Work Text:
Act I: 3096
Jan Faust was somewhat on the tall side, had recently garnered a position as a postdoctoral student at the University of Wittenberg, and was going to change the world. The world did not know it yet: no matter. Jan Faust did not want fame or fortune. He wanted only one thing, but it consumed his every waking thought in the way that a black hole consumes all light.
In his youth (a period of time he defined loosely as the era of foolishness in which he had floundered before settling into the study of demonology at the advanced age of twenty-two), Jan had toyed with the idea of going into the medical field. This is an understatement in many respects. He had not toyed with it so much as poured his teenage years into the sort of obsessive study which terrified his peers and enraptured his teachers. But compared to the fervour with which he threw himself into demonology, it was a frivolous and youthful phase.
Where biology had failed him, the occult would come through. The sacrifices would be great. This did not worry him, for he was sure of purpose and strong of mind.
The night was dark.
The circle was perfect.
The candles were unscented.
Jan Faust took a deep breath, drew a sterilized surgical blade across his palm, and squeezed blood over the symbols etched into the floor of his office. “Come, oh Stalker of Dreams,” he intoned. There was no need for such dramatics as millenia-old English, but Alcor was a Transcendental demon; furthermore, it gave Jan a frisson of pleasure to put his linguistics study to good use. “Come and feast on the blood of my own hand, come and peer into the alleys of my own mind, come and listen to the words of my own mouth. I summon thee and all the powers that flock to your aid.”
For one suspensefully long moment, nothing happened. Then the candles flared blue for an instant, their flames shot up to the ceiling, and the blood dripping from Jan’s hand slowed its descent to the floor and hung in the air like a gory constellation. Jan shivered as the temperature plummeted and a thick, heavy smog filled the room. When it cleared, there was a man (or, at any rate, a man-shaped creature) standing in the center of the summoning circle. It was shorter than Jan had expected, but the gold-laced smoke for skin and the black leather wings stretching out in an imposing arc from the creature’s lower back were, Jan considered, quite up to standard.
W͖̝̳͓ͧ̄̆ͥh̖̩͓̒̈́ͩ͋̂o̩̫̩̲ͯ͑͋̌ ͚̹͙ͨ̓ͭͯ͊d͔̠͚ͫ͒ͯͥ̽a̬̼̲͒͑͋ͨ̃r͉͓̖͙̠͒̆̉e͚̜̺͋ͤͯͯ͆s̹̰͚̗̎ͯ̽̎ ͓̥̩͙̼̹͖̦s̹̲̩̤̹̬͊ͅù̹̫̣͎̍̅̄m̬͖̹͖ͣͬ͑̿m͇̞̥̺̙̲̩̐o͖̘̗ͣ́ͨ̚̚n̺ͦͧ̊ͮ̎̇̊ ̭̦̬̪ͧ̓̾͛A͙̮̮̘̍͋ͫ̏l͚͎ͬ̿̊̿ͣ͋c͉̿ͩ̄̅̄ͧͅo̠̼̟͗̎̀ͨ͗r͓͉̦͙̘ͯ͆ͧ ͈̱̯̒̉͊̆ͯt̻̲͉͎̫̂͌̚h̫̺̩̹͗͋̈ͫẹ͙̮̙̅̌̒ͯ ͎̻̠̭̇̂͂͐Ḋ̙ͨͬ͌͛̽ͅṟ̺͔ͤ͐̍ͭͯẽ̞̩̰̥̩͛͌á͉͚̟̻̋ͬ̈́m̠̠̬̳͕̄̂̒b̺̗̫̂̂̈́ͨ́ȅ̤̼̣͉͈̩̇n̰̯̩̄͗̃̌ͨď̠̱͉̋ͤ͌̾e̦̦̹̯̘͆ͩ̃r̲͇̯̾̓̿ͯͤ?͙̱̖ͮ̽ͨͭ́
The words were not so much spoken as generated from all the molecules in the room vibrating in tandem. Jan gritted his teeth, and waited for his head to stop reeling.
“My name is Dr. Faust,” he said, in as even a tone as he could manage. Fear served no purpose at this point, and could be disregarded.
A grin split across the monster’s face, laced with shark-like teeth. "̝̱̭̌̓W̰͔̐̾̈h͔̤͎ͨ̇ä͍̖ͥ̚t̞̱̋ͫ̓ ̱̦͆ͫͣa͉͛̅̅̇ ͖̻̊͂ͬd̫̳͍̆̔e̱̫̓ͮͅl͉̥̠͗͐i̘͒̃͂ͅc͎͓͑ͭ͐ȋ̙͊ͧ̿o̥̾́̋̏ṵ̮̗͂ͅs͔̘̳͔̪ ̯̰̔̅̅i̙̪̇̀͐r̥̩̯̽͂o͉̗͉̓ͬn͖͙̓͂͂y̾͛ͥ̍̊.̯͈̎́̈́"̼̫ͪ̽̐
He did not know what it was talking about, and so he ignored it. It was always best to stick to the script. “I am from the University of Wittenberg Department of Demonology.”
Alcor the Dreambender crouched down and poked with one clawed finger at the runes chalked into the floor. "̭ͩͅT̠ͬ̿hͨ͐͊e̠ͪͬsͭͬ̒e̼͋̃ ̩̦͆a̝̫̒r̪͐̓ḙ̹ͅ ̭̞̠p̣̜̓r̹͈ͬe̜͐̉t̬̆͊ẗ̯́̑y̜͍͆ ͑̃͋w̳̬̐e̺̲ͬl͔̻͑l͈͇̚-͎̺ͪd̈͊̽r̞͔͉a͌ͤͧwͦͦ͗n̲͓ͭ,̘̓ͬ"͕̝̳ it said, "͔͙̇I̲͔͌'̱̖̓m̺ͤ̉ ̹͊̽ị̮̹m͓̞͚p̞ͩ̈r̺̗ͦe̙ͪ̽s̯͓̑s̃̿ͅȇ̪̾d̳̂͒.̤̄͌"͙̊ͅ
In the terrible, gaping years to come, Jan would look back at that moment as the one he damned himself. He should have ignored the flattery, should have pushed his ego and ambitions back and forged on with the script. Instead, he smiled.
