The silence between us grows thick as we stare each other down, both unsure what to say or what to expect after that particular revelation. Sai’s violet eyes slowly shift to gold as her expression softens. I watch her closely for any signs that she’s trying to trick me, but nothing. For the first time, I feel like my supernatural sense must be failing me. I don’t buy it. “Bullshit.” I grumble, tossing the mostly chewed-through bone to the ground at last and clenching my fists. “You’re fucking with me again. What’s that even supposed to mean?”

“Huh…” Sai mumbles, genuine concern on her face “Really thought that would have awoken a memory or something. I know the overworld’s got a lot of taboo about it, but you don’t have to repress yourself here, kid.”

I glare her down. This isn’t funny. I’m definitely a man, I remember it clearly. It was one of the first things I was able to remember. So what’s her angle? “Sai, why would you think I’m a girl? You saw me nude when I was human.”

Sai clicks her tongue and scoffs at me. “Wow, that’s a little ignorant. Something like that is more than skin deep, you know? Your spirit just took on the form that you had in the overworld, that’s all. I’m talking about your soul here. The actual you. Gender is a pretty obvious identifier when you look at a bare soul. You really can’t remember anything about this from life? You must’ve been real repressed…”

“I’m not repressing anything, it just never mattered!” I raise my voice, getting mad at Sai, then stop. That was a very particular way to have phrased that. It doesn’t matter, though, right? What difference would it make? I’d still have a male body. An echo of overworld knowledge passes over me again, and I have to ask: “Are you saying I’m transgender?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying, yes.” Sai nods enthusiastically.

I’m not sure why, but I feel… offended by that. Defensive. I shake it off and declare “Well, I’m not,” and start walking past her. I want to shut this conversation down before it gets even weirder. “What does it matter, anyway? Don’t we have more important shit to worry about?”

“I mean, not really.” I see Sai roll her eyes as they return to blue and she walks alongside me. She isn’t taking the hint about shutting up about it though. “There’s a lot of empty space in the underworld, we have plenty of time to talk before we get to Josh’s place.”

“Well I don’t wanna talk about it!” I call back to her and shoot a line of shadow out in front of me, blinking several meters forward to make some distance between us.

She, of course, makes up the difference in a second, because she’s impossibly fast on her feet. “If you don’t want to, we don’t have to. But now you know. So at least think about it.”

I try to keep marching forward in silence. Sai eventually takes the lead again, but unfortunately she’s right about one thing. There is a lot of empty space in the underworld, and we’re going to be spending a lot of time traveling in uncomfortable silence, which leaves me with a lot of time in my own head. I can’t even try to focus in on scanning my surroundings to distract myself anymore, since my senses are shockingly undeveloped in this new form. It’s likely Sai is much more aware of what’s happening in the surrounding blocks than I am since she’s probably considered a ‘beast’ demon herself.

Why did she have to tell me that? I guess I did kind of insist on her telling me. But still, she shouldn’t have said anything in the first place if it was just weird speculation about what I was. It’s not like she’s right, she must have just misread my soul. What right does she have making that kind of declaration about me in the first place? It’s absurd. Like I don’t know who I am. I mean, I guess I don’t really know who I am, but I definitely would have remembered something like that about myself by now. Why am I so angry about this?

As we hit a fork in the road and Sai turns us down one of the new streets, I raise an eyebrow. The road and the buildings surrounding it abruptly end a few hundred meters ahead of us, the asphalt making way for a short road that disappears into a dirt path. A wide open grassy plain stretches for miles beyond. It feels wrong. Cities don’t just end like that, at least not on Earth. The sprawl of development would taper off slowly into suburbs, smaller commercial zones, and highways. Instead, it just becomes a new biome in a flash.

“What’s with this city, anyway?” I finally break the silence, wanting to change the subject on my mind toward actually learning something productive. “It feels unnatural. Like someone who’s never actually seen how cities develop made it.”

