( There are people kneeling at his feet, and the smell of rot.

There is a birdcage, and a life-sized doll, and some parts are wooden but other parts are made out of a little girl. There is a crown made of something's skin.

His eyes are impossibly wide and wet and straining. He cannot speak, or move. He cannot do anything. He has been crowned their king.

HAIL PAIMON

The memory of that final night plays out for him now; Paimon lives it, guided by those open palms and hushed whispers and wide smiles. The People have guided him here and through it. And he has torn through humans to get here, to this place, to this moment: a man is scorched alive, screaming, until he becomes curled-up fingers and black char (the shape of him is Father). A woman hangs, impossibly, from attic rafters, a piano wire wrapped around her neck. She cuts through her throat with jagged, sawing motions (the shape of her is Mother.)

He has torn through humans, but he has been ripped from them, too.

There is the squeal of tires and it hurts to breathe, and Peter is screaming and then he is torn from his body and it hurts, it's emptiness, he's too much and he isn't supposed to be here and he needs the warmth of his new host and he will break Peter apart and claw his way in—

There were others, before. Other Vulnerable Ones, other hosts, botched and ruined. They'd do anything to escape him. (They find a rope and they go to their mother's bedroom. They hang the rope around their neck and their legs are dangling, and they're dead now and the ritual isn't finished, and he can't finish being put inside them.)

There are secret things and old magic uttering truths that flutter against him in too many voices, and the lights are too bright and the languages are too loud, and he stands there with too many names and too many past lives scraping up under his skin. The skin is broken and bleeding in places, but it fits better now. His eyes fill with tears. He is afraid.

Hey hey - no no - you're all right...
Charlie. You're all right, now.

You are Paimon.

He doesn't understand. (But he does, and the rising cacophony, the swell of light and sound and power, it comes from within him. These are things that have always existed. These are paths that have always led to this outcome. These are Truths that could never have been escaped, or reshaped, or denied.)

He (she, they) is a god, and a king, and a child, and a bird with wings snapped broken.

HAIL!

He is in a strange, slimy place, and then he is breaking free of it, of that shell, that cocoon. Long limbs curl and then reach and then scrape. An insect transformed into something else, reborn.

But he is wrong, so wrong; everything is Wrong. He can't recognise the room he's in, that safe and soft place. There is a girl with pale blonde hair and round grey eyes, and he does not know her. He scrambles away, incapable of speech, throat pulsing with clicks and chirps, with a throat strained and gagging, with hands against his eyes, clawing at the bandage that isn't really there, bulky and strange and painful against the mutilated centre of his face. He can't understand how to scream, so he moans, and later, he wails.

In the days that follow, Paimon is lost and strange, sometimes not Paimon at all but Charlie, and sometimes a mix of them both and sometimes the absence of either. Sometimes he is others, names he doesn't recall and can't comprehend. He's still in ways humans are not, alien and unmoving, and then he's fitful and violent against himself, a seed buried in deep and trying to escape its pulpy wet flesh, smashing his head against walls or clawing at his chest and stomach, trying to break out of his cage.

Later in the month, he begins to remember things and to understand things (The People, he knows their faces now, he knows the sounds of their voices and the scent of their spices and the way they smiled, and he knows he would rip them piece by piece by piece by piece), and Peter is gone, and his Witch is aching, she is broken, and this is how it was always going to be.

Nightmares ravage him, in wake and in sleep. Sometimes he misses his mother and his father and his brother and his grandmother (his eyes are always leaking). Sometimes he hates them the way nothing human can hate. It transcends emotion; it is simply energy, ancient and beautiful and horrible.

There is a crown on his head, and his feathers lie in pieces on the floor. He stares at himself in a mirror in a hallway, and his neck is long and thin, and his fingertips brush the hollow of his throat. He could snap it easily, he thinks.

His tongue scrapes upwards, against the roof of his mouth. He shudders when it happens, a convulsive ghost that slithers down through him, soft and cold. Cluck. )