Chapter 5
Saer learned all he could during his days with the humans.
Ruki’s overt enthusiasm to Saer’s appearance proved both irritating as well as necessary. The boy yammered on without pause, a necessary evil for him to pick up the language.
When trying to speak in his guttural native tongue, the human body Lucifer crafted him didn’t produce the same sounds properly. To that end, he noted humans didn’t, or couldn’t, growl. Whenever he made the noise, Ruki laughed while others of his settlement widened their eyes in alarm.
Ruki called them his tribe.
Asheda was Ruki’s father, as Saer surmised, though also held the title of Chief and leader of his people.
Ruki’s mother, Donanni, carried some of her son’s light-heartedness and welcomed Saer more readily than Asheda. Together, the mother and son smoothed out Chief Asheda’s stern nature.
Whenever he found a moment of peace, Saer homed in on these humans, attempting to detect what his maker needed from them.
Time and time again, he came up with that same niggling feeling, but nothing certain—and it irritated him to no end, the inability to solve this puzzle.
He needed it. Needed to return to the Hells.
Needed to see Neyu again.
Their settlement rested under a wide, blue sky dotted most days with cotton wisp clouds.
Green mixed with pale yellow hills surrounded them on all sides, and the people slept in huts crafted with thick tree branches and animal skins.
They farmed the land and hunted in the nearby woods with bows and arrows.
A clear river ran along the village, a place for fishing and bathing.
Saer was given a small shelter with blankets, some animal skins to don, and little else.
With nothing more to bide his time as he investigated, Saer absorbed all he was shown. Ruki and Donanni shared their skills first—cooking, harvesting, and tanning hides in the sun.
He didn’t need to eat, though he could. To the best of his understanding, what he ingested boiled and burnt within.
He gained a modicum of heat energy from this, though certainly not enough to sustain him.
Heat of any kind seemed to do as much—including from the sun on warmer days—though fire did best.
Humans couldn’t touch the fire without burning, the same as when their fragile skin made contact with his blood.
He taught himself to absorb and manipulate the blaze’s heat in ways to avoid their questions and suspicion.
Proximity to their fires worked well enough, though if he sat too close, ribbons of flame tended to draw his way.
He found the balance and helped with the cooking more often than not.
After an argument with Asheda—which the mother and son won—Saer was allowed a knife to clean game and fish.
He spoke little in his first days, other than to repeat words and ensure understanding. Other things he feigned ignorance to—like when Ruki asked why his skin burned as though he had a constant fever. “Fever means sick,” Ruki’d said. Whatever that meant.
While the tribespeople slept in the evenings, Saer stayed awake and explored for nights on end. He didn’t require sleep as long as his heat stores remained adequate.
Honing the Daemoenica innate ability to sense heat, Saer learned each familial signature emanated a unique signal. He developed a talent for distinguishing specific people in a crowd, like an extra layer upon his eyesight.
The first time he ever did this, because of his constant proximity, was with Ruki.
Subtle differences set the chief’s son apart from the other villagers—his height, varying temperature fluctuations, the rush of his warm blood with each beat of the boy’s heart.
Saer could pick Ruki out of hundreds by heat sense alone and perfected the ability over the course of weeks, even through walls or barriers.
Ruki grew more intrusive with each passing day, and Pride needed to roam without the inquisitive mind of the adolescent questioning his every move. The curious eyes of the chief’s son saw much.
But even the energetic boy needed to rest.
A warmth surrounded and pulled at Pride’s awareness despite the coolness of the evening, an aggravation that had poked at him all day, but he’d forced himself to ignore it until Ruki tucked himself into bed.
Energy glimmered near—something calling to his core and purpose—closer than ever since his return to Earth weeks earlier.
Like a pervasive itch under his skin.
A tickle at the back of his throat.
The snag under his ribs, reeling him in like a fish on the line.
He followed the tug, leading to the door of a tribesman’s hut—one he didn’t know beyond brief glimpses. Saer only recalled pale, gray eyes clouded by impending blindness, white hair, and wrinkled brown skin.
Saer entered the abode unannounced, stepping to the human’s bedside. The old man lay on his back, lips parted halfway while he dreamt. His worn breaths rasped in and out of his lungs. His skin ran hot with fever. Fever means sick.
Yet, a different kind of energy, separate from heat, surrounded the human. Blinking and squinting, like trying to distinguish white mist from gray fog, Saer saw the essence, tasted it at the back of his throat. He reached for the buzzing vapor, his hand passing over the sleeping man’s body.
It flowed straight through his fingers like slippery air. Visible but untouchable. Barely a breath away, but he couldn’t inhale it.
Yet, he knew.
This was it, wasn’t it? What his maker needed, what Lucifer asked for. This would allow him to return to Hell.
To hear Neyu’s voice again.
Saer turned his gaze to the human’s face. A hum filled his ears, layered upon the elder’s rattling breaths.
The old man blinked awake with tired, milky eyes. Running his tongue over the cracks in his parched lips, the man opened his mouth as though he meant to speak.
Saer didn’t say a word. He stood poised, all the muscles in his neck and back coiled tight, ready to lunge.
The hum in the room built itself into a rhythm, a music unlike anything Saer’d ever heard. His skin itched, invisible waves of energy standing his neck hairs on end. He reached a second time. Once more, it passed through him.
Frustration simmered behind Saer’s ribs, tightening his chest, quickening his breath along with the old man’s. The energy was there. What his maker sought floated around that room, and he couldn’t harness it!
Saer snarled and snatched at the essence once more. Again, his arms, hands, and fingers flew through it. Desperate, he turned to his heat sense and wrenched, thieving the man’s febrile warmth in the span of a breath.
