Into the Demon City: A Strange Person Indeed!

We emerged from the tranquil twilight of the forest not so much a band of adventurers… as we did a trio of weary, dishevelled, benighted ingénues. How many days had passed in that green labyrinth, I could not say, but a single, bitter thought had taken root in my mind: I had been under the impression that our foxy guide knew the way.

I recalled her leading us in a determined single file—for some time the duo’s hands on their shoulders in a dance—navigating by landmarks of such… personal obscurity—a certain mossy stone here, a bent twig there—that they could have meant nothing to any other living creature possessing a brain. It was only after the third time we had passed the same skeletal, lightning-blasted tree that she had stopped, her ears drooping in shame. Her clan, she confessed, had always frequented the western bank of a certain creek; she had, in her great enthusiasm, mistaken one gnarled branch for another.

Now, back in the present, a great sense of irritation, born of exhaustion and despair, settled upon me. Ashley, however, seemed to have shed all memory of our arduous journey. She gazed upon the distant spires of the capital with a look of pure, unadulterated bliss.

I turned to her, my voice sharper than I intended. "And you," I said, "did you not have your own path from the sewers? Ought you not to have known the way?"

A dark, mortified flush rose to Ashley’s pale cheeks. "I am also quite poor with directions!" she cried, her voice cracking with a sudden, defensive shame.

At last, having exhausted all capacity for surprise or complaint, I let out a final, quiet sigh and looked up. My own petty frustrations seemed to dissolve into insignificance before the spectacle that now unfolded before us.

The city lay beneath a sky of blood-orange and dying embers, a perpetual and sickly twilight that was neither day nor night. From its heart rose structures of a kind my mind could scarcely comprehend: monolithic spires of a jet-black, nacreous substance, almost like polished obsidian, that pierced the strange, orange firmament. They were things of a grim and terrible majesty, catching the sour light upon their surfaces in sharp, unforgiving gleams.

And yet, this vision of dreadful grandeur was not the whole of it. Below these dark titans, and spread between them in vast, open plazas, were structures of an entirely different character. I saw great, open-air colonnades of a pale, lilac-hued stone, and grand stairways that descended to the edges of angular, black canals. Pillars, far more numerous than the towers, were crowned with strange, bulbous, and organic-looking adornments that seemed to pulse with a faint, internal light. It was a city of terrible contradictions, a place where the architecture of some cyclopean hell seemed to stand beside the tranquil gardens of a peaceful melancholy paradise.

My gaze then drifted to the far horizon, to the very edge of this impossible sostenuto. There, the bruised orange of the heavens seemed to bleed into a deep and bloody crimson, and beneath this terrible stain, I could just discern a different vista. The land appeared flatter, and upon it rested low, fortified structures, like inexorable, desolate bunkers, hugging the red earth. It was a terrible rampart at the edge of the world, a place that may only speak of hopeless things.

My bleak reverie was interrupted by the sound of Ashley’s voice, now possessed of a newfound and hopeful energy. "Xiao Ru," she asked, her gaze fixed upon the skyline, "where in this great city is your home?"

In response, the fox simply nodded with an air of supreme confidence and pointed a single, delicate finger toward the mad collage before us.

I blinked, my mind struggling to interpret the intention. What? Did she mean one of the black spires? Or the pale, funereal plazas?

"I keep a rather spacious apartment in that one," Xiao Ru clarified, indicating one of the more bizarre of the structures—a great, curved tower that possessed a curious biological aspect, as if it had been grown rather than built.

Ashley let out a low whistle of pure admiration. "Truly?" she breathed. "Could not our tour begin there, then?"

Xiao Ru hesitated for but a moment before her bright smile returned. "An excellent idea," she agreed. "We could certainly avail ourselves of a drink and perhaps a small snack after our long journey through the forest."

