#shoom

He’d had to switch to a different, half-faded design in the back of a dusty old tome that included an extra inner circle with a size-adjusting spell– apparently most demons manifested rather large, going by how big a lot of the other summoning circles were– but he wasn’t too put out about it.

It wasn’t like he was picky about which demon he was summoning when he had no intention of actually selling his soul or anything.

Satisfied that the runes met his exacting symmetry standards, he grabbed a matchbox and got to work lighting the candles set around the circle, humming to get rid of his nerves as he went. It didn’t help much– in the dull candlelight, the red paint glistened like spilt blood.

Roman swallowed, resisting the urge to shiver. No wonder his brother had been so into this.

Still, he wouldn’t back down now! He’d already practiced the new, needlessly complex incantation as much as any Shakespeare monologue, and so the chant rolled easily off his tongue.

His excitement began to rise as he noticed the lines of the circle glowing like fresh embers, the smell of burning wood rising and the candles guttering against a sudden sharp wind. Definitely a good thing that he hadn’t done this in the apartment– he never would have gotten the seared symbols out.

Still, it was working!

Roman was grinning smugly, his magic flaring brighter as the spell continued, already envisioning the boasting ahead of him, when things went wrong.

Abruptly, the drain on his magic grew heavier, and the circle’s several rings, which were now glowing a near-incandescent white, began to shift before his eyes, the structure unfolding and reversing layers to give the spell an entirely new meaning.

He attempted to cut the spell off, alarmed, but it had already taken what it needed from him, and continued to expand until it had left the plywood entirely, the half-dead grass of his backyard flaring up and shriveling into ashes wherever it touched.

The bright lines didn't burn his feet as they passed under him, but he almost wished they had as he realized that now he was the one in the circle, a place no summoner should ever be.

Roman couldn’t move, unwillingly frozen in place as the spell hummed furiously around him, building up more and more until– with a pop like a submarine hull giving way under water pressure– it snapped, whiting out his vision and whisking him away from everything he’d ever known.

For a moment, his mind was blank, unable to grasp the rift he was being tugged through, and then–

Light. That was the first sign something was deeply wrong. The backs of his eyelids were red-orange, illuminated from the outside, even though he’d been standing out in the dark at 3 AM moments before, and he knew for a fact that the shitty light bulbs in his apartment couldn’t ever cast such a warm, bright glow.

The second and more telling sign that something was deeply wrong was that when he opened his eyes, blinking heavily to adjust to the sudden change, he could see the grain of the floorboards that his circle was glowing on as though he was inspecting them with a magnifying glass.

Looking up, he found that it was no strange design choice or optical illusion; everything was huge. The floor, the furniture, even the walls towered up like he had entered the same world as the titular protagonist of Jack and the Beanstalk. He stumbled forward, trying to understand how the floorboards beneath him could stretch out so far.

There was a wooden pillar a handful of meters away. Heart pounding, Roman craned his head back to stare up at a bookshelf where every book was taller than him, his eyes catching on the books’ spines, where some very familiar runes resided. A foreboding chill ran down his spine.

“There’s no way,” he attempted to deny his insane theory out loud, and something about the way his voice didn’t carry in the vast empty space of the room made him feel very small, in more ways than one.

Distantly, there was a series of noises, familiar in nature but unfamiliar in size: a door being unlocked and swung open. Sharp clacks and heavy vibrations that carried stronger and stronger through the floor, like the world’s largest–

“Footsteps,” Roman whispered, aghast, and then dove for cover.

-

Janus felt frozen, staring down at the glowing lines crisscrossed along his hardwood. He kept his face completely impassive as his eyes traced the tiny details finding familiar runes— containment, imprisonment, enforcement.

His hands slowly curled into fists, the sting of his claws biting into his palms keeping him grounded in the present moment.

Because that was all they were: memories. He was still safe in his home, because the human who’d somehow found a copy of his summoning signature, the one who’d tried to drag him back under their thumb, hadn’t been able to cast it properly.

