Awakening to a clear day in Hill Hill, Luos wasn’t going to spend it under his uncle’s thumb. There were places a twelve year old could explore, and having just moved here a month ago, he had a lot to catch up on.
“Balance the books and you can go into town,” his uncle said. “It shouldn’t take you long at all.”
Luos’ uncle was referred to by the village locals as Skinflint, mostly affectionately. Luos just called him Uncle. And while it was true it wouldn’t take Luos long to balance the books for the smithy, he didn’t want to spend time looking at numbers and writing down answers. He could be outside listening to the warbling of the pigs, climbing trees, and stretching his legs.
The table his uncle gave him to do the book work for the smithy was suited for someone taller than Luos. The chair was tall enough to make his legs dangle, and the table was tall enough from the seat of the chair to make him raise his arms to put his elbows on it. Not to mention, the book was very heavy when Luos had to pull it out and put it away.
But as much as Luos yearned to freely act childish, he cared about his uncle. Skinflint didn’t have his – Luos’ - abilities, so simple mathematics like sums, multiplication, time value of money, forecasting, inventory, purchasing, and overhead, which took Luos mere seconds to perform, required his uncle to spend hours of his time scratching his head and scribbling in the margins.
Luos looked at the book. In it were all the transactions of the year that had passed under the roof of the little smithy. He glimpsed briefly into the lives of his uncle’s customers as he read them. Here was an order for a wrought iron gate door. There a repair for a cracked tiller blade. A new edge on an heirloom sword. Pigshoes. Wrought iron ornaments. A hundred centerpiece candlestick holders.
He looked at the page of numbers. With the whole sheet in sight, he closed his eyes and opened them again.
The image of the page distorted almost automatically in his mind.
The scrawled, halting script of his uncle transformed into neat uniform script. The numbers aligned into columns. Running tallies ticked up according to their role on the double-entry form. Calculations unfolded and dispersed, spreading to the various calculations like a drop of ink in water.
In mere seconds, Luos was ready for the next page.
He had no blank paper beside him, nor did he have a quill or bottle of ink. He wouldn’t know what to do with them if he had.
The numbers did what numbers do, he would say, automatically, in the images in his head.
When he got to the end of the ledger, seven-hundred and fifteen pages later, Luos closed the book.
He scooted back his chair with some effort and hopped down. He headed for the chalkboard behind him.
On it were rows of records, their fields and lines painted there, chalk figures drawn in the cells. This was the reporting board his uncle required him to update. It contained the current expected inventory of materials based on the transaction history. Luos erased the value next to “coke” and wrote a new number. He ran down the list, nodding at each.
Satisfied they were all well within expected demand, he turned back to the table, picked up the ledger, and carried it to a nearby shelf. He slotted it into a space between an identical tome and the wall of the shelf, and then
“Luos!”
Pulling his hand away, there was a cat sitting on the bookshelf which hadn’t been there before. Luos was so startled at the noise he fell clear to the ground with a cry.
“Luos! This isn’t real!” the cat said as it jumped onto his chest.
The boy blinked, having realized the cat had spoken to him. It had said his name. And he recognized this cat, too. Wasn’t it-
“I apologize for startling you, but the construct you threw up around you-…” the cat paused and coughed, seeming almost embarrassed for a moment., “It surprised me, is all. It took me a little longer than normal to break in.”
Luos recognized the cat, now. “Peezlebub?” Yes, he could recall the time he spent with Samsian, learning how to use his abilities, learning about the world of magic. “But what am I doing back at Uncle’s smithy?”
“You created this construct in your panic during the ritual, likely based on a memory of yours. It’s rather good.” The cat hopped off his chest and rubbed up against the desk leg.
Luos looked around the room with fresh eyes. “This is all…fake?”
“Yes, boy. And you have control over it. It might not be something you’re consciously aware of, but this is your private space, your creation. If I thought it would be staying much longer, I certainly wouldn’t be appearing before you as a cat.” He scoffed even as he started to lick a paw, but with tongue extended suddenly stopped, scowled a feline scowl and put the offending paw back down.
