The Void Prince Who Devoured the Demon Queens

Chapter 2: Roll for Survival

Ignis was trying very hard not to look relieved.

She was failing. Kaelen could see it in the way her shoulders had started to drop, in the long ragged breath she kept clenching her teeth around. It wasn't pain on her face. It was the look of someone sinking into a hot bath after a week in the cold.

Then she seemed to remember who she was, and she tore her hand out of his chest.

It came free with a wet, ugly sound. She lurched back, caught herself on one palm, and sat down hard on the flagstones with her legs sprawled. Steam rolled off her arm. For the first time since he'd woken, her hair had stopped smoking. The black glass under her feet dimmed from orange to dull gray.

Neither of them said anything. Ash ticked down between them.

Kaelen lay very still and listened to his own body. The hunger behind his breastbone hadn't gone away. But a minute ago it had been screaming, and now it was only muttering to itself, the way a stomach does after a first bite of bread. He glanced at the window.

[VOID CORE: 6 days remaining]

The number hadn't moved. Whatever he had just swallowed, it wasn't enough to buy him a day.

"Do that again," Ignis said hoarsely, and then caught herself. "No. I mean, don't. Don't move." She flexed the hand that had been inside him. The claws were back to their normal black, no red left at the tips. "I'm going to kill you now."

"You used your claws."

"What?"

"The first time." His voice came out like gravel in a bucket, but he kept going, because if he stopped he would start shaking and never finish. "You've got a hand that melts stone. I watched you do it, the floor under you is glass. And you opened me up with claws, like a human with a knife. If you'd been bored, you'd have burned me. It would have been quicker, and it would have been more fun."

Her eyes narrowed. "Careful."

"You weren't bored. You were being careful."

She didn't answer. The tail behind her had gone rigid.

It was the same trick he'd used a hundred times across a table, on players who swore they weren't bluffing, and it worked the same way. Nobody lied well when the truth was close. They just got very still.

"Three days walking," Kaelen said, "and you don't rest. You don't sweat, you steam. You keep that hand pressed to your ribs when you think I'm not watching, like there's a stitch in your side. And when my core drank a little of your fire, you didn't scream. You nearly sighed." He swallowed. "That's not a hunter in a good mood. That's somebody running a fever she can't break."

"Humans get fevers."

"We do. Where I come from, there's a kind where the body's thermostat jams open." He kept his voice low and level, the voice you use on a dog you don't trust. "The muscles burn fuel and the temperature climbs and nothing tells it to stop. You can't wait it out. Either you cool the patient and shut the reaction off, or it cooks them from the inside out."

"I don't know your words."

"Then I'll use yours. Your core is a furnace with the vent welded shut."

The ridge wind picked up, carrying a smell of sulfur and old smoke. Far off, something huge shrieked once and got no answer.

Ignis stared at the ground for a long moment. When she spoke again, the lazy purr was gone from her voice.

"It's called the Swelling." She said it like a confession. "Every Hellfire blood gets it. The core grows when you're angry, and it grows when you win. You burn a village, it eases. You burn a city, it eases for a year." Her mouth twisted. "I've held it for three weeks."

"Why hold it?"

"Because smoke can be followed." She looked up, and underneath the arrogance he saw something raw and tired and not nearly as old as the horns suggested. "Ever since Gehenna, anything I burn is a signal fire for people who want me dead. So I walk. And it gets worse. And then a little human prince turns up alone on my road, and I think, good. Something small. Something quiet." A bitter breath. "Something I can break without lighting up the whole sky."

"And then I started up again."

"And then you started up again, and ate my fire like it was soup." She narrowed her eyes. "Count me the days, prince. How long do you think I have?"

"I don't know. I can only see my own."

"Six, by that face you make when you read the air." She didn't wait for him to confirm it. "Mine is nine. The Swelling kills in a season, and I've nearly spent mine. Which means I can outlast you by three days, and you can't live long enough to make that matter." The ghost of a smile. "Funny thing, arithmetic."

