A Demon Is Here

Adam knelt beside his wife. He reached out and gently closed Orin’s eyes. He held his son’s cold hand for a single moment, so briefly that only those closest to him saw it.

Then he looked up.

“How did he die?”

Anastasia was still staring at her son’s face, but her voice came out steady. “There’s no wound. No poison. Nothing touched him from outside.”

Her fingers rested lightly against Orin’s temple. “It’s his head. Everything inside it… burst, all at once. As though something too large had been forced into a space far too small.”

“...His divination,” Ezra said hoarsely from the doorway. He was looking at the ash scattered across the floor. “Look at the parchments. He was in the middle of a reading. Every one of them rotted at the same time.”

“A divination killed him?” one man whispered.

“It can,” Ezra said. “If you reach toward the wrong thing.”

But Adam wasn’t looking at the parchments anymore. He was looking at the floor beside Orin’s right hand.

His son’s index finger was still bent, its tip dark and wet. And on the stone beside it, written in his own blood, were letters.

Smeared, shaky letters, written by a dying man with nothing left but his finger and whatever blood was still in his mouth.

D̸M̷N̶

H̷R̸E̶

R̸

|

|

|

…

The room went silent.

The last letter trailed off in a long smear across the floor. It was clear where Orin’s hand had fallen.

“What… does that mean?” Bram asked roughly.

Nobody answered at first.

Then Nessa, who hadn’t said a single word since they arrived, lifted her head from her husband’s chest.

“He drops the vowels,” she whispered.

Every eye in the room turned to her.

“In his notes.” Her voice was barely there. “His divination ledgers. Parchment is precious, and ink is precious. So he always wrote without vowels. It was his own little code. He used to make me guess what his notes said, and he’d laugh at me when I got them wrong…”

Her voice cracked and broke apart. She pressed her face back into his robe.

Ezra crouched down beside the letters and began to murmur.

“Without vowels… then the first word… D, M, N. Damn? A dying man doesn’t waste his last blood cursing. Domain?” He frowned. “Domain… here…?”

“Demon,” Anastasia said.

She said it quietly. But the room instantly went cold.

Ezra slowly raised his head and looked at her, then at the letters. As understanding dawned over his face, he went pale.

“…Demon,” he repeated. “Of course. If it’s Orin, he’d call them that…”

When Ashen heard that word, his mind brought a distant memory to the surface.

◉

He was six years old, sitting at a low table in the study hall with a feather quill in his hand and Lapis dozing on his shoulder.

His mother stood at the front of the room with a scroll unrolled across her lap, reading to the children in her soft, singsong voice.

“Do you know what the oldest scripts called them, children? Those beings from beyond the sky?”

Missing the author's notes? That's because this chapter was copied from the original site, where they're published alongside it.

“They were called Demons.”

He had been startled back then. In his original era, he had never once heard them called anything but Outer Gods.

Anastasia had explained it patiently then.

In the very beginning, the scripts humanity had preserved over four million years called them demons.

When these creatures came from beyond, they made sure to let everyone know how deranged, corrupted, and filthy they were.

Their deeds were vile, their very existence was an insult to the world. And so, when humanity looked at them, it saw demons, and called them as such.

The native gods of the world had been something else entirely back then. They had cared for humanity like children. One of them had even given humanity the sacred stone.

But as time passed, the native gods began to fall.

Some were worn down by the ravages of time, their vast minds slowly going wrong over endless ages. Some were tainted by prolonged contact with the demons. And some were targeted, hunted down and dragged into the dark on purpose.

One after another, they fell.

Until one day, when humanity looked up at its gods, it could no longer tell them apart from the demons.

So, since there was no longer any difference, humanity stopped trying to tell them apart. They were all gods now. Those who had come from beyond were simply called Outer Gods.

Only a stubborn few still clung to the old faith. Those few still believed that some of the native gods remained somewhere, fighting the Darkness beside them.

They refused to lump the gods and the monsters into the same word. To them, the ones from beyond would always be what they had been called in the beginning.

Demons.

Orin had been one of those few.

Ashen remembered it now. Orin, of all the brothers, would never call them Outer God. How he always corrected the little ones at dinner. “They’re not gods. Don’t give them the honor!”

