[41st Year of Foresai, Lower Fire Month, Day 7]

His grin drew back, white teeth slipping from view as his gaze soured and turned neutral.

“Rise.”

Chardelon, this was correct of you. Through surrender, you may eke out a moment more, be months, days, or a few precious hours.

Renner returned to her knees, then gently set herself on her haunches and rose. Her immediate closure of negotiations before so much as opening remarks could be levied was not something she planned to do. That it had been Jaldabaoth rather than a lesser sent in the organization’s stead had shaken her, but the factor that sealed the matter for her was degrees less subtle.

What a sharp face you have, Jaldabaoth.

Her new masters had, with this act, dismissed all pretense of limited or partial cooperation. Rather than the gilded lapis mask of his encounters with the Blue Roses, what was resting on his face was a pair of eyeglasses. It was a disclosure of identity, and even if she could not exploit it to any end, he had revealed himself to her when he had not done so to the people of Re-Estize; knowledge that she had earned through divining the existence of his plot. It was at once an award and an admittal: that the conspiracy she had drawn out from the space between really did exist, and that they could confirm this to her without fear.

He has confessed to a lie, and with that, confessed to all lies. Further, he has destroyed any basis for further elaboration of terms. They had every capacity to slay me when I made my outreach to Lakyus, yet did not; they had the excellence to send a lesser, yet they did not; they had the ability to speak with me without legitimizing my claims, yet did not. Were I now to attempt a further discussion, a delicate jockeying to gain concessions from the devil in exchange, I would only hamper myself. I am of value to them, of such that the liability of my continued ability to draw breath is somehow acceptable; this, for a conspiracy so foul and rotten that it has here-to-for remained undiscovered in the taking and killing of tens-of-thousands. To do less for them is, thus, regressive and without gain. Power is only to be had in slavery.

“Forgive me, is there a manner in which I should address you.”

“Select one.”

His what? Majesty? Excellency? There’s no telling if he’s anything I know of; calling him a king or an emperor may be offensive - a tacit implication of weakness, or of succession. Perhaps he holds some rank exclusive to the netherrealms. Impiety? Foulness? Evilness? Who's to say? Not him, obviously. Fall back on something trite.

“Yes, my Lord.”

The fiend brokered no reaction, his gaze unchanged. Renner’s eyes darted across him, finding the descriptions given of Jaldabaoth - if not inaccurate - less than complete. Mention of his thinness, poise, the strange style of dress that was at once elegant yet somehow immodest, the snaking metallic tail that seemed to rest itself on the air, were all true, but the ways in which those words came together was utterly lacking to describe the true and utter sacrilege of his existence. It was a failure of language, a debt incurred from the adventurous urge to overuse superlatives. All but one of these fearsome descriptions realized themselves before her, the sardonic politeness with which he spoke even in battle wholly absent.

An act, then. He is not merely a fiend, but an icon. He is surely cruel, and perhaps has a little of that feyish gaiety known to torturers, but the specifics of the actions he conducted outside this room and donned of his mask have little relevance to now. All the better, then. I may simply dismiss his behavior which I did not witness, for it was never true to begin with.

A wavering from the luxurious black, Renner snapping to watch its violets join with a new yellow as another figure stepped through. Akin to the devil in front of her, it had some semblance to the shape of a taller man, though its head was not merely flat, but smooth, as if a carpenter had taken to the face of a person and sanded it down until no features remained. Only three depressions marked its visage, in rough correlation to the proper places for a pair of eyes and a mouth, sinking away into an inky darkness that lamp behind her had no power to dispel. Along with its gropeful hands, the figure was of a greater monstrousness than the devil. It stepped forward, and as Renner tried to make sense of its strange overcoat and even stranger jacket, its form and dress shuddered alike. Faster than she could track, it altogether shrunk into a replica of her.

“What is the name of the maid on duty?”

