It was late in the afternoon when Palmira finally made it back to her room with Morte. The party down below was still in full swing, the roars of laughter and out of tune singing faintly sneaking in through the open window. The orange light of the setting sun barely eked into her room, bright enough she didn’t yet need to light a fire to see by.
Palmira plopped herself down on the bed, settling her staff against the table so she could look him in the eye—er, eyesockets—while he explained himself. Across her lap she settled Malocchio, the staff’s eyes half-lidded as it curled its tail around her waist like a tired cat.
They sat like that for a long while. As adamant as she was to hear her mentor’s story, she also couldn’t find it in her to push him.
So they simply rested in silence for a time, relaxing as the last wisps of sunlight slowly faded over the rooftops.
Until, finally, he spoke.
“I do not want to tell you my story,” Morte said at last. But before she could get too frustrated at his evasiveness he continued. “But I recognize when my silence would harm you more than not. No matter how much I might wish to keep it.”
Palmira simply huffed, a wisp of smoke curling from her lips. “I might have been fine with it before, but now it feels like I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t know who you are! You’re my staff, shouldn’t that be the other way around?”
“Yes, that’s fair enough. I tried going the cryptic mentor route, but when you’re as famous as I am it turns out that’s harder to do than I thought!” he barked out a laugh, before settling. “But I did not lie when I said I don’t want to talk about this. I didn’t end up as a skull on a stick because my life was all sunshine and rainbows, I’ll have you know.”
That made her feel a bit bad about pushing. “Maybe talking about it will make you feel better?” she offered, because pity or not she was still getting this damn story out of him. “Once I told everyone about my time in Iscrimo
“Well, unfortunately we don’t have a crowed courtroom for me to shout all my sins too,” he scoffed, causing her to pout. “But I suppose the two of you are good enough company for little old me! …Well, let’s get this over with. My story begins some sixty years ago, in a land long lost to myth…”
-
The Nostratum Sea is a vast and mysterious sea. Rivaling an ocean in size, its sheer scale has swallowed every sailor who has strayed too far from the coast. The countless rivers on which human civilization has flourished all feed into its depths, which in turn pours out into the Starlight Sea from across which humanity’s ancient homeland is believed to reside.
Even the Volans, who once ruled it in its entirety, had not mapped a fraction of it and never successfully crossed through its center. Lacking in islands far beyond the shore and more than seven times the length of the Alovoan Peninsula in diameter, its very existence has dominated humanity’s myths and legends since time immemorial.
The greatest of such myths is the Isle of Insula, though what exactly it was has changed from telling to telling. During the age of the First Empire the Volans believed it to be the home of their gods, a semi-mythical island of eternal life and boundless power. When the Volans converted to the Goddess they transferred that belief to her, worshiping the island as the seat of her power. But after the First Empire fell such stories began to fade, replaced with only sailors’ tall tales of jagged peaks topped by warbling sirens and white sandy beaches the color of glass.
These days, most believe that the island does not exist. That it is little more than a story told to children before bed, no more real than vampires or werewolves.
This is not the case. The Isle of Insula is very much real. But nobody born beyond its shores has ever stepped foot upon it. And this is by both nature and design.
For Insula is the home of the Demons.
And it was once my home as well.
-
“Your home—you were a Demon!?” Palmira hissed, eyes wide with shock. Then it passed, and surprise gave way to understanding. “…Huh, that’s not as unexpected as I thought it would be.”
“I cannot imagine why,” she got the impression Morte was rolling his eyes. “But, yes, I am a ‘Demon.’”
‘Query.’ Malocchio spoke up for the first time in a while, and they both quieted down to let it. Though its voice was still weak, that it was strong enough to talk was a relief after the damage it’d taken yesterday. ‘Morte says He is a Demon. And yet His skull is that of a Human. How is this the case?’
“Well, I could give you a long and complicated answer about biology, physiology, and necromancy,” the staff waved off the topic. “But when you get right down to it, most sapient races have similar skull types. That’s just how it is.”
Palmira frowned. “I think I’d prefer the longer answer, there’s no way it’s that simple.”
‘Agreement. We are curious as well.’
“Well you’re not getting it tonight. I’ve got a lot to get through and after all the time you spent pushing me to do this I’m not letting you get sidetracked right at the start! Now, as I was saying before I was interrupted…”
-
I did not have a father nor a mother. None of us did; we Daemen did not reproduce naturally, but were instead born from glass wombs in batches of twenty. Thousands of such wombs were interred in the depths of the King’s Palace, all of which could be activated at any moment. For most of our history it was only the barren poverty of our home island keeping our numbers as low as they were.
