“Who the fuck are you?! What did you do to me?!”

My mind was freaking out. To be fair, I knew there was some reason for that, that I couldn’t remember. The time between now and reading my book. The fact that I couldn’t remember it at all, but that it brought the worst feelings I had ever felt made me fall into a bit of a… panic.

Seeing a random stranger in my house and feeling things that were part of my body but weren’t about five minutes ago, was not helping me at all.

It especially didn’t help when I realized this wasn’t my house.

“Did you fucking kidnap me?!”

I understood that yelling at the person who could’ve kidnapped me and god knows what else wasn’t exactly the smartest move but to be fair, I wasn’t exactly the smartest person around and I was pretty fucking far from okay right now.

“Um, that is, you see… yes?”

My jaw dropped open as I stared at the absolutely shameless man in front of me. One who seemed very scared and now also very flabbergasted. I had no idea what he was expecting but- wait.

“Did you just call me a demon? Are you crazy?”

He had absolutely no response to that, just opening and closing his mouth like a fish. Part of me, no, all of me, wanted to just sit down and take a breath and get my bearings. Figure out why the fuck I was feeling what my brain was mentally calling extra body parts. Oh god, was I in some human centipede style shit? What the fuck was going on?!

“Y…You are a demon right?”

The man asked in quiet whisper. I was about to yell “Obviously fucking not!” when my brain stopped, grabbed me by the metaphorical horns, and screamed at me to think about the question. I blinked, and with a shaking hand, reached up to the top of my head, only to feel entirely real, non-metaphorical horns. Small things, but firmly there. I moved both hands up and felt both my horns. They were only a few inches, hard like metal, and ended in a point. They were coming right out the top of my forehead.

My body and brain had gone into shock. Something, something vital in me, was screaming at me. That didn’t help my mental state. No, if anything, for some reason that screaming collapsed it entirely. It was a simple impulse.

‘Don’t deny that you’re a demon!’

I couldn’t place where it came from, but it was intrinsic to me. Like I could deny it, but it’d be like biting my own hand hard enough to draw blood. Just, unacceptable really. However, it wasn’t the impulse that I felt breaking my psyche. That… screaming of it, had unlocked something in my brain. No, deeper than that. My soul. Only, sensations. Barely anything.

Barely anything, that made my brain shut down and my body go into shock. I was hyperventilating, I realized. And shaking. I, what. What?

I was crying, I didn’t realize it until I saw the ground. I didn’t see the ground until I collapsed onto it.

“D-Demon?!”

Demon. I was a demon. I saw and moved my tail in front of me. It was one of the first things I had seen and it had started my descent into a full blown panic attack. I expected a demon’s tail, now that that word had been thrown around so much. And I guess I was both more and less surprised. It sure was a demon’s tail. But it was segmented. Like a chain blade. Or a spine. Thicker than expected, ending in a classic demon spike.

My breathing felt like it stopped. Maybe it did. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t- I couldn’t-

Pain, pain, pain, torment and atrocities the likes of which man and woman should never know. A plane of it, a never ending realm of horrible torture, of agony, transcending anything the mortal mind could achieve. A stabbing in my heart, a skinning to my back, whips, lashes, agony unending. A world of eternity, trillions of trillions of souls, all screaming.

I was trapped, stuck, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe. I-I-I-

Pain.

Trapped.

Forever.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Oh shit oh shit oh shit, oh fuck, what did I do?! What do I do?!”

Time slowed to a crawl and then to a stop. A tear slid down my cheek and froze. The man paused completely. An errant bit of dust hovered there in mid air, without any movement. My soul, my soul had been through something it shouldn’t have. By pure happenstance. By pure accident. It had changed. But the soul wasn’t the mind. My mind can’t handle it. What my soul felt. What it experienced.

I’m dying.

My brain was being fed information, experiences, realities I couldn’t handle. It was crushing me. I needed, to bleed it out.

Walls, mental walls slammed into place. They weren’t enough. This wasn’t the sort of thing you could simply block off. A new feeling swelled up inside me, from my altered soul. The deluge was, stored. Banked. My soul knew, my soul remembered, but it stopped informing my brain about it. A mind could hardly grasp the eternity I saw, let alone one of such atrocity and pain. More walls, broken, more and more walls.

