Chapter 180: Gaze

Jadis sat on a comfortable chair. She’d sat on many chairs in the past, some more and some less comfortable, though none of those had ever left a particularly memorable impression in her mind. This one, however, did. Not because it was unique in any particular way. No, the chair had no defining features beyond the fact that it was, indeed, comfortable. That was what made it so memorable. It had no defining features at all. It was simply the ideal embodiment of a comfortable chair. That meant one simple fact.

She was back in D’s living room.

A month’s time had passed since Eir’s last use of her oracle ritual, a slightly longer time frame on Oros than it was back on Earth, but Jadis was getting used to the unfamiliar timescales. Since they had been engaged in a night of lewd pleasures anyway, Jadis had suggested they perform the ritual so they could ask questions right away and not waste any time. To her mind, any days that went beyond the recast timer of thirty-five days was time wasted and would result in less questions asked overall. However, Eir had a different take on the use of the ritual.

Since there were very few priests that ever gained a skill that let them communicate with the gods in either an indirect or direct fashion, it had become standard practice in the temples to hold onto those valuable insights from the gods and only use the rituals when a truly important question needed an answer. Such rituals were not performed until after days, sometimes even weeks, of debate between high priests and other temple officials. The gods were not generous with their words due to the restrictions of the Covenant, so a great deal of care always went into the composition of the questions that were asked.

In Eir’s opinion, it was a good idea to keep the ritual in reserve until they truly needed some answers for an important, maybe even life-threatening situation. Unless there was a good reason, she wanted to keep the ritual’s use to a minimum. However, she had to agree that the issue of how Jadis was supposed to communicate with Lyssandria as one of her avatar’s was an important issue that needed to be resolved. Asking for D’s guidance felt reasonable for such a problem considering their lack of progress so far.

So, with Eir’s help, Jadis’ soul had returned to D’s indescribably normal living room with its conceptual furniture and abstract ideas for decorations. Everything was exactly as she remembered it. As least, as memorable as the incorporeal soul scape of a living room could be. Except, there was one piece missing.

Where was D?

“Hel—” Jadis started to call out but stopped herself.

What she had been about to do was call out, “Hello?” Such a greeting could have possibly been interpreted as a question. Considering her last interaction with D, she didn’t want to give him an excuse to cheat her out of a question. Revising her language in her head, she tried again.

“D, I am here.”

Jadis waited a moment after speaking. After what she counted out to be thirty seconds she tried again.

Nothing.

Well now what was she supposed to do? The idea of D not being home, or whatever this all was, had not been covered in any of the discussions she’d had with Eir on the subject of oracles and talking with gods. Was she supposed to just sit and wait until the capricious god showed up? How long was that going to take? She was fairly certain that due to the nature of the ritual and how it had played out last time that no time was passing back on Oros while she had her out of body experience. Or at least time was passing at an imperceptibly slow rate. So she wasn’t too worried about something bad happening to her body while her soul was visiting her patron deity.

What was worrying her was the idea that D might just leave her there waiting for hours, days, maybe even longer while he did whatever it was he did as a god. Her body might not be affected, but she was entirely conscious as a disembodied soul and spending days trapped in the idea of a living room with nothing to do did not seem like a fun prospect to her.

Then again, was she trapped here? There was a door on the other side of the room. No one had said she couldn’t get up and do a little exploring while she waited for D to show up. If he’d wanted her to just sit tight and wait, he could have left her a note of some kind. She couldn’t imagine that not being within the power of a literal god to do. Since he hadn’t, that probably meant he didn’t care what she did while waiting for him to arrive.

The logic there was, admittedly, flawed. D could very much care about what she did while she waited. But this was D’s living room she was in, and he’d left her alone to her own devices. How often was she going to get the opportunity to explore a god’s home?

Getting up from her non-descript comfortable chair, Jadis circled around the definitely-a-coffee-table and the yes-that-is-a-couch to stand in front of the only door that led in and out of the room. There was nothing on or around the door to indicate what was on the other side. Nothing about its pseudo-existence told her if it was a hallway door, bedroom door, kitchen door, foyer door, or any other kind of specific door. It was just a door.

“Fortune favors the bold,” Jadis muttered to herself before reaching out with the soul equivalent of her hand to grasp the doorknob.

Turning the knob, Jadis fully pulled open the door.

Death.

There was no other word Jadis could think of to describe what she saw. What existed before her was the essence of death. No, not just death, it was Death. The Death. The end of everything and everyone. Pure and total annihilation stared into her soul with its single, unblinking, all-seeing eye. An eye so large it encompassed the entirety of the universe because it was the universe because it was what the universe would come to be, eventually, in the end. She was gazing into the void and the void was so beyond anything she could have ever possibly imagined it to be that she could not even begin to comprehend it. She simply stared into the unblinking eye, too numb with mind bending terror to even feel the fear that she knew she was experiencing.

“Oh, don’t mind him, he’s just being a snoop.”

The door abruptly shut in Jadis’ face and she was left standing there, shaken to her soul’s core. If she had lungs to hyperventilate, she was certain she would have by then. Instead, she just had to exist, with no bodily functions to distract her, dealing with the fact that she’d just met Death himself.

Except there was at least one distraction in the room now. D, faceless and indescribable and utterly nonthreatening and absolutely not a mind-destroying nightmare, was standing just off to the side of her, tapping away on the pad he held in one hand.

“Wha—what, what was that?” Jadis finally forced out as she reeled from the horrifying experience.

