Names of the Demon: █████████

Reginald Spronck the Third remembered everything.

That, by itself, was enough to set his stomach churning and leave his hands shaking. People thought he was drinking to celebrate, but they hadn’t known him before his newfound fortunes. He’d been aloof enough that nobody realized this was not how he behaved. He’d just been an antisocial contractor to them, one doing the thankless work of keeping everything running.

Now they wouldn’t stop coming up to him. He was the hero of the day, the man-of-the-hour with practically endless prospects. Everyone wanted to cozy up to him. He was freshly promoted, complete with a sealed commendation that guaranteed him both a job and a stipend so long as he kept his mouth shut about the details behind it. It wasn’t something that would make him particularly famous in the world of magic, but everyone on base and in-the-know at the PID’s divisional office had heard by now how he’d stopped one of the nobles of the Ashen Court from breaking into US military base.

All of them, alongside everything they’d heard, were wrong. He knew what he’d done and what he’d agreed to no matter how hard he tried to block it out and believe in their false reality. When he drank to forget it only brought everything back in increasingly vivid waking nightmares and tortured dreams alight with writhing words that hung, immense and imposing, in front of him.

None of his new sycophants saw that tormented side of their ‘hero’. Not even the ones that knew the actual details of his work.

The public façade that the base held magical artifacts was only a cover.

The base actually held a live Demon.

Reginald was one of the few in the know about that. He had to be; he maintained all of the facility’s wards. Keeping it in and everything else out was his entire job. The prisoner – or guest, depending on which reports one read – was the highest ranking one that had ever been ‘contained’. At least, insofar as the practitioner had been able to piece together the infernal hierarchy. That research, well, would’ve been highly illegal without his new access. What he’d found about the Demon, both inside his work and outside, was vague at best. Where it wasn’t, he’d learned that it was just wrong. Even its name was barely recorded.

Merith, of the Fourth Line of Loss.

Usually, it – he, if you were actually cleared to be near it – was a cloud of mist swirling with symbols and ribbons of clammy dead flesh, content to permeate the majority of his rooms at once. Sometimes he condensed into a tall being with eyes like thunderclouds and distorted limbs that warped and unraveled with every movement. His body, then, was made entirely from wrapped strips of bloodless skin, each piece imprinted with twisted infernal script and sentences that were always almost readable as they writhed about like living things.

He was part of Loss. Which explained the difficulty learning more. Reginald had known thatgoing in. The monthly briefings where manuals had to be rewritten in full because the old ones had just turned blank or disappeared. The daily checkups, on a staggered schedule, where people got reminded what they were actually doing. Even with the wards supposedly blocking the Demon’s agency, keeping anything memorized was nearly impossible. Especially when it involved Merith himself. The government had long-since embraced it; people forgetting about your dirty secrets without you having to raise a finger was literally a miracle for them. As long as procedures got followed, they just looked at the Demon as a gold mine. Officially, for the people that knew he was there but not the actual reason, he was working ‘voluntarily’ to further mankind’s understanding of magic.

Practically, though, he was used as a magic eraser. Whenever someone high enough in the government, at least in a section that interacted with the magical sections of reality, wanted someone to disappear, they used him. Sometimes they tried to be more specific, erasing specific beliefs and memories, but usually it was just to wipe out the vast majority of records relating to someone. Along with the person themselves, usually. The Spronck man ran the wards; he knew that there were almost always fewer people coming out than going in. His records were explicit enough to be sure of that. He’d known that even before everything went up in flames around him that day.

He hadn’t worried about that, before. If he did his job and didn’t piss off anyone important, he’d be fine.

Remembering everything, though, included all of that. Hundreds of faces he’d never even known he’d lost. People that went in and didn’t come out. Who came out but just vanished later on, replaced as if they’d never existed. Some were clearly prisoners, others mages. One person that he’d swear he’d seen running for office and just never heard about again. Dozens of coworkers whose jobs had never been refilled.

