The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 413: Redux Memoria

Chapter 413: Redux Memoria

Malz floated on nothingness. For a long time, she simply remained still, basking in the absence of feeling. She couldn’t remember how she got here, but she could remember pain. She could feel its echoes, visceral in what they’d left behind.

But here, she couldn’t feel, except the vaguest notion of warmth. The tiniest hint of every part of herself, down to the tiniest hairs on her arms.

And yet she knew, there were parts of her that were even smaller. Cells, of course, she knew of. Basic biology for angels. But even inside that notion, she found new knowledge that felt very, very old.

Organelles. Mitochondria. Soma. Dendrites. Nucleii. Marrow and bone.

Limbic and muscular and cardiovascular systems.

The thousand names of the body.

And then, like capillaries, the branches of genetic knowledge.

The encoding of instincts. Lifecycles. Evolution.

Guanine, Adenine, Thymine, Cytocine.

And reflecting behind them... behind life.

Consciousness. Form. Magic.

With every name, she felt a part of herself somehow come to be...

Like these were things she had known, deep down, all along.

More herself.

More human.

Wait...

Why human?

I’m an angel. Not...

What she was suddenly ceased to matter as she felt her mind slot back into reality. The reality of her hovering in the air, staring up at a gray mass of concrete that nevertheless filled her with vertigo as her limbs and wing splayed, searching for balance.

She yelped in panic. "Help! Someone get me down!" The echo of her own voice against the ceiling came with an alien staccato. She knew the words she’d spoken, but they had come out not in Common, Angelic, or even Old Angelic.

The words came out in Japanese.

The moment she was pitched forward and placed on her feet, Malz threw up, vaguely aware of the necklace now dangling from her neck.

The necklace that started all of this...

"Malz, are you alright?" Ferro asked.

Malz? No...

That’s right... I’m Malzkael Memoria...

Why had she thought differently for a moment?

"I’m fine," Malz said, before realizing she’d spoken that strange language again. She repeated herself in Common before she finally saw Ferro through bleary eyes. "What the Hell are you wearing?"

Ferro was dressed in the same sort of suit as Kiryu, but white. A polished grey breastplate of some unknown material formed a breastplate, and the whole affair was covered in lines and hexagons bearing sigils.

"You’ve been out for most of a day," Ferro said. "Kiryu found a message at the back of the book about the necklace. It says that you’re... a copy of someone. And that you need to return the necklace."

"A clone of my wife. Aiko Nasumi," Kiryu said, destroying her vomit with a wave of his hand. He was frowning, his eyes hard and calculating.

The name pulled on something in Malz’s memory.

Staring out of an electrolyte-filled vat...

But that couldn’t be right.

"I have parents... House Memoria..."

"Have you ever met anyone from your House?" Kiryu asked.

The answer to that question was ’no,’ but Malz was still trying to figure herself out. As far as she knew, she’d been raised by House Eros and constantly reminded of House Memoriam’s failings.

"I... was a child when I was orphaned. My parents were exiled..." She tried to lay out what she knew, but her certainty faltered. She remembered parent figures, but when she tried to look closely at the memories, the ideas of her father and mother became more muddled. The memory of siblings resolved into a childhood spent with the children of House Eros...

Kiryu drew a hand down his face, pacing back and forth. On the table near him were two more suits. One in black and another in grey. Since the grey one had four arms, she assumed the black one was for her. Near Ferro, Anko was still passed out, although someone had finally seen fit to lay her down on the table.

"Of course... the fucking corpo-clone special. Make kids and batter their self-esteem enough to guarantee they wind up serving for life. I don’t know how much of your memories are real, but it sounds like you’ve been gaslighted your whole life."

Gaslighted... she felt the term slide into her mind. A reference... one that meant deception. She tried searching for a memory. Anything early enough to refute...

A feeling entered her, like being sharpened. Her memories became more distinct the more she looked at them. The room drifted away, and she felt herself watching snippets of her life like movies...

And the younger she got, the more she realized how little of her life lined up with any definition of the word normal.

The people she thought were her parents had looked nothing like her.

She remembered being six, and receiving a black dress for her birthday. She’d been so excited she ran off to try it on, only to find her parents talking about her when she returned...

The woman had yellow wings and hair, but no matter how much she tried, Malz couldn’t remember her face. "She’s starting to like black things. That’s on the checklist, right? And she stole your knife, so that counts?"

"Hopefully that means we can pass her on to House Eros soon. It gives me the creeps how she stares at people. I don’t want to be around when she starts dissecting animals..."