"It is," Kaelen said. "Because if I die on day six, so do you on day nine. The only difference is whether you spend the last three alone."

That landed. He watched it land.

He turned his head and looked at the air, and the window obliged, as it always seemed to.

[PRIMAL RESONANCE: Concentrated life essence can only be extracted at the peak of absolute surrender of body and spirit.]

"What you gave me was a sip," he said. "A real cure needs the whole meal. And according to this, the only way to get it is..." He rubbed his face with a shaking hand. "Let me put this in plain words. It has to be both of us, all the way through."

Ignis stared at him.

Then she began to laugh. It started as a snort and grew until her whole body shook, tail whipping, one clawed hand cracking a flagstone. It went on long enough that Kaelen began to wonder whether this was the part where she killed him out of sheer embarrassment.

"You want a princess of the Abyss," she gasped, wiping her eye with a knuckle, "to bed a corpse."

"Recent corpse."

"Dying corpse."

"Dying corpse with a cure for both of us," he said. "That's the pitch."

The laughter stopped. What replaced it was a cold, weighing interest.

"I could just take it," she said. "Chain you to a wall. You're in no state to refuse."

"Try." He didn't let his voice wobble, which took most of what he had left. "The window says a victim who's forced seals up like a fist. You'd get a corpse, and a very expensive one. And there's something else." He made himself say it. "When it starts, our souls get dragged into a duel. If I lose, if I'm weaker than you in there, you drain whatever's left of me."

She raised an eyebrow. "So I could finish what I started."

"You could."

"Then why in the nine hells would you tell me?"

"Because a deal where you don't know the risks isn't a deal." He shrugged with the one shoulder that still worked. "You'd find out halfway through and kill me for it. I'd rather you know now."

She was quiet for a long time. Her tail curled slowly around her own ankle.

"Where I'm from," Kaelen said, "we'd write this down. Sign it. Get witnesses."

"Devils do that." She spat the word like a seed. "Clerks with horns. In the Abyss, a promise is only as good as the arm behind it."

"Then here's the arm. Until we're both stable, neither of us kills the other. I cure your fever. You keep me breathing. After that, we renegotiate."

"And if I don't care for your terms?"

"Then wait three days and see how you feel about them."

That was the bluff. He had nothing behind it but a flickering blue number and a body that was slowly turning to ash. At the table, this was where he'd say, Give me a Persuasion check, and the player would roll, and he'd lean back and watch the die tumble across the wood.

Here the die was a demon with a kingdom's worth of fire in her chest, and it was taking a very long time to land.

She stood. She was taller than he had thought, long-limbed and scorched at the edges, and against the red sky she looked like she was already burning.

"If you fail me in there," Ignis said, "I will make it last."

"If I fail you in there, I won't be around to care."

"Fair."

She hauled him up with one arm, like a sack of grain. His legs didn't even pretend to help. Half-carried, half-dragged, he crossed the broken courtyard with her, toward an old gatehouse whose door had rotted off its hinges years ago. She kicked what was left of it aside. Inside was a collapsed barracks with a mostly intact roof, a rusted cot, and a little sun scratched into the wall by some long-dead soldier, with too many rays.

The air flickered once more.

[PRIMAL RESONANCE AVAILABLE] [Partner consent: CONDITIONAL] [WARNING: A Domain Battle begins at first union. If the host's will falls below the partner's, the host will be drained.] [Initiate? Y / N]

Her tail slid around his ankle and tightened. Her mouth was close to his ear, and he could feel the heat of her like the open door of an oven.

"You'd better be as clever in bed as you are on your back, little prince."

Kaelen looked at the window. He thought about a second life, and about whether the dice in this world allowed rerolls.

He already knew the answer. He had known it since the first claw.

He chose Yes, and Ignis's mouth came down on his before the window had finished fading.