“So is the whole underworld just covered in this ugly city? And why is it all… weird like this, anyway?” I ask, resting across the nape of her neck and continuing to pinpoint the mysterious scent I’d picked up on earlier. I can hear the patter of footsteps following at a far distance, but they’re not in a rush to keep up, they’re being careful. I lower my voice before I continue “We have a tail, by the way.”
“Yeah, I caught it too. Probably just a curious or desperate weakling.” She mumbles back before answering my question. “No one’s sure why the cities pop up all over the underworld. No one built them, they’re just here. But no, there’s plenty of natural environments too. Mountains, plains, forests, deserts, tundra, every kind of biome you could imagine from the overworld.”
“Should I be worried?” I ask quietly. “I can pinpoint its direction.”
“Really? I can’t. The streets make noise travel weird at a distance like that. Like I said, senses are your thing. Don’t worry, most real threats won’t be slumming it out here like this, or would have made a move on us by now. If it’s smart, it already knows we know about it.” There’s a short pause while I keep listening carefully for the tail. I suppose it makes sense to just keep moving. I imagine I won’t be able to stop and focus very often if we’re in real danger, so this will be good practice for trying to filter out our own movement from my senses. “What kind of art did you make?”
My eyes open and I glance to Sai “Uhh… character design, mostly.” I feel a little embarrassed to talk about it when that seems like such a distant part of my life already. “I made illustrations for people. I think I might have liked making inhuman things. Monsters, cryptids. Probably why I already know so many kinds of demons. I think I might be leaving some commissioners disappointed.” I let out an amused chuckle at the thought before a twinge of disappointment hits me. “I guess I’ll have to wait until I get a form with thumbs before I can try to do it again, though.”
“Just learn to draw with your claws or something. Can’t be that different, right? Funny, you used to imagine things like me, then? Bet you never imagined you’d end up one yourself.” Sai chuckles as she stops at an intersection, miming trying to figure out which way to go. I close my eyes again and immediately catch the sound of distant movement halting.
“Following on the rooftops, left side going our way.” I note before I reply to her “I mean, I guess I could figure it out, but I’d have to relearn all the muscle memory.”
Sai nods and continues moving forward, miming that it had just been a break to decide where to go. “You have all kinds of new muscles, anyway. I’m curious to see how you’d draw me.”
“Seriously? That’s why you’re curious? I hoped you wanted to foster my art skills.” I smirk. I have to admit, she would make a good subject to try to bridge the gap between people and monsters in art.
“You still have a lot to learn about demons, Tyler. Attacking in 3… 2…”
My eyes go wide when she starts to count down, and she suddenly wheels around in a circle, a knife materializing in her hand before she flings it at the rooftop. The knife clips against the edge of the roof and crashes through the building behind where she’s thrown it, exploding through concrete and flying out the other side where it spun into an arc. A devastating blow to the architecture that it hit, considering it was such a small projectile. I am once more frozen in awe at Sai’s raw, brutal strength.
But it was in the wrong direction. On the complete opposite side of the street from where Sai had thrown her shot, a gangly green-skinned humanoid figure stares frozen up at the decimated building across from it, then down at Sai, a horrified look on its face, before it takes off in the other direction as fast as it can scamper.
There’s a long pause as both of us stare after the fleeing figure, speechless about what just happened. Finally, Sai speaks up “Tyler. Do you know the difference between left and right?” She speaks. She doesn’t even sound angry, just utterly perplexed.
“I said left side going OUR way!” I stammer out. Is she serious?! This isn’t my fuck up! I tried to be as clear as possible! “You know, as in left relative to the direction we were currently facing and moving!”
“Why didn’t you just say right! As in ‘on your right when you turn around, when it matters!’” Sai shouts back, throwing her hands up in exasperation.
“I clarified for a reason!”
“If it was actually a dangerous demon, that could’ve been really bad! From now on, just use relative directions that make sense!”
I let out a long drawn out sigh, closing my eyes “How about this. Do you know how to read a clock? I’ll just use clock directions. Or degrees, how about degrees? I want to be clear if it could actually be a life or death situation!”
“Do you have to overcomplicate this so much?” Sai glares at me. Blue eyes. She didn’t intend to do anything about it. She’s just arguing for the sake of arguing.
“Ugh… Whatever…” I mutter. Maybe I need to learn to work on my own if this is what it’s like to partner up with people. “Do you need to get your knife back now?”
“Tyler, I have like four hundred unenchanted knives prepped, I don’t think I can express how much I don’t give a fuck about any one single blade.” There’s a beat before here eyes turn orange, she holds her arm out, points toward the distant street, and deadpans. “Go get my knife back.”
I open my mouth to say something, then glare at her and hop to the ground, grumbling to myself as I walk toward an alleyway before my body compels me to do it.
Stupid Sai with her bullshit super strength and her absolute control over me. Making me go after some useless hunk of metal no one cares about. How the fuck was I supposed to know she couldn’t follow simple directions about where I sensed something? And then she has the gall to say that I’m overcomplicating things. Where does she get off? I need to figure out this demon stuff so I can learn to defend myself and get away from her as soon as possible.