“What do you mean, Peezle? Of course you’re a cat.”
“No, boy. I only appear as a cat in the physical realm. Here, I take whatever form suits me. Or would if it weren’t for the rules of this wretched space you allocated.”
Luos screwed his face up at the cat. By now he kneeling at the desk, eye-level with the cat. “I’m still not sure what you mean.”
Peezlebub rolled his slitted eyes. “Well, how about this? Does your elbow hurt?”
Luos lifted his arm – “No, no, your other elbow.” – and worked it out. “No? It feels pretty normal to me,” he said.
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“You took a pretty hard fall onto it when I surprised you,” the cat mused, “You fell right onto the joint on this hard stone floor. Isn’t that odd?”
“Yeah, I suppose so,” Luos said. He cradled his supposedly injured elbow. Should it be hurting?
“It doesn’t sound like I’ve convinced you. Well, let’s try something else.” Peezle glanced over the tomes on the shelves, as if trying to spot a fly. Then, he hopped up on a third tier shelf and walked daintily along the thin purchase the books begrudgingly afforded before he stopped.
“What is in this one?” Peezle said, lolling his head at the tome.
“That one would be…” Luos counted backwards from the most recent ledger to the one where Peezlebub stood, “That one would be Winter from three years back.”
“Are you sure it’s not an encyclopedia of insects native to the region, complete with hand-drawn color illustrations?”
Luos chuckled, “No, of course not. What would Uncle need one of them for?”
“Open it.”
Luos grabbed the book, sliding it out by its spine, and split it on the desk to a random page. There, as though pressed flat, were beetles. Flaxgorgers with their polka-dotted shells, bumblebeetles with their black and yellow stripes, Pinefretters with their front-facing needles, and more lay on the pages, some clinging to the stems of flowers or posing on a piece of bark. If it weren’t for the spidery handwriting accompanying the bugs, Luos would have thought the smithy infested. He turned the page, flipping through grubs, butterflies, mantids, and ants.
“This is a document the old man and I had been working on,” said Peezlebub by way of explanation, regarding Luos’ knitted brow coolly, “I just had to import it into your construct. Your attention to visual detail was remarkable, I grant you, but we will need to work on your security skills.”
“Why would Uncle have a book like this?” Luos stammered.
“Listen to me, boy,” the cat commanded, “this is not your world. This room, this desk, this book… all are but shadows to a realm which no longer claims you. You and I? We are creatures of spirit.”
The voice with which Peezlebub spoke – resonant and powerful – was completely at odds to the calm of the room. The light still filtered through the dirty window, illuminating motes of dust in its path to the floor. Luos would have expected the rather cramped enclosure, filled with shelves and sound-dampening books to mute Peezlebub’s words, which nonetheless echoed as though in a cavern.
“You are a daemon now, boy. We do not breathe, we do not eat. I have tried to sway you, but our time runs short. Banish this construct of yours so we may complete the ritual. Yes, it continues even now, and it demands your attention and presence. Do you wish to fail?”
Luos found himself shaken by Peezlebub’s words. But he didn’t feel his face flush, or his stomach flutter, or his blood run cold. Instead, he found himself merely acknowledging the fear without truly feeling it. It made him feel numb.
“The ritual continues?” he stammered.
Peezlebub nodded. “But the stakes have changed.” The cat’s voice, no longer inflected to intimidate, no longer reverberating, no longer sounding from fiery depths, now sounded…. What? Sad? Weary? It did nothing to abate Luos’ concerns.
“Peezle, what do you mean?”
“I mean, boy, that you are to no longer be called Luos.”
“If not my given name, then what am I to be called?”
Peezlebub, now looking fully apologetic, heaved a sigh. “You named yourself. You are Asmod.”
