Kylen lay awake on the stone floor long after the palace had gone quiet.
The Demon Palace never truly slept—there were always footsteps in the halls, always the distant hum of magic thrumming through the walls like a failing heartbeat—but there were moments between the screams when the world seemed to pause. Those moments were the worst. Silence in the Demon Kingdom did not mean safety. It only meant something worse was waiting to begin.
He stared at the ceiling of cracked black marble, the carvings above him twisted into shapes that looked like half-finished nightmares. The air tasted like metal and smoke. Breathing it felt like swallowing rust.
Sleep would not come.
It never did anymore.
And when it didn't, memory always did.
He had been three years old when his father became king.
He remembered little bits of it, flickering and fragmented like burned photographs: the smell of oil and fire in the hall, the deafening chant of voices that sounded less like celebration and more like hunger. He remembered clinging to his mother's robes, frightened by the size of the room and the shadows that moved in it.
He remembered his father lifting him onto his shoulder.
For a moment, he had believed that meant something.
Dekill had stood before the throne in armor black as dried blood, his crown forged of bone and jagged metal. Kylen did not understand the words spoken that day. He did not understand oaths or dominion or conquest. All he knew was that his father's hands were large and steady, and he had felt safe sitting there, high above the crowd.
Later, his mother had kissed his hair and told him he was precious.
His sister had laughed and spun him in circles until he begged her to stop.
His brothers had let him follow them through the halls like a shadow that wasn't yet unwanted.
For a brief amount of time, the Demon Palace had almost felt like a home.
Almost.
The warmth did not last.
It never does in places like this.
Kylen turned five.
And nothing happened.
No fever.
No scream of awakening.
No eruption of power from his blood.
Among demons, power did not arrive quietly. It entered the world violently—bones snapping, air burning, reality tearing wide for something older than thinking. Children who awakened early were celebrated. Children who awakened late were whispered about.
Children who never awakened were erased.
Not officially.
Just…
Forgotten.
At first, people simply looked at him differently.
Longer.
Harder.
Then they stopped smiling.
Then they stopped speaking.
Then they stopped pretending.
He began to notice the silence that followed him like a disease. Servants became slow when he was in the room. Tutors lost patience. Guards avoided his eyes.
His mother still loved him.
He knew that.
But her hands began to tremble when she touched him.
Not from fear of him.
From fear for him.
His sister stopped playing and started training.
His brothers grew sharp and distant, their voice edges harder than steel.
And his father—
His father looked through him.
Not in anger.
Not even in disappointment.
Just as if Kylen had become something that did not matter.
It was worse than being hated.
Hatred meant you still existed.
Kylen shifted on the cold floor, drawing his knees closer as the memory grew heavier.
There were no laws in the Demon Kingdom.
Only power.
The demon plane was a rotting world suspended beneath a poisoned sky. Endless black clouds churned above, heavy with corrosive miasma that never dispersed. Sunlight pierced through for eight hours a day, just long enough to remind the land what color had once been. Then darkness returned, draping the world in a permanent bruise.
The land itself was dying.
Forests stood with their trunks stripped bare, branches warped as though frozen mid-scream. Rivers burned anything that tried to drink from them. The air wounded lungs that were not born to survive it.
Beneath the surface, entire continents lay buried in ash—a civilization graveyard rotting from the inside out. Kylen had once seen the remains of a city where the towers still stood, half-melted into the ground like bones protruding from flesh. Demons passed through it without looking.
Ruins meant nothing here.
Everything became one, eventually.
In the Demon Kingdom, hunger was not an emergency.
It was a pastime.
Children fought over scraps in the streets. Women were traded like livestock. Demons stomped weaker kin into ash over imagined insults and slept soundly afterward.
And the crowds…
Oh, the crowds loved it.
Punishments were public.
Executions were festivals.
Pain was currency.
There was no judge.
No court.
No appeal.
Only the strongest voice in the room mattered.
And the strongest voice…
Was Dekill's.
The Demon King ruled with brutality that made even demons uneasy. His wars were not defensive. They were not measured. They were not necessary.
He conquered because he could.
He destroyed because he wanted to.
He used fear as policy and blood as punctuation.
Under him were twelve Demon Generals, each a tyrant in their own domain. But above even them were three figures whose influence surpassed rank.
The Demon Sovereigns.
Darklord, commander of the armies, was a walking war. He wore his heat like a second skin, flames licking at the air wherever he stepped. His sword was never at rest. It consumed everything it touched. Villages vanished under his boots.
Then came Diana.
Kylen's sister.
She was no longer his memory of her.
She had become something else entirely—something with lightning in her veins and thunder in her hands. Armies broke under her spear. Nations evaporated under her command.
She had been his hero once.
Now she was everyone else's nightmare.
And then there was Liyana.
His mother.
The woman who had once taught him to read.
The woman who could now tear cities apart by folding space like paper.
She commanded systems older than history and newer than fear. She erased time the way other people erased chalk.
And still…
She did nothing.
Kylen knew the truth.
He was not afraid of her power.
He was afraid of her distance.
And distance, in the Demon Kingdom, was the first step toward death.
Later that day—years later, really—Kylen was in the only place he could still breathe.
The old library wing.
A crumbling annex filled with forbidden texts and forgotten history. The palace had long ago deemed it useless.
Just like him.
Scrolls were piled across the floor. Ink stains marked his skin. His eyes burned from reading long after the candles died.
He wasn't studying spells.
He was studying mistakes.
Empires.
War.
Collapse.
Every book told a story these demons refused to read.
Power rotted.
Kingdoms fell.
Tyrants drowned in the ruin they built.
No throne survived forever.
Not even one made of bone.
The door opened behind him.
Kylen didn't turn.
He already knew who it was.
Darien's boots were heavy enough to announce him.
"Get up," Darien said.
Kylen didn't move.
"I'm in the middle of something."
The words were barely out before Darien crossed the room and seized his collar, yanking him to his feet in one violent motion.
"You always are."
Kylen's head snapped back when Darien hit him.
The impact rang through his skull.
Pain bloomed.
But he said nothing.
Darien looked disappointed.
"Practice," Darien said again.
Kylen shook his head.
"No."
That was all it took.
Darien hit him again.
Then again.
Then grabbed his hair and dragged him out of the room.
They passed servants who looked away.
Guards who pretended not to see.
Nobles who smirked.
Kylen was thrown into the arena sand as easily as one might toss trash.
The roar of the crowd crashed over him.
They could smell entertainment.
Nothing excited demons like blood that couldn't fight back.
Darien followed him into the pit, loosening his gauntlet.
Kylen tried to rise.
His arms gave out.
Darien's boot crushed his spine into the earth.
"Look at them," Darien said quietly in Kylen's ear.
"Every one of them is waiting for you to fail."
Kylen looked.
And saw the truth.
Hunger.
Not pity.
Not malice.
Just appetite.
The horn sounded.
The gates slammed shut.
The duel was announced.
And Kylen lay there, staring into a red sky he didn't believe cared whether he lived or died.
But in that moment…
He decided something.
If this world was going to end—
He would be the one to decide how.