TRIGGER WARNING — mentions of suicide

"I'll let you in," said Jessamine, trying her best not to snarl. "But one wrong move, one attempt to control me, to dominate my thoughts, to turn me vicious as before, and I'll find some means to kill myself. I'll go as far as possible to make myself inaccessible to you. Those tree branches? They're sharp, and I can definitely slice my throat with them. Or my veins. Don't think I don't know how."

Not that she wanted to become one of the monsters that had possessed her, but Jessamine knew it was a decent enough threat to them now that they wanted to possess her again. They needed her? Fine; but it'd be on her terms.

They accepted those terms, and within seconds, several demons had surrounded her, getting ready for her.

When they entered her, it felt... weird. Not as ominous and plaguing as it had when they'd shot into her body before, taking over every empty space, filling every cavity with their darkness. Cramping up inside her organs and capturing her mind as their own. No, this time, it was a swifter process, with less of a bitter aftertaste. They got in, they settled where they were needed—muscles, limbs, mostly—and were quiet.

Quiet. No controlling her conscience, no deciding how she'd use her fingers, her feet, how she'd wave her arms, where she'd focus her gaze. No demanding that she bare her teeth and sink them into flesh. Not a single request for her to slurp up blood. And no voices intermingling, one louder than the next, giving her a massive migraine.

"We told you," said one of the demons—one she didn't recall having possessed her the first time around. "We're not here to do damage; it's a time for repairs. And we, demons, are not always destructive."

"We'll only tell you where to go, and which power to use at which time," said another, with a nearly docile lilt to its words. "This is too important to take advantage of. Our goals... those are postponed, considering the chaos around us. We're not idiots."

No, the demons were far from stupid, Jessamine knew that. But they were also sly creatures, hiding their end-game until the time was right. They might not have felt destructive then, but they would later. It was in their nature. And she intended to expel them from her before they had a chance to take her over; she wouldn't be the unwilling participant in their carnage again. Ever.

Landon's possession had gone smoothly, too, but he fidgeted often, wincing at the sensation of having something inside him. As used to the demons as he was, they still irked him, and he'd turned slightly green when they'd started filtering into his bloodstream. The nausea seemingly passed, but he'd never be comfortable having a demon hanging out in his gut—and Jessamine didn't blame him.

She hated how used to the sensation she was. How strangely normal it felt to have someone, something swirling about in her brain. How their powers were familiar, taking up spaces they had before, but without invading her. This time, she appreciated that that something had no say in her thoughts, her movements.

They're only there to instruct, to help. They're not me.

She and Landon floated through the wasteland. The demons' possession inferred most of their powers on their captives, and so Jessamine and Landon were able to fly. For a split second, she'd hoped to use the ability to move away from the oncoming menace—the alternating black and orange clouds, the streaks of neon yellow lightning tearing through the sky, the ominous black figures racing down to the ground, shaking the surface as they landed. But the demons wanted her close, as close as possible, and kept her body facing in the direction they needed her to go.

"We have to push these things back, herd them towards their portals," said one demon, reacting to Jessamine's fear of getting near the shit-storm of negative energy hurdling at them at full speed.

"But how? And I don't even know what the portals look like." Jessamine's interior self panicked, loading up with questions and concerns and catastrophic scenarios she didn't think she'd survive. The demons could hear it, perceive it all, and she expected them to laugh at her. But instead, they infused her with courage, strength, and urged her onward.

"With us inside you, you won't die. And the portals? You'll know when you see them. They're actual gates; iron and tall and clearly out-of-place down here. They stand out."

The description wasn't detailed enough for Jessamine, but she soon glimpsed what she recognized as a gate, and realized that, in truth, the description was spot-on. She noticed it in the distance. It was an iron gate, plain and simple. But it was straight out of a gothic-horror movie, complete with squeaky hinges and sinister, spiked vines wrapped around the bars. And it was the giant key-hole swirling with crimson energy that drew her hyper-fixation.

They'd been flying for what felt like hours when they came across it, after having traversed a thick cloud of smoke. It loomed past the fumes, tall and obnoxious; several others were in the background. All were wide open, and near them, in front of them, and around them, were... battles.

Battles where the portals had been opened and waited to be sealed once more. Battles between recognizable red blobs, striking their energy towards terrifying creatures of all kinds.

