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Tale of the Malice Princess
Book Four - Chapter Five

Book Four - Chapter Five

“Ah, nothing beats the stew here,” Beldo said as he reached the top of the stairs to the inn’s second floor. “I could eat nothing but that every day and be satisfied.”

“I found it unremarkable,” Lusya said. It had not been bad by any means, but the quality had been average and there had been nothing novel or unique about the recipe. It had just been another drop in a sea of beef stews Lusya had eaten during her travels.

Beldo shrugged. “To each their own.”

“I agree with Lusya,” Ariya said. “The candy was good, though.”

He chuckled. “I’m sure it was. Well, this is my room. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Actually, I would like to speak with you, if you do not mind,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow. “I’d love to. Can’t say I ever expected you to say something like that, though.”

“Yeah, are you okay?” Ariya asked. People often made such jokes when faced with unusual behavior, but her tone was tinged with genuine worry. Lusya was not sure if that reflected actual concern or the joke had simply come out more seriously than Ariya had intended.

“I am fine.”

“We can talk in here,” Beldo said. “Unless you prefer your room.”

“I have no preference.” It wasn’t as if she had any attachment to the inn room she had just rented nor would one be more secure than the other, and the walk across the hall afterward was a minor inconvenience at best.

Beldo pushed the door open and walked into the room, beckoning Lusya and Ariya in. They entered, and he took a seat at a chair against the far wall. Ariya seated herself on the bed, while Lusya remained standing.

“So?” Beldo asked. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

“You are a strange demon,” Lusya said. “I would like to know why.”

He was obviously an old demon, for one thing, itself unusual. Then there was his relationship with these humans and his exceptional altruism. Even those demons she had met who helped others usually kept to a select few within a specialized area. Rahgrahb and Danfia had been kind enough—even to the mortals Lusya had seen them interact with—but they had not been in the business of spreading that kindness unless given a compelling reason. And they had still fought for Father in the end.

Beldo’s unique characteristics seemed benign enough, and he seemed well-intentioned, but the matter still warranted investigation. He was a bundle of unknowns, and that could prove dangerous.

“So that’s what it’s about,” Beldo said. “I guess I can tell you. I wasn’t keeping it a secret or anything, I just don’t particularly like to talk about myself.”

“I wanna know too,” Ariya said, waving an arm for attention. “I’ve met a few good demons during our trip, but you’re different than them.”

Beldo smiled. “Anything specific I should focus on?”

Lusya shook her head. “No. How you came to be as you are in general will suffice.” She paused. “I would also like to know how old you are. It is clear it is older than most demons live to.”

“Yeah, we do tend to get killed young,” Beldo said. He sighed. “Mostly our own fault, but it’s still a shame. Well, then, I guess I’ll start from the beginning.

“I was born about…I want to say two thousand years ago? Honestly, it got hard to keep track after a couple hundred. But right around there, in this very region. That was during what they call a turbulent age these days, and boy did I love that. You might have noticed my name.”

“I did,” Lusya said. “It does not suit you.”

“Beldo,” bore a resemblance to the words in several languages for war. Lusya assumed it to be that same word from a predecessor language, perhaps Odessian.

“It did back then,” Beldo said. “I won’t make little Ariya listen to the gory details—”

“I’m not that little,” Ariya said. “And I can handle gory details.”

“Yes, you are, and no, you cannot,” Lusya replied. “Continue.”

Beldo nodded. “Let’s just say I enjoyed war. Really, I enjoyed making people hurt, and war was a great stage to do that.”

“That is not an abnormal sentiment among demons,” she said.

“It’s not, and it wasn’t back then either. So, I fought for my Demon King, and I loved every second of it. The Sacred Knights and the Paladins didn’t exist back then, but I was a real terror to their equivalents. But, it didn’t matter. As you, of course, know, my Demon King lost. A mortal hero killed him at the cost of his own life.” It was interesting how often that happened. Of course, defeating the Demon King wasn’t something that could come without a high cost, but Lusya still would have expected more variation in what that cost was, especially since such heroes did not often fight alone. Perhaps Demon Kings made a point of killing their heroes when it was clear their death was imminent. Lusya could not say if that applied to Father. She had not been present for his death nor had she ever heard the details. “He was half-reltus, half-human, actually. That was almost unheard of back then.”

“I see,” Lusya said. That was an irrelevant detail, but she didn’t intend to derail the story by pointing that out.

