The Demon Inheritance

TWO

We kept crawling beside each other in the moist darkness, being ran out of our home named after its creator, Croma. As our oxygen began to leak out and our senses fade, we fought to keep on. In the end, our fleet of seventy demons, angels, and faerie would all either die out or make it. Either of which could have been a huge mistake.

***

I was dragged out of my thoughts abruptly by the flavor of cheesecake and vanilla ice cream exploding onto my tongue, nearly making me jump. My jaw tingled. I had my knuckles propped up under my chin, mouth gaping open enough to swallow the head of the treat I held in my hand. My coalish eyes made their way over to Mary, who was busily chatting with Oliver. We sat outside the parlor, at a table with a russet umbrella propped in the middle.

"I don't understand how ice cream looks like a science experiment to you. It looks like deliciousness to me!" Mary said, biting into her half-eaten chocolate cone.

"The rate it morphs from solid to liquid at such a quick rate, which is predictable, considering how heated this day is. However, it is still an apparent product of science. And even if it is not, there is a fraction of it that is actually science." He seemed to have baffled himself. He tentatively took another lick at his fudge ice cream.

"Wha? You're confusing me, boy..."

I found myself smiling at the two of them, completely worked out of the daze that I so often found myself trapped within. At times, I would get so lost in the events in my imagination that I'd lose time, and forget the day's events. Apparently, it had already been a half-day that I had spaced out for.

"Emma?" Mary said, "Can we take the ice cream to-go? It's getting dark out, Sis."

I looked at her for a moment, wondering if I should tell her about how reality was fading for me, about how my strange dreams made more sense to me than real life. I wondered if I should trouble her with my concerns, with my petty fears. However, when I opened my mouth to speak and glanced through her emerald gaze, I didn't see any need to complain. All I saw was an innocent child looking for answers, answers to more than what she had asked. So, instead, I clamped my mouth shut and nodded. The daydream would be something I'd bring up another time, to someone else, like my mother. Perhaps.

***

The following night, in another world, I do not wake up in the chair, as I had left off in the last dream. I am simply brought to life with no memory of it beginning, kneeling over a mound of unmoved dust. My hands pat at its soft texture, and my eyes are unafraid of a wind drifting and pressing it into my eyes. My attire is covered in a smooth, pale brown color, which is inevitably more of the loose dirt. There are some stones, all charred, but no roots. This land is so void of life.

I turn around.

Oliver walks up behind me, a sad expression filtering his pale face. "Nothing grows here anymore, Emma Whitestone. Not since time stopped." He sighs, positioning himself on the ground so that he is cross-legged beside me in the dust. "Most of our dirt is rock-hard, but there are loose parts that we have stumbled across. It is frustrating... having to wait until creation can bloom things again."

I take the handful of dirt and toss it up into the air. It freezes in place as soon as I let it go. "It's beautiful, but something everyone on earth takes for granted. Sometimes... Sometimes we destroy it, when we get bored. I guess when you care enough, you find the notion of that sick, but so many of us do it."

Oliver lets out a breath. His hand drifts through the air where the cloud of dust stands still, and he pulls down what could be a tablespoon of it. There is now a gap in the space before us.