Demon Queened - Chapter 80 - Rough Draft

Devilla

“...Goddess?” I whispered, my voice barely audible to even  my ears.

“That’s right!” she answered, picking it up all the same. “In the… well, not so flesh, I guess, what with the whole ‘being kept prisoner’ thing.”

“Prisoner?” I parroted.

“What’s she saying?” Doll demanded.

“Can’t you hear her?” I asked, frowning a little. She seemed to be talking plenty loud to me.

Doll shook her head, though. “I can sense the presence of divine magic, but I can’t hear anything.”

“That’s because I’m speaking in your head!” the Goddess informed me.

“It doesn’t sound like you’re talking in my head,” I muttered. It sounded like she was speaking plain as day.

“Well, that’s because my… I mean, your… Uh… Well, the person I’m most practiced speaking to found it kinda creepy when I did the usual telepathy thing, so I changed it around a little. Think of it like an auditory hallucination!”

“Right…” I murmured. “So it’s all in my head, in other words?”

“Exactly!” the Goddess confirmed. “Mostly because that’s the only place I can be right now. I mean, I totally would have descended in person if I could have! Your prayers are very important to me! I’m just… uh…”

“In prison?” I asked, arching an eyebrow.

I wondered if she could even see it.

“I can! And yeah, I can read your mind, too. Sorry about that - usually I wouldn’t, but we’re sort of in emergency mode right now and you might not always be able to talk aloud…”

“What do you mean always?” I demanded. “You can’t mean to say that you’re just in my head permanently?”

“Nooooooooo? Not really… Just until you free me! Or until the energy I shoved into this spell runs out, I guess, but I sorta panicked and threw a lot in there, and it seems sort of a waste to just let it all go when I’ve got so little of it at hand, so…”

“Right… Your issues with sunk cost fallacy aside, could you perhaps tell me what you meant by prisoner?”

“Prisoner?” Doll asked, furrowing her brow.

“Yup, prisoner… and held that way by my own magic, no less! Specifically the stuff I gave to Luci. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you, don’t you think?”

“Luci’s holding you prisoner?” I parroted back to her, my mind blanking. “With your own magic? How does that even work?”

“Well, the spell’s pretty basic, actually - mostly she just coated the entire room with divine magic, and loaded it full of intent - specifically the intent to keep me here. I probably could have just brute forced my way through it, eventually, if she wasn’t also limiting my diet - she basically built a dam to hold back the worship I’d normally be getting, starved me until I was on the brink of death, and then automated the whole thing to give me just enough food to remain stable… I guess I gave her too much of a free pass with the divine systems, considering how much she mucked around with them.”

“What’s she saying?” Doll asked, again.

“She’s saying she’s being kept prisoner,” I replied. “That Luci is used her own divine magic against her, to build some sort of trap.”

“That… makes no sense,” Doll replied. “Luci’s divine magic comes from the Goddess. Not only that, but the holy magic that sustains her should be coming from the Goddess as well. Surely she could simply cut Luci off at the source?”

“True!” the Goddess confirmed. “Kinda. Let’s go with half-marks, I guess? She’s missing a little. Like the fact that I’m technically just pumping magic into the divine system itself, and letting it handle the distribution and all that. Also, a heart. And a sense of gratitude. You know, if we’re in the realm of listing things she’s missing… I mean, seriously? Letting Abby risk herself like that, without telling you two the whole story? Not cool.”

“Yes, well, as much as I may agree with you, I’d rather focus on the fact that you’re powering the very person who’s captured you. Can you not just cut her off?”

“Without access to a divine terminal? Not really. I mean, I guess I could disconnect from the system as a whole, but… then the world would stop turning. Or maybe start turning at a different speed? It’s a lot smaller than Earth, so it probably shouldn’t be rotating at the exact same rate… not to mention the speed at which it orbits the sun, the level of gravity it exerts, and all that other stuff I just copied over from Earth. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what would happen if I stopped the magic and turned on the physics. Probably nothing good, though.”

“...Right. So that’s not an option, then, I take it?”