A simile of her voice came back to her, near to the sound she knew, yet somehow hollow-seeming, as if its lower tones had been ripped away. Sharp confusion gave way to immediate fear, some deep measure inside her she had never once known telling her to flee. Before her was her, her very face and figure, in her same aureolin dress, donned in her same cream-colored nails, and hair made-up in the same style, though with a discordance she could not place. It was her appearance, down to the finest detail, yet somehow wrong, as if the world had disgorged a blasphemy against her. Her legs felt ready to give. She kept herself from stuttering in her response.

“Per the roster, it should be El’ya”

“And the guard?”

“Knight Frether.”

It’s unmirrored, isn’t it?

The moment clicked, Renner eating up as much of its appearance as she could and feeling as much as hers as she could reckon.

That strand of hair on my left. The clasp of my dexter hand over my other. Pray tell, is that not what it’s doing? On the sides of its body? It appears to me as I do in portraits; how a renderer sees me. Its voice? No, my voice? It must be the same. Another property of my personal experience that does not transfer to observations without, as wrong to me as it sounds when I place my hands over my ears and speak the same. To me, it is discomposing; but to others, it is indistinguishable. In my very physicality, they possess more knowledge of me than I do.

“All correct, then.”

A wild and wonderful sense of danger came over her, a wide, panicked smile growing on her face as the creature effortlessly duplicated her style of speech.

Hours was hopeful. I am to live but minutes.

The revelation was chilling, a diminishing of all her previous efforts. Had she, in her delirium, revealed the breadth of her suspicions to Lakyus, there would be no need for immediate, violent intervention on the part of her new masters. Rather, a simple killing - and in a way undreamed of by even the most wildeyed bards - a slot-in replacement. Renner imagined the reconciliatory conversation, the creature before her replicating her without flaw, spinning dulcet and sorrowful apologies and walkbacks to the Blue Roses, working them down from a warpath that she had spent her life to give.

“I would be in my evening wear by now.”

The clone cocked its head in exactly the way she would.

“Eh? Apologies, mark me a dullard for not coming to that already.”

“There’s a set in the closet. Left side, six deep, fourth shelf.”

“Verily? Thank you.”

Perhaps such a being would be perfect for my imitation. An actress, no?

The thing came nearer, passing her by to grab the lamp off her desk, before doffing its shoes and gently making its way across the floor to the closet in a way that enamored her.

“Come.”

Renner broke from her spell and turned back to Jaldabaoth, seeing him gesture to the hanging void. She bowed as apology.

“Yes, my Lord.”

He made for the mere, Renner rising from her genuflect and following after. Then, quite simply, he stepped through. She came to its fore and felt herself slow.

Chardelon, that your new masters had magics beyond reckoning was something you knew. Something akin to a doorway or portal was an inevitability. Step through.

She issued a silent sigh, before standing up a little taller, and stepping into the black. Her leg entered, and before it touched anything on the other side, the whole of her was pulled into the slip. The light crunched, streaks of unworldly color drawing in all directions as they swirled around her; there was no source in the dark, yet the flesh of her face in the periphery of her vision was still lit. She took a breath, but felt no chill as the air passed through her mouth and into her, as if she had filled herself with something other than air; nor could not hear it, all the sound around her supplanted by a low hum. Her heart, having been thrashing inside her chest for all this time, faded away entirely, stilling itself without seizing. Renner lost all sense of direction, no sensation but the sight of nothing before her - a blackness that was neither large nor small, but sizeless. Then, for a brief instant, the dark in front of her fell away to reveal a world beyond. Through it, Renner saw a woman in white and red, kneeling over what seemed to be a desk. A brush held in an effeminate hand fell upon a sheet of parchment and a made a stroke; with it, the scene was ripped away, and Renner was once again realized in a fiery glow.

Another sharp breath, and her chest met with air hotter than she had ever breathed, a great pain shooting down her gullet. Without thinking, she took a second, nearly doubling over as her breast seemed to fold in on itself. The heat was enveloping and crushing, what sweat had accumulated on her drying as if it had never been, all the skin exposed to the desiccated air set upon by it. Renner felt as if she had been cast into blaze.

“Protection from Elements - Fire.”