“Thank you,” he said.
"̓Ǎl̋rͭi͇g͌h̒tͭ,̋ ͧmͫȍr͇t̍aͭl̗."̈́ said Alcor, the boom of its voice fading to a static buzz, "̞Ēn͇t̯e̥r̅t̚a̞i͐nͤ ͋mͧe̫.̓"̐
Jan cleared his throat and glanced down at his papers, words having fled him. “I propose a deal,” he said. “I would not trouble you, the greatest of all demons, with trivial matters. What I seek is quite simple: the power to revive the dead. I have realized in my years of medical study that only the metaphysical may intervene with the physical, and so I turn to you.”
Humming, Alcor straightened and cocked its head in a very humanlike manner. "̪A͈ṋd͆ ̩wͤh̠ý ̀d͉oͣ ̞yͩǒů ̟ẁaͫn̰t͑ ͖tͣh̯i͂s̈́?͗"͑
“To change the world,” said Jan, his eyes locked with the demon’s. “To make a difference.”
For a long moment Alcor held his gaze, and then all of a sudden his smoke-like form disintegrated into static, leaving only a man hovering a foot or two off the ground. He was of average height, average build, and looked for all the world like he could have been one of Jan’s students. “I can’t wait to see what you’re offering in return for this,” he said, and if his eyes glinted gold, it could have been the reflection of the candlelight.
“Here are my terms,” enunciated Jan, with the confidence of the fatally proud, “I want power over life and death. In return I offer you my corpse at the end of my natural lifetime, to eat or to inhabit as you like. You will not shorten that lifetime artificially.”
Alcor chuckled and reached one finger up to its mouth in a mockery of consideration. “Well, that hardly seems fair,” it mused. “You’re going to be moving a lot of bodies around with my power, but in return I only get yours, and only after a very long wait. That doesn’t seem fair at all.”
This was what Jan had feared. Still, he could do this-- they didn’t call him the most brilliant young demonologist in New Hesse for nothing. “What do you propose?”
“Here are the terms I offer to you.” Alcor prodded experimentally at the air above the binding symbols, and hissed slightly when its fingers sparked, but did not retract them. “Mark them well. I will give you the power you seek whenever you want it, to do with as you wish. In return, I will take from you your conscience.”
This was not at all what Jan was expecting. “What?”
“You heard me.” Alcor smiled, and it could have been nice if only it reached the eyes. “You are a very brilliant man, Jan Faust. I want to see if you’re brilliant enough to stick by your morals in the face of immense power.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Well.” Alcor’s eyes flashed in an entirely literal way. “If at the end of twenty-four years you have sunk into inhumanity, I will graciously return your conscience to you in the pursuit of making things a little better for everyone involved. I am not entirely bloody-minded. Does that seem fair to you?”
It was a better deal than Jan had dared to hope for. Furthermore, it was a challenge-- and almost too tempting. “What do you get out of this?”
“Dr. Faust,” said Alcor, and tilted its head up so that it looked Jan in the eyes. “I have not made a bet in quite a while. I have not had any friends with which to make one.” For one second a hollow expression flickered across its face, an expression which looked very much like loneliness. Then it was gone. “You are a very special man. Do we have a deal?”
Jan stared at the proffered hand as his thoughts raced. He would get his morals back if he needed them, and besides, all he had to do was to remember his ethical values.
“Tick tock, Dr. Faust,” said Alcor, and wiggled its fingers.
Nodding, Jan grabbed its hand and shook it firmly. “We have a deal.”
The fire flared around his hand, tingling, and then faded to a dull glow. Jan retracted his hand, blinked, and was entirely unsurprised to find that when he opened his eyes Alcor was gone.
He did not feel any different, although he supposed it must be subtle. If immorality was obvious, it would present no danger. The only test, he supposed, would be to try to kill someone and see if he felt bad about it. He was not about to lose the bet so early. So instead, he grabbed a broom and set about sweeping up the remnants of the summoning.
There were few opportunities to practice raising the dead in New Hesse. He couldn’t break into a medical ward-- that would be highly immoral-- and he certainly couldn’t create any new corpses himself. Finally he decided to perform a Göz Rite, a simple spell that mimicked the Sight and immediately identified any magical markings on a person. If there was something else-- something inhuman-- in his mind, the Göz Rite would reveal it.
The Göz Rite did not reveal it. Instead, what it revealed was a flowing script in which were scrawled two words along his left forearm: Fly, man!
Jan frowned at them until he managed to retrieve his Classical English vocabulary from the dusty bin in his head where it lived. To fly. He mulled over the word. Yes, he would fly. He would soar to heights unimagined; he would build a Silver City of his own on Earth and make the people of mud into his shining angels. He would fly.
A plague came to New Hesse. It was not like the plagues of millenia ago, but it was a plague nonetheless, and dozens of people died before they found a cure. This was bad, objectively. Jan knew this. But he still felt a frisson of excitement at the obituary in the local paper. A girl-- only twelve, dead before her time, and tucked away in the morgue.
It was cold the night that he snuck out and realised the major flaw in his plan. The major flaw was this: he did not know what he was doing. The building was locked, the corpse was inside, and even if he could get to it, Alcor had certainly left no instruction manual. He coughed experimentally, his breath pluming out into the night air, and knocked gently on the door.
“Need help?”
When he turned, Alcor was standing behind him at a respectful distance. “Eh,” said Jan, and gestured, chuckling. “Perhaps I am not entirely adept at breaking and entering.”
Grinning a friendly, surprisingly human grin, Alcor produced a roll of canvas from somewhere within his thin suit jacket and fiddled with it for a moment before brandishing a lockpick. Jan stood aside and let him do his work on the door.
“You know, I would have expected you could just-- I don’t know, magic it open,” he said, in as non-judgemental a tone as he could.
Alcor tsked. “And where’s the fun in that?”
“Ha.” The cold must have been getting to him, he didn’t seem to be able to form words properly. “Is there-- is there a price for this?”
The door swung open with little obstruction, and Alcor was halfway through it when the words made him turn. “A price? For this?” He smiled, a small, sweet thing, and not at all like the sharp-toothed Cheshire grin of legend. Shrouded in darkness, his brown eyes glinted lowly. “Jan, I told you in the deal. I will do whatever you want.”
