Fantasy 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐥 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰

[neon reverie]

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[Uxie]

maximina

They remember when they were an inkling, no more than a speck in the wretched hierarchy only evil can deem fair, beneath cannon fodder; a scrappy stowaway amongst Beelzebub's horde, made into a worthless errand kid when they found them. They remember his gaze, the way it bore into them and squashed them beneath the weight of it, and they remember that crooked smile on too-wide lips, the echo of a threat that would come once the devils won the war.

She is his only companion when he flees the battlefield, tail between his legs and a coward to no end.

She is the only witness — it was a new moon, she remembers all too clearly — when she rips out his heart.

She got her name from him too, you know? Magnus, to mean greatest, so she was Maximina, or Maxie, if you were really pressed for time. No one ever uses her nickname with her, though, because she hasn't really got any friends. It's a lonely world at the top of the food chain, or something. She lets out a laugh at her own quip.

When she looks down at you for a reaction, you can only stare up at her bug-eyed, gasping for life with her hand against your throat. She supposes you wouldn't understand why she's telling you all this — she reminds you, gently, that she can still taste the rot of his soul on her tongue. That foul aftertaste has lingered for centuries, and she wonders if it is a pathetic battle scar or something closer to Damoclus' sword.

She hopes yours will not disappoint. You do not reply.

Tsk.

Maybe your life flashes before your eyes when her hand hovers over your chest, maybe you think about how you should've picked another night to go hunting. She doesn't know — she's never really cared to ask. Egocentrism might be another one of her sins, and that's just on-brand, right?

She does not stay long, because there is nothing to savour; your soul tastes no better than any of the others she's taken.

 

[neon reverie]

Helena

You see her before you hear her. A shadow slipping through the cracks of dawn, silent as a whisper, deadly as a promise unkept. Gaze pressing down upon you like family paintings have done to her. Blood runs, deeper than one lifetime, inescapably linked to beings far older. Neither of you chose to be of this nature, to be a whisper in other people's mouths, half chewed on, half spit out. It's the inevitability that captures you both, fates as sure as the rising sun.

You will both argue the same things; that you are just living in a world where the line between right and wrong blurs like smoke in the wind. That it's life that made it so, having carved identity from still growing bones, already deciding who you were and who you should not be. Society expects, demands, rarely excuses. Was it truly a sin to snarl back at them, wanting to hurt a world who hurt you first?

You wonder if the legacy weighs on her, if she feels the chains tightening around her own soul. Does she lie awake at night, haunted by the faces of those she’s captured? Does she ever doubt, even for a moment, the righteousness of her cause? You curse her, just as the ones before you have done. Helena. Her name feels rotten on your tongue. You lash out, because of everything you know. It's futile work.

She merely tightens the binds, hands you over to her superiors like the damned pawn she is. It's just another day for her, doing what she has all ever known.

【 Except, it feels like she knows less and less the more she does it 】

 

[neon reverie]

location

the edge of Evernight

interactions

maximina

ace

Helena

Evernight sits on land like a prayer sits on the tongue; hearts pressed against a silent heaven, living in the name of gone gods. It holds lights blinding and shadows consuming, has sin as a guest dining at its table, stomach always growling, hungers never sated. Perfection has long been trampled underneath its cracking stone, brittled and buried because nothing draws more eyes than the glare of a flaw. If one merely throws a glance, Evernight seems like just any other modern city—a pulse of people, a blur of lives intertwining, supernatural and human alike. Everything mingles like paint thrown on a canvas, but the closer you look, the more you see what blends and what bleeds.

Peace has always been frailer than what they wish you to believe, its taut wires straining underneath the weight of too many souls crammed into a space so used to conflict. Tension is a pressure that kills before it soothes, and in Evernight, you can feel it in the air, in the hurried steps of those who know better than to linger in the wrong places.

And just like any other city, people disappear, leaving only a crumble of a trace or nothing at all. Sometimes, they return—sometimes whole, sometimes fractured, sometimes just bodies, pale and still, their stories written on their flesh in ways the living can’t read. And the city, indifferent and immense, moves on. It always does.

However, when someone's uncharacteristic absence is just fresh, rumours rise with the sun, and whispers turn to screams in the Twilight. Was he kidnapped? Is he dead? Alive? Who took him? All are questions that stalk the minds of those privy to a certain man's disappearance. Most of the AOS remains ignorant about this, the higher ups wanting to keep things discreet lest panic spreads and sharks come to bite, smelling the blood in the water.

