by Callie Stone
The thing had no humanity in it, a complete absence of any trace of a soul. It was a chilling effect that I could sense from where we stood no small distance away. Even that irritating flying thing had been full of life compared to the dead-eyed monstrosity glaring upon us then.
If I had ever seen a demon, the thing that was somehow accomplishing the task of sending a heftier chill up my spine than the other horrors, surmounting it was a demon indeed.
The demon saw us and stopped, spending an especial shiver up my spine to compete with all the gruesomeness I had just witnessed. I could feel its malevolence directed at me with focused precision. It was not Zavier, to me it was clearly not anything close to being human. Its eyes were emotionless, soulless; his face a stony mask. Grey skin and black veins covered the entirety of his face. His black nails were as sharp and long as swords.
“Go away, little angels,” he said with a grisly voice, sounding so startlingly close in spite of its clear distance from us, repeating his demon comrade’s words verbatim.
The continued talk of angels—especially in reference to both Natasha and myself—was mystifying and already growing quite irritating atop the unthinkable nighttime of an ordeal that seemed to just be getting underway.
It was a relief when the demon and its presence seemed to just evaporate into the horror-stenched atmosphere.
“Not Zavier,” was Natasha’s only comment, perhaps part of a slow realisation as she, like I, struggled to take so much in after being tossed into the Kingdom’s realm like die from a Yahtzee cup.
We continued trudging through the near-lifeless world towards the castle, and it became clearer as we drew near that the building had no more nor fortifications nor even tenants thereof. It was indeed what we would have been considered a palace rather than a castle in the kingdom. It surely must have been one of the main palaces of the kingdom. My memory, even as old as my memories of the kingdom were by then, was starting to feel foggier than was standard for me as I could not discern if it was the main palace or just another one of the similar structures which I’d recalled.
Even in the kingdom’s war torn state, the building itself was still monumental with a breathtaking regal feel to its architecture. It was something to behold, even as Natasha and I walked through the breached palace door .
Natasha and I began exploring the enormous old building with the same uneasy yet respectful quietude with which we’d walked there. It looked as elegant on the inside as it did on the outside. There was an awful sound traveling the brick walls of the palace. It was a groan of desperation, of starvation, pain and suffering. And as we silently walked the halls, clearing cobwebs from our path, the painful voice became a symphony of suffering, of the imprisoned, tortured and dying.
“What is that noise?” Natasha asked quietly although we were out in the open and likely not hidden from the dark forces who must have been nearby, if not in the palace itself.
“The prisoners and the tortured,” I replied, feeling my right hand begin to clench back into a fist, along with my left hand that time as a crimson aura of anger flashed before my eyes.
“What manner of man are you?” I heard a voice from around the corner call out. “A man of the light leads our rescue, yet you walk with him? You are a creature of darkness to do so!”
“No! Please do not pass us, for we are blind and you are still gifted with sight! Please!”
The voices seemed to notice us, wherever there were coming from. They were spouting what sounded like jagged fragments of Old Testament verses mixed in with bits of half-crazed nonsense, albeit it was nonsense which may have made more sense to me when I still remembered much of the culture of the kingdom.
The trauma of the demonic ravaging of the fae kingdom ran deep.
“Who do you think you are?” a devilish voice, one that sounded very familiar, croaked near us, accompanied by a sudden, sulphurous stink.
It was that cryptic, soulless troll again, who Natasha had earlier mistaken for Zavier. Full demon for certain, although his look and manner were so familiar.
“How have you not been seized?” the demon demanded.
“Who are you?” Natasha asked, again demonstrating her fearlessness.
The brute did begin to resemble Zavier more closely as it deliberately stepped out of the shadows and closer to us. It was about the same size, at the very least.
“Who am I?” the thing mocked. “I am your leader and you will give me the respect that I am due!”
“You are no leader of mine, fiend.” I took it upon myself to respond to that absurd demand.
The Zavier-looking demon’s stink and snark seemed to shrink ever so slightly as it drew itself closer to us. Natasha had seemingly earned some small sliver of its respect.
“Call me...Kalgin.”
After stating his name, the demon’s intensity seemed to reduce even more, belying some amount of exhaustion.
“Kalgin?” I asked, not believing it was him there, a high ranking demon of inner hell, there in my former kingdom.
“Zavier’s father?” Natasha asked, just as confused by the revelation as you were. “But Zavier was a demon, his name…”
“Was a fake one, yes,” Kalgin told us. “I gave him that name to mock my own faults, my failings.” There was no way on earth or in Kalgin’s own kingdom of the lower realms that he was telling the truth with that oddly candid-sounding statement.
“What are you even talking about?” I demanded of the loathsome creature, sick of all it’s word and head games.
Kalgin would have been among the last creatures in any world to make the truth less nebulous. His hellish mode, ongoing through eternity, would be to obfuscate, to confuse, and to put an end to any sort of lightness be it the light of truth or the light of life.
