Demoncember writing prompt — Demon whose singular focus has led to the desolation of mighty kingdoms, and you now stand in their way
“Are you sure about this, Celestine?”
“Stop asking me that before you make me nervous,” Celestine Against-the-Night says, smooth and calm, precisely arranging the cuffs of her formal robe. The downdraft of the dragon’s liftoff displaced stray strands of her elaborate updo; Stanja Blood-on-Thorns quickly, neatly plucks them back into perfect place.
“Six minutes!” Axhal Ore-Gallery hollers, overseeing the strike-mage team hasily fastening the legs back onto an antique table. “Go, go, go!”
Stanja neatly slides a chair under Celestine’s descending rump, as the rest of the team plant the table over her knees. Axhal flings a crisp tablecloth over it; Cobb Sweetwater and Hickory Diadem-of-Stars rapidly set out a bone china cup and saucer, a steaming teapot, delicate milk jug, bowl of sugar-cubes, silver spoon and tongs. Stanja sets a linen napkin out, tweaking it to geometrical perfection on the tabletop.
“It’s fine,” Celestine tells her. “It’s fine. Go.”
Stanja meets her sideways glance, just for a moment. “Break a leg,” she mutters thickly, and then the strike team are dashing away with the toolbox and picnic hamper, throwing up wards of concealment and protection around themselves.
Celestine takes and holds a steadying breath, as the dust plume of the demon’s approach fills the sky.
A demon, by fundamental nature, is immaterial. The shapes they fill are theatre, or comfortable habit; and when summoned into this realm, can be pushed upon them by their summoner. Nobody is ever careful enough about the nature of the shapes they put demons into; the way that function follows form.
Whole kingdoms have ailed on the dried-up rivers and endless pall of dust stemming from this sole, sloppily-done binding; all because some leering fool wanted to gaze upon a maiden in a skimpy servant’s uniform.
Celestine steels her spine in the immaculate posture of a lifetime of deportment drills and etiquette classes. Firms her thundery sneer. Deliberately removes her attention from the approaching scourge to direct a sulky look into the middle distance. The demon’s nearing sounds like a hurricane, now; the wafting dust cloud envelops her.
Whole armies have attempted the direct approach to stopping its relentless, methodical work; the landscape swept, mopped, and polished down to mirror-finish level bedrock, and the terrible consequences thereof. When its ceaseless attentions ground down the original tower confining it to nothing, the demon simply determined to similarly clean the world — and it will not tolerate interruption of its task. It will tidy away massacres, afterward, as readily as mountains.
Out of the corner of her eye, Celestine can see the dune defining the edge of the landscape against the sky collapse, like melting snow; the desert eaten by the blurring motion of determined sweeping. She does not look directly. Breeding does not deign to notice those that serve it. The shape the demon was poured into defines its actions; and this, this madness, this suicide mission, seeks to exploit that shape and definition. She does not look, she must not look, only sharpen her cut-glass accent and displeased moue.
The demon is close, now, close enough that if Celestine turned her head she could see its apron, perhaps even its eyes.
Time.
“I say,” she says, sharp and refined and fired without specific direction at a world in which it is nonetheless perfectly understood she is speaking down. “I do believe this tea is—” and she snaps open a pocketwatch with a vicious, precisely contained movement of her wrist— “an entire forty-five seconds overbrewed, and nobody yet is pouring it.”
The demon freezes. The sudden cease of its sweeping is as terrifying as thunder to a small and lonely creature; Celestine lets none of it show on her face, none of anything show on her face or in the set of her shoulders, simply glowers at the second hand of the pocketwatch.
Tick.
Tick.
“Apologies, Miss,” the demon says, soft and deferential. Celestine was unaware of it movement, but it’s right at the table now, soundless until it spoke.
It pours her a cup of tea.
She sniffs, once, sharp and judgemental. “One lump of sugar,” she says. “Exactly enough milk to approach the brown of the flats of the Bericker river in the August distance, and no more.”
“Yes, Miss,” the demon says, pours a little milk, gently introduces a cube of sugar with the tongs, stirs very precisely — so precisely that the spoon does not touch the inside of the cup, around three times exactly, then tapped twice gently on the rim.
Celestine sits and drinks the tea. She does so with the most excruciatingly considered carelessness; slurps it just a little. She doesn’t acknowledge the demon standing nearby, hands folded, waiting.
She thinks she’ll never stomach another cup of tea in her life.
When she finishes the tea, not hurrying; not hurrying, though the effort feels like it might kill her, she sets the cup down. Stands. “Leave that,” she says briskly, waving a careless hand to indicate — well, everything; and sweeps away with no more than an impatient gesture to say attend me.
Her pulse pounds painfully hard. If the demon turns away; if the demon puts precedence on its standing orders; if the demon picks its broom back up—
It moves silently, and she dare not break character to check. She must imperiously assume that her staff is attending her, screaming inside, as she rounds a dune. The air remains quiet; the terrible roar of the demon’s cleaning does not begin anew.
She marches up to the rest of the team.
“Lady Celestine,” Stanja says, and curtsies; “M’lady,” Cobb echoes; “Your Eminence!” Axhal hails. She lifts her chin regally.
“Simply get in that box until you’re needed,” she instructs, waving a dismissive hand at the direly warded transport crate, ready to accept a standing figure the size of a person, ready to be nailed shut, ready for them to send up signal flares to the extraction dragons; and keeps her face turned away and posture oblivious to, arrogantly sure of, the demon’s obedience as its neat little maid’s shoes step, thunk-thunk, inside the box.
She holds pose until the rest of the team stop hammering the lid on, then begins to hyperventilate.