A coward, most likely, one who wasn’t willing to sacrifice everything to use Janus’s power to the utmost.

Humans had plenty of tomes about demons, detailed records of arcane rituals and scrawled journals full of personal accounts of the occult. Nearly none of them made note of that fact that intention alone could be the most vital part of a summoning, especially if the circle had a history steeped in death and misery.

Magic like this was malicious and twisted. When a caster didn’t live up to its standards, the consequences were… severe, to say the least.

Transporting an undefended mortal into the living room of a demon they’d just tried to enslave, for example.

Janus closed his eyes and took a deep breath, searching out the new element amidst the familiar array of scents in his home.

It wasn’t hard. Even if he hadn’t been summoned before, nearly any demon could pick out the smell of a human, which was why nearly none of the ones who slipped through to their dimension stayed undiscovered for long.

Some considered them a delicacy.

“It seems like I have a guest,” he purred, allowing the heels of his shoes to click sharply against the floor as he slowly began to circle through the room. “Won’t you come out, little mouse?”

There was no answer, predictably enough, but the air was tense with the presence of another.

Janus let his gaze drift over each corner and cranny, as though waiting to catch sight of a tiny, telling shadow. Nothing at first glance; the human must have had a few moments to squirrel themself away before Janus had entered.

“How rude,” he commented with a click of the tongue. “You show up here uninvited and have the gall to hide from your host? Careful, I might get offended.”

On the last word, he supplemented his threat by allowing a low, hair-raising rumble to bubble up from his chest. With the phantom wound of his last summoning still freshly reopened, it wasn’t difficult to allow his more threatening features to come to light.

Still no response, but in the silence, Janus could just barely make out the tiny, shallow breaths of his would-be summoner. His lips upturned slightly as he turned towards the left side of the room.

“Am I more than you were prepared to deal with?” he asked, overly saccharine. “Didn’t you read the fine print on that nasty little spell you failed to cast? Did you know what it was at all?”

He paused. With some humans, the condescending tone and implication that they weren’t as smart as they believed was enough to bait them out into the open.

Nothing. Not a peep. That was alright; Janus was patient.

“Allow me to explain,” he offered, letting the faux kindness leak out of his voice bit by bit, each word colder than the last. “Summoning circles, like the one you just burned into my acacia floorboards, target demons. They force us into a form that's better-suited for your pathetic little world. Part of that spell is designed to crush a demon down, make us so much less than we are, just so we can be bound to the command of a creature that’s worth less than the dirt under our feet.” He brought his next step down harshly for emphasis. The human’s next exhale came out as more of a squeak.

“It hurts, little mouse,” Janus told them, a bit of raw honesty leaking into his voice. “It hurts like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. And you were going to do that to little old me, tsk tssssk.”

He let his tongue flicker out, confirming what he already knew. His feet came to a slow halt next to his favorite bookcase, a heavy wooden thing that was nearly wedged into the corner of the room. The breathing went abruptly quiet.

“Maybe,” Janus proposed silkily, “I should show you how it would feel?”

He dropped into a crouch, and with a single smooth motion, swiped his hand into the space under the bookcase.

His fingers closed around a tiny, warm form with little regard for the short shriek it let out, or the way it cut out once his grip tightened.

The human had planned to do much worse to him.

He lifted the little monster up to eye level, relishing in the way it had gone pale and washed out with fear at the sight of him. At this diminutive size, it was as much a threat to him as he’d been to his first summoner, young and confused and above all bound.

“There you are,” he said, letting a slow, vicious smile spread across his face.

—

Roman heroically resisted the urge to pass out, the bruising grip around him not helping in the least.

The warnings in those stupid books had understated everything. The demon was huge, matching the decor perfectly, but more than that, he was monstrous.

The eyes staring down at him were a reptilian green, the slit pupils sitting stark and inhuman against them. Rigid golden scales covered his skin in thick patches, dark horns curled up in sharp points on his head, and the seams stretching from the edges of his mouth were distinctly snakelike in nature.

