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I Summon the All-Seeing Eye	By : all_possible_worlds Category: +S through Z > Star vs. The Forces of Evil Views: 29523 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Star Vs. the Forces of Evil or its characters. I made no money from writing this story.

Chapter List
- 29
- 30
Chapter 30: Unveil to Me What is Forbidden
Additional Note: This is a five-chapter update on this site today (Aug 12, 2018). If the start of this chapter doesn't make sense, make sure you have read chapters 26 to 29. This concludes Part III, look forward to part IV starting sometime before the end of the year.
Note: Please review if you enjoyed. Constructive criticism very welcome! I respond to reviews here: http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/topic/64957-review-responses-and-open-discussion-for-i-summon-the-all-seeing-eye-star-vs-the-forces-of-evil/

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The real burning star in the middle of the magic wand was currently a rotating sphere of dark purple flames. It held a spell of hate and death at the ready, one phrase away from its completion. 'To see my hated foe devoured' was all Star would have to say, and it would be done: no more ghost Ludo, or ghost Toffee, or ghost not-her-mom. No matter what form it took, the mewman was prepared to end this thing's existence the moment it so much as twitched unexpectedly. She kept the wand pointed straight at the emerald phantasm's heart.
Jackie had taken position behind the green creature of fire and dread, currently made to resemble the pitiable bird monster. The human girl had Sam's glass sword not only drawn, but pointed straight at the back of its translucent skull. She had pulled it backwards far enough that she could put some very real momentum behind it, at a moment's notice. One wrong move, and she would plunge the blade into the apparition. Sure, normally that would be an empty threat towards an immaterial enemy, but they all had just seen the glass blade cut a fireball in two.
Star had seen it perhaps more clearly than Jackie herself had. She noticed that the rapier had torn not only the effect, but the fundamental pattern of their enemy's magic. The princess had seen Sam do something similar once during their fight, when he slapped her spell away with the back of his hand and it shattered like glass rather than merely being deflected. It was quite clear to her now that a physical target was not a requirement as far as the devil's weapon was concerned. Good.
To Star's right, Marco held both arms extended in front of him, hands balled into tense fists. He looked alert but calm. Apparently holding on to the creature using the ritual was easier when it wasn't trying to fight back. Ludo's tiny ugly arms remained extended to both sides of his form, as the monster's body floated in mid air, immobilized by some magic even Star didn't fully understand. As a backup, black chains held his feet, arms, and neck. Tom had summoned those. The demon prince was himself now positioned at their enemy's five o' clock, alert and ready. They had it well and truly surrounded.
"Seriously? Is all of this really necessary? That's two sets of restrains, and two means of execution, for corn sake! Don't you idiots think this is a little too much?" complained Ludo.
"No," the mewman replied coldly. "No, I don't."
If anything, it might not be enough. But she wanted to know, she needed to know, what this was really all about. Besides, Marco had told her about his dream, the one from over a week ago, about Hekapoo's warning: An aspect for an aspect, was it?
So, whatever this creature was, it was not the being that killed her mom. It was a part of it, perhaps, like a tree is part of a forest, like a drop of water was part of the storm. But it wasn't the full thing. The storm was still out there. They needed to know about the storm.
"Well, you see, princess," the being of green flames explained, sardonically, "this, right here, this is your problem. You want this to be a fight, you are looking for a fight, and so, that's what you find. Such a violent girl! You have it all wrong, you know? I was never your enemy. We were never your enemy. We want what you want... quite literally."
Star's grip on the wand tightened, "Right. So you are going to tell me you didn't kill my mom!?"
"Ah...well, you see... mhmmm... that... That was somewhat of a... miscalculation on our part, an honest mistake," Ludo stammered. "Really wish we could lie, by the way. I'd come real handy right about now. But, well, we can't, you know? So, no, I guess I can't really tell you that."
Star's cheekmarks gradually turned black with anger and hatred. The deadly spell no longer seemed to burn her veins since her resurrection, but dark storm clouds had begun forming all around them: a veritable hurricane of shadows around the huge floating staircase, with them all inside the fragile calm of its proverbial eye.
"Well, that does it, I am leaving before this obviously dumb idea turns into a real shit show!" declared Janna suddenly.
She began walking towards their captive, or, more likely, past him, headed towards the big obsidian archway at the end of the stairs, two floors up. Presumably, that was their door out of hell, and into Hekapoo's domain. Unlike the other portals, there was no visible otherworldly scene past this one, just a swirling whirlpool of orange and golden fire. It looked very much like one of Hekapoo's habitual portals, just larger, and, well, more permanent.
"Janna, you do remember this asshole tried to kill you as well, right?" Star asked, irritated.
She was still not sure what the hell was the witch's problem. Frankly, if she did good on her threat to strike out on her own after this, then good riddance! Star wasn't even sure why she was trying to convince her to stay for the interrogation. If the human didn't care about getting revenge on this monster, then that was her problem, not Star's.
