The long shadow of the Pleiades draped heavily across the Aeternean cityscape. Drawing a vast darkened tear as it fell through the night sky, the bottomless valley of hell was split apart into a cleft of lesser spires. Blacking out the glow of blinking stars and flickering storefronts alike, that ink-dark splotch yawned ever wide across the eternal midnight. Even from without the gloom, Sophie could scent the archfiend's terrible design choking the air, and could taste the crushing malevolence of that same dim miasma as it smothered the blighted metropol. And further beyond, over the margins of humming white street lamps, where lay endless hadal expanse, she could touch the gaping maw of that cruel will as it blanket its demesne underneath cavernous second night.

She hesitated for the longest while, halting where night's terminator loomed abreast the street, where only a single step would be enough to cross over to where that impossible tower eclipsed the artifice of the imagined stars. And as the pause stretched moments longer Sophie let the unease hang and, ever faintly, her mortal body conjured up some half-recalled instinct; one that might once have been the first ancestor of fear. She could feel it wedge itself in the empty void of her throat, growing still the stronger as she stood at the shadowed threshold. A silent shriek drummed and strummed and thrummed from deep within living flesh, and it was as though the grasping forelegs of countless chattering insects endeavored to peel back the underside of her skin. 

Alleyway and thoroughfare alike bent ever inward as the shroud, imparting its own gravity, drew hapless souls farther toward the horizon of its own eventuality. And beyond that last precipice, she witnessed every demon, however cacophonous by nature, forever bound and snared, whether in their first or their hundredth step, to the direction of hell's unseen conductor. She had known then it would not be any meager devil who wore this realm's crown, but one of the smattering of true fiends that had emerged out of the great silence of history. 

It was a familiar song, echoing the deeper alleys of this hell. She felt in it a... wistfulness as well. She found something in those patterns, familiar repeating notes that jostled with her body's reflexive unease. She found a nostalgia within, a yearning, that carried her back to those other lost days. Something in those impressions drew her soul back to an earlier lifetime, to another underworld. It had been there, veiled beneath the gaze of yet another Tower, where she had existed before she had once again come alive. To [i]that[/i] Tower and its perdition, a tapestry stitched from countless vassal hells, there were bound its own scores of demon lords. And all of them sworn to the previous recipient of her soul. 

Only an impression, a dream within a faded dream, remembered but one frame in twenty now that she had woke anew to life—that was all that stirred now. Traces of prior existence, not a life but the fragmentary shadow of a personage that stood not numbered amongst the countless echoes that comprised Sophie's other memory. Yet even so, Sophie could imagine the matte canvas of time spanning wide in front of her, and look far into what came before as though in the here and now. In that moment she could still see the myriad legions of seventy-two infernos, together coalescing around the heart of pandaemonium. The severity of such aberrant will by necessity bound every lesser movement to the orbit of its own singularity, and none more so than the hapless mobs drowning beneath the shadow of the Tower. Whether here, in yesteryear, or there again in the present, it was in the essential nature of all devils to be claimed as mere motes of the supreme fiend's being.

Still, although her expedition had gone smoothly thus far, she couldn't know what truly lay waiting on the other side, in the dark places where both thought and memory could only flee. Having sifted through the waking dreams and imaginations of the resort's mortal guests, Sophie carried a fair impression of the hotel's layout, and of the seemingly limitless temporal dangers that she might encounter within. There had even been a time that she could have taken that first step down the road, sure that was the whole of the matter. Instead, it was only too clear what was amiss.  

She did not know this archfiend's name. 

That was strange. She had not caught even a flicker of a thought of it. Not once in the hatreds or terrors of any being within this realm, or in the future of any thing she had touched. It was known to this hell’s denizens, she was sure... but not yet to her. Not to outsiders, not to a stranger standing across the other side. Whoever the linchpin of this hell was, she doubted it was anyone she knew. Not that it mattered much. It would be stupid to assume that this lord wasn't dangerous to her, just because she didn't know of them.

She considered the shadow before her. Psionic camouflage truly only went so far. If she took another step, she would stand out for being one who too obviously did not belong. Was she putting too much thought into this? Demons had never before given her cause to worry overmuch. She had hunted them, she had coexisted within them, she had devoured them like grains of wheat and bound their essence to her mind and soul. 

But as much as the lord of this hell was unknown to her, she couldn’t know for a certainty that she wasn't known to them. She had never done a good job of keeping track of all those that she had killed, whether on behalf of Rashael [i]or[/i] in contract to the House Satori. A supernatural assassin that specialized in killing, and devouring, both deities and hell lords was a declaration of threat all on its own. Beyond that, her soul was bound so tightly to every last one of Lemegeton's demons, and almighty Leviathan itself, that when she finally greeted oblivion they would surely be dragged there alongside of her.

The overlords of hell dimensions tended not to suffer king slayers and pretenders brazenly entering their domains unannounced. She knew her own soul’s predecessor wouldn't have. Perhaps the wisest course would have been to find some other way to the far side of this reality, one that would not risk drawing so much attention to herself.

Yet patience had never counted itself among Sophie’s virtues.