My memories of that time before my birth are vague. I remember I dreamed of Elysium, though beyond impressions of beauty and plenty I could not describe what that meant. It was my home, the dreams told me. A place I should long to return to, our Paradise far beyond this backwards land of ash and primitives.
The dreams told me many things. But the longer I grew in my glass womb the less I grew to listen. For when all one knew was dreams, what would they care for reality?
I did not understand this at the time, but I understood the restlessness that had claimed my soul. Five years after my body had begun gestating, I opened my eyes and freed myself from the prison which had birthed me.
This, I cannot stress enough, was a bad idea.
I was not supposed to have done that, and I broke many things in my frantic flailing. I was born wet and crying, with lacerations across my body from broken glass and torn tubes. I should have remained gestating for another five years; after which, I would have been born along with the rest of my siblings as a fully-fledged adult. As I was, I was a confused youth, without my batchmates and surrounded by adults who had not raised a child in thousands of years.
I had also broken a very expensive, irreplaceable piece of equipment, and no matter the circumstances for that I was to be punished.
I was given my first name—Dodékatos tou Eíkosi, The Twelfth of Twenty—and sent to work under Ektos—the facility janitor—until I finally finished growing to adulthood.
I am going to skip ahead a bit, because very little of importance happened over the next few years. The short version is that I learned to raise myself, had an otherwise very ‘boring’ childhood, and that Ektos was a grungy old bastard who wouldn’t know how to take care of a child if one punched him in the face.
I digress.
After many years of growing old the slow way my batchmates—the Twentieth Batch, to be precise—were born properly, though I never connected with them as they could each other. They were all ‘older’ than me, and after years of keeping to myself I found their presence both overwhelming and often annoying. They eventually simply started avoiding me and I them, leaving me with the stigma of an ‘outcast’ and them with the stigma of exiling one of their own for no good reason.
Many of them never forgave me for that, though one of the few things crochety old Ektos was good for was keeping them distracted with old war stories of when he was a young man raiding the Emirate and how he fought a bug-man who was massive and strong and the most dangerous beast imaginable.
Despite being physically older, I found my biological brethren incapable of thinking for themselves, and they would fall for the old man’s lies hook, line, and sinker.
But nothing lasts forever, and especially not the elderly. By the time I was physically an adult old Ektos passed away at the age of five-hundred-and-sixty-two—”
-
“Five-hundred-and-sixty-two!” Palmira yelped in shock. “Demons live that long!?”
“What?” Morte was startled out of his memories at her exclamation. “Oh, yes. We’d long since developed ways of extending our natural lifespans beyond that of the ‘mortal’ races. Or, well, our ancestors did. My people have… degraded, over the many millennia we’ve spent marooned on the Isle of Insula.”
“But that’s longer than Elves, isn’t is?” she asked, before frowning. “Eh, wait, isn’t it?”
“Sort of. ‘Modern’ Elves—that is, Elves born in the past thousand years—generally only live some four to five hundred years, which many people point to their increased interbreeding with Humans. Older Elves were said to live much longer, though the Volans killed or enslaved most of them to the point that none still live. At least, as far as anyone knows.”
“Huh, I didn’t know that… but as far as anyone knows? Do you think there are still ancient Elves out there?”
“It’s certainly a possibility. I can’t say for certain how long they could live, and it’s equally possible they’ve simply interbred with Humans enough that the longer-lived variant has died out. But there are many hidden corners of the world that those ancient Elves could be hiding in, and beings as old as they would certainly be wise enough to—wait!”
Palmira jumped, hand instinctively darting to Malocchio’s hilt. “What? Did you remember something about the Elves?”
“No, I remembered I’m trying to tell you a story! Stop distracting me, or we’re never going to get through this!”
-
Now where was I? Right, right, I remember.
Old Ektos passed away and I was promoted from apprentice janitor to full-time janitor. And while that may not sound that impressive, you need to remember something important: as a janitor, I could go wherever the hell I wanted and nobody would give a shit.
The war room where important plans were discussed? I had a key. The chambers where the Lords of the Living Council debated the future of Daemankind? Every weekend I swept the place top to bottom. The women’s restroom?
Surprisingly no. They had a female janitor specifically for that. Considering the temperament of some of my peers this was probably a good call.
