The Known/Unknown Quantity

Chapter 132:And Don't Forget the Silver, and a Little Bit of Gold

Chapter 132: And Don't Forget the Silver, and a Little Bit of Gold

Samantha sat in the dark halls of her estate in a lotus position. It does not matter where she sat. Truly, after a while, all these luxurious rooms looked the same to her. Their opulence deadened to her after seeing them so many versions of them. Might as well be an empty space on a theater stage.

And yet, she must surround herself with such to feel at ease. Because the darkness always followed; the sunlight never actually entering. She could see well enough, turn on lamps, and yet it still remained a twilight sort of world, surrounded by stolen riches.

Her ancestor never lived like this. She didn't have to. Her humble cottage had been enough. Not wretched or small. It was comfortable. But the reason she didn't need the castles of her time was that she practically owned the kings in them.

Kings, and knights, and squires and clergy. The minds of peasants, the bodies of princes. All in tortuous servitude, each begging to be killed by the end, and yet she forced them to linger. She had created her own little hell on earth, a thing Samantha was only beginning to come close to.

And Crowley had ended it all with the theft of a baby.

Soon, that would be corrected.

Samantha reached in cold rage to the mirror world of her homunculus. She didn't enter, but hid in the thing's reflections as it viewed itself and preened. Watching it gloating in its growing strength, as it had reached this point on its own volution.

By design it didn't know of her existence or influence. Not when it was full in its glory. Only when it came back to lick it wounds, when it scaped and mewed, lost without agency, did she come back to its aid and sooth it, then it saw her. Samantha couldn't wait for this sordid business to be over. She had long tired of the homunculus, and was ready to shed it like an old skin.

Samantha grew a smile that never reached her eyes. Then she pursed her lips and blew from the reflections, and bathed the creature in an ecstatic dream, and it straightened, elated, and spread out its arms, reveling in what it thought were its own imaginings of victory.

"Wings, soon," it cooed.

"Yes, go, little one," Samantha commanded, the thing not hearing her, but taking the notion as its own. "Go and end them."

The false daughter turned, and began to dissipate into a whirling cloud that grew to fill the space, and then to leave thru another mirror, an image of Jasmine Cottage where those pitiful fools attempted to bare her way.

As the thing left, Samantha stepped into the space at last, then drifted to the image in the mirror.

She wanted to laugh at their antics. What did they think they could do against her power? There was no possible way for them to strike back, they were pooling their meager resources into last ditch defenses as it was. It would be laughable if she hadn't seen it so many times in the past. All the others had fallen, what did these people possibly think they could do?

Then, she blinked, and peered, and squinted. She forgot to look into the skies where her weapon was forming. Instead, she was drawn to a pulsing light building on the lawns surrounding the cottage.

"What...in all nine hells...is THAT?"

"Jinny" rolled in as a vapor, shrieking her glee like a banchee to the night. Gathering her billowing haze, she paused miles over Jasmine cottage, her slitted glowing eyes taking it all in.