Claimed by the scarred Alpha

PRIM

Demon.

My brain supplied the answer before it had bothered to finish the investigation. In fairness, the evidence had been practically filing itself into labeled folders. Red skin. Horns. Eyes full of orange-white fire. Ancient darkness leaking off it in waves. The fine print might as well have read Congratulations. You have encountered a demon.

I did not wait for it to move first.

I hit it with everything I had, all the rage I had been carrying since the bathroom floor, since the kitchen knife, since the fire. Every ounce of spiritual energy that had been building in me since I came back through, all of it directed at the creature in a single concentrated blast that should have moved something considerably more substantial than a demon pretending to be a ghost.

It moved.

Not far. Not in the direction of being harmed. But it moved, and the surprise of that registered on its face before the amusement replaced it, and that fraction of surprise told me I was stronger than it had accounted for.

I hit it again.

This time I came from three directions simultaneously, splitting my attention across multiple points of contact, driving it back toward the far wall while I held the pressure at the center. The room’s temperature had already dropped to something that cracked the air, frost forming across the window glass, and the demon shook it off the way you shook off mild weather.

"Interesting," it said.

"Stop talking," I said.

I drove it harder.

For a time, I held the advantage, at least in the narrow sense that it absorbed more punishment than it returned. I refused to give it a pattern to learn. Every strike came from a different angle, every feint bled into something unexpected. I stayed light on my feet, changing distance before it could answer, forcing it to react instead of dictate the pace.

It learned.

Slowly, but unmistakably.

Each exchange grew a little cleaner. Each counter came a fraction sooner than the last, as though it were still measuring me, filing away every habit, every instinct, every preference.

I saw an opening.

It drifted too wide after parrying my right hand. I stepped in without hesitation, twisting my hips into a punch aimed squarely at its jaw.

Its hand shot forward.

Instead of blocking the blow, it seized the front of me and hurled me aside with effortless force.

The world lurched.

My back slammed into the stone wall.

Agony exploded through me.

I screamed before I understood why.

The wall itself burned.

Brilliant crimson lines flared beneath my shoulders and spine, intricate symbols carved into the stone igniting the instant I touched them. They branded themselves against my flesh, if what I had could even be called flesh, with heat so intense it felt less like fire and more like being peeled apart from the inside. I threw myself forward, collapsing onto one knee as smoke curled from the burn clinging to my back.

The pain refused to fade.

It pulsed beneath my skin, vicious and alive.

I looked over my shoulder.

The rune glowed quietly against the wall, its light fading now that it had done its work.

When had that gotten there?

A low chuckle echoed across the chamber.

The demon stood exactly where I had left it, not bothering to pursue.

"I thought you would appreciate a precaution," it said.

Its smile widened, revealing too many teeth.

"It is my responsibility to ensure that, when I finally beat that pride out of you, you do not decide to run."

Something hummed behind me.

I turned just enough to catch another crimson symbol blooming into existence several yards away.

Then another.

And another.

One by one, the runes awakened around the room, sealing the arena piece by piece.

Fuck this. I refused to be afraid. I charged back at the demon, and I hit it again and kept moving.

The room was getting smaller.

Not physically. The walls were where they had been. But the space I could operate in was contracting, the runes drawing invisible boundaries that my energy could not fully cross, and I understood what it had been doing while I was busy believing I was winning.

It had been trapping me.

"You fight well for a lower spirit," it said.

I hit it with everything I had left. The blast connected properly this time, and the demon staggered back two full steps, its massive frame actually giving ground. It lifted its head and looked at me with those orange-white eyes.

Something changed in its expression.

It stopped being patient.

The retaliation came without warning.

Nothing I had thrown at it belonged in the same conversation.

Its power ignored the shape I wore. It passed through every layer that pretended to be flesh, slipping beneath form, beneath thought, beneath identity, until it found the thing that was truly me.

Then it closed around it.

Pain was too small a word.

There was no body left to break, no nerves left to set ablaze. It reached the place where my existence had been stitched together and tore at the seams.

The world disappeared.

Not into darkness.

Into absence.

For one impossible instant, I ceased to be certain that I had ever existed at all.

I flickered.

My outline fractured like a reflection disturbed by unseen hands. Pieces of me blinked out of reality before snapping violently back into place. My arms vanished to the elbow. Half my face dissolved into drifting ash. My voice escaped in broken fragments, cutting in and out as though existence itself could no longer decide whether I belonged in it.

The room watched.

Even the air seemed to recoil.

The room lurched. My outline continued to fracture, blinking in and out of existence. I reached for whatever remained of myself, trying to force the pieces back together.

I was too late.

