Jogmomich made her way to the castle of Rezdnaq Qandzer, not because she had to, but because it was the smartest thing to do.

Was it anyone else, she would have merely appeared in the midst of the Archdemoness of Red’s halls, bypassing the decorative guard golems and all the other meaningless trappings of fortification and security she had borrowed from the timed realm.

To a timeless, spaceless being like herself, it was almost like she was being forced to play house. Humiliating and aggravating, but ultimately a necessity when her play-mate was akin to a thousand-pound beast that could rip her head off and chew on her brain for ten eternities without growing bored.

When it came time to entreat with an Archdemoness, one played the game, and hoped to survive until the end. It was her only recourse, now that the very same Archdemoness’ corporeal counterpart had shown signs of origin severing, meaning she already had the potential to kill a lesser being such as herself. She just didn’t know how. That was a glaring weakness, but far be it from little Jog to try and poke the bear, both Reza and Rezdnaq. The former was the latter’s pet project, which made her untouchable.

And unfortunately, Jogmomich did not have friends in high enough places, friends that could foil the Red’s plans, whatever they may be.

So for now, she walked. When she reached the grotesque creatures of muscle and tentacles, coiled to only vaguely resemble a humanoid form, she bowed and pressed her forehead against the purposefully muddy and dusty earth.

“State your business,” the lifeless golem pronounced.

“I wish to entreat with the Red. I have Favor.”

“Slice off all your fingers and toes,” the golem said. It handed to her a knife that glowed a unique form of red, one that was no doubt made of the Archdemoness’ very own magic. Just looking at it made her eyes sear with agony. If she held it, she knew she would scream for decades to come. Just willing herself to lop off the requisite digits would take her centuries at the lowest.

She gnashed her teeth and got to work.

Days passed as she willed herself to ignore the agony of just reaching for the knife. Months of screaming and crying tears of blood, vomiting more than she had ever eaten, ensued as she brought the knife to her finger.

She quickly got to work, suffering for the sake of an audience with one of the greatest personages of the known universe.

She thought for years on end, why this demon required so much cruelty. She pondered the question as she inflicted on herself a deep and boundless pain. For the first time since she had ascended, she felt a beauty in time, a beauty in the time she spent doing all of the things she wanted to do, or nothing at all. She relished the moments where she was not here. She held onto that joy for dear life.

The artificial day and night cycle of the Red’s demesne was the only thing that let Jogmomich tell the time, and those days and nights passed in the blink of an eye every time she dug even a fraction of a fraction of an inch into her unflesh. Nothing about her was real except for that intrinsic spark inside of her. The rest of her body was merely a projection of what she wanted to appear as. It wasn’t as if Rezdnaq’s knife took from her a tangible resource, either. She remained whole even as she lost her digits, and yet that pain felt like the most profound of losses.

Her estimate was right. Hundreds of years had passed since she took it upon herself to meet the Red. She had seen thousands of years pass by in a blink, millions go by in an errant nap, and billions, billions, fly by her as she played games with her friends. Games of daemonsjach could take an uncountable amount of time to complete, and yet these scant hundred years in unsurpassable agony felt like the most important moments of her eternal life.

Soon, her last digit, her smallest toe, disappeared, cut off by the red knife that she held in her teeth, searing her skull until she could barely think.

The Golem asked her to disembowel herself.

Then it asked her to carve open her skull and make precise incisions on her brain, the true name of Rezdnaq Qandzer written in glyph. Since it was a projection and not her true self, there were no consequences inherent in the act, but for the fact that it hurt.

Dozens of agonizing acts turned into hundreds, and by the end of what had to have been hundreds and thousands of years, she was naught but a pile of ruined flesh.

“You may enter,” the Golem said. No other instructions came forth. No orders to pull herself towards the Red by her tongue, scraping her body through shards of poisoned glass and submerging herself in a pool of corrosive liquid with unique lifeforms that could only propagate by causing its host the most amount of pain possible.

She was just told to walk.

It was the happiest day of her life.

She walked with a spring in her step, reforming herself with but a thought since she was given permission, and braved the wondrous halls of the most merciful Archdemoness of them all. Rezdnaq exacted a hefty price, but she was truly gracious, truly gracious. Others may have tampered with her soul, edited her memories and rendered her a subordinate pile of slime, but Rezdnaq had left her to merely self-flagellate for a little. She was thankful, and she would be sure to pay that gratitude in her attitude.

