u/GeAlltidUpp

I saw her on my way to work. Had to stop in the middle of my stride to get a better look.

At first, I thought it was just another stunt. A girl in costume, wings strapped to her back, standing on the roof of a four-story office block. Maybe cosplay, maybe some kind of promo. Her wings looked like painted glass, living church windows that reflected light sublimely as she flexed.

I raised my phone, zoomed in, and my gut clenched.

The hair. The profile. The way she leaned forward, head tilted, like she was about to cry.

It was her. My ex. The one who’d fallen. The one whose broken body still snapped into my dreams at night.

She walked toward the rooftop’s edge. I froze. My chest locked, the same terror rushing back.

Then she threw herself off. Falling for a brief dreadful moment. Until the wings unfurled fully. Real wings, catching the light, scattering gold and white feathers across the morning sky. She soared instead of falling.

My hands shook so badly I nearly dropped my phone.

I followed her, eyes locked on her gliding shape above. She moved with certainty, circling, watching.

I grabbed strangers by the sleeve. “Look! Do you see her? Tell me you see her!”

They pulled away, muttering curses. Nobody looked up. Nobody cared.

I stumbled across the park, heart pounding, and grabbed the arm of an old lady knitting on a bench.

“Do you see her?” I demanded, jabbing a finger skyward. “The angel! She’s right there!”

The woman blinked up at me, timid and calm. Then she smiled faintly. “No, dear. I don’t see anything. But if you do, that makes me happy. I always knew angels were real.”

She patted my hand gently, like I was a nervous child, and went back to her knitting.

I ran after her for what must have been an hour. When I stopped to breathe, she landed on a rooftop or flew in circles. She didn’t want me to lose her. It was exactly the kind of summer day she’d loved. I even saw dogs on the street, the breed she’d loved.

I eventually reached a park crowded with families. Kids on swings, parents chatting on benches, toddlers tumbling in the grass.

She sang above it all. Perhaps this was what she wanted to show me, that she was happy. That I deserved to find someone else and have kids, despite the fact that she had refused to have any with me.

There was a boy there who looked eerily like pictures of me as a child. A ten-year-old little ruffian. She saw him too, and then made eye contact with me. Smiling, with the teeth of a predator. The angel dove.

She plummeted like a hawk, wings slicing the air, and ripped the boy straight from his parents’ arms. They screamed, begged for her to let go. Complete panic, but only for a moment. Then their faces smoothed over, blank and calm.

“I think it’ll rain later,” the father murmured, frowning at the sky.

The mother smiled absently. “Yes. Probably.”

Above them, their son writhed and shrieked as the angel tore into him. Tearing flesh, eating him alive. I felt every bite, like he was a voodoo doll of me. The pain was so intense that I fell to the ground and vomited.

His legs kicked against empty air as we both struggled. Blood poured in heavy red streams, guts unraveling, splattering across the swings, the picnic blankets, even the shoulders of other children. And no one noticed.

Parents kept sipping their coffee, checking their phones. Kids laughed, chasing balls through puddles of blood that weren’t there for them. The angel herself was invisible, unseeable, her actions impossible for anyone else to perceive.

I stared, choking on bile. The boy was finally dead. I slowly got up on trembling legs. My ex was covered in blood, chewing down on what remained of his face, a piece of sloppy flesh stripped from his skull. She winked at me, and I understood what was conveyed. She would return, eat another. I would feel that as well, every bite.

The angel soared impossibly high into the sky, overwhelmingly fast. Impossible to track.

The next day, I came back to the park with a rifle.

I wasn’t going to go through that torture again. If I’d been a better person, I might have claimed I was trying to save other kids.

This was for proof. A winged corpse on the ground. A headline. Fame. Something to keep me from waking up in cold sweats, wondering if I’d imagined it all.

As I set up my scope, the old lady shuffled closer. Same floral dress. Same knitting bag.

“Hope you see that glass-winged angel today,” she said encouragingly.

I kept my scope lowered. “I never told you what she...”

She tilted her head, smiled too wide.

“Ah. Forgive me. I forget myself sometimes. I’m not real, after all.”

Something staggered out from behind her. The boy. The one who’d been eaten. His chest crudely stitched, his ribs jutting through torn skin.

And then the crowd came. Dozens of them, men and women and children, surrounding me. Their eyes gleamed faintly, like thin glass holding back a fire.

“None of us are,” said the man that had brushed me off yesterday.

“Except the angel,” added the boy.

“She can feel and think, we’re just here to help her.”

I fired. One man’s skull exploded. He collapsed, then rose again, smiling broader than before.

I emptied the clip, but they kept advancing. Hands seized me, dragged me down, stuffed fabric into my mouth.

I closed my eyes. They cut off my eyelids so that I would see the angel.

She descended. My ex. My angel. Her golden hair whipped in the wind, her glowing eyes fixed on me, her shark’s teeth bared.

And in that instant, I remembered. The balcony. My hands on her shoulders. The shove.

Her scream. That bitch had been taking pills, so that she wouldn’t get pregnant. She had been lying to me, letting me think she was on board with getting a baby, while secretly planning her escape to a women’s shelter.

She touched me gently at first. Kissed my skin as the puppets undressed me. Then came the biting, her fangs sinking into my flesh.

And I understood.

This was her Heaven.

\[Content warning: Cannibalism, torture, suicide, violence against children, and graphic depictions of intense suffering.\]

I decided to do it when I was 16. The chair slipped out from under me with a hollow clatter. My neck didn't break, the pain and panic of not being able to breathe was immense.

Then there was just creaking. That slow, rhythmic groan of the rope straining against the beam. The soundtrack to a failed attempt at a quick death. It felt like being rocked to sleep by a world that hated me so much that it couldn't resist hurting me on the way out.

My fingers twitched against empty air. My eyes blurred. Why couldn't my neck have snapped? It wouldn't matter soon.

I had called the paramedics just before doing it, told them where to find the body. I timed it. My family would be gone all day. Professionals would find my disgusting corpse.

The key turned in the lock.

I heard the door open.

Then voices. Too close. Too soon.

Footsteps slammed against the floorboards, fast, crashing into the room. I couldn’t turn to see, but I felt it. Something pushing me upward. Air, dirty air entered my lungs again.

