I kept playing with the little toy animal that Erech made. I think it was a bull. It was nice.

I never liked my life that much, but I doubt it was Erek's fault. In fact I believe they had done a good job. I had an easy life. My discontentment was all me. Both my brother and my sister were smart and nice. My parents were normal salary workers, but they earned enough. I could pursue any hobby I wanted. I had friends. Sure, my family had problems sometimes, but what family never did?

I had zero excuse for being unhappy. No one to blame but myself when I always longed for something else. Something more exciting, something deeper, something weirder. My life was too convenient, and I had no real wants. They said that I was too nonchalant, that one must put in the effort to one day achieve the dream. Well, you need to have a dream first.

And dreams, for me, were literal. Only the ones when you sleep. There was no one to whom I could share my discontentment: Everyone was kind to me, I didn't want them to think it was their fault. I found solace only in fiction and my sleep. In the adventures and the crazy. In forgetting who I was. All of my unused attention was saved for the worlds of the night. The most consistent effort I'd ever put into anything, my whole life, was probably learning to fly in my lucid dreams. I spent six years mastering different ways to fly, among other things. It was a big lie when I told the Charon I didn't do it very often.

Though, there was a time that real life truly took hold of me. I was in love. The guy was brilliant and interesting. Self-centered, but unique, and he could be very kind to others. Not to me. It was a bit too late before I realized I was being treated like crap. Well, what happened, happened. And with that, my last motivation to pretend to like my life went out to the winds.

I only had the dreams to look forward to. That's where I met the demons. All the fictions and grimoires didn't do them justice. They were scary. They were unusual. They put fear straight into my head and made me wake up trembling. But they were the thrills of my life, the muses for my songs.

And then there was him, Belial. The great liar. The cursed charmer. Grace of the disgraced. So many legends, and his name were often mentioned with an air of mystery and solemn respect on shody occult websites, but those are not what I always remembered him for. I remembered a demon with whom I could actually hold a normal conversation. I appreciated that, maybe a little too much, but who could blame me when I was at the loneliest point in my life. Maybe it was the idea of an arch demon that fascinated me. Maybe it was simply the little calm pauses between words, when two bored and tired souls talked in dreams. But I started to wish that he was real…

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

I thought of Erek, and felt sorry. I had always wondered if I had an angel guarding over me, and if they were upset that I made a promise with a devil, even if just in my fantasy. But I lived an honest life and never gave up. I was going to become a musician, if I hadn't died too soon. When I saw Erek, all the thoughts and emotions just rushed right in. I felt bad, but at the same time, I felt hopeful. For the first time, I felt I could begin my story.

My angel was real, so real they broke my heart with their thousand-years-old sadness. What about my demon?

I wouldn't mind either, if death was just an eternal dream.

I put the little toy animal into my pocket. I have wandered for a long while and now in front of me was a bizarre sight. The air in front of me was pulsating like a wall of disturbed water. I hear sounds from the other side of it. Voices. I threw a bundle of grass, it just sank into the wall and disappeared.

"Are you real, Belial?" I sighed. "Lead me to you."

I walked into the strange air wall and emerged from a brick wall. I thought I just spawned into a historical drama or a video game. Torches burning in the night, people in fantasy-looking clothes running about.

A woman stopped in her track as she saw me popping out of the wall. She yelled something and pointed a big wand at me - was she some kind of mage?

"Whoa, wait!" I raised my hands in a manner as peaceful as I could. The woman's eyes darted around, alerted, then came back to me. She hesitated for a few seconds then grabbed my hand and ran.

"What's going on?" I ran with her, trying to gather clues from the surrounding. All I saw were screaming people. Some of them didn't look human, but hey, I just popped out of a brick wall. We rushed up a few flights of stairs and only when we got out to the top of a great wall did I realize we were in a fortress. Others also gathered here, and one after another they jumped off the wall.

"My god what are they doing?" I yelled. The woman stopped and looked at me, saying something.

"Wait… You don't intend to jump, do you?" I stuttered and wringed my hand out from hers. She quickly muttered something and formed a sphere of light in her hand. Yep, magic. Before I could react she pressed the light ball into my forehead and I suddenly could understand her:

"Quickly! You will survive if you jump! The demon Belial is here… he will soon infest this whole place, hurry!"

Belial? Infest? I followed her glance and turned around just to see the being down in the fortress's middle yard. My heart sank.

My Belial was a fucking Cthulhu.

The lady dragged me and jumped out of the fortress, into the darkness of my broken dream.