But Helena does know.

And the secret feels heavier than she'd like to.

Almost as heavy as her assigned mission.

Helena follows the only trace he’s left her; a location, scrawled in his tight, angular handwriting, the ink smudged as though written in haste. It leads her to the edge of the city, right where the light bends strangely and shadows feel like they have eyes. Here, even the sky looks different, tinged with the deep reds and purples of dusk, as though the horizon is leaking down upon her. She turns another corner, and then she sees a movement. A breathe catches within the throat, finger immediately twitching as it rests on the trigger of her trusted gun, a reflex born of a thousand hunts.

But this isn't just any quarry— as she quickly recognises with a turning stomach— this is her. Helena instantly feels the bitterness rise alongside the sting of a memory that always leaves her empty handed and vexed; the flashing image of a smile stretching like it's hiding a dangerous riddle behind those lips, mocking her as if no amount of effort will ever push her ahead of her; all silk ink and twisting beauty with too little care and an empty heart. Helena does not know why this one keep lingering about, has the annoying feeling she is being toyed with even when the devil hasn't done or said anything yet right now. She knows her name, whispers of it echoing in the back of her mind like a taunt, but she refuses to utter it. She does not deserve the recognition that comes with it.

So, instead, Helena settles on a pointed

" You."

her disdain wrapped tightly around it. She narrows her eyes, before pointing her gun.

" Where is he."

she then demands, because Of course you're involved. And how could it not be her? This city runs on patterns, after all, and this seems awfully on brand for her.

 

[Uxie]

location

the edge of Evernight

interactions

Helena

six

maximina

In the vaunted roads of Evernight, Maxie likes to compare herself to a rat — living in the nooks and crevices of shaded alleyways and forgotten backroads. There are surely more noble ways for a character like her, but she thinks she rather prefers a lifestyle that reeks of self-loathing. A stark reminder, perhaps, that her stay in this little city was yet temporary, no matter how many years she'd spent in this realm between realms.

In her infinite grace and generosity, she'd taken up a stewardship to the city, though she was certain those losers at the agency would have some very unkind words to say about her 'civic duty'. She didn't always have a terrible relationship with them, too young to build ancient grudges as they were, but the rot that seeped through the cracks of old stony pavements had found its way into their ranks, too. Without a sense of smell and an acquired palate — like hers, of course — they'd never even know they'd been made underlings of a devil.

And once more, Maxie chose the road of benevolence!

Protect their innocence

, she had thought,

Let them keep that precious self-righteousness of theirs, their only semblance of purpose.

So she sent him a letter. A simple but cordial one: a time, a date, and a place.

Now, look who he's sent in his stead? It was meant to be a private affair, that rude, rude thing.

She smells her before she sees. It is a sickening stench of purity, white-gold and acidic, and it clings to her form and permeates the air wherever she goes. Maxie doesn't have a name to match to her face, but she's taken to calling her 'Cherub' for her defining scent; she is, after all, younger than most of the hunters who've chased her. She's almost flattered when she thinks about it!

"You." The click of a gun, and Maxie stays observing the swirl of ghosts and shadows in the inconstant churning of the ocean. Ah, that one looked a bit like a man she'd paunched last Thursday. "Where is he."

She turns, then, and finally fixes the girl with a head-on gaze.

"You? I've got a name, you know?"

She flashes a hurt pout, though it curves into a lackadaisical grin when Cherub only glares harder.

"As much as I'd love to feign ignorance, but I don't know where he is, either. He stood me up! Kind of a shitty date, right?"

She throws her hands up in mock annoyance, checks again for a reaction, and is once again left wanting. No one in this city ever wanted to entertain her jokes — not even Luxuria — and if Maxie was a little more principled she might reflect and consider if the problem lay with her. It is far easier to lament the poor sense of humour of its residents, however. Cherub, in particular, had always been rather stoic. She didn't think she'd seen the girl in an expression other than mildly annoyed.

An eye-roll, before her smile fades from her face. No need to perform for an unwilling audience — when she next speaks, her tone is chillingly flat.

"If you've come, I assume he's fled with his tail between his legs,"

She flexes her fingers, inspecting the claws that had been sharpened to dig out his heart this very night.

"How unbecoming. Pray tell, did he leave you with anything else?"

