Akakios didn’t hesitate to rush out the hut, but before their feet hit the hard, cobble stone path, they turned to talons. Then, they dove into the crater, and wings of a million different hues spread into existence. The main vilin wasn’t a full-on anthro (he was more akin to a colorful Welsh wizard whose soulfire-powered castle walked on its own two feet1 than an extra in the copaganda Disney film with the thick-ass bunny2), but there was a reason this novel was a big hit with furries.

  He transformed back to his typical humanish form after the shortest drop, nding with the poise of a ballerina. Dust and ash mulled the air, but Akakios’ constitution (and general aura of “badassery”) wouldn’t let him sneeze. Mars felt very cool, since his body technically completed that whole series of very cool moves. He also felt very uncool, considering his original body couldn’t jump down to the center of the crater without spraining his ankle and then stumbling into a facepnt.

  The demon strolled forward, talons out. Some foot lovers would be very disappointed, but the furries might go wild. Mars was continuing to try not to think of all the Akakios porn, but as he pushed the foot and furry art to the side, a few posts with… other content… that he’d saved to his private album fshed in his mind. But he needed to pay attention to the crater. Akakios might have been inciting his own murder right about then.

  Mars focused back to their shared vision and realized a huge detail was missing from the scene. Namely, Gavin, who should have been limp on the ground (and fully dead, considering the height of his fall). Instead, there was a crispy earth and dust and ash and 0 Gavin. The human would have been relieved, if he wasn’t utterly terrified of what he didn’t know.

  It’s like a spider crawling under his couch. He’s fine to share his apartment with an arachnid so far as he could see them. Which is why he scooped up every spider in his home with a piece of paper and a cup and released them beyond the borders of his territory. There was no apartment-sized panopticon he could construct that would ensure the small creatures remained within his line of sight. That uncertainty was simply unacceptable.

  In other words, Mars (in practice) hated spiders. He hated a missing Gavin more. Akakios frowned. Maybe the demon’s mind finally shared his thoughts.

  “Ah, that makes sense now,” Akakios said, proving his headmate wrong. Mars should never have tried to guess what that demon was thinking.

  A flood of rats and mice, most white as snow, crested the crater like an avanche. The Pgue Queen slipped down to the bottom with their tide and stepped off next to her lord. She scanned the ground, a scowl wrinkling her lead-pale skin below the mask.

  “That wasn’t him,” she guessed. “Not the real him, at least.”

  The demon lord nodded. “He’s got an artifact I’ve been after for years. It seems he figured out how to use it.”

  The McGuffin. Mars couldn’t remember what it did, because M.X. Brady was shit-for-brains as a writer, but he knew the plot had truly started when the demon id his wicked talons on it. It sped up his experiments and let him explore the mortal world without hesitation. He would constantly pop up in the hero’s path, stealing other artifacts, killing important side characters, and generally fucking with Gavin’s life. Now, it seems the story was the other way around.

  “Why didn’t you bring Lars to trade?” Mars asked with their actual mouth.

  The Pgue Queen swiped the air, and her mask disappeared, all so her red eyes could blink at him incredulously. She tapped her staff in front of her, making her way to the bright blur of a demon before her. When she was close enough, she wacked the staff on the top of their head.

  Mars’ soul bounced around the skull like a sped-up DVD screensaver. Akakios cried, “OW!”

  The Pgue Queen “hmph”ed. “Who is in there?”

  “His name is Mars.”

  “You did this?” the human could tell there would be more head-wacking if Akakios answered yes. Thank whatever gods there were, thank the useless glitched out system, thank the terrifying Heavens and all the demons beneath that the answer was no.

  The demon lord shook his head. “I am uncertain how this happened. Dr… uh, well… your doctor and I are researching dual-soul bodies to figure out how to extract him.”

  “She’s not my anything,” the rat/mouse demon wacked them again to emphasize the point. “He’s not a spy, then?”

  “No, too stupid for that,” Akakios assured her.

  Mars was really starting to hate that reasoning. “I’m really not that dumb.”

  “He’s oblivious and knows very little,” he continued. “And anyway, I know enough nguages to hide anything I want hidden.”

  With that, Akakios switched to a tongue Mars had heard before, whenever the demon gave his reports to Dr. Vaidya. It wasn’t Hindi, but there was a simir roundness to the nguage, like verbal cursive. The demon continued to be rude, which was more than expected at this point. Why did he have to keep so much from his curious little headmate!? He could do nothing but watch and listen. He was a nosey young man before being trapped in the headspace, and now it was his only form of entertainment. The demon couldn’t even give him the only thing he could entertain himself with: tea. He hadn’t even answered his question. It was frustrating.

  The not-Hindi was interrupted by the human, who pushed his will into their jaw, tongue and vocal chords. “I said, ‘Why didn’t you bring Lars to trade?’”

  Akakios rolled their eyes. “I wasn’t going to risk my best bargaining chip for this. I knew Gavin wouldn’t hold up his end.”

  “Yet you brought him to my home,” the rat demon reminded him. “My home.”

  “Yes, and that’s the reason I’m still alive. The copy wasted all his energy in that explosion. Then when he was hovering? He was leaking so much soul magic. It was pathetic. I threw a small rock at him and he crumpled from that alone.”

  “You should not have involved me. I washed my hands of all of that drama months ago.”

  “Would you have me die, then?” Akakios asked in mock shock. “I thought you cared a little more for your favorite student.”

  “Lord Akakios, the reason I have not fed my rats with your flesh is my boundless mercy,” she said through gritted teeth. “You are the only fool so lucky. But if you cannot kill a simple copy without my help? Maybe you were never worth my effort.”

