Inside the Pittian pyramid, Azu hastily fluttered about her laboratory. Her pencils and notebooks lay scattered on the floor, for her to stop to read an excerpt or magic her wooden utensils to scribble a remark down. Chalk inscriptions marked the floor and circles of salt layered thickly over the stone ground, criss-crossing each other in a chaotic pattern. “Tonight’s the night,” she mumbled to herself, licking her lips. Clay pots holding preserved organs stood over her on their shelves, their animal designs appearing to watch her as she crawled about with her chalk sticks.
“Yes,” a voice answered her. A wisp of smoke curled up out of one of the salt circles, before Azu fanned it away with her hand. The nearest of the floating candles leaned and flickered with the slight wind.
“Not you, not you,” she mumbled, doubling back to shuffle the pages on the most faded notebook. Finding the passage, she held the book to her chest as she added to the innate chalk marks on the floor – a pentagon, surrounded by a salt circle encircled by another salt circle.
She picked up a jar and placed it on a corner. And another. Three more times. The brain, the heart, the liver, a lung, and a kidney. She didn’t remember if they all came from the same person. She wouldn’t be surprised if she carved one or two out from an animal’s chest.
Everything appeared in order. She checked, double-checked, triple-checked. “If I’ve left anything out, it’s too late to stop,” she mumbled, leafing through her yellow-paged books as quickly as she dared. Her entire ritual depended on the correctness of these texts and their whispers of truth – and the whispers of her ghostly aids. “Who knows how royally I’ve fucked up?” she asked, voice muffled by her blonde hair she chewed in her mouth.
“It will work.”
“Will it work?”
“Fucked up enough.”
“Ready.”
“I know.”
Voices creaked through the windowless crypt, ones she recognized and others barely audible. The necromancer reached for iron knife, jaw set. No turning back now. With shaking fingers, she held it against her thumb; she half-grimaced, half-grinned. In her excitement, the knife slipped and cut deeper than she anticipated, red drops dripping out of her like water from a leaking roof. Unflinchingly, she held her hand above the center of the pentagram. Watching the blood drop to the stone floor, she nearly missed the warning flickers of the candles.
Just as she stepped out of the circles, a white light flooded the room – searing her eyes with its brightness, blinding her through shut eyelids. Groping for the wall behind her, she pressed her back into it as the red-orange glow turned to black. She blinked owlishly in the dark, barely able to see in the dim candlelight now.
She took a raspy inhale. Instead of the horrifically twisted demon she intended to summon, a worse monster stared back at her with a coy grin that matched his green eyes. Human, beautifully human, with massive white wings curled tightly against him – unable to go outside the innermost salt circle, she saw. Or did he just pretend to appear caught? She almost believed she summoned an angel by mistake.
“Beelzebub,” she breathed, testing the name as though she hadn’t practiced the pronunciation a thousand times. He flinched, eyelids fluttering as his beauty dripped from his skin like hot wax, until a red eyed goshawk stared back at her in his place.

WRITTEN BY AXIOM