My father rules everything.
Every demon. Every devil. Every living thing in the Demon Realm answers to him without question. Zarveth. First Demon King. The Absolute One. A being so supremely powerful that obedience to him is not a choice — it is simply the nature of existing beneath him. His magic does not compel loyalty. It does not need to. It reaches into the bones of everything alive and reminds it, quietly and irresistibly, of its place in the order of things.
I am his son. His second son. The younger one.
You would think that means something.
I am starting to wonder.
The chains around my wrists are heavy. Not elegantly heavy the way powerful things are heavy — just cold and blunt and indifferent, the way only iron can be indifferent. The dirt beneath me is damp. The slave house around me smells like suffering that has been compressed into the walls over so many years it has become structural, load-bearing, part of the foundation.
I used to move through space like it was breathing. A thought, a step — anywhere in any realm. Distance was a suggestion I could choose to ignore. The fabric of existence itself was mine to part like a curtain and step through.
Now I cannot move three feet without iron reminding me what I have become.
I am not bitter about it.
I am really, genuinely, profoundly not bitter.
I just have a great deal of time right now and a story I cannot stop turning over in my head. Examining it from every angle. Looking for the place where a different version of me makes a different choice and ends up somewhere other than here.
I never find that version.
It went wrong the moment I met her. Obviously.
I should have walked away on that battlefield. Any reasonable person would have walked away. Looked at the situation clearly, assessed the implications, and walked away.
I was never particularly reasonable.
So. Let me think out loud.
Let me start from the beginning.
~ ~ ~
I am told my first act in this world was opening my eyes.
My second was making everyone in the room deeply uncomfortable.
Apparently I did not cry. Most newborns announce themselves to existence with noise and protest and fury at being displaced from somewhere warm into somewhere cold and loud. I simply looked around — taking in the ceiling, the shadows, the assembled faces of the demon court gathered to witness the birth of their king's second son — and said nothing. Calm. Quiet. Unbothered by the whole affair.
Some called it unnatural. A newborn demon who does not cry.
I call it consistency. I have been unbothered my entire life. I was apparently practicing from the very first moment of it.
The first face I found was my father's.
Zarveth does not have a gentle face. He never has and I suspect he never will. He is the kind of man whose presence makes the air in a room feel heavier — like the world itself recognizes something supreme has entered and quietly adjusts. Standing over whatever surface I had been placed on, looking down at me, he appeared exactly as he always appears. Absolute. Immovable. Like a mountain that learned to breathe and decided not to be impressed by anything it encountered.
I did not know then what I know now about my father. I just saw a very large, very terrifying face looking down at me with those eyes that carry the weight of every living thing beneath him.
I did not cry.
I stared back.
I think that was the first time I ever made him proud.
What I did not see — what I could not see from where I was — was the bed behind him. And the woman lying still upon it.
My mother.
The queen of the Demon Realm.
She had given everything to bring me into this world.
Everything.
She did not survive the night.
I have carried that fact quietly my whole life. Not loudly. Not with grief worn on the outside like armor or a wound I keep reopening for sympathy. Just quietly. The way you carry something too heavy to put down and too painful to look at directly. You learn to walk with it. You learn to distribute the weight so evenly across your whole self that eventually you almost forget it is there.
Almost.
My brother Zaphel was four years old when I was born. Four years old and he had just lost his mother. He had every reason in existence to resent me — the small intruder who arrived and took something irreplaceable and left a screaming inconvenience in its place.
They tell me he walked into that room, looked at our mother lying still, looked at me lying in my crib, and sat down on the floor beside me.
And stayed there all night.
He did not sleep. He just sat there, four years old, keeping watch over something he had decided to love before it was old enough to deserve it.
That was Zaphel.
That has always, always been Zaphel.
~ ~ ~
Growing up in the Demon Realm is not what mortals imagine.
They picture fire and darkness and suffering. Endless torment. Demons gnashing their teeth and plotting the annihilation of everything pure and good in Altharion.
