The demon continued its journey across the Retrospective. But where it had once travelled only with the objective of exterminating abominations from this House, it was now beset by doubt.

Sometimes, the demon remembered the person it used to be. Other times, it recalled that it had been many people, corroded and crushed together by the endless recycling of dead time, to be reborn over and over again, whenever chaos was threatened. But the man in the silver light had awoken something old in the demon. The residue of his voice remained in its mind as a clean and distant ringing, almost like a song. It reminded the demon of a long forgotten thing; an important thing that the demon used to believe in. And it was a word. A single word that represented power.

Genii.

As the demon struggled to comprehend why the ringing remained in its mind, it arrived to where the Retrospective had led it: a hill of red rock and the mouth of a cave. Hefting its axe onto its shoulder, the demon entered the cave and began following a narrow path into a tunnel that sloped down deep into the earth. Almost immediately, the demon felt a chemical change in its body. Its blood was turning to venom in its veins; muscles and bones and organs and skin were becoming lethal toxins. With every step the demon took down into darkness, it changed into a walking, breathing poison; and before long, it understood why.

The tunnel opened into an enormous cavern, a subterranean hive where thousands of mites the size of the demon's hand scurried and crawled. The noise of them was a deafening chatter. Their bodies were transparent, and a glow came from within them, filling the cavern with a sickly pale light. The mites worked tirelessly, crawling over each other, as they devoured the barren rock and used their excrement to build a huge pointed structure that hung from the high ceiling like a smooth glassy stalactite. It glinted wetly, already reaching halfway down to the cavern floor. The rich stench of minerals and nutrients coming from the stalactite cloyed the air of this filthy spawning ground.

Strength waned in the demon, and it welcomed the toxic changes in its body, which now festered with disease. It was repulsed by what it saw in the cavern. This was not the first time the demon had witnessed this kind of blemish.

If left unhindered, the thousands of luminescent mites would multiply to millions; they would continue breeding, devouring, nurturing, building and burrowing, until their enriched glassy tower fed the seeds of life into the very roots of the Retrospective. Even if fighting was the answer to this problem, there were too many of them for the demon alone to slaughter with its axe. The Retrospective demanded sacrifice, and it had altered the demon's state, making it the plague that would spread and choke and exterminate this abomination.

Sensing its end approaching, the demon lifted its axe and hurled it at the glassy stalactite. The head sliced home with a deep toll that reverberated around the cavern. Thick, luminous liquid spilled from the wound, and the chittering of the mites reached a crescendo.

When the mites swarmed, the demon waited, calm and still. Knocked down and buried beneath a thousand scurrying bodies, it was blinded by the sterile brilliance shining from his attackers, but barely registered the pain as the mites tore and bit and fed upon poisoned blood and diseased flesh. Before it knew nothing, the demon heard the clean ringing of a distant song in its mind, and wondered if it would ever see the man in the silver light again.