“What?”
“Do you need to see the contract? It says the power you seek whenever you want it, to do with as you wish. It most certainly does not restrict you to raising the dead. Are you coming inside? It’s much warmer.”
“Yes, yes, I--” Jan shivered and, clutching his fur coat tightly, followed Alcor into the silent, dark morgue. “But why? All I wanted was the one gift.”
“I know,” said Alcor, striking a match he had produced from somewhere and using it to light a proper, old-fashioned candle. “But what I wanted was someone interesting. Gods, Jan-- may I call you Jan?-- it’s been forever since I had a conversation. A real one, I mean, not a pathetic deal with a waste of flesh who wants nothing more than to use me for some paltry, mortal gain and then leave me to sink back into the nothingness, the violent blandness of thoughts. And then…” He spun, suddenly, and the candlelight cast his face in a soft pattern of light and dark. “...then you called. And you wanted to change the world. And with an excellent binding circle to boot, which really did give you, ah, extra credit.”
“You’re a demon,” Jan pointed out, and tried not to let the fact that a demon wanted to talk to him go to his head. “Why do you care if the world changes?”
“Jan, I’ve been alive for longer than New Hesse has existed. When I was created, there was no archipelago on the Northwest coast of the Americas. If everyone you had ever met died tomorrow, you would still not be able to comprehend one hundredth of the death and destruction that I have been witness to.”
“And caused,” said Jan, and was proud of the way his voice held steady.
“Yes. And caused.” Alcor gave him a sidelong glance. “Perhaps I am tired of death.”
“Because it hurts?”
“Because it’s… old. Shall we find this girl you intend to save?”
Jan shook himself. “Yes. Her body should still be-- fresh.” The awful thought passed through his mind that perhaps to Alcor she would look like food. He tried to forget it.
In fact her body was not so much fresh as frozen. They found her in the chilled mortuary room, and Alcor gently pulled the gurney out from its shelf on the wall. As they stared down at her, her dark hair splayed and her cheeks gaunt and pale, Alcor passed a hand lightly over her forehead. From what Jan could see of his face, he looked somber.
“She was so young,” he murmured, as though he knew Jan was watching him. “Magda von Asche. Almost thirteen years old, but not quite. It’s sad, isn’t it? Don’t you understand? I see so many people squandering the years they were lucky enough to con out of the world, but I only see the innocent dying young.”
“And you’ll help me change it?”
Alcor stepped back. “Yes. But I can’t decide these things. That’s not how it works. What
do you want, Jan Faust?”
“I want her to breathe again.”
Beneath them on the gurney something flickered across Magda’s face, and Alcor cupped her ice-like cheek with one hand. “It is done,” he said.
In one horrible, gasping breath, Magda jerked upright. Her clouded eyes rolled in her head, and her hands clenched into fists at her side. Then her irises cleared, her arms relaxed, and she breathed a blessedly fluid breath.
“Magda?” said Jan, leaning towards her and inspecting for remaining signs of illness or death. “Magda von Asche?”
She nodded minutely.
“Can you tell me how you’re feeling?”
Her hand flickered up and she made a shaky thumbs-up which warmed Jan’s heart. Then she looked down at her pockmarked body, flung her arms fast around Alcor, and burst into tears.
“It feels good, doesn’t it,” said Alcor, later. “To help people like that. I mean really help, in the way most people can’t.”
It was hours after the hullabaloo of Magda’s return to her teary-eyed parents had died down, and the two of them sat on the old stone bridge that arched across the Elbe. The sun was rising, and Jan smiled. “Yeah. It was incredible, really-- there were no signs she had ever been sick at all! It was like-- like magic.” He burst out laughing, uncontrollably, and all the tension of the night flowed out of him.
“Like magic,” said Alcor. “Imagine.”
The first hints of the sun peeked up from the horizon, and Jan sighed. “I should go save those other kids.”
Alcor hummed noncommittally, and held out one gloved hand. “I can tesser you, if you like.”
“You’ll come with?”
“To save children? I have been known to do it. And besides, it’s not like you can raise the dead without me.”
“No,” said Jan, and ignored the uncomfortable way that sentence twisted and turned in his head. “It isn’t.”
Act II: 3104
They saved people. They saved people, and Jan fell slowly but surely in love. It was not love in a traditional sense: there was nothing physical about it, and indeed very little of the romantic, but it was love nonetheless. He had never before spoken with someone who seemed to understand the little impulses and dreams that drove him. But Alcor did, and together, they moved mountains.
No one knew what strange angel was keeping guard over New Hesse, and Jan was content to keep it that way.
Decades later, he would look back on those early years as the best of his life. They raised the dead, halted riots in their tracks, and helped keep the peace with a spark of blue fire and a sharp-toothed grin. Never sharp enough to be monstrous, of course-- Alcor looked human enough to put Jan at his ease, and even in the moments when he snapped his fingers and changed the world, Jan had a hard time remembering what he was. He mentioned it once, as the two of them sat curled on Jan’s couch, reading by the fire. “I mean, I know it intellectually, of course,” he added, when Alcor looked up at him quizzically. “I know you’re a demon. But there’s something incredibly-- not human, but-- personable about you. I don’t know how you do it. I have a hard enough time being a person most days, and I am one.”
“I am a person,” said Alcor, slowly.
Jan waved a hand. “Yes, yes, of course. But you’re not-- well-- you don’t know what it’s like, to feel human. So how do you do such a good job of pretending?”
In the flickering firelight, Alcor gave him a twisted smile. “Perhaps you’re just not very good at seeing what a demon is.”
Jan laughed, and breathed in the crystalline, perfect moment of firelight and companionship and comprehension. It was good, in the end, that he had summoned a demon. No one else had ever been able to understand him.
It was nearly a year later that the Patriarch of New Hesse announced the Edict of Darmstadt. “It’s preposterous,” he heard his students whispering to each other as they entered the lecture hall that morning. “Completely preposterous. He has to know it won’t work out.”
They quieted when Jan glared at them. He had that effect, as a professor.
