"That'd be nice," he sighs.

Doug and I will love to hear it, she doesn't say. "Good luck."

"Thanks."

And he can start setting things up.

It's a lot of trips to and from the factory, outside the binding of course. No one else is watching; it's pretty out of the way. There's no telling whether or not the demon knows they're there.

Not like it matters much, with it tightly bound in there.

Eventually they've everything they need and should set a date.

The Astrologer doesn't know how constrained the scheduling is for Sadde's plan (it's not), so she suggests several dates with one in December strongly hinted as best for her purposes.

December it is!

She can make sure he's well-informed on what this is. The archer is, in addition to an archer, also a centaur figure with a long flowing cape. Neither of those is important or anything; it's the mythology's fault. The construct will pretty straightforwardly keep shooting, its arrow rematerializing when called for, improbable aiming skills and all. It'll last for hours between when it's summoned and when the stars move, but will not last indefinitely.

Cool! They'll summon it when they've carved enough space in the factory.

So... time for the factory, then.

Eventually it is.

A diabolist unlocks the new lock on the old gate, and they're on the inside of the barbed wire fence. The "no trespassing" signs probably apply to them, but no one looks twice. The building itself is squat but somehow manages to loom. Graffiti covers every exterior wall, with ladders folded nearby. The windows are blackened. They pause just outside it. "Remember," the person with the key says unnecessarily, "do not look directly at the demon. No pictures, same reason. Anything that holds an image is it, maybe. Can't count on that not being true. We get in, get on with it, get out, get it?"

The luckiest team member, staying on the outside, starts up their generator and runs cords doorward.

And there's the door.

She turns on the portable floodlights.

If you're polite, you announce yourself first. They aren't being polite. There's nothing much present to judge them anyway, aside from the enemy. The lights go on.

The beams disappear into the darkness. It's less like a dark surface than a void. Then more lights flick on and they can see.

They can't see very well. Side effect of keeping eyes cast down at the brightest spots where the demon definitely isn't. The corners of their eyes glimpse a roiling mass of darkness surrounding them, vanishing in smoke wherever the light reaches. The demon? Maybe. There's a claustrophobic feeling of being surrounded, like some monster is breathing down their necks. The smoke is real, no illusion.

The factory floor is big. Wide and long. They've illuminated a wide area around the entrance, but the farther reaches are still dark. Their side, the bright side, has some bones in it. Not human ones; they're far too irregularly shaped. Not to mention smoking. That part gradually stops as the last of the dark flesh evaporates from around them.

"Once upon a time there was a girl," she singsongs, getting a pen and starting to write on the floor. "This girl had a father. And her father was terrible."

The brightest of the floodlights has a grate in front of it. A lot of doubled lines. The negative space form patterns between the shadows, a diagram. The diagram that goes along with Sadde's Seal, because why not. Light to deny the demon its space, then dark then light then dark because they want a boundary made of light, then light again so they can see.

The team members draw and write and narrate and occasionally sing, tracing the boundaries of the symbol and inscribing it in creation as well as light. Peripheral vision continues to show that every shadow contains something. Something dragging itself with too many limbs, long and reaching, where every part of it is bulbous and misshapen. Like a gibbon that had a photocopier accident or a spider made entirely of cancer. Or a demon that ate all the good similes. 

They didn't know how it was shaped, but now they do. It's all around them. They may have walked right into it, but it hasn't made any move yet.

And they're surrounded by light and creation, anyway—they don't advance until every bit of light is covered with art, with music, with poetry, with stories.

After they've carved out enough light in the shadows she can get some astrological help.

They're not exactly safe.

Anyone inscribing near an edge of their diagram is definitionally between the light source and the outside. Someone's shadow leaps up and stabs at them with a clawed hand flowing up out of apparently nowhere. A stick's worth of material connects it to the shadow on the floor. The hand melts away when it crosses the dark-light-dark line, revealing muscle and sinew and lastly a chitinous spike underneath. It buries itself in a diabolist's arm and she falls with a yell. Falls backward, the safer direction, but the demon's next attempts are barbed. The nearest uninjured practitioner swings a long knife, glittering with reflections from the light bulb on the handle, and severs the thin column of demon. The chitin goes inactive, and the remaining flesh writhes but doesn't have the structure to get back to the shadow before it evaporates.

It doesn't attack across any part that was reinforced with art. Probably that means it can't. But they're besieged and can't safely cast shadows past any unfinished segments.

More floodlights! They brought some. And they can write from inside out and just cancel out their own shadows—or at least she can, she's bold (or crazy) enough for that and three floodlights are enough to ensure no part is really in shadow. But enough of that, time to summon an archer.

The construct appears when she gives the signal. It has to get to the factory first, but it's a centaur. It can move fast. It arrives shortly after they finish the first round of diagrams and turn or move the floodlights to start inscribing another broad section. The construct's eyes, as Sadde knew from Diana, aren't reflective.

It stands in the middle of the finished diagram and starts shooting. There's no visible bowstring. Just the motion of pulling back while the bow bends, then the arrow materializes and flies forward. The arrow is pulsing with light from the inside just as much as the archer is. It cuts into the structures the demon's body takes whenever it tries to launch more barbs within the construct's field of view, and other arrows fly farther to strike targets the practitioners can't safely look at. It buys them time, singlehandedly ruining most of the eyes and limbs and mouths the demon manages to send at them.

And buying them time is something they desperately need.

"That girl suffered from gender dysphoria sometimes! And her father was terrible about that! It's a good thing that girl ran away because otherwise she'd still be with her terrible father!"

Most people are choosing to be less autobiographical with what they're saying or writing. Content doesn't matter any more than quality. Occasionally someone punctuates a sentence with "this is fiction, my invention, a creation and not something I assert as true," since this would be a really terrible time to tell a lie.

The demon is not happy with their progress. Or its inability to stab them from far off. They finish their second diagram and move the lights, seeing the now-familiar smoke as the tendrils get burned away. The construct is dimmer, but not faded. Another hour and a half? Two hours? Anyone's guess.

The next segment of ground is covered in a familiar black shell. A tentacle snakes out to inch it toward the practitioners, but retreats when the floodlights burn at it.

"And by the way," she interrupts herself, "this story hasn't ended yet and doesn't end tonight. This girl goes on to do pretty cool things. Have you ever heard of the charybdis? It's a weird little creature. Let me tell you what it does."

The writing on the floor strategy hits a dead end. Can't write on carapace. Doubly so since there's probably more demon underneath it. It isn't tough—arrows punch right through, and knives and axes can break it—but there's a lot of it. And it isn't evaporating in the light. Or if it is it's too slow to matter. The demon bides its time.

"I wonder if you can speed up the shooting?" she tells the archer. "I would be very thankful if you could."

Her phrasing earns an annoyed look from a teammate. "Speed up the shooting!"

It does. Arrows arc outward to the nearest exposed pieces of demon, though it's hard to deal damage to something without a defined physical form. A few arrows puncture the shell and strike whatever's underneath, but mostly it's shooting at visible targets. Someone tentatively tries smashing part of the carapace with the butt of a splitting axe. It breaks off some pieces and reveals more coils of demon, which lunge up her shadow and need to get severed by sword and arrow. Then the light burns away the exposed part, and they've gained a few square feet of the factory floor. Not enough.

Then she thinks it's time for this demon to meet her little friend: the signal flare.