The disembodied foot sat upon the raised platform in the center of the testing chamber. Its skin was tan with ashy white splotches and had the texture of old jerky. The point of severance was just at the ankle; a perfectly smooth cut which resulted in an uncannily smooth, almost glass-like surface. Even while doing his best not to look directly at the amputation site Seymour could clearly identify layers of flesh, muscle, bone, and spongy marrow like something out of a biology textbook back on Earth. All of the formerly bloody inner-workings were colored in faded shades of orange and yellow and white, the way a chicken breast changes color when it’s left on the counter for too long.

  Maybe worst of all, its warm, cinnamon scent was filling the chamber and his nostrils right along with it.

  Resisting the urge to barf all over the mummified foot, Seymour instead cautiously touched the macabre object using his Sigil of Greed and gathered its schematic:

  One major surprise had been revealed here: nothing in the description offered by his catalogoggles back in the jungle had indicated that the fetish was imbued with two effects. The first, ascendant rank effect, had already been accurately described by the goggles, but the master rank ability to exorcize demons had been completely omitted.

  Seymour already knew that the item descriptions which were given by the gnome-crafted goggles weren’t always about clarifying precisely what an item did. More often than not, the informal tooltips they provided were primarily intended to entice customers into parting with their chits, instead. But to hide an effect entirely—particularly one which required activation, rather than a passive effect—struck him as very strange. Almost as if the goggles were programmed in a way to deter the fetish’s use.

  “‘Activation is achieved through the removal of a toe’,” he read the final line of the schematic’s description out loud. Then he shook his head. “What, am I just supposed to bite one off or something? Jesus Christ.”

  Holding his breath, he leaned in to study the foot more closely. Its size clearly indicated that it had once belonged to a man – this Reisuke Karl person, a so-called Exorcist. As a gift from his boss, it seemed more than a little weird and also somehow personal, as if it had been tailored just for Seymour. Every magic-user he’d met during his time on Heschia had possessed Virtue Sigils, which struck him as the opposite of demonic.

  Every magic-user except for Riftborn like himself, of course. He had sigils of greed and envy and pride which were definitely a little more evil in their presentation.

  “Is it because I have a demon inside me?”

  He remembered what Dan had told him just before they parted in the jungle:

  And be prepared to use it thrice.

  “Does that mean I have three demons in me?”

  It made sense, didn’t it? One for each of his evil sigils?

  He prodded the fetish’s big toe. It felt turgid—like the taught skin might burst and spew forth a toe-shaped maggot—and room temperature to the touch. He pinched it between his fingers and wiggled the mummified appendage just slightly.

  “This little piggy went to market,” he began—

  —but then the big toe sloughed off in his grip far too easily and a cloud of mummy-dust belched up from the fresh hole where it had previously been attached at the knuckle.

  “Shit!” Seymour jumped to his feet and dropped the big toe beside the rest of the foot. He heard a sticky-sounding click and looking down he realized the toenail had ripped open as if a poltergeist had pried it up out of the nail-bed, simple as opening an old flip-phone. There was no blood, but the sight and sound still turned Seymour’s stomach.

  And then a beam of pure black void-energy fired out from the nail-bed and enveloped him from top-to-bottom.

  Inside Seymour Little there so far lived three demons.

  The first had taken up residence on his seventh birthday, he suddenly realized. The second had arrived on his fourteenth and the third came on his twenty-first. Together, the three of them had been feeding on vestigial pieces of Seymour’s soul for nearly his entire life. It was strange – the understanding he suddenly possessed. It all felt completely normal, both the fact that he had demons inhabiting him as well as the fact that he owned a soul, and that parts of it were seemingly meant to be eaten by demons and served no other purpose, like some sort of screwed up appendix of the damned.

  And then, a set of log entries and a prompt appeared floating within the black ray which was still enveloping his entire body:

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “Yes,” he demanded. The anger in his own voice surprised him. Did he blame these demons for the way his life had been going back on Earth? Were they responsible for his gambling and other faults? It was a classic chicken-and-the-egg situation, wasn’t it?

  Which came first? The demons or my sins?

  A round, wobbly bubble the size of a basketball floated out of his chest like a ghost leaving his body. It was oily black, and the ray of dark energy firing out of the severed toe’s nail-bed seemed to catch it like a tractor beam. As it dragged the oily black sphere down into the toe Seymour caught a glimpse of something inside.

