Kronos
Meditation, as it turned out, was considerably more productive when you had a thousand years of magical training backing it up.
I had expected the realm-finding to take months, possibly years — the careful, incremental process of extending perception beyond its established boundaries is not typically something that yields quickly. What I had not accounted for was the way the Speed Force and my mana manipulation worked together when I gave them a unified purpose. The teleportation ability already understood, on some level that I couldn't fully articulate, the difference between here and not here. Teaching it to feel for specific varieties of not here turned out to be more of a refinement than a reinvention.
I sat outside my forge-house in the early morning, let the world settle around me, and looked inward.
The spirit realm was immediate — a beacon, bright and familiar, the magical equivalent of a lighthouse I'd been navigating by for centuries. I noted it and moved past it, pushing my awareness outward and sideways in the way I'd learned to push mana, feeling for the texture of other spaces.
It came as a tickle first. Then a tug. Then, like a door swinging open on well-oiled hinges, all three at once.
I could feel the difference between them immediately, which I hadn't expected but which made a certain sense given how deliberately different I'd made them when I built them. The demon realm announced itself with the magical equivalent of a shout — dark, dense energy pressing outward like heat from an open furnace, impossible to ignore, the kind of presence that made the space around it feel slightly wrong. Following the connections outward from there like tracing threads in a web, I found the earth realm and the fairy realm in turn, the three of them wound together in the mutually sustaining relationship I'd apparently built into them without fully realizing it, each one feeding stability to the others like pillars sharing a load.
The remaining realms — the DC CW world, the MCU, the mythological wilderness of the eighth, the vampire diaries gothic of the ninth — were further, harder to reach, present at the very edge of what I could feel. I noted their directions and let them be. One thing at a time.
The demon realm was closest, and the demon realm had what I needed. Dark magical energy in concentrations that might — might — produce materials unavailable anywhere else. It was also, I acknowledged to myself with the honesty that comes from a thousand years of self-assessment, the realm I was least likely to navigate safely through overconfidence. Which meant I should go there first, before I got comfortable.
I looked around the interior of the forge-house that had been my primary workspace for several centuries. Weapons in various states of completion lined the walls — experiments, proofs of concept, a few genuine achievements. Blades in iron and steel and platinum, each one carrying the incremental learning of its creation in the way it sat in the world's magical field. Not masterworks, most of them. But not nothing, either.
The proto-sword was wrapped and stored in the back, waiting with the patient indifference of unfinished things. I would come back to it.
I took the platinum and steel blade — the best of the complete weapons, rune-inscribed in Kryptonian characters for sharpness and durability, my blood worked into the forging process in a way that had taken me forty years to get right — and strapped it to my hip. Into a satchel went water flasks, the blood vials with their freshness runes, food for what I estimated would be a substantial journey, and the tools I'd need to harvest materials if I found any worth taking.
I took one last look at the forge-house. Centuries of work, left unattended.
It'll be fine, I told myself. Not like anyone's going to find it.
I called the lightning, felt the familiar charge build through my body, and stepped sideways out of the world I knew.
The smell hit before anything else.
Sulfur. Dense, choking, the kind of concentration that suggested geological processes on a scale that made the concept of fresh air feel like a distant memory. I stood in it for a moment with my eyes closed, letting my body adjust, until the instinctive gagging reflex the new environment had triggered settled into something I could breathe around. It didn't become pleasant. It became manageable, which was sufficient.
I opened my eyes.
The sky was wrong — the color of burning, perpetual sunset without the sun, clouds that moved too fast and in directions that didn't correspond to any wind I could feel on the ground. Wraiths moved through it in loose formations, distant enough that I couldn't make out details but close enough to confirm they were there, circling in the thermal currents of a world that ran permanently hot.
The ground beneath my feet was cracked and pale, the kind of earth that hadn't seen water in so long it had forgotten what the word meant. Dead trees stood at intervals — not fallen, not rotting, simply stopped, preserved in their death by the particular dryness of this place. The air tasted of ash and something underneath ash that I didn't have a name for, a quality that sat at the back of the throat and reminded you constantly that you were somewhere that did not welcome organic life.
And in the distance, through the haze, the unmistakable silhouette of a structure. Towers. Walls. The geometry of something built with intention, even if whatever intention had built it was not one I'd have chosen to align myself with.
Heading established, I thought, with the automatic practicality of someone who has been navigating unfamiliar terrain for centuries. Walk toward the castle. Try not to die before you get there.
I spread my mana outward — not aggressively, not in the conquering-haki way that would announce my presence to everything within range, but in the careful, receptive extension I used for environmental mapping. Feeling the shape of things. What lived here, where it was, what it was doing.
The answer was: quite a lot, and most of it was not pleased about something.
I had been walking perhaps twenty minutes, calculating the route, when the hellhound hit me.
There was no warning. No sound of approach that my admittedly impressive senses caught in time — the thing moved fast and low and with the particular predatory intelligence of a creature that had learned to use its environment, and it came from a dead angle, and suddenly I was on the ground with something heavy and burning-hot pressing me into the cracked earth and I could feel the heat of its breath on my face.
My first instinct — the thousand-year reflex — was magic. A simple working, clean and efficient, the kind of thing I could do now without conscious thought.
I didn't.
I had a sword on my hip. I had trained in the geometry of combat since I was six years old, watching my father's warriors and then Lyra's more subtle teachings and then centuries of my own practice. I had flash step and the Speed Force and the Strength Force and every tool I had spent a millennium accumulating. And I was being tackled by what amounted to a very large, very ugly dog.
If I couldn't handle this with a blade, I had no business going further into this realm at all.
