Summoning

Part I: Viktor Triumphant

Light flickered across the pages of an ancient tome, stretching and shrinking as the candle guttered beside it. Melted wax had pooled and hardened in uneven rings along the brass holder, the wick now no more than an inch from drowning in its own excess. The hour was meaningless. Time, like sleep, had become optional.

Viktor had been awake for eighteen hours.

His posture remained immaculate. His breathing was slow, measured, economical. There was no tremor in his hands as he turned a page thinner than parchment, made from some alchemically treated skin that still held a faint, organic warmth. His eyes were bright, unblinking, their focus sharp enough to feel almost invasive, as if the book itself were being dissected under his gaze.

Fatigue did not claim him anymore. Not in the way it once had.

Before Mideon, Viktor’s intellect had already been exceptional. A prodigy among halflings. A curiosity among scholars. Since his summoning as an Eternal Champion, however, that intellect had been reforged into something colder and far more dangerous. Thought no longer wandered. Memory no longer degraded. Ideas assembled themselves into hierarchies and lattices without conscious effort, every concept slotting neatly into place like a solved equation.

He sometimes wondered what it would feel like to lose a thought now.

Aris Demonica lay open before him.

The tome exuded a subtle pressure, as if its presence bent the air around it. The leather cover, peeled back to reveal pages dense with sigils and marginalia, bore scars from prior bindings and warding attempts. Some had failed violently. Others had simply… stopped.

Stealing the book from the private library of Bastian Oriel, the Timeless One, remained Viktor’s greatest theft. The memory still pleased him. Not the act of stealing itself, but the elegance of it. The precision. The way Bastian’s wards had folded, one by one, under patient pressure.

That Bastian had not yet come for him was curious.

He would come.

Viktor pictured the lorekeeper’s expression when he realized the book was gone. Not rage. Bastian was incapable of that. Disappointment, perhaps. Or worse, interest. They would not shout when they finally met again. They would speak softly, carefully, like surgeons preparing for mutually assured dissection.

Viktor relished the thought.

But not now.

His work was too close to completion.

Extracting the true name of Al’garath had been an instructive exercise. The demon’s bindings were inelegant, its history extensively documented by generations of frightened scholars who mistook repetition for understanding. Al’garath’s pride had been its undoing. Pride always was. Once broken, the creature had proven obedient enough, though Viktor had learned quickly not to mistake obedience for loyalty.

Pain had helped. Precision had helped more.

But Al’garath was but the lowest fiend in an elaborate demon hierarchy. There was one above him. A demon who Viktor longed to claim as his own.

That name—the name of Al'garath's lord—had resisted him for fifty days.

Fifty days of study measured not in hours, but in mental endurance. Viktor had traced linguistic roots across extinct infernal dialects. He had followed citations through deliberately corrupted bibliographies. He had reconstructed fragments of destroyed rituals from ash, memory, and implication. Summoning Al'garath had become trivial, almost instinctual now. Several times he had come close to uncovering the name, only to find the trail intentionally poisoned.

Until today.

The pattern had not revealed itself all at once. It never did. It had emerged gradually, like a shape resolving from fog, until suddenly it was obvious that it had always been there.

Dor’gokaan.

The name settled into Viktor’s mind with an almost physical weight.

An ancient demon of shadow and flame. A thing said to swim through the lava flows of damnation as lesser creatures swam water. Wielder of a cursed blade that fed not only on blood, but on fear and pain. Even fragmented accounts spoke of Dor’gokaan with a careful restraint, as if naming it too often invited attention.

As with all demons, knowledge of its true name made summoning possible.

Control was another matter entirely.

Viktor allowed himself a thin smile.

Summoning demons was a fool’s game, according to Bastian. Too many variables. Too much risk. Too many worlds destroyed, the price of a warlock's hubris. Even Torin’s tolerance of demonic entities was pragmatic rather than permissive, a calculated risk accepted only because the Effigy War demanded every available weapon. To hear Bastian tell it, the Demon's that now fought as champions of the gods were not even the same species as Al'garath. Supposedly they were a different breed, safer... as if that fool of a lore keeper could possibly know more about demons than Viktor himself.