The mere notion of some simple repast, of a cool draught to soothe a parched throat, seemed in this metropolis of fiends a profanity of the mundane, and the very ground seemed to sway beneath my feet. While my companions planned their refreshments, my mind was still grappling with the fact that I stood at the gates of a place that ought only to exist in the pages of story books.

What had seemed, from the fox’s confident point, a destination within easy reach, revealed itself to be a journey of considerable length, a trek across vast, empty plazas and beneath the cool, dark shadows of the black spires. By the time we stood before the great, curved tower, we were foot-sore and utterly spent. Even Ashley, whose unnatural constitution I had assumed would render her immune to such mortal frailties, walked with a listless and heavy-footed gait. I realised then that Xiao Ru’s eyesight, like so much else about her, was of a quality far beyond my own.

The building itself was a monstrous hybrid, a bizarre fusion of the organic and the artificial. Its primary structure rose like a colossal, petrified tree, its walls of a pale, bone-white substance that possessed a texture not unlike aged bark. From this trunk, however, there jutted at unnatural angles great, metallic buttresses and strange, antenna-like structures of a corroded, coppery-green metal, piercing the bone-white edifice like surgical implements.

The entrance before us was a simple, unadorned archway, a dark and gaping mouth at the base of this architectural leviathan, promising either shelter or the belly of the beast.

Xiao Ru led us through the gaping archway without a moment’s hesitation. The orange light of the city was immediately exchanged for a dim, internal luminescence, while the air within was strangely warm and humid, like that of a hothouse, and carried a faint, clean scent of ozone and damp earth.

We stood in a vast, cavernous space. The walls, the same bone-white material as the exterior, pulsed with a soft, bioluminescent glow. Great pillars, like the fibrous, petrified hearts of colossal trees, rose to a ceiling lost in the high darkness. Veins of the same coppery-green metal I had seen outside were embedded in the walls and floor, tracing intricate, circuit-like patterns that seemed to thrum with energy.

Xiao Ru led us to the center of the chamber, where a great, bulblike pod of some dark, polysemous material rested on the floor. At her approach, it opened with a soft sigh, revealing a small, circular interior. We stepped inside, and with another sigh, it sealed us in. Strange as it were, there was naught a sound—only, and only—the deeply unnerving ascent through the heart of the tower. I felt as though we were not in a building at all, but moving through the circulatory system of some colossal, sleeping creature.

The pod came to an equally silent rest, and the door dilated open to reveal a gently curving passage, its walls still glowing with that same soft, internal light. The portals that lined the hall were not simple, rectangular doors, but rounded archways, each sealed by a panel of dark, iridescent material. Xiao Ru stopped before one, placing her hand upon its surface, and with a faint whisper, it slid aside.

As the portal slid shut behind us, I found myself in a large, open, and circular room that served as the main living space. While the other two began to speak, I turned away, my attention captured by its flourishes. A great, curved pane of some transparent, amber-hued material served as the far wall, offering a dizzying view of the mad city below, its orange light now filtered into a warm, honeyed glow. The furniture was of the same hybrid nature as the tower itself: low-slung divans that seemed to grow from the floor like pale fungi, and tables of polished black stone that rested on metallic, root-like legs. In several corners, scrolls and ancient-looking texts were stacked in neat piles.

It was Ashley who broke my reverie, her voice filled with an eager, almost trembling, excitement. "Xiao Ru," she asked, "do you keep... sustenance of my particular kind here? Any blood, perhaps?"

"Ah," the fox replied, with a short, almost nervous laugh. "I am afraid I do not. But... such things can be procured, if you have need."

Ashley gave a theatrical pout, a playful yet distinctly predatory glimmer in her eye. "A pity," she purred, her gaze lingering for a moment on Xiao Ru’s throat. "Perhaps the blood of a fox would suffice in its absence?"

The threat, if it could be called such, was delivered with such a childish air of menace that I found myself too weary to take it seriously. I simply turned my attention back to the great, amber window, and to the endless, alien vista of the Demon City.

