No one saw it arrive. There was no sound, heat, flickering veil, or flame. It simply was where once it had not been: a new wrinkle in the air, a smudge in the pattern of things. The wind shuddered backwards for a moment and then moved on, pretending nothing had changed.

The masters had sent it, or at least one of them had. It is unclear whether the masters are many or only fracture themselves into many when viewed from certain angles. They reside in a place called Neither, where language folds in half. They do not speak as we understand it.

The demon, this one, was not numbered. Because the multitude of demons is a number beyond all numbers. This is what the masters say; what they say becomes like breath turning frost on the glass of being. 

Their multitude is so great that no sequence, no system, no recursion of counting can hold them. They are beyond the conception of being counted.

This one had no name, but it carried a smell—jasmine, rot, and copper bells—and where it stepped, colors hesitated before remembering how to be. It walked through our city, barefoot and humming the tune of an unborn planet, and no one could quite look at it. They sensed something, though, like a dream they once forgot in the cradle.

The demon’s mission was simple: find the breach and speak to it.

What breach? No one knew. Not even the demon, at first. It wandered the alleys of stitched-together architecture. It asked questions in the language of sleep paralysis. It wept onto glass and read the patterns in the warping.

Eventually, it found the breach in a child’s drawing: a crayon spiral on cracked wallpaper. The spiral whispered the name of a dead god.

The demon leaned close and whispered something in return. No one heard what it said, but the sky turned inside out for six seconds.

Then the demon left; not vanishing but reversing its presence like a cough in a dream. It never walked the same path twice, and the ground where it had been began to forget being solid.

And still, the masters send more. For there are always more. The number of demons is beyond all reckoning, like a scream that outlives the mouth. One of them might be walking beside you now.

The End