Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0136

Chapter 136

The room had been ready for hours, and Erick still couldn’t bring himself to leave.

He scanned the perimeter again, eyes half-closed, tracing the dividing line between the white floor and the gray wall with the patience of a man who had already checked everything twice and intended to check it a third time. A whole day had passed since he last closed his eyes. His body kept no record of this debt. Beneath a skin he himself had created, his machinery functioned with an efficiency bordering on the absurd, filing away fatigue as a mere murmur and sleep as an option he could refuse for days on end. That night, he refused it not out of stubbornness, but because a single mistake in that room would not grant him the courtesy of a second chance to notice it.

When he slept, he slept for reasons that had nothing to do with rest. None of those reasons applied now.

The runes offered him nothing to correct. He had spent the rest of the day filling them in by hand, kneeling on the cold alloy with a brush finer than a needle, applying the reinforcing glyphs that Morgana had proposed to the grooves already carved by the milling machines. The additional layers were now in place, redundancy upon redundancy, each alphabet covering the holes left by the others. He had calculated the arithmetic of the cage so many times that the numbers had ceased to mean numbers and had come to mean security, which was the only meaning he wanted from them.

He stopped beside the north anchor, held it under his gaze for a few moments, and determined that it was perfect.

“It’s ready,” he said.

To his right, the air thickened and rippled, and the hooded figure emerged from it, its garments equal parts shadow and moving code. The hood leaned toward the circle in the center of the room, the red diagram waiting on its white bed like a machine that had never been switched on.

All systems confirm the integrity of the confinement, sir. If anything fails tonight, it will fail within these walls.

“Great.” He let the word sink in. “That’s the only promise this room has to keep.”

He walked to the pedestal, and the black tome was where he had left it, heavy in a way that its size refused to explain. He opened it and began to leaf through the pages.

The book resisted him as always, starting in the middle, refusing him a title, an index, or a single author willing to claim it. Name after name, an unpronounceable name, slipped under his thumb, each accompanied by an illustration and a file so dense it would shame his own databases. He wasn’t just leafing through it. He knew, more or less, what he was looking for. He wanted something small.

The page stopped him on its own.

The illustration was done in black ink that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it, and the artist had not done the subject any favors. Crouched and bent over, the creature carried the bent horns of a ram atop a skull that was almost all jaw. Bat wings folded against a swollen torso. A tongue hung from its mouth, far too long for it, and its hands ended in claws that seemed made for a single verb.

Erick the lion.

A lesser demon. The census ranked him near the bottom of every hierarchy in which he appeared, one step above pure beast and nothing more. One instinct governed him, and that instinct was hunger. He ate. He chewed, swallowed, tore and swallowed again, beyond the point of satiety, beyond the point of unconsciousness, chewing on living flesh until his own stomach ruptured under the pressure. Then, he curled up around his own ruin, healed in the darkness, and awoke to begin the cycle again. The archive used a single word to describe his nature: Gluttony. He was never satiated. He could not conceive of satiety. Even without space within himself, appetite continued to crave, because appetite was the only part of him that had survived whatever he had been.

He continued reading. A robust build, strength disproportionate to its size, a tolerance to fire and heat that would have cooked any mortal being. Conversely, two obvious vulnerabilities: extreme cold and light. And below these capabilities, in the smaller handwriting the book reserved for its most cruel notes, its origin.

A soul dragged down and left to rot. Centuries under the patient work of the pit, until the day it stopped resisting and surrendered to sin. The transformation was slow. In the end, there was no longer a man within the form, only desire, wearing a body that desire had chosen.

Erick closed the matter in his mind and left the book open to the page. The choice satisfied him for purely economic reasons. He wanted his first attempt to fail cheaply, if it failed at all, and there was very little in the cosmos cheaper than that.

There was a greater form behind the choice, and he allowed himself to observe it for a moment. That night was a test, nothing more. If something smaller could be torn away whole, held, and bent into obedience without the ritual consuming it from within, then the deeper entries in the book would cease to be illustrations and become options. He wasn’t doing this to possess a glutton. He was doing this to discover if the door even opened, even with the smallest and cheapest hinge he could find.

