The Daemon, pt. 3: Godform
“Dark Mother!”
Previously: An adversary named Alexei keeps Astra & her old companion, Crowley, trapped in an endless nightmare. That nightmare is presided over by a daemon – an autonomous mental agent programmed to target Astra’s inner child.
○ Opening Era: Spring, 2026, the Dreamworld
For the thousand-and-first time, the grey-eyed girl raced across cracked earth. But the angel would get her every time.
Lightening cracked against the sky. Its thunder was the angel’s voice. The voice named what she was: murderer.
For the thousand-and-first time, she looked for an escape – a boulder, a burrow, a bush to hide behind. But the desert was flat.
The girl tripped on a crack. The angel landed behind her. It removed its mask. It was her mother.
“No,” said the girl for the hundred thousand-and-first time. “No no no no no.” She crawled backward. “Kali!” she invoked the name of the goddess, yelling toward the sky. “Kali! Help me!
“Little girl!” called a confident voice.
The girl looked behind her. It was a woman. Looking at her face felt like looking into a mirror. Except the woman looked like she’d been in a war. Her eyes were at once remote and fierce. The woman’s skin was a sheet of colorful tattoos, many of them symbols that the girl recognized from her training. Her hair was short and shined blue.
“Stand behind me!” The woman’s voice was familiar. Suddenly the girl had a flash of memory. It took her back to a place filled with machinery and circuit boards. A workshop where a daemon with a hallucinatory saw and welder for hands had lurched toward them. Somehow she understood that the angel marching toward them was the same as that daemon.
“That’s right,” the woman said, somehow reading her mind. “That thing is not our mother. Our mother is dead. And the dead can’t care whether we’re punished or not.”
The angel charged at them with outstreched wings.
The woman’s arms grew into blades. Sparks flew as she parried two swipes of the angel’s claws. Then she swung her blade-arm in an arc that lopped clean off the angel’s head. Its wings collapsed as it flopped to the ground with a thump. The face of their mother rolled to a stop their feet. Its eyes were still open, staring upward.
The girl peaked out from behind the woman. “Are we safe?”
“Not while we’re still asleep. Stay behind me and don’t talk.” The woman’s arms turned from blades back to hands.
Blood spurted across the dry earth from the angel’s twitching body. As the red streaks dried, they resolved into an image. A pentagram.
“What is that?” asked the girl.
“The daemon is initializing a subroutine. We’re seeing it metaphorically depicted as a sigil.”
“A subroutine––?”
Suddenly, the disembodied head beneath them blinked its eyes and grinned. Blood began to surge from the angel’s body. Each new spurt became gelatinous on the ground. Each gelatinous mass wriggled, eating a crater in the sand and air around it to become a new angel. Each angel left void in its wake. It was eating their mind to replicate.
“It’s a cancer-program. We need to run!”
The woman and the girl ran as the entire world behind them became angels with their mother’s face. The angels took to the sky.
The girl look at the woman. “Let’s call for Kali.”
The woman looked away. “No. We’ll figure this out ourselves.”
The legion of angels landed on the cracked earth all around them. They were surrounded.
And they were growing dizzy. The daemon’s cancer-program was taking over more and more of their neural real estate.
The girl was right: they needed backup. This was no ordinary daemon. Alexei must have cut a deal with a godform. They needed their own: Kali. But to invoke Kali might mean the end of more than just the daemon.
Godforms – some humanity’s most powerful archetypical forces – were very demanding. Typically the only way to summon their aid was to let them have their way with you.
But since the woman was cut off from her nervous system’s full powers, there was no other way. Astra’s right hand once again became a blade. She cut open her left pinky and then grabbed the girl’s hand.
The girl’s imaginary heart hammered. “What are you doing?”
“What you suggested.” The woman sliced open the girl’s pinky.
“Ow!”
