Pinks and blues. Swirls of bright red and whites. Clouds of purples and greens, scattering the demon’s growing body far and wide in the darkness. For a long time, for centuries, millions of years, for so long that time was no longer consequential, it existed as a mass of dust and warmth.

  But bit by bit, with each passing century, it began to converge, reconstituting itself, forming around twin cores of light. Two bright spheres that gathered all that substance, all the clouds of dust and matter, and the silhouette of a body shimmered into shape. It was almost humanoid – or perhaps it preceded the human shape. Long and slender with two limbs extending for legs and two more for arms. And once it finished its celestial metamorphosis, it descended from the heavens, falling out of the sky like a shooting star.

  Jenny saw the Demon World. This world. Before the ice. It was a ndscape of rocks with pools of va and fires that burned like forests made of fme. A clear sky sprawled overhead, a sky filled with enormous stars – No. They weren’t stars. They were incubating demons born in the sky, waiting to go supernova.

  THIS IS NOT FOR YOU TO SEE - crackled the radio static voice of the demon trying to take over her body. It scratched through her mind, and the memories faded as the demon’s burning blue and purple eyes rose from the darkness.

  A burning hot rage filled her chest. Jenny sucked in a deep breath, expanding her diaphragm completely – no, it wasn’t her taking the breath. The Demon was inhaling with her body. A burning feeling climbed up her throat and through her skull to alight on her face. Her vision fshed blue, burning, and she didn’t need a mirror to know that fire was streaming out of her eyes just as it had done for the ghoul.

  Not again, she swore, trying to reel in her mind, trying to root out the demon. But she could feel it digging, burrowing. Every time she tried to grasp it, it slipped out of her grasp and struck deeper. It was cwing through her fears, trying to pry her open, forcing itself into every orifice of her thoughts. Visions of Susan fshed. Her smile. Her hair. Her corpse. Her glowing hand. Light.

  The light, came the demon’s static voice, higher pitched than before. Give me the light. Open the worlds again. My people cannot survive here. My people need warmth. My people demand salvation.

  Yeah? Jenny forced her body to take the next deep breath. In the split second of the demon’s excitement at seeing the light, its stranglehold rexed. Her eyes shut and opened. She squirmed on the ground, but it hadn’t been enough. The demon rooted through her life.

  Her childhood memories blew through the mind space. The demon saw Jenny’s desperation to leave home; it saw her mom. It felt her crying and sobbing as she was screamed at, as she was hit, as she was trying to hide under the bed – Jenny threw herself back into the demon’s memories. She didn’t need to relive any of her life, but if she could find something, anything, that would help her win control of her body, if she could distract it from opening the wounds of her own life, maybe she could -

  Fmes, orange and blue, erupted from her body. From her skin. From her armor. It was using Ignite, mixing her fmes with its own.

  Her eyes burned furiously, and any snow that drifted onto her melted away. Steam rose from the ground around her, enveloping her as it hid the world away, and she could no longer tell what was inside her head and what was in the world. Choking sounds filled her throat as she rolled over onto her stomach, wriggling and struggling, spshing in the water as she continued to burn.

  A wind blew, clearing the view, and she looked up to see the crowd of deaths. The girl that Jenny had woken, moved toward Jenny, eyes wide, wanting to help.

  “Stay back!” she gasped, but then another voice, deeper and uglier, tore out of her throat.

  “Do not interfere!”

  Her body turned over again. Her head snapped toward the demons who’d been closing in, their ghoul bodies sauntering, arms swinging. Their eyes burned.

  “Do not interfere,” rasped the voice from her throat again. “We need this body. We need its light.”

  The light! That’s what it wants more than anything, and that realization mingled with the demon’s mind – the demon’s desire was the way out. That was its weakness.

  They both pictured the light of the passageway, golden and bursting with colors, and how Jenny had opened it. She showed the demon the exact memory, the exact hurt of how she’d torn the worlds open before healing it. And that gave her just enough access to the demon’s emotions to slip through.