Arms were wrapped around my waist. Rough, urgent, lifting me up, taking the weight off the rope. I could breathe again, damn!

I felt him shaking as he held me up, my father. Must have forgotten something and returned early to get it, or something. What an idiot-

Then another shape darted past, small, fast. My 11-year-old brother. I felt his arms clutching my legs, tight, helping Dad hold me up. His breath came in sharp, uneven gulps, he was hyperventilating against my skin.

Mom stood still in shock for a moment. Then ran out of the room, to return with a kitchen knife.

She climbed onto a chair to reach, sawing through the rope as the other two held me up. Each tug was clumsy, desperate. I felt the fibers fray. Heard my ticket out of here snap. She just saved my life, that hag

We all collapsed on the floor. I lay there blinking up at the ceiling that had almost been my last sight.

Dad cradled me gently. He kissed my forehead, soft, shaking. His tears were warm on my face.

My brother was still holding my legs, crying, gasping, struggling to breathe.

Mom knelt beside me. Her hand hovered for a moment. Then she slapped me. A single, sharp sting across the cheek. Couldn't really blame her.

We sat there in silence for a while.

I remember thinking that the scene could’ve been beautiful.

Tragic, cinematic, in that soft-lit way people cry to in the movies.

The nymph-like, broken angel of a daughter. The strong father trembling as he held her in his firm arms. The innocent-looking boy sobbing. The mother striking her as an expression of unbearable love.

But it wasn’t beautiful.

Because we were all fat and plain-looking. My dad’s arms were thin and his gut too big, I was chubby, my brother had bad teeth, and mom's wrinkly face was showing more rage than love. Studios don't hire ugly or average people to act out tragedies or dramas, or make biopics about people who aren't famous. Because when exceptional or at the very least beautiful people suffer it's dignified and tragic. When people like us do it it's annoying or white noise at best. If we were more successful, smarter, or at the very least thinner and prettier, then this moment might’ve mattered to someone.

\---

In the psychiatric care unit things weren't worse, or better. Just less colorful.

I wasn't grateful for surviving my attempt, nor regretful. Just embarrassed to still be alive. They could only keep me here legally for a month, unless I gave them an excuse that would hold up to a judge.

My therapist tried to gaslight me to care about my own well-being. Why would I? If you showed photos of me to 100 strangers on the internet, most would find me ugly or mediocre. If you started telling my life story or troubles to strangers, most would stop listening. There was a reason I had to talk to paid professionals about this, because I wasn't worth caring about.

Another patient, a young man with three dots tattooed next to his eyes, was kind of cute, and took an interest in me. He wanted to be called E because he thought his real name, Egil, was lame. E's lawyer had fought tooth and nail to have him here instead of jail. E did beat up another patient over defeating him in chess one time, so he probably should be in jail but I was happy that the system messed up. He was turned on by the scars on my arms, and didn't find me too fat to be sexy.

E told me exciting stories from his life in the gang. He said their leader had made a pact with something they summoned from the forest in Scandinavia. A being that Swedes used to feed animals and slaves back in pagan times. Someone who didn't know anything about anything might call it a god, in the same way that they might call North Korea a democracy or incestuous abuse love. Too paltry to even be an angel or demon, a nobody from a cosmic perspective. But overwhelmingly mighty compared to us humans.

The thing was towering, thorny and ugly. Part of it was living wood, part of it was hairy flesh while other segments were covered in feathers. Plants grew on it, and small animals lived inside it. Human corpses had been nailed to its jagged form, some days it had dozens of eyes, some days it had none, but you could always feel it stare. It would tear up the cows and horses they brought as sacrifices, eating them alive.

It would repay the gang's gifts with wonders. The entity placed a claw on a gun once, and its bullets would refill by themselves in seconds after the magazine was emptied. Ammunition materialized inside of it through a recurring process that gave off a rancid smell of death and guilt. If you emptied the gun too many times in a row it would start to leak a black tar that made you vomit if you drank it but helped plants grow stronger.

The entity caressed fool’s gold another time with its slender fingers, and the metal became real gold. A tendril made contact with the photo of an enemy of the gang, leaving a trail of that same tar. The enemy as well as his entire family died screaming a week later, flowers growing on the place of their demise.

E's gang would bow before the entity and follow strange decorum in its presence. Like interacting with a fickle dictator from a country with a bizarre, archaic and opaque upper class culture, and enough of a psychosis to feed you to his dogs if you ate with the wrong utensil.

The leader was eaten by the forest dweller eventually, after being tortured for roughly an hour. E was forced to watch, but allowed to live. They must have broken etiquette in some way, or perhaps it had just gotten tired of them. The gang never dared to try and contact it after that. I didn't believe him, but lies are better than boredom.

On the day E was set to be released, he told me that he would have to get back to his 'real girlfriend' outside, she was pregnant after all. I called him names and cried. In a rare moment of guilt, he decided to make it up to me. Gave me three pills he had smuggled in.

"You know, some people cure their depression with heavy trips. They see things that give them a new perspective." he gave a knowing smile.

"Hallucinations won't fix me"

"No, this isn't like that. This isn't turning on a movie in your head, this is more like watching a banned documentary with weird editing. Stealing memories from other people, or perhaps your own past lives."

"What are you talking about?"

"It's not 100% real, but it’s not just in your head either."

"Are you sure it will make me stop hating life?"

"Perhaps, or it might kill you. I've heard others say it lets them see God or walk on other worlds. I usually wouldn't give it to anyone, too risky and strong, but what do you have to lose?"

I couldn't argue with that logic. I took one pill and hid the rest. During the first trip my body fell apart. The pieces turned into animals. My back split into birds in all the colors of the rainbow, my torso into small lumps of flesh that grew and became bear cubs and fishes, my legs into wolves, my feet into rabbits, my toes into seeds, and so on. The 'me' dissolved into a 'we'. The seeds turned into trees, that in turn seeded new trees. The animals, birds and fishes cast reflections into ponds, shadows on rocks or made echoes in caves. Imprints that vibrated and changed, turning into flesh and blood creatures themselves. They mated with their former shadows and reflections, making more of my former body. Multiplying, forming a forest that grew vaster and more complex. I became what my nerdy ex would call a genius loci, the spirit of a place. Despite the fact that parts of me hunted, killed, and ate other parts, there was still a type of balance and harmony. I enjoyed the process in a detached way, accepting when one part of my former body died in pain, because a new one would be born. I was cyclical, I was fecund, both beautiful and ugly.

