Amidst the charcoal flames, I see a figure in the middle of the chaos beside something that is sticking out of the ground. Is that an altar? Why is he here in all of this? What happened here? Why am I here? Did he bring me here?
With these questions running through, my body instinctually moved forward to the figure in the smoke. As I got closer and closer, his figure came out a little clearer. The details came slowly, I noticed he had a tail, dark hair, a slender figure, then I noticed he had purple skin.
He had a soldiers uniform under the late Demon King Orpheus. It was red in color with gold trim. I close enough to see his face. He had a neatly trimmed beard and a solid square face free of blemishes, brandished with a crooked smile.
“Oh, you came, how wonderful.” He spoke out in a gravelly voice.
“Did you bring me here?” I wanted to clarify.
“Hmm, well, if I had to say, you brought yourself here, I just supplied the means.” He gave a slight chuckle.
Slowly, I asked, “What do you mean?”
He looked at me as if I was slow, then laughed at himself as if he forgot to give me a piece of the puzzle. “My apologies, I lured you here.
Did you really think that your uncle knew about me and left it up to you to save the Void? No, I altered his letter when he wasn’t looking. He might not have even remembered me at all.”
I was shocked, it kind of made sense but “why?”
He let loose another crooked smile. “The letter had some truth to it, to make it more real. There is a reason why there is an extermination of the Void Demon Race put into effect. There was a seal on my powers that the death of your uncle broke, however, I could have used you, your father or your mother to break the seal. The spell was placed on me by a traitor to our cause. One way to break such a flimsy seal is by kill your fellow species member.”
No way he could have killed my uncle, he died from Soulless Anemia. “I’m guessing you’re thinking of the Soulless Anemia he died from. It’s true he died from that, however it isn’t a disease that everyone thinks it is. It’s a poison. After the people started noticing that people were dying in a very particular way long ago, my… organization found out that birds could carry the poison without being affected, we decided to inject some pheasants every once in a while. So when they started searching for a cause to the deaths, they found the pheasants and guessed it to be some rare disease. By the way my organization coined the term.”
“Why are you telling me this? I couldn’t keep my voice calm, it was starting to mirror my anger, I tried to keep inside.
“For that reason right there! I inform you that your family isn’t dying from an unfortunate outbreak in disease, but from an assassin’s poison. Me, being the assassin.” He laughed to himself.
I was outraged and he wanted this to happen. Other’s pain and suffering caused him joy. He was truly a sick man. “So why were you ordered to assassinate all the Void Demons? Aren’t you a Void Demon?”
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
He subsided his laughs a little and snorted, “I so wish to tell you ‘cause I felt like it’, however since you are on my targeted list, I will tell you. It is for ultimate power. Power of that beyond a king or an emperor, the power of a god. I know, I know, ‘but where does genocide come in’” He said in a mocking voice. He continues, “Because in order to obtain this power according to ancient scripts, there were more than just your average humans you see today. Long ago, the scripts says, they were beings with demon like powers in human like bodies.
The name of the race has long since been forgotten. They had died out, but before the last one died he had been granted one wish. The wish being godhood. They had demon like powers but human like bodies, also meant they had the life span of a human as well. The purge of that race was led by demons, the reason was unknown. However, the one whom was given godhood, do you know of his name? You should, it’s all the rage in human religion.”
I was stunned by the information he gave me, I do realize information changes over time, and it’s easy to understand how this information could have changed into that of religious text, if it were true. “So you exterminate a race and you are granted a wish. Easiest race to exterminate would be the one with fewest in numbers, being the Void Demons. All in the name of a wish? That’s nuts!”
He shrugged, “Well, we are banking on it being a wish that will be granted on to us, however, if it comes up to be that there is no wish, which there may be not one, we get rid of one of the most powerful races of demons. It’s a win-win.”
“So why here? How did bring me here?” This is all that’s been bothering me.
“Hmph, well, it was because I needed to trap a god as well. And what’s better is that I can force her to bring her creations to this place.”
He glanced over to the altar to his left. My eyes are drawn to the altar and I laid eyes upon a tragic sight.
I saw a woman elegant in form, skin as black as knight and feathery wings and long, wavy hair equal in color. She had on a long, snow white dress with gold trimmings. She would have been absolutely perfect in any sense of the word beauty, if it wasn’t for the fact that she was covered in cuts and chains that bound her to the altar, almost in a sacrificial fashion. Some of the carvings in her flesh went so deep, oh so deep. There was so much blood it had looked as though she had paint splashed upon her. Her blood was different though it wasn’t the usual color, it was gold and seemed like it was thicker too like it didn’t want to flow but it was forced to by the knife that was still embedded in her leg.
Looking back at the culprit, I couldn’t believe what was happening. “What have you done?”
“Hey I wouldn’t be too hasty if I were you.” He looks over behind his shoulder and I see my parents unconscious on the ground.