Not in any life. 

What could wait on the other side of the threshold, she might ask herself, that she had not already faced in kind, long ago? Regrettably, she knew too well it was impossible to know.  For those other trials ahead, for the tribulations of the spirit, and of whatever sundry challenges heralded the master of this domain's presence, she might have been tempted to armor herself in the confidence born of a long and interesting life. It was already so long ago that the shade of her unbound mind had stormed the court of Lilith herself, shown herself the greater, and harried the eldest devil across the stars for more than one age of human reckoning. 

What was a single archfiend worth? Had she not survived as much and far more, already? But there, Sophie knew, was the death trap of nostalgia. She thought again of the greatest devils of ages past: Asmodai. Lilith. Diabolos. The strongest of the old fiends, or at least the strongest that were permitted to exist in those days.

Those old adventures of had been so very long ago, scattered across every country imaginable under the skies of countless worlds, but never once upon this one. As familiar the designs of hell were, it was too soon to tell how and where they would have diverged from the similar realms she had once called home. From the looks of it, this reality had never had a Great Ender nor an Angel of Horror to cut down any devil that stood too tall for reality to bear their weight. Too many civilizations would have risen, fallen, and arisen once more while this hell’s fiends had been left to their own devices, and all while their heavens sat idle. What angels they did have were plainly ill equipped to rein them in. A great many things could be different in this new world. 

If she could not help but draw attention to herself, then the best course would be to make herself as unremarkable as possible. So long as the truth of this hell was as yet unknown, the only prudent course was to proceed as though anything in the resort was capable of killing her, and act accordingly. 

It took only a few moments to find a less traveled alleyway. When she was alone, Sophie closed her eyes and relaxed her limbs where she stood. She felt her joints loosen as she gathered her breath deep in the pit of her chest. Slowly, it held in place. Quiet, and static—until a stone had formed in her throat. Growing denser; first blocking, then burning. And then something began to itch, tiny pinprick hairs scratching within the drying walls of her throat, as the knot unwound and began to squeeze the ring of sinews apart. And then as she blinked, as a choking sound forced its way from her lips, the spindly black tips of long arachnid legs began to splay free. Out of the bottom corner of her eyes she could see the first black and yellow bands of the spider's foremost legs pushing her mouth opened, its bundled up hind legs still choking her tongue.

She reached into her mouth and grabbed its body, holding it pinched between her first three fingers. She pulled until she could see the thick pair of red spots on the underside of the yellow spider's abdomen, and gave a sharp little yank, feeling a thin glass web snap apart in her throat. She took a slow deep breath, and fought not to vomit right there, wiping the spit from her mouth on her sleeve's back as she swallowed another gag. 

Sophie wound her arm, and pitched the spider forward, towards forever and at nothing in particular.  

There were many possible manifestations of psychic power, and this was Sophie's. Like all the rest, it was rooted solely in the exertions of sapients’ wills upon the reality that fettered them. Where her distortion interfaced with hell's dimensional substrate, bolts of red lightning began to arc. The crackling threads laced together, creating an oblong web, askew but centered where her familiar was pinned to the air. There was a hissing sound, ice melting in a pan, and then burrowing chitinaceous legs began to slip their way through the unseen barrier, carrying the spider outward and away from the lower spaces of the world. 

A third lid closed over her vision, but neither of her eyes, and a fog breezed its way through her ears: that was how it felt, to a psychic, to confine their clairsentience to only the outer planes. The dreams were still there, just within sight. She could reach out and touch them, she thought, but for the moment they no longer lived within her. To make her living vessel hopefully stand out less to a higher being, she he had eliminated the traces of aura that would potentially read as abnormal through her psionic camouflage. When she was done, she blinked and took another breath. When she had calmed herself, she slid off her blue-tinted sunglasses, and opened her gray eyes. 

An unexpected weight had settled in the pocket of her winter coat. She reached inside and felt the cold steel and worn brass of the lost pathfinder, the broken clock that had once kept the time of a dying multiverse. 

She hadn't meant to call it out again. She could have sworn that she hadn't had the thought in her mind. It had come on its own, it seemed, as though it had dreamed itself back into the waking world for her.

Too much, even now. To much had been left behind.

The thought sent a fresh ripple of the most saturnine nostalgia through the depths of her other memory —through poor, gone, Ellie's memories—ever vast and turbulent, even in the merest shallow at the surface of her shade's endless roiling dreams. 

[i]That fucking asshole left too much of himself behind.[/i]

Out of all of the realms of the lower domains, those of hell were the most closely aligned to the power of dreams. Perhaps that was all it was... with her overconsciousness so muted, it wasn’t impossible that her body would be more receptible than usual to a stray feeling—an errant burst of chemicals, really, a misfiring pulse of bio-electricity. A stray flash of familiarity in a place where even that could get away from her.

Let this fade, she bade her errant nostalgia, as she returned to the road to the Pleiades, and let the heaviness in her pockets slide away.

What lay in the past scarcely mattered now.

It was the shadowed road before her where those efforts were best spent. 