“Nope! Not unless we want Luci to win. I mean, the whole reason she trapped me here was because of my ‘unhealthy obsession’ with keeping the mortals alive… To tell you the truth? I kinda messed up in making this world. Bad. I mean, it wasn’t even meant to be a fantasy world to begin with! But then I had to go and make that stupid English spell, and next thing you know the thing’s getting overloaded and there’s divine magic spilling out all over the place and it’s just… ugh. Luci thought I should just scrap the whole thing, and start over, but I didn’t want to kill all the humans, you know? Not to mention all the cute monster girls that started popping into existence… That’s why I begged my parents to stabilize things for me, instead. Which they did! At the cost of me spending the next hundred years at coding boot camp… Luci was not pleased, let me tell you. We got into a real screaming match about me ‘picking lowly mortals over her.’ I thought she’d calmed down enough, by the time I actually left, but… instead she fast forwarded the time stream all the way, making it so that I was gone two thousand years, instead of, like, five, like it would have been on the slowed down settings I left it at… I can’t believe I missed so much development! Not to mention the whole keeping me prisoner, thing, I guess, but honestly, now that the timestream’s going one-to-one again… I mean, what’s twenty-ish years, really?”

“...I’m sorry, can you repeat… all that? Preferably with more explanations? Such as what the hell an ‘English spell’ has to do with the creation of monster girls!? Not to mention the whole fact that two thousand years of war is… what? The result of some lover’s spat on your end?”

“I mean, I’d say it’s more that on Luci’s end than mine. To me, it’s more like what I thought was my best friend locked me in a room and demanded I kill an entire world full of people if I ever wanted my freedom again… but if you wanna classify all that as just a ‘lover’s spat’ like your ancestor does, feel free.”

“...No, I suppose you’re right… It’s just odd to imagine the literal Goddess as a victim in all this, when all my life I thought you the spurious cad who’d abandoned us all…”

“Well, if it helps, you can think of me less like a Goddess, and more like your… uh… actually, nevermind. Let’s just stick to Goddess for now. Less complicated…”

I frowned, wondering for a moment whether I should push - or whether I even wanted to. Only my angelic nature was keeping me from developing a headache as things stood, to be honest - did I really want more of my worldview twisted and shattered at this point?

Yet, at the same time, I couldn’t bring myself to entirely let things go go… “You still haven’t explained the English spell.”

“Right… So. You know how everyone here speaks English? It’s because of a custom spell that makes it really easy to learn the language. Whenever someone figures out a new food or device or anything that has an English counterpart, they’re sorta struck with inspiration for the right word - and that word always sounds right and is ‘somehow’ super easy to learn and remember, so of course it sticks and spreads, and… Look, I just didn’t want to have to learn a new language every time I checked in on the planet, okay? So I made a spell that would keep things nice and consistent. Except I sucked at coding it, and the damn thing broke - irradiated the whole world with divine magic… Literally. Arcane magic is basically just a radioactive byproduct your bodies have learned to adapt to.”

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t.

Honestly, my brain was struggling to process even a portion of what she’d shared with me… mostly because I was still stuck on a singular, early detail.

“Are you telling me… that Sollian is actually just English!?” 

***

Abigail

***

I felt fine. Perfectly fine. More fine than I’d ever felt in my entire life. Not just more fine, in fact - more everything. As in, I could literally feel every fiber of my being, all at once, and I just knew that every inch of my existence was fairing better than ever before. My skin felt smoother, my hair somehow ‘felt’ glossier, and my body was thrumming with energy.

Again, literally. Warm, yet somehow dark energy. Energy like nothing I’d ever felt before. It made my pitiful arcane energy reserves feel actually nonexistent by comparison, like a spark standing next to a bonfire.

It didn’t feel like my arcane magic capacity had gotten any bigger, either…. at least at first. Then I noticed that it was growing slowly, but surely. It didn’t take long to figure out the truth from there - while the actual amount of arcane energy in my body hadn’t changed, my capacity had. It seemed almost endless… though, from what Devilla had told me, it actually wasn’t.

 Either way, it was going to take a while for my reserves to fill up. Maybe days, judging by how long Devilla had been out of action. That was weird to think about… 

“Yes, I know you warned me to close my eyes, but after a minute or so of them just glowing I thought nothing was going to happen!”

