by Kate Gallwey
I shifted shape again in a deserted alley, this time to a Hellion male and I entered the Lakeside where the women and children of the various races were kept in strict isolation from each other. What I saw there shocked and sickened me, females kept for two reasons only, to bare sons and to be sperm buckets for the males. I heard the beatings and wails as I moved silently in the shadows, weaving spells of invisibility and ‘no notice’.
Screams of pain came from one of the Barracks, where the single warriors are ‘stabled’. I looked in and found about twenty of these ‘animals’ taking their turns on two of their females. Similar scenes were taking place across the city. Hellion females grow up in these Barracks taken from their mothers at roughly age twelve human years to serve the males. Only the strongest of their females survived this harsh abuse.
Marriage to an officer was a way out but they had to survive an obscure tradition of ‘Walking the Tables’ that killed many hopeful brides. I later enjoyed this stupid ritual myself, there were deaths. Then I didn’t understand what it was all about, just horrified at the cruelty and injustice of it all. The boys were taken from their mothers at about age ten in human terms, they have longer cycles on their world so take longer to mature, but they do not die of old age; that is mostly human thing.
I had to step back from it emotionally and come to understand and then to tolerate that there are different ways beings go about things and what looked cruel to me may be the Hellion female’s choice of how things should be. It was not my place to interfere.
I strolled casually through the Citadel to the Great Hall and found many demons battling with each other in an arena of sorts and small coins being thrown at them by the crowd. There was drinking and strange off world drugs and herbs being consumed and smoked, a fair amount of naked females of many races being used and beaten.
There in the centre of it all was Lucian, with a naked demon with six breasts on his lap. They were very much involved with each other.
There were four huge lions in a cage as well as several off world animals all fierce and battle scared, these all had their time in the arena to fight for their lives.
Blood washed down the floors and tables from the foods and meats and the remains of someone’s arm left under a table. Jarring music was coming from four winged creatures and the noise was loud and strange to my ears. I had fallen down a rabbit hole and was really stunned at what I saw.
I found a quiet room and cast a spell to secretly show me other spell casters in the city. There was about fifty in the Citadel and five in the surrounding areas, not many considering there was about thirty five thousand beings in this city, the largest city on the planet.
The spell casters didn’t notice my spell and then I left back to Mù very tired and very shocked.
Ok, first things first, I was not jealous. I had shared my body with countless humans since we had arrived here. But what had shocked me was the level of sophistication and diversity in the party.
My all night orgies were so tame and gentle in comparison. At least no blood was spilt and no one died.
My ego was upset, I had prided myself on the level of civilization and sexuality I had achieved and found that Lucian seemed to exceeded it. I hadn’t been aware of it being a competition or a race until then. I got stuck in the easy life in the jungles. I need conflict to grow just like my humans. This was an uncomfortable thought as conflict would mean the destruction of my people, but maybe I could just observe conflict and learn from these demons from afar.
So, with this sort of logic in mind, I set in motion a war between Demon Kind.
CHA
PTER TEN
the rise Of eMPires
Motivating warlike beings to go to war is not as easy as it appears. I needed to create a communication network that could link my empire around the world. I had to meld humans together as one and I needed to gather information on the different breeds of Demons on Earth.
I started by creating a cult of the Serpent Goddess whose human priests could call me from my temples with magic and I would answer. Throughout the human world ‘Temples of the Serpent’ sprang up, creating a world wide communications network. I needed knowledge about the demons, type, habits, abilities etc. and the information flooded in.
It gave me quite a headache but I classified over four hundred types of demons (there were many more but I was counting only the ones in Asia and Lucian’s bunch of animals.) Only twenty two are established and war orientated.
I needed to find a demon band that was strong enough to take on the might of Babylon.
I started to spread my human population across North Africa and around the Mediterranean. Little towns and villages grew across the islands and into Greece, Italy and Spain. We avoided Babylon’s warships by stealth and magic. Staying small and spreading quickly. Nothing threatening or aggressive, we built defences of circular stone walls around the larger towns and harbours but mostly wooden fences were used to keep out the wild animals.
We encroached on Babylon from the South and North. Temples of the Serpent were in every town and village and I did my best to visit every one when it was completed. The High Priest or Priestess could call me when they had information about demons, Lucian or a serious problem that needed magic or advice.
Some of the finest builders in the human world made contact with a demon race that was dying in the oxygen rich Earth air. They were gentle beings and couldn’t return home and were called the Anu.
They could lift hundreds of tons with their minds and work strange time bending magic and we gave them a home in North Africa, in what is now called Egypt, in those days they called it the Black Lands due to the black fertile mud on the banks of the river. They were humanoid in shape but had large elongated heads on spindly short necks and large eyes that could see in the dark. They ate only dark green vegetation and had a hard time growing it so we helped them grow food and they helped us build massive temples and cities that lasted thousand of years and many, of which, survive today.