“Dear old cousin Sam,” D answered without taking his non-existent eyes off of his device’s screen. “Free advice, gal. Don’t poke around in a god’s house unless you’re prepared to experience cosmic horrors beyond your capability to reckon. You never know who else might be hanging around like a fucking freeloading creep!

”

The last was shouted while D slammed his fist a couple of times against the door.

“R—right,” she mumbled. “Sorry about that…”

“Don’t worry about it,” D shrugged before finally looking at her with what was most certainly a smile of some kind. “It’s not like you did any harm to me.”

With that, D casually flopped over the back of his couch and propped what were certainly his feet up on the armrest.

“Anyway, you’ve got two questions left and I’m actually kind of busy dealing with some things right now, so you’d better get to asking before I have to scoot. Always so busy. Busy busy busy.”

D buzzed like the primordial concept of a bee while motioning for Jadis to take her seat. Considering she still needed a minute to gather her thoughts after apparently coming face to face with Samleos, the god of all demons on Oros, she gratefully took the opportunity to sit and process for a few moments.

That thing had been Samleos? That… void of existence was the god whose plans she was supposed to subvert? For real?

The true gravity of the task D had set for her was finally sinking in. That was a God. A God of Death and Destruction and Endings. It had a goal that it was trying to accomplish and she was supposed to get in the way of them.

Holy Fuck.

“Hey, little pale pervert,” D waved his hand in her direction. “Tick tock, tick tock. I don’t have all day. Question nùmero dos and make it snappy.”

“Oh, ah, right. Okay,” Jadis replied shakily. “Right. Shit. I only have two questions. That wasn’t a question, it was a statement of acknowledgement that I fucked up.”

“At least you recognize it,” D murmured in his neither high nor low nor soft nor loud voice.

She had to admit, she had fucked up. Certainly in exposing herself to what was behind door number one, but also in that she’d asked an unintentional question. Again. But really, how was she supposed to keep her thoughts straight after witnessing… that.

Actually, was that the point? Had D purposefully left her to wander unattended because he knew she’d stumble into “Cousin Sam” and that the encounter would fuck with her hard enough to make her lose one of her questions? Considering the kind of god that he was, Jadis couldn’t honestly deny the possibility. In fact, the probability that he was purposefully messing with her for his own amusement seemed like a near certainty.

Strangely, the knowledge that D was likely fucking with her helped calm Jadis’ mind. It gave her something to latch onto. D was an asshole who liked to play pranks on everyone. Just because she was his, well, minion, that didn’t mean she was immune to his trickery.

Jadis took a mental breath. D had pranked her. So what? She could be angry about it, or she could accept that he’d gotten the best of her this time and move on. She did still have two questions to ask.

“Where, in relation to me, is the closest friendly member of an avatar race located?”

Jadis carefully asked the question she’d crafted with the help of her companions. Eir and Aila had both agreed that D was unlikely to give her detailed instructions on how to commune with Lyssandria. The gods avoided answering questions that were too complex. Most oracles of the past described their answers as one or two words at most. D was far more verbose with her than Eir had ever heard of gods being with other mortals, but that didn’t mean that D would just tell her everything she wanted to know without restraint. The Covenant the gods had made was intended to keep them from unduly influencing the affairs of mortals. D could literally not be able to give her precise instructions.

Which was why they’d decided it was better to ask for the location of a fellow Child of the Gods who could offer some guidance. Jadis was hoping for a Dryad, but really any of the options out there would be interesting to meet. Except, of course, more demons. She’d already met plenty of those and could find more any time she wanted, which was why she’d specified “Friendly” in her question. She didn’t need D telling her where to find the nearest twisted wretch.

D snorted lightly out of his perfectly ordinary nose.

“Sitting on top of a crate in a glass jar in your room.”

What?

Jadis thankfully didn’t voice her confusion. She’d already wasted one question so far; she wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

Based on D’s answer, Jadis had to assume he meant the squiggly little demon hatchling she’d been holding on to. That honestly surprised her. She, like everyone else, hadn’t thought the demonling would count as a friendly entity. She wasn’t sure that it even understood the greater concepts of ally and enemy, nor had she been sure that it wasn’t obeying her commands out of some kind of fear of her. But D saw it as friendly. Friendly enough to satisfy the criteria of her question, at least.

Well, it wasn’t the answer she’d been looking for, but it was interesting information at least. Honestly, she didn’t even see it as a loss. She was intensely curious about the demon hatchling, so the knowledge that it was definitively “friendly” towards her was something she was going to explore.

“Okay,” Jadis said after a minute or two of being lost in her thoughts. “Last question. Where, in relation to me, is the second closest friendly member of an avatar race located?”

Eir and everyone else would be disappointed that Jadis hadn’t gotten to ask any of her other questions, but so long as she got a real lead on someone she could actually talk to about her godly communication questions, then she’d rate the session a success.

D rolled his eyes but he didn’t seem upset with the only slightly altered repeat of a question. Even though all she could see of his face was the fact that it was a face, she could tell that he was smirking in an appreciative way.

“At the base of a mountain with a split peak, where two streams meet right before spilling over into five waterfalls.”

As Jadis processed that answer, D sat up on his couch and leaned towards her, somehow putting his blank and featureless face mere inches away from hers despite not leaving his seat. As the room around her faded into nothing and all she could see was D’s presence before her, he offered up a final few words with a sly wink.

“Good luck with the hunt, little gal. You’ll need it.”

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