The presence of the archfiend had only grown stronger as she advanced through the black. And she didn't even know their name. It was not a matter of potency, she understood now. There was a weightiness to it, pervading everything from the craggy pores of the concrete to the moisture in the air. It was all but as foundational to the world as light or sound. His presence was everywhere, diffuse throughout all of this hell, but stronger, more substantial, with each step she took, and nowhere more so than at the shadow's source. 

Yet the presence was not one which grew in concentration. Rather, it was a matter of her own sight coming into focus as all probabilities converged to none within the resort itself.

The moment she had first set across the threshold, Sophie had found herself stricken by the totality of, not the minds of the fiend's enthralled, but of their dreams. 

Not so different, this hell. Nor so different, the Earth beyond. The dreams of the human guests, and those spirits that did still dream, and the odd demon—and rarer angel—that were even capable of it, created a familiar background. It was like hearing a long forgotten song, years later, in a new arrangement. Not so different, after all.

As she drew closer to the hotel’s entrance, it occurred to her that she wasn't really dressed for visiting a luxury resort. But it was always a bad idea to go shopping in any hell, and she didn't want to linger regardless. At a glance she thought she might pass for, more or less, a first time degenerate gambler—no one ever looked at the shoes. And if not, she would have to risk her voice after all. At least to fill in the gaps.

Before long she had passed through the security desk, and walked through their wall mounted metal detectors and backscatter imaging devices. Or, more technically, their occult equivalent.

“Good evening!”

“Move along. Arms up.”

Outside of anyone's notice, the natural frequency of her vocal tone found a resonance with each of their souls, passing harmlessly through the brief surface tension that separated one demon from another, and from her. If one guard maybe judged her appearance more doubtfully than his fellow, he might later fall unusually susceptible to the suggestion that she was actually wearing a much nicer winter coat than she  had been, with perhaps more formal evening wear underneath. 

Another pair of guards waved metal detector wands over her. One of them stopped at her left sleeve, and then slowly fixed the wand’s position to a spot below her shoulder.

“You carrying, darlin'?”

“Is that not allowed here?” 

She was reluctant to use her voice carelessly. In normal use, she was always confident that it wouldn't be noticed until long after she’d passed through, but she couldn't know what she didn't know about this place. At least not yet. She didn't want to change more than absolutely necessary. 

“Weapons are allowed, dangerous eldritch artifacts are not. Let me see it.” 

She reached into her coat, felt the roughness of stingray skin, shaping the warmth of the mercurium grip to her palm. And she felt, as always and forever, the call of her own bones underneath, a phantom touch clasping back against her, meeting the hand they were never taken from.

Or had been once, in another life.

In this one she only withdrew a blocky looking semi-automatic revolver, her finger carefully away from the trigger. Its obvious cylinder, and a barrel slightly longer than common for its size, were the only visual cue to set it apart from a traditional magazine fed handgun. Once, there had been a name inscribed along the frame, but it was long defaced. Now known as Keres, after its ammunition, it was the seventy-ninth and most terrible of the eighty-eight fabled guns.

The revolver always looked overlarge in her palm, but the relics infused in it’s frame kept it from feeling awkward to hold. In ancient times, an entire inter-dimensional law enforcement organization had been formed, dedicated solely towards the execution of anyone who even knew the gun’s name. Now there was only Sophie. Needless to say it was much too dangerous to risk it getting lost, and ending up top where just anyone could stumble upon it and cause trouble.

“Would you take these instead?” she asked, pushing down the cylinder latch and exposing seven Keres-class esper cartridges. “It really doesn’t like it when I let other people hold it.”

It had a bad habit of driving them insane. And also of destroying the planet. Not always in that order. 

“Oh, one of those.” The guard demon considered the density of spiritual power loaded into those shells. Not quite a soul, but close enough for most purposes. “You want to put these up as collateral instead? Do you have our app?”

She pulled one of her coat pockets out and held her free hand wide.

“No phone.” 

“You're one of those, eh? I got you.” The green, horned, cyclops signaled the mouthless horror manning the lobby desk. “Bobby! Toss me one of the chip cards.”

After a fumbling delay, he had finally scanned the card with a handheld reader, and added a few thousand casino credits to it. 

“You can use this in the casino and any of the game rooms. We'll hold your property as collateral until you cash out.”

At least two guards had held that card already, she thought. And it wasn’t like the energy in those cartridges was her own. 

Sophie pushed the ejector star back and let the shells fall out into her open hand.

“Thanks,” she said, and read the card as they made the exchange. Already she could see the steps taken by one guard, then the other, etching the shape of their daily rounds throughout her mental map of the casino’s lowest floor. Today’s rounds, and last week’s, and tomorrow’s, and then last year’s. She considered the hotel as she had seen it in the imaginations and ambitions of it’s guests. Where those two visions overlapped, she began plotting out the beginnings of how the resort had developed through the ages. 

She looked down at the card.

Slots and card tables were bound to see more than their fair share of foot traffic. Some of those guests might even have futures, or pasts, that were worth reading.

There was no need to hurry to the surface without knowing what was up there waiting for her.