When a fox hunted a rabbit, I rooted for both. Sharing the fear of the prey and the thrill of the predator. My life was amoral, exciting, tragic, euphoric, immensely slow in some sense while quick and capricious in others.

I felt more than I thought overall. Humans came into my domain, living short, busy and trivial lives. Like ants with existential dread. They made constructs to live in, I remembered the word "building". An intruding cognition, I didn't think in words. A memory from a future self that didn’t exist yet, intruding on the past gestalt. One of the buildings humans made was the mental asylum they would keep the future me in. This was confusing. Keep who in? What was a mental asylum? The future self was brought into the structure against her will, a trivial uninteresting event. Nothing compared to the drama of a squirrel burying three nuts outside the building soon after, only to be taken by an owl the same night.

When I woke up I was informed that I had been missing for hours. Physically gone in some way. I didn't bother to make up a generic excuse, I just let the questions hang in the air unanswered. During a break an orderly let me walk a bit away from the building, to the edge of the forest nearby. I found it, the spot where the squirrel had dug. The orderly didn't ask any questions when I dug into the ground with a spoon I had brought from the dining room. They were still there, three nuts.

It wasn't just a hallucination, not entirely accurate either. My pretentious ex-boyfriend who I met long before E, would have called it "an experience living in the contested borderlands between the Kingdom of Dreams and the Republic of Facts", or something lame like that.

The whole thing wasn't a complete waste of time, so why not keep going? The second pill didn't change my body, instead it morphed my mind. It grew larger and sharper. I thought many times faster than my ordinary pace, memories were reexamined in an instant, revealing things that had been hidden but now felt obvious. I could hear other patients' thoughts, feel their emotions.

The thing that struck me most about telepathy was how much people thought of sex, and how little humans understood each other. Folks lied so frequently, and almost as often others saw through the lie at least in part and just didn't say anything. What different connotations words had to seemingly similar people, making us almost constantly talk past each other without realizing it. How often people overinterpreted things, all the times we would zone out while someone poured their heart out, to later hyperfocus on other statements they misunderstood or misremembered. My fear that people didn't really understand me had just been bitten by a radioactive Superman.

I wasn't taken aback by that experience as much as the first. Neither of the trips came close to solving my mental issues. I didn't want to tell anyone about what I was doing; fearing that the pills would be taken from me and I would have been diagnosed with schizophrenia or something and kept locked up even longer.

I waited until the month was up, and they let me out. There wasn't anything on the books that would allow them to keep me longer than that, not when I lied about feeling better. I lied to my family, falsely thanked them for saving me. Faked smiles and pretended everything was better. It wasn't just that I often felt lonely, worthless, and the like. It was that I couldn't enjoy almost anything. Psychiatrists call it anhedonia. I decided to put up an act for a few days, then try the third pill. If it didn't work, then I'd end it for good.

The third pill made everything pitch black and silent. Then light and baby screaming, me screaming, a thousand light sources and a thousand screams. Like staring at a tranquil night sky while surrounded by babies in pain. I moved closer to the lights, they were like openings in the pitch black dome of the sky. I passed through them. I was born into a thousand bodies at the same time. Memories from humans in a land and a time unrecognizable to me. The many iterations of me were taken away from our mothers directly. Women who cried and screamed, begged to be with us.

The little children were in most cases kept in damp and cramped conditions. Fed mush made of bugs. We were what in my time and place would have just been called humans; they were their own subspecies there. Known as Sethians, the descendants of Adam and Eve's third son, or just called "the unhorned", "hornless", "rat-monkey" or stuff like that. Sethians were kept in cages, beaten, and played with by Cambions, the children of Cain. I remembered being a ten year old boy escaping his cage, hiding in the woods as the horned monsters looked for him. When they found him, they bit off most of his right hand, one finger at a time.

I remembered being another boy who reached adolescence, forced onto a truck and taken to a slaughterhouse. Through the eyes of another girl, I saw the boy's meat being sold as fast food. I recalled being a household slave, a little Cambion girl had received me as birthday present to dress up like a doll. I pleaded with her to let me go, she taught me why I was less than her. Chewing on a deep-fried Sethian face while she did so.

The first mother, Eve, had cucked Adam. The Sixth-eyed-serpent, the primary god of all Cambion religions, had warmed her bed. Cain had been born as stronger, smarter, and more pleasing to look at than his brother Abel. Cain slew him rightfully, and then ruled over the descendants of his little brother Seth. Her parents later said that it was a myth, they were descended from demonically possessed Sethians, human genetics enhanced by the hateful things beyond the veil.

The little slave me protested often. How could they treat me like this, when they didn't even agree on the reason why my kind deserved it. The mother of the household made it clear that the backstory wasn't important. The undeniable facts in the present mattered. Cambions were stronger, they didn't age beyond their physical peak, they were smarter. In every way superior to us. Our suffering was as unimportant as that of insects.

Every month they sacrificed tons of Sethians to sulfur gods, by calling upon demons to enter our world. Monsters the size of houses incarnated inside gigantic satanic temples. Living things that radiated heat with skin that burned, nightmares made flesh that hated light and people. With bodies that were like the universe, uneven, ugly and absurd. With mouths, eyes, hands, tentacles, many jolted fingers, and the like scattered across their forms in ways that didn't follow the goal-oriented logic seen in Darwinian evolution. Insane shapes, insane in the same way that a mother killing her own child or an animal eating its own body is. Looking at them directly slowly unraveled your mind. They could only incarnate in our world for a few hours usually, and made the most of that time by devouring the live Sethians served to them.

One of my past lives ended with me being gulped up into one of the six mouths of a demon. My memory of the creature's exact shape was hazy enough to not hurt me looking back, but I knew that just the sight of it for a second gave me a piercing headache. That I wanted to be anywhere else than near it, that as soon it touched me the pain started. The mouth had several rows of uneven teeth. The first bite almost tore my arm off, it hung loosely on thin stretches of flesh. I stared in disbelief through tears at my mangled body. In came another human that landed next to me in that warm and dank flesh pit, we were tossed around by the three tongues. The second bite resulted in a fang the size of a sword piercing my leg. The third bite cut my body in half.

