RISE OF THE DEMON KING

Chapter 8: No Home To Return To

By the time Aeris and Alba reached the tree line, smoke was already curling above Stonevale, thick and ugly, scrawling across the sky like a warning. Even before he could see the village, Aeris knew something was deeply wrong. The flames weren’t the warm, controlled glow of hearth fires or cookpots. They raged in wild, hungry tongues, devouring rooftops and leaping from house to house. He saw it and felt his stomach drop. This wasn’t some accident. This was deliberate. He caught his breath, voice breaking. “No.” The word came out more plea than protest, but he started running, dragging Alba with him, ignoring the ache in his own bones and the fever-shiver still in his blood.

They crested the last hill and, for a moment, just stopped. Everything they’d known was gone. Not even ruins, a graveyard of charred wood, shattered stone, piles of ash where lives and laughter had been hours earlier. The square, where just that morning neighbors had gathered in the sunlight, was now chaos. Carts overturned like broken toys, bodies twisted where they fell. Aeris’s heart twisted, numb and aching at once. The destruction didn’t look random, fires burned too hot, too clean, scorch marks marking out the violence, no thieves did this. These scars belonged to soldiers, to the Empire. Stonevale hadn’t just burned. It had been punished.

He wandered the gutted square, boots crunching on debris. Everywhere he looked were splinters of his life, the familiar well, where he’d hauled buckets since he could barely stand, the market stall where Alba’s name had been called out with joy and dread only hours ago. Everything was gone. The faces and voices, the tiny rituals, every kindness and betrayal all crushed under the same indifferent boot. There rose, deep under his skin, a muddled, searing sickness. Wasn’t he supposed to feel something else? Justice? Satisfaction? He searched for it and found nothing but anger and grief.

“They burned it,” Alba whispered, her grip on his arm vise-tight. “They burned the whole village.”

Aeris’s voice came out flat, distant. “Thorne. The ritual failed, they lost their vessel, lost their mage. Instead of coming right after us, they made an example.” He remembered Elder Dorn with his calm, unshakable certainty, treating Aeris more like a ledger entry than a person, a piece to be moved, an asset to be spent. Standing here, there was nothing to feel but dread.

They found Dorn near the wreckage of the shrine, his body half-hidden under a beam. He was gone, eyes wide, jaw slack. Aeris stared for a long moment. He thought he’d feel satisfaction at this, or at least relief, but neither came. Just grief, tangled and filthy, because nothing is ever clean. Dorn had saved him from starvation one winter, bought Alba shoes when she outgrew hers. And yet, when it mattered, Dorn had handed them over without a flicker of concern. Six years of quiet kindness, and it turned out none of it counted. Aeris showed that he missed Dorn anyway. Both things were true. Both hurt.

Alba glanced at him, voice gentle but firm. “He handed us over. You shouldn’t feel anything for him.”

“I know.” Aeris set his jaw, but he couldn’t will the feeling away. “Doesn’t stop it.”

He crouched, closed Dorn’s eyes with his fingers, a pointless gesture, but for him, it was necessary. Some small part of him refused to let their shared history end with Dorn’s gaze fixed on a smoky horizon. Alba didn’t say anything. She just rested her hand on his shoulder, and that was enough. She didn’t need to understand it. She just stood with him.

“What do we do now?” she asked softly. “There’s nothing left, keris. No home, no village. Nothing.”

Aeris looked over the ruins, feeling strangely empty. “We don’t go back.” His voice was quiet. “There’s nothing to go back to. Whatever happens now, it’s not here.”

From the rubble, a groan. Someone was alive, clawing their way free, a figure stumbling into the light. Aeris recognized him even before he spoke. Fenn, the miller’s apprentice, a boy he’d spent summers fishing with in the creek before the world had gotten sharp and hard. Fenn’s face was raw with soot and smeared blood, arm bent at the elbow at a sick angle. His eyes found Aeris, widening in horror.

“You,” Fenn’s voice was ragged, desperate. He scrabbled away, even pain not stopping him. “You did this. The soldiers said, a demon, a demon with your face tore through the ritual! They said anyone who helped you would burn,”

“Fenn,” Aeris stepped closer, hands open, but that only made it worse.

“DEMON!” Fenn’s scream cut through the silence and wreckage, ripped straight from the heart. “DEMON! HE’S HERE! IT’S HIM,”

Alba didn’t flinch. “Fenn, he saved me. He’s not what they said, listen to me,”

“You don’t understand!” Fenn’s gaze darted past them, wild and unfocused. “The soldiers said nothing can stop him. He destroyed their magic, they burned the Hollis farm for trying to shelter him! I’m not dying for you, keris, I’m not!”

Panic rose, thick and hot. Aeris actually felt the dark veins beneath his skin respond, remembered for a second how it must look, saw himself as Fenn saw him now. Not a tired farm boy, but something dangerous. Something else.

A horn split the smoke. One sharp, imperial note, and this time it was close, close enough to mean soldiers already moving through the ruins. Alba’s hand found his. She squeezed hard.

“They’re coming, Aeris. They know exactly where we are.”

Behind them, Fenn wouldn’t stop screaming, dragging himself backward over broken wood, drawing eyes from every huddled survivor left in Stonevale. More faces emerged, First cautious, then afraid. All recognizing Aeris. No one looked glad to see him alive. In their eyes, he was the reason their homes were gone, their loved ones dead.

Aeris’s voice fell to a whisper. “We can’t fight through a village full of people who hate me. And we can’t talk them down before the soldiers get here. We run. We figure out everything else later.”

Alba didn’t hesitate. She gripped his hand and together they ran, slipping back into the trees as the echo of that horn and Fenn’s choking cries rippled through the bones of their old life, closing the door behind them for good.