Heroine Creation: All My Summons Are Custom Made

From the highest window of the citadel tower, a silhouette gazed down at the field of corpses below.

Braavas, the Demon Head, watched the death of his ambitions.

His mismatched eyes swept across the battlefield. The Purgatory Demons, those untamable nightmares that were meant to be unstoppable, lay in mangled heaps across the scorched earth.

Beyond them, the black tide of his garrison forces was similarly broken. And there, at the center of the carnage, the massive corpse of the Demon Commander lay split from chest to crown, its red axe discarded beside it like a child’s forgotten toy.

The silence in the tower room was absolute for one trembling moment.

Then Braavas’s snout-like jaw unhinged and he roared out of pure frustration. ”WHO ARE THESE AWAKENERS?!”

His voice cracked the air. He spun from the window and struck a stone table beside it, shattering it to a dozen pieces.

He punched a giant hole into the war and smashed an innocent statue to bits. ”Arrgggh!”

After the burst of rage, he stood still for a while, panting, taking in great heaving breaths that sucked the Gloom-laden air through his rows of yellow teeth.

Once the anger settled, he was left with another emotion.

Fear.

He straightened slowly, his chest still heaving, and his gaze drifted to the screen on the far wall. The roots around it throbbed, waiting. Lord Baal was waiting.

What would he say? What could he possibly say? The Purgatory fragment—their secret weapon, their unanswerable threat—had been deployed and shattered.

The Demons inside were not supposed to be defeatable. At least not like that. How could they have been cut down by a handful of humans?

Braavas felt something he had not experienced in centuries: the cold grip of utter failure. Lord Baal’s final warning echoed in his skull.

’You will have failed Gehenna.’

He closed his eyes—or rather, the sunken one closed while the bulging one merely twitched—and drew a long, steadying breath.

It barely calmed him, but he knew this had to be done.

He walked to the screen, reached up with one trembling hand and placed a clawed finger on the black surface. The ripples spread outward and red light shivered beneath his touch.

The screen resolved. Baal’s face appeared, covered in hellish light from the flames of Gehenna.

The Demon Lord’s eyes swept over Braavas’s face.

”Is it done?” Baal asked, expecting a yes.

Braavas bowed low, folding his asymmetrical body with the deepest submission he could manage. The coral growths on his shoulder scraped against the stone floor. When he spoke, his voice was a gravelly rasp, stripped of all authority.

”My Lord Baal... I am sorry, but...” The words seemed to strangle him. His snout twitched. ”I failed.”

Silence.

Baal’s eyes narrowed. He appeared confused by that answer. ”You failed to summon the Purgatory Demons?”

Braavas’s head remained bowed. ”No, my Lord Baal. I summoned them. The fragment opened. The creatures poured forth as commanded.” His claws dug into the stone floor, leaving grooves. ”But the Awakeners... they defeated them. The Purgatory Demons are dead. All of them.”

Baal did not move. He did not blink. The only sign of his reaction was a small tightening of the muscles around his jaw.

”The Commander,” Braavas continued, ”and the garrison forces as well. I am all that is left of this Demon Break.”

”Impossible,” Baal whispered, but it filled the chamber like thunder. ”The Purgatory Demons cannot be defeated by Awakeners. They carry Gloom so dense it would kill any human who breathed it. They move faster than the eye can track. They feel no pain, no fear, no hesitation. They were our secret weapon, Braavas. Our unanswerable threat. And you tell me they are dead?”

Braavas could only nod, his misshapen head bobbing in a grotesque display of deference.

Baal’s nostrils flared. The stone wings behind him shifted with a sound like grinding boulders. ”These Awakeners. Did you see them?”

Braavas lifted his head slightly, his bulging eye quivering. ”I did, my Lord Baal. I got a good look when they fought the Commander. It was five women and a boy.”

He paused, searching for the words. ”The boy had hair like sunlight. Golden. He carried a blazing sword that drank souls. The women... four of them were powerful, each with abilities I have not seen in many years.”

Braavas swallowed before continuing. ”One of these women looked eerily familiar. She looked like the one who held us back all those centuries ago. The one who stopped us from advancing through the Greatest Gate when the humans were at their weakest.”