"But it’s on the list..."

Malz turned away from the memory, a cinching feeling in her heart. She’d only done that once... during her first year with House Eros. When they told her about her family... her shame...

The poor bird, dead in its cage...

A cage that had been left near her room, as if for her to find.

Sickness roiled her stomach as she remembered. She’d been caught not by her minders, but by Iriel. The punishment she’d received had left her bruised. And in the midst of beating her, Iriel had been stopped...

Weeks later, they sent Iriel to the surface. To fight monsters.

Bones had replaced flesh and blood in her mind, and her morbid fascinations turned to what was safe. She’d feared Iriel... until she’d forgotten her.

She’d been sent away because of her.

Because Iriel’s intervention had... ruined her somehow. It had turned her away from ever wanting to truly understand life, and towards what remained after death.

And after...

When she was on the cusp of getting her wings.

Her transition. The procedure to help evolve her so that her body matched her mind.

The painting of her ancestor that had been "gifted" to her by the head of the house...

The prods towards medical knowledge that she rejected.

The disappointment over her self-imposed isolation.

An isolation that only truly ended when a blue-haired half-angel wandered into her library. Wearing a smile that masked deep pain.

A sob tore itself from Malzkael’s throat, her sole wing drooping as tears began to fall.

Before she knew it, a subtle wind announced the arrival of Kiryu, who had to kneel to hug her against his chest.

He said nothing.

A moment later, Ferro joined them.

The two men let her cry and cry.

And all the while other fragments of her life slid into place as she felt the true weight of the name Memoriam.

The memory of a dead woman.

Desired only for...

Access. The thought rose as she remembered the name on the tablet she’d stolen. The facial scan that had recognized her as Dr. Aiko Nasumi.

Somehow, having her was meant to access some secret of Heaven. Except she’d been viewed as a failure before ever reaching that purpose...

And yet, when she became an Executioner, they’d kept her in the Black Tower. Separated her from her friends even though she’d been more than capable of taking an Aytherside mission. She thought she’d done it to herself by giving Cassiel a chance at victory, but what if... what if...

As if sensing the spiral of her thoughts, both men hugged her harder.

She realized then that she was out of tears. That no matter how bad she felt, her body still had its limits. And that made her feel... human.

As her breathing leveled out, Kiryu withdrew first from the hug.

"What do you want to do?" he asked.

"I don’t... I don’t know," Malz sniffed. "I want to find Rain and Cassiel... I want to know why I was made like this... I want..." Her voice cracked.

Ferro hugged her harder before petting her head. "It’s alright. I’m sorry about the necklace... I didn’t know."

"This Rain..." Kiryu asked, a concerned look on his face, "Tall boy, blue hair, purple puppy eyes?"

"Yes," Malz croaked.

"Shit," Kiryu swore.

"He talked about someone named Kir a lot. I guess that’s you..."

"Not me. This body. Kir’s not here right now, remember." Kiryu once more went to rubbing his chin before pulling out his pipe and stuffing it. "I didn’t expect things to take this long," his eyes flicked over to Anko. "But I’m afraid I need to ask you to take this," he drew out the black orb from before and offered it.

"It’s safe," Ferro assured her as he pulled away. "A bit confusing, but I was able to figure it out."

"You already...?"

"Yes," Ferro said. "It took a few hours after I agreed to try it. And with this suit and Kiryu to help me understand a few things..." He grinned and hopped backward, floating a little before he gracefully turned about in the air, patterns dancing through the hexagons on his legs and torso. His tails were the only parts of him other than his head and hands that weren’t covered. "Look!"

"I guess I’ve seen everything now," Malz laughed a little. "A flying cat. Maybe I should call you a tressymkin."

"What’s a tressym?" Ferro asked, but Kiryu waved him off.

"Trust me, you haven’t seen anything yet," Kiryu said as he let the spiritual object float within her reach.

Malz took one look at it, made her decision, and then popped it into her mouth.

The sensation of swallowing it wasn’t unpleasant, but it was strange. Like swallowing a lubricated marble. One that, upon reaching her chest, seemed to slide into her spine and up into the space between the parietal lobes of her brain.

She tasted... sour. But with an absence of flavor that somehow pulled her mind into knots trying to identify it because it was delicious and yet it shouldn’t have been. Like it was every sour thing in the world and none of them, and it didn’t help that the taste of dozens of Earth fruits reared up in her confused mind.

Suddenly she had an epiphany.

"It’s like-"

And then the world disappeared.