He reached the edge of the circle and stopped there without crossing it. The rule existed outside of it on purpose. The rules a man creates for himself are the easiest to break with his own arguments, and this was the one he had vowed never to break.

He closed his eyes, raised his hands, and began to speak.

The language was not made for a human throat. It came out of him wrong on purpose, each syllable slightly distorted, older than grammar and hostile to it. On the walls, the torches he had lit precisely for this purpose awoke one by one, blossoming into a low flame that did not respond to any air current. In the center of the diagram, the white floor seemed to deepen, develop a distance that did not belong to it, and then split.

The crack opened with the sound of a breathless sigh, and something climbed out of it.

He recognized it immediately and, in the same instant, saw where the illustrator had failed. No drawing had captured his height, just over five feet three, or the beard that hung from his chin in filthy strands, tangled with whatever he had eaten. His stomach was full. Distended, tense, still functioning. He was in the middle of a meal when the summons interrupted him, and the interruption showed in his eyes before anything else.

She looked around and screamed. Rage, pure and stupid, her tongue whipping the air as her head snapped. Then she found him and leaped.

The speed was impressive. It crossed half the room in the blink of an eye, wings spread, claws extended, and struck the barrier at the edge of the circle with all its might. The invisible wall absorbed the blow without a sound and returned it with all its force. The creature bounced, staggered, and rolled until it stopped on the white floor, and for a moment simply remained there, assimilating the existence of the wall.

Understanding came slowly. She steadied her paws, tested the air with a claw, felt the perimeter close in on all sides. Then she turned to him, and when she spoke, the ancestral language flowed from her far more naturally than it had flowed from him.

“Who are you, human? And why did you bring me here?”

It worked.

The thought passed through Erick’s face without altering his expression. Months of him and Morgana sifting through sources built to resist reading, cross-referencing information from texts that deliberately contradicted each other, and the proof of this was right there, menacing, in a cage he himself had welded shut. He didn’t let any of this show on his face.

“My name,” he said, “is irrelevant.”

The creature’s lip curled, revealing its teeth. The sound it made was closer to a gag than a word, a disgust disguised as language, as if the very act of being addressed by him had left a bad taste in its mouth. She looked at him as one looks at food after learning to speak.

“I brought you here to work for me,” said Erick.

For a moment, the demon said nothing. Then it laughed, a wet, undulating laugh that rattled the fat of its belly, and threw one of its clawed hands toward him in a gesture that no translation could soften.

“Work,” he hissed. “For you. You think you’re a lord, mortal? You exude a scent of life that I could pass by sleeping. A worm. A meal that still hasn’t understood it’s a meal.” He bared his teeth even more, and the laughter continued. “You really believe you have what it takes to command me?”

“Well,” said Erick, and a smile appeared slowly. “Let’s find out who breaks you first. The well, or me.”

He gave the order without saying a word.

The circle awoke.

The laughter died in the creature’s throat and returned as a scream. It cowered, its claws scratching its own arms, tearing furrows into its own skin as if the enemy were hiding beneath it and it wanted to unearth it. It fell to the ground and thrashed about, and between screams, managed to gather enough strength to formulate the question.

“What are you doing to me?”

Erick walked around the ring, his hands clasped behind his back, watching as a man watches a machine he built come to life for the first time.

“I replaced your blood with acid,” he said.

The creature convulsed. He let it continue for a calculated moment, then softened his command, and the fire gradually died down. The trembling lessened. The circle darkened. The creature lay panting on the white ground, enveloped in a layer of sweat, and raised its head and stared at him with a hatred that, at least, had ceased to underestimate him.

“Damn worm. Release me now, or I will—”

The ring widened before it was finished.

This time, the scream had a different form, as did the thing that produced it. Her arms went limp, boneless, bending at angles no arm should reach, falling to the ground like empty gloves. Erick’s voice reached her through the noise, still calm, still in the ancient language.

“I traded your bones for salt and chlorine.” He crouched down to the creature’s eye level, out of line. “Tell me. In all your centuries down there, in every pit you’ve crawled through, have you ever seen anything like this? Can hell create something like this?”

