Sadrahan’s march of his prisoner offered little mercy, there was only the steady squelching noise of his falling feet into the muck and the sharp yank of the improvised rope. He paused barely at all, the human’s steps became more staggered, and when the demon looked back over his shoulder he saw that Ita was heaving and swaying back and forth, the rope had no slack to it, he was on his feet mainly because Sadrahan’s pull of the rope transitioned to being over the shoulder rather than at his side.

“Please! Can we stop?! I’m so tired! I need to sleep!” Ita cried out at last.

Sadrahan stopped and turned around to face his captive, Ita fell to his knees in the muck, he was breathing hard, his chest heaving in and out, spittle flecked from his lips, the rope went slack at last when Sadrahan took a step toward him.

“I plan to keep going till we get there.” Sadrahan snapped, “I don’t care if you need sleep, I don’t.” Then it hit him, ‘How long did I actually sleep before these caught up? I assumed it was hours, but could it have been far more?’ There was no way to know, but his body felt fresh still, while the human swayed back and forth on his knees with bleary eyes looking desperately up at him.

‘How can he not need to sleep? Does the Demon Lord not need to rest?! Is that what we face, a demon who never sleeps, he looks as fresh as if he just started the day! How is that possible? Other demons sleep, but he does not?! To catch us the way he did, he must have stayed awake all day and all night to be ready for us, otherwise he might have missed us… by the gods… it’s true…’ A kind of dull horror settled in on Ita Mal’s exhausted mind, his own father often lamented, ‘If I didn’t need to sleep, I could get so much more work done!’ and some of the other hard working young men and women held similar attitudes. Now here, towering over him, was the embodiment of that truth. ‘The Demon who never sleeps… no wonder he is a Lord.’ Ita bowed his head.

“Please, just a few hours, I-I beg you. I’ll be in better shape when you return me, and… and I will tell them you allowed me to sleep. That you are not a total savage.” Ita added, and Sadrahan bristled a little.

“You do as you do, and say I am savage?” Sadrahan growled, his fingers tensed with the urge to violence, but Ita was clearly barely holding on. ‘I wonder how long they were traveling before they ran into me?’ Part of him wanted to ask, but instead he ignored the question.

“At the top of that hill.” Sadrahan turned and pointed to the hill directly in front of them, “If I can see your place from there, I will let you sleep before going the rest of the way.”

“Th-Thank you, Demon Lord.” Ita’s more conscious mind registered disgust that he was thanking the creature, but it seemed the safest move, and he got his feet under him, bending his knees and rising to his feet to stagger forward again.

Every step up the hill was like dragging a load of lead, a struggle for his exhausted body, but the Demon Lord seemed to treat it like a stroll through a garden. When Ita finally began to take the final steps to rise to the wet green hilltop, the Demon Lord addressed him by pointing ahead.

“They’re there. Fall, sleep. It will be an hour’s walk, but then you go home.” Sadrahan looked at the distant ‘settlement’. From atop the wall he could see within the low walls, and he suppressed a whistle. The fire he’d lit did more damage than he expected. A multitude of buildings were burned to ash or blackened skeletal ruins were made of the toppled and broken frames. Tents were now fewer in number, and the movement he could see appeared slower, sluggish, and weary.

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Ita fell face first to the grass, turned his head to the side, and fell into a deep sleep almost immediately. Sadrahan listened to the thud and glanced down at the heap of a man at his feet. ‘They die like we do, at least I know that much.’ It was with that thought that Sadrahan realized, ‘I’ve never actually seen a dead human before, not till… well hopefully I never have to again.’ He sat down, bringing his knees up and resting his forearms on them, Sadrahan watched the distant settlement that wasn’t a settlement.

And while he watched, he spent the human’s snoozing time, thinking. ‘Lamashi has to be kept safe, even if I get all the demons down there, and the villages, we still don’t have enough to make those ‘fort’ things. Maybe those aren’t stupid after all, but I can’t do it. And we don’t have smiths of our own either. The human metal shirts are a problem, we need to make more things for ourselves. That place with the mine, they had people making things, repairing things… things my village couldn’t do. But if I have lots of villages together at my mountain, then maybe we can just have a few people only do one job, instead of everybody doing everything?’ When that thought came to Sadrahan’s mind, he scratched his horn and bit his lower lip.

‘Why does it feel like that’s better than it sounds…?’ He asked himself, a tingle went up his spine, like the chills of fear and anxiousness that were more frequent and more familiar in the recent past, but different. Like he’d stumbled upon a marvelous idea.

‘But to do that, I need a lot more.’ Sadrahan’s thoughts turned toward the other villages of demons, their numbers were likely not much different than his own, but he frustratingly enough, didn’t know how many they numbered at all. ‘Midas would know. Wait… he mentioned passing by the mountain, maybe… maybe I could pay him to take one of my people with him. Maybe there are other not-humans and not-demons out there who would come to me if they knew I would accept them? Maybe…’ So many maybes, his mind spun with endless possibilities.

The danger represented by the not-settlement ahead loomed large and the more implications of its existence that he considered, the less he liked his odds. He looked down at the human beside him, the man was well fed and muscled, appearing to be a fit specimen of his kind, that said a lot about how he lived. But when Sadrahan looked at the man’s body, it was marked with scars here and there that made no sense for a farmer. ‘What if he isn’t a farmer? Midas had a scar on his leg from a beast… if someone has more scars, it was either a bad fight, or many fights.’

He poked the human, hours had come and gone, and aside from wanting to move on and not caring just how well rested Ita Mal was, there were questions to be answered.

Ita’s eyes fluttered open and his entire body went stiff when he saw the red faced demon looming over him. “So it wasn’t a dream.”

“You, Ita, how did you get those scars?” Sadrahan pointed to the marks on his arms.

“Battle.” Ita said and clenched his jaw.

“You have fought many of those?” Sadrahan pressed as Ita slowly rolled over to rise.

“A dozen at least.” Ita’s pride asserted itself as he and Sadrahan stood up at once.

“Is that how you took many people together?” Sadrahan asked.

“Some.” Ita acknowledged.

“So they did not all hail your leader as leader? Or did he have to prove his strength, or did you do it for him?” Sadrahan asked.

Ita’s mind spun at the implications of the question. ‘Does he ask because all the other demons bowed to him by choice? Is that it? Is he so strong that no demons were willing to resist him?!’ Ita’s mind was afire with the possibility. ‘He did defeat me, and all of my people with no effort… what else but a Demon Lord, supreme over all his kind, could do something like that?’ Ita’s pride comforted him in his loss as he settled on that truth of the Demon Lord’s supremacy over the common kind.

“The King rules, we fight for him. The peasants farm for him. The artisans make things for him, and the captives,” Ita looked away with discomfort with the red eyes bored into him, “mine for him.”

‘So they don’t all do everything, they focus on special jobs.’ Sadrahan filed that away for later, and then tugged the rope. “Come, we are taking you back to your people.”

Ita bowed his head, and with more rest under his belt, and more certainty that he would survive, his steps were no longer staggered and broken, he was, at last, able to keep up with the steps that were taking him home.