“There’s a lot of theories about that,” Sai says, stepping into the grassy field without a moment’s hesitation. “That’s one of them. That Aegis has never actually seen a human city, and that it just creates them based on the ideas the people that end up here bring, with a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how these things are actually supposed to look. You might have noticed while you were falling, but the biomes all end abruptly, like they’re scattered patches of land sewn together with no regard for easing into each other.”

I can’t say that I had noticed it. I had been a little busy panicking and trying to make peace with what I thought was my impending doom. Something to look for if I ever turn into something that can fly, I guess. “At least it’ll be harder to ambush us out here.”

“You’d think. But there are demons suited for every kind of environment. Out in the open like this, there’s nowhere to hide. Keep your eyes up for flyers that might take us for prey from a distance, and watch out for speedy types that can maneuver better in wide open areas.” Sai warns “At least until we get to Josh’s territory. Provided they weren’t totally overrun, they should be able to offer some degree of safety.”

“More laws like Main Street?”

“Ehh, the laws of Main Street are enforced supernaturally. If someone breaks those laws, everyone will know about it. They’re a function of this world. It’s harder to tell who’s in the right with disputes out here. It’ll be more like what you’re used to in the overworld.”

“Corrupt bullshit you have to maneuver your way around to make sure you look like you’re in the right when you do something shady?” I mumble.

Sai looks back with a raised eyebrow “What, were you a lawyer or something?”

I let out a sigh and regretfully tell her another bit of my pieced together past “Barista, if my memories serve.”

“Like a bartender?”

“Coffee shop. Can we not talk about this?” I roll my eyes. It wasn’t exactly a dignified position to come from, but I suppose I was still a student, so it was pretty normal, right? “I was studying for something else. Uhh… Not really sure on what yet.”

“You’ll get a better picture of who you were, eventually. And maybe who you'd rather be.” She gives a knowing smirk back at me and I grimace. She wants me to keep thinking about her bullshit gender theory.

Instead, I decide to dig deeper into memories of college. I can’t seem to pinpoint what I was studying abstractly, so I need a different approach. Individual classes. I close my eyes and think back. It must be related to my art. Let’s see… figure sketching? No, that was something I learned from the internet and practice. Painting? Self-taught as well. Storytelling? Some practical experience gleaned from my life, but nothing formal that I could pinpoint.

Had I ever actually attended a class related to my art? I couldn’t remember a single instance of it when I tried searching for new threads of logic to follow. But of course I wouldn’t find any, they would never have let me pursue something that frivolous.

I stopped in my tracks, bristling at that thought. Frustration. Anger. Oppression. I’d felt that feeling before, but I couldn’t recall when. I needed to think. My art wasn’t frivolous, it meant a lot to me. It made me feel important things. People even paid me to pursue it. So why, when I search those memories, do I feel things like ‘wasteful’, ‘frivolous’, and ‘worthless’? Someone else’s words. Someone who didn’t understand me.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“Kid?” Sai’s call breaks me from my trance. I look up to see her motioning to follow since I had just stopped moving with her entirely a few moments ago. I shrug and shadow-step to catch up. “You look like you got a lot on your mind.” She speaks softly as I come to her side again.

“Yeah, thanks for that.” I mumble, but I don’t want her to think it’s her theory that’s getting to me, so I continue. “Anyone ever tell you that what you want to do isn’t worth it and you feel like you gotta believe them?”

Sai stumbled a little mid-step, but kept moving anyway. That question struck a nerve. There was a long pause as she considered her answer before I heard her let out a surprisingly soft “Yeah.”

“I think I had something like that in life.” I clarify, trying to make a point that this isn’t about my gender. “I wasn’t in school to become an artist. And someone was keeping me from pursuing my art.”

“Parents.” Sai intones without skipping a beat.

“Huh?” I tilt my head at her. I suppose I do have a grudge with my family. I remember feeling it before, but I didn’t really get into the context of why.

“It’s not an uncommon story. A lot of parents hold their children down. Try and shape them to be something they’re not. For some people, like you, you don’t even get a chance to feel you can be mad at them until either they’re dead or you’re dead. They held you back. They’re not here. Go on, be mad. It's safe.” She almost sounds impatient as she tells me to go off on my parents.