  Her body went rigid, back arching as she cried out. Was it a cry of triumph or the demon’s cry of fear, she couldn’t tell. But then she was freefalling again through the demon’s memories. Its own hurt. The desperate reason it wanted her light.

  Battle spread all around her. Was this a Survival Challenge? Some other kind of fight? She couldn’t tell, but she was sure it was grim.

  Countless figures, humanoid silhouettes made out of fme, the fires of their eyes rising like enormous flickering horns, and their wings, magnificent and wide, feathery and burning with little bits falling away to fizzle out. They had fearsome burning cws extending from their hands; the Army of Demons.

  Angels swooped down from the sky, brilliant burst of colorful lights, white wings fpping powerfully. In their hands were shining swords and gssy spears. The demons rose from the ground, and the collision was cataclysmic.

  Burning cws melted through angels. Weapons made of light sliced demons in half. Bodies exploded. Fire and lightning and wind blew around every single one of them; the elements raged on as well.

  Fierce gusts blew away weaker demons and angels. Rivers of water gushed through the air, and geysers of va burst from the ground. Some demons flew into a group of angels and exploded, lighting up the sky in a show of color and light nearly as bright as the sun. And there was so much color – reds and oranges and blues. So much light, and they were so beautiful, Jenny swore the stars were battling.

  But the memories were hazy; she was in the demon’s body, looking through its memories with its own eyes.

  It felt responsible for the massacre. For the dead on both sides of the war. Demons and Angels alike. It was chosen to lead... not it. A he. He identified with masculinity, something he’d adopted for himself after observing the angels. And this demon identified as Iblis, a name given to the demon by an angel called Sat’en.

  Iblis had loved Sat’en.

  A weighty feeling surfaced through these thoughts: longing, duty, responsibility, regret. Iblis had led the other demons in rebellion, following in the footsteps of the angel he loved. Fighting against an enemy that didn’t have much hope in defeating, but a burning desire for change fueled Iblis. They had no choice in the fight.

  Through his eyes, Jenny saw the other demons, floating in circles around Iblis so that everywhere he turned, shimmering silhouettes with burning eyes looked back at him – they had chosen him as their leader.

  The next memory shifted like smoke. Iblis’ wings spread and fpped, the burning feathers generating heat and lift, and he looked down at the world as he flew through sky. Volcanos dotted the nd as far as she could see. Rivers of va thrummed across the nd like veins. And above shone the stars, each one burning brilliantly.

  Iblis loved the stars; they were his birthpce; they were his children. But they reminded him of the angel he loved.

  Jenny couldn’t see that angel no matter how much she searched. She tried to root deeper through the demon’s mind, but those memories were blocked away. No, it was worse than that. Most of the memories of Sat’en were forgotten.

  Through Iblis’ eyes she saw the sky rip open - a deep gash between the stars, like a jagged wound. As though someone had taken a knife to a painting of the night sky, and from that horrible darkness, poured out the angels.

  Tarnished Angels plummeted from the wound. Unable to fly, their thin arms and legs fpped and kicked uselessly, their gaunt faces screaming as they dropped like stones. They nded on the molten ground, breaking apart into burning bits upon impact. Some nded on demons, dragging them down, fmes billowing behind them.

  Flying gracefully between the Tarnished Angels were the natural angels, holding swords as brightly colored as their bodies.

  The memories came distorted and quickly. At first, she was in Iblis’ body, his burning cws raking a purple wretched angel. He tore a tarnished angel in half, guts and blood spttering on the rivers of va. A spear made of green light fshed through his arm but his burning body regenerated as quickly as the blow. The green angel didn’t even get to respond; Iblis cwed its head off, and the angel disintegrated into vapor.

  She couldn’t tell who was winning. She saw angels sucking up demons, inhaling the glowing fmes that seemed to comprise the demon’s silhouette form. But she saw just as many angels struck down, cut into pieces or scorched to ashes. Iblis cut open desecrated angels, blood bursting every direction. He flew through the battle field like a bullet train, and corpses rained down, angels and demons alike as the demons rose higher and higher, trying to get to the gaping wound where the angels kept pouring from the darkness.