Kalgin began to grow before our eyes, shifting from his more humanoid form, either in his physicality or in another hallucinatory projection as part of some demonic mental warfare. With a slick, repulsive squishing sound, two horns pushed themselves through above his temples, growing rapidly and twisting themselves in chaotic swirls above his head. The black holes which made up Kalgin’s eyes finally showed some presence of colour, but it was a muddy, brownish glow with an undercurrent of the white-hot flames of Hades.
I turned to look at Natasha just as the entire hallway, the entire place started to rattle and vibrate as if from an earthquake. Before I could see Natasha, before I could try to take in her expression to glean what she was thinking, we tumbled through a newly formed crack in the palace’s outer wall.
At first, I thought we may have been sent through another portal, and worse, losing my teammate Natasha. Before I could even react I had already fallen several feet down into a slimy, muddy bog. By the continued echoes of demons scampering about and fairies and humans crying in pain in the distance, I could tell we hadn’t been sent through another portal but were in the kingdom. I looked around in the darkness, frantically trying to find where Natasha had ended up.
“That was his father,” I heard Natasha’s voice murmur softly before I spotted her lying on the ground next to me.
It was if Natasha were trying to figure it out, or to process another few bits of this ill-fitting puzzle from hell as it came together quickly and chaotically.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“I’m fine.” Natasha demonstrated this by pushing herself up off the ground and helping to pull me up by my arms. I did my best to stand quickly as we needed to preserve our strength.
“What do we do now?” There was a genuine curiosity as to what Natasha’s opinion was starting to burn at my mind with a surprising intensity. However, before she could even begin to answer, the sound of belligerent, hoofed footsteps quickly approaching from some nearby angle sent us both to run—near-simultaneously, as if we shared the same mind—and stealthily dive behind a row of overgrown bushes by the palace’s outer wall.
We both ended up laying close to the ground, much in the same position as we were
after tumbling from the inside corridor, as that is how we were least visible to whoever’s unfriendly footsteps those were passing close by.
We stayed there, painfully still, until the group of clomping footfalls seemed to pass. And, perhaps to rest, we both seemed to have some silent agreement to lay still for just another moment.
“I never got to finish making breakfast.” For whatever reason, that was the thought I’d felt important to share right then. I thought of the half-cooked fry up growing cold on the burner back in the flat in Paris. I even thought about how unlikely it was that any of the others had bothered to clean it up.
Natasha, surprisingly, chuckled in that moment.
“I’m sure our teammates just left it there.”
We looked at each other, both still in the spots where we’d been momentarily hiding.
“I was just thinking that.” The traces of a smile Natasha had fell rapidly, and I knew it was time for us both to refocus.
“How will we get back there?”
“We’ll find a way,” she said, her voice suddenly growing much quieter. “But for now we need to get out of here.” She gestured to the direction from which the footsteps came. I could hear them clearly again, and that time there was no doubt they were headed right to where we were.
Natasha leaned away from where I was laying, towards the edge of the bushes farthest from me. As she pushed herself up slightly by her left arm, it seemed clear to me that Natasha was trying to make a break for it—perhaps with the intention of running back across the open area from which we had come.
If that were indeed Natasha’s plan, it was not a particularly bad one, despite the obvious risks. For one, there had seemed to be less demon activity in that area than there was around the other sides of the palace. Additionally, whatever portal it had been we had traveled through—whether it was a demon created portal or the less likely scenario of a magic circle portal created by fairies with dark intentions—it may have still been open somewhere around there, although neither of us had spotted any evidence of that after our arrival.
As the footfalls became closer, Natasha froze before moving any farther in that direction. She looked silently back at me, likely with some of those same considerations running through her mind and trying to confer with me of the best course of action.
While turning all of those facts around in my brain once more as quickly as I could, the decision was finally made for us by the sound of the hooved footsteps approaching from that very direction, sending Natasha and I to bolt the other way.
All I could think about was how we would likely be spotted either way, and that bit of unpleasant logic inspired the perhaps less than logical move of leaping into one of the newly formed cracks in the palace’s structure, climbing the rest of the way through the breach in the building’s wall and finally jumping down into a corridor not far from where we had just seen Kalgin.
While I had been in front of Natasha, like any of my teammates I was aware she was more than capable of following me through that mild bit of acrobatics, and sure enough I heard her shoes gracefully hit the ground just behind me soon after I had landed.
While it was certainly no surprise to me that Natasha was able to follow me easily back into the palace, what I was less sure of was her opinion on the amount of intrusive I had taken leading us in there.
“Really?” Natasha whispered almost immediately, the harshness in that single word giving away that she was indeed less than pleased with that course of action. “Right into the demon’s lair?”
A sigh escaped me then. Not because of Natasha’s objections, which were not exactly unreasonable, but because of the conceit of the kingdom’s former palace becoming, quite accurately, a demon’s lair.
“You probably don’t have to whisper,” I responded, still using a bit of a whisper myself. “I’m sure he knows we’re here regardless.”
