Money was a problem. I had some for now, but that was a bunch of cash I had gathered up over the years in the Woven Forest.
Most realms had their own form of currency but The Asrin Dollar was accepted almost everywhere, even in hell. There was a reason why the Merchants Guild and the Adventuring Guild had moved their bases here within the last five centuries.
There were a lot of jobs here, sure, but very few of them would hire me. And of the few places that would hire me, it would only be because of my half-demon nature and not in spite of it.
I would rather die than work for folks like that. As much as I hated to admit it, demons weren’t discriminated against unjustly. They were evil, inherently. There was no goodness or kindness in a demon's heart only corruption.
Even the one that had fathered me had done it under a pact. It was a price my mother paid for a ritual, one done on behalf of Archina. It was something akin to celestial espionage. She laid with the demon in return for information of sorts, and I was born as a byproduct.
I managed my demon blood fairly well. There were methods to do so and stay in control and I had collected them over the years.
But I was the exception. Most half-demons turned full by the time they hit puberty. You’d either have to kill them before they fully turned or banish them into the abyss afterward. Either way, half-demons were dangerouse.
I was dangerouse.
I sighed and flipped through the book some more.
Adventuring was quickly starting to look like my only option for good and steady work. But still, if I could get something, anything, that allowed me to learn as I worked, I would have preferred that over running around in a dungeon and killing undead.
I could do it of course. Hell, I could probably do it better than most. I was apt at killing and familiar with monsters of all sorts. I’d lived in the Woven Forest for decades on my own, and even though I couldn’t deal with anything decently strong, I could evade most monsters and burn through the weaker ones.
“Shit,” I mumbled as I got up and slammed the book lightly.
I might have to be an adventurer.
“Dammit.”
It wasn’t the worst job in the world. It could pay well and if you had a knack for it, you might even come out of a millionaire, or even a billionaire if you got something nice. I’d even heard of a couple of adventurers who became trillionaires comparable in power to the High Families themselves, basically buying their way into nobility.
But that was exceedingly rare, borderline impossible. And just because I’d be decent at doesn’t mean I’d want to do it. I’d spent most of my life trying to survive on my own since childhood, and I barely had anything to show for it.
I wasn’t too keen to jump into it again.
But I couldn’t think of many other ways of making money, not with my bloodline.
I thought about it as I let my clothes in from the wash. The dry cloth construct looked at me and saluted.
“How’d you dry yourself?”
My clothes looked at me and made a gesture pointing outside to the lobby. Ah, the fireplace.
“Smart,” I replied.
It nodded its non-existent head in response.
“Dismissed,” I replied and the clothing constructing flew up and apart, each of the items landing perfectly folded on the table.
I relaxed as I felt the magic drain slowly shut off as the connection between me and the spirits crumbled away. Even that was a fairly excessive drain on my mana pool. True it was a more powerful spirit than the ones in the skeletons but still, it hurt.
I doubted I’d be able to maintain a constant spirit summon like that without locking myself out of most of my spells.
For all my understanding of magic, I lacked stamina. I also couldn’t touch half of my mana pool, because going beneath that much would risk turning, even if the risk was minute. And then add in my lack of specialization and I was basically the most unattractive hire in the city, or at least the top one hundred.
I sighed and collapsed into my bed.
“Adventuring here I come.”
********
The boy was happy, which was different than most days.
Most days he was mad. Not, not mad, something more than mad. The others in the tribe had called him evil. Demonic.
He would sometimes be caged and tied up, just because of how evil he was being. Only his mother did that. She said it was necessary sometimes, but only while he was young. She said it would be better when he got older.
He hoped she was right. All he knew was that sometimes he’d feel bad and just… wanted to do bad things to people. It wasn’t anger or just plain hatred. He had felt those things before and he knew them, but this was different.
No, what he felt was compulsion. An ever-burning urge to destroy. It was like an itch at the back of his brain or a horse that consistently leaned left, no matter how well you rode it. It wouldn’t straighten. It wouldn’t fix, but most days it was small, and his mother had taught him methods of keeping himself on track.
