The Damned Demon

Chapter 925: The Damned One’s Truth

For a heartbeat, everything that made sense to Asher lined up and quietly fell over.

Duncan’s words—you are of my blood, son—still rang in his chest like a hammer that had found the softest place to land.

He stared at the old man and searched the gravel of his mouth for a joke. There wasn’t one. He searched the hard lines of his face for a lesson. There might be—later—if he survived the next minute without the world re-shelving itself again. And he tried to remember all the times Duncan had watched him suffer in the Tower—impassive, distant, yet committed in a way that felt like cruelty only until hindsight named it care. A pattern emerged where before he had only seen difficulty.

“Your… blood,” he said finally, the words dry in his mouth.

Duncan’s smile thinned. Not warmth. Not exactly. Approval, perhaps. Or ownership. “Hard to believe? I know…” he said, and the dark-green lightning licked the clouds above him in lazy agreement. “It’s a lot to take in, but you’ll manage.”

Heliara took one step forward. Under her heel, a small white flower pushed up—hopeful, absurd—and in the next second the border where her gold met Duncan’s green scorched it flat and turned it to ash. “He doesn’t belong to you,” she said, voice unbothered by the violence beneath her feet. “He never did.”

Duncan tilted his head. “Interesting claim,” he murmured. “From someone who was prepared to kill him the moment you learned he existed.”

Heliara’s eyes stiffened for only a breath; Asher caught it and wished he hadn’t. Something indescribable knifed through him. He turned toward her, searching the gold of her gaze for a denial that didn’t come.

“Circumstances were different then,” she said, meeting his stare with a calm, cool gaze. “But right now, you have to come with me.”

Asher’s jaw clenched. “No.”

Her gaze did not soften. “You do not understand what is at stake.”

“I don’t want to,” he bit out, teeth grinding. “Especially not from a so-called mother who wanted me dead.”

Duncan stepped forward, dark-green sky rippling overhead like a satisfied animal. He didn’t raise his voice. “You heard him. My son wants nothing to do with you.”

Heliara ignored him, keeping her eyes on Asher. “He is trying to manipulate you,” she said, steady as a blade. “He has always been good at that. Do not listen to him.”

Duncan’s mouth curved, slow and unkind. “Manipulate him? Yes—if it saves him from you. Since you love the truth so much, tell him who first set his suffering in motion.”

Heliara’s lips parted, then closed again. Silence. She kept her golden eyes on Asher.

“I thought so,” Duncan said, and the contempt in his voice set the grass to withering another inch.

Asher’s hands curled into fists until his knuckles ached. He swung his glare to Duncan. “Don’t think I’m going to believe your version either. I don’t care if you’re my father or not—but… you’re the Damned One, aren’t you? You’re the one who kept me caged in that hell of rebirth and death.”

Duncan exhaled, more tired than angry. “Son, do you think I would deliberately hurt you? What I did was the only way I saw to give you a way out after the mess your dear mother created. The alternative…” He let that hang, a door left closed on purpose. “You wouldn’t want to know. But I refused to lose you. I took it upon myself to oversee your punishment—to keep it from becoming an execution.”

Punishment, Asher repeated in his head, wondering why he was punished. What the hell did he even do to warrant such a punishment from divine beings?

Duncan’s eyes warmed—actually warmed—and the effect was so rare it felt like a sunrise in the wrong direction. “I knew you—and the ones who love you—would find a way to break it. Only because it was me watching did you manage it. No one else would have looked away when you and yours bent rules that don’t like to bend. Believe me or don’t, but this is the truth. I have waited eons for you to finally succeed, my son.”

The anger Asher carried against the Damned One—against the abstract thing he had sworn to hate—thinned under the heat of that look. It didn’t vanish; it stepped back, confused.

Then the faces of his people rose up—Rowena, Rebecca, Grace, Naida, Yui and rest of his people, all dead, just minutes ago. Now only he was left behind.

He felt the echo of that death still prowling inside him. His throat tightened; he forced sound through it.

“If you cared,” he rasped, “why let them die? They were all I had. You watched them die and did nothing!”

Duncan set a hand on his shoulder and let it sit there, heavy and certain. “In a mortal world like this, no one is ever truly gone. I can take you back to them, if you come with me. Only if you wish. I won’t force you, son.” His eyes cut toward Heliara, and there was a knife’s smile behind them. “But if you want to follow her, by all means.”

Heliara’s gaze cooled by a degree Asher didn’t know existed. “He is tempting you and trying to use you,” she warned, each word a measured blow. “He doesn’t care about anyone but his own agendas. He serves only—”

“That’s enough!” Asher snapped, eyes shut for a second as if to push both of them out. He opened them and stepped back—deliberately—until he stood beside Duncan. As he did, the molten gold in his irises cooled and pooled into a dark, ominous green that caught the lightning overhead and answered it. He leveled that new color at Heliara. “I don’t care if he’s using me as long as I get what I want. What I do know is I want you out of my sight.”

Heliara’s expression barely shifted, but something in the air went sharp. “I won’t allow you to make any more mistakes,” she said. “I am taking you with me.”