And yet throughout the lecture he could tell none of them was really listening. Half of them kept glancing at their MagiOrbs, as though there was any chance the Patriarch would reverse his decision, and the other was passing notes to each other whenever they thought he wasn’t looking. Finally, Jan slammed his meterstick down on his desk mid-sentence, and the lecture hall stilled. He stared at them, young and silly and entirely stupid. None of them knew what he was capable of-- their understanding of the world was miniscule compared to his. And it was his job to teach them, to care about this preposterous edict and pay it heed as though it could for a single moment infringe upon what he could or could not do. As though he hadn’t already achieved in his thirty-odd years more than the Patriarch of New Hesse would in his entire life! For the first time, Jan felt the shackles of anonymity and raged against them.
But he did not let it show on his face. Instead, he smiled; a long, slow smile which did its best to imitate its inspiration. “I’m sure you’re all wondering if I’m going to keep teaching,” he said, patiently. There were a few scattered murmurs of assent throughout the seats. “There is nothing wrong with what is taught here. There is nothing unholy. I teach the natural world, and the supernatural world, and I attempt to show you that they are one and the same. There is nothing supernatural in a name. There is nothing supernatural in the whole world. All is as it should be, and is thus as natural as the air. I will not kowtow to ignorant, prejudiced ideas about what I can and cannot say. And neither will you.”
Someone in the audience raised their hand, unsure. “And what if you’re caught?”
“Caught?” Jan spread his hands. “Who will report me? Will any of you, the crème de la crème of New Hesse’s demonology students? Here, I will say these things that the Patriarch has told me not to say, and see if anything comes of it.”
The class hung on his silence, and he relished it. Placing his hands flat down on the desk, he leaned towards them, and smiled again. “Alcor,” he said. “Xiaxiarshar. Iranael. Sharatan. Has the Patriarch appeared to smite me down for my sins? Well? Has he?”
There was some frantic head-shaking and mutters to the tune of assent that no, he had not been smote down for disobeying the Edict of Darmstadt. “Right,” said Jan, softly, and an idea began to kindle in his brain. “If anyone will be smote down, it will be the Patriarch himself. Just you wait. Class dismissed.”
He did not wait for them to process his words before throwing his things into his briefcase and stamping out the door. As it swung shut behind him, he heard astonished discussion break out among his students, and he breathed out, long and slow.
Next to him, someone began to clap. He turned his head. It was Alcor, because of course it was, but he had foregone his typical suit in favour of a passable imitation of a Wittenberg undergrad’s attire. Once he had finished slow-clapping, he strolled forward and patted Jan on the shoulder. “That was certainly an exit,” he said. “Do you have any ideas to make good on your prophecy, or was that all bluster?”
“Prophecy?” Jan caught his mischievous gaze and held it. “It’s not a prophecy if you’re the one who plans it.”
“Dr. Jan Faust,” said Alcor, tucking his arm through the crook of Jan’s elbow as they strode off through the hallways of Wittenberg University, “I do believe I like the way you think.”
The Patriarch of New Hesse had just retired from a long day of press conferences, and had settled down to a nice dinner with a few influential lobbyists whom he considered to be his friends, when the good china started falling off the table. First it was the sugar bowl, and could easily have been deemed an accident, save that the Patriarch had it in his line of sight at the time and he would have vowed that no one had touched it. But he ignored it, snapped at poor Louis Branburg to clean up the mess, and continued on with dinner.
That is, until the Lady Coloxia’s plate crashed to the floor and spilled blood pudding everywhere.
After the affray, Louis Branburg coughed nervously and raised his hand. “I didn’t want to say anything in case I was wrong,” he said, “but I have a touch of the Sight and I could swear there’s something else in the room with us. I keep catching glimpses of it from the corner of my eye.”
Everyone at the table froze. For several long, drawn-out seconds, nothing happened. Then all of the cutlery on the table lifted a foot into the air, swivelled around, and drove itself into the antique tapestry on the far wall with the speed of a bullet. The Patriarch screamed, and pushed back his chair to make a run for the door. It was at this point that his pants fell down.
“What in the blazes is going on?” screamed the Lord Coloxia, clutching his wife’s arm. “Don’t you have proper protection from occult tampering?”
“Of course we have proper protection from occult tampering!” roared the Patriarch, trying vainly to cover his glittering purple underwear with one hand and shaking the other furiously. “This must be something one of you lot brought in.”
“Oh, jolly good,” sneered the CEO of Tasson Fuel, frantically pulling his tie away from his mouth, where it seemed intent on burrowing. “Blame it on the lobbyists, like always.”
“Well, it’s generally your bloody fault, isn’t it?”
“Our fault?” hollered the Lady Coloxia. A teacup made a beeline for her head and she only barely managed to duck in time. “Who is it who’s passing nonsense occult edicts to feed the Pro-Nat populist machine?”
“Um,” said Louis Branburg, because he had just noticed the demon, but no one listened to him.
“Populist machine?” the Patriarch spluttered. “Populist machine? This regime is built on good solid traditionali-- spleurggggh!” This last was because something had just pulled down his underwear as well, and no one wanted that.
“Hey, uh--” tried Louis again, and, as usual, failed to get anyone to pay attention to him.
A pillow levitated from the loveseat in the corner of the room, and eyed the Lady Coloxia in a way that pillows shouldn’t be able to. “There aren’t-- wumph-- any cameras in here, right?” she managed, in between being walloped on the head by a square foot of plush goose-feathers and satin. “That would be-- oof-- unfortunate.”
“No, of course not, don’t be preposterous--”
“Well,” said Louis, and pointed above the Patriarch’s head. “There’s that one.”
They turned as one to stare at it. It practically winked at them. “That used to be a clock,” the Patriarch protested, shakily.
“Door?”
“Locked,” said the CEO. “I tried it.”
The Lady Coloxia drew a deep breath. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
Nothing came out.
“Hey, what’s your name?” said Louis, staring at a fixed point just behind the Patriarch’s left shoulder.
“What’s my name?” roared the Patriarch. “What’s my--”
“He’s not talking to you, idiot,” hissed the Lord Coloxia.
“Then who the blazes is he talking to?”
