The world darkened for a split second as Rowan felt his skull crack from the impact with the paint bucket. The left half of his head went numb, and the world returned to his vision painted red with rage. He spun on his heel and let out a roar that must have been audible past his walls. Fingers already tipped by claws found the soft flesh of a throat and his attacked let out a startled shriek that quickly died down as Rowan slammed him against the wall.

The redheaded man blinked up at him, eyes dazed by the impact and glowing emerald green. Slitted pupils of bright green focused back on him just in time to see the werewolf snarl, gums splitting and falling off in lumps as black rubbery flesh pushed up beneath them, followed by razor sharp teeth erupting through the blunt human teeth that cracked and gave way like egg shells.

The sight was terrifying by human standards, but the demon responded by lashing a long frilled tail around Rowan’s naked waist. The thin appendage wrapped itself tightly and squeezed like a snake locking down a rat. Rowan ripped it off with one hand.

Cain shrieked as blood and bone shards flew after the torn off tail, face contorting with pain and rage. Rowan had him by the throat, and as the demons started thrashing he slammed him back against the wall hard enough to make Cain’s head loll forward after the impact. Wine red wings with far too many joints and bones spread to the demon’s sides, jerky and slow as his head spun. Rowan caught the right one as it lashed out in an attempt to wrap around them both.

Again Cain screamed, this time more desperately as Rowan caught the wing and tore. The thin membrane connecting the bones of the wing proved surprisingly stretchy and tough, only tearing up partly despite Rowan using his full strength. He felt his bones crackle beneath his skin as muscles heaved and writhed, eager to be unleashed to take the form his body always craved. He fought it back just barely, keeping himself in that half way form of sharp teeth and human body just barely holding on like a frail shell covering what hid beneath.

The second wing lashed out, unbroken and fast. Rowan ignored it and lunged forwards instead, maw splitting open wide enough to make his cheeks tear open to let his jaws unhinge. The demon screamed, a gurgled and terrified sound that slowly died out as it choked on its own blood and no air could reach its lungs. Rowan jerked his head back, ripping a large chunk of flesh with him that sent a spray of blood flying. The demon went limp, limbs twitching only slightly as blood kept pumping out of his wounds. The sweet herbal scent that surrounded it kept flowing into the air, but unlike earlier where it had turned the werewolf into a lusting thrall, now the warm-cold feeling left by Margret’s tea only made the scent trigger nausea.

Rowan snarled, droplets of blood and saliva hitting Cain’s paling face in a spray. Feeling the danger of the change taking over grow stronger, Rowan tossed Cain’s body to the side and clutched at his head instead. The world spun and pulsed around him and the iron taste of blood in his mouth had his hearth running double speed. He swayed unsteadily, then stumbled back against the wall and sunk to the floor, head in his hands and breaths coming out in short ragged gasps.

The demon lay twitching on the ground where it landed, body contorting and flinching over and over like a dying spider. The way the wings bent this way and that, joints seemingly able to bend any direction like the ball based limbs of a puppet. The sight was haunting in a way things that shouldn’t be looked. He noticed now that it had horns. Pale, curved things growing from behind its pointed ears and curling up and to the side, then down again at an angle.

Rowan torn his eyes away and curled in on himself, hands shaking as his nails retreated back into his fingers and changed back to their usual dull and soft rounded edges.

He sat there for a long time, until the last of the light from outside had faded into night and his house got left in near complete darkness. Vaguely he could see the demon twitch, body still quivering and alive somehow. When his breathing finally calmed down enough to not block out the rest of the sounds around him, Rowan could hear the demon whimper and sob.

“Don’t kill me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Don’t hurt me. Please.”

Cain lie on his side, wings torn and moving on their own as if unsure what to do. Glowing green eyes roll around without settling on anything, too worked up to focus on any one point. Rowan felt a shudder go through him as he watched the demon plead and shiver on the floor. What should he do? He could try and get Marian- no… He couldn’t possibly explain this. A human couldn’t tear up a changeling like this. Impossible. He would reveal himself if he said anything about this. Then what?

“Please. Please please don’t. I’m sorry.”

The demon kept mechanically mumbling the same words over and over, as if he wasn’t sure what they meant, but fully believed that they could save him. Rowan felt disgusted, then guilty. He saw what he’d done to the creature on the floor, how he’d torn it up and left it to bleed out. Only a monster could do such damage in the span of a few minutes. Seconds? How much time had passed.