Janna let out an annoyed grunt, the flesh membrane of her wings shuffling behind her as she did that. "Yeah, and that was to get to you! If I leave now, then I won't have to worry about him or about you. Look, if you are going to kill it, then I am all for it. But kill it now, before he goads you into yet another stupid mistake..."
"Heh. It's funny, you know?" the monster interjected. "I think Janna and I would have understood each other quite well. I mean, her and Ludo, not, you know, the actual us. Both struggling harder than anyone else, just to try and fail to get to the place others simply started from. Both unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time... the punchline of a cosmic joke they don't even get to understand... ha. ha. HA!"
Janna glanced disinterestedly at her tattooed finger. "Whatever. Just leave me out of this!" she huffed, but sat back down on the stair steps.
"You were always out of this," replied the ghost with a vicious grin. The witch tried to appear nonchalant, but even the mewman noticed the tense way in which her hand had balled up into a shaking fist without thinking.
"Ok, enough!" Star interrupted. She so didn't care about Janna and her issues right now. "So, you say you can't lie? Ok, then, tell me, do you have a name!? We know you are not Ludo, or Toffee, or... anyone else we know. And don't give me any of that 'Love, All-Conquering', 'Will, Unbending', bullshit!"
"Heh heh. It is not bullshit, princess," retorted the emerald apparition. "We are hope, and will, and love. We are the wellspring of goddamn living potential. We are the spark inside this poor pathetic creature striving to amass unimaginable power for the sake of all the love he never received. We are the demon prince willing to deal with the stuff of his own nightmares to help out his unavailable crush. We are the fucking proverbial 'why not?' that you children so cherish."
Wait! How did it even know anything about that last part?
The thing wearing Ludo's face continued, "and, specifically, we are your potential, Star Butterfly. We are your hope, your will, your love. That and so much more. If you must have a name for us, you might as well call us... Wish... for we are the wish of your deepest heart desire! That, princess, is who, and what, we are."
"That is a load of crap!" Star yelled furiously, a violet glow sparking behind her eyes. "I didn't wish for my mom to be dead! I didn't wish for Hekapoo, or Glossaryck, or even Ludo, to die!"
"Of course you didn't," Wish retorted calmly. "Your mom and Ludo just got in the way of what you really wanted, and paid the price. Wrong time, wrong place. To bad, so sad. You see, there was once a world where Ludo survived, where Toffee murdered your mum, and Hekapoo and Glossaryck too, and where you, in turn, killed him. But, more importantly, in that world, you confessed your feelings for Marco... and he rejected you! Broke your precious little heart, let me tell you."
The bird monster laughed raucously to her face.
"Wait a moment," Marco protested, keeping his arms raised, restraining their foe. "What the hell are you talking about? I could never do that! I love Star, she is my best friend, and an amazing girlfriend, and, ah, our souls are bonded, and..."
"... and without me, you would have ignored her and humiliated her, let her flee back to Mewni alone to face the choice of war or exile," 'Ludo' explained. "But that world is no more. It will never be. That's because the princess and I have a deal, because I answered her prayers just like the Blood Moon answered yours. That night, she wished for nothing else than for you to be together, she wished it with all her heart and soul... and we delivered."
"No, no, no, no..." Star muttered horrified. Realizing which day the being meant. "Not like that, not at the cost of my mom's life, not at the cost of anyone's life..."
"As you saw them together, embracing in the same adoring desire that your own heart held for the boy, you wished for Marco to love you, and you wanted him to have Jackie as well. In that moment, it was all that mattered," Wish concluded. Then, his voice changed, it was now many voices, echoing atop each other, all female, and all very much like Star's own, "You called me, Star Butterfly. To rewrite reality. To change destiny... To tear a hole into the sky!"
Tears began streaming down the princess' cheeks, despite her best efforts not to cry. There was no way any of that was true. "You are lying!"
"I already told you," Ludo's voice retorted. He smirked as he said it, "we can't lie."
No, no, it really couldn't be true! The All-Seeing Eye spell was just a scrying spell. Sure, spying was wrong, spying led to crying. But there was no way that dumb mistake had caused her mom's death. There was no way that it had summoned this... this thing. It was just a damn scrying spell!
Then the mewman remembered something: 'A scrying spell? Oh, dear. Is that what you think that is?' Eclipsa's words echoed inside Star's head. She knew. That night after her mom's funeral, Eclipsa already knew!
"So, we made it so you three ended up together," Wish continued. "And to protect that oh so precious happily ever after, we removed the Septarian general as a factor, and then anyone who was able to see that reality had been changed. But, of course, mommy dear had to get in the way and die anyways..."
Star felt, for the second time in twenty-four hours, as if she were suffocating. She had done this. Her spell created, or summoned, this creature. She had killed her mom! It didn't even matter that Moon was dead in that other world that the monster was talking about. It didn't matter at all. Because, in this world, the cause of her mom's death... was Star herself...