As I emerge onto the next street, I watch two figures scatter at the next intersection.
I drop down to a defensive stance, but I don’t sense them coming toward me. A moment passes and I relax, scanning the street for the knife. It had gone all the way to the next intersection, past the two figures. Wow, I can spot a knife on the ground from a city block away.
I sigh as I trot up to what’s obviously going to be an ambush, but what am I supposed to do? I’ll be compelled to follow through if I try to just not do it. I have to wonder if I can win against any other demon in this form. Sai certainly seems to think I’m weak, and I definitely don’t feel like I can do the kinds of things Sai does. I wonder if I’m about to die again. That thought really feels like it should disturb me more, but here we are.
I walk up to the knife and tap it with my claw, realizing how I’m going to have to do this. I growl quietly at the indignity of being as close to an animal as this plane of existence allows before I lean down and pick the knife up by its handle in my mouth. Then I think for a minute. I place the knife back on the ground. Technically speaking, I had just gotten the knife back.
I sit on my haunches and wait for a few moments to be sure. No compulsion. It seems that whatever magic makes me follow commands is a stickler for semantics. I’ll have to remember that I can try to make monkey paw interpretations of Sai’s orders for the future. For now, this isn’t something worth making her more angry over. I pick it up again and turn around to hear that the figures I sensed earlier were moving around me, closing in from both sides to block my return path. Yeah, I was being ambushed.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
They’re probably just hungry. That thought doesn’t make it better. Worse, actually, because I’m food to someone else. I take in a deep breath. I’m not strong enough for this yet. Everything is happening too fast. I need to be stronger. Or more clever. I suppose I’m not going to just become more clever by nature of being a demon, I’m going to have to- hang on. Where am I?
As I ponder my situation, I had at some point phased out of reality, it seems. And I feel decidedly less whole again. I’ve been stripped of my meager form and am once more simply floating in this paradoxical abyss. Sai had told me earlier that half-demons tend to transform under stress, and what was more stressful than being outnumbered in an ambush?
“Hello Tyler Snow.” came the feminine voice I remembered to be Aegis. Glorious and meaningless at the same time. “Are you acclimating to your place in my world?”
I ponder that question for a moment, unsure how to answer. But then I’m overcome with outrage “Wait, I was told that you don’t talk to half-demons like this.” I call out somehow despite my utter lack of a form.
“And yet here I am.” Aegis sounds amused/annoyed. “You are an oddity, Tyler Snow. My sister has marked you in a profound way that I have never seen. I do not know what to expect of you. And so you have my attention.”
“Your sister?”
“Aurora. She is to the overworld what I am to the underworld.”
“So the human world has a god too?”
The voice quakes violently, shifting briefly into its eldritch contradictions, but one thing is perfectly clear as she speaks: Hatred. “My sister is a pretender. A villain. ‘God’ is too kind of a word for her.”
The rumbling stops and I’m afraid to speak again as her voice returns to calm “She is a necessary function of our twin worlds. And her meddling concerns me. I do not believe you to be a threat to me, Tyler Snow. But I must wonder her intent.”
Intent. That seemed to be an operative word today. By Aurora’s ‘meddling’, does she mean…
“Do you have eyes?” I ask curiously.
There’s a long pause before the calm voice continues “What an odd question. But you are not here for questions, Tyler Snow.”
I swallow. It seems she’s run out of patience. But it does seem to suggest something: If my ability to read intent is this ‘gift’ she keeps speaking of, then she doesn’t seem to be aware of its function. God is not all-knowing. And she is not constantly reading my thoughts, or she will have reacted very differently to that question. “I’m here to transform, aren’t I?”
“Perceptive. Prepare to be judged.” The veneer of peace disappears and the space surrounding me once more falls into unreadable chaos. I feel change set in once more. I recall what Sai told me. It was influenced by thought. What had I been thinking of recently?
—
As my perception pulls back to the city, the first thing I notice is that I’m taller. I haven’t returned to full adult human height, but I’m probably near Sai’s stature. My center of balance has been restored to something more familiar to humanity. I’m bipedal again. I reach out in front of myself and note that I have hands that I reach out from a dark cloak that seems to have simply appeared over my head and upper body. That’s a good start, even if they are covered in a sickly grey skin. glancing down further, I see that I have cloven feet below knobbly, hairy legs. A devil? Some kind of satyr? Too early to judge.
I reach up and retrieve the knife from my mouth, spinning it around in my hand for a moment to find I have a delightful amount of dexterity in my fingers.
I don’t feel any extra muscles that hint at unfamiliar extremities. No tail, no wings, but I feel something entirely new at the back of my mind. A need. I can’t quite place what it is yet, but I have something I need to do. That I’m compelled by my new nature to do. I just have to figure out what it is.
And I don’t have much time. The two figures from earlier step into view from opposite sides of the street. Some kind of small humanoid lizard creature that I tentatively label a kobold, and a taller elfin-looking person, each dressed in rags and wielding steel poles no doubt scavenged from the city around us. They both stop and I watch them take up formation, making it clear they’re not going to let me go back past them. And I’m willing to bet they know a lot more about what they’re capable of than what I know I’m capable of.