“Me,” said a voice which most assuredly did not belong to any of the lobbyists. The Patriarch spun around, and the man standing behind him gave a small wave. “Jan Faust, PhD, at your service. You’ve made some interesting policy decisions recently, your Holiness.”
“Demon!” shrieked the CEO, and then clamped his hands over his mouth.
“Oh, no,” said Jan Faust, PhD, “I’m not a demon. I’m just a professor. Slightly different, you may be surprised to learn.”
The Patriarch crossed himself furiously. “Er… begone!”
“I just said I’m not a demon,” said the man, frowning. He hadn’t been very remarkable to look at before, but now something more sinister sat on the sharply dissatisfied angles of his face. “But I have friends in… ahh… low places, shall we say.”
The lights flickered, and cold ran down the Patriarch’s spine. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean,” said Jan Faust, ambling towards the disaster-struck dinner table and perusing it with an artificially casual eye, “that you should think twice before infringing on what demonologists can and cannot do.”
“You can’t-- you can’t tell me what to do! You’re just an academic!”
“Oh,” he said, taking a careful bite of panettone, “sorry, I hadn’t realized. What are you, then? A god?”
The Patriarch drew himself up to his full height and glowered. “I am the chosen Hand of God of the Theocracy of New Hesse, and I will not be toyed with by a mere mortal. I am divinity on Earth. I am the Champion of--”
“Blah, blah, blah,” said Faust. “You know nothing of divinity. I am more a god than you will ever be able to comprehend, Reiner Gerstmann.” He reached out one hand and, his mouth twisted in a patronizing smirk, placed it on the Patriarch’s cheek. He had just opened his mouth to continue speaking when the Patriarch screamed. It was a horrible sound, and all those in attendance flinched, including Faust, who jerked his hand away as though it had been burnt. It had not, but the Patriarch had. As the raw flesh of his cheek sizzled and popped, his knees buckled and he crumbled to the floor, whimpering.
“I--” whispered Faust, his eyes wide. “I didn’t mean to-- no matter. You see now what happens when you cross us, Reiner Gerstmann. Do not do it again.”
“No… no, I... never.”
The assembled lobbyists stared at the grisly scene before them. “Leave,” said the Lady Coloxia, in an impressively even voice. “Leave and do not return. We will not speak of this again. We promise.”
“Of course,” said Dr. Faust, and his lips twitched as though he wanted to say more. Then he held out a hand to the thin air, and disappeared.
“That man is no god,” said Louis Branburg, as the Patriarch sobbed on the floor. “But something else is.”
“I don’t understand why you did that,” said Jan eventually, as they sat on the bridge like they always did after a miracle. “I didn’t want you to do that.”
Alcor frowned. “You didn’t?”
“No, I just-- I just wanted to scare him, I didn’t want to hurt him.”
There was silence for a moment. “Oh,” said Alcor, and he sounded guilty. “I’m sorry.”
If anything, it was the plain regret in his voice that got Jan to relax. “Really?”
“Yes, I-- you said you wanted to scare him. It’s been a while since I really talked to humans. It’s so easy to forget what words mean.”
“Ha. Yes, I can understand that.” The bland grey water splashed below them, and Jan sighed. “Still, I feel bad.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s not an evil man, exactly. Or perhaps he is, but he didn’t deserve that.”
“Oh,” said Alcor, “alright.” He fiddled with the hem of his jacket for a moment. “He was going to hurt you, you know. He would have found you and he would have punished you. But you’re safe, this way.”
“Aww,” Jan chuckled. “You almost make it sound like you care.”
Alcor turned to face him and leaned his head in. “I do. Of course I do.” He smiled. “I have a very personal investment in what happens to you, Jan Faust, and don’t forget it.”
“You really phrased that in the most menacing way possible,” Jan said, but the words had comforted some concerned part of him regardless.
“Ah. Sorry. Demon habits. You know how it is.”
They shared a smile: quiet, secret, and amused. “Right,” said Jan, and laughed. “Demon habits.”
Act III: 3112
Demon habits, as it turned out, were undeniably addictive. The morning after Jan and Alcor’s foray into politics, the Patriarch reappeared on broadcasts across New Hesse with blotchy makeup that didn’t quite cover up the ugly new scar in the shape of a hand across his cheek, and explained that perhaps he had been hasty, that freedom of speech was very important, that although this was a theocracy he could concede that comprises must be made.
Jan’s students never looked at him the same way again, and he reveled in it.
Rumours abounded at the University of Wittenberg: Jan Faust had summoned demons. Jan Faust had walked in the nightmare realm. Jan Faust could call down curses on anyone who dared to challenge him.
Jan Faust had been having a marvelous eight years of tomfoolery and skullduggery with his best friend, and fully intended to continue doing so. There was nothing malicious in their antics-- or, at least, nothing that Jan recognised at malicious. They targeted the petty and cruel, those bloated with power, and made them their sport. Jan was careful to delineate exactly what he meant when he put forward ideas, so as not to have a repeat of the Patriarch incident.
From the Patriarch, they moved on to various corrupt politicians and religious figures (and frequently those who were both). Then to minor dignitaries and academics, or occasionally just people who were plain annoying. And if they did not make as many miracles as they used to, if Jan no longer raised the dead, well-- he had done his service, hadn’t he? There was nothing transactional in their relationship anymore. It was just friendship.
By the time they pushed the motorcyclist into the river, Jan had all but forgotten the prophecy scrawled on his arm.
There was nothing particularly insulting about the man, but he did bump into Jan as he walked past where he had parked his bike, and his apology could have done with a little more sincerity. Jan accepted it with equanimity, and leant against the old stone baluster to wait. As soon as the man had finished taking in the view from the bridge and had swung his leg over the motorcycle, Alcor appeared.
“What are you thinking?”
“Perhaps an unexpected swim?” murmured Jan.
The edges of Alcor’s grin were as sharp as his eyes. “Sounds delightful,” he said, and snapped his fingers.
To the shock and consternation of the biker, the motorcycle suddenly levitated in the air and performed a neat spin. The man spluttered and gripped the handlebars tighter. “What? What is--”
He had no time to finish his sentence, because the bike shot forward over the bridgerail, hovered in the air for a moment, and then dropped like a stone into the river below. Jan and Alcor leaned over to appreciate the splash. A second or two later the man stuck his soggy head out of the water and flailed for a second before finding his balance.