The second attack hit before I had recovered from the first.

I fell.

The floor caught me.

I collapsed onto my hands, struggling to stay upright as my form shuddered beneath me. The runes held me inside the room with merciless certainty, but they could do nothing to keep me whole.

I reached for myself.

My outline refused to listen.

The edges of my body trembled, blurred, then came apart into ragged wisps before dragging themselves back together. Every time I thought I had regained control, another piece unraveled.

The demon lowered itself into a crouch until we were eye to eye.

It regarded me with the quiet, professional satisfaction of an artisan watching a difficult process unfold exactly as intended.

"Where you are going," it said, "you will not be alone."

It opened its mouth.

Nothing visible emerged.

Instead, I felt a pull.

It ignored the shape I wore and fastened itself to the thing beneath it, the part that was truly me. My essence lurched toward the darkness beyond its teeth, drawn with quiet, inexorable purpose.

Not my appearance.

My existence.

I felt myself beginning to separate, strands of my being drawn away one by one.

I thought about Margaux.

I thought about the deal we had made in the corridor, the promise I had given her, the marks on those Omegas that needed to be broken before I could rest.

Then another memory surfaced.

The demon’s confession.

It had used fragments of itself to deceive me. So this moment would happen.

I could do that too.

Split.

I had demonstrated that with the part of me that had rejoined itself in the corridor after Margaux’s light hit me; the smaller portion that had entered through the window and merged back into what I had become demonstrated that I could pull something like that in this situation.

The consumption was pulling at me, and I let most of it pull.

I tore away the smallest fragment of my essence I could manage while the greater part of me continued to be drawn inexorably toward the demon’s open mouth. Instead of resisting the pull, I let it continue, sending the fragment sideways through the air rather than upward. I guided it toward the single gap in the rune pattern, a flaw the demon had left unsealed because it had never imagined I would attempt escape with something so infinitesimal while the rest of me was in the process of being consumed.

It was so small I was not certain it would survive the attempt.

Then the dark took me completely.

Not the darkness of the garden, or the corridor, or the liminal places where spirits sometimes lingered. This was something denser. Darkness that had weight. It clung to me like a submerged ocean, cold and viscous, as though it had been pooling here for ages beyond counting, pressing against every part of me at once.

I tried to orient myself.

There was no up or down. No horizon. No sense of distance or direction. I could not even tell whether I was moving or perfectly still.

"Hello?"

My voice left my mouth, then seemed to dissolve before it had traveled anywhere.

"Is someone here?"

Nothing answered.

Not even an echo.

I reached outward with the sense that had been growing ever since I returned, the one that had led me to Margaux across the estate and warned me of the demon’s presence long before I saw the face it had borrowed.

Nothing answered.

I searched for the fragment I had torn away from myself. It lingered at the edge of my awareness, so faint it barely qualified as existence, a distant flicker that might have been too insubstantial to matter even if it somehow reached Margaux.

"It is useless."

The voice emerged from the darkness itself. It had no direction, no source. It simply existed, as though the void had decided to speak.

"Trying to escape from here."

I turned toward where the voice seemed strongest.

There was nothing.

"Who is here?" I asked.

"Someone who was consumed before you."

Silence settled between us for a moment.

"It has been some time. He only consumes those who become troublesome. You must have caused him quite a bit of trouble."

I let out a quiet breath.

"I held my own for a while."

A faint chuckle drifted through the darkness.

"That sounds about right." Dry amusement colored his voice, startling in a place that seemed to have forgotten such things. "He or perhaps it is an ’it ’-dislikes resistance."

I waited.

The darkness stirred.

I was beginning to understand that even this place had its own language. Darkness did not ripple here because of wind or motion. It shifted when something inside it chose to move.

Something was approaching.

At first, it was little more than a denser patch of black. Gradually, contours emerged, not because light revealed them, but because the darkness itself withdrew just enough to define a shape.

A young man.

About my age, perhaps a little older. He possessed that unmistakable quality of someone whose youth still belonged entirely to him, untouched by the slow awareness that time was a finite thing. His face was calm, his eyes clear, carrying the quiet steadiness of someone others would have trusted without needing a reason.

I studied him.

Recognition brushed against the edge of my thoughts.

There was something familiar in the arrangement of his features, an echo of another face buried somewhere in my memory. I reached for it, but it slipped away before I could grasp it.

"He consumed you too," I said.

He gave a small nod.

"A long time ago."

"Who are you?"

His gaze remained fixed on mine, patient, almost knowing.

"My name is Yann," he said.

He paused, as though giving me one last chance to recognize him before the truth settled between us.

"Yann Archambault."

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