He remembered the events of the ritual. Samsian, robed and lurking over his shoulder in the candle light, himself, Luos, in the summoner’s circle. He remembered the avatar of operation and its triangle. He remembered the name he wrote into the screen.
But it didn’t make sense. He was Luos. He objected to Peezlebub, saying as such.
“You are Asmod, boy. You are no longer Luos.” The voice of the cat was firm, confident.
“Then-… Then what happened to me? To Luos?”
“You are still out there.” The cat paused briefly, as though frozen, then resumed. “Yes. You stumbled slightly in the circle, but did not fall out of it. Now, Samsian and you – the real Luos – await you – Asmod the daemon – to make yourself known.”
Luos – but no, if Peezlebub was right, he was called Asmod now – started, “What do I do? What sign do I make? How do you know this?”
Peezlebub waved a paw in the air, a gesture of conciliation in a human which, in a cat, looked like he was swatting a string. “Do not be upset, Asmod. It is normal for we daemons to work between the seconds in the real world. When I say Luos and Samsian are waiting, I mean it is still the very moment which you – the real you - recovered from the summoning.”
Asmod gripped the sides of his head, a standing fetal position. “There’s still time?” He was looking around the small room, at the books and the shelves, at the desk and the door. Peezlebub said they were all fake, all constructed by him.
“Yes, and you must use every milisecond to recover your wits. Gradually, you may come to accept your new role.” Peezlebub sought Asmod’s gaze, which until that point had been flying around the room. He looked the cat in the eye and there it stuck. “You will come to accept this role just as I have,” Peezle added.
Asmod began to calm, his arms lowering to hug himself.
“Peezle,” he said, casting his eyes to the floor, “you said I’m still needed for the ritual?”
The cat nodded. “We can’t complete it without you. Now, boy, banish this construct. See the spirit realm unfettered.”
Luos looked inward, as Samsian had taught him. Conscious activation, he called it. Many people had some touch of magic, using certain global operations instinctively, like Luos could with numerical analysis. But only those born with divine right could plumb the depths, and even then they must be trained. Through conscious activation he could mentally touch the magical realm.
Only in this trance did he become fully aware of a truth that had been tugging at his forebrain. This body was not real, as Peezlebub said. The senses – touch, smell, balance, weight, heat – were psychosomatic feedbacks, as tangible as smoke, a vision at the corner of the eye suddenly lost when looked at directly. It was a drawing in the sand, and it was time for the tide. He deactivated the construct.
One might expect dramatic visuals. Perhaps the shadows of the room growing to dissolve the room, desk, walls, books, and all. Or for these things to particulate into a buzzing cloud and disperse. Maybe perhaps for the room to tilt in perspective and flow into a glowing horizon.
But none of these things happened. With the construct stopped, no further visual component was left for Asmod to perceive. His surroundings weren’t even black, but a dull featureless grey. He had no body, either. It was complete sensory deprivation. The boy took several breaths, which he didn’t truly feel.
“It takes some time, getting used to living in the spirit realm of the machine,” the cat said as though reading Asmod’s mind. “That construct you created did not allow for sensory input, so you can’t feel your emotions or your breathing as you once did. If you had paused a moment, you would not have even felt your heartbeat.”
“And this is my new home? This featureless landscape where nothing lives or grows?” Asmod asked miserably.
“I will teach you how to make these things, boy, if it will comfort you. You will see that there is more here than it seems. In truth, the spiritual realm is teeming with life in ways you cannot even comprehend right now. But first, we must meet up with the wizards.”
“How do I do that, Peezle? If I’m not real, that is.”
“Tell me. What is item the first for the binding of a daemon?”
“A vessel,” Asmod said mechanically. He remembered the bound hawg he had brought, and groaned. “I’ve got to be a hawg?” He drooped his shoulders – or would have if he’d had any. The emotional aftermath of the world-quaking news he had just received was temporarily shoved aside for simple childish annoyance.
“Take it from me, boy, at least you didn’t choose a cat,” grumped Peezle.
