the lóng play a game called Pearls and Bridges. it involves a board and tiles that have grooved edges. tiles are placed so that a pearl might roll across the tiles smoothly across different regions of the board. there are also chess like pieces--bridges placed over the groves, etc.

long games are dynamic, they exist in "real time", even if they also employ turn based moves. they were among the space going races, and they are more used to thinking in orbits than perhaps anyone, save the angels, with their choirs and resonance orientated beings which comes from being composed of cosmic frequencies.

the dragons tempted us out of the garden, they fed us knowledge and would have granted us immortality, had they only not been condemned by the Gods, who showed up in their time machine and dowsed the holy fire with the holy Grail.

we did not know until later that the Phoenix had stolen fire and rushed it to the garden where even then the depots of heaven were vomiting their tactical battle angels.

the demons showed us the way out.

demons are drawn to mazes, they are the keepers of blind allies and false turns, for being spiritual completionists, when they undertake a pilgrimage a legion of demons will first complete the longest possible path to get there.

does it surprise you that not only does the demons and the angels change sides, but so do the sides change sides, demons and angels? the Gods may find themselves waking to discover their priests and aeons have pulled a palace coup, reversed Heavens policies, announced that such and such heritics are in fact catachesimic, while those devout choirs are in fact conspiring against the Divinity. thus old accusers might be called back to court when their usurpers lose confidence, a game gods tend to play most schizo-tactically so as to keep present plotters too uncertain where to strike or go to ground, whether to revel in their numbers or counter recruit in secret, spending 9/10ths of the annual heavenly budget earmarked for intelligence agencies, investigative bureaus, and offices of omniscience on spying on each others' departments, agents, field offices, training academies, to say nothing of intraagency spying on one's rivals, one's allies, one's superiors and inferiors, one's contacts and moles and double- and triple-agents raised to the Nth aleph. and again, that's not to mention self-espionage, to test one's defenses, crack one's own moral codes, compile long lists of scapegoats everyone among one's own subconscious personality modules.

with all that self observation, it is comparatively easy for the truly out and out partisans to find some breathing room, in the cracks.

as a demon shuffles along at the speed of light from Rome to Jerusalem to Mecca to the Bodhi Tree to the Six Grandfathers to the Temple to Artemis which humanity will discover on the so called dark side of the moon in 2036, ze may pause just an iota of a microsecond longer than average under the heel of Christ, or at the shoulder of Odin, or the halbard of Catherine's sword.

or ze might crawl on broken knees and wings over broken glass and pepper up and down the slopes of Golgotha lamenting their deserved exile for 4000 days, when usually they walk on broken feet on blades of salt for that time while singing the praises of the divine meritocracy.

such deviations can send a message, readable to those who know how to look.

there are styles to these things, for demons are not merely mechanicaly worked upon by their torments but invited into the process, made the architect of their own torments. their jailers might bring them in for a performance review every quarter aeon or so for their first few cycles, but honestly those jailers have more important things to worry about--namely the always immanent reversal of the state of things, when any single munitions strike in one thundercloud might set off a reversal such that the demons might be recalled to the high heavens and appointed as princes and commissars, and the angelic jailers, for the crime of not stopping a revolt or not starting a purge at the opportune time, would be cast down to the lowly task of accumulating merit, or else plotting, down among the down and out.

a demon does not skip time. they expirence it a rate comparable to you and me, comparable but excidingly more fine-tuned, perfectly aware of the moments they live and reflectively aware of their own awareness in the very next moment, or the very prior one.

though they cannot skip time they can move backwards in it as easily as forwards, such that every day may be the crucifixion if one lives every other Passion in reverse, a sequence not without its special horrors brought on by vertigo and hope, since each

demons are ridiculously useful, for their speed and intelligence and capacity to perform infinite tasks. get a demon to like you and you've got the ability to reverse entropy, tell the future, resurect the dead.

the demons showed us a way out of the maze. they had walked that garden of forking paths. they whispered that they had an old understanding with the dragons, zeir Czar had exchanged favors with the dragons' King. they knew the Phoenix lords in their anarchic parliaments would not give the gift of fire to an order without good cause, even though the unicorn even now saught out the betrayal of the servants and was leading all the king's angels and all the king's hounds after Eve and her party.

and though the black and white sphynxes saw only shades of gray and would not pick a side, but challenged demon and angel alike to the same riddles, the same trials, the same sacrifices whenever we would pass through there foreswarn gates,

though one choir of angels loyal to the godhead (or so they believed) might come upon us, an errant choir (or so they might secretly have wished) would fall upon the first with clubs and swords and warrants for their arrest, their obliteration, their made never having had been, to drag them before the nearest, most convenient authority, by which point other machinations might have invalidated those charged scrolls, or promulgated the policies of such bills which had been forgeries when they were written.

thus we bought off certain factions with information, or opportunities for distinction in place of disreputable victories. and we carried with us the fire and the

fruit and the hostages and the names.