Extra Chapter 0.5 The Demon Yearns
DAMARIS HAD MADE a terrible mistake. Or, more accurately, he had made a series of terrible mistakes, the latest of which might actually kill him. That was the last thought he had as he fled the demon realm, the home he had known for the whole of his existence, to cross to the human realm.
Pain. The only thing he could feel was pain.
He’d used up all of his magic to get through the plane between the realms and since magic was the only thing that kept his body together, he felt his body coming apart.
It unraveled, his arms and legs and horn and tail unspooling out of existence until the only thing left was his consciousness.
And, from the way he kept drifting in and out of awareness, barely even that.
Damaris, formerly a demon prince, drifted in the wind, unable to see because he no longer had eyes, and unable to hear because he no longer had ears.
He could sense energy, life force, because that wasn’t something he needed senses to do, but it was all frustratingly locked in a form he couldn’t touch.
Later, he would discover it was because humans had solid form, he couldn’t merely take a bite out of them as he might a smaller or weaker demon.
Even when there was a tantalizing glimmer of magic he thought he could absorb, he had no way of aiming his incorporeal, insubstantial body. He had no idea how long he drifted for until fortune turned his way, and the wind collided him into an animal.
Let me in, he commanded it. It did not respond, or could not respond, which counted as not a rejection.
He wafted in through its ear and settled himself in the hind of its brain, squashing some presumably non-essential parts of its consciousness.
For the first few days, he merely rode as a passenger, trying to acclimatize himself, getting used to the way its eyes and ears and twitchy little nose worked.
He was inside a very small animal, Damaris quickly discovered.
The perspective of having everything looming over him was unfamiliar and his little host was scared of practically everything, from humans to large birds to storms. If he had tried to possess this creature at his own full size, he might well have made its tiny body explode.
The things he did enjoy was that it was very speedy, given its relative size, and could scrambled across the ground and up trees with remarkable speed, and that it had a magnificently bushy tail. Once he regained his own form, he might try it on for size.
Being a squirrel was not, ultimately, his aim in crossing the border, but he allowed himself a moment of complacency in escaping the Demon Queen of Uncountable Desires, his progenitor.
Spacious though it was not inside the squirrel, it allowed him to take stock of the human world and readjust his perceptions.
For one, Damaris had not expected the human world to be so bright.
The sun, even on clouded days, lit the world up for hours at a time and the squirrel kept its eyes open all the time, even when it was dark.
The squirrel didn’t often go near other creatures – he gathered it was considered prey by most other things – and any subtle suggestion he tried to make on its limited mind to wander closer to the small four-legged animals was met only with terror.
Finally, it rested near enough a gray bird that was marginally larger than it that Damaris slipped out of the squirrel and into the bird.
He regretted it immediately.
The bird’s brain was even smaller than the squirrel’s, and it seemed to follow some unheard rule of the flock when occasionally it would sweep itself up into a flurry of feathers with a cluster of other birds.
No, he did not like that at all. Demons were solitary creatures, with a tendency to eat other demons if they thought they could get away with it; he did not understand flying formations.
There was enough of him now to crush the bird’s mind, the minuscule amount of consciousness the creature had, and suck up its life energy.
It died instantly. The bird was barely a mouthful, a single chew of magical energy at best, with a strange flavor he didn’t like.
But the whole flock of birds… The thought struck Damaris with glee.
The bird’s body dropped out of the sky and Damaris remained, fluttering in the wind again but at least larger and marginally more aware of his surroundings this time.
He rolled himself into the next bird and consumed the whole of it, and then the next, and the next.
He managed by his count eight of the stupid things before the rest had scattered far away enough he couldn’t reach them and rolled to the ground digesting his newly consumed energy.
It was the least delicious meal he’d had in a long time, and the unfamiliar tinge of energy from this world as opposed to his own gave him indigestion, but at least Damaris no longer felt like his last two wisps of consciousness were going to drift apart again.
He was a shadow now and to propel himself across the ground at short distances, which made everything easier.
If the demon queen could see him now, she could have laughed until her thousand eyes shook loose. She might even have spared him just for the amusement of watching him slither across the ground like the lowliest of demon shreds who could not even conjure their own body.
What Damaris really needed was to get close to humans.
The squirrel and the bird both seemed to inhabit a stretch of grass – and what an unfamiliar concept that had been at first, Damaris truly did not understand why the ground was made up on ten thousand little blades of anything – interrupted with trees, with only the occasional human walking past. It took him another few days before he found one, and he was ready for it.
He heaved himself into their shadow, winding himself around their legs.
Damaris had never paid much mind to humans.
It hadn’t seemed relevant until recently; they existed in a separate realm and so rarely reached out.
He’d felt traces of their magic before, when their summonings had pierced the barriers between their worlds, but none of their pleas had ever seemed enough for him.
Grant my wish and I will sell you my soul seemed to be the most common request, and Damaris had always been powerful enough that one extra soul had never seemed worth it.
He knew other demons who had answered their calls and crossed over, but it was common knowledge that those who liked to make the pacts did it because they weren’t powerful enough in the demon realm.
The appeal of being bound into a human’s body had been foreign to him, right up until the point the demon queen, the originator of his line, started making noises about how he had been amassing power a little too quickly for her liking, and how delicious he might be if she sucked him dry and left him wrung out on the shores of the sealess sands, waiting until he regained enough power for her to take a second bite.
And then a human body suddenly seemed a great hiding place to stay out of her reach.