“Anyway, after that, I did what I was supposed to,” he said. “Went into hiding, tried to lay low, you know the drill.”

“Indeed,” Lusya said.

“We knew most of us would be found. A handful, at best, would get another shot in the next cycle,” Beldo said. “It was really just about surviving for as long as possible. So, I ended up finding my way to a little village. I pretended to be injured for sympathy, got them to take me in, and before long I was one of the villagers. They just thought I was a reltus. Relations between the mortal races were even worse back then, but a half-reltus had just saved the world, so I got a little slack.”

So, that detail was not irrelevant. He would have benefited from making that clear first.

“So, what happened?” Ariya asked, as if he would not continue without prompting.

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“I settled down,” Beldo said. “I lived in that village for years. Worked as a farmhand for an old man who couldn’t tend his own fields anymore and whose son had died in the war. Made friends, found a lover. That kind of thing.

“At first, it was just about surviving. I just needed to lay low so nobody would hunt me down, and all that was just part of the act. Then one day, I woke up, kissed my wife, and realized I was actually happy.”

“Happier than before?” Ariya asked.

Beldo shrugged. “Who knows? It’s hard to measure that kind of thing, especially in hindsight. But it was close at least.”

“You do not sound happy about being happy,” Lusya said. “Were you dissatisfied with that realization?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t know then, and I still don’t. I spent a long time trying to figure it out. I mean, I’m a demon. We’re almost literally made of hatred and anger. I was trying to destroy the world a few years earlier. Was it okay for me to be happy in peace? Was I losing myself by accepting that?

“And moreover, even though I was happy, I still felt the pull of war. My impulses as a demon weren’t gone. So many times, I thought about strangling that old man in his sleep. Even after I moved into my own place with my wife, I still worked for him. And I thought about the look on his face when he realized I was killing him, after gaining his trust over the course of years.

“But I was happy without doing those things, and I knew I needed to refrain to survive. So, I held back. I contented myself with my simple life. Started a brawl or two when I really felt the itch and moved on with life.” He chuckled. “For not knowing any motomancy, some of those guys could throw a punch. I’ll never forget the feeling of Branus’s right hook.

“Nothing lasts forever, though. I lived there for almost twenty years. Watched people grow old around me. My benefactor went from a frail old man to a husk that could barely get out of bed if I helped him. And then, this pompous nobleman came into town. I don’t remember his name or what he ruled, but he was a big deal, waylaid into our village by bad weather. The villagers had no choice but to accommodate him, of course, to scrape and bow and cater to his every whim. It wasn’t the first time something like that happened, but most were at least a little gracious about it. This guy relished his power.”

Even now, the incident roused obvious anger withing Beldo. His hands were balled into fists, his brow furrowed in a deep scowl.

“After a night of gorging himself on our food and drinking every drop of alcohol he could fit in his mouth, he set his eyes on my wife, Iula. I can’t blame him. She was beautiful. But she, of course, told him she was a married woman and refused. I was standing right there and agreed. Tried to be good-natured about it, like it was a joke. Now, there have been countries where a king or a lord can take any woman he pleases, marriage be damned, but this wasn’t one of them. I remember this folk tale about how you’ll turn into a slug if you sleep with a married woman. Ientos, my son, thought it was the funniest thing in the world.

“Anyway, point is, pompous nobleman wasn’t happy with her answer. He threw some wine on her and ordered his guards to restrain and execute her for defying him. So I killed him. And them. And her. And everyone else in the village. I started because I was angry, and I kept going because I was having fun. After decades of holding back, I couldn’t help but indulge.”

He hung his head in shame, his voice growing lower and lower, until it was almost hard to hear.

“My benefactor was the last one. His house was on the outskirts. He was awake when I got there. He had been lying in bed, listening to the screams and carnage until I reached him. And when I loomed over him, he just looked me in the eyes and said, ‘It’s okay. I forgive you.’”

“An interesting choice,” Lusya said.

Beldo nodded. “He knew. I don’t know if he somehow knew some motomancy without me realizing or he knew enough to spot my fangs, but he knew. I asked him how he could forgive me, and he told me, ‘It’s not your fault. You were made to be evil. The gods played a cruel joke when they made demons. This is all you can be. Yet you came and helped me out of bed every day for the past ten years. If a storm held itself back for twenty years only to do what a storm does, I could hardly be angry at it either.’”