“Exactly!” chided Natasha as we began walking again, as we had been, down the empty corridor.
We had fled the demons outside the palace walls but had ended up inside those walls again, in a place that was likely no less dangerous, to say the least.
I thought of that half-cooked breakfast once again as Natasha and I began roaming the palace halls and the perfect idiomatic description of our situation became clear to me:
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
3
From Hell to Eternity
Zavier
Before I had reached that insipid fairy kingdom, I had spent a year relegated to the deepest layer of the lower realm.
There, I had spent plenty of time in solitary agony, as that place was not meant for anything with human blood, and it served as a constant reminder that I was not a full demon by birth.
However, I would always be enough of a demon that a year meant the same thing to me that eternity meant, which was fuck all.
If the rest of my life was spent in the deepest pit of eternal damnation, I would consider myself to be lucky, given my lot of being cursed with sickening vestiges of humanity in my heart and soul. That was my mindset when I finally reached that fairy kingdom; I had nothing to lose. It was only when I arrived that I realised they were just short humanoids rather than the delicate winged creatures one normally sees in paintings and stories.
I found them disgusting.
They had the hearts and desires of the worst and most cloyingly saccharine of humanity, with unearned immortality and freedom from human suffering which could give the fairies even a modicum of character.
It was as if the entire fairy race had collectively committed the worst sin a creature could make; they chose to be boring. The rest of their nature was not worth mentioning, but suffice to say they were the lowest sort of prey.
Of course, I worked with the help of the competent demonic legions brought forth by my father, Kalgin. So refreshingly competent were they that I often felt myself to be like an idle prince of that revolting little kingdom, wandering the emptied halls of its former main palace.
What’s more, Kalgin, who I had to thank for everything that was good and useful in my anecdotal makeup, had arranged for me to be freed from my boring and utterly useless time in the lowest levels of hell by allowing me to show my face again with the possibility of full demon status.
The opportunity was certainly alluring, but as part of the alleged ritual, my father had demanded the souls of every being—be that human or creature—he felt had wronged him. As one of the highest priests of the lower realms, my father would know what was required. But, like any worthwhile demons, his motivations were bound to be suspect.
Yet, whether working for my father’s interests or my own, my days in that war-torn fairy realm were growing long and remarkably wearisome. My time roaming the former palace halls most evenings provided a pathetic excuse for the entertainment I should have been entitled to after a long day’s work.
The fairy folk’s architecture was bland and boring to look at, and even the cries of the tortured fairies and humans heard from many sections of the palace were bland and embarrassing for the insipid souls involved. Or maybe out was there annoying remnants of my humanity forcing me to feel that way.
That’s what I would tell myself in my weaker moments when the pangs of guilt would hit me.
Still, the jobs had to be done, and all of those fairy souls and even sadder and weaker human souls were going straight to my father to fuel his own needs. I couldn’t disappoint the old man now, not after he went through all the trouble of rescuing me from the damnation of eternal embarrassment.
Maybe that was another of the vestiges of human still within me, but that was a fate I had no taste for enduring.
I could still remember hearing his voice beaming in from some unknown direction and distance as I was in exile. It was not a voice I had expected to hear, but I would admit that in the moment it was a welcome vibe, and what it had offered was at the time beyond welcome to my ears.
Kalgin told me that he would rescue me
from that fate, but only if I promised, naturally, to serve him as he demanded and fulfill the clear goals he would lay out. At the time I didn’t dare hesitate. After all, he clearly knew what he was doing.
Good salesmanship was an asset in any realm.
“My soul for the pain! My soul to burn! Make the truth be known and my suffering to stop!”
There they were again, those asinine, nonsense pleas polluting a perfectly good empty palace.
“Shut up!” I wanted to shout to all of the tortured voices on one particularly grey and boring day in the palace. “Just accept your damnation and be done with it!”
Somehow, I didn’t think that’s what they wanted to hear, but they continued to wail all the same. Sissies.
Whilst I was spending yet another evening wandering, and yelling at the piteous mewling about the halls aimlessly, that the ground began to tremble. It started softly at first, barely noticeable.
And soon enough, it had passed. Immediately afterwards I’d stopped, out of sheer boredom and nothing else, to examine a tiny crack which had formed beneath my feet during the tremor. The crack itself was just that—a waste of time to even look at—but just before I moved on, I noticed something else on the ground: a thin wisp of ashen-blonde hair glinting in what little daylight there was. With some difficulty I retrieved the hair from the ground. It was so fine that I could barely get a grip on it. So fine that some would even call it ‘Angel hair’.
She was there, I knew it immediately. And if she was there, then they were also there.
I crept through the halls as silently as I could, but the old wooden floors still creaked under my feet no matter how gently I stepped. Still, they didn’t seem to have noticed me, engrossed in their own argument as they were.
I did my best to look disinterested and I was surprised when I turned the corner to spot them.
