The Broken Halo

Cold ash covered the plain. Ahead, a narrow track crossed the black ground beneath a red sky without a sun.

Simon still held the One-Horned Demon’s hand.

”Where am I?”

The answer arrived before he could call Lilith. Not a voice. Recognition rose from the bloodline beside him, carrying a certainty that had never belonged to his memories.

”The Path of Origin.”

He looked down the track.

This was not the history of one demon. It was what his blood remembered of the creatures that had existed before it became something so weak.

And the path led backward.

These were not ancestors returning to life. They were shapes preserved within his blood, each older form containing something its descendants had lost.

The One-Horned Demon took a hesitant step.

Simon followed.

Ash stirred beneath their feet, exposing countless overlapping footprints. Some were larger than his body. Others had claws, divided heels, or shapes he could not identify.

The nearer prints were small.

The farther they walked, the deeper the older ones became.

Then a figure appeared across their path.

Two black horns curved above its forehead. It stood straight, unlike Simon’s companion, and its gaze carried the instinctive disdain he had seen so often in noble demons.

A pressure struck them.

The One-Horned Demon fell to its knees.

Simon staggered, feeling the same force grind through his bones in Velmora.

The pressure reached him through the weaker bloodline. The strength of his Infernal Heart could not prevent it from buckling, and every failure tore at the body they shared.

The figure did not attack. Its existence was enough to deny them another step.

’Weaker blood doesn’t belong here.’

The words were Simon’s interpretation, but the meaning was unmistakable.

He bent and pulled his companion upright.

”Then we’ll stop being weaker.”

They moved together.

Beyond the gate, the nine hundred and ninety-nine hearts answered their steps, holding the frail manifestation together.

The first step opened a wound across Simon’s shoulder. The second made his teeth creak.

On the third, the manifestation’s bent horn cracked.

A second point pushed from the opposite side of its skull.

In Velmora, two swellings rose beneath Simon’s scalp.

CRACK!

Black bone pierced the skin.

He groaned without opening his eyes. UnholyRegeneration closed the torn flesh around both growing horns.

Across the array, the black connection to Tarvak finally activated and something thick travelled through it.

Tarvak arched against the restraints. His severed arm stumps swelled, and bone pushed outward.

For a moment, he stared with desperate hope.

Then the growth bent backward.

It was not an arm.

A horn tore through the end of each stump, twisting toward his shoulders while the flesh around it continued trying to form fingers.

”STOP!”

Lilith steadied the black channel.

What could not remain in Simon had found somewhere else to grow.

On the Path of Origin, the two-horned figure dissolved as they passed through its position.

Simon’s companion stood taller. Its hand was no longer transparent.

Behind it, the footprints of the One-Horned Demon ended.

The next figure had two horns and a pair of wings.

They stretched across the track, their dark membranes covered in veins that pulsed with every beat of Simon’s heart.

Images flickered within them.

Winged demons above fortified cities. Their children descending among demons with smaller horns. Generations passing, strength thinning until wings vanished and a horn was lost.

Simon saw only fragments.

Enough to understand that he was walking against that decline.

The wings struck downward.

Black wind scoured the track.

It did not merely push them back. It tore at the shape his companion had just gained, trying to strip it into the weaker form they had left behind.

Simon caught its shoulders.

”Hold.”

Blood filled his mouth in Velmora.

Two ridges pressed outward beneath his shoulder blades. His flesh split, closed, then split again.

He remembered Lilith’s warning and stopped himself from forcing more energy into the regeneration.

Preserve the flesh.

Allow the change.

He braced through one beating of the wings, then another.

By the time they crossed beneath them, his companion possessed a pair of its own.

They unfolded awkwardly, black and wet.

Simon felt their weight on his real back.

Then something farther along the track raised its head.

The winged figure behind them bowed.

Simon stopped.

The being ahead had no wings.

Its skin was ivory, so smooth that the fine black seams across its joints resembled deliberate craftsmanship. Two polished horns swept backward from its temples, then curved down beside its jaw, framing the throat like a rigid collar.

Its silver eyes contained no pupils.

Thin crescents of bone rose above its shoulders and hips. Nothing covered its body, yet it looked more formally dressed than a king.

”A Daemon.”

The understanding came from the same place as the path’s name.

His companion’s wings folded tightly.

Simon felt the boundary between them and that figure. Crossing the previous stages had hurt.

This one felt like walking into something that would reject his existence entirely.

’There. That’s what we came for.’

He stepped forward.

His knees hit the ash.

In Velmora, blood burst from his nose.

