The liminal space we entered whenever Lust cast his teleportation always appeared a little differently from before, every time. More detailed, colorful. More hypnotic and alive, like a painted monster come to life. What began as a surreal, dream-like experience became something that now felt even realer than reality—and it terrified me.
The very first time, when Lust spirited us away just as Coven enforcers swarmed on us, the transference had been so overwhelmingly and nauseatingly alien that it was all I could do to not puke my guts out whenever we lurched in and out of reality. The second time had been better, despite being whisked off from the top of a blizzard-ridden mountain in lethally low temperatures while I ran around naked and screaming. And now, for the third time, we melted into the otherworldly dimension that made my body feel like it had been turned inside-out in the most surreal, static-needle-knife-stabbing way.
The curving 'walls' were but solid streaks of multicolored lights all layered over one another in a long, never-ending tunnel, threading in and out like tapestry strands. The ground—was it the ground? or was I upside down and was it actually the ceiling, because that would explain the flipped-turned-twisting pit in my stomach—was a wide, fishbowl-like path of equally uneven, shifting, crystalline formations. The very air, unnaturally hardened, took physical form inside my lungs with every breath, mineralizing or melting, I couldn't know, into something that was neither solid nor liquid nor gas. Bones, muscle, skin, even my hair, nothing felt the way it should, warping with stormy violence as my every cell fought to retain its being. From one second to the next, I was being reshaped and reborn, soft clay molded mercilessly by a thousand different hands. Yet through it all, there was no agony, only the confused quasi-pain of being in the wrong body, wrong skin.
Everything about this place was realer than life, yet more fantastic than any hallucination, something painted not with mere mundane colors but with the explosion of emotions and sensations and threads of a thousand different eternities, things that could never be taken in by the five senses alone.
The dream dimension. Something that humans were never meant to comprehend, much less traverse. This was the place where Lust made his home whenever he haunted the dreams of mortals, slipping into their sleep and entangling himself in the shimmering threads of their consciousness. And the place from where Lust began his dogged haunting of me, too, marking me for this insane, hellish journey from the safety of my bed to the far corners of the world.
And it was far from over. Far, far from over.
The ethereal tunnel quaked with wild tremors, every deep reverberation pulsing through me with sickening force as the walls expanded and shrank with chaotic swells. Smaller fluctuations rippled within massive ones, strong enough to yank me away from Lust and Mammon in the blink of an eye. They both lunged for me in the same instant. Their claws dug into my robe and dragged on the fabric, catching just in time to hook me before I slipped away into the growing storm. I fumbled for their hands, slowed by a jelly-like force that tried to yank my body backwards with invisible, pulsing waves. I tumbled to the ground with a strangled scream, lungs heaving, voice choking, world spinning.
Lust and Mammon dove after me again when the force almost tore me from within the robe's confines. Their grip was truer this time, wrapping around either wrist with bruising strength and a certainty that I would not slip away a second time into nothingness. But gratitude was the last thing on my mind. Just when I thought I had caught my breath, a horrific sensation like I was an ant swallowed up in the shadow of a monstrous mountain crept over me from behind. My throat convulsed, raw with swelling fear, and as I turned to confront the darkness—
"Don't look! That gives it the power to manifest here. Look only at me, love. Look only at me!"
I had no choice but to listen to Lust. This was his world. His dimension. The smallest hesitation could cost me everything, when I was so close to escaping that hellhole of an island and everything that wanted to kill me on it. Listen. Trust. Do as Lust said, and believe that both of us—that all three of us—were united in one purpose: to get the fuck back home.
So I obeyed and trained my gaze forward, staring hotly ahead down the length of the wavering, blurring tunnel. I ignored the horrifically massive presence looming larger and colder by the second behind me, pretended not to see the slivers of its reflections scattered all around us on every rippling surface of all too familiar white scales and feathers that grew larger and closer, murderously vivid.
The tunnel shook, sending glimmering lights showering over my head that sizzled when they touched my hair. Don't look. Don't look. All I could do was creep forward, inching along as Lust and Mammon pulled me with them whenever I lost my balance. It would have been easier to swim in hardening clay. Sharp, cold, slippery, hot, a sea of contradictory sensations abraded my body all over, but the sheer killing pressure building with every step numbed the pain until all I could feel was a suffocating grasp cocooning my entire body.
