallest of Blake’s companions emptied one jug just below the window.
Isadora was tense. Her muscles were akin to cables, stretched tight by some immense weight, legs spread for more balance, as if she instinctively expected some great collapse.
Fire flared within, a rolling explosion followed, a jug of gasoline being caught by fire.
Too early.
The demon was growing faster than it was being destroyed.
It was as though the cables had been cut. She dropped to the ground hard, wings still partially extended at her sides, then folded one front leg over the other, trying to find some poise.
Poise was important in moments like this.
The ones outside were scrambling, running.
Isadora could hear the mirror-bound diabolist shouting. Ordering one of the other girls, Alexis, to the front door, to provide Blake an escape route.
Too slow, moving around the periphery of the building.
The ache she felt yawned wide. There were no English words for the idea. Chásma. The closest she could manage to an explanation would be to say she felt fractures in her bones.
Except the fractures were tested, the wrongness sharper, and when the cracks opened, a hollowness was revealed.
She moved her head, stretching her neck.
Getting closer would be dangerous. At worst, she’d disturb the binding around the exterior of the building. She’d hurt herself much as someone like Blake might hurt himself while standing too close to open flame.
At best? There was no best. There wasn’t much she could accomplish here.
Ironically, given how her mother had been created to be sentry to a holy site, Isadora wasn’t inclined to prayer.
The chasm of wrongness widened, and she suppressed a shiver. Every sense was jarred, now.
How could it be so vast, while staying within the factory’s bounds?
Rather than try to avoid the grating impressions of this misshapen thing straining against its bonds, she let herself feel them.
It was only then that she realized how apt her earlier metaphor had been.
The factory stood there, not tall, but still largely intact, part of the roof collapsed. To use her comparison to bones, it wasn’t so different from a fractured shinbone, the only thing keeping it from crumbling to pieces was the band that encircled it.
The marrow had been devoured, and there was only infection within.
This shinbone extended deep into the earth.
Deep, deep into the earth.
A great shaft of darkness, a pit.
All the gasoline in the world might not make a fire great enough to bring light to the bottom of that pit.
Did the young diabolist comprehend that the floor he stood on might as well have been paper thin, given the distance that the pit extended below?
Did it matter?
Questions. These ones didn’t require answers.
She felt the moment he ceased to be.
The wrongness reached through each and every one of them.
It lanced through Isadora, and she did what she could to distribute it, to break it up so that it would damage every part of her a little, rather than deal a grievous wound. It didn’t wound her awareness as it did the others.
She remembered, at least in part. One of her duties was to remember, and here she could retain the fragments she’d held on to, the ideas she’d established.
It helped that she hadn’t maintained a close connection, that she hadn’t been on a first name basis with him, and that the impact she had made on him had already been partially erased, the scars filled, then smoothed away. The ripples that extended outward had less foundation to travel across, and were easily shored up. She no longer had his name, but she knew who he was, and she could identify him as Thorburn, as the diabolist, and put the rest of the pieces in place.