Once she reached the courtroom of Rezdnaq Qandzer, populated by all sorts of wondrous, marvelous creatures of a mortal’s wildest nightmares—walking beasts of teeth and pus, single-celled organisms with void nuclei that burned to even look at, grimoires with the meanest scowls in the known universes, and a bird.

The bird sang, and Jogmomich almost laughed, for it was the worst, most maddening, disgusting song she had ever heard. She would be sure to share that one with little Janina. It would do her well to see the heights of the heavens, maybe give her something to work towards. It would be hard skirting the Second Tenet, but there was no law that stated she couldn’t insert some color in her dreadfully boring life!

She smashed her forehead on the unyielding ground, a ground that was reinforced by Rezdnaq’s attention alone, for she would not stoop so low as to deliberately insert her power, much less her soul, into some dead ground. Death was not her domain. It was life.

She banged her forehead so many times more into the ground, marveling at the solidity, bumfuzzled by how outclassed she was.

So many, many, many, many, many years ago, she compared Rezdnaq to a thousand-pound beast.

Laughable. It was genuinely hilarious.

If she was a thousand-pound beast, then Jogmomich was the unborn grandchild of a speck of dust.

“Speak, girl,” Rezdnaq said.

Jogmomich was shocked. She had only banged her head five or so times, and yet that was enough to satisfy her. Gracious. Truly gracious. “I come…” Why did she come again? Oh. The favor.

Her blood turned to ice, and then to that state of matter lower than ice, stiller than stillness itself. “A favor.” She whispered so faintly that even an ant could not have heard a thing.

“Has my counterpart promised you something?” She asked.

“Yes.” She said. “In exchange for my counterpart’s sanity, provided I do not break the Second Tenet of course,” she added quickly. “She said I could gain a favor from you.”

“Name your prize.” Rezdnaq said.

There was only one on her mind, a prize that many lesser demons like her yearned for, and would never stop yearning for. It was the key to her ultimate defeat, rendering her inert until the end of time. A happy death, an end, a meaningful conclusion to the immeasurably long story that was her life. “A Golden Timeline.” She said.

“Very well,” she nodded. “Confined to Aellia, I presume?”

The Red did not even ask for details, merely the limitations of her wish.

She nodded.

“I will give you three percent of all your iterations within three deviations.”

Jogmomich’s eyes widened so far that her eyelids vanished from all existence, followed after by her skull. In short order, she was nothing but eyeballs, staring at Rezdnaq in a way that many would consider as rude. She re-manifested her body and bowed again, smashing her forehead into the satisfyingly invulnerable ground.

She could not help her impudence, for she had been granted a thing that no other demoness of her station had ever been given.

She wanted a Golden Timeline, a drawing on the great tapestry of the mortal realm where she could watch her life go on with utter perfection, a timeline where Janina Reizenbrahm would be the happiest woman in the world.

Jogmomich wanted one such timeline. Instead, she had been given three percent. Three percent of every iteration where Janina Reizenbrahm existed, playing out each their own Golden Timelines. Even with the limitation of three deviations from her core self, the number of timelines were in the millions.

She had asked for a copper, and instead received a palace filled with crowns.

Rezdnaq the Red was truly benevolent.

“Complete the task that was asked of you to the best of your abilities,” Rezdnaq said. “And then you may enjoy the favor I have granted unto you.”

More ambitious demons would constantly seek to raise that admittedly low percentage, to make three percent into four and so on, but Jogmomich was not so powerful that she could seize control over her own life. From her very inception, she was always meant to be beneath her betters, a consequence of not having excelled in magecraft as a human.

None of that bothered her, however, for she would finally experience bliss.

000

“Rezdnaq Qandzer.”

For a moment, I genuinely felt my skull would explode. Instead, in the nick of time, a weight held my head in place. I looked back and saw her, finally.

Rezdnaq Qandzer was taller than me by at least a foot. She wore a long, flowing gown of blood flowing off from her neck, slowly drenching the room we were in. Janina sputtered, blubbering incoherently as she slept. The guards outside had decided to look away from the cell ever since my screaming match with Jogmomich had turned glyphic.

The blood from Rezdnaq’s gown flowed past their feet, but still they did not look, leading me to believe that it was not real the way I understood it. Janina, already in tune with Chaos, could react to the ethereal blood, but since it wasn’t a part of our realm, it couldn’t harm her. At least, that was my standing theory.

Her face was like mine, albeit a few decades older. She looked like a woman in her early forties who held up against the test of time remarkably well. Her skin was a healthy tan and free of all blemishes, and with far less baby fat. The only way I could tell her age was the pronounced wrinkles on her cheek as she smiled.