Many of my former selves had seen propaganda clips of a Sethian being punished by being forced to look at the photo of a demon for hours, the victim going gradually more insane. Until he could no longer understand language, switching capriciously between complete apathy, hysterical laughter, and crying. Largely regardless of outside stimulus. While a Cambion child was shown the same image without any effect.

A piece of demonic meat was placed on a Sethian tied to a bed, he screamed as his flesh sizzled upon contact. It lay there in a speed-up video often shown, slowly burning a hole through his chest until he died. The video then showed a Cambion child eating the same piece of meat without any harm. One of the many ways they claimed superiority over us, an immunity they delighted in beating us over the head with.

Some of us were sacrificed in rituals that made Cambion benefactors prettier, smarter, stronger, or the like. Others were massacred in recurring religious fests necessitated to stave off the wrath of the Sixth-eyed-serpent and the other bloodthirsty deity filling his infernal court. The Cambion-demon relationship was a bit like having an uncle in the mob who seemed to love you to some degree but not enough to abstain from breaking your legs to ensure the debts were paid. You needed to pay protection money or he'd make you wish you were never born. But he would also sell you stuff no one else could.

Every hour there were TV shows of Sethian slaves being forced into blood sports, every minute they ate us, wore human skin, or released us into the woods to be hunted for fun.

From overhearing Cambions talking about statistics, former versions of me concluded that approximately 90% of all Sethians lived and died in the meat industry, factory farmed to produce cheap food. Each year a number of Sethians 10 times larger than the total Cambion population was murdered just for food.

Cambions didn't feel compassion for Sethians, only for others of their kind, coming closer to serial killers in their emotional and ethical relationship to us. Many Cambions had predatory instincts triggered by seeing Sethians; they wanted to see us die, be dominated, and suffer. A Cambion showing genuine concern for a Sethian was as rare as a wolf protecting a sheep.

New memories were awakened, new lights and babies screaming, as the old ones died out. The darkening was quicker than my births, slowly there were fewer of me. Until one final birth.

Her name was Ary, one of the lucky few designated to be a household slave instead of meat. Raised in a type of boarding school by a Cambion-run corporation. They wouldn't be beaten or whipped when they didn't measure up, because that might ruin their looks. Instead, their heads would be held under water, or they were electrocuted.

She was taught the etiquette of Cambion society, their worldview and the like. There were large-horned, and small-horned Cambions. The first had red skin, wings, claws, sharp teeth, and a tail. They were either directly born from a demonically possessed Sethians, or from two large-horned Cambion. The small horned ones arose when a large horn impregnated a Sethian, the small-horned ones being the half-bloods of their folk.

Small horns had skin in the same variation found among normal humans in my time, looking mostly like Sethians overall but with two small retractable horns on their foreheads. The latter made it possible for them to disguise themselves as Sethians, something they claimed to do at times to spy on their slaves. I dismissed that claim as a cruel lie, they were probably too lazy for it.

Beil, a large-horned Cambion woman, bought me from the institution when she was 14. Beil had over 500 Sethian slaves, and a number of wild animals in her private zoo. Slaves that misbehaved were at times fed alive to the latter, at other times she did worse things to them. A classical nouveau riche Cambion, trying to impress others with sadistic spectacle.

One day a stranger came to her house, a man who she was desperate to impress. Before he came Beil had told us about new rules. Small horns were never slaves, but second class citizens. We slaves were usually expected to treat these guests accordingly, serving them with cheaper cutlery the like. This evening would be different. He was in the employment of a woman who's good graces were worth their weight in gold.

As I carried out his dinner plate, I was surprised at how humbly dressed the man was. None of the fancy brands you could see in commercials where Sethians were flayed alive. Instead, he wore a simple business attire. What more, as I came close, I could see that something was off about him.

Why had he brought weapons and a large rucksack? It didn't feel fitting for the event.

Or was I just overinterpreting his fake laughter at the hostess jokes. They were alone at the dinner table that night, no one except slaves in the entire mansion. The man asked me to refill his wine, that's when it happened. I accidentally dropped the wine flask. It shattered into a thousand pieces, the thing cost more than me.

Realizing that I wouldn't survive embarrassing my mistress, I started to run. There wasn't really anywhere to go that I knew of. Escaped slaves were either kidnapped by new masters on the streets, or returned to their original owners by the police.

Two other slaves grabbed me, they were adult men. At Beil's command, they forced me into a cage, then carried the cage with me in it. Beil escorted her guest to her private zoo, with me being carried along. I saw the lion, hungrily staring at me. She would feed me to the mighty maned animal for entertainment. That's when the Stranger pulled out a gun and shot Beil in the head. The two slaves let go of my cage and ran.

Every slave in the house seemed to be fleeing. Afraid that the guest would remove witnesses, everyone except me.

"Can you help me get him into a truck?"

The stranger pointed towards the lion as he asked me. I nodded. After he let me out I took a long look at his horns. He gave me a grin that silently said "You're right. I'm not one of them." Perhaps my mistress had known that, but just thought that his employer had decided to send a Sethian pretending to be a Cambion as an elaborate prank?

When I returned with the keys to the truck used to transport the lion, I asked "Who do you work for?"

"Not the bigshot your owner thought. Someone much higher up". I showed him which buttons in the zoo to press, and the lion cage was automatically loaded onto the truck. I helped him gather food from the kitchen and other things that might be useful. As a wordless part of our agreement, I took the passenger seat, and he drove us out of Beil's vast home.

We drove for hours. "Won't they be looking for this car?"

"Yes, but not for a while. I arranged a false message to Beil's acquaintances. That she let me take her on a trip for a week."

"You're smart,"

"You're not too dumb either. Otherwise, you wouldn't have noticed how smart I am."

"What's your name?"

"Names have power. We aren't safe yet. So I'll keep mine to myself for now. Hungry?"

I nodded, and he gave me a package of berries. You couldn't buy any meat during this time, without the overwhelming risk of it being human. So Sethians tended to eat vegan, when given the choice. Not to let the Cambions lower us to their level.