"And, of course, after that, we just plain couldn't get you to be happy with what you got out of the bargain!" Ludo's form complained. "We tried everything! We tried to convince you to let go, to move on, to understand that your mom was now in a better place. But you wouldn't have that. We threatened you, and your friends, to no avail. We even offered you all everlasting bliss, but your boyfriend pushed us away. Star, we mean you no harm, we just want you to be happy with the one, or the ones, you love, and leave us be in turn, to pursue our own wish."
She couldn't take this anymore. Star was trembling. She had caused this? She had wanted this? Or at least it thought she wanted this? This was some sort of cruel joke. It couldn't be true. Could it? Maybe, deep down, she really was an evil princess. She had killed her own mom, because, for a second, she had not cared what happened to anyone and anything else, as long as she had Marco, and he had Jackie. Star thought of Princess White. The vampire had bragged about murdering her own mother. Was Star just like her? A monster too?
The mewman's legs failed her. In the last moment, she felt a pair of hands steadying her by the shoulders. Marco had rushed towards her the moment she began falling down, and was now the only thing keeping her standing.
"Star, are you ok?" the boy asked, pale with worry. "Look, this is not your fault. You didn't want this. You didn't wish for this. That thing twisted your spell. It is obvious to all of us that you wouldn't have wanted to hurt your mom, for your own sake, or for mine. Besides, like I said, I loved you before that night... Being with you is the best thing I can possibly imagine, so I would have said yes, in this or any other world... So... so he must be lying! About that, and also about why it is here, about why it... you know. He simply must be! Star... This. Is. Not. Your. Fault."
There was a loud screeching sound behind them, that of metal twisting and shattering.
"Uhm, Marco, Star, I don't want to pressure you two now, but I kinda can't hold him on my own," complained Tom. Star looked up to see the black chains melting and crackling around the ghost form, a form that was now half-way between Ludo and Toffee. The lizard smiled cruelly.
"We can all talk about this later, Star. For the record, what this monster did is definitely not your fault," Jackie shouted. "But I think we learned all we needed to learn, so let's kill this asshole!"
She followed those words with a piercing lunge. The human's girl blade narrowly missed the lizard's neck, as it twisted himself free from the chains. Not-Toffee sprung around and hit Jackie in the face with its burning emerald tail, throwing her against the stairs, knocking the human girl unconscious.
That did it. It was the final drop.
"To see my HATED FOE DEVOURED!" shouted Star, releasing the deadly spell against the being of green flames.
She meant it. She meant it like she had never meant anything before. To kill this thing was truly her heart's deepest desire right now. She wanted it to die, she wanted it to suffer, she wanted everything that it was, everything that it represented, everything that it had done, everything that it had said, to be gobbled up by her hate.
She didn't hit the heart, not directly. A huge lizard claw caught the blast of the spell in its palm. But it didn't matter. Hate like hers would not be denied, could not be denied, not this time. Tendrils of magical darkness began spreading up through the abomination's arm, its emerald brightness dimming as the death spell gnawed at its form. Toffee's eyes reflected a look of surprise and terror she had never seen on the lizard, before or since his death. Star smiled, a maniacal glee filling the hole in her soul that had been carved up by the knowledge of her accidental matricide.
The magical resonance that had accompanied her previous attempts to use her spells on the fiery phantasm flared up. It made the princess' entire body shake as if electrocuted. Yet she powered through, driven by rage and the euphoria of her anticipated victory.
"Argh! You think this will get rid of us? You think you have won? You know there is more to us than this form, Star! So much more," threatened the creature, using Toffee's voice, it's reptilian face a grimace of unearthly pain. His right arm lit up in brightness one final time, and then exploded into a shower of green embers, just as the black tendrils begun creeping around the center of his chest and spreading all the way to its face and the tips of the fingers in his left hand. "You can't beat us... Ugh!... You can't undo your bargain... Argh!... But you can decide when you are done fighting... and letting innocents get caught in the way!"
Toffee smiled a big toothy smirk, and pointed his remaining claw at Janna. The witch's eyes went wide. She sprung up of her sitting position, suddenly realizing that she was not sitting this battle out, after all.
Out of Toffee's hand, the black and violet blast of Star's spell emerged. The rest of the lizard's burning form faded into nothingness with a bone-chilling scream and a harrowing mad laugher. Yet, the deadly spell continued, strong, towards Janna.
----
Janna's body slid forcefully through the sharp edge of the stair step, her wing partly torn by the impact. The silver rim had cut a nasty gash across its membranous skin, and bent the cartilage supports the wrong way around. It was a pain unlike any she had felt before. It was a pain that she, most decidedly, did not enjoy. It was the bad kind of pain.
She forced herself to remember that the appendage was not originally part of her, that this, therefore, could not be a fatal wound. After all, all the 'real' parts of her were intact, superficially beaten up at most. She had been lucky.