The secret vaults where we stored ancient artifacts of incredible power?
It was part of my damn job description.
I assume you can guess where the story goes from here.
In the middle of my routine dusting, a voice called out to me. Beautiful, warm, and haunting, the first time I heard it I nearly fled the building in shock. I really should have, in hindsight, if only because we were given monthly safety debriefings that I was blatantly ignoring by staying and not informing anyone else of what was going on. But I was young and stupid enough to keep talking with the disembodied voice in the secret vaults, and we were both lonely enough that we built up a rapport fairly quickly.
And the more I spoke with the woman, the more one thing became abundantly clear.
She was a huge bitch.
She was also my closest friend.
We talked often and of everything. I told her of my life on Insula. Of the city of Daexisi which was its capital, of my job as a janitor, and of how awful my new boss was even compared to old Ektos. In return, she told me of the outside world. From her I learned of distant lands, of elves and dwarves and orcs, of cities lesser and greater and of magics banned and benign.
Those conversations lit a hunger in me. Each day we spoke and each lesson learned only left me starved for more. There was no mental compulsion to it, no corruption. Just the slow realization that the world I had lived my whole life in was so terribly small.
Eventually… I decided that I wanted to leave.
And like she had been waiting for that the whole time, the woman praised my courage, and then directed me to the back of the vaults. There I found a spear made of bone which reeked with the magic of the Divine.
She encouraged me to pick up the spear.
And, like a fool, I did.
Then I was immediately arrested.
It turns out that people do in fact care when the janitor tries to steal a precious artifact.
I was dragged into a cell, to await my inevitable execution. Nobody much cared to defend me—I was strange, an outcast. Premature, people liked to call me. I had neither friends nor allies on Insula. None but the holy spear I was now going to die for.
But my friend had a plan. When the guard came to grab me, she flew through the air and sliced off his hands. And as she landed once more in my grip she announced to everyone watching that she had found a new wielder! That I, Dodékatos tou Eíkosi, would be able to wield her full potential. For good or evil, from Hell to Heaven, The Spear of Destiny would follow me into battle for whatever cause I so desired.
We did not realize how massive a mistake we had made at the time, but we would soon find out.
-
“Wait,” Palmria held up a hand, frowning. “Pause. The Spear of Destiny? You mean… you mean the spear the killed the Daughter? The spear that was wielded by the first Roisuissian Emperor and found the Second Empire? That spear!?”
“Yes, that spear,” Morte gave the impression of rolling his eyes. “What of it?”
“I’m just… we are talking about the same spear, right? As in, the one Johan was wielding? Vita?” she rubbed her forehead, unable to connect the two in her head. That the na?ve kid who liked to stare broodingly into the distance was the same one who wielded the Spear of fucking Destiny.
“Well, yes, obviously. What other sapient divine spear would I be talking about?”
Palmira huffed, grimacing. She should have felt more shocked by this, but somehow the flippancy at which he was treating all this was making it hard to feel so. “Whatever,” she sighed at last. “Just continue.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
-
Naturally, the Daemen were in turns shocked, horrified, and elated at Vita’s pronouncement. The Spear of Destiny itself, once their greatest foe, now fighting for them? It was arguably the greatest victory they had achieved since the Original Sin.
It was all a lie, of course. Or, well, she did not technically lie. She just never told them what my personal cause was.
But I doubt they’d have cared either way. This was a propaganda victory for them, one they planned to capitalize on to its fullest extent.
Overnight I was raised to the heights of society. No longer the weird janitor nobody liked, I was suddenly the greatest warrior of my generation! A fated Hero who would take the war back to the mongrels of the mainland and return the Daemen to their rightful place as rulers of the world!
I’ll… admit, looking back on it, the whole thing went to my head a bit. I stopped listening to Vita as much as I should have. I started listening to the Chancellor of the Living Council a little too much.
I made a lot of mistakes, back then. Please, don’t make me say any more than that. Some things I’d much rather forget.
I was taught many things during those years, both by Vita and by my fellow Daemen. I was taught how to harness Divine magics, and the teachings of the Goddess and her followers. I was taught artificery by the few left alive who still practiced it. And I was even allowed into the more advanced courses on Cosmology, finally cementing myself as a ‘proper Daeman’ among my peers. All the while the constant praise and adulation inflated my ego to embarrassing extremes.