The cityscapes behind us faded into flat, empty fields where the lights of civilization grew rarer and less certain. We passed gas stations without staff. We stopped and camped for a night. He had brought four sleeping bags and a tent in his rucksack. His hope had apparently been to bring a few rescued slaves with him. We continued driving the next day. I felt sorry for the lion, we fed him and I pushed a toy through his bars to play with. Keeping him wasn't right. The Stranger refused to let him go.

Two more days passed like that, until we reached the outskirts of a particular forest. "We're almost there!" he smiled in a lovely way, like I imagined my Dad would have smiled if I had one.

The truck rumbled over gravel, then dirt, then a narrow path through thick wood. Moss swallowed the edges of the road.

He stopped and killed the engine. The forest swallowed the silence.

We both stepped out, I helped him remove his prosthetic horns. We walked for a bit, deeper and more off road. He stopped at a tree with the carving of things, he breathed in deeply and then made a sound.

It wasn’t a word. A call, sharp, guttural, almost like a dying bird. Or a predator pretending to be one. He stood still. Waited.

No answer.

He called again, a slightly different pattern. Waited longer this time.

Then again. And again. Like he was tuning a forgotten frequency.

I was too amazed by the forest to be bored. I had never been allowed to leave the city. Amazed that the Stranger hadn't beaten me once yet. Might I have found an owner that wouldn't hurt me, not just refrain from hurting me for fun but not even hurt me as a way of disciplining me? No, not an owner, a leader.

A response finally came, someone imitating his sound but in a specific rhythm. The Stranger in turn answered that with the same sound in another rhythm. Then the sound of movement coming closer.

Figures emerged from the trees, slow at first, then bolder. They wore patchworks of woven fibers, moss, and discarded fabrics sun-bleached and dirt-streaked by time. Some of them had old t-shirts or the like, probably found from Cambion tourists leaving trash in the woods. The stranger shouted something to them in a language I had never heard, and they laughed mirthfully.

They didn’t walk like domesticated Sethians. They moved like creatures with their own agency.

No collars. No brands. No subservience in their eyes. They were real, the Wild Sethians.

I’d heard stories about them. Every Sethian had. The kind of comforting lie we whispered to each other in our cages: “Out there, in the woods, there are people like us who aren't force-fed feces when they speak out of turn. Who run free.”

We weren’t supposed to believe it. I didn’t. Until that moment.

There were about 500 of them. The nomads hugged the stranger, greeting him like a returned leader from a great quest. They hugged me, offered berries to eat and a knife for me to defend myself against future threats. A mother with kind eyes overjoyed at the sight of me, she told her nervous children to go and said hey. After they had dared to, she lifted me up in a hug.

"You're safe now", she said and kissed my cheek.

Then turned angrily to the Stranger, speaking their own language. He remarked something dismissively in return, then turned his focus on directing other nomads into helping him find a safe way to transport the lion's cage.

"I told him that you look hungry. Has he given you enough to eat? My name is Maro." I gave my own name, Maro seemed nice and so did her three children.

The stranger performed an incantation, and the lion went into a deep sleep. The men then lifted the cage, and it was carried the last bit of the journey by hand. Into a huge wooden structure. A marvel large enough to house hundreds upon hundreds of people, the thing appeared to have been built by hand. According to Maro the stranger had shielded this place from Cambion eyes through powerful rituals, borrowing power from the Creator.

Inside it were many other animals, all in cages in pairs. The male lion's cage was opened, and they carried his sleeping body into a cage where a female lion waited. I was immensely frightened to see the affair, but Maro assured me that the Stranger's incantation would keep the animal asleep no matter what. She wouldn't tell me his name, referring to him as 'our leader'.

"Why did he save me?"

"Why not?" responded Maro.

"Because I'm worthless"

"Nonsense. You can feel, can't you? If you can feel, you're worthy of happiness and safety" I smiled at that.

Hair was gathered from both lions, placed into a wooden bowl. They told me to sit still and not disturb anything after that. The whole tribe, me included, gathered in the structure. Sitting in concentric circles around the Stranger. Circles punctuated by spaces left for the animals sleeping in their cages. At the center of the circle stood the Stranger.

As bowls with hair, sweat, nails, or the like gathered from each animal were brought into the center to where he was standing, the stranger started chanting. Not the language of his tribe, nor my tongue. A language that didn't sound like something humans should have been able to understand, let alone speak.

I could feel things changing, a tingling sensation through my entire body. The sound of rain pouring down outside. The entire forest was slowly being flooded, and the structure began to float. My senses were acting weird throughout the process, something other than rain was coming down from the sky.

Once the rain stopped I walked up to the top of the structure, which turned out to be a huge boat. There was water in all directions. The stranger used the language of angels to make the smoke emitted from fire take the shape of food. Then solidify, change color, and texture until real food was there. Fruit, vegetables and the like for us, and meat for the animals that needed it. We lived like that on the boat for a year. People there were curious about my life and kind, we shared simple and harmonious days.

The Stranger's words let the animals play and hunt in vivid dreams, impossible night visions that kept their muscles strong and them happy. They spent the most of their time in supernatural sleep like that.

Once the water dissipated, we released the animals, the Stranger commanding the predators to leave without attacking any of us. The world had changed more than any flood could have achieved. There were no cities, no roads, not even remnants of them. There were no Cambions left. Through this ritual the Creator had allowed the Stranger to rewrite the past, to one where Cain's heirs died out early or perhaps never existed. Ordinary humans instead became the dominant people on the planet.

I asked the stranger his name, he told me and I smiled. As I woke up, the present me kept smiling in recognition of having heard the name.

Texted my family. I didn't have the guts to say it live. Told them that I was sorry for what I had put them through and that I would start doing things to try and feel a bit better now. You can't choose to be happy, but you could choose to eliminate the chance of happiness. I was going to stop making that choice. I wasn't the world’s most joyous person the years after that, but not suicidal either. I had realized that the question wasn't why my feelings should matter, but why not?

I saw her on my way to work. Had to stop in the middle of my stride to get a better look.

At first, I thought it was just another stunt. A girl in costume, wings strapped to her back, standing on the roof of a four-story office block. Maybe cosplay, maybe some kind of promo. Her wings looked like painted glass, living church windows that reflected light sublimely as she flexed.

I raised my phone, zoomed in, and my gut clenched.