Viktor found such caution tedious.

Al’garath had proven that control was not only achievable, but sustainable. Once broken, the lesser demon had been compelled to unlock the sealed pages of Aris Demonica itself. Those pages had resisted countless prior readers, keyed as they were to suffering, submission, and the absolute clarity of intent.

Viktor had provided all three.

It was there that he had found the ritual for Dor’gokaan.

Still, he had not rushed.

Power without an exit was not bravery. It was stupidity.

Hidden among the catalog of demon names was a banishment spell of remarkable brutality. It did not negotiate. It did not reason. It tore a named entity back to its native plane with surgical finality, unmaking the metaphysical bridge that allowed its presence in Mideon.

Viktor committed it to memory with the same care he reserved for lethal equations. Each rune was placed into his mental palace, cross-indexed, reinforced. He tested recall repeatedly until the sequence was flawless.

Only then did he close the tome.

The metal clasps snapped shut with a decisive click. Viktor carried the book to a rune-etched chest in the corner of his laboratory and sealed it inside. The wards flared briefly—blue, then violet—before settling into dormancy.

He closed his eyes.

The laboratory sharpened into absolute clarity. The etched stone floor beneath him. The copper inlays of the summoning stars. The faint, omnipresent pulse of Mideon’s soul-current threading invisibly through the structure like a second circulatory system.

His mind did not waver.

That was enough.

Viktor began to speak.

The words belonged to no language spoken on Athien. Each syllable was articulated with merciless precision, the cadence exact, unforgiving. Power responded instantly. Parchment tore free from his desk and scattered across the chamber. Glass instruments rattled and shattered. The air thickened until it felt almost viscous, pressing against the skin.

He sat within the smaller of two glowing stars carved into the floor. Opposite him, a second sigil ignited—vast, intricate, hungry.

Purple flame erupted.

What began as a flicker became an inferno, a roaring column of fire twelve feet high that licked at the ceiling. Heat rolled outward in suffocating waves. Sweat gathered at Viktor’s brow and traced a slow path along the deep lines at the corner of his eye, a quiet testament to his age... to the wisdom gained in years.

He did not blink.

The roar carried beyond the tower walls. Ravens nested in the loft above shrieked and scattered into the night sky, black shapes fleeing something they could not name.

Then—silence.

Mideon itself seemed to recoil. The ambient soul-current stuttered, then steadied, as if the plane were bracing itself.

A low growl broke the stillness.

Dor’gokaan stood within the star.

The demon dwarfed Al’garath, its form a brutal fusion of shadow and incandescent flame. Malice radiated from it not as emotion, but as principle—an offense against existence itself. In one massive hand it held a sword alive with writhing darkness, flame and shadow dancing endlessly along its edge.

Its gaze fixed on Viktor.

Hatred followed.

“Dor’gokaan,” Viktor whispered.

The demon lunged.

An invisible plane flared as it crossed the boundary of the sigil, searing flesh that was not truly flesh. Dor’gokaan howled, recoiling to the center of the star, its eyes never leaving the halfling.

Viktor snarled with effort.

The future unfolded cleanly in his mind. Power. Dominion. Apotheosis. Let Bastian come clutching his principles like shields. Let the gods watch from their effigies, uneasy and distracted.

With a final incantation, Viktor clapped his hands together.

The demon vanished with a thunderous pop, leaving only curling tendrils of smoke.

Exhaustion struck all at once.

Viktor staggered to his cot and collapsed beneath heavy furs. Sleep claimed him instantly. He dreamed of chains forged from will alone. Of Dor’gokaan kneeling. Of Al’garath serving cakes, and Dor’gokaan pouring tea into Bastian Oriel’s hollowed skull.

Viktor giggled in his sleep, a rare sound from his lips.

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By Andrew Galea and Peter Adams