Am I mad at them? I try to follow the threads of logic again. They liked to keep me from doing things I liked. Always had me act in certain ways that didn’t always make sense to me. Told me how to live life. How to get ahead in the world at any cost to myself and others. But it was all ultimately for my well-being, right? A bitter pill for a cruel world.

I don’t like these thoughts. They were real, but they were somehow forbidden. They made me scared that I might express them. That I might be berated more and then disowned. Left with no support at all. Fear had cowed me.

I grit my teeth. I’m stronger than that now. I’m a demon. “Yeah. Fuck ‘em.” I grumble, only able to bring myself halfway to meaning it. I’m still scared of them, even if I barely remember anything about them. Even if they're not here, and by the time they are, we'll be in no way recognizable to each other. “My life’s over, but it wasn’t really my life, huh? That’s… kinda pathetic.”

“Humans tend to be.” Sai stated matter-of-factly “Here, if someone gets into you that deep like that, you can just kill them.” She said it with such a smug sense of satisfaction that I could tell that she’d done just that at some point. “Hell, people will cheer with you on Main Street about it. Celebrate you throwing off your chains and the death of an asshole.”

“Huh. Wait, like thralls overthrowing their masters or something?” I ask, biting my tongue only after I realize that I’d just suggested it to my own master.

But she doesn’t seem the least bit offended, looking back with a devious smirk “Exactly like that. Kid, do you know why I treat my thralls the way I do?”

“Cause you’re a half-decent person who doesn’t want to enslave people?” I ask, knowing that it’s not the answer she'll accept, even if I happen to think it's true. Sai won't let herself see herself that way.

She lets out a mocking cackle. “No, it’s because I know all too well what happens when a reaper is hated by enough of the people they surround themselves with. Thralls are not powerless. A demon is a demon. They cannot be perfectly controlled. If you give them enough reason to, they will fuck your shit up. Sometimes, reapers are bad enough that their thralls will give up immortality to be rid of them.”

I glance up and have to do a double take. Sai has a very serious expression on her face, but most alarmingly, her eyes are a deep red. She’s somewhere else right now, and wherever she is, someone is being brutalized.

Maybe it’s best I don’t pry too hard into her past, but I get a pretty good idea of what must have happened from the conversation already, anyway. Sai killed her reaper.

“So that’s why I don’t have territory. Why I don’t have a ‘kingdom’ or some bullshit like that. Why I don’t care to oppress my thralls, and let them pursue whatever life they feel like. I’m perfectly happy with my nice big house in my nice quiet pocket dimension with the few thralls that genuinely want to live beside and serve me. I get my own power from Aegis no matter what I do with my thralls, so may as well let them do their own thing. That’s how I’ve survived four thousand years.”

“Hmm, alright. That kinda makes sense But if you could have absolute control over us and build up a country or something, would you?”

“Absolutely!” she shouts enthusiastically, not a moment’s hesitation to her exclamation. Orange eyes. I kind of wish that I could sense lies, but orange eyes are about as close as I can get to that.

I smile a little. “Uh huh. Of course you would. Anyway, I guess I have almost forever to work on what I really want to be now, fuck anyone who tells me otherwise.”

“Exactly.” Sai nods “You can be anything you want in the underworld as long as you’re strong enough.”

I cross my arms and smirk at her. “And you’re not strong enough to be a tyrant?”

Sai gapes slightly at me, the implications of her earlier bluff catching up to her before she growls slightly, materializing something into her hand.

I watch her carefully, expecting her to pull out some kind of weapon to pummel me with in a flash of violent rage that tells me I overstepped, but I raise an eyebrow when I see it’s just a small flashlight. “Uhh?” I start, but then she points in upward and clicks it on.

I flinch sharply at what I see, forced to take a step back from her as every muscle in my body desperately tugs at me to flee as quickly as I can. The light that shines from it is blinding and looks completely solid, everything that it touches disappearing from my sight entirely, and my instincts tell me enough to know that I do not want it to touch me. To a Darkling, that light is a searing hot cone of fire. “O-Okay! I’m sorry! You made your point!” I stammer out, taking another step back and holding my hands out in protest.