“You called for me,” she said in Arabic, appearing in front of me. She wore a stone crown over her head, floating a few inches above her. It was a rectangular slab of rock with a semi-circle cut from it where it floated directly above her head. It was carved with the most confusing set of symbols I had ever laid eyes on. It felt like a taste of madness, and I almost wanted to immerse myself in an unhealthy dose of Chaos in order to grasp more of it. There was a fuller picture that I wasn’t seeing, and that made me feel an instinctual sense of bitterness. “Talk.”

I was beginning to regret my decision to summon her now. Still, I tried to stick with the plan as well as I could and ordered my thoughts. I had no guarantees that she was telling the truth, so all I could hope to do was extract information. That started with Daemoncustom, and continued with my role in her wish to make me a god, and ended in her answering my questions about how I could get out of the pickle I had found myself in.

In order to make sure that I was only posing useful questions, I had to start from the beginning. “When you say you are timeless, what does that mean?” I spoke also in Arabic, seeing no reason to clue the guards in on my conversation with what they could only imagine was the air itself.

She rolled her eyes. “It means, stupid child, that I can travel through time the way you travel down a path. That means all time. Even the time that never happened to you, because between you and me, I am more real. I have more access to reality than you do.”

“Then tell me,” I continued. “Why me?” I asked. “You are only one, but I am infinite. Why did you decide to meet with this current me?”

“Because you’re special,” she said in an overly saccharine tone of voice. “Is that what you wanted to hear? Because, as melodramatic as that is, it is the truth. You are apart from your other possibilities, and my being here is only a consequence of that.”

“What sets me apart?” I asked.

“The way you brushed your hair this morning, aligning your hair in such a way that it would trigger a cascade of reactions that led to you, this current you, leveraging your relationship with me in order to gain favor from a minor demoness, as a rank beginner no less. That puts you apart, but what puts you even further apart is that your brain didn’t somehow explode like an electrocuted melon when you spoke my true name and summoned me.”

“Why?” I asked, trying, and failing to suppress the raw terror at having been so close to death.

“Because you were lucky,” she said. “You have been lucky. That will change, no doubt, and I will speak with the you that continues to be lucky. Unfortunately, luck is a finite resource, and you cannot rely on it any longer.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Ask me a more interesting question. My time is unlimited but yours is not.”

“Daemoncustom,” I asked. “Tell me about Daemoncustom.”

“Three major tenets,” she raised three fingers, the only fingers in her whole hand at that. “Tenet the first: when you become a demon, you adopt the conditions of a demon. Those are an ability to traverse time as one sees fit, break the boundary between oneself and space itself, becoming one with the entire universe in a way that lets you go wherever and whenever you want, and you will truly taste the meaning of freedom.”

The non-thumb fingers morphed into one. “The second Tenet, and the most constricting of them all: All demons, from their inception, exist as the greatest version of themselves. The power of a demon depends on the power they could bring to bear as mortals. Since you are on your way to becoming a most impressive specimen, that makes me nigh-invincible. This rule, however, disallows a practice known as potential-scumming. A demon cannot raise their corporeal counterparts to become more impressive as humans for the sake of making themselves stronger as demons. You see, when a human being becomes a demon, even a most unimpressive human being, they will naturally be subsumed into the form of a version of themselves that managed to cultivate an even more powerful being. All versions of a human can only become one demon, the strongest possible demon that human could make. If you shoot too low, you will only be a part of something greater. If you try and artificially force your human to become greater, you will be destroyed as the Deep Universe metes punishment on the being that had defied it.”

“Then,” I scowled. “Why are you helping me?”

“I’m not doing it for the sake of making myself stronger,” she said. “That’s madness. True madness. The madness of raging against the entirety of the universe itself. No one can do that. No, I’m trying to make you take a path that wildly diverges from my own, to become a being that adds its own essence to the Deep Universe, becoming a god in turn.”

So many questions. “What is the Deep Universe?”

“The universe below the universe. If the world as you know it is a machine, then the Deep Universe is the mathematics and the physical laws that made that machine feasible.”

“Okay,” I nodded. “And… how do these limitations prevent you from learning?”

