One week ago

The winds of the underworld howled like the screams of a thousand banshees. Residents of a town in the common demon realm went about their daily lives. Many demons walking in a line while the citizens cower in fear. The little demon children hug their mothers and/or fathers. Others outraged by this sudden invasion of their town. “You can’t do this!”, a male demon civilian shouted in utter defiance. Sooner than the flight of a gnat, one of the many soldier demons stopped and turned to the traitorous man, grabbed his face, and carried him off into the mosh pit. His screams awoke a fear that had never been present in his infant daughter, who in this moment, spoke her first words, “Da–da!” Her cries faded into obscurity as the man disappeared thoroughly into the crowd. “It must be voted into action by the council. You are traitors!”, shouted the man in final words. His daughter cried for her father again, but her other father shushed her. Another male demon, this one with long, course black hair, outraged. Instead of expressing his anger, he kept it in. “Just bow down, hun. There’s—nothing we can do,” she hesitantly whispered in his vicinity with the same fear in her eyes, and between sobs. They held hands, and he calmed down. Still wearing the same face but remaining silent like a doll in the presence of greater rank; just like they taught him in school all those years ago. Down the sidewalk, a boy demon is hugging his mother in fear of the greater rank soldiers that invade the streets. “Mommy, I’m scared. Are the bad men going to take our homes, like they took daddy?” His mother knelt and picked her snot-nosed kid up gently in her arms. “I don’t know sweetie but stay close to me. Okay?”, she reassured as she pecked a kiss on his little forehead, crying but trying not to, not in front of her young, impressionable, and only son. The boy couldn’t speak another word, just as he could no longer blush at the feeling of his mother’s touch in this very moment. Murmurs of thousands of demon parents and their children reverberated through the area. It was an invasion by the upper realms. Now, what caused this commotion? Well, the answer is a long story.

Meanwhile, a few miles outside of this quaint, little town turned warzone, there lay a mountain range. Inside, a system of interconnected caves. In one of those many caves, there is a common-ranked demon named “Ecniv”, who is doing pushups. “Five billion one hundred sixty-seven thousand sixteen,” gasped Ecniv as his super-fast speed slows down. Doing another pushup, running out of breath, he continues to pant, “Five billion one hundred sixty-seven thousand seventeen.” He lets out another gasp as the cold sweat now ran down his entire upper body and face. “Five billion one hundre…” Just Ecniv ran out energy, a strange, hooded figure approached from behind. His footsteps clicked and clacked as his boots hit the floor with each step. Click! Clack! Click! Clack! Ecniv noticed this sound. The footsteps stopped. A figure close behind him. Turning around, he spoke with relief in his voice, “Oh, it’s just you, Nicosal,” Ecniv exhaled. “Why did you get your edge of execution?” Nicosal walked closer with the sword in hand. “Oh,” blurted Ecniv. As Nicosal ran the blade through Ecniv, he screamed in a scraggly and annoying voice, “NOOOO—” Ecniv was stabbed through the chest with this blade. Blood trickled down the far side of the blade, it ran down the lips of its victim because of the internal bleeding it left in its wake. Gasping his final breath as more of a choking sound, as the light faded from his eyes slowly, he fell to the ground, parallel to the sword, and propelled by his own body mass. Now a bloody mess surrounds the lifeless corpse of Ecniv. Nicosal, the man behind the slaughter, turned around and walked away. A smile can be seen on his face.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

Exposition

Many years ago, before the age of humanity, there lived a demon named Oshose. He ruled over his own faction for years. Its name was known as “The Devil’s Seven Prodigies.” However, he was eventually banished from the faction by his other senior members. Locked inside a “maddening crystal” for an unforeseeable period for his crimes, and stripped of most of his former strength, Oshose sits—repenting for his crimes, suffering unspeakable insanity from the solitude. By the age of mankind, the humans started to mine deeper into the Earth and strip their mother planet of her fine resources. One material became of great use to humanity in the modern era: the quartz crystal. The crystal that Oshose lay dormant, suffering in, was one of those very same crystals. His prison located on the outer edges of hell, in a dark space, devoid of demon-kind and all life. A dank, dirt covered space that vaguely connected with the realm of mortals.

When the quartz crystals were being mined, one crystal stood out from the rest. A large, shining one that glow beautifully in the darkness of the mineshafts. It was broken into a few pieces and used like all the other ones were to support digital storage for computers, laptops, and flash drives. Only one of the pieces made it out of the Earth, and it was fashioned into part of a hard drive for a laptop in the human year 2022. The locations of the other fragments are unknown to this day by many, but they most likely remain somewhere deep below the Earth, aging with our mother planet. Now, in the depths of the crystal-turned-computer, lives Oshose. His fate yet to be fulfilled.