They came to me as instructed on the first dusk of the new moon: the Voidwalkers.

  Strange, eerie-like folk made of swirling dark energy wrapped loosely in binding cloth, the cloth shells their anchor in this physical world. They moved like aerial squids, floating around and about seemingly without much purpose, blobbing their way erratically through our space and time.

  As strange as a sight it might be to some, I’d seen their kind before. Many times over the years, actually. These were weary tourists. Tired of our physical plane, eager to portal-hop their way back to home. Not flying per se, but rather an arcane slingshot through the celestial sea. From one star to another, surfing the astral ley lines with carefully calibrated timing and a questionable over-enthusiasm. It’s a miracle they make it at all, but that's why they come to me.

  I’m the Astrolomancer. I'm not selling charms or telling fortunes tonight. I'm charting paths far into the future, I calculate the cosmos's every movement. They needed a route, caring little for my prophesy-like abilities. So at long last I was able to use my education for something practical instead of reading some noblewoman's boring and dreadfully mundane future. I gleefully obliged.

  We gathered in a Market square near "Borrowed Beauty", where the view of the heavens arc was the widest and starlight here hangs heavy abundance. I drew my binding circles. Burned the ceremonial void-ink for the journey. Performed the hand signs, spoke the ancient words of power.

  The sky peeled open. And that’s when I saw it. A new star. Incredibly bright, but definitely in the wrong place.

  It throbbed instead of twinkled, pulsing like an arterial bleed. And worse still, it was moving. Stars don’t move like that. I narrowed my eyes and reached far with my mind.

  Contacting something like this was like constantly biting your cheek after the first injury, pain certain to happen but uncertain of when, over and over in waves. My senses screamed as the being's power threatened to crush me.

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  Thoughts hit me. No, not quite. Intentions, concepts. It communicated only in thought, torrential wave after wave of constant psychic presence. I steeled my mind against the onslaught, finally finding clarity.

  The “star” was no star. It was a god. An old one. One whose name sounded something like Rhal-K’thume if you tried to talk with your mouth full.

  And he was coming here, to the Night Market.

  I took a breath and grounded myself before speaking.

  “That’s a really bad idea,” I said aloud. Just loud enough so that I could hear myself through all the psychic noise.

  He didn’t answer in words, but I felt the rebuttal: Curiosity. Hunger. Triumph.

  “No,” I said again. “You don’t want to come here. I know you think you do, but trust me, there’s nothing for you here. No conquest. No cults that follow the old ways. Just too many warlocks with an incredible thirst for power and boundary issues.”

  A pulse of displeasure. But still intent. He was still coming even after that minor threat.

  So I offered him something else.

  “There’s a nice pocket-world just three solar-orbits aft of here. It’s full of half-literate theocrats, dying magic systems, and a xeno cult desperate for validation. They’d love to have you.”

  Rhal-K’thume rumbled back with what I think was derision. Maybe indignation. He wanted this world.

  Of course he did. So I sighed, loudly and theatrically, to let the stars and anyone else listening hear it.

  “Fine,” I muttered. “I’ll get Mepho. And his siblings. We’ll call the Court into session.”

  That did it. He suddenly slowed down, almost stopping in an instant. The amount of power that must have took.

  Then, from the dark, a single strained word bubbled out from the otherwise incomprehensible darkness.

  “…Mephistopheles?”

  I smiled.

  “Oh, yes. You know him by that name, but these days he goes by Mepho. You know, he's the other ancient unknowable being. Well, he and his kind. I don't really know exactly because honestly, I'm too afraid to ask.”

  Silence. Then, like a child caught with their hand in the cookie jar, it sweetly and politely asked:

  “Directions… to that other world?”

  I obliged, tracing a gentle arc through the void and pointing him on his way.

  The stars settled finally. The sky portal hung open still, waiting for the Voidwalkers to enter.

  I turned to the Voidwalkers, who had frozen in an anxious twisting motion mid-ritual, flickering like a glitching frame in clockwork cinema.

  “Minor emergency,” I said, dusting my coat sleeves and I finished drawing their charts as if I had never been interrupted in the first place.

  “Someone else was in *dire* need of directions.”

  They blinked slowly in gratitude, at least I think it was gratitude, and hopped into the first portal with a noise like a whirlpool at the end of a shallow pool.

  Above, the stars returned to their usual indifference.

  And somewhere far away, a world of half-witted priests began to re-write ancient infallible prophecy to match the arrival of their new god.