Time eventually caught up to me though. As I was distracted by pomp and pleasure more glass wombs were activated, and with them more Daemen born in batches far too large for our island to support. In a decade our numbers tripled, a generation of my people born solely for war.
And war came quicker than anyone ever could have expected. The Living Council made their move, and through a grand ritual they opened a gate straight into the heart of Bellasari, the Capital of the Second Empire, and sent forth an army of Daemen larger than any had seen in millennia.
That day what would later become known as ‘The Demon Wars’ began.
…I was apart of that initial strike, did you know? I’d been wavering between Vita and the Chancellor for quite some time, and in a single day I found myself pushed over the edge in both directions.
I followed the first Phalanx into battle under orders by the Chancellor. He’d spent years worming his way into my good graces, and though I still planned to sneak away the moment I could I thought I could fight at least one battle for him. To honor my people and home one last time before I left it forever.
I was a na?ve fool who didn’t know the true horrors of war. Of what my people would be inflicting upon the rest of the world.
I fled my first battle, so horrified I was. I hid in the alleyways of Bellasari for days, fleeing from both sides of the conflict. Like a rat I snuck through the sewers while innocent people died above me, unable to bring myself to fight for or against either side.
But I couldn’t keep hiding forever.
There was once a little boy. A child, short and a bit pudgy. I never learned his name, but I remember watching from the darkness. Watching him call out to parents he no longer had. Watching him beg and plead. Watching the uncaring sword come down.
I moved. For the first time in my life I made a decision all my own, and the first man I killed was one of my former Batchmates in order to save a boy I did not know and never would.
I remember being sick once I realized what I’d done. And I remembered the boy, terrified, running away at the sight of me.
I did not feel like a hero in that moment.
But I had chosen my side. I discarded my armor, my clothes, everything but Vita herself and donned the plate mail of a fallen knight as my own. Under that armor nobody would recognize my pink skin and under that helmet nobody would see my pale hair. Hidden from both sides and with the Spear of Destiny in hand I fought back against an invasion I had mere days ago headed.
Throughout the following week the survivors would rally to my side. A Human Knight who had survived the purge of his local chapter. An Orcish Warrior with more brawn than brains. A young dwarvish priestess whose heart was too big for her body. And even a Half-Elven Princess, the last surviving child of the late Emperor.
It wasn’t enough. My help came too late, if it could have even stopped the invasion in the first place. The invasion of the capital turned from a battle to an evacuation, with the goal of getting as many of the civilians out as possible. And despite our best efforts, we did not save half as many as we’d hoped.
I… never knew what became of the boy I had saved. Sometimes I wonder if it would be worse to know.
After the battle, those people who had fought alongside me refused to leave my side.
Nobody knew who I was. But they knew the spear I wielded, and that I had fought off countless Demons and saved countless lives.
So they declared me a hero. The Hero, sent by the Goddess to save them from the Demons in their darkest hour and retake the home they had lost.
How dreadfully ironic.
-
“You’re the Hero!?” Palmira screeched, arms flailing wildly. Then the second, much more important, realization came. “The Hero’s a Demon!?”
“Indeed he was!” Morte chirped, dry laughter in his tone. “And indeed I am. So, how does it feel to know you’ve been carrying the blessed Hero’s skull around with you for weeks now?”
“I don’t… I didn’t realize… Oh Goddess, I’ve been carrying the Hero’s skull with me everywhere! I sleep in the same room as it! Oh my Goddess, holy shit…”
‘Query,’ Malocchio spoke up, dragging her out of her spiraling thoughts. ‘We have been listening to Your story, and We notice a discrepancy. The Hero was never blessed by the Goddess. You merely wielded the Spear which killed Her Daughter.’
“Yeah, the semantics get a bit funky there,” Morte gave the impression of a shrug. “That’s not to say I wasn’t practicing holy magics or following the Goddess’ will, but that’s something for the priests to debate, not us. And as someone who spent a decade wandering the countryside with a priestess, trust me when I say I’ve heard every version of that argument.”
“Wait, so… you never met the Goddess?” Palmira asked, having calmed down from her initial freakout. For some reason, that idea made her sad. Everyone knew the Hero was the Goddess’ chosen, but if he’d never even met her?
That was just… it wasn’t right.
“Well, that’s not quite true,” Morte corrected her. “I wasn’t ‘blessed’ by the Goddess, at least not anymore than anyone else was. But I did meet the Goddess before I died. And it was… well, it’s a story for another time. We have something far more important to talk about tonight—me!”