As my gaze drifted over the mad panorama of the city, moving past the biological towers and the lilac plazas, it was finally arrested—captured and held fast by a structure that rose from the city’s very heart like a shard of solidified night.

It was a vast and sprawling edifice, a mountain of black glistening stone with white interior contrasts that was at once a fortress and a cathedral, consecrated to some dark and terrible god. Flying buttresses, like the skeletal ribs of some great beast, supported walls of breathtaking intricacy. Its countless spires were so thin and sharp they seemed to wound the sickly orange sky, glittering like dark stars carved into twinkling knives. And here and there, upon its dark façade, were accents of a fiery, gem-like light—great, ornate windows that glowed like ruby broaches pinned to a funeral shroud.

The sheer perfection of its construction was a thing that defied reason; a work of such impeccable and exasperating detail that the eye could find no rest upon it, but was drawn ever deeper into its labyrinthine, gothic splendour.

I was so lost in this reverie of dread and wonder, so completely captivated by the terrible beauty of that black citadel, that I did not hear Xiao Ru approach my side. Her voice, when she spoke, was a mere whisper, yet it cut through my thoughts with perfect clarity. It was a voice hushed and reverent, tinged with a note of awe that might have been mistaken for fear.

"That," she said, her gaze following mine through the amber pane, "is the Obsidian Spire." She paused for a moment, as if to lend the words their proper weight. "It is the palace of our eternal empress."

The words, spoken so softly, nonetheless possessed a great and terrible finality. Empress. The title conjured images of absolute power, of an unassailable sovereign who could command the construction of such a nightmare of stone and shadow. Though, in a manner of speaking, I would contend it almost as a monument to the dead she described it so. I turned from the window then, my gaze leaving the dreadful palace to fix upon Xiao Ru's face, my curiosity now piqued by this new mystery, warring with the instinctual dread the sight of the palace had inspired within me.

"An Empress?" I asked, my voice low. "What manner of ruler is she?"

Xiao Ru’s gaze drifted back toward the window and the dark spire in the distance. "Her name," she said, her voice a hushed and careful thing, "is Cleodiana. She is of an age beyond mortal reckoning; the histories say she has watched stars be born and turn to dust."

She paused, her expression solemn. "She is not the first of her line, but she has been the sole sovereign of the Makai since the Primordial Queen departed upon their Great Journey, a billion years past. Or so the chronicles tell. Such spans of time are beyond the understanding of one such as I."

"Her appearance, it is said," Xiao Ru continued, her voice dropping even lower, "is most peculiar. She garbs herself in the strange vestments of some forgotten or unknowable customs—a severe habit of pure white and deepest black. She is often depicted holding a talisman, a strange, crossed symbol, though its meaning and origin are a mystery lost to the aeons."

A strange sort of hope, a fragile and desperate thing, began to bloom in the barren landscape of my heart. "Is there... a portrait?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper. "Some likeness of her that one might see?"

Xiao Ru looked at me, her head tilted in that familiar, foxy way. "A portrait?" she repeated, as if the concept were a quaint and curious novelty. "Why would you settle for a mere image when you can seek a direct audience?"

The words struck me with such force that I felt a fresh wave of vertigo. "An... audience?" I stammered. "You mean to say that one can simply... approach a being such as her?"

A bright, mischievous laugh escaped her. "Of course! A visit to the palace was to be the grand finale of our tour!"

I could but stare, my wits so entirely overcome that the power of speech had quite abandoned me. The casual manner in which she spoke of meeting a being of such terrifying and cosmic antiquity was a thing my mind could not, and would not, accept.

It was Ashley who spoke next, her voice small but filled with a sudden, desperate hope. "The Empress…" she breathed. "Perhaps... perhaps she possesses the power to restore you to your mortal form." She wrung her hands, a nervous energy seizing her. "It would surely be a more certain path than seeking the City of Blood."

