Long ago, everything, matter and nonmatter, darkness and light, existed in chaos. A mass of tangled fabrics, withing nothing recognizable, nothing distinct. A precursor to Energy.

  Jenny sat and listened as Iblis spoke, ccking the ghoul’s jaws, the crack on his head glistening with blue light. The fmes rose up like horns, and it was weird that he was just standing there. It made her feel self-conscious, but she was thrilled to finally have some answers to all this. To existence.

  He expined where the demons came from. At the beginning, there was only one world, and the demons were the embodiment of the first substance, the source of Energy. And from that Energy came light. Light was the second substance. The third substance was matter, coming into existence as Energy was spend, as Energy cooled.

  Over billions of years, these substances separated, each one acquiring different needs, different wants, existing at different levels of existence. And at the start, the demons ruled, taking on a parental role in the expansion of the worlds. Their leader was a primordial being without name. An entity that drew itself across every world, guiding and shaping, seeking to understand – the entity that Jenny came to know as Eve. It... she had birthed the stars and all the pnet, and she’d so desperately wanted to be material. There was a holy trinity, a bance to it: Energy, Light, Matter. And Jenny had a fsh of the three headed figure, shining so brightly, shifting, always shifting.

  In your nguages, said Iblis, his static voice dropping low as he took a break from his story telling. We called her Parent. But you might transte it more accurately as Mother.

  “And I finally gave her what she wanted...” whispered Jenny with a shudder. She'd given birth to their mother. Did that make her Iblis’ grandmother? But what did Eve want? “So was she the first demon?”

  She was the first everything. But she did not communicate with her children. She abandoned us for a different World as we could not give her what she wanted.

  That other world... was that where Eve had taken Jenny? With the pool of water and the forest and the stars? She remembered the stars, shining so brightly in the night sky, much rger than any star she’d ever seen in any night sky. Had Eve constructed it to be like that? Or was that Eve watching over her children?

  Iblis continued with his expnation. He nor the other demons knew what Eve wanted, so he spoke of the angels.

  Angels were beings of light. They were the second beings to come into existence, life pouring from the glow of Energy. But they were limited in their capacities for growth – they hungered for growth in the same way that Eve had. Wanting to be more, wanting more substance. And no matter how fast light may shoot across the heavens, it could never catch up with its own desires. But one angel discovered that it could grow. It could change. It could be more than itself by feeding on other angels.

  Jenny shuddered, staring into her little campfire as the possessed ghoul stood on the other side. Its jaws kept ccking. The other ghouls stood a distance away, but the snowfall got heavier, and most of them faded into the bnketing softness, the glow of their eyes blurring.

  Iblis maneuvered the Ghoul body to sit down by the fire, its legs crossed. Jenny had the sense it picked up on this sitting position from rooting through her memories, and the ghoul with its oversized head and nky white limbs looked rather odd in a seated position. She’d gotten too used to them desperately trying to rip her to shreds. The blue fmes in the ghouls' eyes flickered, and Iblis continued.

  That angel decred himself ruler of all angels, the master of everything. It used its tremendous strength to bend the other angels to its will. It expanded its power, taking over the World of Light. And as it fed, as it learned of even more worlds further beyond the World of Light and the demon’s world, the World of Fmes, the first angel’s hunger only grew. It discovered the most important world, the rgest of all the worlds: the Material World. And subsequently, the World of Death and the World of Soul.

  On the Material World, something was taking shape. None of existence knew how or why, but something new emerged from the third substance. From matter, came matter that inherently had Energy and Light.

  Iblis lifted the ghoul head to look right at Jenny. From matter came you. The Humans. And the angel who could not exist in material form watched with increasing envy, seething jealousy, as you conquered your world. As your people expanded and grew from the dirt. As your people could create. As your people experienced all the pleasures and hurt that this angel wanted for itself. It abhorred the thought that itself was created, and it was consumed by its envy of whatever had created your kind, and how your kind itself could in turn create.