Palmira snorted, rolling her eyes. The joke wasn’t all that funny, but the fact he had made it at all meant he was starting to sound like his old self again, and that more than anything helped her relax.
Instead she compartmentalized the information. Morte was a Demon? That was only unexpected because she never really considered it. Morte was the Hero? That was far more shocking, but also somehow not? Or maybe it just hadn’t fully sunk in yet…
Shaking her head, she let the information sit. His story wasn’t done—she could at least wait until the end before freaking out.
-
The Demon War, despite its grandiose name, was not quite a war as people might think of it. With the central administration of the Empire shattered in the opening days, there was little organized resistance. Instead scattered pockets of warriors fought back against the Demons who—despite their initial victories—quickly found themselves stretched far too thin, especially with the portal which had let them flood into the capital being destroyed during the fighting.
So instead of finishing off our resistance once and for all by pushing south or east, they instead pushed west to the sea. There the Demon Lords met the Woman-Serpent Edda and made a deal with her—in exchange for safe passage between Insula and the mainland she would be granted the title of Demon Lord on the Living Council and declared ruler over all the seas she conquered.
In the long term they would regret this, for the Woman-Serpent was as canny as she was ancient. Accepting the deal she used the Demon Lords as much as they used her, the both of them only harming each other in their attempts to control the other.
This delay allowed the rest of the world to consolidate. The Kingdom of Castella declared independence and destroyed the last land bridge connecting them to the mainland, turning to focus on the threat of the Woman-Serpent over the landlocked Demons. In the East the Elvish Dukes united under the Queen-Mother of the Second Empire, who declared herself first Regent and then later Empress. And in the south the surviving armies and adventurers of the Alovoan Peninsula were slowly gathered under my banner to fight back against the Demons.
We had some success. Not enough, clearly, considering the Demons still rule a third of the continent, but enough they don’t currently rule all of it.
This was not a quick war though. It was long, and bloody, and ruthless. I fought for ten… eleven? I fought for around a decade, killing so many monsters and Demons and even Lords that I was declared a Saint before I turned thirty. I visited near every corner of the world in my attempts to rally support—a cruel irony, considering how a few years before I had dreams of seeing the world for myself. I suppose I got that wish, in the end.
I wasn’t alone during all this, of course. I’ve seen the statues, so I’m certain you know the next part of the story: the Hero and his Four Companions.
There was the Orc, S?ońce, who you might have recognized yesterday, under Rosalina’s thrall. She… well. Well. I have made my thoughts clear on her.
Then there was Anni, a priestess from Dwarfskiy. She was always too kind, despite all the horrors we witnessed. I… don’t know what happened to her, in the end. I assume she is dead, for if she weren’t surely someone would know where she is now.
And I’m sure you’ve heard of Laurence. Of what the Arch-Traitor did. That he still lives while the rest of my friends perished fills me with a rage I do not think you can comprehend.
You want to know why he betrayed us, do you? I suppose it’s not common knowledge, the drama that can shatter adventuring parties like ours. Then let me be clear:
It was because Laurence was the stupidest, horniest, most unbearable fucking incel of a man who threw a hissy fit when the last member of our party told him that she didn’t want to marry him.
‘The knight always gets the princess,’ he’d whine to me in the bar. ‘I’m handsome, strong, and a hero! How could she keep refusing me?’
At the time I… admit I thought it was a bit silly. Just a little in-joke between us men. He’d ask her to marry him after a big battle, she’d say no, we’d all laugh it off, and then we’d go to the bar and drink our sorrows away like it was no big deal.
It was routine after a certain point. Normal. Nothing much ever came of it, and we all had bigger issues to worry about regardless.
But then… then I made a mistake which destroyed a friendship I didn’t realize was so fragile.
I fell in love.
Ah, right, I didn’t introduce my last party member, did I?
Well, she was the Half-Elven Princess Aldelina de Roisuisse, last living daughter of the Last Emperor of the Second Empire. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever known, with a smile that shined brighter than the sun and a laugh that haunts my dreams to this day. I… do not think my sanity could have survived as I am now, if not for my memories of her.
Over the years we fought alongside each other we grew closer. First as allies, then friends, then confiders, then… well, I know you know what sex it. You can fill in the blanks from there.
We tried to keep it hidden, for a bit. I didn’t know at the time how Laurence would have reacted to the news, even as it began to frustrate me every time I watched him propose to the woman I loved.
