Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Demons — Demon who has seen your writing, and is insisting on correcting your factual mistakes about demons
You didn't bother to put your glasses on; not for a middle-of-the-night, trip to the kitchen. You were just thirsty. Three minutes, you'd be back in bed; sharp vision would only serve to wake you up more.
Your stumble at the bottom of the stairs didn't warn you. Startled, yes; somehow misjudging that you were already at the bottom, when another step presented itself beneath your feet, you nearly fell, twisted you ankle a little, hobbled along the corridor into the kitchen—
The kitchen warned you. The lack of kitchen warned you, doorway unaccountably leading to a cool-breezed, stone-scented stairway plunging down. Still blinking away the last of your sleepiness, you turned in confusion, to find that the house had writhed out of shape behind you, corridor leading too far and bending the wrong way; too many doorways. All the correct style for your house, but—
"Oh. Dreaming." Well; doesn't matter if you take the ominous stairs down, then. Though the cold of them underfoot makes you wish for slippers, and no amount of lucid-dream concentrating seems to make it happen. Lousy subconscious.
The stairs go long enough into the dark that you wish you'd checked for a light switch at the top, too. And ponder sunk cost, as you keep at it, they've got to go somewhere after all this, your brain can't just have stranded you on an endless loading screen? Or I guess, maybe. Not much of a nightmare, if it has; just dark stairs.
Eventually a dim geometric shape comes up toward you, in time with your descent, and rather later, you resolve it as extremely dim light, painting the planes of a small square landing, a right-angle turn in the stairs, a continuation down. You think, in the almost-dark of the next stretch, that there's writing on the walls; but none of your attempts to read it help, eyes swimming with the low-light noise of fuzzing nerve endings.
The stairs go through more turns, the flights between them shorter and shorter, each ever so lightly brighter; though there's no light source you could name. And finally, at the bottom, a door, still in keeping with the style of your house, which you open onto a a small room, unremarkable save for a lit fireplace, an imposing mahogany desk, and a chair behind the desk, its high back turned to you.
You close the door behind you, and start for the desk.
"Ah, the writer," an arch voice says from the chair, speaker invisible to you. "You're expected; go through."
You hadn't noticed the other door, previously. Maybe it hadn't been there. You follow the instruction.
The room beyond is not in keeping with your house. Cavernous, industrial, echoing. Lit by furnaces with their bellies burned down to only smouldering cinders; the handle writhes in your hand, and when you look, the doorway behind you has sealed itself, the wall warping and blackening like hot plastic, despite being made of the same bitch-to-heat brick as the rest of your — well, as your house.
There's a tall, slim figure in an ambiguously cut suit, shaded by a wide-brimmed hat of unfamiliar style, in the very centre of the factory floor, next to the gaping mouth of the biggest and most elaborately machinelike furnace. Most of them look straightforwardly furnacelike; that one bulges, crawling with exterior detail, pipes and hatches and boxes and mechanical parts; an inside-out steam train, greebled courtesy of Giger.
There's a single chair. You infer your destined position.
You cross the room, and sit.
The standing figure looms oddly, somehow too tall, too slender, too shadowed.
"The writer," they say, and with a small movement of their hand, which you can't quite follow, they send a printed page fluttering in the air, down to the floor. For a moment, as the page is in the air, the room also seems full of gently falling snow. "This is one of yours?"
And you know, without having to see the page itself, over yonder on the floor, that it is.
The figure moves. You don't quite see them in motion; they are still, there's an impression of speed, and then they are somewhere else. Another page flutters in the air. "This?"
It goes like that, their tone darkening and darkening, interjections becoming venomous ("Golnaarth? Golnaarth is an absurd name,") the there-not-there falling snow crusting the floor and building up. The factory darkens, furnace-light turning into ever-more dramatic chiaroscuro, black and orange, black and red. You shiver in the cold.
"I'm afraid," the figure says eventually, somewhere past your shoulder — and you somehow know that craning around to look will give you an eyeful of things you'd rather not see; "that all things considered, we're going to have to clear your writing with Legal."
"Legal?" you chatter out, and in the shift of shadows, you realise that the big furnace has, high on the front of it, a clutching cage of sharp, rough-edged prongs, like a poorly-made jewellery setting; and within it is not some gemstone, but a disembodied, inflamed, bloodshot eyeball, glaring down at you.
Within its gape, the cinders stir; and you realise that they're burning on top of a great tongue, the firebox lined with twin banks, top and bottom, of fire-blacked iron molars.
Steam bursts from dozens of vents as the many horrible moving parts of the furnace judder into eye-watering motion. Cold, cold, shadowy hands fall — immovably heavy — onto your shoulders.
"Oh yes," the figure says, soft now — almost a gurgle, a wet noise like overripe fruit pulp. "We're going to have you processed by Legal."
Cinders scattering, the furnace licks its teeth.