No, not lucky. Not exactly.
Blood splattered her. Lots of it. Glowing crimson blood. Literally glowing, like cooling embers. She looked up. Horror dawned in her mind.
"Aaaahh! Urghh," panted Tom. Clutching his arm.
Or, rather, what little was left of it.
He held onto the cauterized stump where an arm would have been. Two of his fingers, the only remains of his hand, lay atop Janna's lap. That, and all the blood, was the only evidence that the demon prince had ever had an arm.
He had jumped towards her in the last minute. He had pushed her away from the path of Star's spell. He was the reason she was still alive at all. But the hand he used to throw her out of the way had been caught in the blast instead. Now it wasn't there. Instead, there remained only an irregular bump stopping inches away from Tom's shoulder.
The demon boy was crying and howling in pain. Janna had never seen Tom hurt like that. Knowing how strong, how resilient, how damn near indestructible Tom was, only added to the horror.
Everything around her was silent, and moving way too fast. She had to remind herself to breathe.
She saw Star rush towards Tom, crying as well. She was doing something to him. Grabbing him. Restraining him. Tom couldn't speak, he only opened his mouth to yell. Janna could barely hear his shouts over the deafening all-encompassing silence. Yet she knew they were lung tearing screams of agony. She could see that in all three of his red glowing and crying eyes. Not anger this time, just suffering, just pain.
Janna wanted Star to leave him the fuck alone! She wanted her to leave all of them the fuck alone! Wasn't this enough for her? Hadn't she hurt them enough?
Somehow, the arm wasn't growing back, not even a little. Tom could regenerate most injuries, Janna knew this first hand. But Star had done something to him, something he couldn't heal.
No. Star had tried to do something to her. That spell had been headed for Janna.
Well, originally, it had gone after the ghost.
But the ghost was also Star's fault! She created the creature, and in her attempt to kill it, she had almost killed Janna. She would have killed Janna. But Tom...
Tom interfered. Why? He was no longer her pretend boyfriend. The witch had never imagined he would care about her this much, even back when he was. Then, why? Just why? Why did he have to do this!? The fucking idiot!
"Tom, calm down, it's ok, it's ok," she finally heard what Star was saying.
How dare she?
How fucking dare she!?
It was not ok. He was never going to be ok, and it was all Star's own fault.
"Get away from him!" Janna yelled, as she jumped up to her feet.
She should have known. No, she did know! She knew when they began this brain-dead tv-serial interrogation of theirs. She knew that it would turn badly. She knew, back in Sam's place, that Star was eventually going to get one of them killed or... maimed. That was what she had done now. Wasn't it? Got Tom's goddamn arm disintegrated. Crippled him forevermore! And she had the nerve to say that was ok?
"Janna?" the mewman looked at her with wide surprised eyes. "Oh god... I am so sorry..."
No, she wasn't, not nearly sorry enough. But she would be.
Janna had been such an idiot. She knew something like this was bound to happen. She could have prevented it, back at Sam's place. Take his deal, have her and Tom walk away, forgetting they ever even knew who Star was. He would still have an arm then. Sam had said that she would kill Star if Janna accepted that deal. She should have just taken it!
Well, that last part could still be fixed...
The witch extended the snake tattoo finger towards Star, and streams of blue lightning arched out of her hand towards the princess' body. They crackled through the air, only to be stopped mid air as the mewman turned around and raised yet another of her pink glitter shields.
"What the hell, Janna!?" Star yelled. She seemed angry. Angry at her for using magic against her. The goddamn barefaced hypocrite.
Sam had said he would kill Star. But, Janna realized, he did kill Star. It was just that the devil had never intended it to be permanent. Well, now, she had other plans.
The witch closed her hand into a fist and, instead of lightning, a spear made of black ichor appeared in mid air and flung itself towards the princess' shield. It crashed through it like a canon ball through a glass window. Star simply danced out of the way behind it, leaving Tom's convulsing body down on the floor.
Now, Janna wasn't crazy, her attack missed the demon by a wide margin, whether the other girl was there or not. She wanted to help Tom, to protect him, and she knew just how to do that.
"Janna, please, calm down," Star pleaded, "What are you doing?"
"Saving us all from the Dark Queen Ascending!"
With a wave of her hand, a storm of azure arrows fell like hail on the mewman princess. But Star simply waved her wand, muttered one of her dumb spells, and Janna's magic attack was wasted on turning an incoming pod (or whatever!) of narwhals into pincushions. The creatures even reacted to it, crying as if they were actually hurt, actually alive. But it was all a charade, of course, mere constructs of Star's magic. Just one more way for Star to mock her. The princess had near limitless reserves of crude childish summons at her disposal, while Janna paid for every magic arrow with a sliver of her own immortal soul.