I wish. That sounds far more interesting than what it actually was.
It was a kingdom. The most powerful kingdom in all of Altharion — but a kingdom nonetheless. Politics. Ceremony. Hierarchy so rigid you could break your neck on it if you moved wrong. Everyone knowing exactly where they stood and conducting themselves with the precise discipline that knowledge demands. Structure that had been built over centuries and calcified into something indistinguishable from natural law.
My father's law. Always, in every room and corridor and shadow of the Demon Realm, my father's law.
Zaphel and I grew up at the center of all of it. The demon court. The weight of being Zarveth's sons pressing down from every direction. It pressed harder on Zaphel — he was the heir, the firstborn, the one our father's eyes tracked in every room the way a general tracks his most important asset. Every decision Zaphel made was evaluated. Every strength was catalogued. Every weakness was identified and quietly, relentlessly, eliminated.
I was the second son.
More freedom. Less expectation.
I was genuinely fine with that arrangement.
Our father was not absent. People assume that about powerful rulers — that their children raise themselves in cold throne rooms while their fathers are busy conquering things. That was not our reality. Zarveth was present. He trained us personally. Educated us personally. His hands were in every part of what we became, shaping us with the same relentless precision he applied to everything in his realm.
But his love — and I do believe it was love, in its own particular architecture — was a conditional thing. A structured thing. It arrived when you performed well, when you obeyed, when you reflected exactly the image of what a son of the First Demon King was supposed to be. It was not warm the way Zaphel's love was warm. It was more like sunlight through a very narrow window — real, valuable, worth working toward, but always at a slight remove. Always asking you to position yourself just right to feel it.
I spent years chasing that narrow window.
More years than I would like to admit, sitting here in the dirt.
Zaphel never let me feel the absence of it. That was his particular genius — he filled every space our father's conditional love left empty without making it feel like compensation. It just felt like Zaphel. Like that was simply what existing near my brother felt like.
I did not appreciate it enough. I know that now.
There is something about losing everything that clarifies exactly what everything was worth.
~ ~ ~
I was nine years old when my magic decided to introduce itself.
Most young demons ease into their power. Small flickers of demonic energy, gradual development, years of careful cultivation and training before anything significant manifests. Controlled. Predictable. Appropriate for an institution built on hierarchy and order.
Mine had apparently never received that particular instruction.
I was sitting in the training courtyard watching Zaphel practice his time magic — already devastating at fourteen, already stopping and rewinding small moments with the casual ease of someone flipping pages, already the kind of power that made the air feel different when he used it — when something cracked open in my chest. Not painfully. Just — open. Like a door that had existed my entire life suddenly had a handle on it that I had not noticed before.
One moment I was in the training courtyard.
The next I was standing on the roof of the highest tower in the demon court.
I had no memory of moving. No sensation of transition. One place became another place and I was simply there, standing at the edge of the parapet with the entire Demon Realm spread out below me — vast and dark and brutally, impossibly beautiful — and feeling something I had no name for yet.
Like every point in space around me was a thread I could reach out and pull.
Like distance was a convention I had just been informed I was not obligated to follow.
I stood there for a while and let it settle into me. This new thing. This impossible, extraordinary, completely mine thing.
Zaphel found me twenty minutes later.
He appeared in the doorway at the top of what I can only assume were several hundred stairs, thoroughly out of breath, and took in the sight of me standing completely calm at the edge of a parapet a lethal distance from the ground.
He stared at me.
"How," he said.
"I genuinely don't know," I told him.
He continued staring.
Then he sat down on the floor right where he was standing and laughed until his eyes watered.
I sat down on the parapet ledge and laughed too. Neither of us entirely knew what was funny. It was just one of those moments — the kind that feel significant even before you understand why, that you find yourself returning to years later because somewhere in your body you already knew it was important.
We told our father that evening. Zarveth listened to the full account without expression — which was his operating mode for most things, including natural disasters and political crises. When I finished he was quiet for a moment, those absolute eyes moving over me with that particular quality of assessment he applied to everything.