As she bent forward at the midsection, a light tap came against her forehead, and from the spot sprouted a membrane that swiftly spread across the entirety of her body, slipping under her clothes and then doubling-back. The heat diminished, instead becoming that of a languid midsummer day. Her chest still sundered, Renner took a third pull, relieved that she had not been scorched. Unable to speak a gratitude, she gave a limpid nod, blinking to restore her vision. As her eyes wet again, the scene before her resolved, feet half-buried in coal-like grains. She drew them up and replanted them, her once clean heels hopelessly fouled. Slowly leveling the gaze, she gasped, seeing Jaldabaoth framed by a world that fit him.

Lo, the netherrealms.

Renner had never before seen such a variety of reds, oranges, yellows, browns, and blacks. She and her master were standing at the crest of a dene of scorched gravel, the vista capturing at once a great glowing field of what Renner reckoned to be magma, a vast inland spill, and the beach that split them. It was a sight beyond the most exacting renderings in codices, any frieze carved upon Valencia’s walls, or the most skilled bards’ wildest exaggerations. There was no sky, the horizon seeming to bend up and over, turning back on itself to lid the expanse entirely. Under it flew and walked a great many things, demons that matched or exceeded those which Lakyus had spoken of. She stood, tracing the vast dis and forcing herself to understand it as real. A throbbing terror at once came over her, yet, was somehow distant, like a grease fire that had been covered but not yet snuffed. A trodden path ran along the vulcan sands just to her right, and the fiend stepped over to it; after she could compel her own legs to move, she followed him without beckon.

“Everything we discuss in this territory is not to be spoken of elsewhere.”

‘This territory’? An odd phrasing. I’d have fashioned him a ruler of this felish place. If I am to understand such a transcendent being as being one of many who jockeys in the hells, I ought to simply throw myself into the molten stone below and wish for a quick end.

She tried to speak, but found her mouth too arid to do so, tongue feeling tacky as she peeled it off of her teeth. Precious little saliva flowed in, she doing her best to swirl it, restoring some semblance of her voice.

“Of course, my Lord.”

Renner paused, throat catching on itself as she desperately tried to issue her next words.

“May I ask questions, my Lord?”

“I expect you to know when and when not to.”

This is the time, then.

“Am I to understand that this is not your domain?”

Jaldabaoth stiffened, stopped, and looked back to her.

“Look at my lips and understand that I am not speaking as you are. Your tongue disgusts me, and while I shall bear it for the purposes of speaking to you tonight, all future conversations between us are to be conducted in my own. Do you understand?”

Not dismissal, but a denial. This is his realm, but the magic through which he speaks to me must have some flaw - a lossiness that strips words of their subtleties. A problem even for mundane translation. Perhaps there is no easy equivalent for “territory” in my tongue for it to spit.

“Yes, my Lord.”

At this, he readjusted his glasses, turned away, and went on.

“Your education is inadequate in the least, unacceptably so in the context of your servitude. You are to fix that. Language, mathematics, economics, political theory, thaumaturgy, literature, philosophy, natural sciences, and music shall be done in a formalized and rigorous manner of self instruction. You are expected to design and complete your own curriculum from texts and resources we provide. Reports on your progress in these subjects are expected on a biweekly basis.”

Expenditures for my development? I am not to be killed? An unexpected affordance of time, perhaps a few years, or a lifetime. My paranoia that this was a grand conspiracy is correct. Even these names are by themselves revealing. ‘Political theory’? A whole field of study for politics? How odd. I haven’t a clue what ‘natural sciences’ may be. Pray tell, what is the purpose of instruction in music? It seems my new lords are not only conspiratorial beings of such terrible make that they exceed all the worst nightmares of mankind, but are cultured as well. Still, there is an absence on that list. No mention of history. With what delicate considerations they seem to have made for this conquest, it is not simply disdain for their lessers; rather, this confirms them as external things, detached from the moorings of our world.