She tried to think whether she knew how to make Sam's magic suffocate the damn bug to death, to remove the air from her lungs, like he had done during their fight. Realizing that she couldn't do that, she opted for the next best thing. Thick ropes of translucent phantasmal darkness exploded out of her fingers, tying themselves around the mewman's wrists, ankles, and most importantly, her neck. Janna noticed that the tattoo was up to her own wrist. She didn't care. The shadow ribbons began to constrict. They had no heads, but they hissed like snakes.
"Ky-aah!" Marco shouted, as he cut the spectral ropes with a well placed karate chop. His body still glowed white, and the witch realized he could touch the immaterial, her own constricting spell included. "Janna, that's enough! Look, I know you are in shock, but you need to back the hell off!"
"Make me."
She twisted her hand and let the snake tattoo advance a few hundredths of an inch more. The intangible ribbons swiped left. They passed right through Star, and through the silver stairs. But Marco could touch ghosts, and so, the ribbons could touch him. They pushed him away. All the way away.
Janna threw him out of the floating staircase, and down into the pits of hell. He was almost as much to blame as Star was. He was the reason for the princess' dumb wish, the inciting cause behind that monster.
"Marco!?" Star cried, horrified, realizing what she had just lost. It was music to the witch's ears. What followed that... wasn't.
"GLOWING DARKNESS HELLBLAST!"
Janna raised her arm in front of her. A wall of something she could only think of as a piece of firmament rose between herself and the mewman's deadly attack. It was a shadowy fog-like substance, filled with a billion dots of blue light. Star's spell didn't so much break against the barrier, as it faded into its deceptive depths: light-years of distance held within the span of a few feet. It was power like the human girl could before barely have imagined possible.
The troublemaker looked at her arm. She noticed with charing that she was elbow-deep in snake tattoo now. She had clearly overdone it with that last one.
The magic wall faded not a second later but, fortunately, by then, Star was no longer focusing her spell on her.
The princess eyes were closed. Soon after, they opened up with a blinding violet glow exploding out of them, dismissing any semblance of human expression from her face. From the sides of her torso, two extra pairs of arms were quickly emerging. Behind her, six black and golden wings had begun to unfurl.
The witch knew that, even after her bargain, she could never win against a transformed Star. It was now or never.
Janna pushed back with her own wings, flying towards the mewman as fast as she could. She had to struggle to keep balance on her broken left wing. She closed her hand, THE hand, the snake tattoo hand, around Star's throat. She constricted her windpipe, pushing her thumb against the front of her neck, turning it into a piercing lance of force at the cost of even more of her soul. As she did so, she kept flying forward with the force of her own assault. They flew up one full flight of stairs, then the other. She was headed for the door out of hell, and she was taking the princess with her. Out of hell, and away from Tom.
The witch felt five strong arms grab hold of her, trying to push her away. She saw a glowing violet ball of fire, a living star, pressed up against her chest. The royal wand, held by the princess' remaining hand, was powering up for something. Janna asked Sam and all his hells for the strength to kill Star before she could cast another spell.
At that moment, they crossed the threshold of the portal, leaving the underworld behind.
----
Marco fell.
He fell through the empty air. As soon as his body was more than a meter or two away from the silver staircase, the entire thing seemed to vanish into thin air: Star, Janna, Jackie, everyone gone. The portal was gone too. Just an empty door floating in the sky, one moment far below him, the next one far above.
He fell towards the dark waves below. If the other hells were any indication, touching the water would either dissolve him, freeze him to dead, or just alert the deep sea predators to come eat his body alive. And the worst thing was, he hadn't even been able to help Star. He hadn't been able to talk any sense into Janna. He had seen how mad his old childhood friend was, and how beyond fed up Star was with her in return. One of them was going to murder the other.
He hoped it was Star who did it. He felt horrible to even admit that to himself. But, after all, he could imagine a world without Janna. He couldn't imagine a world without Star.
The thing was, even if she won, Star would be devastated. She would feel terrible about killing her former friend. Besides, well, Marco was going to be dead soon too, right? That was probably not going to be a picnic for his best friend either. Fuck, he had failed her. Hadn't he? Not just failed to stop her fight with Janna, but he would fail to be there for her, even after all the times he swore to never leave her.
'Jackie, take care of Star for me, ok? She is going to need you. Sorry to both of you, for being such an...' he thought as he readied himself for the crash.
"Idiot!" shouted a voice above him. Marco opened his eyes to see a purple form falling behind him. No, not falling, diving down, head first, with his arms, no, with an arm, pressed against his side. "Marco, I said: 'look up and hold on, you idiot'!"
Marco reacted as swiftly as he could under the circumstances, and reached for Tom's body in mid air. He literally scrambled towards him, and, almost by miracle, managed to hug his leg before the demon fell past him.
"What the hell, Tom! She threw you too!?" Marco shouted.
"Argh. No," Tom panted. "I jumped. Now hold on tight, Marco."
The Lucitor Prince turned around in mid air somehow, and pointed his remaining hand, the left one, down towards the water below.