  A flood of emotions filled their senses. Before, the demon was pying offence. Now, Mars could feel a genuine hurt well up, leaking through their shared synapses. “The artifact is too powerful for me to face alone, teacher,” the demon lord admitted, bowing his head in a new sense of shame. “I am sorry to have disappointed you.”

  Technically, Mars knew their retionship. Akakios, before taking over his father’s hellish domain, studied under The Pgue Queen herself. He was a brilliant student, winning over the notoriously harsh demon with his natural skill and true effort combined. Before obtaining the artifact in the original novel (and clearly here as well), he was still far less powerful than the rodent demon. But he had earned her respect, nonetheless, and she joined his domain when he cimed it. That didn’t mean she was ever reverential to her student. Even as he amassed more power, in her eyes he was still the little Akakios she had first trained, and she treated him no different.

  Except, for some reason, in this version of reality she had fully defected. It might have had to do with a certain “her.”

  Still, as her “lord” bowed his head in apology, she sighed. “Head up. Straighten your back. Do not bow to me again. I will not see you bow to anyone again.” Her staff had followed her words, snapping his head up, and guiding his back straight. Then, she tapped her thin lips in thought. “This human, Gavin. He is not worthy of such a powerful artifact.”

  Akakios nodded. “It has made him stronger than I thought. He’s somehow perfected certain avenues of soul magic. Centuries of study could not bring me to that point.”

  She squinted at him. “Ah, you were studying him, were you not?” she ascertained.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s no excuse to use my good humor.”

  “What good humor?” Akakios joked, but there was still respect in his irreverence, even as another wack nded on his sore head. He was a good healer; it would be fine. And that respect glimmered in his eyes as they rested on his teacher. She was everything he wished he could be and everything he would never be. There was no one he admired more. No one except…

  The demon lord coughed. “I would love for you to join my domain once more, if you desire.”

  “No. I am content here.”

  “Then may I visit?”

  She pursed her lips.

  “...again, I will not bring your lover.”

  “She’s not my lover,” his teacher snapped, hitting him on the head again.

  They were both brilliant characters, when they needed to be. They were also incredibly childish, it seemed. And Mars still wanted in on that tea. Was it Dr. Vaidya? It had to be Dr. Vaidya.

  Narrator’s Note: I will confirm. It was, in fact, Dr. Vaidya. Mars is not as oblivious as some might think. He is still pretty fucking oblivious though.

  The two demons discussed different ways to handle Gavin and different solutions to the “Mars problem,” slipping in and out of that not-Hindi at will. When the demon lord and his headmate left, they had a package of herbs and a couple of small, silver spoons (like the kind your boring aunt would collect and/or the kind your less boring but equally unloved aunt with that horrid cocaine problem would collect) in their hands and a new round of experiments ahead of them. The Pgue Queen had given Akakios a lot of nasty ideas, but they had some potential.

  When they got back to the demon’s room, he knelt down just before the floor’s main carpet. The herbs and spoons were set down next to him so he could freely use his hands to lift the edge of the rug. Then, his sharp talons dug into the edge of the floorboards, lifting them to reveal a small treasure trove underneath.

  “What is this?” Mars thought, more to himself than his headmate, but letting it spill to their shared space anyway.

  “These are mine.” The demon emphasized that st word, almost licking his lips to taste the sound.

  What was “mine,” was an unsorted collection of random silver objects. The demon lord probably had more precious items in a vault somewhere in his pace. Actually, Mars knew he did, as Gavin had stolen a few powerful artifacts (not the MacGuffin) from one such vault in M.X. Brady’s story. He got a really cool sword and a cursed, uncut ruby out of that arc. The human had no idea why Akakios would hide such mundane, though somewhat precious, metal here when his actual wealth was locked up in another more reasonable location.

  However, the demon started unpacking his hole, pcing the contents in neat rows on the floor. He muttered numbers, counting the pieces with an intense focus. There were rings, bracelets, other small spoons, small forks, random wires, coins, etc. etc. etc. Mars couldn’t keep up with the collection, but the demon was meticulous with his count. He added the two spoons with a “343, 344,” before thumping his own chest with a “345.”

  Then, he carefully pced everything back into the hole, covering it once more with the wood and the rug.

  Mars could understand why he would keep a crow, of all things. Speaking of the crow, when that whole strange ordeal was over, the demon sauntered over to the cage and refilled the bird’s seed. It looked like it wanted scritches, but the demon ignored it this time.

  “Scritch that bird!” Mars said, aghast.

  Their body “hmph”ed, but the demon followed his headmate’s instructions, and the crow happily fluffed up. “You want the body?” Akakios asked.

  “What?”

  “I told you before, human to animal transference is safer. Do you want this bird?”

  “But that’s your pet!”

  “It’s just a bird,” Akakios stated, coldly.

  “???”

  “Do you want it, or not?”

  “...”

  “I want you to have this bird.”

  “If I say no, will you kill it like that first test subject?”

  Akakios thought about it for too long for comfort, but ultimately said, “No.”

  “...I’ll think about it.”

  “Good.” The demon scritched its neck a few seconds before muttering, “one.” Then, he released his hand from the creature, and closed the cage door with an assured “clink, thunk” of the tch. “You’re going to be a good apprentice, Mars.”

  Something else finally clicked in Mars’ oblivious brain. Oh, he thought to himself. I’m the rebound. Some of the demon’s behavior was starting to make at least a lick of sense…

  ~~ Author's Note: 1. "Howl's Moving Castle," 2024, Hayao Miyazaki

  2. "Zootopia," 2016, Disney

  P.S. I would love to hear what y'all think of the chapter/story so far! Any good moments? Any theories?