  The angel even adopted your ways. Decring that angels will now distinguish into Male and Female forms. The males would adopt names ending with ‘il and the females would adopt names ending with ‘el. This way, the angels can be closer to their ultimate desire: to be material.

  But this angel did not accept limitations on himself. He wouldn’t just take a male identity and a male name. He would be titled. He would be Him. He called himself, Adonai, Master of all Creation. And he convinced the angels that he had created them – and who could deny him when he had such power? And through his messengers to the material world, he convinced humans that they and all living things and everything else in existence had been created by Him. He crowned himself, master of all creation.

  Iblis’s fmes seemed to diminish. A cold wind blew through the fire in front of Jenny, and a chill went down her spine. How many times had she heard sermons, preachers, her mother going on about the one who’d created them, the one who’d died for their sins, the all-powerful, the all loving – that it was through Him that everyone would be saved.

  And still, continued Iblis. Adonai was jealous of the beings He’d now cimed ownership of. For he was not yet whole by his definition of whole. He could not be happy with what he’d worked so hard to achieve, and he found it even more frustrating that those who could create, those of the material world, were mortal.

  So, he set about with his grand pn. Drawing around him five angels of the highest order. Beneath him of course, but far more powerful than any other angel. He taught them His secrets. Enlisted them into His cause.

  He wishes to have true dominion over all of existence. He wishes to conquer the material world. HE wishes to BE the material world.

  And he found his entry point. A strange crack between worlds, a rift, something so ancient, that He only found it more offensive – what you call the Survival Challenge.

  It began with the birth of the Material World. No living being understands why, but evolution is inherent to this world. Change. Growth. The strong and capable overtaking the weak and vulnerable – an idea that Adonai was obsessed with. But He also recognized that some other force was at py, something so beyond his grasp of existence. It filled him with want. With rage.

  So he infiltrated the Survival Challenge, recognizing that it took pce in the space between worlds, enabling him to intercede with his angels. An invasion of the material world.

  “You mean the Veil?” whispered Jenny before exhaling deeply. She could still picture that that pale, pasty, gross world the high school had gone into. The strange emptiness that had stared back at her when she looked out the window. The sense of deep gloom. The snow around them was white and pristine, and even with the possessed ghouls standing like ghostly figures on a haunted night, this world wasn’t anywhere as unsettling as the bnk emptiness of the veil.

  The veil. It exists between the worlds – nobody knows why the Survival Challenges take pce there. Perhaps it’s due to the nature of material life, being both material and spirit, but Adonai and his angels infiltrated. Using a power that He had to physically cross between worlds, something unlike anyone across the world has ever seen before.

  The way Iblis said that made Jenny shiver. She could tell the underlying hint... until now. But she wanted to remind him again that it wasn’t even her power. It was Susan’s. Or was it a composite of both?

  But Adonai’s power wasn’t perfected, continued Iblis. The ghoul body looked up at the sky and snow fell into its glowing blue crack and melted down its cheek, giving it the odd impression that it was crying. His power converted Light into Matter by force. Thus creating the Tarnished creatures you have come across. Their minds reject their transformed bodies.

  The horrible darkness. The empty eyes. The desperate hunger that promised – if you just eat enough, if you get enough life into your belly, maybe you can be whole too. Jenny remembered that all too well, digging her fingers into her palms and trying to suppress the ugly hunger roiling inside her. Her tentacles remembered. Her exoskeleton remembered. The taste of blood, wet and hot on her lips. The delicious satiating warmth.

  “But what’s different about what I can do?” asked Jenny, though she was already starting to suspect.

  You open passageways between worlds that do not trigger transformation. It does not tarnish. But it also means that any angel moving through your passage would lose form in the Material World.

  "What?" Jenny blinked. "So, they’d have form in their own world? And this world? But not in mine?"

  Yes. In these outside worlds, the six worlds, Energy and Light are defining factors of existence. Matter is secondary.

  “But what am I sitting on then? Isn’t this ground? How does that make sense? How can I be here?”