“Hrckgh…” The demon grew quiet at once, only its rapid breaths breaking the silence. Rowan grunted again and sat up, knees pulled to his chest and hands clutching at his elbows hard enough to make his knuckles go white. He’d done it again. He’d ripped something to shreds with so little effort. The demon hiccuped and curled up, hands hugging its sides as its green eyes found Rowan at last. It stared with pure horror at him. Horror and desire. Like a rabid thing, blinded and sick. Rowan wanted to look away but couldn’t, so they sat there staring at each other for a long time instead.

Rowan was the first to break the silence again.

“Give me one reason I shouldn’t kill you.” It was all but a whisper, and he felt horrible for saying it. But it was a changeling. Something evil. It had attacked him. He might have fought it before. The walls and ceiling still had dried blood on it beneath the new gore added on top. He couldn’t remember that fight. He must have changed, or the demon did something to him to make him forget. Did it matter?

“I’m sorry,” it croaked at him, voice too human for something so alien.

“Stop saying that.” Rowan felt sick. It acted too much like a person. The demon stayed quiet when Rowan waited, so he spoke again after a while.

“Why?”

It didn’t respond. Did it understand? It looked so human.

“Why did you attack me?”

This time it reacted.

“I wanted to-”

A gurgle cut it off, and it gave a few rough coughs as blood filled its mouth. Rowan waited for it to settle down, then pressed.

“Why?”

“-eat you,” it croaked. Rowan grew quiet. It wasn’t surprising, but the words still chilled him. Still, it had a human face, and it cried. Did it feel pain? It probably did. It had screamed. He’d torn its tail off. It had felt pain. The demon let out another gurgle, then spoke.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Don’t you?”

The question made him feel cold. Didn’t he want to eat others? Wasn’t that what his feral side did. What it wanted. What it had done so many times.

He too was a monster. It knew. It had seen him change. He had ripped its windpipe out. It healed like him, skin crawling and knitting back together in that unsettling way. Could it die? Could he? They were both monsters. The demon kept staring at him. He felt pressured to answer. It wasn’t a thing, no more than he was. It was a person, as cursed and wrong as he was.

“Sometimes.” Rowan felt numb saying it. The demon stared.

“What… do you do then?”

What did he do?

“I resist. I try to stay human.”

“But you aren’t,” the demon said. Rowan paused, then said with a tired smile,

“I like to pretend.”

The demon kept quiet after that. So did Rowan. They sat in silence as wounds mended, mostly the demons, then waited some more. The torn of tail rotted on Rowan’s floor, quicker than it should. What was left looked like a withered snake, dead and shriveled and shapeless. The fin like frills dried up and broke into browning flakes that flew away as air caught them. A new tail grew out of the stump, pinkish and soft. Rowan was too tired to react to it in any other way than with fascination. He wondered if it looked like that when his own body grew back missing parts. He’d gotten into some nasty fights before. It would seem freakish healing was a common trait among changelings. Thought then again he only had two examples to judge from.

The demon had been the first to move. It had been wary, afraid. Rowan hadn’t stopped it. It had asked for his name, and Rowan had told it. It had told him its own in return. He was called Cain, and he was young. In a way he was old too, but he’d only been in the above world for a few days. He’d been born in the Underground, Ilo’s domain. Rowan had asked what it was like, and it had turned out Cain sucked at describing things.

“It’s very noisy and completely silent.”

“It can’t be both at the same time, Cain.”

“But it is.”

“What’s the noise?”

“Voices.”

“Who?”

Cain shrugged. Rowan grimanced and asked something else.

“Is Ilo there?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see them?”

“Nooooyes… I dunno.”

“How don’t you know?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Quiet and noisy at the same time kinda deal?”

“Sorta.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Ilo doesn’t care if it does. It’s their world. It works as they want it to work.” Cain nodded importantly as if this was a great excuse. Rowan snickered.

“I wish I could use excuses like that when making things. Would make some jobs easier.”

“What do you work with?”

“I make art.”

Cain gave him a blank look.

“I make pretty things.”

“Ah. For others?”

“Yea mostly. Someone’s gotta. Church people especially need pretty things to make their places of worship look impressive and important.”

Cain grimanced at the mention of the church.

“I don’t like the church,” he said.

“Why not?” Rowan tilted his head.

“It’s noisy.”

“It’s pretty quiet too.”

“No, just noisy. It’s a extremely unpleasant place,” Cain grumanced.

“That’s because you’re a changeling.”

“I’m a demon,” Cain corrected.

“What’s the difference?”

“Demons are special. We’re born in the Underground and we’re unique.” Cain’s wings flared up slightly. Show off. Rowan wasn’t too impressed.

“As in the entire race?”

“We’re not a race. Every one of us are unique.”

“Imps and succubi aren’t. They’re races,” Rowan argued.

“Their shapes and abilities were effective, so many mimicked them and formed a race. That happens sometimes. Most demons are unique.”

