A Conversation with Demons

The house was mine, though I did not recognize it. It stood in a foreign land beneath a high sun, bright and open like the memory of childhood—not innocent, exactly, but untethered. Its angles and light felt familiar in the way a forgotten melody does: you hum along without knowing the tune.

It had a basement, though calling it that felt dishonest. It was not dark, nor damp, nor anything like the subterranean spaces of waking life. The lower level was just as open and sunlit as the rooms above, as if the earth itself had conceded something. Yet I knew—without question—that something terrible had happened there. Not long ago. People had died, grotesquely. I had not seen it, but I remembered it, and the memory lived in flashes: a woman, grinning; blood bright against her white gown like paint spilled in a gallery. Her teeth were thin needles, too many for a human mouth. The horror of it was made worse by the absence of chaos. There was no scream in the memory. Only stillness, and the quiet understanding that the victims had played some role in their own end—though perhaps unknowingly.

I was not alone in the house. Members of my family were there, though their faces refused to take form. They moved like outlines in my periphery—present but indistinct.

Then came the presence at the threshold. I didn’t hear them arrive. I simply knew they were there—outside. Waiting. The woman from the memory was among them. So were others like her.

I moved to defend the house, fashioning barriers from things that were not designed for defense. Furniture. Blankets. Sheets of intention. The intruders made no sound, but I could feel them testing the seams of the world, pressing in, looking for points of entry. And they found them: small slits around electrical sockets, gaps under molding. They poured themselves inward like ink through paper, slick and slow, with the weightless confidence of things that had done this before.

I fought them, pushed them back, blocked what I could, and shouted into the silence. My voice came not as pleading, but as command. I told them to leave. I hurled sentences like weapons. They responded, though their language was garbled, slippery—like words spoken underwater. Their replies didn’t matter. I understood their meaning was not in the content but in the cadence. They were talking not to communicate, but to sustain the dance.

And then I saw it: one of them was already inside.

He was reclining on the couch behind me—legs crossed at the ankles, one arm draped behind his head like a man enjoying a lazy Sunday. He smiled when I turned, not with malice, but with the smug satisfaction of a magician revealing a trick he'd performed in plain sight. I had been so certain I was winning. I had believed in the wall I’d built. But it wasn’t the breach that had undone me—it was the engagement.

I had let them in the moment I began to argue.

He—this one—was different from the blood-slicked woman in the memory. Or perhaps not different, only... more refined. His appearance was a study in contradictions: a cross between a lounge-bound aristocrat and a leather-clad guitarist from another era. Lace at the wrists, rings on every finger. A top hat feathered in black and burgundy, as though he’d attended both a funeral and a festival without changing clothes. He looked like a man in his forties who had lived for centuries. His eyes were a trap—golden rings flickering around obsidian pupils, laughing quietly even when his mouth was still.

I did not want to die.

It was not fear that compelled me to speak, not exactly. It was a survival instinct shaped by awe. I asked him what I needed to do—not to defeat him, not even to bargain, but simply to avoid being unraveled like those in the basement.

He regarded me with the amused detachment of a cat watching a bird try to reason its way out of a trap. Then he stood—not quickly, not dramatically, but with a kind of fluid authority—and began to speak.

He did not answer my question. Instead, he condemned humanity.

His voice was smooth, even playful, and the indictment he issued was long and specific. Genocides. Betrayals. Tortures, casual and orchestrated. He recited our sins with theatrical relish, his words like the turning of pages in a book we had all signed. He paced the room slowly, gesturing with his hands, as if recalling events he'd witnessed firsthand—which, I suspected, he had.

And then it was me who stood.

I do not remember rising. I only recall the sudden knowledge that I was on my feet, and that my voice—my real voice—was filling the room. I met his accusations with memories of my own: of kindness, of sacrifice, of moments when one human gave everything for another, knowing there would be no reward. These things I had seen with my own eyes. These things I knew.

My words did not silence him.

They humbled him.

He smiled again—not mockingly, but like a teacher whose student had finally arrived at the right question. There was pride in his grin, and something else: recognition.

He did not retreat. He allowed me to rise. And though his posture never slackened—though his confidence remained intact—I could feel the dynamic shift between us. The game had changed. Or perhaps I had stepped out of the game entirely.

Dreams do not observe continuity. They unfold by intuition rather than order, and I found myself—without transition—at a wedding whose significance had nothing to do with the bride or the groom.

I never saw them. I never thought to look.

The ceremony took place beneath an endless blue sky, the kind that seems impossibly distant and close at once. The wind was strong—not violent, but insistent. It tugged at garments and hair and thoughts, making stillness impossible. The ground underfoot was uneven, a patchwork of grass and stone that should have been uncomfortable but wasn’t. It felt honest, textured, alive.

Near the edge of the gathering stood a blue spruce tree, tall and vibrant. It swayed gently in the wind, its new growth catching the light like soft needles of silver. The tree held my gaze longer than anything else—perhaps because I have failed so often to grow them myself. Here, it thrived. Its presence was both a contrast to the scene and the only thing that made it real.

People moved through the space like actors unsure of their script. Some laughed, others whispered. But among them, I saw the ones who stood apart—self-appointed priests, dressed in strange regalia, calling others to worship the demons.

They were not emissaries of the demons. Not prophets. Just men and women playing at reverence, hoping their mimicry would make them seem important. One man in particular drew my eye: round-bellied, middle-aged, draped in a shimmering purple robe that caught the wind like silk sails. He spoke words I could not understand—incantations, perhaps. Rituals. His voice was theatrical, but not empty. His performance bordered on revelation.

I didn’t know what he was saying. But I felt its weight.

Behind him, a woman chanted in a language more beautiful still. I never saw her face, but her words pressed into me like the rhythm of the earth itself. I wished desperately to understand her, not for knowledge, but for meaning.

And then I remembered: this wedding was not just a dream. It was a distraction.

We had a plan.

Before the demons ever crossed my threshold, we had conspired against them.

I don’t recall the details—only that there were others like me, and we had buried explosives deep in the tunnels beneath the earth, where the demons nested, where they bred and fed and watched. Detonating those charges would collapse the tunnels and destroy them in one sweeping act of righteous fire. The plan was in motion. My allies were preparing to strike.

But even as the realization settled over me, something shifted.

It wasn’t fear. It was awe.

The demons, I now saw, were more than threats to be eliminated. They were power. They were ancient and potent and unaligned. They were the marrow of something terrifying and profound. And in that moment, I felt the boundary between destruction and revelation collapse.

I saw what could be done with their energy.

It wasn’t an articulated thought, but an understanding that settled into my bones like warmth. Killing them would be not just a tactical decision, but a loss. A loss of potential. Of strength. Of something I could not yet name but knew I would never find again.

And so, with the wind still pulling at robes and ribbons and the tree swaying in solemn grace, I reached up and touched the comm in my ear.

“Don’t detonate,” I said. My voice was calm. Certain. “There’s power here. We can use it.”

There was silence on the other end.

And then—nothing.

That is the last thing I remember.

I never heard the answer to my plea. Whether my message reached them or was lost in wind and static, I do not know. The detonation never came.

The demons remained. Not lurking. Not gloating. Just present—like gravity, or memory.

In the silence that followed, I sat alone beneath the blue sky, the wind still tugging at the hem of the world. The spruce tree swayed beside me, its new growth humming in rhythm with a future I did not yet understand.

There had been no bargain. No pact. No whispered promise in the dark.

And yet, something had passed between us.

I had seen what they were. I had not turned away.

That was enough.