"Forward!" I thought I heard Lust urge, but the harsh command sounded like it came from so far away... And now the scattered reflections against the glassy, scintillating walls around us stretched ominously ahead, no longer restrained to my peripheral vision. Too close. Scales. Feathers. A telling diamond shaped head. Fleeting glimpses of the thrashing monster gaining on us from behind, also fighting the thickening current that blocked us all from advancing—but unlike me, winning against it.
"Isn't this your magic, Lust!" I gasped, forcing all my strength into speaking above a whisper. Was this what it was like to try to survive at the bottom of the sea, crushed under thousands of pounds of pressure? "How did it get in here with us! Can't you kick it out!"
"This place has existed forever, before me. It's not mine to govern. Don't let go, Sable! Hold on to me!"
"I can't—" I gagged mid-word, gut heaving as a wave of murderous nausea boiled up from my stomach. The world toppled, the tunnel tilting completely from side to side and back again like a ship rolling on an army of ten-foot waves. "Lust!"
"Don't release your magic, Sable! Hold on to it. It'll alter the pathway!"
"I'm not doing anything! I swear—"
"The dream's collapsing!" Mammon snapped, cutting in with a ferocious growl. His voice distorted and shattered as he spoke, and whatever else he said ripped away in the turbulence before it could reach my ears. The tunnel shook again, vibrating like a struck tuning fork, harder and harsher than any disturbance that came before.
Lust yanked me closer with a burst of strength, pointed teeth bared as he ground them together in a fierce grimace. I collapsed against him with a startled yelp, and not an instant too soon. A deafening crack exploded loud enough to flood my ears with a deafening ringing, filling my head with a metallic scream that drowned out all other sounds in an eerie blanket of piercing white noise. But even deafened, my sight worked just fine. I stared in numb horror as the place where I had been crouched a second before transformed into a burst of gem-like stalagmites ten feet tall, tearing up the ground with a shower of sparks and shrapnel. They sizzled in my hair, burning my scalp, but swamped as I was in Lust's embrace, most fell harmlessly away from me.
But not from Lust, whose skin smoked with every burning spark that landed on it. And not from Mammon, either, who dove to cover us both with his hulking, half-wolf form when another explosion of ethereal light flashed above our heads from the rounded ceiling. A crackling cluster of enormous stalactites plummeted towards us and cracked over Mammon's back. His lips parted in a silent snarl as he pulled back away from us, but he betrayed no other sign of pain as he violently motioned for us to keep moving. Under the constantly shifting golden lights that swam around us, like a watery aquarium gleam, the sickening magical burns that marred Mammon's entire face and body were even starker than before. Lust's too, for that matter, but Mammon's wounds were visibly worse, black patches breaking up the surface of his skin all over like a cursed desert.
I did that, came the numb thought. Those injuries weren't only from crawling through the dream dimension here—I did that to Mammon somehow, with a power that I shouldn't and couldn't possess, and when I wiped out the siren horde and disabled the serpent monster—temporarily or not—I hurt both Mammon and Lust. Higher demons. Princes. Lords of Hell. An unimaginable feat from the most insignificant, unlikely of sources. Me, a dead-blood, fake witch who couldn't execute a single incantation.
But unbelievable or not, it happened, and I was here now. We were here. And like hell was I going to let these two burnt, mottled, struggling Infernal Princes carry my dead weight. I would pull my own or die trying.
"I'm going to try it!" I shouted, but another barrage of crackling, shattering noises shook the warping tunnel, and neither Lust nor Mammon heard me as they fought their way to their feet and hauled me forward. I struggled in their grasp, but it was impossible enough fighting one of them, much less both. "Let go! This isn't working. I have to try something!"
Lust heard me that time, not that it stopped him from picking me up completely and putting me over his shoulder. Only then did I realize something had happened to his right arm. I gagged, thick nausea bubbling up at the sight of the mineralized mass cracking and crumbling piece by piece with every movement. Skin and bone had turned to see-through crystal, clear enough to track every pump of blood that pulsed and flowed through veins and arteries. The sight stunned me to silence long enough for Mammon to let loose with another snarling outburst. "It's corruption, Asmodeus! Some spell is poisoning you and your hold on the plane. I can smell it!"