“Did you kill him?”

Beldo nodded again. He was silent for a long stretch of time. Long enough that Lusya was about to prompt him to continue when he spoke again.

“Then, I left the village. Walked into the woods nearby until eventually I curled up and went to sleep. I was happy with what I had done, and upset with what I had lost. I wasn’t sure which I was feeling more. Until the next day, when I woke up and went to say good morning to Iula out of habit.

“That was when I decided the prove that old man wrong. That I would conquer my urges and live peacefully. Forever, this time. I wish I could say I succeeded right off the bat, but over the years, I figured it out. I’ll spare you all the details on how. It’s a lot of meditation and introspection. And, well, here we are.”

Lusya blinked. “I see. That is quite the story.”

“I guess it is,” Beldo said. His eyes were cast downward with a sad smile. “Does that answer your question? Or is there something else you want to know?”

“I have one question to start,” Lusya said. She had many, in fact, but most could wait. It irked her that they had skipped close to two thousand years and the details of how he had overcome his urges, and she could not help but be curious, but such details likely weren’t important and fell outside the scope of what she had said she wanted to know. She could wait to learn about them while she focused on the matter at hand. It would take some time to organize her thoughts on two thousand years of a events and a concept she had never heard of before anyway. “Was your village also in this region?”

Beldo nodded. “It sure was. Of course, it fell into ruin after what happened, and it’s gone now. You can’t even tell people used to live there.”

“That is unsurprising,” Lusya said. “Assuming, of course, that any of your story is true.”

“It’s gotta be true,” Ariya said. “It’s so sad and cool and awesome!”

“Those last two are synonyms, and your reasoning is nonsensical.”

“Guess I can’t blame you for being skeptical,” he said. “It is a pretty crazy story.”

“Indeed.”

It was mostly the time scale that put things in question. The story itself was interesting and unusual, to be sure, but it was not implausible, and it seemed to align with Beldo’s behavior. However, for him to have survived for over two-thousand years was such an extraordinary feat that Lusya struggled to believe it. She couldn’t think of any reason Beldo would have to lie, but she could not help but be skeptical.

“How have you avoided being hunted for so long?” Lusya asked. It was one of the key issues that had occurred to her on further consideration. “You are a powerful demon who is often in the same place. The Sacred Knights would ordinarily have killed you long ago.”

“Like I said, I make a habit of coming back here, but I travel around a lot,” Beldo said. “But, to answer your question, they—and other groups before them—mostly leave me alone. If one of them gets close, I usually run away, and at some point, they decide I’m not a threat and not worth dedicating resources to. Sometimes that understanding is more explicit than others, but it’s been a few hundred years since anyone came after me.”

“Is this one of those times?” Lusya asked. “Otherwise you would have run away from Mother.”

Beldo hummed in thought. “Well, I have spoken with a couple Sacred Knights who’ve agreed not to attack me, but I don’t know what the situation with the higher ups is.” He chuckled. “The main reason I didn’t run away from Azure is that she was traveling with the Demon King. Curiosity trumped survival for a second there.”

“I see,” Lusya said. “That is a sentiment I can understand.”

“Are you okay, Mister Beldo?” Ariya asked. “We’re sorry if we made you sad by asking.”

“Do not apologize on my behalf, child.”

Beldo raised his head, his eyes widening as his melancholy gave way to surprise. After a moment, he laughed and shook his head.

“No, I’m fine,” he said. “No one needs to apologize. It hurts a little, but it’s nice to talk about it sometimes, actually. It’s not like I get many chances. I can’t tell most people any of this. It’s been years since the last time I explained it. But it’s nice to make sure someone other than me knows about it. So if something happens to me, their existence isn’t just forgotten.

“That’s a little selfish, sure. There are plenty of other villages and commonfolk who’ve been forgotten after thousands of years. Even kings and nobles from back then have faded away. No one will ever speak their names or think about their stories again. It might be conceited to make sure this one goes on just because it’s mine. But, hey, it’s the least I can do.”

Lusya blinked. She could not say she entirely understood. These were the sentiments of someone who had lived for thousands of years. Perhaps she would never be able to comprehend them in full. But she felt she understood enough. She, too, had someone she didn’t want to be forgotten as just a number in a long list of Demon Kings.

“Then it is fortunate I asked,” she said. “Come, Ariya, it is time for bed.”