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When a demon dies, they are sent back to the void awaiting to be summoned into a new world with new players.
But what happens if you were only summoned by accident? What happens if there's no one left to remember how to summon you?
How long will Monarch have to wait?
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…
It’s cold, so so so very cold. Their skin itches with static, code lines running past them, forming worlds, lives.
Players.
It hurts, not in the sharp way that you become accustomed to, but in a continuous ache. One that never dulls or ceases, only continues to thrum steady and consistent within your bones grating apart your skin.
Monarch regrets.
They can’t even distinguish between themselves and the code anymore, was there any difference in the first place? Sometimes they remember a different time, one where they lived happily within their mountain. Friends to laugh and comfort and…someone who loved them.
Sometimes they wish they could sleep here, just so that the endless nothing filled with binary code would stop. Maybe if they could, they would dream. Dream of a world where they took Harvey's offer, where they stayed. Where they were loved.
But they can’t, and with nothing else to do they can only regret.
…
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Harvey has to hurry.
He doesn't know how long it's been, months, years, decades? How long since that world?
How long since Monarch died?
Not all demons make it back after their first death, Harvey knows this. He was fortunate that one of the first worlds he joined belonged to a youtuber.
The player had spread his game far and wide allowing for him to be summoned fairly quickly, but that's not always the case.
The majority of newborn demons go insane after their first taste of life. The endless binary of the void rips apart their consciousness before they can even be summoned again.
…
The circle cross game had been losing popularity in forums recently, Harvey being summoned less and less as the years went on.
The void had been wearing on him recently, with the repetitive nothingness followed by the monotony of the sheep that summoned him-
he had grown lonely.
…
And then Monarch appeared.
They were so genuine, and confused when they had first joined, their mind feebly filling in the blanks for them, not even aware of the manipulations they were performing on their "friends".
He was so endeared in fact, that he didn’t even hunt the players for the first couple weeks, merely watched this newborn demon stumble his way through the flock attempting to fit in.
And then they started noticing. All the things he had forgotten to hide , first the window. Then came the corridor and the rooms.
But can he truly be angry with them, when it only served to bring them closer together?
Harvey knew the dinner was a joke, a cheap lie in an attempt of interrogation.
Looking back however, he thinks that was when he first realized he might feel something more for Monarch. The awkward conversation, more blush and stumbling words than anything else, and admitting the name he’d chosen for himself. The only real reason he had come up with one in the first place was to hide his identity, but hearing monarch call him by it had made him so unbearably flustered that he had gotten genuinely worried for his health.
It had gotten so bad in fact that when Monarch accused him about his room he panicked, resulting in a truly mortifying art exhibition he’d rather not repeat.
…
That mountain.
Harvey thinks back to his last moments there, face to face with Monarch who had trapped him within the circle-cross. He remembers how cold the wind was, how it had stung their cheeks red, and the tears that rolled down Monarchs cheeks only to be blown dry before they fell. The sunrise veiled them in a warm pink .
Harvey’s heart breaks as he thinks of how Monarch ached in that moment, and how he had vowed to himself in that endless void.
Vowed to find Monarch again and keep them, no matter what it may take.
Now he just has to convince these sheep to try another summoning.
This time he won't let them go.
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