The two of them collapsed into laughter.
“He looked like a drowned cat,” said Jan, once he’d caught his breath.
“Did you see how surprised he was?” Alcor waved a hand majestically in the air. “Fly, man! Fly!”
“Ha. Yes.” The words settled uneasily in Jan’s stomach. “Perhaps we shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not? It was fun.”
“True.” Jan thought for a second. “I’m going to get dinner. I’ll see you soon?”
“I can come if you like.”
For some reason the thought did not please Jan at all. “No, no, it’s fine.”
“If you insist. Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” said Jan, and stayed staring at the river for quite a few minutes after Alcor had disappeared.
Fly, man. He had forgotten. His dreams of flying had been so long ago-- a decade and a half. He had been young and naive and he had, against all better judgement, summoned a demon. Just because it had worked out did not mean it wasn’t stupid. He was forty now. Forty was too old for childish games. What he needed, he realised, was perspective. Something to remind him what he was in it for.
The thought occurred to him as he walked back home through the quiet streets of Wittenberg, and once it presented itself it did not let him go. It was the perfect reminder of what he could accomplish if he set his mind to it: Magda von Asche. The little girl he had raised from the dead, that very first time Alcor had come to visit him. She was, in many respects, the start of it all, and he would return to her. He smiled, and changed course. After all these years, he still remembered where her parents lived, from that glorious moment when he had returned their daughter to them alive and well.
The woman who opened the door looked nothing like the Mrs. von Asche he remembered, but he supposed time changed everyone. She was old and grey, and looked very tired.
“Hello?” she said, staring at him blankly as he stood on her doorstep.
“Hi,” said Jan. “I’m Dr. Faust. You might remember me.”
Her face shuttered. “Dr. Faust. Of course I remember.” She waved a hand listlessly. “You had better come in.”
The peeling wallpaper encircled him as he stepped through the door, and he felt suddenly that something was wrong. “Ah, I was wondering if I might speak to Magda?”
The woman stopped in her tracks, and spun to face him. “You were wondering if you might speak to Magda,” she repeated, monotone.
“Er.” He blinked. “Yes? Your daughter?”
“I know who Magda was, you bastard,” she hissed. “I know what you did to her. You and your hedge magic.”
Jan felt his eyes widening, and his heart picked up its pace. “What?”
“You want to talk to Magda,” said Mrs. von Asche again, mockingly. “Well. Magda’s been dead for sixteen years.”
The world dropped out from under him. “What?”
“She died two weeks after you raised her poor corpse from its grave.” There were tears of anger and grief in her eyes. “You’d sworn us to secrecy, of course, and none of us dared break a deal with a mage. Who knows what might happen? So we couldn’t say anything as our daughter disintegrated in front of us. We could only hold her hand as her eyes filmed over. When she finally died it was a blessing, and we thanked the Lord for it and prayed we’d never meet your ilk again, Dr. Faust. Does that give you all the closure you need?”
“Er--” Jan backed away towards the door as the walls seemed to close in on him. “Yes--”
“Oh, I’m so glad,” spat Mrs. von Asche. “I’m so glad you got closure. The Lord knows we never got any. Now get out of my house.”
He did, although later he could not remember descending the old stairs to the street. His head was reeling, and stars swam in front of his vision. This had to be a mistake. Something else had gone wrong, nothing to do with Alcor-- he glanced down at his arm, where he knew the words sat, invisible except to those with the Sight. Fly, man. Perhaps it had meant something else entirely.
There was only one way to find out, aside from asking Alcor (and for the first time in decades he did not feel he could expect a straight answer from the demon). He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and, hands shaking, fumbled with his MagiOrb. He remembered some of the names. The early ones that he would never forget, because they represented his greatest successes. He fumbled with the touchscreen and managed to type in Heinrich Schulz obituary. The first result was from March 12th, 3096, and he breathed a sigh of relief before seeing the date on the second: April 2nd. He clicked on it, tears blurring his eyes.
After a fatal illness, Heinrich Schulz, 23, has passed away. His family will miss him.
There was a picture of a smiling young man who thought he had a future. And after that there was nothing else, as befitted the second obituary for a boy dead before his time. Jan gasped in a painful breath as his world lurched around him. There was something wrong. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Something had gone wrong with the magic, Alcor wasn’t as powerful as he thought he was, it was a mistake--
But no, the scholarly voice inside him pointed out. Alcor the Dreambender never made mistakes. Alcor the Dreambender had murdered 50 million in their beds and houses and schools, had destroyed the entire state of California and left a scar across the public consciousness that defined what a demon was in the millennium after.
Jan Faust dried his tears and walked home, and knew that he was alone.
He waited in his kitchen, his hand curled around a cold handle. He breathed in once, twice, and then spoke. “Alcor.”
There was no show, no fanfare, but when he raised his head the demon was there. His ears were long and pointed, his eyes were gold-on-black, and his shark smile stretched gruesomely across his face. Jan did not let him get a word in before lunging forward with a speed he never knew he possessed and plunging the kitchen knife into his chest. He buried it up to the hilt with a disgustingly wet noise, and Alcor staggered back, clutching with claw-tipped fingers at the blade. He caught himself on the far counter, and stared down for a second before, to Jan’s horror, he began to laugh. It did not even have the decency to be a properly villainous laugh; instead, it was the noise that Jan had heard a hundred times before when he told Alcor a joke.
Wrapping his fingers around the hilt, Alcor tugged the knife out of his ribcage with a pop and balanced the tip on the palm of his hand. “Oh, I’d forgotten about pain,” he said, wearingly. “That’s a good one. But you’re really slipping if you thought a knife would stop me, Faust.”
“Faust?” spat Jan, and stumbled backwards. “Did you ever even care about me? Did you ever love me?”
Alcor twisted his head and, without blinking, drove the point of the knife through his hand. Golden blood curled around the metal, and he twitched his claws. “Did I love you? Did I love Jan Faust? What is there to love?”