"Demonic Space Magic," he said.
"Is that good?" I asked.
He almost smiled.
Almost.
"Yes," he said. "That is very good."
I carried those four words for years. Held them like they were made of something precious. Took them out and turned them over when the conditional love felt too conditional and the narrow window felt too narrow.
Very good.
Zaphel teased me about it for months. I let him. He had earned it.
~ ~ ~
The years after that moved the way years do when you are young and do not know enough to pay attention to them.
I grew up.
Training consumed most of it. When you are the son of the First Demon King, mediocrity is not an option anyone around you acknowledges as a concept. Every day was combat and magic and strategy and the kind of relentless refinement that turns raw ability into something that actually deserves the power it carries. Zarveth did not raise sons the way other fathers raise sons. He forged weapons. The fact that those weapons happened to be his children was secondary to the craftsmanship.
Zaphel took to it like it was his natural element. Disciplined. Focused. Brilliant in that particular way that looks effortless from the outside and costs everything on the inside. Watching him develop his time magic was like watching someone compose music — every movement deliberate, every second he reached into and reshaped bending to his will as if time itself found him reasonable. Our father looked at Zaphel the way kings look at legacies they are confident in.
I was good too. Genuinely good. By fifteen I could tear open rifts across the entire Demon Realm. By seventeen the fabric of space around me was a second skin — every point in existence within reach, every distance collapsible to nothing. By nineteen I was something that made the older demon lords uncomfortable to be in proximity to.
But I was never serious about it the way Zaphel was serious about everything.
I trained hard and then forgot about it the moment training ended. I did not obsess. I did not spend every waking hour pushing against my own limits. I just existed — moved through the demon court with the particular energy of someone who is very aware of how much power they carry and finds the whole thing mildly interesting at best.
It drove our instructors quietly insane.
It drove Zarveth quietly, professionally, deeply insane.
He never said it directly. That was not his way. But I could see it in the absolute eyes — that particular look that said you have everything and you treat it like it costs you nothing.
He was not wrong.
Everything had come easily. Power. Status. Respect. Being Zarveth's son opened every door in the Demon Realm before I reached for it. I had never wanted for anything. Never lost anything.
I did not know yet what losing felt like.
The Purge was three months away when I turned twenty.
Every five years, since before anyone alive can remember, the demons and goddesses gather on the battlefield between realms to settle the oldest argument in Altharion — which race is superior. It is part war, part ritual, part the kind of pride-driven tradition that ancient powerful beings apparently cannot resist perpetuating. The battlefield between worlds is a stretch of scorched black earth that belongs to neither side and has absorbed more violence than any ground has a right to hold. It remembers everything that has ever happened on it. You can feel it through your boots.
I had fought in one Purge before — at fifteen, more observer than combatant, sent to watch and learn and understand what I was part of. I watched. I understood that the goddesses were everything our world told us they were — radiant and precise and armored in absolute certainty of their own righteousness.
I had no strong feelings about them. They were the enemy the way tradition makes enemies. Not personal. Just established.
That was what I believed at twenty years old walking onto that battlefield for the second time.
I was wrong in ways I cannot fully articulate even now.
The Purge arrived.
And with it, everything that unmade me.
And everything that made me worth something.
Depending on how you look at it.
~ ~ ~
Let me tell you about The Purge battlefield.
It does not exist in any realm cleanly. It occupies the margin between — a stretch of dead earth that belongs to the space between the Demon Realm and the Goddess Realm, scarred by centuries of violence from both sides. The ground is black. Not from soil or rock but from everything that has been poured into it across generations of demons and goddesses trying to prove something to each other that neither side has ever managed to prove conclusively.
It smells like power. Raw and ancient and terrible and alive in a way that living things rarely are.
The second time I stood on it I was twenty and stronger than I had been at fifteen and the ground felt it. Recognized something in me the way old things recognize power — not with deference, just with acknowledgment. You are here. I remember your kind.
