Hehe. If this is confusing, tell me.

They were shadowy shapes flitting through her thoughts, testing the limits she had placed on them. For the first time she doubted their strength, wondered if the bonds had enough power to hold.
Find me something with power, she had said, and the daymare minions she had called went. But they did not return. She could feel their reluctance to give up on the target they had found, but she had not ordered loss of life. She told them to return, to find a new target, and they refused on both counts. And a good few of them had been sent back by the very artifacts she had sought to steal, banished beyond the Abyssal Wall that protected the living from horror.
The hold command had stopped them. Until she could call them back she would not rescind it. She wanted power, but she didn't want to kill for it. Not yet.
The blue Carrotan sky was darkening when she finally turned the carefully marked pentagon on the floor. Summoning was risky, and she was not particularly gifted at it; it was her careful planning and attention to every necessary detail that had allowed her to succeed thus far.
The runes etched onto the floor flared with a weak blue light as she fed power into the magical cage. Doubt gnawed in the back of her mind. Suppose her control slipped? What if one of the runes faltered? She pierced the Abyssal Wall, calling for one of her minions.
Immersed in her self-doubt as she was, she didn't notice at first the shape her minion had assumed. She looked up and stared into her own eyes.
Her replica laughed, quietly insane, and reached forward. Blue light flared as it came into contact with the pentagon construct. Doubt assailed her again, and the light died. She gasped and sought blindly to banish the minion. The daymare shrieked and vanished as the Abyssal Wall closed, dragging it back into the Abyss.
Half-panicked, she poured enough power into the pentagon for it to be self-sustaining and closed off the channel between it and her. Her doubt would not affect it again.
Something chittered softly behind her. She whirled, terror welling inside her again. One of her captive minions gazed at her calmly, in its Abyssal form.
/You called us./
"Yes, I did, yes," she snapped. "I'm finished with you for now. Return to the Abyss."
/We cannot pierce the Wall. You must send us./
"Yes -" She broke the pentagon long enough for the daymare to enter it.
In her residual panic, she failed to adequately pierce the Abyssal Wall. The pentagon sought a location that did not exist in reality, and settled instead for a random location.
A shape filled the pentagon, huge, humanoid, armored. Where its body might have showed through that thick iron was empty space, save for its face, a glowing green death's-head staring out from within a thoroughly evil horned helmet. It looked down at her paralyzed shape ponderously, then took a step forward. Blue light flared and died. It halted briefly and gazed at her again. She harbored a brief hope that the pentagon would hold it.
The demon raised its axe with negligent ease, then struck with blinding speed that was completely at odds with its heavily armored form.
She never knew what hit her.
The creature stepped over the pentagon as if it did not exist, breaking the barrier and kicking the nameless mage's mangled body aside to fall across one of the blue runes. It strode away, not looking back, destroying everything in its path.

Once broken, however briefly, the pentagon slipped back into its familiar channels, following the path that pierced the Abyssal Wall and calling automatically for the daymares.
They streamed across steadily, unbound, uncontrolled. They fled the confining pentagon across the break provided by the slain summoner's remains.
Darker things than daymares sought to cross, but the bridge of power was attuned only to the daymares, and rejected all other attempts. Self-sustaining and self-powering, the pentagon glowed bluely.
The daymares already controlled by the summoner's bonds were freed. The hold command dissolved and the lesser demons joined their kin, laughing silently.

Mehr turned in the shadow-strewn night, taut as a wire, senses telling the shapeshifter everything it did not want to hear.
Mental, awake, powerful, unfettered, prowled the Carrotan night.
Riddles were the farthest thing from Mehr's thoughts in that moment.