Lust chuckled as he unraveled himself from around me and resumed climbing back up the curving, lopsided tunnel, but his laughter was strained and teeth-clenched, nothing like his usual devil-may-care delight. "I know!" he called back over his shoulder. "It's coming from that creature, but this power is different from its own. It must be enslaved by contract or some other bond. It's manifesting that other power now that the puppeteer is channeling it through him, and getting stronger."
"Then what!"
"Then the plane collapses and we are trapped with the enemy. Once my hold is broken here, we can't reenter. And that thing will have us."
"So how do we stop this! Do we have to kill the snake!"
"Neither of us can do that in our state. But all that matters is Sable. That's all. I will get her to safety. Even if it's Sable alone." Lust's crimson eyes glowed bright, Infernal magic burning from within. He struggled to his feet, pulling me up with his lone good arm. But he no longer had the strength to carry me, or rather, his body no longer had the capacity to support me. The crystalizing infection that had reduced his arm to a translucent mass now spread across his torso, covering everything from shoulder to waist. It even extended to his other arm. Soon enough, he wouldn't be able to move at all. Oh, God. Oh, God. I stumbled along, too shocked to resist his forceful guidance as he pushed me farther up the tunnel—yet even through the fear, the gears turned in my head.
I twisted halfway and managed one more glance backwards, a testament to Lust's waning strength that he couldn't stop me. I was careful to ignore the looming serpent's massive head that now was so close I could hear each individual clinking scale, not that it made a difference anymore, I was sure. Staring at it couldn't possibly make it any realer than it already was, manifested in all its lethal, titanic glory. Even so, I made sure my gaze fell only upon Mammon who tracked after us, teeth bared and broken tattoos swirling over his mottled, charred skin with feverish speed. Impossible. Both demons were both ground down to nothing, and in no small part thanks to me. I'd thought I saved myself, blowing away a sky full of sirens, but I was going to be my own undoing because I didn't know how to control magic that I didn't even know I possessed.
But now that I knew I had it, I could use it. I must use it. And I damn sure would, for the same reason that a cornered gerbil that found itself in possession of a rocket launcher would use it forthwith. So fuck it. Press any button, slam every trigger—if I was going to die here, I was going to die messy and loud, not with a whimper.
"Sable!"
I ripped myself away from Lust just as the crystallization reached his lower jaw, paralyzing his speech along with the rest of his body. Mammon, too, let me slip between his fingers, his body too damaged to keep up with my agility born of desperation. And desperate I was. So desperate that every thought erased itself from my head, everything from terror to bitterness to rage to confusion, every thought except one:
Live.
The gigantic beast that descended upon me like a falling skyscraper moved without a sound as my sense of hearing vaporized along with every other conscious notion. The white-eyed, blind man's torso that nested in the triple-mandible jaw of the serpent creature no longer struck any chord of fear in me, no awe, no panic, not even the slightest thread of reaction. I no longer registered its beauty or its horror, not even the sheer size of it that dwarfed me in its monstrous shadow. Instead, I fell into the abyss that opened up inside me, dark and light and impossibly expansive, the sea inside me that I'd never known was there. If this was power, if this was magic, it didn't feel like it. It was simply the movement of a hand I'd never moved before, a breath sucked in deeper than I'd ever inhaled in my life. A new sound, a new smell, a new sensation—
I closed my eyes just as the serpent fell upon me, and breathed.
The rush of power had no structure or meaning, only pure intent given life. The form it took, I had no idea, except that it was bright enough to sear my eyes through my closed lids and drown the tunnel in sun-like heat. It engulfed everything in it and poured endlessly from end to end, somehow outside of me and inside at the same time—like my nerves were flowing out of my body and following the wild current of power into every crevice and crack of the tunnel. I felt everything, from Lust's rock-frozen body, to the scorched cracks and bleeding lacerations on Mammon's, to the horrendous, enormous fangs that stopped just before they could pierce my body and crush my bones to smithereens.
Time stopped. Whether that was my doing or the incomprehensible physics of the dream dimension, I didn't stop to assess. I simply acted. The current sat frozen at its zenith, waiting for me, and I did the only thing I could possibly do, the only thing that made sense.
I unleashed.