The Purge does not begin gradually. One moment there is silence — two armies facing each other across that dead ground, the air between them tight with everything about to happen — and then something in the atmosphere shifts and it simply begins. All at once. Everywhere simultaneously.
Chaos is the only honest word for it.
Demonic magic against divine light. Two fundamental forces of existence meeting without mediation, without rules, without anything between them except the bodies carrying them. The sound of it is unlike anything in any realm — not just the noise of battle but something deeper, a frequency that lives below sound, the vibration of two opposing truths trying to occupy the same space.
I moved through it the way I moved through everything.
Calmly.
Space magic in battle is a particular advantage. I did not need to fight through the chaos — I stepped around it. A rift here. A repositioning there. Appearing behind a target before they registered I had moved, gone before a counter-strike could land. I was everywhere and nowhere and the goddesses I faced kept looking at where I had been a moment ago.
It was almost too easy.
Almost.
I was deep in the battlefield — a pocket of relative stillness in the surrounding devastation — when I felt it.
Not a threat. Not magic incoming.
Something else entirely. A shift in the quality of the air nearby. A presence that did not feel like anything else on that battlefield — not fully demonic, not fully divine, something that seemed to exist in its own category and was not particularly concerned with fitting into either of the available ones.
I turned.
I have turned that moment over in my head more times than I can count. Sitting in this dirt, in these chains, I have examined it from every angle looking for the version where I don't turn. Where I keep moving. Where I trust the instinct that had kept me alive and effective for twenty years and simply do not look.
I always turn.
In every version, I always turn.
She was a goddess. The light that clung to her, the divine energy radiating off her in quiet, controlled waves — there was no mistaking what she was. She should have looked exactly like every other goddess on that battlefield. She should have registered as threat or target or obstacle and nothing beyond that.
She did not look like every other goddess on that battlefield.
She was looking directly at me.
That was the first strange thing. In the middle of all that chaos — the battlefield consuming everything around us — she had stopped moving. And she was looking at me with an expression I could not read. Not hatred. Not the cold divine certainty I had come to expect from her kind, that armor they wear over their faces that says I know exactly what you are and what you are worth. Not even wariness.
Just — looking.
Like she was trying to understand something. Like I was a question she had not expected to encounter and was not sure she had the vocabulary for.
We stood there.
On a battlefield that was tearing itself apart around us, in the middle of the oldest ritual violence in Altharion, surrounded by our respective kinds trying to prove their superiority — we stood there and looked at each other for a moment that had absolutely no business existing.
Then a detonation of magic between us shattered the moment like glass.
She moved one direction. I moved another. The Purge swallowed us both back into its chaos and I did not see her again for the rest of the battle.
I told myself it meant nothing. A moment of stillness in battle, nothing more. Curiosity between enemies, the way you sometimes pause to look at something dangerous and unfamiliar before the fight reasserts itself.
I told myself that for the rest of the battle.
I was not convincing even to myself.
When the Purge ended — no victor declared, as always, because neither side was ever going to admit the other was superior — I stood at the edge of the battlefield watching the goddess forces withdraw.
I found her in the crowd.
She was looking back.
That was the second strange thing.
That was the beginning of everything.
~ ~ ~
I want to be clear about something.
I did not pursue her.
That is not defensiveness. That is the accurate account. I was twenty years old with no history of catastrophically bad decisions, in full possession of my reason, entirely aware of what she was and what realm she came from and what the distance between a demon and a goddess meant in practical and cosmic terms.
I knew all of that.
And then approximately three weeks after The Purge I tore open a rift to a location I had not consciously chosen.
Space magic goes where the mind goes.
Apparently my mind had been somewhere very specific for three weeks.
She was already there.
Standing at the border between realms — that narrow margin of nothing that exists between the Demon Realm and everything else — looking at the space I had just stepped through with an expression that suggested she had not entirely meant to be there either.
We stared at each other for a long moment.
