Demonic rock.

I had a flash of inspiration - this came out. Raw and unedited because - well shit this barely ever happens any more.

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A loud rock club was no place to stop a migraine from giving him a hellish sleepless night of pain and seeing demons dance on the walls; but he didn’t exactly have a choice. He was the front man after all, and the three hundred or so people were packed into the room the cramped, sweaty, beer soaked room to see him and his band perform.

And performing they were, ripping through their set with power and finesse. Despite the burning pain at the back of his skull, he still roared the lyrics to their songs and wove chords together like some possessed spinster. He knew why his migraine persisted. Even to the unattuned the eldritch demonic air was even palpable but they were too close to stop now. Too close to throw the months of writing the music, of working in the incantations and the summonings into their lyrics with with just the right emphasises and inflections.

It had all come to this - the demons that had been whispering their promises and seductions through his dreams for the past fourteen years were finally ready to be brought here and to feast on all of these souls that blindly screamed the words of summoning along with him, powering and hastening their own demises. He pushed himself harder their penultimate song finished, and with his voice cracking announced. “Savour moments like this, you never know what it’ll be over. Live, love, fuck and fight like it’s your last.”

The crowd roared, lapping up every word, hardened metallers smiling grimly, nodding in agreement with his words while younger emo-teens turned to the ones they loved - for the minute - or others of their own kind to lock lips and embrace, as if his words made it obvious just how much they needed raw oblivious passion.

“This is The Final Rite.” the words were almost lost to the upswing in noise as he announced their most popular track. The final part of the summoning which would bring demons of the nether to this little rock club in the middle of Staffordshire. He grinned wildly as his enthralled audience raised their cacophony louder as if calling the demons through themselves and demonic energy thrummed and pounded against the walls, floor and ceiling as his bloodied and shredded fingers found strings to produce the opening notes which bellowed from the amplifiers set up around the club. Purple lightning crackled unnoticed as the the bodies heaved and thrashed before the small stage until it began to gather around the arcane stylings that made up the bands banner on the walls above the back of their heads. The front man chanced a glance at it, his eyes lighting up with unbridled joy and terror as the lightning connected on the banner and slowly started to twist in a crude vortex of evil energy.

Wild eyed, he pushed himself harder and his band followed suit, their eyes taking on a sickly and otherworldly purple glow as the crowd - no longer a mass of individuals but a seething mass of raw primal energy; hypnotised in the fury of it all - surged together, howling the announcement that his demonic masters were nearly here.

The lightning formed cracks, and the cracks - with almost no middle ground - formed a void that yawned like a tunnel from the wall. Vile black and purple tendrils started to feel their way from it like probing vines as bestial, guttural, soul rending screeches ripped from the tear in the world.

The crowd were caught, caught in the hypnotic trap that the magic had weaved and the music - the summoning ritual - pounded on harder. This was it! he exulted triumphantly. The moment was here! Power would be his. He would serve these powerful and wonderful beings as they had promised and the frailness of humans would be crushed under Their might.

But something wasn’t right - he played and chanted the summoning on autopilot as he took it in - why was one of the crowd floating above the rest? Why was she surrounded by a blue numbus of light and gesturing in the air - drawing shapes with the aura that engulfed her. The guitar was getting heavier and more sluggish to play and the words were becoming harder to form. Who was this? Who dared to interrupt what he had worked so hard to create? Who was she to interrupt his plans?

Then there was another one, hanging from the balcony on his left, a man this time, surrounded by a fiery red glow; a third, again a man, on his right - bathed in green. His gaze was drawn upwards by some sense of dread and above him was another woman, resplendent in the purest white that it hurt his eyes.

Shapes in the colour of their glows surrounded each of them, forming a nexus of mystic sigils. Light began to streak between each of the shapes, as if finding their twin, forming a weave of iridescence that he was beginning to find impossible to look at. The maw in the fabric of the world, bellowed its defiance at the light and he could feel it straining and pushing against the light in the club room. The last words of the summoning caught in his throats and the instruments were silenced suddenly and abruptly a mere line and a half away from the final incantation. The gap in reality closed with a thunderclap and everyone in the club slumped to the floor unconscious.

Except him.

The eldritch shapes and wards that they had carved into their instruments had burnt out, smoldering against the wood of the body and fretboard. The strings had broken and burnt away to almost nothing.

The woman he had seen first was suddenly before him, anger on her face to rival the expressions he had seen in his otherworldly masters.

“You fucking moron.” he hissed. She raised a hand and a blue flash blinded him briefly and he too slumped into unconsciousness as the knowledge and desires of the demonic otherworlders was purged from his memory.

“And now it’s over...” the woman with the blue aura sighed as he slumped down in a heap, the nimus of light fading to reveal her pale blue skin, silvery hair and slightly pointed ears in the now dimly lit club.

“Yeah, it is.” the fiery nimbus extinguished itself as the man dropped from the balcony onto the main floor. “So cheer up, Dee... we just saved the fuckin’ world.”