  Iblis didn’t respond right away. She heard deaths stirring, and another wind howled across the nd. The snow felt the same as snow back home. The ground felt the same as ground. So what did it mean to be part of different worlds?

  For you, it is of no consequence, said Iblis finally. As a Human you are both Matter and Nonmatter. Solid Energy is indistinguishable from Matter but it isn’t truly matter.

  “Oh,” whispered Jenny, suddenly understanding what Yeshua had meant. The food they create with the system doesn’t have life in it. It would never satiate the hunger she has. Sure they could create all the meat or vegetables or whatever they wanted, but it never would’ve come from a living thing. And as Iblis expined more, about how matter is Energy in a different stage of being, Jenny shut her eyes and finally understood what all this was about. “So, you’re telling me, there’s a crazy ass war across all these worlds because God is jealous of us?”

  And thus he set about to bring all the worlds under His command. We do not know all the details of his Grand Pn, but as you can see from the world of demons, He means to cim dominion and control over all creation.

  They came for our world first. For millennia, my people and the angels went to war. We fought not only for our sake but to maintain bance between the worlds. They fought for Him.

  Memories, Iblis's memories fshed through Jenny’s head. “So where does Eve py into all this?”

  That story, I’m afraid, is forgotten to us. She is as ancient as Adonai, and the role she pys, we do not know.

  "I gave birth to her. That’s what Adonai wants too right? To be born?"

  Verily. And we cannot allow that to happen. And now that you are here, we have another chance to win this war. The war they are so sure they’ve already decided. They call it Destiny.

  “Okay,” said Jenny, deep in thought, trying to make sense of all this. “So where do I come in? What will you do with these passageways?”

  Iblis’ mouth ccked. For Demons, before the Great Freezing, we were able to project ourselves into the Material World.

  “To possess people?” she asked accusingly. Was that where all the horrible stories came from?

  To disturb the angel’s plot to shape humanity’s ascension to their will. To guide. To redirect. But that was all we could do – and that was all the Angels could do. Project themselves into the Material World.

  The Angels however, and under Adonai’s guidance, mastered physical mobility between the six other worlds. And that was how we came to war. But we were at a disadvantage. While Light can travel between worlds – us Demons require a Vessel to do so. To be physically present. Our projected selves were powerless – and once humanity began to reject us, once the angels led them astray and they lost their faith in the world around them – we were doomed.

  We lost the war.

  We were frozen.

  Jenny sat quietly for a long moment, thinking. Thinking. As the fire crackled. As Iblis stared at her. There were other questions she had. About Adonai. About the greedy angels. And how human history had been shaped. And about the angel called Sat’en that she’d seen in Iblis’ memories – but even she knew not to go there. She got the sense that Sat’en to Iblis was what Susan was to her. Something heartbreaking.

  She couldn’t understand Adonai’s entire thinking. Why did He want so much power? What was He after?

  And there was something else in Iblis’ expnations that was bugging her. She’d thought Adonai and the angels were at fault for the Survival Challenge that had ripped her school out of New York. But Iblis seemed to imply it was something long before the angels got involved. What did that mean?

  Was it going to be a nightmare regardless of all this?

  “Earlier you said you would help me find Yeshua. How?”

  I was within your memories. I know your limitations. But if I should possess you and you use my Energy, my essence, to fuel your light. Then perhaps we can open a passageway sooner rather than ter.

  Jenny’s teeth clenched. She curled her nose. “I don’t want you to possess me.”

  I will not seize control. I will not overreach your autonomy. You will remain in charge.

  “So, you want to be inside my head and work together?” She'd heard that before.

  Yes.

  “And you’re asking for consent this time?”

  Yes. I believe it will be mutually beneficial.

  “And what will you get out of this?” She swallowed, staring hard at the unmoving ghoul. It looked like something out of an animated movie, the bulbous head, the burning blue eyes, the gentle snowfall around it.

  We ask that you help us in return. In the war against Destiny.