Well, it wasn’t like it wasn’t a fantasy she hadn’t had before. Her, on a journey across a fantasy world with a group of men, her protectors, that she’d satisfy sexually every night. What girl didn’t want to be the center of attention of an orgy of handsome, muscular, deadly men? Just, in that fantasy, she’d been a wizard or elf princess or something, and they’d fuck in inns, or in cute tents near a campfire. Down here in the trenches of Hell, there was considerably more blood and guts than she wanted.
“I wonder,” she said, and she tugged on Adron’s tail as the man finished strapping on his armor bits. “If I can really do things to Hell, maybe I can change it in a big way. Not more firestorms, but make a place that’s softer, cleaner, no remnants, no rocks.”
“No place like that in Hell,” he said. He shifted around, adjusting more of his armor, and his tail pulled at her grip. A big, heavy tail, with some black spikes along its top that worked up to his spine. She squeezed it, and Adron chuckled. With his skin dark red, almost black in some places, it was like squeezing a baseball wrapped in dense leather. Firm. She held on, both hands.
“I figured, that’s why I’d make one.”
“You can make stuff?”
“I don’t know. Maybe? I can summon stuff, move stuff, and I think… maybe… I don’t know. I just know that, much as all this sex is great, it’d be better having it someplace less gross. Without remnants.” Not that there were many remnants down in the caverns. Most seemed to grow above, in the swamp. “Without blood and guts and stuff.”
“Heaven,” Kas said, and he squatted beside her.
“Heaven? Oh, you mean the actual place. I uh, I don’t think so. That place was beyond beautiful, but that’s not what I’m aiming for. I’d like some place kinda like a spire, maybe? Sure, it had remnants, so we’d have to get rid of those. But otherwise, it was pretty badass in there. The bone furniture was a bit much, but still. I liked the red silk blankets.”
Faust hooked his sword on his armor and joined them. “Maybe when we’ve saved the world, we can visit the Scar. More incubi and succubi than you can count, and plenty of them making silk.”
“That could be fun. Fashion! I never really indulged in fashion much on the surface, not as much as I’d have liked. Maybe–”
“You are all ridiculous,” Julisa said, and she started the march.
The four incubi rolled their eyes and followed. Mia looked back at Vin, but the four-armed goliath avoided eye contact. Sighing, she set a hand on Kas’s shoulder and climbed up on his back. Forward march, it was.
They found another forbidden tree growing on the ceiling a few hours later, and Mia again plucked the strings and made the tree drop its fruit. Everyone ate some, Mia and Vin especially, and resumed the march. For the first time in a while, she wasn’t feeling hungry. She actually felt good, healthy, and her inner fingers didn’t ache at all anymore.
“It’s gotta be because of the remnants,” she said.
“What of them?” Kas asked.
She patted his shoulder. “Grems and imps eat remnants, right? Because they have a tiny bit of resonance still in them. The swamp above us is growing remnants and churning through them with those bone grinder things. All those guts and stuff is… fertilizer, I guess? For Hell? So it can grow forbidden trees in places that’ll let them, like weeds in the sidewalk. And because demons can’t fly, no one can get to them.”
Kas nodded slowly. With his body forever leaning forward, huge tail behind him counterbalancing him, Mia sitting on his back was easy, almost like riding a horse, and she held onto some of his back spikes like a horse’s reins. It was even easy to keep her egg nice and snug in its shoulder wrap against her belly. And fortunately, she didn’t have balls to crush from riding bareback.
“Is that why we’re down here?” Locutus asked. “Someone or something pulled us down here, to feed us?”
“Or maybe to hide us from the monsters,” Oudoceus said.
“Maybe there’s something down here waiting for us,” Gallius said. “Someone who wanted us fed and wanted to save us from those monsters?”
Hearing demons call things ‘monster’ was weird. She was literally riding a monster. A sexy one, but still, a monster with a flat shark head, no eyes, big bull horns that came out the sides of his head, and a dinosaur body with big arms. But her brain did think of Kas as ‘demon’ instead of ‘monster’, while it thought of those squid-faced, human-ish things as monster, definitely.
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” she said. “The monsters, I mean. They started off kinda invisible, right? And got more form to them as we fought.”
Adron nodded. “I’ve seen the scrying pools enough to recognize a squid. They had faces like squids.”
“Yeah, they did. Not at first, though. It was like, as they fought us, they adopted a shape. But the shape they found isn’t… unique, I guess. It’s a shape a lot of humans have seen before. I mean, maybe not that creepy, but still. It was like… like someone had wrapped them in human skin, and gave them a squid face, too. All the wrong color though, dark blue, right? Like, dark greens and blues and… definitely like something that crawled out of the ocean. Like, something that crawled out of the deep, deep ocean.”
“Where are you going with this?” Julisa asked.
“On the surface, humans have this idea of what things might look like if they came from another… dimension. Like, if there were some alien race, lurking in a dark dimension, waiting to consume Earth or people or whatnot, it’d probably look something like… those things had.”
The demons stopped and traded looks. Not good looks. The incubi looked concerned, checking with each other before looking down. Adron looked up and stroked a horn. Kas grunted.
“Aliens?” Adron asked.
“I don’t know. I mean, maybe? That’s… That’d be pretty weird, right? Aliens, in Hell?” She shook her head. “No, I’m thinking… Well, I mean, maybe aliens, but not like aliens from another planet or something. Something that came to Hell, and it adopted a new shape. If it just showed up looking like a Lovecraft monster, I’d think maybe some kinda eldritch monster, but it didn’t. It showed up without a form, and kinda built one as we were fighting, and…” Shrugging, she rubbed her egg and watched the creature inside shift, shades of black and red barely moving against the dark leather shell. “All I know is, when I saw its eyes, it reminded me of the canyon that tore open under the spire. This… endless void, but alive.”
She looked back at Vin, but the dragon was looking down. They all were.
“Nothing,” the titan said at last, “ever, in the history of the Great Tower, has ever happened like this.” He shrugged and nodded forward, the weight of his words crushing them all. “So we keep moving.”
The demons grunted, nodded, and pressed on. Even Kas and Adron nodded, as if Vin had just bestowed infinite wisdom. If you didn’t know what to do, what could you do but keep moving until you found an answer?
It was a good thing David wasn’t here. That way of thinking would have driven him insane.