He chose Queensford, simply because it was nearer than Aerievale or Porttown. He arrived at the city walls only an hour or so before dawn. He stopped at the first inn he came to and got a room. He felt keyed up, very aware that the demon or his followers were very possibly somewhere within the city, and might well find and attack him while he slept, but when the sun rose over the horizon he managed to fall asleep anyway.

He was a bit surprised to find himself waking at sundown, with no sign that anything had happened during the day. But when he left his room and went downstairs he found the innkeeper waiting for him with a letter.

“This was left for you, sir,” the man said. Aidan took it cautiously, and opened the folded note. The handwriting was unfamiliar, but seemed to be ordinary ink on ordinary paper. It was an address, followed by “Come tonight” and nothing more.

“Did you see who left it?” asked Aidan.

“Aye. A human man, highborn I'd guess. Well dressed, dark hair, fairly tall. A mage maybe. It was strange though, he had red eyes. Don't see that often.”

“No, no you don't,” said Aidan. So he's here, he thought. Good. Maybe I can end this tonight. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket, then with a deep breath he set out through the torch-lit city streets.

The address proved to be pretty much what he'd expected, an empty warehouse in one of the less savory parts of the city. The broad loading doors were shut, but a smaller door near them stood open, though the room inside was dark. Aidan stepped inside, one hand resting on his blessed dagger, the prick of pain reassuring him as he entered.

At first he thought the cavernous room was empty, but then a ball of blue light flared into life near the center of the room and he saw a figure standing there.

It was not Asmodeus. As Aidan cautiously approached he saw that it was a bearded, middle-aged human wearing mage's robes.

“You must be Aidan,” said the man genially as Aidan stopped a few yards away.

“Where's Asmodeus?”

“Waiting for you. And if you will kindly take two steps forward, I can send you to him,” said the mage.

Aidan hesitated. He was walking into a trap. He knew he was walking into a trap, but what other choice did he have? He tightened his grip on the dagger's hilt, the intensified pain reminding him that trap or no, he had a weapon the demon couldn't possibly anticipate. He stepped forward.

There was a flash of light, and the world dropped out from under his feet. The sensation was familiar, he'd felt it before. The falling, spinning, twisting sensation was the feeling of moving through a portal between worlds. It didn't last long, and only moments later he stood on solid ground again. He looked around and blinked at the scenery. Okay, maybe not so solid.

He was standing on a roughly circular patch of what seemed to be rock. It dropped off on all sides, as though he were standing at the top of a mountain, but the view around him suggested something very different, for floating against a reddish background that might or might not be considered sky were hundreds of chunks of a similar substance. All of them had one flat plane on their otherwise irregular surfaces, but although some were oriented like the space where Aidan stood, others were on the sides or the bottoms of the floating rocks. Thin ribbons of something, perhaps water, wound through the air among the rocks. It was a bewildering landscape, and when Aidan stepped to the edge and looked over, it looked the same below as it did on every other side.

“I guess I'm not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” he said to himself.

“Indeed not.”

Aidan jumped and spun around. Although seconds ago nobody had been there, now the demon Asmodeus, in his all-too-familiar human form, stood a few feet away.

“I give you one last chance, mortal. Give me the torc. I will send you home, and you will never see me again”

“No,” said Aidan.

Asmodeus snarled. “You pathetic creature! Why must you be so stubborn! Do you want me to follow you and harass your family forever? Do you want me to kill you?”

“Not particularly. At this point, demon, what I want is you, dead.”

“I am immortal. Demons can't be killed. Unlike you frail mortal beings.”

Aidan laughed at that. “You are a liar, is what you are. You're no more immortal than I am.” He drew both daggers and advanced on the demon.

Asmodeus pulled a black sword out of thin air. Or perhaps shaped it from his own shadow substance, it was hard to tell. And it didn't matter. Aidan leaped at him, letting the ordinary, right-hand dagger lead, and following it up immediately with the blessed dagger in his left. The demon managed to deflect both blows, but the second whisked past within inches, and Asmodeus flinched, perhaps feeling the dagger's holy power.

“What is that blade?” He backed away as he spoke, his sword held warily in front of him. “You are undead, you can't even touch a weapon that can harm me!”

Aidan just smiled, letting his fangs show, and advanced again. Although he was moving backwards, Asmodeus seemed to be aware of the where the edge of their small circle lay. He shifted sideways as he retreated, circling warily. Aidan struck forward again, and this time the demon parried the holy blade, rather than dodging it. The sword seemed to shatter, and the demon made a peculiar hissing, screeching sound. The demon's sword reformed from scattered shadow fragments, but now Asmodeus was dodging Aidan's blows rather than parrying them. And so it wasn't long before Aidan managed to hit the demon itself. The blessed blade drew a line of fire along the demon's arm, and Asmodeus dropped his sword and screamed, stumbling back away from Aidan, who continued to pursue. The demon's form flickered, dissolving into shadows and partially reforming a dozen times as Aidan advanced. But when he thought he had his opponent pinned against the edge, Asmodeus turned completely to shadow, and went over the edge, almost seeming to pour over like a brief, dark waterfall.

Without hesitation Aidan spread his wings and dived after the falling shadow. But as he plummeted through the air, suddenly there was a horrible jerk and he found he was falling sideways. After a moment of sickening disorientation he realized that no, he was falling down, but “down” was no longer in the same direction. He partially spread his wings, straightening himself and slowing his fall slightly, but the demon had not gone sideways, and looking around as he continued to fall he couldn't see it anywhere. He spread his wings further, gliding, but with another lurch the direction of “down” changed again, and he started tumbling, disoriented as he pinwheeled through the air. He managed to pull out of the spin, and tried to aim for a piece of floating land that seemed to be oriented in the right direction, but before he got there he encountered yet another change in direction, this time a complete one-eighty turn that left him feeling upside-down, and falling once again. He yelped in shock as his fall sent him through one of the flowing ribbons. It did indeed seem to be water, and ice cold water at that, so now he was drenched and chilled as well as dizzy and disoriented.

He clung tightly to the blessed dagger as he once more tried to straighten himself up. He no longer had any sense whatsoever of what direction he'd come from. And then, even though the pull of gravity hadn't changed this time, he was falling again, plummeting straight down as though he had no wings at all. He beat them, trying to slow his fall, but he continued to plummet as though he had done nothing at all. At the same time he realized that although he'd tried to draw breath and yelp at the sudden drop, nothing had happened. There was no breath to draw. He was falling because there was no air, and wings don't work in a vacuum. A sudden stabbing pain lanced through his ears, and he realized that his eardrums must have burst under the sudden pressure change.

This makes no sense! There can't be a patch of vacuum in the middle of a bunch of air! He could still see distant floating islands of rock, and the sky all around was the same dull red. He looked below, in the direction he was falling, and gulped. There were no islands there, just red, featureless and without any sense of distance or scale. It could be thousands of miles of nothing, or it could be a wall just a few feet from impact. He knew he was still falling, although there was no wind rushing past him. Great. I came so close, and now I'm just going to fall forever!

Just as he thought that there was jerking impact, almost like hitting a wall, or like belly-flopping into a pool, and wind was whistling around him again. The red had vanished, and he was falling through gray fog, with a dirty orange glow below him. He spread his wings and pulled up, and then something huge and brilliant loomed up ahead in the fog. He swerved just in time to miss colliding with a massive stone spire. He dodged it, and passed a second and a third, all three smoothed pale granite, obviously part of some building, lit up on a foggy night. He sank down lower and then with a thud he reached the ground, landing on a concrete sidewalk hard enough to leave him feeling shaken, but with no real harm done.