The halfbreed writhed, screaming an endless high-pitched wail completely at odds with his sagging shoulders and tatted gray hair. His voice was like a leaky steam engine; ranging from squeal to shriek and back again with predictable regularity, but never dropping octaves or running out of breath. Until he did run out of breath, and then the noise stopped abruptly, cut off completely from one moment to the next.
Three steps above the man, the magnificent and bloody marble steps of the demon castle, three figures stood. A male, by far the tallest, broad-shouldered and glowing-eyed. Two pairs of horns rose regally from his bare scalp, and a gleaming firedrop pendant, the crown of his kingdom, dangled between the taller set. He looked vaguely uncomfortable with the goings-on on the steps below, the single lone and old slave that had been chosen and offered up to the visitor.
Or perhaps he was just uncomfortable because the visitor had broken one of his favorite toys. The human girl was held pinioned between the spidery-frail hands of the third figure, clever pressure from the clawed forefingers forcing the girl's eyelids open. The king glanced irately at his newest bride, and seethed with quiet anger that one of the greater daemons had seen fit to come crashing into his castle at this time, messing around with his new toy human and thoroughly wrecking all his careful progress with the pretty female.
The old man was on his back now, his limbs flailing in the spastic motion of a crushed insect, and the king forced himself to look down at the man. There was subtext here, valuable subtext, and he didn't plan to let the lesson go astray. One drop of the daemons blood had wrought this horror. The man had apparently known what was coming; the moment he'd been chosen, he had clamped both hands over his mouth and eyes, probably assuming that the daemon would have to put her blood into an orifice for it to poison him. She hadn't seemed to mind; had merely pricked the ball of her thumb against one of her own teeth, and then smeared the black stain onto the back of the halfbreed's hand. And before the king could even react, the slave had whirled, grasped the sword hanging at the king's waist, and immediately turned it on himself. First to amputate his own arm; but when that failed, he had attempted to open his own throat, and last his gut...all in a series of motions with the speed of raw panic driving them, and before the king could even make a motion to reclaim his weapon. Not that there was a weapon to reclaim anymore. Whatever effect the daemon's blood had had on the halfbreed; it had progressed even more rapidly, and the sword lay in shattered shards across the steps now, where it had been crushed by...apparently...the constricting effect of the man's own blood. As a demon ruling his own kingdom on the outskirts of Hell, the king was used to peacefully watching all manners of events, but this one had shocked him on too many levels for him to be even remotely comfortable. The fact that the halfbreed slave hadn't died yet, was similarly shocking. The man had at least two mortal wounds, in addition to whatever poisoning effect the daemon-blood had taken from him; but the gray eyes remained disturbingly lucid as the man flailed and clawed at the dirt.
Eventually the king coughed faintly, deliberately turning one shoulder to the spectacle as though to pretend it had not disturbed him. "My lady," he addressed the frail-seeming daemon. The girl had fainted away, and the daemon had let her fall into an untidy heap at the top of the stairs. "Your point is well taken. No-one in this fortress will...risk...your blood."
The daemon looked through him, glassy eyes unfocused for perhaps a thousand yards beyond the point where the king actually stood. The creature did not seem even fully aware of what it had done; let alone anything else...but the king knew better than to underestimate the creature by now. It turned, not so much as to look at the man flailing on the ground, as to indicate the continuing metamorphosis by looking as though it looked at it. "This one is not complete," the creature said, abstractly, as though either not understanding what the delay was, or not understanding what the king's hurry was.
"You gave the princess a terrible shock," the king pointed out, kneeling down to pick up the human girl and cradling her limp body against one shoulder. Being nearly seven feet tall himself, the adolescent looked as small as a toddler in his grasp. He gave a dirty look at the pulsing pile of flesh that the slave had become. "And I do not think I need to see the end of this."
"Suit yourself." The daemon looked back one more time, as though there were something slightly of interest on the other side of the city, behind the king's shoulder, but then the creature turned another hundred-and-eighty degrees. "I shall return tomorrow, then."
------
"Sire." One of the guardsmen was shaking the king's shoulder, and he looked up blearily, his eyes taking a moment to focus. He'd fallen asleep on the throne, with his wine bottle, and he made a disgusted noise, throwing the bottle across the throne room. It was bad enough he'd surrendered the kingdom to the abyssal horror that had appeared less than a half-score of days ago. Now he was crawling into a bottle; his father would have been ashamed of him. He sat himself up and adjusted his position. "What?"
"You should perhaps see this, sire." The guard coughed discreetly.
"What? What is it?"
"I...it seems...we are not sure." Another shuffling noise, another false cough, concealing discomfort. "It appears to be a church of sorts."
Opposing the castle, a construction of sterling marble and flawless obsidian reared itself, intricate and twining, constructed entirely of interlocking stone that seemed more grown than chiseled or formed. The patterns were largely geometric, but at even intervals, statuary in one or the other color of stone leered out of the construction, and the king felt his stomach drop. He recognized only one of the forms; but it was the form of one of his subjects. The priestess who had called down the abyssal beast upon them; and the king had intended to punish her himself. It seemed, though, that the monster's reward for loyalty dovetailed neatly into his own punishment for treason.
He walked uneasily out, and down the steps, and studied the open structure of the new building. The half-breed male slave stood within...or not really stood, he levitated...he almost appeared to be hung, as on a crucifix, except there was no cross structure anywhere around him. The body had merely been abandoned, in mid-air, visible from all sides...while underneath the high arched dome of the building, up inside what would in other situations have been the roof, darkness lurked and coiled in restless motions.
So it had surrendered the slave again, but a conditional surrender. It wanted to retain control of the body, to use when it pleased, and to have it on display otherwise. The king crossed the courtyard, and climbed the three steps up to stand before the row of columns that delineated between the 'outside' of the building, and the inside. He peered upwards to where living night coiled and rippled and mocked him, and then down into the nearly mirror-shine of the white marble floor. He was hardly surprised to see that the slave cast instead the reflection of the very neat and trim businesswoman who had come to see him eight days ago, proposing a new religion and a new alignment for his kingdom. She saw him looking at her, and smiled that exact same smile as when she had first seen him, stepping away from the underside of the slave, and leaving the floating body without a reflection. Walking upside down across the underside of the floor, she moved until her feet met the king's, and then he heard her voice, greeting him, inside his own skull.
A magical illusion that did such a thing, would not have bothered the king at all. He had seen a great deal of such magic, in his days. Almost anything could be shown, through magic. But this...this was...not magical. He hated to think it; but the only alternative was that she was really there, in the floor, smiling up at him with that strange, secretive, hidden grin, and her pale hands with their long almost spidery fingers, and their manicured claw-like nails, and that strange intense but glassy look in her eyes...as though she had never left, nor ever would.
Numbly, the king shook his head, and stepped backwards away from the temple, raising his hands and gesturing to his subjects to stay away from the structure. It was not exactly that he feared the daemon, exactly...but some creatures, it was better to not have made deals with, and in that sense, he recognized that it was probably too late for him to save himself.
