I panicked. I lost control of my senses. I felt like I was blind, deaf, and suffocating. I wondered if this was how other demons felt when I ate them.
It probably would have been the end if I hadn’t realized one thing: being eaten by a demon and clawing your way into one is pretty much the same thing.
The only difference is how you think about it.
It took a few agonizing seconds, but I managed to reform myself inside of him. But just partly. If I’d reformed my whole body, he would have noticed right away, so it was probably for the best.
It was weird, being in there. I was completely surrounded by colors, trapped in a little bubble whose walls were slowly burning me away. If my mind had been working right, it would probably have been really painful. But it didn’t hurt at all. For a little while, I just watched myself die.
Then I remembered what I had to do. My plan. I’d gotten him mad, I’d gotten him into space. I had to finish, now or never.
Phase Four, go.
I focused all my energy on turning the colors red. Blood red, the way Clarion always described it.
Toll noticed that. He got angry again, and since I was almost part of him I could feel it, too. That scary, confusing, uncontrollable emotion that I saw in his mind way back when I first met him. It felt like an earthquake, like if I didn’t give into it I would fall apart.
I tried to push past it. I wasn’t really a part of him, and the harder I worked at controlling him the more obvious it would be. I let my eyes disappear.
Then he got desperate. He started ripping at his own body, trying to get me out. But it wouldn’t work anymore. I was dissolving voluntarily now, taking control. He was too emotionally distracted to fight it. Everything was turning red.
Finally, I opened my new eyes. Toll was still in space; he had almost made it back to the Satellite before I’d stopped him. I turned his body around.
“…Well, you’ve won,” said a voice in my head. “What do you plan to do now?”
“I’m going home,” I thought back to it.
I made his body into a spaceship, the way I’d imagined Starship demons looked when he described them to me. I pushed it back into Earth’s orbit, burning up the colors like he’d shown me. Then I made myself a little dot again, and hid in its center as it fell.
He tried to take back control of his body, but I suppressed him. I had to keep doing it until he disappeared, even as he screamed and burned and even as I started to burn. I kept beating him back down until he was gone.
Then I lost my senses again. I couldn’t tell if I’d stopped burning or if I just couldn’t feel it anymore. Soon I couldn’t even feel myself falling. I was afraid I was dying, but then I forgot what that meant. I forgot my name.
My mind blinked and faded out.
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