  She could feel Iblis’ determination. His desire for victory. For freedom. But a ghost of a face appeared, burning red eyes and an evil grin that was too wide. A rge shadowy hand curled into an enormous fist and struck Iblis down from the sky.

  A name popped into Iblis’ mind, into Jenny’s: Azra’il, the Angel of Death.

  A shudder rippled through the mindscape – the enormous angel fpped four hideous bat-like wings and rushed down. Azra’il’s wide muscur frame seemed to take up the entire sky, and as he closed in, reaching for Iblis with one hand, she saw the angel’s face. The look of sheer glee as Azra’il’s fingers closed around Iblis’ throat – around Jenny’s throat as she was seeing through Iblis’ eyes, feeling through Iblis’ body.

  A part of her wanted to feel happy watching the demon lose, but she felt his pain and anguish, and beyond the pain, a deep, cutting feeling of regret. The burning feeling of regret that she knew all too well.

  Iblis the demon, chosen by his people, had done something horrible, something dreadful. Something that had cursed his entire people.

  He had fallen in love. He had led his people into a war they could not win. He had-

  There were gaps in Iblis’ memories. Fshes of Azra’il’s dark gray face. She noted that he was the only angel wearing cloth. It looked like a loincloth made from leather. And a neckce of skulls bounced all over his broad gray chest as he punched Iblis repeatedly. Fists the size of boulders. Snakes that lunged from his head and snapped at Iblis’ wings.

  The demons had lost. Everything blurred. Jenny was falling, the dizzying sensation of tumbling from a great distance – no, the demon was falling, burning up in the air, losing its silhouette as it crashed into desote rock below. All around her, the other demons fell from the bursting stars, and the shadow above, the darkness, was sizzling away.

  Snow began to fall. Gently at first, but with every passing second, the storm picked up, and a furious blizzard enveloped the world.

  The fmes of the demons rippled. Iblis’ blue fires struggled as the ground froze. As the warmth and heat faded away. He and his people succumbed to the cold, their bodies slowing down to a standstill – and he/Jenny looked up to see Azra’il towering over it all, a cruel fist raised to the sky. The angel was draining all the heat from the world, and he was ughing. Laughing so loudly that his ughter became thunder that rolled across the sky, fading only as Azara’il vanished in a fsh of darkness.

  Cold became the only memory, spreading like frost across a windshield. It was all Iblis felt. It was all he’d known. The coldness that sapped all his strength, his ability to maintain form. He and his demons drifted across the frozen world, moving gently with the wind, with no care for self, with no desire for self.

  Without warmth, they had no idea of self, and nobody could tell him apart from the others – and he was grateful. The sense of responsibility dulled; his regret dull; his broken heart faded away.

  Centuries curled up and crumbled away; millennia passed by. How many osciltions around the Material World? They lost track of all meaning, but the demons didn’t die.

  They couldn’t die. Billions of demons nguished in their world, stuck in pce, all of them still and calm, comatose like fish asleep in a frozen ke. With no thoughts to be shared, no emotions what so ever, a quiet world where the only sounds are the muffled softness of snowfkes nding on piling snow.

  But burning discreetly, hidden away, a familiar desire to break free. For revenge. For love. A nurtured secret want.

  Iblis’ buried wants; to live his life. To escape from this frozen, cold world. To rise up to the heavens and tear the angels down from the sky. Something he kept hidden away, menting and lost, drifting through the snow and blinking away centuries of sleep, until one day, the snow parted.

  The wind curved, and temperature rippled through the world. A little opening appeared in the air, and golden light bloomed. Colors and heat spread across the world, chasing the wind, fading, but it was enough.

  Iblis shifted from the snow. His fellow demons began to move again, their particles, their sparkling essences growing excited. They rushed over to the parting in the air, sensing the warmth of the other worlds, a warmth they had not felt in so long that it stung, it burned.

  He wished so desperately to slip through this gap and leave this frozen hurt, but then a human tumbled out of the light. A girl with swishing tentacles, and a partial red exoskeleton, and the bnk, white eyes of the tarnished ones.