She smirks at me “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” The flashlight clicks off again and I breathe a sigh of relief, ready to stow the backtalk for now. “You’re lucky we don’t need light to see in the underworld, there’d be a lot fewer safe places for you in that form.”

“I noticed that.” I mumble, noting that she isn’t dismissing the flashlight. When she told me that Darklings flee from the light, I didn’t think it would feel quite so visceral. “Just another thing Aegis got wrong?”

“Maybe it’s just a nuance it didn’t care for.” Sai shrugs, shaking the flashlight. “Only reason we have stuff like this is to counter unnatural darkness like what you make… and sometimes for ambience. You probably noticed mood lighting in a few places on Main Street. Probably best you don’t go there until you change again.”

I nod quickly. If just a little flashlight was that frightening to me, then I don’t want to think about a commercial district’s lighting. I flinch again when Sai points the flashlight directly at me, but doesn’t turn it on. “Holy shit, Sai, don’t do that! … Please.”

Sai chuckles, lifting it away again “Relax, if I’m going to kick your ass, I’m not gonna do it in a way that’ll kill you, unless I intend to kill you.”

“Why would you kill me!?” I whine “I’m not gonna try to kill you!”

“I just might not like what you turn into.” She shrugs, dismissing the flashlight now that her little demonstration is over with.

“Well that’s just great. I love having all that agency over myself that you were just preaching about.” I immediately start mouthing off with the threat gone. I bite my lip and realize that I’m just going to make her pull it out again. I look down at the ground, submissively avoiding her gaze. “Sorry. Just kinda irritated right now.”

“Sometimes dying is the best out.” Sai says calmly. “For a half, anyway. Maybe you should take some agency. Cause there’s gonna be some day when your best possible option is going to be to kill yourself.”

I swallow hard. In a sickening way, that makes sense. If I end up in a situation where it’s going to be more advantageous to be a drake, there’s actually a fairly simple way to reach it. Would I really be able to do that, though? I look down at the knife in my hand and try to picture slicing through my own windpipe to make it quick like I’d done with Sven. A shiver runs up my spine and I sympathetically run my hand over my neck. I don’t think I can do it. “I mean, being something I don’t like for a few days won’t be that bad,” I mumble to myself.

“If you chicken out, I can always just tell you to do it.” Sai smirks.

“Fun. ‘Hey Tyler, go kill yourself.’ Sure, thanks for that, Sai!” I mock as we crest the top of a hill and get a lay of the land.

—

Rather than returning to Sai’s house each night, we built up a small camp out in the open. Sai had told me that it’s too costly to open the gateway between dimensions, so it was best to only retreat there about once a week. ‘Night’ was a fairly arbitrary term in the underworld, with no celestial bodies to speak of, but Sai had demonstrated that we have clocks in the underworld, created from memories of how time had passed in the overworld. That’s how we measured hours and years despite the lack of a sun and moon. And most demons still have similar rest requirements to humans, so there really wasn’t a reason not to adopt the overworld timekeeping standards.

Three days of travel passed uneventfully, other than Sai continuing to coax me into exploring my gender, which still made me irrationally angry every time she brought it up. By the third day, I had begrudgingly accepted that maybe I had an unusual soul configuration, but I was still a man, dammit.

Finally, on the morning of the third day, with the looming mountains that Lucretia had promised hanging in the distance, I look out over the plains and spot what looks to be a large wooden wall in the distance near a forest edge. “That the place?” I ask, twirling what had become my knife between my fingers.

“Josh’s little village, yeah. He and a few of his friends made a little refuge out here. He tries to secret away half-demons who run from their reapers. Give them something to do while they wait for their masters to kick it. Sounds altruistic on the surface, but they're mostly using the runaways for free labor. Still, usually an improvement for their situation.”

It doesn't sound like a terrible trade to me. Just an exchange of services. Labor for safety. But there's an obvious flaw in that plan. “But what if someone comes to retrieve their thralls…?”

“I've always suspected I might have to come here and find out one day.” She mumbles, taking the first step over the hill.