As it had done to those first humans, the sick man’s lips darkened to dusky blue…and his mouth curved into a subtle but relieved smile.
The elder relaxed, and a final exhale whispered out of his throat. His chest didn’t rise again.
Silence.
The next instant, the room expanded, then exploded with the energy Saer sought.
It broke away from the old man’s body, blinding Saer.
Crying out, he snatched frantically for it.
He pulled with his heat sense but found no further purchase.
Quick as it grew and burst, the disturbance faded away, like that day when he’d killed his first human after they attacked him.
The memory played like a disgraceful tease in his mind.
Before long, Saer grabbed for nothing. He didn’t stop trying until far after.
The old man didn’t stir. Whatever energy he’d housed had gone. Frustration and fury bubbled under Saer’s skin, in his chest, a seething pressure behind his eyes. He was better than this. He would not fail!
“Frenzied Hellsfire.” The biting curse left Pride’s lips in the first language he’d ever known—Lucifer’s language. It sounded rough and unpracticed on his human tongue, and didn’t ease his disappointment and defeat.
Saer gritted his teeth, then left the hut.
Tribesmen carried the body of the old man with respectful tenderness out of his hut the next day.
The man appeared to sleep, but when Saer re-tapped his heat sense for warmth, he only sensed the bodies that transferred his lifeless husk.
The elder’s blood, organs, flesh, and bones remained still and cold as the surrounding air.
Saer’s frown deepened, but he said nothing. People from the village looked on in observance, many with tears streaming down their cheeks.
Was this sadness a normal occurrence when faced with this end of life? Why so, when the phenomenon was inevitable for these fragile creatures?
A quiet sigh to his right reminded Saer he didn’t stand alone.
“Gaugii was old and sick. But it’s always weird to watch it happen.” Ruki spoke in a quiet, reserved voice. He didn’t cry, but a sadness lined the edges of his lips, all the same.
Understanding but half the words, Saer remained silent as he watched. That man, hours before, had been filled with heat and energy, that special element he needed to seize for his maker. He knew it. And he couldn’t harness it.
Who knew when the opportunity would arise again? The question weighed heavily on his shoulders, and he fought to keep himself from growling. Though, if he stayed angry, he could ignore how much his heart ached to see Neyu again.
Ruki went on despite the language barrier. “I hope I’m as old as Gaugii when I die. Or maybe even older. I want to see everything before my spirit joins the ancestors.”
Saer’s unfocused eyes blinked, and he turned his head. The juvenile’s deep brown gaze held a sharpness, even for one so young.
“Spirit,” Saer repeated the unfamiliar word.
Ruki’s face lit with surprise to hear Saer speak.
“Yes, spirit.” He nodded with encouragement.
When Saer stared, Ruki furrowed his brow and tried to explain.
“Spirit.” He flattened both hands and touched his russet-toned chest. “Spirit. It’s inside.
And when we die…” The boy breathed out and mimed something leaving with his hands. “It goes.”
It goes.
Saer narrowed his eyes. He understood what Ruki tried to convey, even if all the words weren’t grasped. What he needed to ask next was very important and required him to dig through the language he’d stored away in his memory to pick the correct word.
“Back?” he asked.
Ruki’s lips pursed with contemplation before it appeared to dawn on him. “Does the spirit come back?”
Saer nodded, once.
The boy shook his head. “No. When it’s gone, it moves on from the body forever. You’re dead.”
“Dead.”
“Yes…dead.”
Saer turned away from the boy. One chance. One opportunity to collect ‘spirit’ was what he had. Then dead. He understood perfectly.
All at once, the stakes seemed much higher.
The experience Saer shared with Gaugii was not the last.
With mild surprise, Saer found a similar energy existed in animals and escaped them as they perished, though their spirit didn’t pull Saer’s attention with the same ferocity.
Seasons passed, one after the other. Saer learned them, and his urgency percolated, leaving him short-tempered. Ruki called him ‘prickly.’ It amused the boy, but Saer made it clear he didn’t appreciate the word.
The more time he remained on the surface, the more Neyu remained in Hell, away from him.
Did she think of him?
Had she stayed away from Lucifer’s ire?
If time passed so differently on the surface than it did in Hell, how much had gone by for her?
He thought of her in every empty moment. He needed to dispel her from his mind, lest it distract him.
For days.
Then weeks.
Months and eventually years.
Hellsfire, it grated at him.
Saer witnessed a handful of deaths, and each resulted in the same infuriating outcome.
He blended with humanity. He learned to smile, joke, express sorrow, and mimic fear.
He honed his skills.
Heat sense told him where animals and humans dwelled or hid.
His spirit or soul sense sharpened and called him near the end of life, though he found he could blink into it at any time to see wisps of that life energy hovering around any creature.
A third, unnamed awareness of an odd metaphysical warmth continued to evade him.
It flared and waned from human to human, situation to situation.
He’d felt it emanate from Asheda most often, the first time when the chief told him his name.
Next-to-never did Ruki display it. Occasionally from Donanni.
He couldn’t put a finger on the connection, yet an instinctual familiarity nagged at him with it, just like all else.
Heat sense. Soul sense. And…something else.
Saer dared not return before completing his mission, nor did Lucifer contact him.
Would his maker perish before he brought It the cure?
Did Lucifer persist in creating Its army, despite growing weaker with each passing day?
What had he missed? The thoughts turned Saer’s stomach, anxiety squirming inside, but he couldn’t linger on them.
He had a duty. He needed to focus on it.
One way or the other, he would appease Lucifer. He’d return to Neyu.
No matter how long it took.