Two people with absolutely no business occupying the same space, in a location that belonged to neither of their worlds, with no reasonable explanation for why either of them had come.
"You're a demon," she said.
"You're very perceptive," I told her.
She almost smiled. Just barely. Kept it at almost, like it cost something.
Her name was Elena.
I found out on the third meeting that she was the daughter of the Supreme Goddess. I stayed anyway. That tells you everything about the state of my judgment by that point.
She was not what I expected. Nothing about her was what I expected.
She questioned things. Not quietly, not carefully — openly, without apology, with the particular frustration of someone who has been given answers their whole life that did not quite fit the questions they were actually asking. She had been raised inside the most suffocating doctrine of purity in all of Altharion, shaped by a mother who had turned righteousness into a weapon, and somewhere underneath all of that conditioning was a person who did not entirely believe it. Had maybe never believed it, but had not yet found the language to say so.
I kept coming back for that person.
The meetings became something neither of us planned and both of us kept showing up for. That margin between realms became our place — a location that existed in the space between two worlds that had always despised each other, which felt appropriate because that was exactly where we existed too.
Months passed.
She told me about the Goddess Realm. The hierarchy. The doctrine. The way the Supreme Goddess's vision of a pure Altharion ran through every aspect of their existence like a river so old nobody remembered a world before it.
The monster race came up. It always came up, eventually, when talking about the goddesses.
"They are abominations," she said. Not with cruelty. Just reciting something. The way you recite a fact you have heard so many times it stopped feeling like an opinion and started feeling like the structure of reality itself.
"Have you ever met one?" I asked.
She was quiet for a moment.
"No," she said.
"Then how do you know?"
She did not have an answer.
I watched something move in her eyes — a small crack in something that had been sealed for a very long time. The gap between what she had been told and what she was actually seeing getting just slightly wider.
Those small moments. Those quiet fractures in the certainty she had been built around. That was when I understood I was in serious trouble.
Not because of what I felt, though I felt it. Because of what I was watching happen to her. The way the person underneath the doctrine kept surfacing. The way every conversation made her more herself and less what she had been shaped to be.
I could not look away from that.
I should have.
I want to be honest about what happened between us because there is no version of this story where softening it serves any purpose. We crossed every line that existed between our kinds. Every boundary that Altharion's order had spent centuries establishing between demon and goddess. Not gradually and not accidentally. We knew exactly what we were doing and we chose it.
In Altharion there are sins and there are abominations. There is no word in most languages for what we became to each other because no one had ever been reckless enough or desperate enough or — I will say it — in love enough to actually do it.
A demon and a goddess.
Everything.
I knew what both our worlds would call it. I knew the weight of it pressing down on every moment we were together. I chose it anyway because there are things you encounter in this life that make the weight feel like nothing. That make the cost feel like nothing. That make even the most rational part of you go quiet and let something older and more insistent take the wheel.
She was that thing for me.
For a while — a short, impossible, luminous while — I was happy. Not the comfortable satisfaction of a life without problems. Not the quiet contentment of someone who has everything they were supposed to want. Real happiness. The kind that makes everything before it look like a rehearsal and leaves you terrified of losing it because you finally understand what it is you would be losing.
I had never been afraid of losing anything before her.
I did not know then that fear was the world telling me something. That the thing you are most terrified to lose is always the first thing Altharion will take.
It never allows things like that to exist undisturbed.
It never does.
~ ~ ~
They found out.
I still do not know the exact mechanism. Whether someone tracked my rift patterns. Whether a spirit sensed divine energy where it had no business being. Whether the universe simply has a standing policy against certain things surviving long enough to matter.
It does not matter.
We had a plan for when it happened. We had always known, on some level, that it would happen — you cannot keep something that impossible a secret forever in a world built on hierarchy and surveillance and the absolute authority of two supreme powers who believe they have the right to determine what is permissible. We had a meeting point. A specific location at the border between realms that only the two of us knew. If everything fell apart — when everything fell apart — we would go there. Find each other. Figure out the rest from the margin.