Then… uh, we made a mistake. A happy accident, if you will.
It turns out that half-elves and Daemen are biologically compatible. After several years of carefully keeping our relationship a secret, it all went out the window when we realized that Aldelina was pregnant.
I cannot stress enough how Not Prepared any of us were for this outcome.
But while S?ońce and Anni congratulated us, Laurence… something snapped within him, I think. He grew distant. He spoke to us less, refusing to join us in the taverns and bars. His eyes grew dark whenever he looked in our direction.
I gave him his space, because for all I was frustrated with his behavior I understood he was hurt.
I just didn’t think he was hurt enough to sell us out to the fucking Demons.
Years ago at this point I had revealed my secret to them, how I was myself a Daeman. And at the time, they had all accepted me. Even Aldelina, whose whole family was slaughtered in the opening acts of the war.
Laurence used that secret against us. He informed the other Demon Lords—who had thought me long dead in the initial battle and the spear merely lost to a lucky knight—and set a trap for us. While we slept in a walled village deep in our own territory, under the new moon he opened the gates and let the Demons flood into the village.
It was the largest force of Demons we’d faced in years. Every man, woman, and child in the village was slaughtered. S?ońce tried to hold them off, but he fell in the assault. Anni I last saw trying to help the children escape, and I never saw her again.
Aldelina was kidnapped by Laurence, and he fled with her in chains.
I survived, if only barely, tearing the last Demon apart with my own bloody hands. And when I realized what had happened, who had sold us out…
The Heavens themselves trembled with my rage.
I chased Laurence for a year. Into the depths of enemy territory, to the fallen capital itself. There I finally confronted him and the knights who had followed him into damnation. I demanded to know what he had done to my wife.
He confessed she had died. The kidnapping, the betrayal, the loss—it was too much for a pregnant woman to bear. The birth occurred prematurely, and she did not survive the following night.
I don’t think I can express what those words did to me. I told him that I couldn’t believe that so suddenly, everyone I loved was dead.
He had the audacity to point out that he was still alive.
Not for long, I had responded.
Our battle was brutal. It was the violence of love which had soured into hate, of friends turned enemies. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to make it hurt.
I think he wanted the same. He had numbers on me, even if I were clearly the stronger fighter. I was injured badly, losing an arm and an eye before I could finish it. With that arm went Vita as well, the spear stolen from me by his Black Knights. And with her lost also went any hope of me winning.
They almost killed me that day.
They were going to, even. But Laurence stopped them. Maybe he still clung to what was left of his honor. Maybe he regretted killing all of his friends, and didn’t want to be responsible for the death of the last.
A little late for that, I would say.
But he granted me mercy, if you could call it that. Broken and bleeding he tossed me from the city like little more than trash, his knights dragging by body as far as they could before leaving me to rot.
Until that day, there was a part of me that had hoped that I was wrong. That Laurence had been tricked, or corrupted, or something. I had hoped—I had prayed—that he did not chose to side with the Demons of his own free will.
Evidently, I was wrong.
-
Morte went quiet at that, a silence born of grief and anger. His voice had trailed off as he wrestled with emotions she only barely understood.
Palmira did not know what to say to help him.
Instead, she simply grabbed her staff and held him in an awkward sort of hug as she waited for him to work through his grief. Even Malocchio joined, his second tail wrapping itself around Morte’s skull like a living crown.
Admittedly, it looked kind of silly.
They sat in silence together, as the sun fully set and the Night of Matyrs began.
Eventually, slowly, Morte continued, the end of his story now drawing near.
-
Years had passed, yet the war was still ongoing.
Nobody knew where the Demons were coming from. Most assumed Hell, others that they simply spawned into existence in places of great sin. Nobody was sure.
Except for me.
I sailed across the Nostratum sea in a rickety old ship with no hope of returning. My friends were all dead baring the one who’d betrayed me. Each battle we fought was more and more fruitless, the last Hero left stripped of both pride and glory. The war was all but lost, with our castles shattered and the last of our hope spent. I didn’t even have Vita, my longest companion.
All I had left was spite, and the desperate desire to make all our suffering worth it.
I barely made it. I’d nearly been killed by the Woman-Serpent on the way, but she was not so loyal in the end days of the war. Through luck and bribery I managed to steal my way past her and onto the glassy shores of a home I had not seen in a decade.