The name sent a fresh chill down my spine. "City... of Blood?" I repeated, the words tasting of ash in my mouth.

"It is a place of pilgrimage," Ashley explained, her gaze falling to the floor. "All of our kind must drink from its fount once every thousand years, or our bodies turn to dust. It is a terrible journey, and it is said that few who seek the city ever find it." She looked up, a faint, desperate light in her eyes. "But there are other tales... whispers of an unmaking, hidden somewhere within its walls."

A solemn quiet fell upon me as I absorbed this new and terrible lore. Two paths now lay before me, both shrouded in the deepest melancholy of impossibility: an appeal to the mercy of a terrible and antediluvian sovereign, or a desperate pilgrimage into a legend of blood and vampires. One was a swift and dreadful judgment; the other, a slow and perhaps fruitless torment.

I, who had spent my life seeking answers, could only choose the more direct, if more perilous, course. The thought of wandering for a thousand years in search of a whispered cure was a horror my practical mind could not entertain.

After a long and heavy silence, I lifted my gaze from the floor to meet Xiao Ru's. My voice, when it came, was steady with a grim sort of resolve. "When may we seek this audience? When do we depart for the palace?"

A look of almost comical exasperation crossed Xiao Ru’s features, breaking the solemnity of the moment. "Depart?" she echoed, her voice rising with an impatient, beaming energy that was entirely her own. "We should depart this instant! The Empress will not wait forever, you know! What are we waiting for?"

Xiao Ru’s tail began to wag with a quick, impatient rhythm, and she adopted a posture of imminent departure, a bright smile upon her face. Ashley, however, let out a plaintive, weary protest. "But we have only just arrived! And these... these divans..." she said, gesturing to the pale, fungoid furniture, "they look so very comfortable..."

I paid her protest little mind, for my attention had been caught by my own reflection, mirrored dimly in a great pane of polished, black obsidian set into the wall. I saw the pale, haunted face of a fledgling oupire, clad in the simple, foreign attire of another world. It would not do. One does not seek an audience with a billion-year-old empress dressed as a common vagrant. "Xiao Ru," I said, turning from my grim reflection, "might I be so bold as to borrow a change of clothes?"

She led me to another of the iridescent panels, which slid aside to reveal a small alcove. Within, hanging in a row of perfect uniformity, was a collection of garments almost entirely identical to the one she currently wore: the white, flowing robes and the voluminous trousers of deep hues. My heart sank with a comical disappointment.

"Is there... a place nearby?" I ventured, my voice small. "A place where one might... procure... different attire?" I asked, already knowing the next hurdle. "Though I confess, I have no money with which to purchase anything."

Xiao Ru looked at me, her head tilted to one side in that curious way of hers. She seemed to fixate on the unfamiliar word. Her brow was furrowed in an expression of the most sincere and absolute confusion.

"Money?" she repeated, the word sounding strange and foreign on her tongue. "What is that?"

A sharp, involuntary gasp of disbelief escaped my lips, a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob. "You... you do not know what money is?" My voice rose with a note of near-hysteria as the sheer, bedrock madness of my situation crashed over me anew.

"But... how does one live?" I stammered, gesturing uselessly at the strange room around us. "How do you buy things? How is your society ordered?"

Xiao Ru simply continued to stare at me, her head tilted, her expression one of placid blankness, as if I were attempting to explain a colour to a person born blind. After a long moment of silence, a light, airy laugh escaped her—the sound of one humouring a poor, delirious child.

"You are a very strange person, Mei-Ling," she said, her smile one of gentle pity. "Come," she commanded softly, turning toward the portal without another word on the matter. "We will find you suitable attire. It is not so complicated a thing as you seem to believe."

I was left standing in the center of the room, my delirious questions hanging unanswered in the warm, humid air. Her inability to even comprehend the foundation upon which my entire world was built was a more terrifying prospect than any fanged creature or dark palace. Silently, my mind reeling, I could do naught but follow.