Day 1 Morning

[Ada Wong]

Before he could even bat an eyelid, Crowley was transplanted somewhere entirely different.

The modest plateau of grassland around him was brokenly shaded by trees, a deep teal green haze freckling the ground with fleshy fungus growth rippling along its edges. A faint breeze passed through, sending henceforth dangling leaves to the forest floor in dainty helicopter twirls. Delicate little bells of color, youthful cups of downturned nectar yellow and powdery blue petals, rose out of the tangled undergrowth in vibrant pockets of flowers.

Breathing in deeply, Crowley turned his chin up towards the sky. Not a single distant speck of a bird careened across it. The sweet, lulling notes of birdsong were suspiciously sparse and faded in and out of his hearing. Somehow, this was a cause of concern for him— a silence so nearly all-consuming could never bode well. Almost like heaven, then, but not quite.

Distantly, he wondered how it was that a pair of blistering miscreants had deemed him fit to be tossed across dimensions like a loaded dice. He was really getting too old for this, had been for the past couple decades. It was too bad departure from The Work in hell was absolute shit— which is to say, as fictional as a bleedin’ prancing unicorn.

Somehow he had completely failed to notice the odd weight settled upon the ground beside his feet. Stooping and lifting it into his arms, Crowley squinted curiously down at the dimly glowing, dark metal-streamed weapon he had somehow obtained while hurtling through a pocket in space-time. It looked just like something out of a whackadoodle science fiction film, but unfortunately for him there were no attractive aliens hanging around for him to cozy up to.

Indistinct electronic swoops and drops emanated from the weapon’s sizzling, sicknasty core. Crowley turned it over in his hands before simply letting it hang limp on one arm, surmising that it must be the weapon Teucer had secured for him. Wonderful.

A peculiar twinge of balled-up pressure coiled beneath his shoes as he strode forth. The earth was solid and intermittently bumpy, as if it were an old weather-beaten map someone had arranged a few toy soldiers and action figures upon before playing at war. Crowley became acutely aware that it seemed as if no one had ventured across these grounds before, and if they had, it was very long ago.

He had been wandering north only a few delicate, testing paces when a tall tree layered with pale bark waylaid his attention. It was endowed with thicker branches towards the topmost part of its trunk, the kind of branches a hangman would prefer to string a noose from. But, perhaps unfortunately, this was not what troubled the demon the most.

No, what Crowley saw when he gazed upon it was just how utterly different it seemed. Rearing up amidst a landscape of luscious, leafy green and brief flecks of robin’s egg blue, it was as forbiddingly smooth as an axe head and about as subtle as a skeleton picked clean of its flesh placed in a field of sunny wildflowers.

Something in his mind attributed meaning to the tree, and that small, budding connection erupted in a parasitic grove of intense fear. Crowley’s tongue flickered out in a bifurcated curve as he swiftly ducked his head down and stalked away, ignoring the prickling along the nape of his neck that gently informed him that, if he were to chance a glance backwards, the stake of bone-colored timber would no longer be there.

An evening-tinted shade stole after him as the demon passed under the frothy cover of trees, his suit jacket sweeping behind him as he proceeded in the direction opposite to the hated (feared) tree. This was not heaven, nor a haven or a sanctuary. With a thorny glare at his surroundings which was expertly concealed by his shades, Crowley chose to head off in a more southerly direction.

Surely it would yield more fruit.