“It’s an unofficial tenet,” she said. “That’s what we call it in our realm. The law of absolute asymmetry. We arrive in the demon realm with our full faculties, and the ability to glean all the information in the world that we can based on how powerful we are. Other demons can do the same, and in doing so, we create a natural, and absolute hierarchy of power that leaves nothing to chance. If I were to battle a peer, and managed to find success because I had the capacity to glean a single iota of information more than my opponent could, then that would make me invincible to them. Forever. We cannot learn from defeat because what it takes to defeat a being such as myself is literally beyond my ken, beyond my ability to know. It is a hard limit imposed on us by our very own potential.

“It is not that we cannot learn from defeat, but simply that in a game of informational arm-wrestling, my opponent just knew more, or less even, and was stronger or weaker for it.”

And in that same vein, would never be able to grow stronger or weaker, based on the fact that they were stuck in that level of potential, now and forever.

An unenviable place, eternally jockeying for position, trying to eke out every ounce of advantage they could from their opponents.

“To learn is to improve,” she continued. “And we cannot do that.”

“Then the third,” I said. “What is the third tenet?”

“The sanctity of the deal,” she smiled. “We are bound by the transactions we make. Once we have agreed to make any sort of trade, we are obliged to carry the terms out, although there are some caveats. While our word is our bond, poorly worded agreements can lead to one party not being satisfied. It’s all very legalese and lawyer-like, I’m sure I don’t have to explain every little detail to you.”

I nodded. In summary, demons were an unaccountably alien sort of being with no way to make themselves any stronger than they already are, and for some reason, they couldn’t renege on the deals they made. The lattermost tenet was familiar to me, and once again brought the question of how much culture Earth shared with Allmother.

“Well, do go on,” Rezdnaq urged. “You wanted to know about what I have in store for you and ask for help on breaking you out of the magical knot tied around your heart.” She folded her arms. “I’m afraid the answer will elude you, even if I say it out loud. What I want from you is to attain unimaginable power. To do so, you must transgress, in the most fundamental manner possible. I’m talking about temporal paradoxes. Why else do you think I’m here and not in the future, when you’ve gotten stronger? You need to change time for such a thing to happen.”

“A temporal paradox, as in, giving birth to yourself?” I asked. “Or killing your grandparents while they are young, and somehow surviving?”

She shook her head while smiling ruefully. “Silly girl, I’m talking becoming the very reason for the big bang. I want you to reach into all of time and space and be the cause of it all.”

“But that would—”

“Require the power of a god, I’m aware.”

She didn’t elaborate further, and I was genuinely beginning to wonder if she was just crazy, if maybe the chaotic state of the demon realm made her thinking utterly illogical in this realm.

“I’m not crazy,” she said. “Luckily for you, it comes in levels. Minor paradoxes first, until you build up enough power for things to become really weird. Now, as for your pickle—“

“Hold on!” I said. “You haven’t explained anything yet. How would I even make a single temporal paradox?”

“Figure it out,” she snapped. “I’m not here to hold your hand, which is exactly the same answer for your current situation. I want you to grow, but that won’t happen if you come running to big sister every time things don’t go exactly as you’ve planned. Remember, you are but one of many, many viable candidates. See to it that you succeed on your own terms.”

“Why would I help you?” I asked, anger rising in me. “You clearly don’t give a shit about me.”

She walked towards me and stopped, only a foot away. The floor of the entire dungeon seemed submerged in her false blood, nearly three inches deep. “Even if I tell you, you will just rail against it, and risk both our lives in your childish tantrums, but suffice to say; you promised me. Believe me, we are on the same side.”

“Not this me,” I said.

“This is what I was talking about. You think those rules I just told you about were made up by a cabal of nerdy demons? The Deep Universe enforces them, and if you renege, all traces of Reza Talib in the entire universe will be erased. Time will retroactively modify itself to accommodate a world without you, and me? My independence from you won’t afford me any protection either. Even if I don’t die, I will lose much of my power.”

“This isn’t fair,” I said.

“More childish tantrums,” she scoffed. “It’s not, but it is simply how it will be for now. We are allies, and though you may not come to realize this for some time longer, it is the unvarnished truth. You have no more questions that require my presence, so I will leave you to ponder one thing: if you were my enemy, or merely my plaything…” Her smile returned, that same smile she gave me in the forest. Instead of her mouth leaving the bounds of her face, it emanated an aura of discomfort and slowly bubbling anxiety. “Would I really be so gentle with you?”

The demoness disappeared, taking with her the blood. Janina gasped, spitting out nothing at all. I checked her health, and found that she’d been holding her breath all this time, not by her own choice.

A message, no doubt. She could reach me, and hurt me, if she so desired.