The hair. The profile. The way she leaned forward, head tilted, like she was about to cry.

It was her. My ex. The one who’d fallen. The one whose broken body still snapped into my dreams at night.

She walked toward the rooftop’s edge. I froze. My chest locked, the same terror rushing back.

Then she threw herself off. Falling for a brief dreadful moment. Until the wings unfurled fully. Real wings, catching the light, scattering gold and white feathers across the morning sky. She soared instead of falling.

My hands shook so badly I nearly dropped my phone.

I followed her, eyes locked on her gliding shape above. She moved with certainty, circling, watching.

I grabbed strangers by the sleeve. “Look! Do you see her? Tell me you see her!”

They pulled away, muttering curses. Nobody looked up. Nobody cared.

I stumbled across the park, heart pounding, and grabbed the arm of an old lady knitting on a bench.

“Do you see her?” I demanded, jabbing a finger skyward. “The angel! She’s right there!”

The woman blinked up at me, timid and calm. Then she smiled faintly. “No, dear. I don’t see anything. But if you do, that makes me happy. I always knew angels were real.”

She patted my hand gently, like I was a nervous child, and went back to her knitting.

I ran after her for what must have been an hour. When I stopped to breathe, she landed on a rooftop or flew in circles. She didn’t want me to lose her. It was exactly the kind of summer day she’d loved. I even saw dogs on the street, the breed she’d loved.

I eventually reached a park crowded with families. Kids on swings, parents chatting on benches, toddlers tumbling in the grass.

She sang above it all. Perhaps this was what she wanted to show me, that she was happy. That I deserved to find someone else and have kids, despite the fact that she had refused to have any with me.

There was a boy there who looked eerily like pictures of me as a child. A ten-year-old little ruffian. She saw him too, and then made eye contact with me. Smiling, with the teeth of a predator. The angel dove.

She plummeted like a hawk, wings slicing the air, and ripped the boy straight from his parents’ arms. They screamed, begged for her to let go. Complete panic, but only for a moment. Then their faces smoothed over, blank and calm.

“I think it’ll rain later,” the father murmured, frowning at the sky.

The mother smiled absently. “Yes. Probably.”

Above them, their son writhed and shrieked as the angel tore into him. Tearing flesh, eating him alive. I felt every bite, like he was a voodoo doll of me. The pain was so intense that I fell to the ground and vomited.

His legs kicked against empty air as we both struggled. Blood poured in heavy red streams, guts unraveling, splattering across the swings, the picnic blankets, even the shoulders of other children. And no one noticed.

Parents kept sipping their coffee, checking their phones. Kids laughed, chasing balls through puddles of blood that weren’t there for them. The angel herself was invisible, unseeable, her actions impossible for anyone else to perceive.

I stared, choking on bile. The boy was finally dead. I slowly got up on trembling legs. My ex was covered in blood, chewing down on what remained of his face, a piece of sloppy flesh stripped from his skull. She winked at me, and I understood what was conveyed. She would return, eat another. I would feel that as well, every bite.

The angel soared impossibly high into the sky, overwhelmingly fast. Impossible to track.

The next day, I came back to the park with a rifle.

I wasn’t going to go through that torture again. If I’d been a better person, I might have claimed I was trying to save other kids.

This was for proof. A winged corpse on the ground. A headline. Fame. Something to keep me from waking up in cold sweats, wondering if I’d imagined it all.

As I set up my scope, the old lady shuffled closer. Same floral dress. Same knitting bag.

“Hope you see that glass-winged angel today,” she said encouragingly.

I kept my scope lowered. “I never told you what she...”

She tilted her head, smiled too wide.

“Ah. Forgive me. I forget myself sometimes. I’m not real, after all.”

Something staggered out from behind her. The boy. The one who’d been eaten. His chest crudely stitched, his ribs jutting through torn skin.

And then the crowd came. Dozens of them, men and women and children, surrounding me. Their eyes gleamed faintly, like thin glass holding back a fire.

“None of us are,” said the man that had brushed me off yesterday.

“Except the angel,” added the boy.

“She can feel and think, we’re just here to help her.”

I fired. One man’s skull exploded. He collapsed, then rose again, smiling broader than before.

I emptied the clip, but they kept advancing. Hands seized me, dragged me down, stuffed fabric into my mouth.

I closed my eyes. They cut off my eyelids so that I would see the angel.

She descended. My ex. My angel. Her golden hair whipped in the wind, her glowing eyes fixed on me, her shark’s teeth bared.

And in that instant, I remembered. The balcony. My hands on her shoulders. The shove.

Her scream. That bitch had been taking pills, so that she wouldn’t get pregnant. She had been lying to me, letting me think she was on board with getting a baby, while secretly planning her escape to a women’s shelter.

She touched me gently at first. Kissed my skin as the puppets undressed me. Then came the biting, her fangs sinking into my flesh.

And I understood.

This was her Heaven.

Sara had committed her first murder earlier that day; the two cups of coffee she shared with her mentor had gone cold long ago. Isidora Rojas sat motionless beside the rain‑streaked window of her office. She had tried to say something comforting before, but Sara had reacted aggressively. The city below was grey, the type of autumn grey that made Sara feel like color was a myth invented to sell color TVs.

Perhaps it wasn’t murder; self‑defense, defense of others, or was it called a "justified shooting" when a police officer killed a violent criminal as the only way out of a bad situation? Sara didn’t find the thought of recategorizing the event as comforting as she had imagined beforehand. Isidora didn’t need to drink coffee. She performed a spell calling upon Hypno's favor (a god of sleep) every six hours or so, it replenished her body and mind in a few waking minutes more than if she'd just slept for hours. She drank coffee for the taste? But she added plantmilk to it, so she obviously didn't like the taste.

“Why are you fat and old?” The 18‑year‑old Sara wanted to hurt Isidora’s feelings in the moment. Isidora ignored the question, sitting there looking middle‑aged (but few knew her true age). “My parents have de‑aged and yassified themselves several times. Through, you know, magic!” Sara continued.

“Rhabdoic,” Isidora corrected.

“Sure, whatever pretentious term you like. Why don’t you use Harry‑Gandalf stuff to be thin and young?”

“Not everyone wants to look like you more than anything else in the world.”