"Don't fucking... ugh... dare let go," forced the demon.
A blast of fire exploded out of his palm, like the exhaust of a rocket. Marco was well clear of the blast itself, but the proximity heat alone felt like it would melt his skin. He still held on to Tom's leg. Even third degree burns would be better than certain death.
"Why? How?" he asked. "Tom, how did you get down here in time? Is Star ok? How about Jackie? Janna?"
"My... fucking... arm... is gone," Tom's eyes glowed bright like brazes. "I am in literally mind shattering amounts of pain right now, Marco! Argh! So don't ask any more fucking questions, ok!?"
Marco, quite reasonably, shut up.
"Wait, where are the... argh... damn stairs?" the demon prince asked, between pants and grunts.
"They are gone," Marco pointed out. "They are only there if you go through the doors, and if you fly too far away from them, they vanish. You were the one who explained that to us, remember?"
"What part of mind shattering pain is not clear to you?!" Tom protested. "Fuck those stairs with the Astray One's Five Pricks!"
Swearing aside, the Lucitor prince angled his hand to push them towards the other side of the hovering door. With some difficulty, which Marco imagined was due to navigating using a single blast for thrust, the demon managed to drag both of their bodies through the floating black gates. They crashed against the solid cold metal of the staircase, among a bunch of random muffins and cupcakes.
"Crap! I... ugh... I thought I would only have to fly you all the way up..." Tom looked up at the stairs. He stumbled, barely able to walk after all that, let alone climb ten thousand stairs. "...We don't have time for this! We need to stop them."
"I know," replied Marco. He moved his hands as fast as he could, rushing through the words of the Fierceness Ritual.
"What are you doing!? Just run, I'll... arghhh! ... I'll try to keep up..." the demon yelled.
"No, Tom," Marco said, kneeling down. "My turn. Get on my back. It will be faster this way."
----
Under normal circumstances, Tom would have felt quite uncomfortable taking a piggy back ride from Marco. It was just a plain out weird thing to do. Right now, he didn't care. His mind drifted in and out of consciousness. He had moved past pain, into a general state of numbness. But he couldn't rest, not until they got to Star and Janna. He tried to slap himself awake... then realized he no longer had the hand he had tried to use.
"Tom, sorry for the stupid question..." Marco spoke, as he ran up, carrying the demon, without slowing down one bit. "...but why did you jump after me rather than try to calm down Janna?"
"I... I didn't think... I just jumped..." he answered truthfully.
Marco groaned. He seemed about to say something, but held back. Tom recognized the signs of someone trying to control his own temper, by focusing their attention on some other mental task. Was Marco counting backwards?
The demon prince had been worried about Janna first, of course, and jumped in front of the deflected spell without thinking. Then, in his feverish state of agony, he had seen Marco fall, and had rushed after him as well. It was only half-way through falling that he processed what had happened and realized that they needed to get back up there as soon as possible, before either Star or Janna did something truly irreversible.
Then again, if he hadn't jumped right when he did, Marco would have probably fallen to his doom. The carnivorous microbes of the hellish sea below would have turned him to bones in seconds. Not that the boy needed to know any of that now.
"Tom..." Marco said, quietly. "...thank you."
"Yeah, um, I... I guess I am kind of a hero now," reasoned Tom, half out-of-it.
Marco paused for a moment. Then, somewhat hesitantly, he said, "Yes. Yes you are, Tom."
"You were a big hero for sixteen years, weren't you?" he pressed. Not sure why he was thinking about that now. Or why they were talking. To keep awake, he guessed.
There were still over three quarters of the stairs to go.
"I guess..." Marco responded.
"Does it always suck this much?" Tom asked.
There was a very long pause after that.
"Yeah... I think it does. I don't remember all of it but, from what I have seen, I'd say it sucks alright," Marco admitted, frustrated. "You still got a particularly shitty deal today, though, sorry... Hey, how about, once we reach them, you get in front of one of Janna's spells, and I catch the one from Star? That way we can compare notes."
It was a joke. It was also possibly their best actual plan to stop a fight between those two.
"Deal."
----
Jackie woke up alone.
The left side of her face hurt particularly badly. Tentatively, she ran a finger over the burned skin. Ouch. It stung, a lot. She resolved to leave it alone for the time being. She had bruised her arm and legs against the stairs too. Nothing broken, it seemed, though.
Alright, never mind that just now. She scrambled for the glass sword, feeling so much safer with the hilt in her hand. It all was quiet. She noticed the silence before she even registered the view: empty stairs.
What had happened? Had they won? Then, why would they leave her here?
She looked around, no sign of anyone else, burned metal, a pool of crimson blood. Blood? The green ghost creature didn't bleed. But this didn't look like human blood either. Star? Tom?
Had they lost? Oh god, they had lost! But then, why would the creature leave her alive? That made no sense!
