Return of the Lantern Bearers

Thin, black threads, gleaming with damp, trailed up the high walls of rock. Little pale green gnemons scraped the black algae from the wall of the palace. Flat-fingered hands carried dripping armfuls to the kitchen, where a blue fire flickered beneath a giant kettle.
Kveggla's hands moved close to the rim of the kettle, creating spells to make the ladle go round in the nasty-smelling soup. Other movements, other spells--now the soup changed color, form, and taste. Part of the black sludge compacted into greyish quenelles, part of it thinned out to light yellow broth. Hundreds of deep plates waited to be filled with tasty, nourishing soup for Ramgor's gnemons.
True, they could manage without eating at all. They could even manage without breathing. During the first period in the rocky black wasteland, with only the thinnest possible stratum of air around, nobody had been allowed to eat. She herself had barely been allowed to breathe during the Demon's horrible experiments. He reshaped the Gnomes into gnemons; he incubated bodies of new gnemons from stone eggs smelling of sulphur, filling their empty minds with thoughts; he built rivers of streaming water directly of the atoms in the air and the ground; he raised a temporary palace of the grey and black rocks around them.
Finally, Kveggla had a kitchen and a duty: to keep things clean and tidy, and prepare savory meals for the Demon and his growing household of gnemons. Mealtimes brought variety to the humdrum life where only one thing mattered: to plan the Demon's return to reality, to his homeland Winny-Vanna-Ye in the Land on the Rim of Time.
As time went by, Ramgor had failed at turning her into a gnemon. This was strange, her mind being clean after all these suncycles. Her soul was untouched by evil. Most likely, she was too old, her psyche clinging to her brain like burnt food in a frying pan.
Dirty dishes piled up in the kitchen: beautifully patterned china plates, bowls, and pots of black basalt, designed by Ramgor from memories of his desolate homeland; spoons, knives, forks, all in shining blackish silver. Ice-cold water poured from the rock. Shivering, she moved her hands and fingers to direct the running water at the used china. Even the tiniest mistake would be punished - if the plates weren't clean enough; if the food tasted bad, or wasn't pleasant to the eyes. If the illusion was shattered: when the meals collapsed in a heap of evil-smelling algae, or when the hot, delicious tea was unmasked as ice-cold water tasting of metal. Then the Demon's dark rays threw her, whining, into the nearest corner. She would lie there whimpering, arms above her head, waiting for the pain to cease.
Now and then she tried to teach the little gnemons to help her, or at least not to run in front of her feet, disturbing her, but they were completely impossible. They were designed to create chaos and disturbance. A few of them had intelligence, which they used to make her life even more difficult. They flew in front of her eyes when she was serving tea, so that the tea tray fell to the floor. They teleported between her feet, and swish! a piece of china lay in broken fragments all over the kitchen floor and had to be recreated or put together by Ramgor. On such occasions the Demon prolonged the punishment as if tasting it, making it a lengthy pleasure, trying out dark rays of varying quality and strength on her.
Now they were moving. Ramgor had found a path through spacetime to his castle in Winny-Vanna-Ye. His magic crept through the dimensions like tendrils, always searching for a crack in time, a hole in the multidimensional space, where he could sneak through. He listed everything he found, ordered it meticulously, with a flair for organization that made an astounding contrast to his yearning for chaos and destruction. To be sure, the castle on the Mountain of Evil Dreams was only half real. Around it were magical barriers preventing him from going outside the castle and into present time and reality in the Land on the Rim of Time.