Chapter 03 | Their Devotion

He woke to a hum.

It was quiet and steady, the low drone of his portable vacuum cleaner making its rounds somewhere to his left. He lay still for a moment, cataloguing the ceiling, the same ceiling he always woke to, cracks in the same familiar places, and then the rest of the morning arrived in sequence: the clean soap-and-cedar smell of recently straightened upholstery, the subdued rhythm of the vacuum moving between the hallway and the far corner of the room, and beneath all of it, threading through the air from the direction of the kitchen, something that smelled of dashi and warm rice and a soft, deeply pleasant sweetness he couldn't immediately name.

He sat up.

Astreal was working the vacuum across the far end of the hallway with the same focused economy she appeared to bring to every task, her white-silver hair pinned back, her black dress traded for something simpler, dark slacks, a pale blouse. She moved in unhurried, overlapping passes, the kind of systematic coverage that spoke of a person who had cleaned a great many rooms and had developed opinions about the correct sequence.

From the kitchen came the sound of water, then a soft sizzle, then the deliberate knock of a wooden spoon against the rim of a pan.

At the counter, Belial was cooking. She had acquired an apron from somewhere, white, with a practicality about it that sat somewhat incongruously on someone who looked the way she looked, and her attention was entirely on the stovetop, one hand adjusting the flame, the other lifting the lid of a pot to release a small, aromatic cloud that reached him across the apartment.

She heard him move. She turned, and the morning light caught the green of her eyes and did something unfair with it.

"Good morning," she said warmly. "Give me just a little while longer. Breakfast will be ready soon." She glanced at the time, then back at him with a faintly scolding look. "It's only seven. You don't need to be anywhere yet. Sit."

"I can..."

"Sit," she repeated, with the gentle immovability of someone who was not actually making a request.

He sat.

Astreal passed him in the hallway, vacuum trailing behind her, and paused long enough to offer a single observational remark with the flat precision of a property inspector filing a report:

"I am an adequate cook at best." A beat. "Acceptable edibility. No aesthetic merit. Belial handles the kitchen."

"And you handle everything else," Matthias said.

"Correct. She would leave dust on the upper shelves for weeks before noticing." Astreal resumed her pass down the hallway without elaborating on whether this constituted criticism or simply data.

From the kitchen, Belial called back without turning around: "I would notice. I would simply have assessed it as a lower priority than other things."

"You would not have noticed," Astreal said, in the tone of someone who had been right about this before.

Matthias leaned back against the sofa cushion and watched them. The morning light was doing something with the apartment that was not its usual quality, something to do with the fact that it was occupied in a way it had not been occupied before, the familiar space rearranged around two presences that moved through it as though they had always intended to be here. Belial at the stove, precise and unhurried. Astreal progressing through the rooms like a tide that left order in its wake. Two extraordinary women, quietly and without ceremony, filling his apartment with the sounds of a household that was actually, actively running.

He found he had nothing to say, and so he said nothing, and watched, and the morning moved around all three of them.

Breakfast was set on the table with a neatness that Matthias suspected had more to do with Astreal than with any coincidence of placement. The food itself, miso, grilled fish, rolled egg, pickled vegetables, rice so perfectly cooked it might have been measured by the grain, was beyond anything his kitchen had produced under his own management, which admittedly set a modest benchmark, but still.

He ate. He did not comment at length. Belial watched with that same settled quiet from the night before.

"Tomorrow," she said, when the rice was half-finished, "we'll move to better accommodations."

He looked up.

"There's a place downtown. It's been ready for some time. We were simply waiting for..." she tilted her head, the smallest acknowledgement of the obvious "...the right moment to use it."

Matthias set his chopsticks down. "Downtown."

"Yes."

"That district is not inexpensive."

"No," Belial agreed, in a tone that suggested the sentence was technically accurate and also not especially relevant.

"So how..."

"We acquired it some time ago," she said.

"Perhaps I can explain more completely." She folded her hands on the table with the precision of someone opening a briefing. "Over the course of the past three thousand years, Belial and I have not been idle. We constructed and abandoned numerous identities as circumstances required, countries, centuries, languages, professions. We invested. We accumulated. We diversified across assets and time periods and jurisdictions as the relevant systems developed." She paused. "The compound return on three millennia of patient accumulation is substantial."

"Substantial," Matthias repeated.

"The current holdings," she said, "would purchase this city. Roughly one hundred times over." She considered. "And still leave sufficient capital to equip a reasonably sized private army. If that were ever required."

The apartment was very quiet for a moment.