He relaxed the command. The bones met again within the shattered limbs, and the creature pulled them against its chest, nestling them tightly, and stared at him furiously, without ceasing to gaze.

“Worm,” he spat.

The word cost him his tongue.

The ring caught the curse when she left, and where the tongue had been, there was nothing, and down her open throat came ground glass, a bright, shrill rain, tearing the creature apart from the inside as it fell. When the glass reached the swollen stomach, it suddenly turned to salt and accumulated against the already raw flesh. The thing couldn’t even scream properly. It could only manage a faint cry.

Erick reversed the process. The tongue, throat, and entrails regenerated, and the demon lay amidst the remnants of all that he had done, his entire body trembling with the memory of the pain, more than with the pain itself.

He stood up, looked down, and for the first time that night, felt completely unhurried.

“Now,” he said. “Let’s see how many of you there are.”

…

Three days later, the room was silent.

The demon lay in the center of the circle, its arms and legs outstretched away from its body, its wings spread and pressed to the ground, held there by the sweat it had poured out for three days, until the white beneath it turned gray. Nothing about it now resembled the creature that had crossed the room in the blink of an eye. The figure had not shrunk, but emptied itself. The strength that had once tolerated fire, the appetite that had once devoured living flesh, had all vanished into the circle, leaving a body so exhausted it could barely close its own mouth.

He had endured much. Bones remade and undone. Blood turned to acid and back again. Eyes ground to dust and restored so he could watch them being ground again. Flesh frozen to crack, skin ripped off and reattached, three days of a catalog that Erick examined slowly and without repetition, because repetition would have let the creature learn the form of what was to come, and he was careful never to let it learn anything but impotence.

Morgana had been present throughout, a patient shadow at the edge of the room, and hadn’t spoken a single word except to report. Every reaction recorded. Every command timed in relation to the response it provoked. Somewhere inside her, a model of this creature was forming from three days of data, and Erick knew that the next thing he pulled from the book would find a version of it that he had already practiced.

And yet, none of that brought an end to everything.

What really broke him was that he went three days without eating.

It was gluttony. His stomach was all he was, and never, in all the ruin of his long unlife, had his stomach been left empty. Sin was not a habit for a creature like that. Sin was fuel. It was the current that fed the creature, the matrix from which its strength was drawn, and Erick simply cut off the supply and waited. Everything else he had done was theater. Starvation was the work. A demon with nothing left to feed on is not a demon in any sense that matters. It is a sack of appetite with no appetite at all, a shell that has forgotten why it should continue wanting to survive.

The creature turned its head toward her, slowly, because turning its head was almost all it had left.

He had arrived there certain that he was mortal. Three days had shattered that certainty as completely as they had shattered everything else. Whatever it was, it had taken him to his very core and kept him there, and he no longer believed that the ground had a bottom.

“Are you ready to send it?” Erick asked. “Or would you like three more days?”

The creature couldn’t raise its voice to reply. It looked at him through the wreckage of its own face, and that look was answer enough.

“Do you accept?”, he asked.

The demon managed to make a single movement. He moved his head down and up, just once.

“Good.”

He gave the order, and the creature braced itself for the fire, but the fire did not come. Instead, something warm moved through the empty stomach, and the emptiness began to fill. Flesh, springing from nowhere and from all sides, filled the stomach that had been empty for three days. The effect was immediate and obscene. Strength returned to the limbs it reached, wings detached from the ground, claws flexed and found their grip. The thing rose, its belly round and firm again, and swayed in the center of the circle, whole, fed, and terrified.

He looked at the one who had done this, the one he no longer allowed himself to call human, and his fear had many layers.

Other masters could have humiliated him in the same way. That was the truth, and the truth offered no comfort. There were things in the abyss that could have inflicted worse suffering, and you wouldn’t even care. But such things didn’t bother him. To the lesser powers, a lesser demon was cattle, disposable and forgettable, unworthy of the effort of cruelty. He, however, had chosen the effort. He had spent three days on a creature that the entire cosmos agreed was worthless. The demon didn’t remember the man he had been before the abyss unraveled him, didn’t remember the world he was born into, or the name that world had given him. Centuries had consumed all that, leaving the void in a borrowed form. There, standing, full and trembling before the thing that had summoned him and that would now possess him forever, all he could do was tremble.

