The Void Prince Who Devoured the Demon Queens

The woman who had killed him was humming.

That was the first thing Kaelen heard, before the pain, before he understood that he could hear at all. A tuneless little melody, the kind people hum while they wash dishes. Somewhere close, leather creaked and something small and metal clinked against stone.

He opened his eyes.

The sky was the color of an old bruise. Ash fell out of it in slow gray flakes and settled on his lashes. He was lying on cracked flagstones with his arms thrown wide, like a man dropped from a height, and the stone under his back was strangely warm.

"Mm," said the humming woman, without looking up. "Still dead, I hope."

He turned his head, an inch at a time.

She sat cross-legged a few feet away, going through his pockets, which were apparently also hers now. Red hair that pooled on the ground in coils and smoked at the ends. Two black horns swept back from her forehead. A tail with a spade at its tip lay across her lap like a sleeping cat, and every so often the tip twitched. She wore a few leather straps and a great deal of confidence.

She had found a waterskin, a string of cheap wooden prayer beads, and a folded sheet of parchment under a heavy wax seal. She was reading the parchment.

"'By order of the Crown and the Church of Absolute Light,'" she recited, in the voice of someone doing a bad impression, "'Kaelen Vanguard, afflicted with a demonic mutation of the blood, is hereby stripped of title and protection and remanded to the border.'" She snorted. "Remanded. Is that what they call it when you throw a boy away?"

Kaelen. That was his name. He knew that with the same flat certainty that he knew his hands were cold.

His chest felt hollow, as if someone had scooped it out with a spoon. He looked down. His tunic hung open on four deep furrows that ran across the ribs, their edges black and puckered and already crawling shut. What seeped out wasn't red. It was the color of used engine oil.

He tried to work out how he'd gotten here, and found two sets of memories stuffed into the same head, like slides jammed in a projector.

The first was a twenty-four-hour pharmacy on the ring road, rain smearing the glass, a stock count that refused to balance. Twenty-seven years old, two hours past midnight, and worrying about whether he'd given the dragon too much treasure for Friday's game. Then headlights, much too bright, much too close.

The second belonged to a boy of nineteen. A white marble balcony. Hands lifting a thin gold circlet off his head. A man's voice, gentle and very sure of itself: It's mercy, Kaelen. Be grateful. Then a cart, a long road, church bells fading, and a cough that tasted of iron. Then a gate of black stone, and a woman walking out of the dark, smiling.

Well. That explained the hole in him.

The air in front of his face flickered. Pale blue letters wrote themselves across the ash.

[HOST: KAELEN VANGUARD. LEVEL 1] [HP: 3 / 41] [CONSTITUTION: PRIMAL VOID (CURSED)] [VOID CORE: 6 days remaining]

He read it twice. It was the same typeface he used on his own character sheets, which struck him as unfair.

Six days. Whatever the Void Core was, it was eating him, and it had a schedule.

"You're looking at something," the woman said. She had finally lifted her eyes, and they were the color of the inside of a forge. "That's new. The last ones just stared at the sky. Do you see things, little prince? The Church says your blood rots you from the inside."

He opened his mouth. What came out was a croak. He tried again. "Where am I?"

"Cinder Keep." She waved a hand at the ruins around them, the broken towers, the rusted portcullis hanging from one hinge, the black ridge behind it where a dull red glow bled up into the clouds. "Your people built it a hundred years ago to seal a Hellgate. The gate closed itself. Nobody came back to say thank you." She tossed the parchment onto his chest. "They left you here with a waterskin and a prayer. Either the Church is very stupid, or it wanted you found."

The borrowed memories filled in the rest, unasked. The glow beyond the ridge was the Ashfall Dominions, where the demons lived. Two kinds of them, the old stories said. The Abyss bred the wild ones, hot and loud and ruled by whoever hit hardest. The Nine Hells bred the cold ones, who signed things. Lawful and chaotic. Two flavors of damned, forever at each other's throats, and a human border fort sitting in the middle like a plate on a battlefield.

In his campaigns he would have called it the Blood War.

Here it was just the neighborhood.

"Why did you kill me?" he asked.

She seemed to find the question charming. "I was bored." She said it the way someone admits to a second helping of dessert. "Three days walking. Nothing worth breaking. Then I find a human prince sitting alone at my road, and I think, I wonder what's inside one of those." A shrug of one shoulder. "Not much, as it turns out. You stopped. I felt your heart quit around my fingers. And then, a minute later," she tilted her head, studying him as if he were a clock that had started running backward, "it started again."

"Persistent," Kaelen managed.

"Funny." Her smile widened, and it was a lovely smile, and nothing in it was friendly. "Most of them scream by now. I like it when they come back, though. It means I get to do it twice."

He made himself breathe.

In his games, this was the point where a kind Dungeon Master fudged a roll behind the screen. Level one. Three hit points. A creature so far above him that her stat block would need its own page. But there was no screen, and nobody behind it, and the only thing he could do was what he had always done at the table: stop watching the monster's face and watch what the monster did.

Her weight sat on her back foot. Her fingers kept curling against her thigh, closing and opening, closing and opening. Sweat gathered at her temple and vanished before it could fall, gone as steam. The stone under her bare feet had gone black and glassy in two perfect prints. Behind her, the nearest wall shimmered with heat, and the old blocks ticked as they cooled.

He filed it away. He was not in a position to think about it yet.

"Let's talk," he said.

"People say that right before the screaming. Ignis, by the way. Ignis Ashblood. You should know who's doing it." She rose in a single easy motion, and the tail slid off her lap and began to sway. "Hold still. I'll be quick this time. Quicker, anyway."

She crouched over him again. One clawed hand hovered above the wound in his chest, five curved black points, still faintly red at the tips.

"Wait," Kaelen said. "Wait, wait, I can..."

The claws went in.

He had expected pain. What he got was something else, a lurch deep behind his breastbone, sudden and enormous, as if a starving animal had been woken and thrown a bone. The hollow in his chest strained toward her hand like a dog at the end of a chain. Heat poured up her arm and into him, golden and thick and wonderful, the first warm thing his body had felt since waking, and he heard himself gasp like a man hauled out of a frozen river.

The woman's smile vanished.

She tried to pull her hand back. It did not come.

"What," Ignis said, very quietly, "are you doing?"

"I don't know!" He could feel it drinking, feel the fire running out of her and into the black emptiness inside him. "I swear I don't know!"

She wrenched at her wrist with her other hand. The heat kept pouring out of her, and for the first time since he'd woken, the demon who had killed him looked afraid.