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This is faelin's NaNoWriMo journal for 2004. Granted, she crashed and burned on November 17th, but still works on it occasionally.

Title: Demonea's Arches
Genre: Fantasy (hopefully with some smartassed gallows humour)
Rating: R - It is spectacularly violent in places
Word Count: 26,806 as of January 19, 2005

Synopsis: While visiting the city of Lalaerii on a business venture, a half-fiend woman named Kaleah finds herself stuck there when a celestial army lays siege to the city. Being no slouch with a weapon, she joins in with the fighting. As it turns out, the army was from a place high on the Universal Spine, and they are intent on fighting their way to the very bottom and killing Demonea, the embodiment of suffering. And a few of them got through. Kaleah is not stupid; she knows this is a bad thing. She offers* to try and track them down, and starts off on a journey down the Universal Spine, which is essentially a trip into pain itself. She is accompanied by only two people-- her old love Kaethix, another half-fiend that she trusts no further than she can throw, and Shael, an enigmatic, angelic creature that she purchases from a slaver in Lalaerii... who does not trust HER any further than he can throw her**.


*Under the threat of being fed to shadow-monsters.

**Which is probably not at all.

Setting: The lower parts of the Universal Spine (in my writing, this can best be described as the equivalent of hell, but that's still rather inaccurate), and the cities therein.


The title is taken from a strange little poem I wrote some time ago, about a creature that is surrounded by viewing-portals and imprisoned there, forced to watch every painful and tragic event that exists. In the setting that I am building, that place is at the bottom of the Universal Spine, the staircase that runs through seventy-three disks, each of which is connected to its own planet on another plane of existence.


...and what of the extremes? Is there a being of infinite good reigning at the top, and the embodiment of evil at the bottom? Truth be told, the most interesting conjecture that I’ve heard concerns not deities, but two once-mortal women.

Demonea and Tylinde were mortal sorceresses obsessed with the interactions of their worlds. Both had a fascination for the way people worked, and both wanted to savour every moment of their emotions.

Both scryed, watching all they could. The experience proved to be two-faced, and each of them got something completely different.

Tylinde sat before her viewing-portal, absorbed in a continual blur of overjoyed reunions, loving embraces, and friendly laughter. She became so ensconced in her watching that she became powerless to do anything else. Still she sits there, above the highest world on the Spine, melting away in passive happiness.

Demonea, on the other hand, received all the pains and sorrows. Every harsh word and abandoned love became hers to watch. The arch that was her scrying-portal duplicated itself over and over, surrounding her with thousands of images. She sits in the middle of it all, feeling for each tortured soul, perhaps even comforting it.

-Faeilynne Kair-Thorn's Treatise on the Universal Spine

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