Kronos
The door to the throne room was heavier than it looked, which I noted as an interesting architectural choice for someone who presumably received visitors regularly, and pushed it open with one hand while keeping the other on my sword hilt.
The room beyond was large in the way that spaces built to intimidate are large — high ceilings disappearing into shadow, the kind of dimensions that make a single figure standing in them feel appropriately small. Torches burned in brackets along the walls in colors that fire shouldn't naturally achieve, casting everything in layered shades of amber and deep red. The floor was some dark stone worn smooth by what I chose not to calculate in terms of years of occupation.
And on the throne at the far end, regarding me with the particular expression of someone who has just noticed something unexpected in an environment where unexpected things are not generally welcome, sat Asmodeus.
He looked exactly like the show. That was my first coherent thought — the slightly surreal recognition of a face I'd watched on a television screen in a life that felt like it belonged to someone else entirely, now sitting in a demon throne room in a realm I had wished into existence. He was watching me with something that hadn't quite resolved into an emotion yet, an assessment still in progress, elegant even in his surprise.
"Well," he said, in a tone that managed to be simultaneously welcoming and deeply threatening. "What do we have here. A human with a sword." He tilted his head. "Am I to understand you've come to kill me?"
The line rose in my mind fully formed, delivered by a fictional character to a fictional villain in a story I'd loved before I died and was reborn into a world where that story was real. There was absolutely no universe in which I was not using it.
"Asmodeus," I said. "I've come to bargain."
Something moved across his face — interest, genuine and sharp, the kind that a creature of his nature and age probably didn't feel often enough to hide when it arrived. He settled back slightly. "Have you. And what is it you've come to bargain for?"
"Your blood."
The interest curdled into something colder. He stood.
The spear beside the throne was in his hand with the fluid ease of someone for whom reaching for a weapon is as natural as breathing, and he descended the throne steps toward me with the measured pace of a predator that has never needed to hurry.
"I see," he said pleasantly. "You're one of those."
I tightened my grip on the blade, got my feet into the stance I'd been developing and refining across twelve hours of demon fighting and several centuries of theoretical practice, and reminded myself that the plan was not to win. The plan was to survive long enough to get what I came for.
He attacked without further preamble, which I respected in a purely tactical sense — no speeches, no circling, just a spear thrust aimed at the space just left of my sternum with the precision of something that had been doing this since before my current civilization existed.
I pushed the tip aside. Misjudged the angle by enough that the blade caught my arm on the way past, a clean slice that burned cold rather than hot, and stepped back to reset.
He came again immediately, no pause to observe the effect of the first exchange. Spear in a horizontal sweep, lower than I expected for a second attack, and I sidestepped rather than blocking this time, let it pass within inches, and swung at his chest in the window that opened immediately after.
He caught the blade on the pole of the spear with the reflexes of something genuinely ancient, and the smug look he gave me over the crossed weapons was the expression of a creature who was having a considerably better time than I was.
Flash step. I was behind him before the look had fully formed, swinging at the same target from a different angle —
He ducked. Rolled clear. Came up already moving into his next attack with the infuriating fluidity of someone who has fought for so long that defense and offense are the same continuous motion.
What followed was approximately thirty minutes of education.
He was faster than me. Not dramatically — the Speed Force kept me competitive in ways that should have been impossible against a greater demon — but consistently, in the small margins that accumulated over an extended exchange into something significant. Every time I thought I'd found the pattern, he shifted it. Every time flash step created an advantage, he was already adjusting by the time I arrived. Cuts accumulated on my body — some shallow, some less so — and healed as they appeared, which was the one comfort available to me in an otherwise humbling situation.
I stopped trying to fight beautifully and started trying to fight usefully.
The mana spread through the blade was a quiet working, low enough that I hoped it registered below whatever threshold Asmodeus was using to track my magical activity. Every time my sword connected — every graze, every partial block that became a slide along his spear's pole — the mana absorbed what it touched. His blood, where it had transferred to the blade. The faintest traces of his energy, which was its own form of information.
A cut here. A cut there. None of them deep enough to actually matter to a greater demon. All of them contributing to what was accumulating along the flat of the blade.
At the twenty-eight minute mark, by my internal count, I had enough.
The mana burst was crude — I was using it as a distraction rather than an attack, a sudden expansion of magical light that hit the visible spectrum hard and bought me approximately three seconds of advantage against a target whose senses were calibrated for the demon realm's permanent ambient darkness.
Three seconds was sufficient.
I was through the throne room door and moving before he had fully recovered.
"Running away?" His voice followed me down the corridor, carrying the particular amusement of someone who can afford to find things funny. "How disappointing. I thought we were only just finishing the warm-up."
"I got what I came for," I called back, which was true, and "I'll be seeing you around," which I suspected was also true and which I was genuinely uncertain how I felt about.