The creature approached the inner edge of the circle and descended, its wings folded and its head bowed toward the ground.

Erick observed the kneeling figure on the other side of the red line.

“Will you obey all my orders?”

The voice returned, deep and hoarse. “I accept.”

“Will you preserve and protect me, at any cost to yourself?”

“Accepted.”

“Will you thwart any conspiracy against my plans, against me, or against my family?”

“Accepted.”

“Will you become a tool? Fuel for the things I intend to do?”

“Accepted.”

“Will you allow your mind to be transformed and fully integrated into the purpose of serving me?”

The creature stopped here.

She understood this. The others had stolen her freedom; this one had stolen the last thing that remained of her freedom, the small, dark room in the center of her, where, however faintly, she still belonged. To say yes was to agree to her own absence, to surrender not obedience, but the self that one day might have resented obeying.

The creature raised its eyes to his, searching for another door out of the room. There wasn’t one. There never had been. And a demon, whatever it is, is a coward above all else, made to save its own skin and nothing more noble. So, it looked into the eyes of the thing that had broken it and chose the only way to survive available.

“Accepted.”

With each word, she felt a piece of herself leave and not return, crossing the line and entering him. Now, she would never betray him. She couldn’t even consider a conspiracy against him. Whatever he had been, now he was fuel and tool, and he knew it.

“You know how your species’ magic works,” Erick said. “A pact, once made, cannot be broken.”

He reached into his sweatshirt pocket and what he pulled out didn’t belong to this century. A parchment, the paper aged to the color of ancient bone, its surface covered in ancient writing that he himself had scribbled. The demon held his breath. Of everything he had seen in that room, this was what frightened him the most.

“It was hard to find,” Erick said, observing the reaction and storing the information in his memory. “Even harder to get. But you know how it is.”

“Of course.” The words came out in a whisper. “Only to you gentlemen is this granted.”

Erick allowed himself to feel the satisfaction, briefly and silently. Months of work rested in his hand. A contract parchment, something that hell jealously guarded and reluctantly made almost impossible to obtain outside the most intimate circles. Everything written on that page became binding the moment it was sealed, indestructible. It bound the signatory to every clause contained therein and, in case of non-compliance, whether through incapacity or refusal, it stipulated penalties that fell not on the body, but on the soul. The oath the creature had already uttered would have kept him bound to it on its own. But Erick was, by habit, paranoid, and he didn’t trust any intermediary to keep anything secret.

He placed the parchment on the inner edge of the ring.

The demon read. Slowly, from beginning to end, his ruined eyes scanning line by line, because a lesser demon is a lesser demon and still a demon, and this was the only document in the world that deserved his full attention. When he reached the end, he bit his own thumb until it bled, spread the dark blood across the tip of his claw, and pressed the mark where the page awaited him.

The parchment caught fire. The writing became fixed, and the entire material transformed from parchment into something that could no longer be torn, and then it split in two. One half remained on the ground. The other appeared in Erick’s hand as if it had always been there.

He folded it and put it away.

“It’s done now.”

A thought broke through the barrier. The pressure at the edge of the circle dissipated, and Erick gestured with his hand.

“For.”

The demon crossed the line against which it had thrown itself three days before, and this time nothing stopped it. It stopped beside him, with a full head and lower than him, and kept its eyes fixed on the ground.

“This is truly impressive,” Erick said, more to himself, looking at the thing that was now, in every sense that the well understood, his. The demon listened and said nothing. His soul was trapped behind a lock he himself had unlocked, and he was beginning to understand exactly how permanent the pact he had made was.

Erick smiled.

“Very well.” He turned to the door, and the demon turned with him because it couldn’t do anything else. “Time for your first task.”

The smile widened, and there was very little in it that a merciful person would have recognized.