Jessamine had to blink and pinch herself a few times to get a clearer vision of those creatures; a vision that didn't come off as a nightmare. It was real, not in her head, not a hallucination.

The flying skeletons she'd spotted earlier were here. They swooped down and screeched, snapping their beaks as they came close to the demons trying to fight back. These demons were nothing but vapor, but if a beaked creature closed in one, it seemingly took a chunk of that vapor into its mouth, as if it had beheaded it. It was a ghastly sight—demons losing parts of their faces, shrinking into the ground as if hiding. Or dying.

Can demons die? Aren't they already dead?

Some beasts looked like demons; but they were bigger blobs of red, brighter shades with glowing eyes instead of black, and emitting a draining energy that turned Jessamine's thoughts darker than ever when she came closer to them.

One such being shot over at the sight of her and Landon. But the demons took over her body momentarily to snap her out of her trance and shove her sideways, out of reach for the demon-mimicking monster.

"You don't want that thing to hop in here," said one demon, sounding breathless as it released control over Jessamine's limbs. She landed swiftly on her feet and her senses fogged over in fear. She'd have reprimanded them, but they'd saved her life; likely not for the last time. She wasn't battle-trained, had no idea how to fight all these terrors, and wondered if she'd gotten in over her head by accepting to go straight into the apocalypse. "If it possesses you, I can't say what horrors it'll put you through. But when those were out in the real world, before being sealed in here, then in their own realm... there were many unexplained human explosions."

Shuddering, Jessamine rolled her sleeves up and took a deep breath. The air was tinged with blood and rot, with a burnt stench from wherever the lightning struck, and with a lingering sulfur odor that itched at her nostrils.

Landon was quiet, retreating into his mind, unwilling to face all the furor head-on. It was a lot, Jessamine agreed; but a part of her wanted to be conscious as she navigated this treacherous terrain. She wanted to remember how she helped the demons, which meant she potentially helped the world after she'd been the reason it almost went down in flames.

Redemption.

Swerving past demons pushing back against the invasion, she noticed human-like beings, grunting and clawing their way out of a portal in the ground; a black hole of sorts swirling with creepy energy.

"Not humans," said one demon, following her thoughts, paying attention to where she'd set her sights.

They were humans, or at least they resembled humans, with legs and arms and heads of hair and mouths. But the radiating red glow around them gave them a surreal air, almost as if they weren't real, weren't there. Their flesh was pallid but slightly see-through, and as Jessamine got closer, she noted their deformed limbs, their disfigured faces. They moaned—a sound that chilled Jessamine's core and immobilized her as she stared in horror.

"They're zombies, in a sense," explained one demon, pulling her away from the scene, giving her some distance. "Corpses of humans who'd made their way into our dimension somehow, but the realm rejected them. All they do is complain about not deserving to be stuffed into another world, because they were meant to be demons, too. The issue was they were too evil for even us, their souls so marked with malice we couldn't contain them here."

Jessamine scoffed. "Too evil for you? I find that hard to believe."

"Is anything hard to believe, at this point?" Landon used his voice for the first time since he'd been possessed, jutting his chin at the unfurling catastrophe below. They'd settled on a ridge—this side of the demonic realm had hills and cliffs that hung over desert-like valleys. "Look at all this—fuck, look at that one," he lifted a shaky arm and pointed to a spot near one of the iron gates, "it's like a grim reaper."

Reapers didn't exist, they couldn't, based on all she'd learned from the demons. And yet, Landon was right—the being that loitered there, blowing fire at the red blobs, was a grim reaper, it had to be. It was a shadow-like figure, tall, with spindly arms and skeletal hands poking out from long, draping sleeves of a black cloak. Its hood covered its face, but Jessamine had no doubt it didn't have a face, or if it did, it was better off concealed. The flames it blew from its mouth—if it had a mouth—incinerated everything in its passage, demons included; as if it had a magical blow-torch under its hood.

Jessamine shivered and glanced at Landon. "This is insane."

"We've reached the heart of the action," said one demon, its voice resonating as it slowly slipped out of Jessamine. It took shape before her and Landon, its black eyes wide and trembling. "We have to go down there and wait by the portals. We can't participate in the actual fighting—our combative powers won't work when we're inside you. But we're part of the final solution: sealing the doors."