 

[neon reverie]

location

the edge of Evernight

interactions

maximina

ace

Helena

Words roll like a fog before a bleeding sunset, all pretty blurs that merely serve as a foreshadow of something far darker. Helena has faced devils before, the nameless kind, the kind who beg or scream, or sometimes laugh as their bodies get riddled with bullets. Those, she could dispatch without thinking, without the blink of an eye. They were no more than hollow reminders of what the Abyss spat out; a thoughtless heart turned a festering wound. Dirt easily scrubbed from the plane they have come to cling to. A nuisance at best, a parasite at worst.

But this one?

Helena feels as if this devil is one of the beings far older than Evernight who have come crawling, attracted to the scraping depravity that rots in humanity's corners. Or perhaps Maximina has simply become bored among themselves, their Everdays in the Abyss only one broken tune.

Don't mistake her; Helena can tolerate a devil's existence on earth, a portion of them merely content to waltz with humans, trying to live differently than they did before. But there were those who wish to bend and twist humanity to their own will, unable to hold onto anything unless it came with the same pigments of pain they missed from home. Maximina, she heavily suspects, is not here for mere mischief, nor for the idle pleasures of torment that most devils crave. No, this devil has deeper appetites, and Helena can feel them gnawing at the edges of the world. She is a splinter slipping from skin to skin, sampling pulses like a doctor deciding who lives or dies — the smoke in Helena's lungs that she can neither catch nor cough out.

"Stood you up?"

a barely held back scoff, layered with frost. Does it think she’s a fool? The idea of her boss simply walking away from an encounter like this—without a word, without a trace—is as laughable as it is insulting.

"You expect me to believe you had nothing to do with his disappearance? That he simply forgot to pencil in a meeting with a devil? "

Helena can't look any less skeptical. Doesn't have the time to entertain the sputtering of false innocence, the bending of truth until it snaps.

" I am not here to answer your questions, and I do not have the patience for your lies."

She inches closes, the click of a gun echoing within the street. Helena's gaze hardens once more.

“You’re going to tell me where he is, and you’ll do it now. If you confess, maybe the AOS will show you some mercy."

Ah, but who's the one lying now?

 

[Uxie]

location

the edge of Evernight

interactions

Helena

six

maximina

"You expect me to believe you had nothing to do with his disappearance? That he simply forgot to pencil in a meeting with a devil?"

She shrugs, bare shoulders flinging up and down carelessly.

"It's your boss, not mine."

The click of a gun is an unveiled threat, the sound echoing through the lonely street like a match held over a powder keg. It is accompanied by a verbal one, said in that stern tone AOS must have beaten into their agents. But if Cherub thinks she looks any make of danger from that distance, alone and with but a poor little pistol, she just might give into the temptation to prove her wrong.

It's just ego talk, of course. Maxie knows from experience that Cherub's not as pathetic as the others the agency sends on her tail.

The girl's reputation precedes her, though. A devil has ears — even the ones who prowl like a lone wolf, in the form of prey hunted in the light of a new moon. Of those in the agency, stubborn losers as they are, Cherub has an impressive track record. Straight-laced to a fault, incorruptible, even when they wave promises of wealth or justice or truth in her face; guided by something far more fettering than mere morals.

Or maybe she's just totally gunning for a spot in heaven! Who knows? Maxie wouldn't judge, even if everyone knows dead humans don't go to the Empyrean.

Either way, the ghouls hate her — fear her, even. Her formidable reputation almost makes the devil a little jealous. She's damnation to a demon — can you imagine?

And here she is, the most puritanical agent in Evernight, offering little ol' her a lovely olive branch!

Maxie offers a smile, their peace offering. The darkness doesn't hide the way Cherub's finger tightens around the grip of her gun.

Laced with poison, it seems. Just how she likes it! Adds a bit of kick when it goes down.

Her gaze darts lazily around the space, assessing the darkened silhouettes of dying trees; the ominous alleyways that twist into dead ends; her dear opponent, and who, thus far, has a stunningly horrible catch rate when it comes to herself, because it sits at a big fat zero. If she taunted her with that now, she was sure Cherub would freak out and start shooting immediately.

She weighs her options, and for a split-second, Maxie's expression morphs into something unreadable. And then, a small smile as she loosens her stance, readies her claws.

Let herself get hit a few times, get a few more hits in. Just to make things interesting — reasonable.

"Sorry to disappoint you, angel, but I have nothing to tell you,"

she says, excitement brimming beneath the surface of her voice, audible if you listen hard enough,

"Let's just skip straight to the action instead, shall we?"