Klemet was wiping the sweat from his brow with one hand, and clutched his belly with the other. A growl in his gut warned him of the need for food. It didn’t need to tell him. ‘They’re not giving us enough…’ He thought and then raised the mattock one more time. He brought it down against the ground and the chunks of earth cracked under his strike. His back straightened and bent with blow after blow as he broke up the stubborn earth, while one of his fellows began pushing a shovel into the broken place and throwing dirt over his shoulder.

To their right stood the beginnings of a wall. A long line of sharpened trunks. One day’s work under the supervision of the bat-demon Batagan, and it admittedly looked good. But a question haunted him, ‘How many paces is that? The Demon Lord’s steps could be long, or short? Every ten gets Shala another spoonful of food… why did I do that, why did we do that? Having a child, here? Surrounded by demons that hate us, that want to kill us? What will they do to our child? Will they even keep their word? Will they starve it to death out of sheer spite?’ The nightmarish questions kept him awake most of the night before.

Shala’s urgent clinging to him in a few moments of privacy were the only thing that let either of them sleep, her calloused hands clung to his, and she’d urged him on, ‘I’m already going to have one, you can’t exactly put another in me…’

That privacy came only in the woods, beneath the tall trees they’d been clearing for farmland and for building materials, it was also a place they could sneak off to before returning to their effective prisons. ‘Run.’ The voice in the back of his mind nagged at him. But how? Where? ‘And if I get caught, if anyone gets caught… all our fates are bound like the strings used to make rope.’

So instead, he swung. “Do you think they’ll keep their word?” Klemet grunted out the question. “Or are we just delaying our miserable deaths?” He asked further while the shovel of his companion, a brown haired young man of slight build but wiry muscles.

He looked up, pausing in his shoveling and said a little louder than he needed to, “I don’t know, what do you think, Klemet, about all this, about the Demon Lord? It's hard to believe he’s a father, isn’t it?”

“Who knows? Not me. The priests say they’d just eat my child alive. Or that they’d make us watch it be torn apart by hounds. They say we’re bound for torture and death, that demons serve the underworld… but so far I’m alive. We’re alive. I guess,” he grunted when the mattock wouldn’t pull up, and then crouched down on his knees and grabbed an old root. He began to tug and pull, grunting and straining his body, “I guess I’ve got no choice.” Klemet said and paused in his desperate pull. “A lord is a lord… always working for somebody… had a lord in the city, he gave us less food than this one. And at least this one promises to give us a little extra for more work. But him being a father? Odd question… guess it shouldn’t be, demons’ve got to come from somewhere, right? Some of the demon women are even… kinda pretty.” He blushed a little, “Don’t tell my wife I said that. I’m just sayin, maybe their babies are cute? Like ours? A baby is just a baby, nothing to them yet…”

He felt the eyes in the back of his head.

“Damn! This root is stubborn.” He cursed and tried again. “Don’t mind my questions, I’m just rambling. Neither of us knows if they’ll kill us or not… or anything else, if they don’t, maybe they’ll even let us keep the land we work… maybe we can change their minds about us?”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

The root continued to resist. “Now will whoever is behind me just stop fucking staring at me and help me with this damn thing? By the Demon Lord’s balls, I want to get another thirty paces of wall built before he gets here!” Klemet finally snapped.

When Sadrahan went out to inspect the wall the day after the order, he was in fact, pleasantly surprised. A little trace of a smile spread over his face when he touched his claws to the wooden stake, he craned his head to look up, it was significantly taller than himself, his arm stretched up and still his talons couldn’t touch the pointed top. Beside the brown wood stood another that was pressed tight against it and sealed not with pitch, but with tree sap harvested by one of the more innovative humans.

“They’re a clever lot.” Sadrahan admitted and glanced to his left at Liln.

“I suppose.” She admitted with some reluctance and touched the wooden shaft beside him. A clutch of the humans were working at a point where the wall was to curve to create a half circle around the entire settlement. “Forgive me, Lord, but I still don’t trust them.”

“Me neither.” Sadrahan admitted, “But I knew humans before, did I ever mention that? Not just the merchant family we both probably knew… but there was a village of them only a few days walk away. That felt like half the world back then. Did I ever mention that?”

“No… no, you didn’t.” Liln answered and watched while Sadrahan went to where wood met stone, and took his first pace, not with a normal stride, but one foot close to the other.

She moved aside and waited until he was beside her again, making his small steps and looking up at him while he spoke, “I grew up going there, we used to share festivals around harvest time. I went to theirs, they came to ours, and it had always been that way. We traded goods and gossip, and we were friends.”

“Except for Midas the elder and Midas the younger, I’d never seen any of them at all. Our nearest neighbor was another village of our kind. Most of them,” she looked over to the fields where a handful of demons were finishing work, “they’re not here.”

Sadrahan didn’t need to ask where they were. “I didn’t go to them when everything went wrong. And I didn’t have you lead our people anywhere near them when you were guiding them back, because I saw the banner of the forts there. I thought they betrayed us.” He admitted and muttered a few numbers under his breath as he counted his paces, then stopped in his tracks.

“Now, knowing about this invention of ‘war’ that came from Sevenills? I wonder, could that village have just been conquered? If they would force ‘us’ to work, why not other humans? Clearly,” he waved a hand toward the clutch of them working at the curve, “they can be made to work. Maybe they took away our old neighbors and put some of their own people there. Maybe they just took over the village years ago and we just never knew?”

That gave Liln pause, ‘I can’t say it didn’t happen that way, or isn’t so… and what do I know about that kind, not much, really.’ But more importantly, it gave her some insight into Sadrahan’s thinking, he was ‘softening’ as the humans showed less and less inclination to fight or make trouble.

“So we keep them alive?” She asked, “We let them live?”

“Maybe. There’s a lot of land here, we need hands to work it, a small population of humans is no threat as long as it stays that way. Maybe I’ll borrow another of their ideas… eventually.” Sadrahan suggested, and resumed his paced walk forward.

Before Liln could ask what he had in mind, the conversation among the humans became audible to her, ‘Klemet, that’s the one Batagan is managing things through…’

She was about to speak up when she saw the shovel bearing human speak, she raised her hand and put her forefinger to her lips and made a quiet ‘shhhh’ gesture, Sadrahan saw out of the corner of his eye and counted out his paces until he was standing behind the human pair.

When the human asked him to stop staring, a playful, if slightly cruel, impulse came over him.

“Sure.” He said, and leaned far over the human, he reached his thick red arm past Klemet’s own, hooked his claw beneath the root, and curling his finger, he snipped the root in two. “There, now you should be able to work around it.” Sadrahan said and straightened up again.

“But what was that about my balls?” Sadrahan asked as Liln cracked up into laughter at his side.