Well, it was supposedly opposed to killing her, as well as Star and Marco, even if they were never sure how far that preference truly went. But, even so, why would it take the other two away and not her? No, it still didn't add up...
And, if it had killed any of them, there would be bodies, wouldn't there? Jackie thought she should have felt like puking at the mere thought of her friends, the people she loved, being dead, but she didn't. It was like her mind was too focused on trying to reconstruct the events to let herself be distracted by the horror, at least not yet.
She looked down through the edge of the staircase. True, the bodies could have been disposed that way. Either way, there was nothing she could see from up here but the dark unsettlingly calm ocean below.
She looked back to the stairs they had climbed. No. There was no reason for them to go back, not even when fleeing. If they had needed to escape, then Star would have surely summoned something that flew. And, well, she would have taken her too, she hoped. Star... Marco... where were they? None of the options made sense!
Then Jackie looked up, to the portal at the end of the stairs, to the swirling maelstrom of orange and gold. It was the path that seemed most reasonable. She didn't know why she had been left behind but, if they were alive, then that was the more logical path for Marco and the rest to follow. Either way, since she couldn't fly, well, it was her only way off these stairs...
----
Star had to be fine, Janna too, they had to. Even if they were really fighting to the death, Star would be alright. She had survived the fight with Sam in the end, there was no way Janna could... The thought alone made Marco sick in his stomach. If she had so much as hurt Star, Marco was going to murder that fucking bitch!
Wait, no, crap, that was the stupid ritual talking. He needed the strength to carry Tom, to run up faster, to reach Star and Jackie and Janna, but he needed to keep calm too. Not a good idea to add yet another explosive temper to that mix. He was going up there to stop the fighting, not join it. He counted down from twenty.
He was in control of the ritual's side-effects, not the other way around. As long as he remembered his mind was being affected, and focused on fighting those instincts back, he would be ok. It wasn't another personality, not some sort of cliched dark side, nor mind control, it was like, well, like his aggression was on a fucking hair trigger. But he just needed to remind himself that Star would be alright, that as long as he didn't mess up this time, all would be fine.
Star was tough, really really tough, there was no way anything too bad would happen to her, not once the emerald ghosts were gone. Janna would be ok, too. Star wouldn't really kill her, would she? Maybe she would just knock her out, or do her time freeze thing and restrain her? Maybe break a few of her bones, just to be sure... no, that was the ritual again. Marco shouldn't be thinking along those lines, and neither would the mewman.
Sure, Star had become a lot quicker to resort to lethal magics since her mom died. But, still, she wouldn't use those on a friend, even an estranged one, no matter what the troublemaker did. Would she?
Then again, if she didn't, wasn't there a chance that Star herself might get hurt because of it? After all, if Janna had some of Sam's power, but Star couldn't fight her as freely as she fought Sam... Maybe it would actually be better if Star did let go. She could smash a damn mountain on the other girl or have a dragon eat her, see if that taught her not to throw Marco to his death! Maybe he ought to teach her that lesson! Ugh. Stupid ritual.
It wasn't just the ritual, though. The worry was driving Marco insane. It didn't help that this stairs seemed to go on forever, and that Tom had just passed out on his back. He couldn't blame the demon, of course. It was a testament to his willpower that he hadn't lost consciousness the moment the spell hit him. An arm. God. Marco had been cracking jokes about it for the sake of his friend, but he couldn't even begin to imagine what Tom was going through.
And he didn't have the time to imagine. There were still over one third of the stairs to go. He needed to channel all his magical strength, all his magical fury, into climbing those god damned stairs.
"Star!!" he growled, uselessly. He knew he was still too far away to be heard.
Something was happening to the sky. Instead of the feeble gray light that flowed over the place when they first arrived, it seemed to take on a bright reddish color. Maybe a sort of infernal dawn?
No, it was still dark outside, it was only brighter in relative terms. Maybe they had been in the underworld for long enough to forget, but he thought he knew what the sun looked like, and this wasn't it. But then Marco realized that it was not just reddish: it was red. Blood red, in fact.
He looked up to see the round crimson form of the Blood Moon above the sky. He remembered Tom's words earlier that day: 'the Blood Moon appears to the lovers when one of them is in danger'.
He had to hurry. He had to reach Star.
----
Jackie stood in front of the portal, wondering if she should step through the opaque swirling brightness. She guessed it was worth a try. At least to peek at the other side and double back if the others weren't there.
Her left cheek stung so much. She was seeing red, all around her. Wait, that wasn't from the pain or anything. Things were literally red, or at least illuminated by a red light.
She looked up.
The Blood Moon.
Why? How?
What was it trying to tell her? To go forward, or to stay back?
Well, she had been standing here for a while now, and waiting had never much been her style. She adjusted the nacre scabbard on her belt and held the glass rapier at the ready. She glanced one last time at the red celestial body in the hellish sky, and took one decisive step forward.
'Marco, Star, I am coming after you, alright? Please be ok...'
