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.”