That was the plan.
I felt it before I had confirmation — a shift in the energy of the Demon Realm, that particular heaviness that precedes Zarveth's anger the way the pressure drops before a storm. Something had changed. Something had reached my father and whatever it was had moved him in a way almost nothing moved him.
I ran.
Not away. Toward the meeting point. Tearing open a rift with hands that were steadier than they had any right to be and stepping through into the border between realms.
My brother was waiting for me.
Zaphel.
Standing in that margin between worlds with his arms at his sides and an expression on his face I had never seen in twenty years of knowing every expression he owned. Not anger. Not judgment. Not the cold calculation of a heir following his king's command.
Just pain.
Pure and quiet and so profound it looked like something physical. Like something was pressing down on him from the inside and he was refusing to collapse under it through sheer force of Zaphel-ness.
We looked at each other across that space.
"Father sent you," I said.
"Yes."
"And if I don't come back with you."
He didn't answer immediately. That silence was its own answer. That silence was the answer I already knew and had been building toward since I first turned on a battlefield and found someone looking back at me.
"Zein," he said. Just my name. The way he had said it my whole life — with a weight behind it that was specifically his, that meant something it did not mean in anyone else's mouth.
"I know," I told him.
"You have to come back."
"I know."
"Then come back. Please."
Please. Zaphel almost never said please. He was a man who asked things directly and received them because of who he was and what he carried. Please meant he was reaching past rank and inheritance and everything between us and asking as just himself. Just my brother. The person who sat on the floor next to my crib and chose me.
I looked past him toward the path that led to the goddess side of the border. The direction Elena should have been coming from.
Empty.
"She is not coming," Zaphel said quietly. He had followed my gaze. Of course he had. He had always known where I was looking before I said it.
Something cold moved through me.
"What does that mean."
"It means they knew on their side too. It means she was intercepted before she reached the border." A pause. "She is alive, Zein. She is alive."
I breathed.
One breath. Just one. And then I looked at my brother and he looked at me and we both understood what was about to happen and neither of us could stop it.
"Come home," he said. "Come home and face it. You will survive it. Whatever he decides — you will still be his son. Just come home."
He was asking me to leave her. Standing there with everything he felt stripped bare on his face — his love for me, his loyalty to our father, the impossible geometry of being caught between them — and asking me with the only thing he had left to ask with.
His love.
I looked at him for a long time.
"I'm sorry," I told him.
And I moved.
What followed was not a fight in any glorious sense of the word. It was two people who had spent their whole lives choosing each other trying to stop each other from doing the only thing each of them believed they could do. Zaphel's time magic against my space magic — the two most fundamental forces either of us owned turned against each other by hands that were shaking slightly and refusing to admit it.
He slowed my rifts. I repositioned around his time locks. He froze the moments I tried to move through. I tore through the spaces he tried to collapse. We were perfectly matched in the worst possible way — not because we were equal in power but because we were equal in our refusal to truly use it. Neither of us was trying to win. We were both just trying to outlast the other's willingness to keep going.
I do not know how long it lasted.
Long enough.
Because at some point I felt it.
Zarveth.
Not arriving. Not approaching. Simply — present. The way his power was always present the moment he chose to extend it, reaching across whatever distance existed between him and the thing he had decided to address. The Absolute One does not require proximity. It does not require anything except his will.
It landed on me like the weight of the entire Demon Realm dropping from height.
I could not move.
I could not open a rift.
I could not do anything except stand there while my space magic — the thing that had lived in me since I was nine years old and felt like breathing, like the most natural and inseparable extension of my own existence — went quiet.
Not diminished.
Not suppressed.
Gone. Sealed somewhere inside me so deep I could not feel it anymore, could not feel the threads of space around me that had always been there, could not feel anything except the terrible absence where something essential had been.
My legs gave out.
Zaphel caught me.
That detail I will carry until I stop existing. In the middle of everything — our father's power dismantling me from the inside, the whole shape of my life collapsing — my brother caught me. Both arms around me, holding me up, his face close to mine.