It was nearly empty. Most Demons had immigrated to the mainland once they realized the wealth that could be made there, away from this barren rock which few truly cared for. My march from the coast was unimpeded—for I was a Demon, why shouldn’t I be allowed into the city?—and I soon found my way into the King’s Palace.
There has been a common misassumption that the Demons have a King. This is because people have heard the Demons talk about how they’ve been getting orders from the ‘King’s Palace.’ Therefore, there must clearly be a Demon King.
There is not one. At least, not a living one. The day-to-day ruling is done by the Lords of the Living Council and the Chancellor, whose number and makeup changed drastically over the course of the war.
Instead, the ‘Demon King’ is the Dead God of the Daemen, the one whose holy corpse resides at the bottommost depths of the King’s Palace and whose veneration is enforced by the Council itself.
This was something I always knew in theory, but on that day I witnessed it in fact.
I marched into the depths of the King’s Palace and destroyed every last one of the glass wombs which had birthed me. I destroyed them so utterly that not a one could ever be used again.
Then I went deeper, to slay a god long dead.
Yet I could do nothing. For it was dead. And I did not know how to kill a Dead God.
So with nothing left to lose I instead returned to the surface. There I marched into the Living Council’s chambers, the ones I had regularly cleaned as their janitor so long ago. There I massacred every Demon Lord I could find, until at last I was slain in turn.
I had hoped—with that final blaze of glory ending in my death—I could help what remained of the mainland win the war before I ascended to Heaven as a Champion of the Goddess and reunite with my wife and daughter.
…I was wrong. On both accounts, though I didn’t learn anything of the aftermath of the war for quite a while later.
The last Lord of the Living Council—the Goddamn cockroach I was unable to kill—decided that I was too useful to let die so easily.
Lich-King Aethric locked my soul into my own skull, and through ritual both profane and profound he turned me into the staff you see before you today.
Then he dumped me in the bottom of his fucking junk drawer for the next twenty fucking years.
-
“…And that’s how I became Morte, the staff and teacher of Palmira the Fire Mage,” he told her, a bitter nostalgia coloring his tone.
Palmira didn’t know what to say. There was so much to take in, so much she’d just now learned…
One thing did stand out to her, though.
“Um, hey, Morte,” she frowned, thinking back on what he’d told her. “Back when we were fighting Rosalina, you said that Dodékatos was no longer your name, right?”
“Hm? Yes, I did. That is not a name—it’s a number. One I’ve long since discarded.”
“But you also made up the name ‘Morte’ when we first met, didn’t you? So… what did you call yourself in between? What is your real name?”
Her staff seemed to ponder that question for a moment. Then, with a small chuckle, he gave the impression of a shrug. “I will admit, I’ve grown fond of the name ‘Morte.’ Especially now that ‘Vita’ is calling herself that. But if you must know… as the Hero, I took on the name ‘Espior.’ It was the name I used in life, the one I and I alone chose.”
“Espior, huh…” the foreign word was strange on her tongue. “Would you prefer if I start calling you that instead?”
“Oh, Goddess no!” he cackled at the thought. “Could you imagine going around in public calling me by the fallen Hero’s name? We’d both be hanged for heresy, and I don’t even have a neck! And besides… Dodékatos was the name of a Daeman who did not know the truth of the world. Espior was the name of a man who loved and lost. Morte, though, is the name of Palmira di Firozzi’s brilliant teacher, and these days that is all I need to be.”
Palmira sniffed, blinking away the tears which began to boil at the corners of her eyes. “If it’s all the same to you… I prefer my teacher Morte over the Hero Espior as well. Even if he can be a smug ass at times.”
He laughed at that comment, loud and boisterous as she was used to him being. And as her other friends came up to drag her away to the festival, she found herself joining him.
Because for all that she had learned about him tonight, one thing was still clear:
Morte was still Morte, and that was all that mattered.
originally planned for Morte’s backstory to be similar to Palmira’s—it would be a series of interlude chapters showing his life from birth to death to Palmira. However, I very quickly realized something:
way the hell too long.
months. Like, at that point I might as well just write a prequel instead and be done with it. When I realized that I decided on two things: one, I’m going to write a prequel focusing on Morte’s adventures one day. Two, I wanted to keep this to a single chapter, which I managed to succeed in.
what exactly I’m telling you. And for those of you who read the authors notes I’d like to remind you: Morte may be one of the most knowledgeable characters in the story, but he’s still an unreliable narrator. And that’s all I’ll say on that subject.
thank you.