Forget.

Forget!

FORGET!

YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!

FORGET!

My soul stirred, my last mental walls held, and time resumed.

For the second time, I took a large gasping breath like a dying fish, except this time I was on the ground, soaked in sweat, adrenaline, and tears.

The man ran up to me, his hands on my chest, trying to make sure I was breathing.

“Oh shit. SHIT! What do I do?! Demon? Demon are you okay?!”

I grasped his hand, I needed it. My grip was so weak, my body felt cold, my brain felt alien and destroyed, ripped to shreds.

The last sight I saw was a very worried, scrawny, and somewhat dirty man. It made for an odd last image as I felt the wings I missed bury into the dirt.

.

.

.

I came to and felt, gone. Dried out. Dead. Like all of my emotions had been removed from me. I felt a hangover, but in a distant sort of way. I felt in pain, but in a way that my brain immediately filed down to ‘ha, you call this pain?’ which was an odd thought and one my brain immediately seemed to say ‘hush, shut up.’ I did not feel alright. But honestly, I almost didn’t feel anything at all.

A whisper, a quiet whisper of a very scared man, reached me.

“...demon?”

I turned and the man who had spoken flinched and gulped. Then he looked back at me.

“Are you… okay?”

I looked down at my hands. My emotions were fileted and my brain was mostly incapacitated. I didn’t feel…. alive for lack of a better word. Like something was missing. Like a lot of something was missing, and most of what was missing was me. My very self and ego. My brain told me not to worry about it for now. I ignored that, I was me. I was my brain, not pieces. A whole seemed to form. I was broken, temporarily. In a state of shock and dissociation from effectively inward mental surgery. I don’t know what had been blocked but the faintest leftovers that couldn’t be expelled, and the feeling of incredible danger when I hit that mental block in my mind, told me that it was beyond my experiences as a mortal to undertake.

As I continued to stare at my hands, I spoke to the man.

“I am not okay. But I will get better. I seem to be nearly numb from an emotional and mental standpoint. My psyche nearly died, which would have left me brain dead. My body would have expired shortly after most likely.”

The man looked even more terrified after my words and his next actions, even through my numbness, surprised me. Which must have meant he shocked me to my core, if I was extrapolating correctly.

Because he kneeled and slammed his head on the ground.

“I’m sorry! I never meant to hurt you! I just wanted to summon you!”

Thinking on it, I had gone from a modern day life as a normal human, to a wooden cabin with demonic traits. I felt a small urge to guffaw which spoke volumes. I had been summoned. You summoned demons. I had been summoned. I wasn’t a demon.

So it had made me a demon.

The emotions boiling inside me from that were plentiful and odd to watch from an outside perspective. Shock, indignance, slight amusement, incredible fury, disgust, fear. And above all, a general statement that could summarize my feelings distinctly arose. I looked at the man and spoke the words I knew I would want to speak if I could feel said emotions.

“What the fuck.”

The man seemed to shrink in on himself even more, the weight of guilt seeming to crush him. I wasn’t angry or disgusted with him. Merely at the world. The universe. My emotions, even separated from the current me, wanted an outlet and developed one. Never before had I internalized the phrase “The world is unfair” but I felt it becoming a core part of me. I had been sent to hell for no reason at all, seemingly by accident by a random dirty man in a wooden cabin.

How was something like this even possible? I suppose in a way, it was time for a story.

“How did you even summon me?”

The man looked up, moving with haste, and took out a square jewel. Shining a baleful red. It hinted at a familiarity, as if I’d seen many things like it before.

“I found this old gem in the ruins to the south! And, well… everyone knows the stories of summoning demons! I just wanted your help, I promise!”

Honestly, the continued shocks weren’t going to help my recovery any. Or maybe they would. Either way, I absolutely had to know what on earth someone needed my help, or a demon’s help in general, for.

“Help with what?”

“Please! Save my village!”

I felt a new headache forming already.