At that moment, Jackie crossed the threshold of the portal, leaving the underworld behind.
----
Marco ran up the stairs as fast as he could, holding onto Tom's unconscious body behind him, making sure he remained strapped to his back. He wasn't thinking. He wasn't planning. Even the fury of the ritual was not there anymore, subsumed by his dread of what he might find at the end of his desperate climb.
The silver stairs reflected the glowing red disc of the Blood Moon. An urgent warning for him to hurry up.
Then, suddenly, no more than a dozen flights away from his goal, it went away. A moribund grayness replaced it, as the normal light of the hellish dimension reasserted itself. Marco looked up and saw no moon in the empty sky.
He ran, if such a thing was possible, faster than he had been running before. He ran as if his life depended on it. Faster, even. Faster, because it was not really his life, after all, but Star's and Jackie's, and those were infinitely more precious to him.
Almost there, he was almost there, he was... there.
Marco turned around and saw, three flights up, the orange and gold swirling portal. He didn't stop then. One flight of stairs later, he saw the pool of Tom's blood. What he didn't see, unfortunatelly, was Star, or Jackie, or even Janna.
Tick. Tock.
He stopped there, confused.
Tick. Tock.
If they weren't here, that either meant they had also fallen down, or, more likely, they had gone through the vortex.
Tick. Tock.
Realization dawned on him like a sledgehammer. He raced towards the portal, not wasting a single additional second. But it was too late. Way too late.
Time in Hekapoo's dimension didn't flow the same way as it did on Earth or, presumably, in hell. Marco understood what that meant better than most people. He had once spent sixteen years there, while for Star, outside, only eight minutes had passed.
So, how long ago had the others gone through the portal? And, how long had it taken for Marco and Tom to climb back up the stairs? Half an hour? Forty-five minutes? A full hour? More?
The blood drained from Marco's face as he ran up the remaining two flights of stairs, not daring to pause even to breathe. He had to see it. He had to know. But, even if he went into the portal now, what difference did it make?
He flung himself through the whirlpool of golden and orange flames. Not a step, but a desperate leap.
At that moment, and not earlier, Marco crossed the threshold of the portal, leaving the underworld behind.
He landed on a mound of hard dry soil, his powerful muscular legs cushioning the fall. Large empty lungs drew air all at once into his toned chest. Sharp hunter eyes surveyed his surroundings. Old honed reflexes already stood prepared for an ambush.
On this end, there was no sign of the portal. All around him instead was a circle of rune-etched obsidian black monoliths and, beyond those, a forest of foreboding incredibly tall gray trees. They looked as if made of limestone, rather than living wood. Soot drizzled slowly but endlessly from an overcast morning sky.
He lowered Tom's sleeping body to the ground, carefully. The ritual's effect was gone, but it didn't matter. In his adult body, Marco was more than capable of carrying the demon boy's lanky form.
It was the same body Marco had when he was last here, the body he honed over sixteen years of chasing Hekapoo. Sixteen years of terror, and death, and war, and monsters, of countless terrible acts done to and by him. It was the body of that other Marco, the one in his dreams and hazy memories. It was Marco of Zonst, and Averx, and whatever the other place was.
Any other time, he would have been overjoyed to have this body back, if nothing else, to once again feel as powerful as he remembered feeling by the time he finished his scissors quest. But right now he couldn't muster the energy to care. Right now he didn't feel powerful at all. Right now he could only kneel down and sob.
There was no sign of Star, or Jackie, or Janna. But Marco hadn't expected there to be.
He was too late. Way way too late. Years too late. Decades too late.
If they had crossed the portal even two seconds ago, they could be as far as a month's march away from here by now.
If they had crossed between five and ten minutes before Marco reached the end of the stairs, then they would have lived through the same sixteen-years-long horror show that Marco had endured while chasing after Hekapoo, give or take five years or so.
And, if they had crossed the portal soon after he fell... then Star... and Jackie...
They were likely already long dead from old age.
----
END of Part III
----------
Author's note:
This concludes Part III. Unfortunately, there might be somewhat of a hiatus between this and the start of Part IV, since there are a lot of editing tasks on older chapters I have been postponing and a fair amount of planning for what comes next. In the mean time, hope you enjoy this little cliffhanger above.
(AFF specific note) "I Summon the All-Seeing Eye" is a work that started at AFF, and while I am always happy to update here if prompted, please know that the most up to date copy (as well as the full autor notes) often lives in AO3 instead. The reason for this is mostly that as the story progresses, the porn component of it slowly gives way to the plot one, and that, in all frankness, the fic gets a lot more attention on that site. I try to keep it up to date here as well, so I am not intentionally neglecting my AFF fans (if any ;) ), but it has happened more than once that I have let this version lag behind the AO3 one.
If that happens, and you are reading here, feel free to remind me in AFF forum thread, and I'll gladly update here too.
Love,
APW
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I Summon the All-Seeing Eye