“Well, this is hardly fair.” I start, and realize that though my voice has become deeper since becoming a drake, I sound a lot more nasally. I clear my throat before I accept that that’s just what I sound like now. Maybe I can scare them off. “If you wanna talk this out, my reaper’s just up the street waiting for me.”
They both look surprised to hear that and glance to each other before the elf points his pole at me like a sword outstretched in one hand and demands “You don’t make a goddamn peep, you hear me?”
“SAI!” I shout out immediately at the top of my lungs “A little hand here!?”
The two demons flinch, and look all around, expecting to hear rapid movement… but nothing. That’s when I spot her. Up on a rooftop far behind the pair, I spot her materialize a lawnchair into her hand, which she unfolds in a swift motion and then plops herself down into it. My senses aren’t nearly as good as when I was a drake, but my imagination is enough to see a smirk grow on her face as she puts her hands behind her head.
That BITCH.
The elf shakes his head “We don’t scare that easy!” He shouts, putting both hands on his pipe and taking a step forward.
I take a step back in turn and reach down to pick up a fist-sized rock from the debris of the street, chucking it forward at him as hard as I can. It just kind of pathetically falls along an arc as I might have expected if I’d done that as a human. It catches the elf off guard, but it doesn’t even reach him. They both look at me with confused expressions while I bite my lip.
Okay, no super strength then. Both the demons look angry as they start running toward me, and I turn tail to run.
At the very least, I’m nimble. Okay, I need to figure this out quick before they can close the short distance to me. I’m not strong. That means I have to be clever. I duck my way past a pile of collapsed building and into an alleyway, diving quickly into one of the buildings I’d watched them circle around in. I could use that against them!
Dashing inside the building, I move to run clear through until my foot suddenly fails to find purchase on the ground. The concrete crumbling away in a perfect square beneath me. I slam my upper body into a solid perch of concrete that hadn’t collapsed, and I look back in terror to see that the ground had simply given way to a deep pit, and at the bottom are very intentionally placed rows of spikes made of rebar.
Oh. Okay. I was right. Kobold. Kobolds are dungeoneers. Trap masters. I swallow as I scramble quickly up the side of the hole just as the pair come through the door behind me. The kobold clicks his tongue in frustration seeing me just barely evading his death pit, and I turn around to face them. I don’t dare take another careless step in this room. For all I know, I’m completely surrounded by traps like this and worse. This was his domain.
I need a way to hide. A way to disappear. That’s… a very specific thought. Or is it instinct? I search my mind for answers, following that thread just as I’ve been learning to do with my memories recently. I don’t have time to think, though. They’re stepping around the pit and lunging toward me.
Forget thinking, I need to act. I reach for that invisible need I felt earlier and let my instincts control me. I have to hide in the shadows. And then suddenly there is darkness.
All around me, engulfing the room, a sphere of shadow erects itself, swallowing the environment wholesale in blackness. And suddenly, I feel calm. I’m home. Just like frost made me feel cozy as a drake, whatever I am now feels cosmically right with the darkness that’s overcome the building.
In a state of zen confidence, I step back from the demons’ strikes, and they clamber to a stop, glancing about the room frantically, standing back to back to try to cover each other. I realize that I’ve blinded them, and suddenly, I’m overcome with vicious triumph. I can see perfectly fine.
My footsteps make no sound as I step around them, measuring to see if they can spot me at all. No reaction.
“You need to guide me out, Sven.” The elf whispers to his companion, who nods in response, taking his friend’s hand and guiding them both, still back to back, around his traps. He gets a little too close to the open pit, however, and I have a dark urge. I approach with a smile on my face and use a bit of momentum, body-checking the kobold into the sheer drop and then stepping back.
The lizard creature lets out a scream, and I hear scrabbling against dirt before the quiet sound of metal piercing flesh. The elf wheels around and shouts “Sven!” He begins to hyperventilate, glancing in every direction in sequence. He takes a few wild swings into the dark, connecting with nothing while I keep my distance.
He begins muttering to himself, and I feel it. Fear. My smile only grows as I become excited. My prey is scared. I revel in it. I take my time to carefully mark out the signs of traps around the room in my head while he panics, so I can take total control of the room.
“Ow… Carlos, help!” I hear faintly from below. Oh. He’s not dead. That’s… wait, that’s good. Holy shit, what am I thinking? I don’t want to kill anyone, I just want to get away. I purse my lips as I consider it. I… want to kill them. I want to eat them. I want to consume them. They are in my trap now, they are mine.
I shake my head. No! Stupid demon instinct, I’m not a killer! I huff quietly, the dregs of my human conscience winning out over my alarming desires. I need to leave. These two can deal with this themselves. They deserve to stumble around in the dark for a bit at least. Carlos looks relieved to hear his friend’s voice as I carefully step around traps and walk out of my circle of darkness, shivering slightly as I leave my comfortable domain. I am, however, surprised when the sphere of darkness collapses without my inside, and the elf spots me again immediately. He doesn’t dare move after me, though, glancing at the floor to try to take note of the trapped spots himself.
I give him a sheepish wave before I dash through a window and back onto the street, booking it towards Sai as quickly as I can.