My eyes snapped open at the sound of Devilla’s voice, only to find her rubbing the palm of her hand into her own eyes. 

“I didn’t say it was your fault,” Devilla continued. “I’m just saying it caught me off guard…”

Right. So Devilla was talking to herself… or to Doll? Who was also here - which… I mean, of course she was here, I could literally remember talking to her just a couple minutes ago. With, like, crystal clarity. As if someone had just frozen the moment in time, and put it up in a hallway for me to go look at whenever I wanted.

Was that what all of Devilla’s memories felt like?

I shook my head, and let out a soft groan - not because I was in pain, but because I couldn’t come up with a more articulate way of letting Devilla know I was awake. At the same time, I pushed myself up off the ground… A little too hard, in fact,  as I immediately went flying towards the ceiling, slamming into it and then crashing back to the ground.

Devilla winced, but I… didn’t really feel any pain. I mean, sure, there’d been a bit of discomfort at the moment of impact, but it had gone away pretty damn quick, and now I just felt… fine.

“This is going to take some getting used to,” I muttered, running a hand through my hair. Was it just me, or did it feel somehow smoother and softer?

“I imagine it will,” Devilla replied, a relieved looking smile on her face. “I would advise against exerting force on anything until you learn how to control your body, though.”

“Easier said than done,” I grumbled. “What am I supposed to do? Just lay here? I mean, just trying to push myself off the floor catapulted me to the ceiling!”

“If I may,” Doll interrupted, “I would say that it’s not your strength you need to learn how to control, but your mindset.”

“My mindset?” I asked, blinking. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“A Demon Queen - or rather, an angel is only ever as strong as they need to be. Devilla does not control her strength directly - she doesn’t need to. Her maximum strength is whatever she needs to output in the moment. By contrast, us mortals tend to think in terms of limitations. We put forth a portion of our strength at any given time. A percentage of it, even. Yet when one has nigh infinite strength, trying to unleash a portion of it is… ill recommended.”

“...Riiiiiight…” I said, doing my best to parse through what she said. Thankfully, I could remember every word perfectly, so it wasn’t actually as hard as it could have been. “So you’re saying I’m more like Devilla, right? As strong as I need to be? And I just need to… what? Just… change how I think about exerting strength entirely?”

“In a nutshell,” Doll agreed. “Though I’d say the fact that you still think of it as exerting strength is part of the problem. If you’re already as strong as you need to be, then trying to draw on more power will only cause you problems.”

“Don’t worry!” came a new voice - and I couldn’t help but notice that Devilla’s posture sagged in relief the moment she heard it. Then again, I guess I was pretty relieved, as well… “We can train together! I’m pretty used to only using part of my strength, though - I wonder if that’ll actually make me weaker for a bit?”

“Maybe,” I hedged, crossing my arms and trying not to let too much of my relief show. “Though I’m guessing neither of us can exactly qualify as weak anymore.”

“Not if you’re as strong as me,” Devilla confirmed, with a grim nod. “But, unfortunately, I don’t believe we have much time for you to get used to your strength… I need to head back to the holy city, immediately.”

“I’m coming too!” I said, even before Lucy could reply. “I mean… assuming I can figure out how to make my wings disappear…”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” Devilla replied, shaking her head. “I fear subtlety and concealment are no longer on the menu. According to the Goddess, there was a price to pay for rescuing you - just as she intervened for us, Luci will have interfered for them. We should assume, if nothing else, that the Grand Patriarch knows everything about us now…”

“So why did you want to get back to the holy city, then?” I demanded.

“Isn’t it obvious?” she asked, arching an eyebrow. “I’m going to dispose of the Grand Patriarch before he has a chance to get away.”

~~~

Author's Notes

Have you ever wondered how Devilla could possibly know the Sollian word for "potatoes" despite never having seen one in this life? Because I did. I thought about it a lot. To the point where it became a massive plot point that - while arguably largely irrelevant to current events - essentially shaped the backstory of this universe. What can I say? I just really hate plot holes!

On another note, I've been coming out of depression a little! Enough to write at least. Enough to write a lot. Hope you're ready for more, because I... probably will be soon!