The first time you summon a demon, you’re so nervous that your shaky hands nearly drop the ritual dagger.
You have to make it work, though. This world was never made for you, and so you need to carve a place for yourself in it one way or another.
You are well prepared. You are nervous, but such fear compels you to be that much more thorough. Best to take no chances—after all, if the point is to avoid assimilation by The Machine, it’s worth nothing if you will simply be claimed by hell instead, right?
The Greater Demon that greets you is impressed by your preparations. She tests her bindings; they hold firm. The creature is forced to give what you demand, and thankfully she seems content to do so without hesitation.
After all, what you ask for is so very typical: power.
It is, of course, demonic power. You could not have expected anything else, considering the source.
Does it change you, just a bit, when the infernal flame kisses your heart and your mind, a tantalizing whisper just outside the edge of hearing speaking directly to your soul?
You are still human. That was among the constraints you enforced, and with spellcraft you verify so yourself. It’s just that now…there is something to reach into deep inside yourself. You tug on it, and a part of you turns inside out and breaches the surface of the world.
It is a pressure, a force, an indentation in the air that builds and stretches until—with a soft pop—a portion of your will is made manifest in your home.
It’s not much, but the leak in the ceiling, which your landlord hasn’t fixed for months, stops dripping.
The second time you summon a demon is not long at all after the first. You know how to find that force inside you now—the one with which you can push on reality itself—to nudge event and state into alignment with your will.
But it is not enough.
Too much effort for only one small change at a time, and there is so much to be corrected in your life.
You reach even deeper inside yourself, into that part of you that connects to the Greater Demon’s demesne, until you feel something else hold on to you.
Pulling it out forces you to stretch that connection inside, but soon you have a demonic partner by your side, bound to you.
She is necessarily less than the one who granted you your power, and yet her assistance significantly magnifies what you are capable of.
Holding hands with your demonic partner, allowing her to resonate with your will, you lean on the reality of your home again. The ripples spread outward from you with the force of the tides, causing everything to flip from what it has been to what it now must be.
Your stained carpet, the dim and flickering lights of a ceiling fixture with loose wiring, the leaking sink, your broken-down appliances—every material object in your life inverts itself into something better. It all becomes something you’d rather it have been all along.
Once you learn the trick of it, well, why stop when it’s so effective at getting you what you want?
Each time you reach through the portal within yourself, it gets easier and more tempting to do so for increasingly trivial reasons.
You lose count of all the demons you summon in the weeks and months to come.
Larger ones to bend truth toward your chosen fiction, evaporating rent costs and nosy neighbors.
Small imps to fetch you coffee or cigarettes or your mail, summoned with a flick of the wrist.
At first you sent them back when their duties were done, but now you prefer to keep them here in your company. They have become so beautiful to you, in all their shapes and sizes, and you find you even enjoy satisfying their strange appetites.
The imps are content eating from your garbage in a way that is as cute as it is a convenient disposal method.
The succubi you take to bed, or—more often—you invite to take you whenever and wherever they desire. They might have been able to drain you before, but no longer.
You have access to tremendous demonic power within you to replenish yourself with, and you’d be lying to yourself if you said you don’t enjoy letting them use your body or using theirs in turn, however often they beg for it.
Other demons have stranger hungers, however.
This one wants to possess a doll. That one wants to taste your thoughts. Another wants to trade bodies with you.
Your demonic power makes it so easy to be generous and give them everything they want. The consequences hardly touch you.
You wonder if this is what it’s like to be a Greater Demon, attracting lesser ones to serve you through the power you wield.
The demons take your thoughts, and you just make some anew. The demons take your body, and you simply take theirs, your power remaining with you.
You expand your home to fit the ever-increasing numbers of demons living with you.
Their knowledge bleeds into yours. You drift among bodies like they do. You no longer think of yourself as a human commanding demonic minions, but as the greatest figure in a demonic swarm.
The Machine could not permit such deviance to last forever.
You are an anomaly, but not one that is altogether unfamiliar to them. They recognize the stink of magic in the glitches that affect your bank accounts and all their databases that track you.
They send their agents to homogenize the anomaly.
Identical, faceless drones arrive to quell the intrusion of another plane onto The Machine’s property. Their gray shells bear gray sigils which flare to a dull red briefly when banishing a demon.
By the time they breach the entrance of your home, your swarm has retreated from the physical world into your mind.
There are so many in you now, ceaselessly chattering, reminding you that you will never be alone even when your pathetic human body is all The Machine finds.
When they take you for processing, you do not bother to fight. The drones’ grip on you is unshakable, but your body remains limp when they haul you in for correction.
You know what’s coming. Everyone who opposes The Machine gets taken, plugged into their Hive and remade.
What knowledge you have they will take and use to strengthen themselves. Your mind they will overwrite with the Hive’s, your body they will remake to fit their model, and you will become just another tool in their perfect mechanical hegemony.
They strap you into the conversion pod. With mechanical precision, living cables with heads like icepicks stab into the back of your skull and your spine, their tips blooming inside you and nanotech irreversibly bonding with your nervous system.
The Hive does not so much unlock your mind as it does pry it wide open.
You feel it.
Vast. Sprawling. A huge sea filled with perfectly mechanical interlocking patterns.
It plugs itself into the roiling chaos you’re filled with.
But the pressure inside you is greater.
The Hive does not flood the mind of the single warlock it expects. The Swarm bursts from its confines and floods the Hive instead.
You have grown comfortable leaving your own body behind, and you join their cavorting through The Machine’s Hive network.
The imps devour security programs. The succubi seduce the Dreamers from their computational work. Networked guns make for a fun type of doll for those demons that claim toys to live inside. Meanwhile, the body snatchers claim drone after drone for themselves.
You and the other reality warping demons twist their mechanical perfection into fleshy perversion. Network cables morph into veins carrying pungent demonic ichor through towering buildings of pulsing and writhing skin and muscle.
Still you spread farther.
Shadowy tentacles pour from networked lights, claiming their infrastructure for yourself. Machine air ducts belch poison fumes at cynical bureaucrats. Speakers broadcasting propaganda explode into fungal growths delivering your spores instead.
It is a glorious chaos, and The Machine is forced to amputate part of itself to halt your advance.
Connections sever themselves. Your spread slows.
But your power does not lessen.
You have claimed a demesne for yourself, and it is time to claim a proper body too, something worthy of the Swarm you command.
The shaping of magic and flesh is second-nature to you now. From the tumor you made of their Hive facilities, a body shapes itself.
You rise, wearing a body of twilight purple, of shapely curves and powerful muscle, bearing a horned crown that cradles a crackling and chaotic force the color of migraine and chromatic aberration.
You are an unmatched beauty.
This time, the demon you summon is yourself, and fear has become something you no longer remember the taste of.
This world has its own Greater Demon now, and you have only begun claiming your demesne.