Isidora was subtle in her taunts. Sara wasn’t thin and pretty because of good genes, self‑disciplined eating, or skin care. Her parents had sacrificed a man to the goddess Freya when Sara was very young, a ritual murder meant to buy their daughter beauty. It had been a man who deserved to die and who would have hurt people if he had not been stopped, a giant cat of Freya played with him and ate him alive.

Her parents “walked the flowery path,” meaning they only used really bad people as human sacrifices, or consenting good people. Those on “the thorny path” killed strangers almost completely indiscriminately, as long as the potential victim wasn't a child or someone they had sworn to leave alone. Satanists targeted children and good people in particular.

Sara used to think that the part about only killing bad people made things squeaky clean from a bad boy deontological viewpoint, the Punisher’s approach to life. And that it mattered how the math checked out from a utilitarian perspective, á la "a lesser evil for the greater good". But it had not felt like that earlier today, when she fed a murderer alive to a monster. It took him so long to die; he begged as the thing chewed on him.

Pagan gods had sacred monsters, “blessed beasts,” animals with a supernatural touch to their blood. Human sacrifices often took the form of feeding people alive to those freaks. Iðunn, a female divinity of youth, loved apple worms that phased through human skin and ate your brain. Odin had eight‑legged flesh‑eating monster horses the size of trucks, and Zeus had eagles that electrified you before pulling out your organs. Anansi and Athena let their giant spiders lay eggs inside you so the young could eat you alive. There was no pleasant way to be sacrificed. If you sedated the victim too much then the gods might be offended and punish you instead. Their precious pets wanted to play with alert food, not inactive pieces of meat.

Humans are innately mundane, meaning that magic doesn’t work naturally for them. Most people could perform rituals correctly for hours and nothing would happen. You had to lay some groundwork to activate your potential. In Sara’s case, her parents had fed her breast milk from a woman whose childhood had been spent as a "feral child", living outside human civilization and raised by blessed beasts. Individuals with that background acted as a kind of prophet to the pagan gods, living with visions and voices from other worlds for the rest of their lives.

Once the potential was activated, you could do some minor things through spells, just chanting the right words and focusing on what you wanted. A little heavier stuff came through long rituals consisting of dancing, sex, ritual eating, and the like, but the gods didn’t give away the really sweet candy cheaply. Heavy purchases required blood, either through amputation, torture, or death. Animal victims were for the moderate favors, ordinary humans for anything above that, and the next level required royal blood.

Her parents had hired Isidora to teach her rhabdics, which she definitely didn’t have the stomach for. Sara hated herself for not being vegan. During a date, a cute boy joked that the pig who died to become her bacon was lucky to end up in her mouth; she started to cry. Not because of the sex joke’s lameness and far‑fetched nature, but because she had to block out the thought of eating something that had wanted to live. She imagined him in the slaughterhouse, trying to get out, confused and frightened.

She was too prone to guilt and sympathy to be okay with eating meat, yet too weak‑willed to stop. Sara felt she should hate her parents for raising her to be part of all this horrible stuff. Occultism, that is, not meat‑eating (although probably that too, now that she thought about it). They were not close enough for her to be mean to them, so Isidora would suffice.

The man she killed had been bald, fat, and had bad teeth. The mental image of his appearance made Sara feel a bit less bad, but she felt lousy about that being a source of relief. A good person should not care about shallow things, at least not when doing moral algebra about murder.

You could only memorize a certain number of spells, and they took too much time to chant in combat situations. Sacrificial rituals were even worse. So serious occultists obtained one or more Fiats. Powers they could exert at will without any words or deeds. The bald guy's death had bought Sara the Fiat of conjuring a force field strong enough to withstand sustained and heavy firepower for a long time. Not enough for a bomb, though.

Sara had lost consciousness after he died. During the three hours she slept, a new part of her brain had grown. A small unnatural lump of tissue dedicated entirely to controlling the Fiat. The power was like an extra finger. She wondered how many such little growths Isidora’s skull hid.

“But you are older than you look. You have rejuvenated yourself a bit. Why not go all the way and make yourself twenty?”

The question’s secret edge was that reverse aging rituals were expensive enough to require human sacrifices. Unless you possessed extremely rare artifacts that granted rejuvenation for free at intervals, you had to kill one human to reverse between one year or one decade of age. The results varied based on the ritualist's connection to the god in question, the quality of the victim and the deity's mood. Isidora was clearly willing to go there, killing murderers to extend her own life and health, but not far enough to look and feel her best. That restraint implied guilt, or at least a view on taking human life that did not casually justify killing bad people for personal benefit.

It was a squeamishness that student and mentor shared, and that Sara’s parents lacked. In her current mood, it made Isidora seem hypocritical rather than moderate. “You are not a bad person.” Isidora was, frustratingly enough, kind to her even when she was acting out. Sara played with her blonde hair.

“I bet no bad people in history have ever been told that by their parents’ employee.” She muttered a chant to Chrysus and watched, desensitized, as her coffee transformed into literal gold. Rhabdoics resembled technology in the sense that new solutions were discovered and circulated. The once‑daunting task of creating gold had been solved long ago. You had to do some strange things for Chrysus: dancing naked in the moonlight and sleeping with one of his priests, a morbidly obese lady who wore a gold mask and had golden tattoos, in Sara’s case. All of it had to be performed on a recently rediscovered altar made from the bones of a Famulid, during a specific time window that only came once every decade. Famulids were essentially the pagan gods’ off‑label version of angels, something many times more powerful and long-lived than humans but magnitudes less impressive than the divine.

They lived in alternative worlds; extra-universal places Sara refered to them as “kind of like Westeros or Narnia but with more violence, sex, torture, less logic, and no Jesus‑lions.” Famulid bodies were absurd constructions of paranormal substances, created directly by their masters’ will rather than by evolution. Famous types included nymphs, valkyries, satyrs, cyclopes, rakshasas, and dryads. Famulids were almost always bad news to encounter, killing most people they met in order to honor their deity. They possessed strong inborn Fiats, regenerating bodies that could not be harmed by mundane weapons, and more esoteric knowledge than you could shake a stick at. Famulids were close to unkillable for humans, so an altar made from their bone was rather showy. Sara had once described it to Isidora as “like hiring a gigolo made of gold to strip at your ex’s funeral.” Afterward, she wished she had said “a stripper with double F cups and a concave stomach to entertain at your stepson’s bar mitzvah,” simply to annoy her mentor’s old feminist moralism about “sexist” and “racist” jokes.