The runes across his bare chest pulled tight. Lilith looked toward the outer circles and turned her hand.

Faces rose beneath the blood.

Fear. Hatred. The final resentment of Velmora’s dead.

They surged toward Simon.

On the track, black hands caught his legs. Voices shouted from the ash, demanding that he stop, fall, suffer.

Their hatred wanted him destroyed.

Lilith forced its pressure against the boundary holding his bloodline in its lesser shape.

”Do not take it into yourself,” her voice reached him. ”Let it break the resistance. Then let it go.”

Simon gritted his teeth.

The pressure before him cracked.

It did not become weaker. The thing inside his companion that insisted it could never endure it began breaking instead.

He stood, dragging the manifestation up beside him.

They crossed.

Its wings dissolved into pale threads that wound beneath its skin. The horns curved down beside its jaw. Its bowed spine straightened.

A Daemon stood beside Simon.

In Velmora, his new wings contracted painfully against his back. Blood steamed along the inscriptions as his body began rebuilding the structure that had supported them.

Tarvak screamed.

The array fed him what Simon’s changing blood could no longer carry... damaged structures, incompatible residues, and the spent resentment. His living blood tried to give all of it a body.

His chest swelled without taking a breath.

Something resembling a second ribcage pushed outward beneath his skin, but its bones pointed inward, hooking through the flesh they should have protected.

Faces formed along his stomach.

They opened their mouths.

His scream came from all of them.

”Kill me! BLACKMOON! PLEASE!”

His neck twisted toward a horn growing from his stump.

Lilith caught his jaw with a blood band before he could impale himself.

”Not yet.”

He could not hear her.

The array forced another heartbeat through his distorting body.

Simon staggered past the ivory figure, expecting the track to end.

But it continued.

Another being waited ahead.

”No...”

This one was also wingless.

Its skin resembled translucent obsidian. Fine points of light moved deep beneath it, crossing the places where organs should have been.

Two horns rose vertically, each dividing into three narrow tines. Between them hung a pale disc of bone, suspended above the brow without touching either horn.

Its eyes held three golden pupils apiece. All six moved independently before fixing upon Simon together.

Within that dark skin, Simon glimpsed cities built along the ribs of something vast. Ivory Daemons walked beneath statues shaped like the being before him.

The scene vanished before he could understand what he was seeing.

The first Daemon’s pressure had forced him to his knees.

This one’s attention bent the path.

Simon’s newly changed companion shrank against his side.

’The first Daemon wasn’t the origin?’

The answer moved through his blood.

An older form.

The ivory Daemon had descended from this.

Simon laughed once, breathlessly.

”Of course. Why would it be that easy?”

The pressure came down.

He lost all sense of time beneath it.

There were steps he completed and steps that left him crawling. His companion’s skin cracked whenever it tried to remain what it had just become.

Again the resentment struck the resistance. Again Simon refused to let the hatred settle inside him.

Every discarded trace travelled down the black channel.

Tarvak’s torso lengthened against the bindings. His knees bent the wrong way. Fingers budded beneath his tongue, forcing his mouth open until the blood restraints had to keep his jaw from separating.

He could no longer form a plea.

Lilith kept the deformities away from his Demon Heart and forced his distorted chest to rise again.

Simon crawled through the second figure’s position with his companion’s wrist locked in his hand.

The manifestation darkened.

Lights appeared beneath its skin. Its horns branched.

Outside, Simon’s own horns split into new shapes, and something deep within his bones shifted so violently that his scream finally broke across Velmora.

UnholyRegeneration held him together.

Only just.

He reached the other side.

For several breaths, he remained on his knees, unable to make his fingers release their grip.

Then four enormous shadows fell across the track.

Simon slowly looked up.

A third Daemon stood ahead.

Four wings rose behind it.

The upper pair consisted of long black vanes, each smooth as polished metal, separated by narrow lines of crimson fire. The lower pair were translucent silver membranes stretched over curved bone, their veins carrying patterns that changed whenever Simon tried to follow them.

Its skin was deep blue-black. Long white hair passed between two horns that swept forward and joined above its brow in a double arch.

Its eyes were white.

Not glowing.

Empty, as though holes had been cut through its face into a brighter place.

The first two Daemons had looked regal.

This one made the entire black plain seem like the floor before its throne.

It turned toward him.

Simon’s strengthened companion dropped to its knees.

The pressure had not even arrived yet.

Simon stared from those four wings to the creature trembling beside him.

”Another Daemon?”

His voice came out as a whisper.

”What the fuck was this bloodline before it became a One-Horned Demon?”