Renner, stepping after him, looked to her hellish plains to her right. It was a wide valley, running on nearly a mile or two before it faded into the gloom. Along it went great billows of uric smoke, broken by up-struck crag and sent swirling into little eddies down the way, glowing streaks twined by rivulets through the haze. Following the brooks of magma upstream, she watched as they split away from each other, unmingling in the shroud, before they suddenly came clear into view past the great field of vents that so poured out the cloud. Navigated by a shambling horde of piglike things prodded along by a hulking fly twice their size, these rills unwound into thinner coulees, each sallying off up the separate knolls that ensconced the valley, slipping from view into the rolling and barren dells of each. Catching one from the right angle as she walked, Renner saw a gentle fonting of the stuff, glowing scoria spraying the sides in stuttered disgorges from a wound in the earth. Tracing the hill up past its font, she watched it curl up into the sky, tor reaching so high that it met with the stone roof above.

“In addition, you are to receive a degree of training in tradecraft. Counter-divination, scrying defense, encounter and acquisition avoidance, information security, truth evasion, interrogation resistance, charm and domination mitigation, polyphonics, and basic escape technique.”

A bevy of subjects; surprisingly similar to what I have taught myself. I’d have figured their concerns would be well and above mine. Still, this investment is discombobulating. Was I not their enemy but two evenings prior? What would compel them to then snatch me up, furnish me with such training, and then unleash me to their ends? The minute turnaround too. Why, it seems as if my treason was expected.

Renner stayed silent, unsure what a correct interpretation of his words would be. At the very least, she was of value, an asset worth acquisition and enrichment. That she was to be trained in the work of underhands was something unexpected, and though she was content to let the demon carry on, she felt a growing sense of her task and purpose.

“The methods you have learned and employed so far are ineffectual, are vulnerable to certain intrusions not unknown to this region, and rely on the graces of specific, unreliable individuals.”

Mm, he’s referencing the Gambling Division ledger. I suppose that thing which lurks in shadow must have come upon it - a ‘shadow demon,’ perhaps? By that token, it’s probably made a thorough sweep of the palace itself. Saves me the trouble of handing them a layout… Still, that Evileye is a liability I need no longer accept, that her magics are no longer a critical facet of my survival; it’s almost a sweet thing.

Renner hung for a moment, then doubled-back on herself.

No, it is a sweet thing. She is known to them, and deductible from my speech to the adventurer group, my loathing of her. Jaldabaoth is proffering that deliberately; almost a perk of sorts. Interesting.

“This necessitates the use and operation of specific magical items, including equipment and consumables. You will be taught these methods at the necessary junctures. Further, you are to be taught identification techniques for specific species and entities of concern, beings which you are to make an immediate report of upon discovery.”

Enemies purely ruinous to them, or merely threatening? I suspect the latter. This is not an organization committed only to the barest expense, the most basic caution. They are grand, they are exacting. Even weak things will see a thorough stamping out for prudence's sake.

Jaldabaoth and Renner went up and over another dune, then stepped out from sand onto the stone it had been hewn from, the beach being the crumbling remnants of a series of basalt bluffs that ran along the umbral sea. She had been taking furtive glances at expanse for since she had arrived, each time wincing and looking away from the luminance. Now, she turned and bore it in full, blinking her eyes to adjust them. It was vast, stretching out an unreckonable distance before coming flush against a vault of distant stone. It roiled and churned, rock the color of the sun bubbling up through cooler magmas. The medium, already tumultuous, was broken by the occasional explosion, great liquid columns sent up and down in deadly showers of molten stone. Great bergs of slag drifted across like surface scum, a chance few inhabited by lanky, spined things that seemed to tend to the lake, scraping up frozen shards and piling it upon what floated.

“Your existing intelligence network is to be integrated into ours; assets you have obtained will remain under your control, however, you will coordinate them to assist in our objectives.”

“Of course, my Lord.”

“What active interventions you will use your existing assets to conduct will primarily be counterintelligence operations; however, those will not be the only assets under your control.”

Jaldabaoth suddenly stepped off to the left, leaving what was only now starting to become a proper highway. Renner struggled to scurry after him, heels unfit for such use.