The altar had once hosted the sacrifice of a young prince twins (the pagan gods were “very classist,” according to Isidora). Royal blood given to Chrysus, carried out in what Sara called “the times before smartphones,” her preferred way of referring to antiquity in order to annoy Isidora through feigned stupidity. After that event, the simple chant Sara had just used began turning things into gold instead of producing its usual temporary illusion of gold.

The problem came in the form of Satanists; they had cracked the nut of making gold long ago through a bit of good old fashioned child sacrifice, and would gladly torture and kill anyone who devalued precious substances too much or created too much prosperity for the common man. So if you tried using magic to create enough valuable rocks to cure world hunger, “you’d wake up in a torture chamber with your host having misplaced your legs or something similarly inconvenient,” as Sara had summarized Isidora’s dire warning on the subject once. But if you made enough to enrich yourself moderately, you might get away with it.

There were so many ways for rhabdoists to earn easy money from the mundane world that people like Isidora worked because they wanted to work. Sara never understood that; all she wanted to do was play with animals, read, make other women jealous, annoy prechy people, and sleep. Once this tutorship was over, she’d probably learn a few healing spells, fake a veterinary diploma or something, and charge people for fixing their pets.

“How about this: ask me something I wouldn’t usually tell you.” Isidora smiled slyly.

“What’s Satan’s real name?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“I knew you wouldn’t.” Sara muttered a spell, calling upon the power of Týr, and the gold transmuted into acid, slowly burning through the cup. Isidora didn’t utter a word. Through a Fiat, she made the liquid return to coffee before it could reach the table beneath the cup. Sara assumed it was a general counter-spell Fiat; her mentor carving out a space in her meat computer for coffee transformation didn’t seem likely.

“When I worked as a contractor for the Foundation,"

“You should marry the Foundation already.” Sara rolled her eyes as she said it (both as a reaction to Isidora bringing up the Foundation again, and as a respons to the lameness of her own respons). The NVP Foundation was an organization that worked above the law, containing and sometimes eliminating paranormal threats to mankind. The tall, dark, and bureaucratic agency that extreme conspiracy theorists dream of. Isidora didn’t respond and just continued with her anecdote.

"I read about an archaeologist studying Cambion art. He didn’t read the name directly. Just saw incomplete references to it in the art. Enough for him to piece it together in his mind.

“He began screaming, his eyes bled. Horns pierced his flesh, claws grew out of him and—”

“He was possessed and mutated, get to the point.”

“It took a strike team to take out the thing that stole his body. Needing enough blessed bullets to build a small church. It wasn't just him, demons possessed his wife, his children, his parents, his siblings, three of his closest friends, two of his ex-partners. A defence designed to destroy any human who knew the Sulfur Sovereign's true name, and enough friends and family members to decrease the probabilty of clues surviving.

It isn't just it's named, it's true form any some other private information is warded in the same way.”

"Why hasn't old Nick flooded everyone's mind with demons already? If he can just send them from hell like that."

"There are competing theories, perhaps it doesn't want to. Perhaps it can't, sending them here in great numbers unprovoked taking too much effort or would be too provoking to the angels. Whatever the reason, she's private enough to make sure that most people can only have a vague outline of the great enemy without dying."

"You said 'she', so that's safe to know"

"I might be lying about that part"

"Or Satan might be genderfluid, might have been a she ten minutes ago"

"Isn't making fun of genderqueer people a bit 2020? I thought you were woke-adjacent"

"I wasn't making fun of them. Anyway, you could have just have said the name’s an epistemic hazard, if you didn't love telling spooky anecdotes” Sara said. The term referred to knowledge that caused harm to those who possessed it.

“But isn’t Foundation personnel shielded against harmful paranormal effects?” Isidora asked rhetorically. Perhaps she was trying to distract Sara from her guilt, or she simply enjoyed playing the role of teacher again.

“Yes, but the power of this particular effect obviously requires shielding too expensive or time‑consuming for ordinary staff. Not everyone’s bomb shelter has walls as thick as the president’s.”

“Correct. At least some of the Crown Council members know Satan’s real name." The Crown Council constituted the highest governing body of the Foundation. "For each one in the know, they employ at least thirty‑six occultists to perform protective chants twenty‑four seven to keep the information from triggering a hostile effect. A running salary cost closer to fifty skilled employees each, if you include support personnel for the casters. Tell me, why doesn’t Satan just target the chanters?”

“Most curses would not have protection against third‑party attempts to shield them built in; this one obviously isn't most-curses. So I am guessing the staff size is actually twice what you just said, because you need additional rhabdoists to shield the shielders. Perhaps even three or four levels of barriers on top of barriers, considering the threat level we are talking about. That, or they're casting it from a location with a really strong permanent and intrinsic ward, protection that does not need to be replenished, but just remains immune to entropy. Like on top of the grave of a saint God thought had cute dimples or something.” Sara sounded more bored than sad now, a small step in the right direction.

“Well done. Satan acts like a great filter for paranormally attuned individuals and civilizations. If they get too good at diving into dreams, scrying secrets from animal entrails, or other equivalent approaches, they will eventually discover his name or form. The demons summoned by said knowledge will kill those who know directly by taking their bodies, and without the Foundation or something similar, the possessed will kill a lot of people. They might pose a civilizational threat, at least enough to destabilize things and drag them back to less advanced times.”

“Then why isn’t Lucifer chewing on you right now? You sure as hell don't have a team working for you, your coffee isn't even that good.”

“I’ve carved my name into a rare and powerful artifact that keeps me safe. Something the Foundation wishes they had.”

“Cool. And you can’t add my name to Jesus’ foreskin or whatever you’re referring to?”

“Maybe I can, maybe I can’t. Maybe I will, when you’re ready.”

“You’re so annoying, and fat.”

"I should really charge your family more for teaching you. Seeing as you can transmute gold no price should be too high"

"And old."

Isidora smiled at the insult. It had worked, Sara wasn’t thinking about the life she had taken or the victim’s family members.