This, then, was the worst betrayal yet. Jan felt a great exhaustion settle over him, and he sagged against the counter. “I’ve wasted my life,” he realised. “I gambled away my morals on impermanent resuscitations and false friendship. I’ve got nothing to show for it save a minor political consequence and-- and one soggy biker. You know, I really thought I was doing well. I thought I had been a good person despite the deal. But you made me blind when you stole my conscience.”
“Oh, Jan,” said Alcor, a mockery of pity in his inhuman eyes. “I never did anything to your conscience.”
Jan gaped at him. “What?”
“Everything you’ve done has been what you wanted to do.” Alcor began to walk towards him, slowly and deliberately. “You let yourself sink into ineptitude and wastefulness out of a desperate need to feel like someone understood you. You delighted in your petty crimes because you thought I endorsed them. You never cared about whether you helped others, you only cared that I thought you were clever. Well, congratulations, Jan Faust, you’re very clever indeed, but not a good man by any stretch of the imagination.”
“Me? What about you? You’re--” It was hard, even then, to find a reason to hate him. “You’re a monster.”
“Burning cities in a night,” said Alcor, as though he was quoting some age-old scripture. It was nothing that sounded familiar. “I’m glad you finally cottoned on. No, Jan, I haven’t taken your conscience. Do you want to know a funny little thing about demons? Something you teach your students every day?”
Jan couldn’t speak, so he nodded.
Reaching out a hand, Alcor cupped Jan’s cheek in a cruel recreation of the scar he had given the Patriarch nearly a decade before. “The thing you’ve got to remember when you’re dealing with demons,” said Alcor, “is that words have more than one meaning. I didn’t make a deal for your morals, Jan. I made a deal for your conscience, and that is something else entirely. Something that I can take at any moment I want.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your consciousness, if you will. It’s mine, to do with as I like. And at the end of twenty-four years… well, you haven’t won our little bet, so after I pull it out of your body, I’m going to return it. Of course, your corpse will be significantly degraded by then.
There was nothing occult keeping him pinioned, but Jan found he could not move. The full horror of the situation had dawned on him. It was Hell, in a sense-- worse than the Hell the Patriarch threatened, to sit in a rotting cadaver buried under the ground and wait.
“How long?” he whispered.
“Forever,” said Alcor, with a look that indicated he knew exactly what Jan was thinking. He probably did. “That’s Hell, isn’t it? Do you want to know the punchline? It’s exactly the fate you almost doomed those poor people to years ago. Magda von Asche. Heinrich Schulz. Jonas Friedman. Others, too. You wanted to raise them from the dead-- there’s no such thing, Jan, not if you search through every dimension in the history of existence. The most you can do is drag a soul back from the ether before it’s reincarnated. But the body knows it’s dead. What you wanted me to do was leave poor Magda’s soul stuck in her slowly rotting body, because you never once looked into the occult side of death. Those poor children were lucky I only brought them back long enough for a quick rejuvenation before I helped their souls back into the reincarnation track painlessly.”
“I-- I didn’t know--”
“Of course you didn’t know!” snarled Alcor, lunging forward so that his eyes were an inch away from Jan’s. “You didn’t care enough to know. You didn’t want to help people, you wanted to change the world. You wanted to be a god, with the power of life and death in your hands. How dare you? How dare you play with the lives of children? You’re not me, Jan Faust. You don’t understand me and you never will.”
There was no adrenaline left, only a creeping existential dread. “I thought,” said Jan, “that we were friends.”
“I know,” said Alcor, stepping back and dusting off his sleeves. He placed the knife carefully on the counter. “It was always hard not to laugh.”
And with that, he was gone.
What was there left in life? Only the countdown, ticking day by day until eventually it would reset. Wait time: the end of the universe. Jan went to class, and he taught. He ate. He slept. There was nothing else to do.
If his students noticed anything different about him, they didn’t show it, but his colleagues certainly did. A few of them approached him at various points to inquire after his health, and he would smile hollowly and shrug them off. It began to eat at him, that they worked beside him and didn’t know he was damned. There was no way they could help, of course. Some of them were brilliant academics, and even the mediocre ones would try, but what was the theory compared to the praxis? Trying to cheat Alcor the Dreambender was the final exam for a course that no one could pass.
He saw him, sometimes. In the crowd at conferences, clapping politely with that cursed smile on his face. Mingling at soirées, laughing at other people’s jokes, and always tipping his glass to Jan when they made eye contact. It was infuriating.
It was at one of those post-conference gatherings that he finally snapped. It had been twenty years since he had made the worst mistake of his life, and he only had another four years to go before his eternal punishment began. A little drama, he reasoned, was owed to him; this was how he justified throwing his champagne glass to the floor and striding across the room when the cluster of professors began to loudly discuss Alcor.
"Fascinating from an academic standpoint," said Jan, once everyone had frozen to stare at him. "The phases, I mean. You lot reason that he's segueing out of one of his darker phases, is that it?"
"Well," said Joreth Tamsin, rubbing his hands together, "it's just a theory. There haven't been many big disturbances in the last half a century. Aside from the Massacre of 3081. It only stands to reason that he's retreated into the Mindscape, which historically is succeeded by a reintegration into society and a more human period."
Jan laughed, and the room shrunk away from the manic edge in his voice. "He's doing no such thing. Alcor is as evil as ever, the only difference is that right now he's doing a perfect impression of having a-- a conscience."
"Oh?"
"He's the worst of the lot. Don't you forget it, any of you."
"Dr. Faust," said Liese Konegsmann, evenly. "You seem to have a measure of perspective on the matter."
"Perspective." He strolled over to a nearby grad student, grabbed the glass of scotch from their hand, and downed it in a gulp. "Yes, perspective. Twenty years ago I summoned Alcor. Four years from now I meet my fate. It's not something I'm particularly looking forward to."
A ring of murmurs expanded throughout the room. "Why the hell did you summon Alcor?" called someone, who was quickly shushed by more sympathetic voices.
To change the world, Jan thought. And to have a friend. "It doesn't matter," he said aloud. "Not anymore. It damned me. It’s a dead man you're talking to, do you understand? Do you understand that he will destroy me?"
