#called*

It starts in a circle of stone on the Path of the Beam and with the creature inhabiting it. Incubus, they’d call his kind somewhere else, on another level of the Tower, but that’s not entirely correct. In this (dying, forgotten) world demons are more akin to the raw essence that drives that same kind universes away from here, nothing but emotions and desires and needs made sentient. 

This one comes in a buzz, a swarm growing from the other side of the circle and circling any unaware traveler (although there’s so little travelers nowadays; although it’s all growing silent and cold since the world has moved on) and taking their life away one wave of pleasure after the other. The never-ending growl and hunger of a being that’s been alive since the beginning of time, when the beams still stood - still meant something, and will live long enough to see the end. Or move elsewhere, if he can.

What followed next was a mistake, curiosity taken too far and past the point of no return. There was talk of opportunities, talk of change of a kind he might be interested in, and he was too ravenous for more not to agree.He’s never been the one to be lured and deceived - never the victim, always the maws that bit and gnawed - but years of solitude can blind even the wisest. After that came the machines at End-World, where universes rattle and sing distorted melodies to each other. After those came the pain and the flesh and bones and the feeling of feeling so little, so confined but somehow freer than before. He wasn’t stable enough to walk on his own, but hundreds of years had washed away whatever morality he might have had at the beginning. 

The man standing in a nearby room never stood a chance of surviving, not when Val was on him, then inside him, then devouring his conscience to make room for his own. 

(O DISCORDIA!)

What happens then - what happens now - is a primordial being on the loose, safe inside a new sort of circle and guided by nothing but his instincts and what he’s always known - ravenous desire. It didn’t take him long to explore the castle and what was left of the other machines (the buzzing so similar to his own, but much more mechanical; a cold kind of familiarity he can’t recognize as such) and find the doors to other whens, other wheres. Places much more populated than the wasteland he lived in till now. Places where he could satiate himself - or eat to his heart’s desire, not worrying about starvation anymore.