“So you’re one of the unique ones?”

“I’m an incubus.” More proud wing fluttering and hair flipping.

“Like a succubus? It has the ‘cubus’ part in it.”

“Sort of? I dunno, I haven’t met them.”

Rowan frowned. “Then how do you know so much?”

“I’m special,” Cain smiled. Smugly. Rowan rolled his eyes.

Further pushing didn’t help much, the demon wouldn’t budge on the question. After awhile Rowan gave up and sank back against the wall with a sigh. He felt odd, sitting there chatting idly with a creature that had just tried to kill him, and who he’d nearly killed himself. He shouldn’t be sitting there feeling chummy with it he thought. But what could he do? None of them were fit to walk outside into the open without risking getting a arrow through their head. Blood and gore and a notable lack of clothing. Sure, Rowan had his pants still, but they were soaked in blood and plastered to his legs in a way that didn’t exactly scream ‘civilized’. Cain watched him silently as he thought about what to do.

The demon kept a blank face when Rowan stood up, but his voice had a twinge of worry in it.

“What are you doing?”

Rowan answered without looking at him, instead making a beeline for one of the almost organized looking piles of junk crowding the room.

“Solving the blood problem. We need to clean up this mess.”

Cain watched in confusion as Rowan checked through the pile of stacked buckets and painting tools. After rummaging around a bit the artist stood back up, then made a 180 turn and headed for the bedroom. Cain sat up and craned his neck, but couldn’t see into the room past a work table standing in the way. He heard a wardrobe open, then yelped as a bundle of clothes came hurtling out the door towards him. The bundle landed next to him, a plain pair of linen pants and a short sleeved shirt, both stained with various hues of paint.

Rowan strode back out through the door with two equally color stained rags that might have passed for towels once upon a time were it not for the torn edges and obvious misuse. Dried paint tends to turn softness of any kind into a hardened mess, a lesson Rowan had lost a good few brushes to before he realized the importance of cleaning up paint stains before they dried and ruined the fine hairs.

“Wipe as much of the blood off as you can,” he instructed, already rubbing one of the towels over his hands and forearms without much result. The blood was already dry enough to stick stubbornly to his skin.

He tossed the other rag at Cain, who caught it with a dubious frown on his face.

“No water?” he asked

“I only had one barrel,” Rowan replied through a muffled face full of itchy towel scratching away at his bloodstained face.

“...and that’s the one you heaved into the air like it weighted nothing earlier?”

Rowan paused his rubbing.

“You saw?”

“Scared me shitless,” Cain confirmed.

Rowan opened his mouth to stutter some kinda explanation, then remembered that he’d pretty much revealed his true colors to Cain already. Like when he’d choked the man against the wall with one hand. Yeah… Not much reason to try and hide it.

Rowan shrugged as if it wasn’t that much of a big deal, then he pointed at the towel in Cain’s hands.

“Use.”

“It won’t help that much.”

“Towel.”

Cain sighed and did as told, grimacing as the rough surface of the paint stained cloth scratched at his throat. The skin beneath the crusting blood showed no sign of injury anymore. It frightened Rowan a little that it healed that fast. That would have been a lethal injury on anyone else.

The two of them did their best to scrub off as much blood as they could, leaving them looking vaguely less homicidal, but still suspiciously covered in stubborn patches of reddish brown clinging to hair and harder to reach spots. The towels ended up looking like the true victims, filthy beyond saving.

Cain commented about them both still reeking of blood and the poor cleaning, then let out a displeased grunt as the only reply he got was a instruction to put on the not-as-filthy but still colorful clothes next to him on the ground.

While pulling the shirt over his head he heard a low ‘pop’.

“Wha-” As soon as his head emerged from the shirt the world went black, literally. Then the paint hit his face and the demon scrambled back with a startled screech. Once he’d managed to wipe the paint from his eyes and turned to stare Rowan down, he was met with the sight of the artist emptying another bucket of paint over his own head. Pink this time. Cain stared blankly at the scene that unfolded before him. The sharp scent of paint stung his nose.

Rowan rubbed some of the paint away from his face, just enough to see, then went for another bucket, opened it, then turned towards Cain with eyes gleaming with the joy of revenge. Protests were met with another wave of paint, blue now, and when Rowan’s paint rampage finally ended they were both left looking like a rainbow had thrown up on them. The scent of blood was barely noticeable past the stingingly sharp scent of paint, and the floor had gotten a splash or two as well. Red was no longer the dominant color of the room.

Cain stared in disbelief at the chaos of colors and the stupidly grinning Rowan standing in the middle of a stack of empty buckets. Silence reigned, then finally, Cain broke it.

“Rowan what the fuck.”