The people were the most horrifying things that he suddenly remembered after making that single, awful bargain. But they weren’t all. There were things that people walked past all day and never noticed missing. One of the security checkpoints that everyone treated seriously didn’t even have a metal detector anymore. More common, though, were things that were there that people just ignored. The second fridge in the minimum security break room. The bathrooms in the third basement. The cup on his own desk holding seven different copies of his preferred inscribing stylus. He remembered buying replacements, but he thought they’d been stolen. Seeing all of these little things was like suddenly taking blinders off and seeing the world as it truly was.

It drove home just how ineffective every protection and precaution they’d taken was.

It wasn’t even restricted to the section and personnel around the Demon. There were entire sealed buildings on the base that he never saw anybody even look at. They were inside his ward scheme. He knew he’d been maintaining them, but before now he’d never even thought about them. The bushes that grew alongside them had cracked the sidewalks and the one time he’d tried to go in his instincts had screamed at him to avoid it. He didn’t have the guts to try again.

So he drank. He drank to try to forget the way that everyone’s eyes glazed over when he so much as mentioned what happened that night. It had broken Reginald’s pride, his sense of worth and confidence. It had even shattered his belief that he was a good person. A single conversation was all it took to drag what had been, before that moment, the worst night of his life past all of the spells and coping mechanisms he’d put on it.

What only he seemed able to remember was that a Faerie had bypassed the best protection the government had been able to pay for. One of the Highborn Fae, the nobility of the Courts, had torn through everything as if it hadn’t even existed. The lives’ work of his predecessors had fallen, one of the last masterworks of a truly ancient immortal, and even what Reginald himself had dedicated years to improving and maintaining – it had all been ignored. Worse than useless. Not a single alarm had been tripped. None of the lethal or nonlethal spells had deployed. He hadn’t even known something had happened until he’d done a visual check through the single unblocked scrying avenue and seen her there. The diagnostics, rekeying, cycling – nothing he’d tried had shown anything outside of the expected baseline. She hadn’t even noticed him trying to activate the security manually.

She’d been like a ghost, except ghosts should have been and regularly were caught and blocked by the wards.

Then she had left and destroyed everything. All that was left after her departure was a throbbing pain in his head from the mental backlash and a Demon staring directly at him. He had no idea what had happened in the intervening moments. When he tried to probe his own mind to see what was missing from his now painfully, nauseatingly whole memory, he just found ragged edges lined with the same taunting glyphs as Merith himself.

He knew better than to push at those.

He’d known that night that, even though he literally could not have stopped something strong enough to pierce the wards that Olaf Aufrey – the Flowering Death – had left behind, he would be blamed. It didn’t matter if he was actually responsible; he was the one in charge of the wards. The clear one to blame when people higher up the chain raced to cover their own asses. His career, his future, and his very life were going up in smoke before his eyes when it happened.

Merith had offered him a deal.

Reginald had taken it.

Everyone else forgot.

He couldn’t.

They only knew their false version of events, one that either the Demon had placed there or that their minds had tried to fill the gap with. The Spronck practitioner couldn’t imagine the magic would be shallow enough for anyone nearby to believe the truth even if he tried to beat it through their heads himself. He couldn’t even try, though; the will to do it vanished into thin air alongside the rest of his thoughts whenever it came up in any serious intensity.

He was only sort of sure that nothing physical had changed. Outside investigators could probably figure things out if the Demon decided on a whim to let them. Especially any Blood mages that decided to check on the base’s personnel. Somehow, though, Reginald doubted that they’d ever get orders or a reason to do so. Stopping someone from snooping at all was always easier than hiding things when they did. And with how proactive the blocks in his mind were he knew that the Demon wasn’t going to be cheated out of his due. Any paperwork that could uncover him?

It would be Lost.

He knew, deep inside, that he had to fulfill his end of the deal. He wasn’t strong enough to resist.