He hurried back inside Jessamine, and she and Landon were propelled towards the closest portal. Up close it was even more terrifying, with lightning reflecting off its surface. The spiky vines Jessamine had noticed were similar to those that had wrapped around her when she'd gotten too close to the exit from the realm.

Vines and spikes—a common theme down here?

From this vantage point, she found other doorways waiting to be closed: pointed gates that poked towards the sky, black holes in the ground, like the one the zombie-humans had crawled out of.

"Be ready!" yelled a demon zooming by her and Landon, a strong wind in its wake, nearly knocking Jessamine into the iron gates. She cringed, not wanting to know what would happen if she were to touch them; would she be sucked in, too? "We'll keep pushing, and you close the thing, okay?"

"They only open for the creatures they were destined to contain," said one of the original demons that had possessed her, his voice a distinguishable deep, grating sound. "You and your friend aren't at risk; well, not of disappearing into another world, at least."

Sure enough, as a cluster of demons backed up, drawing a group of skeletal, screeching monsters closer. Jessamine sensed the ground rumbling beneath her feet. The gates squeaked, moving inward, opening up to what seemed to be nothingness—but Jessamine detected a faint hint of an outline there, like a mirage leading into another place. A vapid, transparent cloud ready to suck up anything that didn't belong.

At the last second, the demons shot up, side-to-side, out of the way. Those inside Jessamine moved her in the same direction, and she watched in fascination as the skeletal creatures were guzzled up by the gate. They didn't have real faces, but she sensed their strife, their determination to stay here; the gate didn't care. It jerked them back, took hold of their wings and beaks and slurped them up like a tasty meal.

The gates slammed closed, and the demons poked at Jessamine—this was her and Landon's cue.

"Push on the gates, ensure they're tightly shut," said one demon, hovering near her, catching its breath. "We'll take care of the rest."

The idea of touching the iron still bothered her, but the demons within whispered encouragement, reassuring her that she was safe—for now. Instead of filling her with dread and death, they filled her with hope; a feeling she'd have never expected a demon to hold on to, ever. Power coursed through her, and after a quick glimpse at Landon, they counted to three and set their palms onto the bar's surface.

The coolness of the bars shocked her, as she'd anticipated they'd be hot to the touch. A metallic click resonated, and the keyhole she'd seen earlier brightened, glowing with a green energy that sent her recoiling at its foul stench.

A handful of demons pushed past her, settling in front of the keyhole, their misty red arms outstretched. A film of black blasted from their hands and into the keyhole. After humming in low, spooky voices, they recited some ancient, ominous incantation that emitted another click. This portal was sealed, protected, its inhabitants no longer a threat.

I hope it's not some temporary fix.

Rinse and repeat—Jessamine and Landon pressed their palms to several more iron gates, gripped a few wooden posts, and bent in front of black holes they feared would suck them up. They witnessed more incantations, each one sounding different, each one recited by a different set of demons. There were thousands of them; more than Jessamine had ever imagined, more than what had possessed her up in the human world. They rallied together, put their differences and goals aside, and closed up the realms that were never supposed to be opened.

Realms had opened... because of her.

What if those deadly creatures got out of the demonic realm and into the real world, with humans? How many were left to lock up, how many more were shaken up and out of their realms?

She wouldn't ask herself why; she already knew. It was because of her. Because she was pushed into the demonic realm, and it rattled all the dimensions. Such a powerful end to a prophecy had to have messed up the atmosphere, unearthed dangers once well hidden, broken open places that were never again to see the light of day.

If Jessamine had left the house in the forest when Faz had told her to, when Avery had told her to, none of this would have happened. If she'd stopped pushing, let Faz stay inside her, let him guide her home... perhaps the prophecy might have been averted. If she hadn't pushed her curiosity, putting herself in peril by watching those documentaries on the house... no, none of this would have happened. The prophecy wouldn't have been activated.

As she placed a palm against yet another set of cold gate bars, she gritted her teeth. Yeah, if she'd followed all the advice, she wouldn't have met Avery; or if they came across one another, they'd have never known that they were each other's undoing. That they were, in some strange twist of fate, sort of soul mates. They wouldn't have grown to care for one another.

But she'd be safe. He'd be safe. The world would be safe. Sometimes, not finding love was the right price to pay, and Jessamine should have paid it.

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