I got a hand under the thing's chest and pushed, using just enough of the Strength Force to break its grip without launching it into the stratosphere, and rolled to my feet in the same motion. Got my first clear look at it.
The hellhound — and yes, that was immediately what I was calling it, taxonomy complete, I was not spending any more mental energy on nomenclature — was approximately the size of a large wolf, built low and heavy, its fur singed to something between fur and scale by what I assumed was a lifetime in this environment. Its eyes were wrong in the specific way that eyes go wrong when the thing behind them is operating on instincts older than any civilization. It was looking at me with the focused assessment of something that has decided whether you are threat or food and is now only working out the details.
It growled. The sound had a wet, broken quality — the hellhound equivalent of a bark filtered through a throat that had inhaled too much sulfur for too long.
I drew the blade.
The weight of it was familiar — I had forged it and carried it and trained with it enough that it had become an extension of the hand in the way good tools become, the balance of it sitting naturally in the grip. The kryptonian runes along the flat caught the strange light of the demon sky and did something I still found slightly uncanny, a faint luminescence that seemed less like reflection and more like response.
Flash step. Closing the distance in a fraction of a second, the Speed Force flickering through my legs, momentum building into the swing aimed at the neck — and the hellhound wasn't there.
It had moved. Felt the danger at the last moment the way animals sometimes do, some warning sense that didn't have a name firing just in time, and it wasn't where I'd calculated it to be.
It landed four feet to my left and immediately came back at me, committed now, past the assessment phase and into pure action. I watched it gather and spring — the specific mechanics of a creature attacking high, going for the throat — and stepped into it rather than away, inside the arc of the jump, and swung.
In the air, it had nothing to push from and nowhere to go.
The blade connected cleanly. The sound it made was not something I'm going to describe in detail. The result was that the hellhound was no longer a problem.
I stood there for a moment, checking the periphery with extended mana while my heartrate did its thing and then settled. Nothing else in immediate range. The pack, if there was one, was keeping its distance — which suggested either that hellhounds were solitary in this realm's ecosystem, or that whatever had just happened with their packmate was enough information for them to make a different decision about me.
Smart, for demons. I appreciated that.
I crouched beside the creature and got to work.
The blood first — two vials, sealed with their freshness runes. The quality of the energy in it was immediately interesting even through the containment, dark and dense and hot in a way that I filed away as potentially significant for forging purposes. Then the bones — I had no idea yet whether demon bone had the material properties I was looking for, but the principle that unusual environments produce unusual materials had served me well for a thousand years and I saw no reason to abandon it now.
The fur made a serviceable bundle, tied around the bone harvest and slung over a stick from the nearest dead tree. The meat I left. I was hungry, in the abstract way of someone who has been walking and fighting, but there were some experiments in dietary pragmatism that I was prepared to let wait for a more compelling reason.
The castle was still in the distance. The desert road stretched between us, and in the haze along it I could already feel the mana signatures of more things that would need to be dealt with before I arrived.
Following the desert road to see the wizard, I thought, adjusting the stick-bundle on my shoulder. I have definitely been alone for too long.
Twelve hours later, by rough estimation, I stood before the castle and reassessed my definition of the word.
The journey had been eventful in the sustained, exhausting way that combat always is when it doesn't stop being new challenges. More hellhounds — four separate encounters, each one teaching me something different about the way they moved and attacked and communicated with each other. Wraiths that descended twice from that burning sky, fast and cold in a way that felt wrong against the ambient heat of the realm, requiring a different approach than anything ground-bound. Demons of two other varieties that I didn't have names for yet, catalogued mentally by morphology until I could do better research. All of it dismantled and sampled and carried, the bone-bundle growing unwieldy enough that I eventually used a simple containment charm to reduce the carrying problem.
I had gotten better at the sword in twelve hours than I had in two decades of solo practice. Adversity is an efficient teacher.
The structure in front of me had clearly been impressive once. The bones of genuine architecture were there — scale, deliberate design, the sense of something built to communicate power to anyone approaching it. But it had been through something significant since its construction, the kind of damage that takes centuries of neglect to fully accumulate, walls cracked and towers listing, the outer gates hanging at angles that suggested the mechanisms holding them had given up some time ago.
I stood in the entrance and thought through what I remembered of the Shadowhunter demonology. Greater demons. Hundreds of them, potentially, in a realm this size, each one with enough power to make the lesser creatures I'd been handling look like practice runs. Lilith — mother of all demons, tower-dweller — probably not this structure, the architecture was wrong. Which narrowed it down to every other greater demon in a taxonomy I only half-remembered, which was not as reassuring as I would have liked.
Unknown entity of significant power. Approach with appropriate caution.
I set down the satchel and the bone-bundle. Rolled my shoulders. Drew the blade and felt the runes respond to the mana I was unconsciously pushing through my grip, that faint luminescence brightening slightly.
Then I pushed my mana outward — slowly, carefully, reading the interior of the structure the way I had learned to read terrain, building a map from the signatures of things living inside it.
Old. Whatever was in the throne room at the end of this corridor of broken stone was old, in the way that the energy signatures of ancient things read differently from young ones, heavier and stranger and more settled into the world around them. Power that had been accumulating for long enough that it had started to feel geological rather than biological.
I was going to need to wound it rather than fight it to a standstill. Get what I needed — blood, primarily, and whatever else this creature's biology might offer for my purposes — and leave before the situation escalated past what the blade and my current abilities could manage.
Simple enough plan. Clear objective. Acceptable risk level.
I moved toward the throne room.
Let's see what you are, I thought, in the direction of whatever waited ahead.
The mana signature pulsed once, as though it had heard me.
I tightened my grip on the blade and kept walking.