We started building and they helped by raising huge blocks of stone and taking them to the chosen sites where humans shaped and carved them using a technology involving crystals lasers – we were not as primitive as you modern day humans like to think, in a lot of ways we were more advanced than you are today.
Many of those old monuments are visited by the thousand today. If we had the technology to those sorts of things then, what do you think we can achieve today?
The building continued for a thousand years until the gentle Anu died out. We learnt much from them. Humans now had beautiful cities up and down the Nile and I ruled an empire.
I ruled out of what today is Alexandria and we established our capitol. The religion was learning and magic, the death cults came much later when I had been asked not to visit anymore. I involved pleasure at every opportunity but I had a drive now to help my people survive and to dominate their own world. I studied battle magic and spells of death and madness.
Magic of any kind requires a strong will and an imagination to see what you want happening in your mind and bring it forth into the physical reality. Words help you to focus especially in battle when the fear of death puts everything into a panic. Telepathy, empathy and telekinetics are trainable in most humans but nowadays most humans don’t have the discipline to achieve the focus required. In Karnak, way down river, we developed magic to a high degree of magic and telepathy and had mighty schools of magic that could shake mountains with their power, but this was not much use on the battlefield as it would kill everyone including the enemy.
I had little actual battle knowledge then; I needed to see Lucian humbled by my skills in battle and war, what a young fool I was.
I found the Dragon Clan in what is now China rearing for a fight, so with some shift shaping and a little manipulation on my part, they started recruiting for a fight with Lucian. I really only started the ball rolling they did the rest themselves.
The single horned horse-like demons and the
great flying cats were strong allies of the Dragon Clan, they too wanted a piece of Babylon. The Centaurs also joined in and the one-eyed giants, as did the tall giant female race called the Amazons. Over ten thousand demons came to fight under the Dragons flag. But Lucian had over thirty five thousand, and I didn’t even know that.
Know thy enemy, we had no bloody idea!
Humans were not told of what was going on, just to keep out of the way. The idea of retaliation did not occur to me.
I was just high on the chance to command. I had taken the form of a Gryphon noble and there were twelve nobles commanding, two from each species that had war knowledge, the rest were just willing to follow. We drew up plans and assessed weapons and troop strength, like children playing with toy soldiers. On a field of battle numbers are only half the problem, the other half is tactics and will of the troops.
Many demons irritated or insulted by Lucian joined us; we didn’t think to check that they weren’t spies; it just didn’t occur to me that Babylon might know that we were coming or that they would strike first.
My learning curve was steep and at great cost. Our side was not prepared when Lucian swept down the Indus Valley where we had our encampment of about twenty thousand sentient beings of over eight different races. He had overwhelming numbers and began to slaughter our horned magicians; history would remember them as Unicorns.
They wielded a beautiful but deadly magic that entices and slaughters swiftly, their horn could kill the impure of heart with a stroke, in our surprise most of them were wiped out in that first sweep.
We retaliated with waves of deadly magic and the sky rippled with pain and terror at our enemies, clouds of death and madness filled the valley and then we unleashed the dragons.
It was a sight I will never forget six hundred dragons flaming the advancing enemy. The dragons were mostly golds and silvers with a black here and there, the blues and greens are the teachers and healers and do not fight. All had an armoured rider on their backs that share the dragons mind exclusively with a bond that was established at hatching and both die if one does.
There are few dragons left today and the Dragon Lords have died out completely but a few dragons have survived by linking with a human and this link is one way of extending human life beyond the ‘three score years and ten’ limits, though they are an arrogant breed and I have had some trouble with them recently.
The Hellions formed a huge shield with their individual interlocking shields and much of the dragons flame bounced off the sheltering warriors underneath, they also sheltered the colossal catapults from the flame. These fired huge flaming spears and stone from these catapults and with time and some losses, took out every dragon, filling the sky with screaming flaming dragon as they fell to their deaths.
Magic filled the skies from both sides, fire storms took out whole battalions, ice and hail halted the advance for an hour or two, I had laid traps of ‘hungry grass’ and ‘turn to stone’, but they were not nearly complete nor enough.
Sheet of colour filled the sky as Demon magic fought Demon magic. Howling nightmares with tentacles and teeth fought each other for domination, conjured up by each side’s magicians. Old stories of the Wild Hunt come from this time, of nightmares come to life with claws and death at even a glimpse.
Many humans that watched from afar went mad under the horrific images that were thrown by both sides, and tales of the War of the Gods and Demons are still remembered today in human history books.
We fought bravely out numbered for about nineteen days and were on a desperate retreat when I noticed smoke coming from the nearby human town of Indus. I went there immediately and found the town being attacked by a battalion of Hellions.