No one seemed to know what to say to that. There were a few paltry commiserations, but the dominating emotion seemed to be horrified uncertainty. Eventually the grad student whose scotch he had stolen offered him the rest of the bottle, which he took, and gave him an awkward pat on the shoulder. "Right," said Jan, and took a swig. "Glad that's out in the open."
It didn't help his sleep any. He had always been a bit of an insomniac, and the realisation that a dream demon had invalidated both his life and his career did not make the unconscious world an appealing one in which to sojourn. So he would lie there for hours on end, staring at the peeling ceiling and trying to think of anything meaningful he could do with his remaining time. He could always do something dramatic, he supposed. He could take up free-climbing, or finally take that sabbatical he had lined up, or-- Heaven forbid-- get married. He smiled to himself. That would be very dramatic indeed, and might be a decent prank simply because of how much it would shock his colleagues. Of course, the problem with getting married was that he would have to find someone to get married to, and then they would probably have to do all sorts of things that Jan wasn’t particularly interested in, like file taxes together.
He dismissed the thought with annoyance. This was what happened when he didn’t get enough sleep: he began to get romantic. And it was hard to seriously consider trying to form any kind of relationship with anyone, after the golden-eyed fiasco that had been his first best friend. When the insomnia got to its worst, and he lay utterly sleepless, strangled by sheets as the grey dawn light filtered through the window, he would use the Göz Rite and stare at the words traced on his arm. Fly, man. What a fool he had been.
So there was nothing he did, in the end, aside from wait.
Act IV: 3120
The night was dark.
The circle was perfect.
The candles were unscented.
Jan Faust took a deep breath, exhaled shakily, and slit his palm open over the chalk on the floor. “Come on, you dickwad,” he said. “You know you want to.”
Alcor did not even have the decency to appear in the circle. Instead, he popped into existence on Jan’s favourite armchair, sipping a martini and smiling an infuriating amount. “Hello, Jan,” he said. “Long time no see. Want to change the world?”
“Do I get a martini?” said Jan. It was the only thing he could think to say.
“Oh, this?” Alcor took another sip of his drink. “You can try if you like, but I don’t think it will be to your taste. It’s your blood, you know.”
“It’s my--” Jan’s stomach lurched, and he shot a horrified glance down at the floor to confirm that, indeed, the blood he had sacrificed was gone from the circle. “That’s revolting.”
“Don’t knock it ‘til you rock it,” said Alcor, incomprehensibly. “Anyway, what’s going on with you? Enjoying your last few hours? Done anything productive with your life since the last time I checked in on you?”
Jan was silent.
“No, I thought not. You didn’t even try to make amends with those poor families, did you?”
“They’ve suffered enough without me wandering back into their lives.”
“Mmm. So are you here to scream at me? Insist you’ve done nothing wrong?”
“No,” said Jan. “I’m here to beg.”
The smile that spread across Alcor’s face was one that Jan had seen a hundred times, but now, in the flickering candlelight, he did not understand how it had ever struck him as anything but cruel. “Oh, this should be fun.”
“Please, Alcor,” said Jan, the hysteria rising in his throat like bile, “I don’t want to rot underground forever. Please. I was young and dumb and arrogant, and now I’m only two of those things. I learned my lesson. Kill me, or torture me, or let me fade into nothing like mist, but please for-- for the love of-- just please don’t trap me in a grave. If you feel anything that passes for what a human feels, please have pity on me.”
“Pity,” mused Alcor, pushing himself to standing. “Pity for the sinner. Why should your soul be let to drift peacefully back into the reincarnation cycle, after everything I’ve done for you? Why should I get nothing in return? Your pain could keep me fed for quite a while, until you finally lose your novelty.”
Jan collapsed to the floor. Hopeless. It was hopeless. There was nothing he could offer, unless--
A thought occurred to him. It was the biggest taboo in all of demonology, a rule taught so stringently that no one who broke it ever lived to describe the effects, but it might be preferable to an eternity in a rotting corpse.
He looked up at Alcor, who all of a sudden was standing right in front of him. “What about my soul?”
The glint that flashed through Alcor’s eyes was unmistakably eldritch, and his teeth glittered in the dark. “Your soul.”
“I propose a deal,” said Jan, pushing himself to his feet. “Anything is better than what you have planned for me. Once you eat a soul, it’s gone forever, right?”
“The final sleep,” Alcor said quietly.
“Then here’s what I offer you. My soul, in return for making sure that I die. Just that. Do you accept?”
Blue fire bloomed up between them, and Jan took the proffered hand almost on impulse. “I accept,” said Alcor. “By the way, where are we right now?”
So it was over. And the pain, too, would end eventually. This was better. “My lecture hall,” he said. “I never left after my last class.”
“Perfect.” Alcor dusted off his hands. “Tomorrow morning you’ll give your students a lesson they’ll never forget.” He tilted his head, and an expression of sadness passed across his face. “Oh, Jan,” he said.
“Feeling guilty yet?”
“No.” His eyes were lidded, and there was something dark behind them. “You never figured it out, of course. All demons want, from the very first moment you summon them, is your soul.”
Act V: Epilogue
Excerpt from Summoning the Past: An Encyclopedia of Demonic Activity in the 4th Millenium, edited by Aba Startooth. 3rd edition.
FAUST, JAN W. April 2nd, 3072- February 4th, 3120. Former chair of the Department of Demonology at the University of Wittenberg in New Hesse, Professor Jan Faust is most remembered for his grisly demise. After making a deal with Alcor the Dreambender (see p. 7) at some point in his early life, he kept a relatively low profile for much of his academic career. However, on the morning of February 4th, 3120, undergraduates in his morning lecture class entered the auditorium to find a scene of such violence that only two students out of seventy-six remained in the Demonology program at Wittenberg.
Forensic occultists determined that Alcor had eaten through his body until he reached his soul, which he had then ripped free and eaten as well. Only enough of Faust’s flesh remained to be identifiable, and pieces of his bones were found scattered throughout the auditorium. His killing is considered an oddity in the field of Alcorian studies (see p. 662 and 720).
Following this, Alcor’s behaviour entered a five-year period of extreme and regular violence, culminating in the North Carolina Massacre (see p. 513). Academic opinion differs on whether Alcor may have regretted the murder of Jan Faust.