Matthias processed this in the way one processes something that is, structurally, not surprising, three thousand years was not a short time; compound interest was a real phenomenon; two immortals with indefinite lifespans and nothing to spend money on had no particular reason not to be extraordinarily wealthy, and yet which still managed to sit in the stomach with a certain specific weight.

"Right," he said.

He picked up his chopsticks. He ate a piece of fish. It was very good.

Then, because the question had been sitting with him since the previous night and had not gotten any lighter with the morning: "Did you do all of this, the investments, the planning, the house, for me? Specifically."

The silence that followed was a different kind than the one before.

Belial looked at him. Something in her expression shifted, just slightly, just enough to show what was normally kept in careful reserve, a quality of feeling that was neither theatrical nor performed, that was simply, plainly there.

"Every part of it," she said.

Her voice was still soft, still level, but it carried the weight of something said with the whole of the speaker behind it.

"Every investment, every identity, every century of patience. All of it was so that when you came back, when we found you, we would be ready. So that you would not return to nothing. So that we could give you the life you deserve, from the very first day."

He looked at Astreal.

"What she said." The ruby eyes held steady. "Every year of it. All of it, for you."

Matthias understood, then, not in the abstract way he had understood the words the previous night, but in the particular, weight-bearing way of actual comprehension. Three thousand years. Not a story. Not a metaphor. Three thousand years of waking up in a world without him, of building and preparing and holding on to the certainty that the day would eventually come. Three thousand years of the specific, quietly enormous loneliness of waiting for someone to come back.

He did not have a response that was adequate to this. He suspected there wasn't one. He ate another piece of fish, and the table held the silence, and neither Belial nor Astreal seemed to require anything further from him just now.

After a moment, he asked: "Is there a catch? To taking up the old identity again, the demon lord. If I chose to go back to that."

"Your will is our will. In this life as in the last. We follow you, toward whatever you choose, through whatever it requires, until death, and beyond it if death permits." She paused, with the faint quality of a caveat being weighed. "There are parties who would take an interest in your return. The descendant lines of the three families still exist. There are those among them who are aware of the cycle. But those are matters for when you are ready."

He nodded slowly.

"For now," Belial said, her voice returning to its usual warmth, "there is no urgency." She reached across the table and refilled his cup with the ease of someone who had been doing exactly this for a very long time. "You have time to decide what you want your life to look like."

After breakfast, Astreal placed her phone on the table, a recent model, slim and matter-of-fact, and Matthias noted it with only a small, internal revision of expectations, because of course they both had smartphones; of course they did, and slid it toward him.

On the screen was a photograph of a house.

Three stories. Clean lines, all glass and pale concrete and dark wood, a design vocabulary that was precise without being aggressive, modern without announcing itself. Restrained. Quietly significant. The kind of house that was expensive because everything about it had been very carefully thought through, rather than because it was trying to impress anyone.

"Belial wanted a mansion," Astreal said, with the air of someone reporting an incident they had since resolved.

"A proper one," Belial confirmed, without apparent embarrassment. "Appropriate to the occasion."

"I determined that a very high-profile property was counterproductive." Astreal took the phone back. "We compromised."

"The compromise was very much in her direction," Belial observed.

"Yes," Astreal agreed, placidly.

Matthias looked at the photograph a moment longer, then passed the phone back. He looked at the kitchen, which was cleaner than it had ever been under his tenure. He looked at the remains of a breakfast that had been better than anything he'd made for himself in three years. He thought about the city being purchasable one hundred times over.

He thought about the fact that twenty-four hours ago, he had been a man who filed reports on time and ate convenience store lunches and was, by every available metric, comprehensively ordinary.

It occurred to him that this was no longer quite the whole picture. He wasn't sure exactly what picture had replaced it yet. But the contours of it were becoming visible, and they were, whatever else they were, interesting.

"I need to go to work," he said.

"Of course." Belial rose and began clearing the table with the easy efficiency of someone who considered this entirely natural. "We'll spend the day preparing. Packing what needs packing, arranging the rest. Everything will be ready by tomorrow morning."

"Don't pack the things on my desk," he said, reaching for his jacket.

"Already noted," Astreal said.

He paused at the door. He looked back at them, Belial at the sink, Astreal folding the table cloth with precise corners, and found that words were, again, not quite up to the weight of what was in the room.

He put on his shoes.

"I'll be back by seven," he said.

"We'll have dinner ready," Belial said, without looking up, and smiled at the kitchen window.

Matthias Titus, ordinary office worker, closed the door of his apartment behind him and walked out into the morning, carrying with him, for the first time in a long and unremarkable life, the quiet, off-balance feeling of a man who has somewhere to return to.