He was talking. I could barely hear through the roaring in my ears but I caught pieces of it.
I'm sorry — I tried — I love you — I'm sorry —
And then Zarveth's voice.
Not raised. Never raised. Filling everything the way only an absolute thing can fill everything — not by volume but by nature. By the simple fact of being what it was.
"You are no longer of this realm."
And Zaphel's arms were gone.
And the margin between realms dissolved around me.
And I fell.
Through the nothing between worlds. Through the vast dark that exists between one reality and another when you have no magic to navigate it and no anchor pulling you anywhere specific. Just falling, through the kind of emptiness that has texture, that presses against you with the weight of everything you no longer have access to.
I landed in dirt.
Mortal realm dirt. I knew it immediately — it felt different from Demon Realm ground, lighter somehow, less dense with history, made of ordinary material by ordinary processes without the weight of ancient power compressed into it over centuries.
I lay there.
The sky above me was the mortal realm sky. Different from home in ways I cannot fully describe — just different in the way everything here was different. Slightly lesser. Slightly more fragile. A world that did not know what it was housing.
I had no powers.
I had no name that meant anything within a thousand miles of where I was lying.
I had nothing except the one word Zaphel had given me before everything came apart.
Alive.
She was alive.
Whatever punishment the Supreme Goddess had designed for a daughter who had committed the most unholy act imaginable in the Goddess Realm — whatever she was doing to Elena in the name of purity and righteousness and the sanctity of everything a demon and a goddess had just obliterated together — she was alive.
I held that word like it was the only solid thing left in existence.
I would find her. That was the only thought I could hold onto that felt like something real, something with direction and weight and purpose.
I would find her.
That was the last clear thought I had before the slavers found me.
As it turns out, lying powerless and motionless in the dirt beside a trade road is a remarkably effective way to end up in chains.
I know that now.
~ ~ ~
And that is how I arrived here.
This dirt. These chains. This place that smells like despair pressed into the walls.
That is the whole story from beginning to now. Twenty years of existing as the most powerful young demon in the Demon Realm, the untouchable second son of the supreme ruler of everything, the one nothing had ever cost — and then six months of being reminded, in increasingly direct terms, that the universe keeps its own accounts and eventually balances them.
I have been in this slave house long enough to know its rhythms. Long enough to know the guards and their rotations and their habits and the three specific structural weaknesses in this building that I have been cataloguing with the particular focus of someone who no longer has anything else to do with their attention.
I have been waiting. Gathering information the way you gather it when you have no power and no allies and nothing to work with except your mind and your patience. Learning how this world works from the inside of one of its worst corners, which is not the education I would have chosen but may be the one I needed.
The demon prince who once moved through space like breathing is now a man in chains who has learned to be very, very still.
Still.
Not defeated.
Those are not the same thing.
My powers are sealed. My father has made clear in the most absolute terms available to him that I am no longer his son and no longer of his realm. The woman I burned everything down for is somewhere out there with no memory that I exist, shaped into something unrecognizable by a mother who could not allow her daughter to be anything other than perfect.
I have lost everything.
I want to be honest about that. I want to sit in the accurate weight of it rather than the version where I am fine, where this is manageable, where I have everything under control. I have lost everything. My powers. My home. My father. My brother — not to death but to the impossible position of a man who loves someone he cannot choose. Everything.
And Elena.
Most of all Elena. Who is alive somewhere in a world that has taken everything from her that made her herself and replaced it with something her mother approves of. Who walks around with my absence inside her like a wound she cannot locate because she does not remember receiving it.
That is the one I cannot set down.
That is the one that sits in my chest in this dirt in these chains and refuses to be still.
But I am not bitter.
I am not broken.
I am a demon with sealed powers, no allies, no name that means anything, and absolutely nothing left to lose.
Which — if you think about it carefully — makes me the most dangerous thing in this building.
They just do not know it yet.
But they will.
Soon.