At that same instinctual level was the knowledge that he couldn’t forget anything he might want to until he did. Not what he’d done before running to the US, not what had happened, and not the incandescent price that he knew he’d be paying.

The list that the Demon had recited.

It burned in his brain every moment of the day, waking or otherwise. Towering words that itched in his psyche with no way to scratch them. No relief until he let them out. It was so painfully simple; say them in the right place, at the right time. Then he’d be free.

The consequences were what scared him. Not just of what he’d be doing, but what would be done to him. Once he’d done the task – why would the Demon keep protecting him from his actions?

He knew what the list was, knew the contents so intimately that he probably didn’t even need to be awake to say them. Still, he couldn’t even think of them in any concrete terms. It didn’t matter how hard he tried; they couldn’t be spread outside the bounds of the deal. Not until the initial seal was broken, and maybe not even after. He’d know them when it mattered, and only then. No chances to research like he’d done about Merith. No finding a way to circumvent what would happen.

The entries each seethed with twisted and tortured mana, writhing as they tried to worm their way free. They were just as constrained by Merith’s magic as Reginald was, that much was clear. The actual entries weren’t really instructions, for all they carried the weight of Merith’s commands with them. Nothing about them was difficult, long, or involved.

Just seven entries.

Seven places.

Seven times.

Seven Names.

Seven Demons.

They would be either something new or something forgotten. Unbound, just waiting to be unleashed on the world. All it would take was an invocation; the only constraints that each apparently had a specific recipient picked out for them. Ones that Merith had given him oblique directions to.

He didn’t know what would happen when each was spoken. Maybe they would come through. Maybe they would just have a path forward, something to take at their leisure when people had forgotten what was said. Whatever it was, he had that bone-deep knowledge that at least six would not touch him. The last – it wouldn’t do to think on it.

He’d been told it would leave a mark. What came afterwards was the endless abyss of possibility when the certainty that he knew would guide him through the others vanished. His life – it wasn’t really his until he spoke that last Name. What would happen then terrified him.

It was that fear that really drove home how bad of a person he was. Even knowing what he was going to unleash, it was the thought of what would happen to him that drove a large chunk of the drinking.

Knowing the Names, on their own, would be enough legal justification for a huge number of governments or gods to kill him on the spot. Even in places where diabolism wasn’t banned he would be put on lists. Then watched. Heavily. He could know the names if he wanted, but when it crossed into the domain and context of a Name, it became forbidden knowledge. Any fool could speak of someone like Merith; only those that truly understood what they spoke of could actually give the utterance weight. A name was simply an irritance to these kinds of beings when spoken – a Name was a call.

An invitation.

He had that context, for all of them. The knowledge, buried just out of his reach, of what he was now bound to summon. It made each entry in the list pulse in his mind with a burning rainbow of putrescent, tainted shades that were anathema to reality as he knew it.

After days of delaying and suffering, he gave in to the inevitability. That night, with the resigned conviction that he would begin in the morning, he slept peacefully.

Knowing where to start was easy. He could have figured this one out even without detailed instructions.

~-~-~-~

Whisper one into a missing ear.

Cryptic as it sounded, Reginald would have to be an idiot to miss the meaning in this town. He had thought himself an upstanding citizen before all of this, despite what had preceded his employment with the PID. And the fact that he wasn’t actually a US citizen.

Still, he wasn’t deaf. You couldn’t live or work on-base without hearing about someone with, well, connections. One of those people, a bartender off-base who always seemed to know your name, happened to deal with gossip and news. Some parts were rather more illegal than others. It was all “I heard” and “If you believe the rumors” when you wanted something. Completely deniable, of course. Selling, though, was another story. For that there was the backroom that people who needed time to think or catch their breath could use when it wasn’t reserved. If a drunk mage or soldier happened to talk to themselves there, well, who could blame them? Some people just needed to let things out.