  It was the demon, looking like a super pissed-off salamander trapped inside a glass orb. It pressed its face against the sphere’s surface and screamed angrily but Seymour could only tell by its expression. No sound escaped the orb, and the orb itself could not escape the energy beam being projected by the toe. It was dragged down until its mass began to warp and distort and then it was completely swallowed into the exposed nail-bed of the severed, mummified toe.

  It was all a lot for Seymour to take in at once: both that demons were actually real and perhaps most discombobulating – they were helpless to resist his Foot Fetish

  The toe began to twitch and tremble. For the briefest moment Syemour worried the demon inside it wouldn’t be contained – that it would break free and he’d have to fight it or something. But then the toe simply melted into a flat, black puddle which assumed a perfectly rectangular shape. A few beats later Seymour realized the process was over.

  “A card?” He cautiously knelt to pick it up.

  It was all black from corner-to-corner, except for the name Lucifer written across the bottom in gothic, white letters. But as Seymour examined it, he realized he could sense the weird, pissed-off salamander-face he’d seen a moment earlier. It reminded him of one of those posters where if you let your eyes unfocus in just the right way a hidden image appears – not unlike the face on his Greed sigil, but operating on an even greater level of subtlety.

  And while he felt like he could have spent a moment teasing out the image in its entirety, he didn’t dare. The thought had suddenly entered his mind that doing so might somehow allow the demon to reenter him. He also didn’t feel safe capturing its schematic, so instead he glanced up at the crystalline wall of the testing chamber, which had lit up when it registered the newly-created item:

  Three things occurred to Seymour almost simultaneously:

  The first was that scene in Pulp Fiction where Marsellus Wallace is talking to Bruce Willis about throwing his fight. He says Bruce might feel a sting, but it’s just pride screwing with him. And then there was the whole bit about Marsellus throwing some dude off a roof for giving his wife a foot massage, right? It suddenly felt like Quentin Tarantino was somehow responsible for all of this.

  Knock it off. Seymour self-scolded. You’re trying to distract yourself with this Pulp Fiction shit, but it’s not working.

  He was trying to distract himself from the next thing that had struck him: this demon had entered his soul upon Seymour’s twenty-first birthday, mostly because of how he’d thought and lived as a teenager and young adult. After the death of his father when he was fourteen, Seymour had spent more than a few years acting out and struggling to cope. There were a lot of fistfights in high school. And some drugs. But none of it had ever helped him get over losing his dad. At the time he had thought of himself as sort of invincible, but now he realized that wasn’t the actual reason he’d attracted a demon of pride.

  “It came to me because I was raging against God.”

  The truth was: he didn’t even believe in God. Hadn’t since he was a little kid, really – but as he got a little older he’d been pissed at Him, nonetheless. He’d thought he’d known better than the invisible man who had stolen his father too soon.

  This realization wasn’t an epiphany so much as it simply became obvious knowledge, on the level of the sky is blue and water is wet. It must have been a function of exorcism, lending him an immediate understanding of the demonic onboarding process. It turned out the sins came first, after all.

  Finally, the third thing which occurred to Seymour was that this obviously wasn’t the first he’d heard of this particular demon: Lucifer. He was used to thinking of that name like an alias of the Devil, but now he suddenly had a different understanding:

  “That’s just what all demons of pride are called.”

  Again, he wasn’t entirely sure where this new knowledge had come from nor what to make of it, so he filed it away and decided he’d need to spend some time in Adara’s library soon. Hopefully she had some books covering basic demon nomenclature.

  The sigil over his heart—Pride—felt oddly alive.

  “No, that’s not quite right,” he admitted to himself out loud. “It’s not just alive.”

  He opened his shirt using his left hand, the card still in his right. He brought the card closer and closer.

  “It’s hungry.”

  He pressed the Card of Lucifer into the evil-ass tattoo which he wore over his heart, and it melted into his flesh. Then he fell on the floor and spasmed in ecstasy. He’d applied enough catalysts to others over the past few weeks that this had already all become second nature. When he finally regained control over his body, Seymour studied the details of his freshly-manifested power:

  Seymour blinked as he read the rest of the description.

  “Hot damn,” he finally said, his voice a shaky whisper.

  His next steps instantly became clear.

  “I guess I need to get my hands on a fresh corpse.” He smirked. “But first, I’ve got two more demons to evict from my soul.”