The woman held their hands to the sky. She shouted the improvised religious gobblygook that godforms liked: “Dark Mother!” she shouted. “Friend of jackals; black smoke of the crematorium; tiger’s cruel jaw! Let the razor edge between love and hate cut us open! We offer you all that is inside: The spleen, the bone, the marrow, the mind! Feast upon the shadows within!”
The dream of blood streamed out from the pair’s outreached fingers. It spiraled outward into the void that the angels had left behind. Something emerged from this emptiness: a vast red mouth amidst a blue-black face. A tongue lolled out between fangs to accept the blood offering. Upon tasting it, three eyes smiled from above the maw. Kali was pleased, but not yet sated.
She looked down at all the delicious daemons replicated across the desert. The daemons tried to escape, flapping their angel wings. But there was no where to go, for Kali’s realm was all creation.
There was a slurping sound loud enough to rattle the stars, then a hurricane wind with Kali’s vast mouth at its center. Blood began to leak from the daemons’ eyes, ears, and mouths. Blood whorled through the air to be met by Kali’s reddening tongue.
In synchrony, the daemons turned the mother’s pleading eyes to the girl.
The closest one spoke, “Daughter! Help us! Don’t let us die again!”
Kali’s four great arms reached down to twist off it head. And then another and another. Kali braided their hairs on these heads together, and the heads became a garland.
The daemon’s bodies fell and withered, rotted. Their remains decomposed into void, and void once again became earth and sky.
Kali remained. Her black hair and garland draped over her naked breasts. She was pleased with her garland of daemon heads. The garland needed only one more.
Kali’s third eye centered on the woman with blue-white hair.
The woman looked down at the girl. “It was a privilege to share a body with you, little Astra. I’m sorry we didn’t have a better relationship.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“You’re the real Astra. I’m something like a daemon that you built to stand between you and our parents,” said the woman as Kali’s bloody hand descended toward her from the sky. “And now, that makes me food. For her.”
“But…she’s imaginary!” said the girl.
“No more imaginary than I am. Every adult is a myth made to protect a child.”
Behind them a manhole covered lifted. The whites of two eyes gaped beneath it at the unusual scene.
“I don’t want you to go,” said the girl.
“I don’t have much of a choice while Kali keeps us here. I’m the darkness she devours.”
Kali’s massive thumb and pointer fingers began to close delicately upon the delicious morsel before her. But before it could grasp the woman, Crowley darted forth and tackled her out of reach.
“Let’s go!” He pulled the hands of the woman and the girl and threw them into the sewer before jumping down himself and sealing the cover.
“Kali will still get me here you know,” the woman spoke through darkness. “We’re still in the Imaginal Plane.”
“Is there anything you can do for her, sir?” asked the little girl.
“Yes.”
Then the tunnel was gone. Astra woke to a sharp pain in her arm.
“I pinched you.” Crowley was crouching over her. He grinned. “Dangerous move invoking the Dark Mother. But I deem the exorcism a success.” Crowley held up his hands. “Look ma, no daemon.”
Astra could attend to the needles now: they were lying on the floor around her. Crowley had managed to plucked them out of both of their skins. “What happened to Kali?”
“Oh, I invited her to hop over to my mind. Godforms love an invitation. She’s still eating up daemon-traces inside me. But fading fast. I never went through a Kali phase, so I’m less of a good host for her. Hmm. Funny that she tried to eat you. In case there’s any Kali still active in your system, I suggest you distract yourself, fast.” Crowley passed Astra her phone.
Old gods like Kali fed on rapture, terror, rushing blood. The quickest way to discohere such ancient thoughtforms was pick up a screen and numb out. Astra started swiping on Tiktok.
As the screen lit their face, Astra-the-girl tried to get Astra-the-woman’s attention. She knocked on the imaginal door of the place where she was trapped once again – that place buried deep in their mind. Please, the girl whimpered. I don’t like it here. I don’t like in the meditation room. Please let me out. Can you hear me?
The woman ignored the voice inside. The girl only got in the way. And Astra had a traitor to hunt.
Next release: Astra & Crowley prepare to fight Alexei’s goons waiting just outside the door.