Duncan moved.

It wasn’t far. It didn’t need to be. One step, and the dark-green sky above him thickened like a storm deciding it would be a sea instead. The ground underfoot drank the last of the gold that had dared creep into his half; roots curled and died. He stopped between Heliara and Asher and turned his head just enough that she could see his eyes.

“Careful,” he said softly, and the softness made it worse. “You’re standing in my domain.”

Heliara’s gaze tightened. “This carcass of a world does not belong to you.”

“It doesn’t have to,” Duncan said. “I do.” He let the sentence linger until the meaning uncoiled properly. “And in the Seven Hells, where I stand is mine.”

A pressure rolled out from him—soundless, weighty, like the floor of the world remembering it had another basement. For an instant, his outline stuttered in the air the way heat does, and something else leaned forward through him, like a face pressed to glass from a darker room.

It was barely a moment—small enough to deny, large enough to never forget. Horns that were not horns but the idea of authority curving out of shadow. A crown that wasn’t worn so much as admitted. A second mouth opening where a heart should be, lined in green fire and whispering a language bones remember. Wings—if that merciless shape at his back could be called wings—unfolding not from shoulder blades but from every place the world had a corner. The ground quailed. The sky over him bowed.

Then it was gone. Duncan stood exactly as he had, breathing exactly as he had, old and mortal and wearing a cloak that didn’t flap because the wind knew better.

Asher’s skin prickled. He had seen it and not seen it; whatever it was had burned a silhouette on the back of his eyes.

“You should leave,” Duncan said, still mild. “While you can. You’ve already been here longer than is wise for a fallen Aethernal that lost her wings. Don’t forget you are just a Crownbearer now.” He then turned around to look at Asher and said, “Come, son. She won’t dare to follow us.”

Heliara’s pale hand lingered in the air for a moment, fingers trembling as if she wanted to reach for the fading trail of her son’s aura. But she let it fall. The sound of his steps—those echoing thuds as Duncan led Asher away—still rang in her ears like chains dragging across stone.

She turned, each movement slow, deliberate, as though gravity itself pressed heavier on her now that he was gone. The field behind her stretched empty, littered with the faint shimmer of mana residue where Duncan’s lightning had scorched the ground.

Then—

“Master!”

The voice ripped through the air, sharp and frantic, like glass shattering against steel. It was a woman’s voice, young yet ancient, vibrating with both rage and desperation. It echoed beside Heliara though no body stood there.

“Forgive me for my rudeness but…Why did you let that bastard take away your son like that! Even without your wings, you didn’t have to back down—” the voice cracked into a wail, “—and let him humiliate you before your son.”

Heliara closed her eyes, sighing deeply, the sound heavy like a world-weary wind through dying trees.

“Soon,” she whispered, “he will learn on his own. I can’t convince him here.”

“Then why not tell him the truth?” the voice pressed, trembling now, near pleading. “Make him realize how hard you tried to get him back. Show him what you sacrificed.”

Her golden eyes, dimmed under the shadow of the crimson-stained sky, flicked to the void where the voice resonated. “He won’t understand,” she said flatly, “not while he is a mortal.”

A sharp inhale echoed. Then a shrill, almost petulant protest:

“Nooo! Master, nothing is impossible for you—except communicating what you truly feel. Now he hates you more than he ever did.”

Heliara’s lips briefly twitched at that.

The unseen voice grew louder, closer, as though pressing into her ear.

“Maybe I should have come down here to help you out. Only I know how much it took for you to come all the way here. And now… now that monster took that brat away. Your son is too caught up in his mortal emotions to see the truth and played right into that bastard’s hands. What if he does the unthinkable?”

For a moment, silence stretched. The wind hissed, carrying with it the faint metallic scent of scorched earth.

Heliara lowered her gaze. “…I will be watching.”

Her tone was cold, but beneath it, something trembled.

“Watching isn’t enough!” the voice snapped, cracking into near sobs.

Heliara ignored the protest. Her figure began to glow faintly, threads of light peeling from her skin like burning parchment. Her long hair lifted with the radiance.

“But for now,” she said, voice steady again, “I am leaving.”

Her eyes narrowed, and her final command fell sharp and absolute:

“Open the gate for me, Ariel.”

A sharp gasp of relief answered her, the frantic voice finally stabilizing.

“Sigh…At once, Master!”

The air tore open beside her, a rift of shimmering golden lines spiraling into a shape like an ancient door. From within came the sound of a thousand bells, haunting yet divine.

Heliara’s form dissolved into brilliance, collapsing into a pillar of golden light that surged upward and vanished through the gate.

And then—silence.

The rift snapped shut.

The heavens shifted. The once-blue skies darkened in an instant, painted in shades of bruised crimson. Even the sun—its radiance choked—bled red across the horizon, a wound in the firmament. Shadows spread over the earth like ink spilled across parchment.

And with Heliara gone, the air itself grew colder.

The voice of Ariel whispered faintly in the emptiness, as if speaking only to herself now:

“If only he knew who you really were, Master… perhaps things would be different.”

The words scattered into the wind, lost in the crimson dusk.

Oh…

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