I changed to my true form and attacked them with all my strength, stopping the butchery of the humans who lived there. There was dead humans everywhere, men, women and little children just cut down all over town and I was not enough, there were so many of them of the enemy and I was so tired as the battle had been going on for so long and I had not had any rest since the first attack.
I began to draw in Life Essence from the invaders. They felled drained at every corner of the town, leaving the humans untouched. I drove them back.
‘My Place. My People. Your fight is not with them!’ I stated, placing a small spell on my voice so all invaders would hear. They knew me and pulled out of the human town.
Lucian soon arrived. His troops pulled back and he walked to the front of their line and causally strolled to the remains of the human walls. I met him at the wall. I was exhausted and a bit bewildered on how everything had gone so wrong so fast. He was calm and demanded that I surrender to him, and came back to Babylon with him.
I was confused but pulling my thoughts together fast and asked what this has got to me and my people.
“This is a demon conflict and we are not involved. Why did your demons attack this human town?”
“You are mine. You will come back to Babylon and be my woman.” He replied, as if this was the natural way of things. He didn’t use the word ‘woman’, but that is about as close as I can find in English. An older word is ‘lay woman’, or ‘bed warmer’, you get the general gist.
A girl gets so many offers that she just has to refuse.
I laughed and said no way, and implied something like hell would have to freeze over first.
“Then all your humans will die.” He turned and walked away.
He pulled the remaining part of the Hellion Battalion out of the area of the Human town and continued slaughtering the rebel Demons.
Lucian crushed the remaining demons that opposed him, and then went to war with human kind.
CHA
PTER ELEVEN
exPOseD POsitiOns
He pulled his troops away from my town and concentrated on the total destruction of the Dragon Clans, it took him a few decades to track down and eliminate the survivors but many of those that did survive that big battle swore fealty to him and turned on the rest of their kin that remained Rebel to prove their loyalty.
My time would come.
His victory was complete and his forces now commanded the whole of Asia. He was ruthless in hunting down his enemies and legends of what he did to my comrades in arms are still told in the Demon Bars of today. Many who refused his rule were skinned alive and then boiled in acid, made to linger for weeks with healing spells.
Many other atrocities were carried out by Lucian to go down in history, our Creators would have been proud of him. Clans had their family members sold into the worst kind of slavery for consorting with the Rebels.
From my interference thousands of beings were left in misery or hunted down to face torture, rape and death. I tried to help all that I could and set up many colonies of Demons over seas on a large uninhabited island what is now called Australia, where they escaped Lucian’s wrath. No one knew I had been involved but I heard they were hunting for one of the Gryphon nobles that had escaped, it doesn’t take a genius, and Lucian is not one where I am involved but he is a very clever hunter; he must have figured it out that it was me.
I had allowed humans to build a few towns very closely to Babylon, and I pulled them back to the cities and started to fortify them. Lucian didn’t attack immediately, I was lucky I had about fifty years or so to prepare for war.
I could have had a hundred years and still humans would have been crushed. We just can’t stand up to that sort of force.
Walls were fortified and the weapons upgraded. Preparations were made; we did everything we could think of.
It was not enough.
Two walled cities fell to the Demons of Lucian within days of each other and the people wiped out to the last child and the cities burnt to ashes, these cities had huge mines of the crystal used in our power generators and lasers the explosion filled the sky and the force of the fires could be seen for miles, they were Sodom and Gomorrah. Even today you can find their names in your human history books.
This was our first
indication that the war had started. Each city had close to sixteen thousand humans in them. I think I have those cities names forever engraved in my memory; history remembers them in their destruction.
I fought with them to the last soldier and transported up to ten people at a time away at a time. In a city of sixteen thousand I saved only fifteen hundred or near about. It was a desperate time and I fought to exhaustion.
I learnt that being an immortal Goddess to a people that were being slaughtered and butchered devastating, and I found that I could hear the thousands that called to me while dying, their faces haunted my sleep and I could not think of any way to stop it. I had to harden up considerably but then I could not just leave my people to die alone and risked my life many times just to hold a human soldier’s hand as the light faded from his eyes.
I asked Gaia for help but she returned my own words to me, ‘people evolve by conflict’. I had to grow or die.
I took council from the group of human leaders in Karnak and Alexandria that had been elected for life to make the major decisions for my people. I had seat on the council but at the end the decisions was theirs.
I always prefer independence for my children and teaching them responsibility and to think and rule for themselves is part of that. Beside I soon got very bored making the every day decisions for nearly four hundred thousand humans.
They watched the human towns and villages fight and die, through the huge scrying mirror at Karnak. This could see what was happening anywhere in the world, like TV but had no sound. The Council saw with horror what we were up against.
After a week of discussions they wanted me to talk to Lucian and see if I could get a truce or at least a withdrawal of the women and children from the war zone. These people were so gentle and naive and could not conceive of the reason that most of the demon army goes to war is to rape the enemy women.