◉

“An Outer God,” someone breathed. “He was divining an Outer God.”

“That’s what killed him,” Ezra said quietly. “Orin’s divination doesn’t look for things directly. It sweeps outward instead.”

“It feels for anyone in the world who is thinking about us and the tribe. It picks them out, reads their emotions and intentions, and from those, it guesses who they are and what they are.”

“...Sometimes even how strong they are.” He looked down at the ash. “Most of it happens below his awareness. He only ever touched a sliver of what he found.”

“And a sliver of that mind…” Anastasia’s voice was flat.

Everyone in the room knew what she meant.

The mind of an Outer God was a battlefield. Countless concepts crammed together inside a single vessel, warring endlessly, incompatible and screaming. Even a sliver of a sliver of that was enough to drive a mortal mad.

Or simply make his brain stop.

“…It’s just… Orin isn’t capable of peeking at beings of that scale,” Ezra murmured. “Unless they allowed it, or no longer cared to hide what they intended.”

“...”

“...”

“Then HRE, means here.” Bram said hoarsely. “A demon… here.”

“And R…”

“Run,” Ezra said. “It can only mean run.”

“Or return,” Adam murmured.

Every eye turned to the patriarch.

He was staring at the letters, and his expression suddenly took a very bitter turn. Beside him, Anastasia had gone very still.

Ashen saw his parents exchange a look. It lasted barely a moment, but it said more than either of them had said out loud.

It was clear that they already had an inkling of the identity of this demon. Ashen had a theory of his own.

“Here,” he said.

The room turned to him, but his eyes remained on the bloody letters. “He wrote here, Father. Not coming or near but Here.”

“Ashen…” Lapis tugged at his sleeve.

But he didn’t stop.

“For six years, something has been inside my head,” he said quietly. “Every one of you saw it. It nearly made me kill my own brother. We searched everywhere for the cause, and no one could catch it.”

He looked around the room.

“What kind of thing does that? It doesn’t just want me dead; it wants me to hurt the people I love. It’s also intelligent enough to slowly and patiently plan it.”

“But to plan like that, it has to be watching us closely enough to know exactly where to push.”

Nobody said a word.

“I think it’s been here a long time,” Ashen said. “Not coming here.”

From the back of the crowd, a quiet voice spoke up.

“…He’s right.”

Heads turned.

Cain stood near the wall, his arms wrapped tightly around himself. He was pale, and his eyes were fixed on the floor. When he felt everyone looking at him, he flinched. But he didn’t stop talking.

“For years… when I was younger,” he said haltingly, “my thoughts used to get… loud. From envy to anger. Everything seemed louder than it should have been.”

Anastasia’s hand went to her mouth, seeming to have realized something.

“...Like someone was turning them up.” Cain swallowed. “I always thought it was just me. Then one day, it stopped. All at once. Right around the time brother’s started.”

Ashen looked at him across the room. Many others did, and their looks were very different.

They suddenly realized that there was far more to his troublesome childhood than met the eye.

“…My hush is still whole.”

It was Misty. She was standing behind Vera and Joran, her face pale and her sleepy eyes wide open for once.

“I checked it on the way here,” she said. “Nothing has torn it or broken through it. The whole ward is just as it was.” She hesitated. “So either whatever it is was strong enough to stare straight through it without breaking it…”

“…or it never needed to look for us,” Ashen finished quietly.

Adam glanced at his wife, who was still kneeling beside Orin with her hands folded in her lap.

“It’s the same one,” Anastasia said quietly.

She didn’t phrase it as a question.

“Most likely,” Adam agreed.

He looked down at his son for a long moment before straightening. And when he spoke again, it was no longer a grieving father who stood before them, but the patriarch.

“Prepare him,” he said quietly. “Wash him and dress him in his best robe.” His eyes moved to the warriors crowding the doorway. “Double the watch at every ward. And no one goes above ground.”

“Father—” Bram started.

“We will gather again,” Adam said. “Tonight. When the crystals dim.”

He walked out of the room without another word.

Anastasia stayed kneeling beside Orin a moment longer. Then she rose, pressed a kiss to his forehead.

‘Thank you for everything. I hope you are in a better place, my dear son.’