Gillan slowly made step after step towards her bed. The floorboards creaked under her feet. That had never happened before. Was it the weight her soul struggled beneath? Or maybe just the anxiety's mass had materialised and now sat comfortably on her shoulders.
Whichever one it was, the noise accompanied her all the way into the bedroom. She didn't open the door; there wasn't one. As the girl traversed the room's threshold, a sitting figure steadily unveiled itself. The devil was sitting on her bed.
He was short. Maybe not short, but certainly below the average height of a villager. Of course, the horns only made him taller, but they didn't change the fact his head still sat at about where Gillan had her neck.
When she approached, he turned his head towards her. The girl swallowed loudly. Birdsong fully exited her hiding spot and now hovered above the two in the form of a faint melody.
"[Unintelligible]," said the devil, "[unintelligible], [unintelligible] [unintelligible]."
Gillan looked to the pixie for help, a mixture of confusion and hope on her face. The fairy understood the message and said:
"Ask his name."
Gillan asked. The devil understood nothing. Gillan repeated. The devil let out a collection of sounds so alien to both the girl's and the fairy's ears they both blinked rapidly in sync. Gillan finally swallowed her pride. That's a lie. What she did swallow were the years of silent contempt she'd lived through with her head down and her curls locked away.
"Gillan," she said, tapping her chest. She then extended the same hand towards the devil. He seemed to understand. He then reached to his face and removed what the girl had thought to have been his face, but now turned out to be nothing more than a demonic mask.
"Katsugi," he said and tapped his breastplate. It was all Birdsong needed.
Names are very powerful. They are largely — but not fully — immaterial, they are concepts. Just like law, money, or morality. Non-existent, yet so very present, people had fought wars over them. Either verbal or physical.
Birdsong knew Gillan's current name. That one too, was very powerful, but not in the 'traditional' way. That name didn't grant strength or might, knowledge or intelligence. It wielded a different kind of power. Or rather, held a different kind of power.
Names are all faeries need. Knowing them grants the Little People a certain degree of control over their holders and — until the incident — they limited themselves to playing mostly harmless tricks on those dull enough to give them away. Birdsong was one of those faeries.
Trained in all the things that could be done with a name, she now adopted the form of a ribbon of voice and shot into the man's unmasked visage. His eyes — shaped like almonds, something Gillan didn't know existed — gave a brief glint of magic. He exhaled loudly, bits of golden fairy-dust flying from his mouth. The more he breathed and exhaled, the more the dust formed into a tiny, winged person. After a finalising cough, Birdsong reappeared in her usual form. And the devil spoke.
"Glory be upon thee, Venerated Her-Spirit." His voice sounded like a colossal brush being dragged across a field of ink.
"I, Katsugi," he touched his chest and bowed, "honour you and ask for fair judgment at eternity's door."
Gillan looked around in bewilderment. She had worked well on the cabin. She had painted the doors, the walls, even a few of the rafters had two-dimensional vines wrapping them. Whatever her cabin was, it was not death's door.
"Glory be upon thee as well, Miss God," he added, bowing his head towards Birdsong.
The pressure of the last day had mounted so much, that the two local residents couldn't help but exercise an utterly extreme reaction. They burst out laughing. A single tear streamed down Gillan's cheek as for but a moment her emotions overloaded and a spell of bliss fell upon her.
When the laughter died down, both the fairy and the girl were surprised to see the man smiling too. He also changed not only where he was sitting, but how too. The devil now sat on the floor, his legs curled up beneath his rear and a sincere grin splitting his face.
"I am glad of thine joy Venerated Her-Spirit and Miss God. May thine patrons' sling and javelin always strike true, but not once more to a halt."
Gillan understood all of the words the man was saying. Separately, they all made perfect sense. It was the manner in which he conjoined them that caused her brain to start smoking.
"I honour you too," Gillan returned the bow and the man visibly lightened up even more at her words, "but you must forgive me as I may have misled you. You are not at, as you described it, 'eternity's gate', nor are you about to face any kind of judgement. You're in my cabin...umm, my home. In the village. No name, no nothing, just the village. And she, whom you call 'Miss God', is my friend, she's a fairy. Do you know what a fairy is?"
The man didn't seem disappointed at the piece of information. More than anything he looked...deep in thought. Not in the confused way, but in the way of not really understanding what had happened to him. So, I guess you could call that the confused way.
"So," the man began, his thoughts' pieces almost visibly coming together, "if thou are not Venerated Her-Spirit, and she is not Miss God...and I am in thine home — for which sharing with me I thank thee — then...I am...not dead?"
Gillan and Birdsong blinked in sync a few times. "No, you're very much alive...uhh sir? May I ask..."
The man raised his eyebrows expectantly and nodded for her to continue.
"Who are you?"
The devil/man stared off into the non-existent distance for a moment, an answer formulating in his mind. After a short while, he said:
"I am a [man-person-who-leads-fighter-people]. A former one at least. Without my title, I still am a—" he struggled with the word. Even with fairy-magic using a new language could be an ever-uphill climb.
"A Knight, I believe to be the term. My name, as I said, is [the-act-of-carrying-an-object-over-the-shoulder]. Katsugi. I do not remember much from just before my arrival here, but if this indeed isn't an afterlife, then I have a home and a loved one to get back to. I most-humbly ask for thine help and assistance, for I do not know the way."