“You are to be placed in command of a number of intelligence-gathering units. These will include field operatives, remote observation specialists, and support personnel. You will be tasked with coordinating this apparatus, using it for the collection of data, the processing of that data into workable information, the analysis of that information for the production of actionable intelligence, and the use of that intelligence to inform short term objectives, long term strategy, and future data collection. Do you understand?”

I do, my Lord. I truly do. It’s almost oversimple, isn’t it? I, in the course of two months, divined your existence through gossip, double-talk, and bulletins. Further, I am unable to pry myself from your wills; no threat I can levy against you, no hazard I may present to your objectives. To forget my opposition and integrate me, why, it’s the most sensible thing to do.

“Yes, my Lord.”

Jaldabaoth approached the edge of the outcrop, then turned again down an only now visible flight of stairs that had been carved into its flank. Upon realizing where she would have to follow, Renner slowed, and after a moment's thought on the narrow descent and seaward gusts of wind, doffed her shoes, wincing as she shifted her weight onto the pointed rock below. Slowly, and with careful steps, she followed after, holding her heels in her left and bracing her right hand against the rockface. The fiend, who had been looking at her from a landing some ways down, continued.

“You are to generate intelligence on the state of your Kingdom, including an analysis of its politics, the status of each of its houses, the relationships between them, an accounting of its various forces both regular and irregular, the state of its economy, a balance sheet for the expenditures of the crown and various houses major, a detailed demographic survey, as well as assisting in the creation of a detailed survey of its geography, including surface topography, as well as its meteorology, ecology, and geology.”

Renner stepped down onto the landing, less than a pace above the magmaline, fresh splatter having pooled at its base; as she thought to navigate it, she realized much of the wall had been wet as well. Turning with a start, she realized her current handhold had been drenched in the stuff, some of which had dripped onto her. Though it was liquid, it had an odd weight to it, still as heavy as it had been as rock. Before she knew it, a bead of the stuff rolled down her palm and broke away to strike the floor below, the molten stone seeming no warmer than anything else.

“At the same time, you are to continue your research into your nation’s history, and that of surrounding nations.”

As expected, they are outsiders. Beings from someplace distant; or, as this place would suggest, a separate world altogether.

Jaldabaoth rounded a corner, the ledge thinning even further as it bowed into a littoral cave. Renner followed in the gentle bob of his tail, resisting the urge to shimmy. The space was tight, the ledge no more than half a pace wide, and the other side no more than a pace after that.

“Further, you will be asked to perform certain direct interventions using the assets you have been provided. This may include interception, espionage, sabotage, assassination, or more personal manipulations.”

Jaldabaoth went in a bit further before slipping around another corner, Renner following after to enter a small chamber which held a secret inlet. A wizened looking demon - by Renner’s estimation, an imp or a gazer - sat on a rock within, tending to the pool with a long rod at least double its length. Mabes of glass hung along the ceiling, the vitreous drippings catching the light of the pond in a way that dazzled her. The light danced across Jaldabaoth’s face as he stepped out behind the demon, then turned to her.

“Tell me, what do you know of your duties?”

“My kingdom is to be delivered to you. Its population, resources, and markets fit for use. I am to facilitate these changes through the tools you have provided me; to use them for the purposes of manipulating the body politic, leading the population to desirable beliefs and antagonisms, and the steady preparation for a secret or open transfer of leadership.”

Jaldabaoth gazed at her in silence, glasses flickering in the light. After nearly a minute of this, he turned, and readjusted them.

“I see there are still some misconceptions at play.”

He prodded the hunched demon on its shoulder. The creature then plunged the rod deep into the magma, rooting around in it for some time and seeming to use it to pry something beneath the surface. Eventually, it withdrew the rod hand over hand, revealing a hooked end which had snagged some cage about the size of her fist. Unhooking it, the demon set down its implement and manipulated its catch, eventually knocking the thing open and shaking out the contents onto its hand. It then held out its hand to her, she breaking from her place to see what it was offering. Within its gnarled grip were two brass rings, which she gently took from its hand. Raising her head to look back to Jaldabaoth, she saw another portal had opened beyond him.

“Come. Let me show you what I make of your kind.”