The demon smiled in a very unfriendly manner, baring fangs that looked longer than his entire forearm. Definitely a snake. And he’d called Roman ‘little mouse,’ which didn’t bode well at all.

The demon shifted backwards to sprawl elegantly in a chair, his grip on Roman loosening enough for him to clearly feel the air rushing past him as he was moved around above a fall that would shatter every bone in his body.

His terror spiked up another few notches, which he hadn’t thought was even possible. A new achievement for the day, right alongside ‘accidentally summoned himself to the demon dimension’ and ‘probably about to die horrifically’.

“So,” the demon started, propping his chin up with one hand to consider him with that eerie gaze. “What was it?”

“What?” The question slipped out mindlessly, his voice at a considerably higher pitch than usual.

He thought his confusion was perfectly fair, given the incredible vagueness of the question, but his captor didn’t seem to agree going by the sigh. Roman didn’t even have time to brace himself before the fingers around him nimbly shifted, turning him upside down with the same vague idleness one would fidget with a pen. The thought made Roman’s skin flush red with humiliation, and also with all the blood that was currently rushing to his head.

“The reason for your current predicament,” the demon clarified unhelpfully. Roman stared blankly at him, trying to come up with an answer that wasn’t ‘uh, you mean you?’ for long enough that he finally elaborated further: “Why did you try to summon me?”

Clearly irritated, the demon’s horrifying croaking growl– like the rumble of a crocodile– began to rise in volume, making some small, primal part of Roman’s brain want to curl up or skitter away.

Seeing as he was currently upside down and pinned to a demon’s palm, utterly trapped, he didn’t have the luxury of either.

Instead, in true Roman fashion, he opened his mouth and started babbling the first thing that came to mind.

“My sincerest condolences for imposing, I just– wanted to see how beautiful you were! In person!”

The demon raised the scaled ridges that he was pretty sure were eyebrows in what looked to be genuine incredulity, the first expression Roman had seen so far that didn’t make him feel like he was about to become a victim right out of The Most Dangerous Game.

It wasn’t entirely a lie, if he really thought about it: he had wondered how hot demons were, in a secretive, Remus-can-never-know kind of way.

“Is that so?” the demon in question drawled, his eyes narrowing intently. The pads of his fingers pressed down on his chest a little firmer, forcing what felt like half the air from his lungs.

“It is so so,” Roman managed through gasps, trying to appear earnest and eloquent past the dark spots that were beginning to dot his vision. “I’ve– I’ve heard legendary rumors from near every corner of the world about your grace and charm. It has occupied my every thought!”

That wasn’t true by any stretch of the meaning. He’d only found the tome with this demon’s circle out of sheer dumb luck (the bad kind, apparently) and unlike some of the other circles, there were absolutely no mentions of it online. What little had been written down legibly in the actual passage made no mention of grace or charm, being mostly full of metaphors about two-headed vipers and the highest positions being the most fatal ones to fall from.

… Those may have been warnings, now that he was thinking about it.

For a moment, the demon’s lip began to curl up, showing off even more of those fangs, but then he seemed to reconsider, tilting his head slightly as he flipped Roman back right side up. “Please, do go on.”

Roman hesitated for a fraction of a moment as his dizziness faded, astounded that his desperate ploy had worked, and then decided to embrace it. If the giant snake demon holding him captive wanted flattery, who was he to disagree?

It wasn’t like it was particularly hard to find things to compliment. The demon may not have looked particularly human, but Roman had been an avid Beauty and the Beast fan since forever. Perhaps even more helpful, he had been exposed to Remus’s musings on monsterfucking since birth.

“The rumors didn’t do you justice!” he announced grandly, because that passage really, really hadn’t. “I can see now that it would be utterly impossible to know the fullest extent of your beauty without an in-person appearance. Your eyes are like the richest mosses, your horns are dark silhouettes of elegance, and your scales– why, I doubt words could do them justice!”

The demon idly lifted him up to eye level, an amused challenge in his gaze. “Try anyways, since you fancy yourself a bard.”

