continuation for devildo || its terrible potential has begun

[americanvvitch]

[continued from here]

The ending came quickly, as they so often did.

Little fanfare surrounded Alastor's exit... no floating appendages, no jovial crackling of her radio. Only the quiet ringing of piano keys to play him off as he vanished from sight, the last notes of a doleful wake. It seemed an inappropriately sober outtro, in contrast to the tone of the rest of the evening.

With Alastor gone, deep silence settled over the cabin. Save for soft footsteps while the flour and whiskey were tucked away, and the creak and latch of the door. The radio show he had pulled into existence dwindled away by the time she had finished, and then all that was left was the sound of grit and sand as it blew over the horizon and the occasional pop of the fire in her hearth. Little by little each trace of him faded, unsustainable without his magic, but even as his essence seeped out of the world, Lotte felt the creature take root in her mind. The worn mattress beneath her gave no comfort or relief. The red stag and the thrill and terror of it might very well haunt her for the rest of her days.

The feeling that had long plagued her, of feeling somewhere lost between this world and another was only intensified now. Time would flow, dawn would come, nothing in her little home would stretch itself larger than its physical shape ought to have been, and the world would return to its previous state. All would mend itself now.

All but her.

The idea that she could not be the same after what she'd done followed her, like her own gauzy shadow, through the following week. The days rolled in and out, hazy with dust, fragrant loaves of fresh bread and the slow drying of the original, ordinary bottle of whiskey that predated the harvest night. Lotte had never missed anyone, so she couldn't really say for sure that the strange restlessness she couldn't quite shake was covetous. Or that it had anything to do with Alastor in particular. If she had called something else up, would it have been such a distraction? Well, there really wasn't any way to know with Alastor and his like down there and Lotte wasting away up here - and that was just how it would have to stay.

She had no excuse to call Alastor and what good sense she possessed (along with pride, perhaps) prevented her from making another social call. She was stalwart in that, or so she thought.

But Lotte was not any great mountain or a deeply-rooted tree. She was kindling, and a spark of fire and a rush of air was all it ever took to change her course.

∅ ∅ ∅ ∅

Near a week and a half had passed, before the storm hit. It wasn't a surprise - this was probably closing in on the fiftieth storm Lotte had weathered in this place. The static electricity had woken her before dawn and she'd wasted no time tugging on her boots and wrapping the bottom of her face with a double piece of old cotton before she ventured out of the cabin to check that each sigil at the edge of town was intact. The farmers had instructions on how to refresh the sigils placed at the center of their acreage and along the borders - they would be on their own with no car or horse at her disposal to check them.

Surrounding the town itself, there were three. The head of the triangle lay about two miles up the road, just off a crossroads. She'd noticed early on that most of the storms rolled in from that direction, and so she'd created the barrier's tip there with some hope that it would slice through the force of nature and help distribute the power along the sides of where the barrier ran, rather than letting it hit them head on. That one had to be checked first, then she'd double back along the fence line to the other two.

After that, things had happened fast. Dark clouds had rolled in on her way to the last sigil point, and cast a shroud over the land that turned it black in a matter of moments. There'd been no choice but to run for the last sigil and then pray the storm held as she ran harder back through the fields to the shack, sparks of blue flame snapping at her her hair from along the fence line as she went.

There hadn't been enough time to seal up the shutters, plug the cracks in the door with rags and blankets and scribble a sigil on the door as she normally might have. Instead, she'd had to disappear into the basement with little more than a blanket to shield from the dust.

Dust storms came and went quickly, at least.

The cleanup had taken longer. Several hours of sweeping the sand and dirt from surfaces, dragging all the linens out to hang outside and beat the dust from them - because the barrier couldn't keep a storm out entirely. No, it only curbed the force, mitigated the damage.

It was well into the evening by the time she'd finished that, eaten some cold stew, a piece of bread, and settled in at her table with the whiskey Alastor had given her.

She'd earned a bit of celebration hadn't she? She'd managed to get a fire going, all the doors and windows were open to air things out, and she did have a little cough that needed soothing.

Of course, Lotte planned to make the bottle to last, so she hadn't poured too much. Which was.. admittedly hard to do after tasting it for the first time. Little favors allowed her to be alone for the coughing fit that followed her first sip. It was smooth, very smooth, but also by far the strongest thing she'd ever put in her body.

But it was good. Very good, really.

So good that Lotte didn't quite notice the warm, easy slide that took her from pleasantly tipsy to quite drunk all in her first glass.

And how she'd gone from the cheery warmth of sitting by her fire, reading a book by candlelight and listening to the radio to painting a rather large, improvised sigil on the wall of her shack well.... she really didn't know. She felt warm and loose all over, and it seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea to invite Alastor back for a chat and a drink. Why shouldn't she?

He had been more of a friend to her than anyone here! He was clever, had more than a bit of wit, and she missed the particular heat and bite of his magic. Like cinnamon and clove in mulled wine.

Lotte stepped back, wiping the blood on her pale green dress before her eyes fluttered closed and she called. This sigil was not so carefully crafted, but she felt no lack of magic in it, if anything, she felt like she knew how to call for Alastor better. Not at a physical place, so much as a wavelength in the magic, her intuition told her that this sigil was right for what she sought, and it was nothing to funnel her own magic through it to create a proper invitation. A door. All he needed to do was step through, because that was what she wished.