It wasn’t like they’d said it to anyone, after all, and there’d been no contracts or agreements. Nothing untoward, anyone that heard of it had to understand. It would hold up even under scrutiny. And if you found some extra money slipped in with your change or a few things you’d been asking around for showing up over the next few days? Well, sometimes luck was just like that. But you could safely swear you hadn’t spoken to anyone about it at Vincent van Grog’s.

Now if they asked if you’d talked to the ear, well, that might be a problem. The people in charge knew better than to ask, though. Bribes and connections to the upper echelons of society had a way of making people that threatened a mostly harmless outlet of illicit desires disappear. Reginald had experience with that kind of corruption firsthand and it still made his gut twist with guilt when something sent his mind racing back to that day and the all-too-vivid memories.

He could feel the first of the Names scratching near the front of his mind when he walked in and that was more than enough to make him want to leave. He’d wanted to be wrong, for once, but knew he hadn’t been that lucky. As soon as he crossed the threshold he knew he wouldn’t be leaving without saying it. More than that, without saying it as it was meant to be said. It had to be the full Name, complete with the context and sacrament that would bring an echo of its owner across worlds. If he even thought of leaving the past that he wanted so desperately to forget would rear its head.

He thought it anyway.

His hands were shaking once he got to the bar and started drinking. Nothing was making him rush along, at least.

People had started to notice by the time he finally called over the bartender. Not just one of the employees – the bartender. The one who everyone knew was in charge. The man had been studiously avoiding looking at Reginald before the signal. It sure didn’t stop him from sidling over without any kind of pause.

“What can I get for ya? Anything special for our man-of-the-hour?”

Reginald cut the chase. His voice cracked as he said, “I hear that there’s an interesting mural in the back.”

The other man’s eyes sharpened and he slowly nodded. His face had the ghost of a frown on it.

“That’s a pretty direct way of putting it. It’s my cousin’s work; he still gets a big head about it, damn ‘impressionist’. Most people are a bit unnerved back there these days – can barely rent out that damn room anymore. People keep saying it’s too creepy. I guess it’s still useful though; nice and quiet if you need a moment or two to breathe. Sorry to say it, but it looks like you could use a few of those. .”

Reginald realized his fingers were still shaking and made a conscious effort to grip the countertop until they stopped. After downing his eighth shot, of course. “Yeah, maybe I do.”

People had started noticing after the fifth, honestly. He’d only been there for five minutes after all and enough people were keeping track of him to notice it. One of the researchers he recognized from artifact storage had started to make eyes at him after the third; if he hadn’t already been committed to what was about to happen he might’ve actually gone over to her.

The bartender, ignorant of the magician’s inner conflict, just hummed and inclined his head at one of the other staff.

“Let me get a key and I’ll show you in. Can’t just leave the door unlocked all the time or nobody would ever pay to rent it.”

The woman he’d gestured to brought over a key that she’d obviously had on hand and ready. The man started walking as soon as he grabbed it. Reginald ended up a few steps behind him, trudging along the thin clear aisle that ran parallel to the bar. He had to step around a two stumbling drunks and a couple that was getting a bit too handsy for a bar.

Vincent van Grog’s wasn’t a particularly refined establishment, but usually it drew the line at hands going down the front of pants.

As he passed them it drove home that they had no idea what was about to happen. More than just not remembering what had happened, they didn’t know that the man they hadn’t even noticed was about to, in principle if not in practice, unleash a Demon on the world.

Probably, at least; there wasn’t much else that he could imagine happening.

Poor, ignorant fools.

The door they both headed to was near the back, across the dance floor and past the gaming area. It was next to the small VIP section that was cordoned off for the well-connected regulars. From the outside it didn’t look any different from the other private rooms or closets that the place had. Once he was inside, though, he realized that nobody had exaggerated when they talked about it.

The ceiling was straight out of Starry Night and three of the walls were either collages or some unholy artistic cousin of theirs mimicking other parts of Van Gogh himself. The other wall had the man himself, sort of.