Roman gave a faux-offended huff, trying not to cling too hard to the unsecure grip around him. He hoped he wasn’t sweating visibly. This was far closer than he ever wanted to be to teeth that sharp in a mouth that large.

“Fine then, I will!” He looked closely at the scales in question, and it wasn’t actually particularly difficult to see the beauty of them. “To start, it’s clear to anyone with eyes that they have a superior shine to any dragon’s hoard or the greatest miser’s gold. They look as smooth as riverbed stones and as strong as diamonds, outmatching any stone no matter how precious. The color of them is like fresh honeycomb and the golden hour– you know, honestly, they go quite nicely with your eyes!”

He’d gotten a bit too familiar at the end, falling into habit as though this was one of the long complimentary spiels he usually lavished upon his friends rather than a last-ditch attempt to not have ‘crushed like a bug’ on his epitaph. The demon stared at him for a long, silent moment, all traces of expression wiped from his face, and Roman began to rethink this plan.

“Or, I suppose you’re a demon, and human compliments are beneath you? Perhaps you’d be more interested in compliments about your menacing demeanor or how terrifyingly cutting your glare is?” Roman tried, using all his willpower to keep his voice from squeaking as he rambled under that unreadable gaze.

The demon shifted his grip, fingers slowly tightening around Roman like a boa constrictor that had just found lunch.

“Tell me again,” he finally said, “about all the rumors you’ve heard about me. My summoning circle must be so widespread by now, yes?”

Roman nodded in a way that hopefully didn’t convey that he was about to start lying through his teeth. “Right, yes, absolutely just– so many rumors. Tons of people know about your summoning circle, it’s practically infamous, I’m surprised you don’t have people knocking at your door this very minute! Your reputation precedes you, your name is whispered amongst admirers, far too numerous to count, really–”

“And what,” the demon said with a smile like a cat spotting a mouse in a trap, “is my name, dedicated admirer of mine?”

Roman’s expression froze quicker than a puddle in Antarctica, and he cleared his throat several times as though buying himself a few extra seconds would magically provide him with the correct answer. It had to have been written down somewhere, he must have glanced over it in passing–

“Your name, of course,” he stammered. “You’re so popular, it’s practically a good luck charm… it’s obviously– obviously… um. Janice?”

—

Janus continued to hold the gaze of the tiny, trembling creature in his grasp, staring down at him with mild consternation. Had he really guessed Janus’s name at random?

“All the coolest demons have elderly librarian names,” the human tried weakly, and Janus resisted the urge to scowl. Just a fluke, then.

Instead, he maintained his composure and leaned forward, until he was undeniably looming over the human.

“My title is Deceit,” he informed him with a victorious baring of teeth, “and I’ve tasted every lie you’ve told like honey on my tongue, little mouse.”

And what a relief, to know that his summoning circle, his name, his existence was so unknown that every claim the human had made about his supposed fame rang irrevocably false. He wasn’t safe, wouldn’t be safe until every copy of that circle was purged from the human plane, but he wasn’t in immediate danger, either.

Of course, the human didn’t look nearly as relieved at this revelation. Rather, he looked as though his soul was about to escape his body, his eyes painfully wide and his skin taking on a sickly pallor. Janus could feel his tiny, rapid pulse fluttering against his hand like a bird trapped in a cage.

“I would be flattered that you apparently were sincere in your compliments,” he continued, inspecting the nails on his free hand, “except I also know you planned to imprison and constrain me to your will, which makes it all feel rather concerning instead. You understand.”

It took the human a few moments to grasp what he was implying, at which point he recoiled in horror, which was… surprising. Most of the humans who summoned him were the type that would hardly shy from using force to get what they wanted.

“I wasn’t– I wouldn’t,” he insisted, and there was no uncertainty in the taste of that truth. “Really, I wasn’t trying to do that– any of that to you, I didn’t even know that summoning circles could do that, I just– look. My brother summoned a demon and he was being a total shithead about it, so obviously I had to summon one too, to shut him up, and your circle was the only one that fit on the plywood–”

“Hold on,” Janus said, desperately searching for the bittersweet tang of a lie. “You’re telling me that you decided to perform an arcane demon-summoning ritual with no prior experience or actual plan for said demon. All to one-up your brother.”