“Small constant adjustments,” she said. “That’ll keep you on track.”
Sometimes she’d just start lecturing him, right when he got upset or annoyed.
“Watch your eyes, Elrun. Watch not what you see, but how see it. When the skies seem dim and when the world seems irritating, that’s when it starts. Watch out for the small changes. That will keep you on track.”
That was what she told him. And she was right, the evil wouldn’t come all at once, but rather in bits and pieces, and when he noticed those bits, he would tame his mind. Irritation and anger were the low tides before the tsunami and he would ready himself for the feelings that would come after.
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That worked most of the time. He would only break when bad things would happen too fast. One of the boys in his tribe had punched once when he was doing nothing but reading a book. Elrun had tried then to keep hold, to not let the evil in, but the boy didn’t stop.
He brought his friends. They were all older than him, and they were all mages, all days away from being shipped off to the Dark City to train in the magical arts.
And they cast spells. Well, cantrips really, but they hurt. Flame whisp was a spell that created a candle’s flame atop your finger. It was useless in combat and mainly used during camping or cooking, as a means to start a fire.
But fire was fire, and fire burned.
It burned when they held it against his skin. It burnt when they poked him and then cast the cantrip, manifesting the spelling within his skin and it burnt when they all poked him and cast it at the same time.
The group was a mix of boys and girls, and though a boy led the group, the cruelest one had been a girl who held a flame in her hand. A fireball spell, small as it may be still a spell and still far more dangerouse than a cantrip.
Elrun remembered feeling panicked and fearful, he remembered fear and pain, and then he remembered nothing.
He blinked, and then suddenly he was bloody. For a moment he thought it was from his own wounds, his own cuts. But then he looked around and saw them, children, people, enemies, all bloody and screaming on the floor.
None of them were dead, not yet. But they were missing some parts, teeth for the lucky ones, ears and fingers for the rest. Elurn didn’t know how or why, all he did know was that he seemed fine. His wounds had all healed. But that was normal. He’d always been a fast healer.
But the other kids were torn up, like broken dolls. He wondered what had happened and looked around curiously to see what had attacked them.
A monster? A bandit? Why had they not run away? Why hadn’t they tried to fight back?
Their wails came in like the coldness of winter. They were screaming? How had he not noticed that?
They were loud, piercing, and afraid. They called for their mothers and fathers, they called for someone, anyone, to come help them.
Elurn tried to help them, trying to ask them what happened. He knew some healing cantrips, maybe he could help.
But the moment he took a step closer to one of them, they all screamed louder. He backed up. Maybe they wanted someone official? A healer of some sort. Elurn waited, trying to talk to them while praying that someone else would arrive soon.
And someone did come, an adult. One of the townspeople appeared and… hit him. They attacked him. The kids kept screaming and pointing, while a few of the dark elves kneeled by their sides, stuffing them with healing potions and looking at him with anger. The others had started to come at him, choke him. One of them had even cast a lightning spell, almost striking him in their rage.
“Kill the damn thing,” one of them screamed. “Kill it before she comes.”
And they almost had.
But before they could kill him, his mother came and all grew silent.
His mother was a high priestess of Archina, one of the patron gods of the Dark Elves. She was powerful and beloved within the town. All respected her, but more than that, all feared her.
She had almost killed them that day.
The kids were healed but held back for one more year before going off to the Dark City. They had been excited to leave, excited to grow and see a world beyond the town, but his mother had taken that from them, citing their injuries and immaturity as a reason to stay.
As for the adults that had threatened him, his mother had forgiven them. Seeing that they were parents themselves in fear for their children, she had both empathized and accepted their behavior and had warned them to not speak to Elurn ever again.
It was a small vague threat, but that was all the more reason for them to believe it.
After that, no one talked to Elurn, not the children or the adults. It was sad at times. The moments when he didn’t have books or wasn’t practicing magic. The moments when his mother wasn’t there and no one would even acknowledge his existence. Those strange moments of isolation and absolute apathy he’d see in people’s eyes.
Those moments hurt the most.
He had tried to talk to them, but even then he was ignored. The townspeople couldn’t harm him, but after that day, they universally shunned him, ignoring him at every turn.