Why don't you come join me for a drink, Mr. Radio Demon?

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[devildo]

Time passed, for Alastor. There was no notable difference in its passage now, to what there had been before, but that was not to say he wasn't keenly aware of Lotte's absence from his life, which was as sudden as her presence had been. The idea of "missing" something that had taken up a mere hour of his life (no longer, yet, than a more fortunate mortal man's might have been) was incomprehensible, and so he would not say that he missed her. Still, those garnet-colored vials of Lotte's blood sat upon the shelf by the fireplace in Alastor's front room, and he gazed at them nightly. Some nights, the temptation to pop the corks, hold the glass in his hand, swallow them in one hot mouthful like a shot of fine brandy, was almost too strong to handle. When it did happen, he did exactly that - took a mouth-filling gulp of brandy and stared at them while he did so, imagining the difference between the two, the sharpness that would settle on his tongue when he finally deigned to drink the blood, in contrast to the burn of alcohol in his mouth.

The light would catch on the vials, shining through them like stained glass, when he lit his fire. This was every night, and it made every night agonizing. If anyone asked (which they didn't), he would say he was only playing a little game with himself, seeing just how long he could deny himself the pleasure of the drink before it drove him insane and he had no choice but to indulge. He would not say, for he did not believe, that it had anything to do with the company of the woman who slashed her wrists and bled for him.

And yet, inarguably, he thought of her: the flames dancing in his hearth, all cliches aside, resembled the color of her hair in the lamplight. The pull of his summoning, the few times it took place in the weeks since his visit with Lotte, sent a flare of curiosity through him - each time, he wondered if it might be her. Each time, it wasn't. (And each time, in truth, he knew better. The feeling of a more practiced act of black magick was incomparable to the artless reaching of someone like Lotte.) Therefore it must be true, in some way, that it was her absence that he missed when he thought of the blood slipping thick down his throat, coating his stomach, settling softly there. Perhaps he would warm it, he thought, before he finally drank it. Doing so would pale in comparison from harvesting it straight from its source, but even the imitation had its worth.

How long he intended to leave those vials there, gazing at them every night from the safety of his favorite armchair, he wasn't sure. The occasion would feel right, one night, he was sure. Or perhaps, some particularly wrought transaction would take place between himself and some insufferable mortal soul who called him up from Hell. Then, he would feel he deserved it, had earned it, could spare the finest vintage in his cellars. So far, the time wasn't right. The days passed, just the same as every other series of ten or so days, in and out, dull and uneventful.

This was the reason for this feeling akin to longing, when he looked at her blood in the firelight. The evening Alastor spent with her was the first in a long time that didn't feel just like the others - the first with a spice, a panache, that the ordinary rhythm of his days just couldn't match. He spilled blood, struck deals, grew interminably and intermittently stronger, but nothing happened.

The blood on the shelf, in itself, was not maddening, but tantalizing. The maddening thing was his sudden awareness that there was no end to this stream of days, repeating endlessly, over and over again. It called to mind an awareness of his youth. There were things here, so many, far older than Alastor. What would be his lot, when he reached their age? Would his mind dull, bashed in by the drudgery of thousand, million, identical days? The thought sent a shudder through him. If he'd contemplated it before, in his time here, it was never with such sincerity.

He wasn't willing to admit this was it.

The night Lotte called for him again was just like any other.

He sat in the same armchair, the same snifter of brandy pressed to his lower lip, poised between sips, the same amber glow shining through the steadily darkening blood on the shelf by the fire. His legs were crossed in the same way as always, one dangling over the other's knee, the same shoe planted in the same pile of the same rug. Light danced off the lacquered shine of his coffee table, tickled at the edges of his vision where it caught the gold leaf in the wallpaper, and dissipated to almost nothing, in the far corners of the opposite wall.

All of this was the same, and he was caught in the same lull of normalcy that nearly every evening possessed, when a heat gripped his chest.

A living man might have thought he was dying. Alastor was startled by it, but no more than that. He looked around, ears craning behind him, listening out for the sign of company at his front door. But it wasn't that. The company was closer, and much more foreign.

Across from him, the barely familiar and yet unquestionably identifiable blackness was growing in the corner of the room. His ears perked, his hair stood on end. If this wasn't Lotte again, he'd be damned. He could swear that it was, the opening between the worlds felt so similar. Racing ahead of him, his shadow slithered across the floor, towards the growing shadow of a doorway on the wall. It wanted to go. It was sure of something he told himself had no reason to be true.

But he stood, setting the glass down and following it. One moment, the fire was crackling behind him, the next, it was in front of him, as he stepped through the passageway, and back into Lotte's familiar home.

She swam into focus in front of him as he parted the veil, the fuzziness of the light bouncing off her curls in that familiar, golden way, until it focused down to a faint back light, a soft halo around the strands of hair that frizzed up from the rest. But she looked wild tonight, her eyes bright and manic, her smile easy. Alastor spied the whiskey bottle on the table, from the corner of his eye. Ah, there was the reason. She'd been enjoying herself, without him.

His feet fully met her floor, bringing him solidly into the room, just a few paces from her. His smile, though practiced and automatic, was genuine. It was a delight to see her so undone, so filled to the brim with the extra boost of confidence that good whiskey would bring. "Good evening, my dear," he purred, and his throat was so hot with the words it was as if he hadn't spoken in a week. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"