“I had a plan!” he protested. “It involved flattering selfies and possibly movie marathons.”

Janus stared down at the human he had been lightly tormenting for the past half hour, who apparently wasn’t some spineless cretin that planned to wipe out thousands of lives for his own gain.

“And to accomplish this, you chose my circle. Out of all your available options. The one that’s been used for mass murder, catastrophic destruction, and the conspiracy-based downfall of empires.”

“You committed mass murder?” the human echoed in a near-shriek.

Janus felt a muscle in his jaw twitch. “What part of ‘the circle binds me to the command of a human’ did you not understand, exactly?”

“I’m not great at paying attention at the best of times, let alone when I’m being stalked by a 50-foot snake demon that wants to have my spleen for lunch!” the human retorted, and then paused. “So… humans made you do all those terrible things?”

Despite the fact that Janus had literally just confessed to being titled ‘Deceit’, the human’s tone was horrified, not dubious. Horrified on his behalf, of all the idiotic things.

“It’s not like I particularly cared about the murder,” he corrected hurriedly. “Humans are always killing each other, what concern is it of mine? It’s the fact that they dared to use me like a tool, to bind me to silence, to try and break me under the weight of their commands.”

His lip curled up into a snarl, his body going tense at memories he’d much rather forget– but he couldn’t miss the way the human’s breathing went shallow, and unlike before, he pointedly kept his grip from tightening around that delicate little form.

“That sounds– rough,” the human managed, transparently twitching with the urge to try and break free. “I definitely wasn’t going to do that though. The ordering or the mass murdering or anything. I try not to violate the Geneva Convention, as a general rule.”

Janus rolled his eyes, ignoring the little twinge of remorse at the human’s clear discomfort. He’d misread the situation, but it didn't change the reality of things. In this dimension, it was every demon for themself, and it was better that the human got used to that now, rather than later.

“Your intentions matter little to me,” he lied, “but I do appreciate knowing that there’s little risk of any other impertinent mortals finding my circle. I suppose you deserve a reward, little mouse.”

The human visibly brightened. “It’s Roman, actually, but I’m glad we agree! You can send me back home, and I’ll be out of your hair! I’ll even burn the book I found your circle in and make sure nobody else can ever try to do that to you again.”

Now that was funny. “I take back what I said: You’d make a better jester than a bard. If I were to send you back, presuming that I even could find a way, how would I know that you wouldn’t seek vengeance? It would only take one proper summoning to have me defenseless and bound before you, or you could sell off the circle design to the highest bidder, or a more power-hungry mage could steal it from your very thoughts.”

Roman drew breath to counter this, his brows drawn down firmly, but Janus silenced him with a single finger, the pad of his thumb against his face.

“No, I know well that I’ll never be safe so long as someone with even the memory of that cursed spell exists in the human plane. I won’t send you back,” he said, tone final. “But as a reward, I won’t turn you out onto the streets to be snapped up or tormented, either. I imagine it’ll be quite the adjustment, but you’ll find that my hospitality is far better than most around here.”

Roman’s expression spoke volumes about how accurate he thought that final statement was, but Janus didn’t care to prove it. The human now resided in this dimension whether he liked it or not. He’d learn just how vicious demons could be, and if he still tried to escape and suffered the consequences, then he wasn’t Janus’s problem anymore.

He stood up, looping his thumb in front of the human’s chest to create a more stable hold than any of the others he’d subjected the little creature to thus far. Going by the way Roman immediately drew his legs up and clung to the provided finger, the gesture was appreciated. Or the human was particularly desperate.

He’d never actually interacted with a human without being filled with utter loathing and disregard for their life before. There had to be safer, less terrifying ways to hold them. There was research in his future, provided that the human in question didn’t immediately squeeze through some errant crack in the walls and get himself killed.

Not that Janus would care. Obviously.