Baal’s already narrowed eyes narrowed again.

”Astensia,” he said, the name rolling off his tongue like a curse. ”The Knight with the Iron Will.”

Braavas’s face twisted with confusion. ”But my Lord Baal... she is long dead. She died on that seventh day. The histories all confirm it.”

”She did,” Baal agreed, his voice distant now, contemplative. ”I watched her fall myself. Her light extinguished. Her body broken.”

His eyes refocused on Braavas. ”Even if she somehow survived, she could not have walked through the Gloom of Purgatory. No human, Awakened or unawakened, can survive that density of corruption. The intoxication alone would shred their Grace channels. Their soul would unravel before they could swing a blade.”

Braavas bowed his head again, faster this time. ”Forgive me, my Lord Baal. I do not mean to speak falsely. I only report what I saw. If I am mistaken—”

”Silence.”

The word was absolute. Braavas’s jaws clamped shut.

Baal was thinking. His deep red eyes had gone distant, focused on something beyond the screen, beyond the tower, beyond the present moment. His massive horns seemed to grow heavier as the silence stretched.

”There is one, however,” Baal murmured, almost to himself. ”One who could walk through the densest Gloom as if it were morning mist. One who would not merely survive Purgatory’s corruption but drink it. Feast on it.”

He shook his great head slowly. ”But she died as well. A century and a half ago. I saw to it personally. So, no... It simply cannot be.”

Braavas’s head lifted. A strange, desperate hope flickered in his bulging eye — the hope of a servant who might yet provide useful information, might yet salvage something from this disaster.

”She, my Lord Baal?” His voice was careful now. ”This woman... tell me what she looked like.”

Baal’s eyes snapped to Braavas with an intensity that made the Demon Head flinch.

”Did she have pure white hair?” Braavas asked, speak fast to save face. ”Crimson eyes? A red and golden rose as a headgear? An energy about her that was not quite human?”

The silence that followed was terrible.

Baal’s face, that vast and horned visage of demonic royalty, contorted through a series of expressions. First was disbelief, then dawning recognition, then a fury so pure and cold it seemed to lower the temperature of the air itself.

”Impossible,” Baal whispered, but the word had lost its certainty. ”What you say cannot be. I skinned the pagan Mother of Demons with my own claws. I watched her scream. I watched the humans finish what I started, their blades and their fire and their righteous hatred. She has been dead for a century and a half. Her body was burned. Her soul was scattered. What you say simply cannot be.”

Braavas’s eyes — both of them — went wide. The bulging one quivered. The sunken one seemed to retreat even deeper into its socket. A tremor ran through his asymmetrical frame.

”My Lord Baal,” he breathed, the words barely escaping his snout. ”Is it her? Is she the reason for all of this? The reason we are searching for Lord Baphomet?”

His voice grew more urgent. ”Is this the same woman who entrapped him? The one whose catalyst is somewhere in this world with your brother, our Lord, locked inside?”

Baal’s reaction was like a volcanic eruption.

His stone wings snapped outward with a crack that resonated through the magical screen and into Braavas’s chamber, shaking the roots along the walls.

His deep red eyes blazed with an unholy light, and his massive cow-head lowered like a bull preparing to charge. The Gloom around him — in his throne chamber, visible through the screen — erupted into furious motion, swirling in great cyclones of crimson and black.

”That human witch,” he snarled, the memory was like a curse. ”That meddling, lunatic pest—” He stopped himself, his chest heaving.

The composure of the Demon Lord cracked, and beneath it was something older and uglier: a personal hatred that had festered for over a hundred years.

”How? How has she returned? I killed her. I watched her die. Who is this boy she has united herself with? No, it can not be her! She would never align herself with Awakeners. It just can not be!”

He slammed one massive fist against something off-screen, and the impact was so violent that the screen itself shuddered, the image flickering for a moment.

”Where are they now?” Baal demanded, his voice a thunderclap. ”Where are the Awakeners? Where is she?”

Braavas opened his snout to answer. ”I expect they will be coming here to stop me anytime s—”

BOOOMMMM!!!!