My satchel and the bone-bundle were where I'd left them — good, or at least not worse. I grabbed both without stopping, felt Asmodeus's spear leave his hand via my mana perception approximately half a second before it would have entered my skull, dropped into a dive that became a roll that became me on one knee with my hand on the ground feeling for the realm connection —
The earth realm opened under my intention like a door I'd used before.
I arrived in forest. Green, immediate, the shock of actual oxygen after the sulfur of the demon realm producing an involuntary full-body exhale that I spent several seconds just letting happen. Above me, actual sky — grey and overcast, but actual, not burning, not wrong.
I sat in the leaf litter and laughed until my ribs ached.
It was not dignified laughter. It was the laughter of someone who had just sword-fought a greater demon with no formal sword training, collected biological samples under active combat conditions, and escaped via distraction and a running dive, and who was finding the entire sequence of events simultaneously absurd and genuinely satisfying. There was a cut along my jaw that was already closing. My sword arm had three separate healing lacerations. I had accomplished exactly what I came to accomplish.
When the laughter wound down I got to work — a vial from the satchel, mana extended carefully through the blade to coax the accumulated blood into the collection point, a simple engraving spell to mark Asmodeus on the glass beside the rune inscription. Clean, labeled, stored.
I stood up, adjusted the bone-bundle on my shoulder, and started walking in a random direction with the confidence of someone who knows that forests eventually end.
Three hours later, with the sun dropping toward the horizon in a way that suggested I had perhaps twenty minutes of useful light remaining, the village appeared.
It was different from anything I'd seen in the immortal realm — more structured, more deliberate in its organization, surrounded by a wall that spoke of something specific rather than general caution. The kind of fortification you build when the threat is known and regular rather than theoretical.
Demons don't always need to be summoned, I noted, filing it away. At least not in the earth realm. Of course they don't. The realms are adjacent.
The guard at the gate had runes on his neck and forearms — unmistakable, the angular script of Shadowhunter markings, as familiar to me from the show as any face I might have recognized. He looked at me with the professionally skeptical expression of someone whose job is to prevent bad decisions from walking through the gate, which in this realm was presumably a growth industry.
"Business?" he said.
"Passing through. Supplies and a night's rest. Gone by morning."
He studied me for a moment — the sword on my hip, the satchel, the stick-bundle of demon bones that I had perhaps not thought through in terms of how it looked — and made a decision I appreciated. He let me in and assigned a younger Shadowhunter to escort me to the inn and the supply vendor, which was either hospitality or surveillance and was probably both.
The younger one had the easy confidence of someone comfortable with his own competence, which I found congenial. He glanced at the blade on my hip with the appraising eye of a person who has spent their life around weapons.
"That's well made," he said. "Where did you get it?"
"Forged it myself."
He looked slightly more impressed despite what I suspected was an effort not to. "Really. Looks like quality work." Then, with the competitive instinct of someone who cannot quite resist: "Still, nothing compared to mine."
I looked at his blade — the particular quality of the metal, the way it sat in the world's magical field with a brightness I recognized as significant. "I can see that. What is it made from?"
"Seraphim steel. Gift of the angel Raziel." He said it with the quiet pride of someone whose heritage is the thing they are proudest of. "Cuts through demons like they're not there."
Seraphim steel. The words landed with the weight of something I'd been looking for without knowing I was looking for it. I kept my voice easy. "I'm actually searching for unusual metals — trying to forge something better than anything I've managed so far. Any chance of getting my hands on some of that steel?"
The look he gave me was genuinely kind in its regret. "I don't think that's going to be possible." He stopped in front of a building that announced itself as an inn by every architectural cue available. "Here we are. You'll be comfortable enough."
"Thank you," I said. "Genuinely."
He left. I watched him go and spent approximately thirty seconds feeling mildly guilty about what I was already planning.
Then I went inside, ate a meal that was unremarkable but real, and waited for the village to sleep.
The weapons vault was easier to find than it should have been, which I noted as a security concern I had no current reason to raise with anyone. I apparated in, stood in the dark surrounded by more seraphim weapons than I had expected, and took a moment to simply appreciate the craftsmanship before getting to work.
Ten swords. Four spears. I chose for quality rather than quantity — the pieces that sang clearest in my mana perception, the ones whose metal had the most interesting relationship with the ambient magical field. Wrapped in a containment charm to reduce the carrying problem, back to my inn room in a thought, and then out of the earth realm entirely before the first Shadowhunter woke to begin their morning rounds.
The forge-house in the immortal realm received the seraphim weapons with the quiet indifference of a space that had already seen centuries of stranger arrivals. I laid them out and looked at them in the early light and felt the particular satisfaction of a problem getting closer to its solution.
Then I went to bed. A proper bed, in the forge-house I'd spent several centuries building into exactly the right configuration for a person who needed both a workspace and a place to collapse afterward.
I had been awake for over thirty hours. I had fought a greater demon with insufficient preparation, collected biological samples under combat conditions, navigated two realms, stolen from an organization of angel-blessed warriors, and apparated across the boundaries of reality multiple times.
The fairy realm could wait until morning.
I was asleep before I'd finished deciding that.