“Is – is that actually a…?”

“Nah. Just a mannequin or casing or something my cousin found. It can’t actually move or anything and it’s stuck to the wall. Mostly just set dressing, nothing odd about it.” The disconnected part the other man pointedly wasn’t looking at, Reginald surmised, was otherwise. “Anyway, door will lock itself on your way out. Hope it helps.”

The door shut with a dull click and then it was quiet. The pulsing, pounding music from outside was gone. Just like that. It could’ve been an enchantment, he supposed, but he’d seen how thick the door was. It was probably just good soundproofing.

The actual magic in the room was, by and large, muted enough it might as well have been absent. A few inscriptions in the art on the ceiling were standalone blockers against scrying and other forms of divination. Not even remotely complex work – honestly, they were a bit of a hackjob. They weren’t his specialty, but the entire array looked slapdash even if it blended into the paint. Not something he’d be caught dead using; they were just noisemakers. Throw out enough random stuff in the area and it got inordinately difficult to pull out clear data from any observation spells.

Reginald did have to admit that it was clever. It didn’t block out areas completely, so you’d have to actually try to look to notice anything weird about the room.

The ear, though – that was definitely magical. Strong stuff, too. Set into the wall in a swirled web of paint scratching out a surreal version of a table, it looked painfully real compared to the surroundings. It was more comparable to the actual sculpture, but still looked almost real compared to the rest. It had the dull look of plastic, but a worn-down texture that seemed closer to actual skin. He had a feeling that it had, at one point, been real.

The abomination that was supposed to be the troubled artist was looking at it with a garishly painted – or sculpted, the mage really couldn’t tell which it was – visage of horror.

The way it worked was obvious. Sympathetic feedback, like calling to like along conneections deep enough that cutting everything off would be easier than blocking them. Whoever used to own that ear was still walking around, but under whatever prosthetic or regrowth they’d had they’d still hear what went through this ear. The hardest part was preserving that connection after it was lost; not many people would know the right words, rituals, and methods to use something like this.

Sure, a microphone could’ve done the same job, but this way didn’t leave any physical evidence. Reginald had to respect that.

He didn’t know who was on the other end. And honestly, he hoped he never would. They might not forgive him for what he was about to do. The blocks around the first Name were already fading as he leaned in to it, finally letting him think about what he was about to unleash.

A Demon from the choirs of Corruption.

The words formed unbidden, crackling on his tongue like he was chewing on static. The bursts of flavor that followed them curdled and inverted as he choked, swallowing on a suddenly dry throat that felt both burnt and frozen at once. The sourness of a lemon twisted into the warmth of fresh bread then popped into the taste of someone else’s spit. No rhyme, no reason, no sensible transitions. The sensations were just – there. As they’d always been. As they always would be.

Until they weren’t.

The ground didn’t shake, lightning didn’t strike, and no angels exploded out to silence him. Nothing broke or deepened the quiet in the room, save for his own voice. It was just him, kneeling in the dark and speaking profane words into a stranger’s ear.

“Sargonnan of Corruption.”

He took a breathe – the pause it engendered forced on him. A stronger Name would have carried the rest within it. This one did not.

“Acolyte of Usurpation, Servant of Discord, Singer of Greed.” Each title was a facet of the being he knew they represented. A sacrament that reinforced its presence and its link as parts of the Name itself.

“I’m sorry.”

The last words were his, as he stood up and left. Nausea and doubt mixed with the lingering chaos on his tongue, the sickness he felt wholly imagined. It warred in his mind with the relief and satisfaction he felt at buying a reprieve from the torment he’d brought on himself by delaying. His task for the day was done.

He had time until the next. If only he knew what he was going to do with it.

He didn’t know, as he walked out, that the dimly lit and silent room wasn’t the same as he’d left it. There, a trickle of liquid fell from the ear. Black and rancid, boiling away even as the door closed.

Blood.