"Have you gone insane?" Kadria screeched.
"Given I’m standing in a void talking to a demonic Messenger? Maybe," August said. He crossed his arms.
Kadria paced back and forth in her strange void world. He had visited her immediately after the invasion. The fact that his binding stone was empty concerned him, and there was an incoming enemy army. He doubted she’d help, but maybe he’d get lucky.
Instead, she shouted his ear off the moment he walked in. August looked around.
This place seemed larger somehow. More palatial. August didn’t keep track of the furnishings, but he swore there were a few more.
And the room was definitely larger, and not in the mind-bending way. The outline of a rug shifted as Kadria padded back and forth, her bare feet tugging at fibers August couldn’t see.
Was she leeching off the binding stone to feather her own nest? August shook the thought away. He didn’t have the time right now to concern himself with Kadria. And a slightly larger bedroom for the Messenger was the least of his worries.
"Funny. You’ll find yourself enslaved in somebody else’s void if you keep pulling stunts like that," Kadria growled. Her eyes flashed.
August noticed that her pupils had enlarged, giving her the appearance of having almost solid red eyes. Her horns had blackened as well. Gone was the Messenger who lusted after his crotch. In her place was a genuine demonic general.
Kadria terrified him right now. He hid the shudders she sent down his spine, but he knew he’d be having nightmares about this.
If she had shown up with this appearance when they first met, he’d never have accepted her deal.
"What’s that supposed to mean?" he asked quietly.
"What do you think it means?"
He paused and thought about it. "You said I didn’t need to worry about Messengers yet. That the portal was too small to concern them."
Kadria rolled her eyes. "Are you stupid? There must be a Messenger behind every portal. Who do you think creates the things? Do you think those armies of hulking musclebrains are traversing transdimensional space by themselves?"
"What?" August blurted out. "Hold on, but you said—"
"I said that a Messenger wouldn’t come through the portal." Kadria run her hand over her face and glared at August. "Look. Why do you think the portals get worse the more you suppress them? Shouldn’t it be the opposite? Use your brain. I turned up when I did because I was looking for competence. I found it, at the end of everything, in a world that had defeated so many other Messengers."
August felt like the world had been ripped out from underneath him. "Other Messengers are doing the same thing you are?"
"Not exactly," Kadria hedged, her tone uneasy. "I can’t be too specific. Not yet."
"Why not? We seem to be in this together. Or aren’t we?"
Kadria rolled her eyes. "We are. And we’ll both be very, very dead if I say the wrong thing at the wrong time. You probably won’t understand this, but let’s just say that the walls have ears."
August pointedly looked at the closest wall. It didn’t appear to have an ear, or the outline of anything at all on it. Kadria kicked him.
"God, you people are stupid," she muttered.
"You mean goddess," August corrected automatically, hiding a grin. He had successfully taunted her.
"Sure." Kadria waved a hand. "In any case, each Messenger has its own goal. They’re looking for things. But you know what I know every Messenger wants? Servants. Useful servants. Servants who can manipulate portals using binding stones, which is a power I thought unique to Messengers. Where did you even learn to do that?" Kadria snapped, growing irritable.
A lull fell over the room. August rubbed the bridge of his nose while Kadria huffed and puffed at him.
Then Kadria coughed and straightened herself up. Not that there was much for her to straighten up, given her lack of attire.
"Sorry," she mumbled. "But you Bastions tend to be so terrible at working with your binding stones. Where did you learn to manipulate a demonic portal?"
August frowned. "It was something that an old comrade of mine worked on in my timeline. His theory only really worked on weaker portals, because the power necessary to close a portal is equal to the demonic energy leftover. Plus, closing a portal early will trigger a cascade."
"But you’ve used it before?" Kadria asked.
"I’ve tested it on weaker portals." August shrugged. "And my comrade used it in an evacuation once. That’s when we learned the spell caused cascades. For what little it mattered at that point. Trafaumh was already a ruin by the time he closed the portal, so creating a bunch of new demonic portals there was a drop in the bucket."
Kadria clicked her tongue. "Just another oddity of your world, I suppose. So many little things drew me there."
Her mutterings continued for several minutes. August didn’t pick up anything of particular value from them and eventually grew bored.
"If you didn’t notice what we did in my timeline, why does it matter here?" August asked.
"Because this world isn’t a maelstrom of death, destruction, and despair?" she asked rhetorically, looking at him as if he were an idiot. Which had been her default look for most of this visit, to be truthful.
"That makes a difference to Messengers?"
"A big difference," Kadria said. She placed one hand high in the air and moved it up and down like a fish. "In your world, large invasions, cascades, trigem Champions, and entire countries being destroyed were normal. A Messenger knew your world was serious business, which attracted major players such as myself. But the individual events don’t stand out."
Kadria lowered her hand, and her motions became slower, but much more deliberate. Like waves, August realized. She was making a wave pattern with her hand.
"In this world, the level of activity is far lower. Fewer large invasions, very few cascades, and only the Kurai Peninsula has been destroyed. So every big event stands out."
August licked his lips. "So by converting the demonic portal into a gateway like that, I made a big wave in a small pond?"
"Exactly. And the Messenger behind this portal definitely noticed." Kadria scowled. "And those twins aren’t the sort I wanted you to attract. They’re the slow burn type. I figured you’d have a year or two before they took an interest in you, then you could flirt for a while before they took you seriously. By which point I could deal with them."
"You know them?"
"Unfortunately." She poked her horns, which had turned back to their typical shade of creamy white. "Same breed of Messenger." She prodded his crotch with her foot. "In a few ways. Although they don’t have my background, and my objective differs from theirs."