And that hurt. That really hurt. It hurt more than anything he’d felt up to that point. It made him feel useless and nonexistent and he cried himself to sleep some nights.
But most of the time he read. He read anything and everything he could get his hands on. Stories, tomes, scripture, texts, encyclopedias. Anything he could read he would read and for the things he couldn’t read, he would try to learn from them.
His first mastered tier three spell was a lesser translate spell and he had mastered it at the age of twelve. But he hadn’t told anyone, not even his mother. She was always busy at the church. Sometimes she would be called away to the Astral Realm by her goddess, serving her directly in times of need. She was a powerful priestess, one of Archina’s beloved, and her soul had already earned a place by her eternal side. She was important.
She was a paladin of the Shadow Spider, an enemy of the Dark Dragon, and a hero of war of and blood. And now she had settled here, still doing some quests for the Lady of Darkness here and there, but mostly retired.
Mostly.
Then, one day, she died.
It wasn’t on a mission, nor was it out in the wild, but rather at home. Her body had been stabbed and her soul had been corrupted, tainted by a demon.
It would degrade and be kept from Archina. It would never reach its rightful place of peace in her holy realm. It was a vengeance of the highest order, breaking her soul into oblivion and destroying all she was in one go.
Gothen Rathor had died that day, in the entire sense of the word. Lady Archina managed to make sure her soul wasn’t damned to hell or the abyss, but it wasn’t saveable either.
The only solution was for it to be put into the astral realm. There her soul would break and degrade down into the spirits of lesser things. There she would be no more.
The Lady of Shadows cared for her servants and for Gothen, she had wept. He had seen her, the divine being, the Goddess, he had seen her weep by his mother’s breaking soul.
And he had raged.
It was strange that he didn’t lose himself that day. It was strange that he didn’t turn. By all means, he should have. He should have turned into an absolute monster, killing and burning everything in blind hatred.
But he didn’t. He couldn’t. A demon had killed his mother. A thing. The same thing that lived in him. The same being that would win, that he would become if he gave into it all.
He refused that sentence. He would not become a demon. Not now, not ever.
That day the boy swore a silent promise of vengeance. One that would be cold and permanent. A mortal’s vengeance, a demon’s death.
He promised to find it. He promised to kill it. Not banish it, not damn it, not just hurt it, but to kill it. To wipe the thing off of reality. To break that demon’s soul into oblivion.
He swore that to himself.
But to do that, he would need to survive the night. He would need to survive his own anger and grief. He would need to leave the town as the clan that refused to speak to him had quickly cast him out. He needed to stay calm as they took his mother’s things, claiming they belonged to the church and not to the half-demon bastard she had born.
He needed to keep himself even then.
Sometimes he would remember things.
His mother.
The coldness of her body.
The visions from Lady Archina.
The words of his mother's fading soul.
The hole in her chest.
The hole in her chest.
The hole in her chest.
The hole in her chest.
Many nights he almost broke.
Almost.
He cried every night under a tree or out in a field somewhere, not daring to light a fire for fear of being seen and not daring to make a noise for fear of being heard.
Silent tears would run down his face. He was afraid. Afraid and angry, angry and hateful, hateful and empty.
But yet he kept himself. He refused to become that thing. That monster. He would find it. He would end it. He would kill it.
He would kill it.
He would kill it.
And for that reason he kept himself.
For vengence.
Anger, hatred, love, pain, all of it was thrown away. In the place of passion came something cold and ticking. Something with gears instead of blood, and a furnace instead of a heart.
Vengeance. He would have it, no matter the cost.
********
I woke up feeling angry and grumbled. That happened sometimes.
Dreams were common enough, and that specific dream was all too common
I could feel the demon blood in me rousing, that was always what triggered these dreams.
I closed my eyes and meditated, calming my emotions and casting a relaxing spell all over my body. My muscles loosened, my fists unballed and my whole body went limp.
“Not today,” I whispered as the demon blood receded.
“Not ever.”
Then I went back to sleep.
I wondered if they had antidream potions around here.