Demon Core - Chapter 26: Maggot Ugly

~ [Guezel Aschk] ~

Human | ♀ | Priestess Location: The Demon-King’s Castle, Floor ??? Level: 73

They walk past a few puddles, reflecting the visages of the passersby up back toward them. Strands of silk line the walls here and there.

Guezel turns her head, looking at the otherwise blank wall to her left.

— Beautiful things matter more than ugly things.

It’s an undeniable truth of the world. People value beautiful clothes more than ugly ones; this is why expensive brands and designers exist; it’s not about the robustness of their designs, it’s about the look of them and the social story they tell about the person wearing said pieces. People value beautiful stones more than ugly ones, this is why the concept of gemstones as a rare, luxury good exists, despite their limited usages in practical matters. People value beautiful food more than ugly, poorly plated food, even if the nutritional content is one and the same in both dishes — the eyes and mouth eat together. People value beautiful art more than ugly art, this is why children’s valueless scribbles do not find themselves in the grand art galleries next to the works of the old masters, as their creations are, strictly speaking of exterior matters, bad.

And people value beautiful people more than they do ugly people.

Sure, there are many voices who would decry this statement if it were to be made in public, wildly aghast that anyone could ever insinuate such a terrible thing, that anyone could make a statement only a socially unfit, soulless monster would make. ‘Of course everyone matters as much as anyone else’. ‘Of course they would never think that someone who is ugly is inherently less valuable than someone who is undeniably beautiful’. But the truth is, they do.

We know this because beautiful people are treated more kindly, are given more chances upon failure, and are held open to more social doors and opportunities than their less attractive counterparts, and while beauty is, of course, dependent on a specific time and place within a society, the desired standards of that beauty matter deeply there within it. Even if the standards of a city to the west vary from a city to the east, a person who is beautiful within said domain of their living will have an easier, more desirable life on average than someone who isn’t.

That’s just what it is.

There’s no need for anyone to play these games of pretending it isn’t the case, so that they can be seen as virtuous. Everyone knows, but everyone pretends that they don’t. Everyone acts like they’re so great.

— But those same people still all called her ugly back in school for all of her life.

That’s what she hates the most about it all. Back then, everyone tore her apart because she looks different and now that they’re older, everyone is pretending like they’re such moral saints, even if they still look at her sideways, if they avoid facing her or being seen talking to her too much. Even if she’s always somehow the person who walks in the back of a group of three, trailing after the other two, who seem more than content to talk with one another and to pretend that she simply doesn’t exist.

It’s always been like this.

People don’t really choose to associate with her in their work freely, but if they’re assigned to be in a group with her, somehow everyone will find themselves together in one unit plus her, rather than all of them together. It doesn’t matter if it’s three people, four people, five or any other number. She’s somehow always the odd one out.

When her bootlace comes loose and she needs to stop to tie it, nobody stops to wait for her or looks back her way, until after she sprints to catch up and they turn for a brief second, perhaps afraid they’re being rushed and then only seeing her, their bored, disinterested expressions turning away as quickly as if they had seen nothing at all. When she leaves the cathedral, after sessions of chores and prayers and everyone veers off down all possible corridors and streets, heading out in groups of two or more to their destinations, she has no choice but to quickly hustle out of there by herself on her way to her quarters alone — because it kind of stings to look at everyone else every day.

In a way, one gets used to it, yes. One gets used to being an outcast and alone and, in general, worthless. But to say that one becomes numb isn’t entirely correct either. Yes, there is a certain level of numbness that sets into place. But rather than this numbness being a full shut off of feelings and ache, it is rather simply a new lowest baseline of existence. Being numb in this context doesn’t mean feeling nothing, it means feeling the same bad feeling for so long — the emptiness — that it becomes the standard.

In adult life, ugly people aren’t treated as viciously by their peers as they might have been when they were all young and without inhibitions, but that is not because their peers have learned to better themselves, but rather that they have learned to protect their own social images, and, so, the treatment becomes one of total, undeniable disinterest and distance rather than direct attacks, which would make them look bad within their inner and outer social circles.

It’s not wrong to want to be beautiful. In essence, it’s the same as wanting to be healthy, strong, rich, smart or any other positive attribute. It serves to make life for the possessor of such things much, much easier, and who doesn’t want an easier life?

Guezel adjusts the straps of her expensive rucksack — very out of place for a priestess with a more than meager take-home pay — looking ahead of herself at the others walking there, talking to one another about this and that. Her standard issue robes, tailored and custom lined with a sleek, comfortable silk liner, flow against her as she walks, her nice boots — muddied — striking the stones.

She’s recently gone through a phase of over-compensation, by trying to be as fashionable as possible. People don’t like her face, her hair, her body — just about anything that is her, really. So she’s tried to take control of the things she can control. Her bones are what they are, but she can control her hygiene, what she wears, her hair on which she spends the last of her salary after clothes, the ash lining under her eyes and the off red, soft, waxy grease for her lips.

With each of these things that she became obsessed about after their discovery, she was certain that they would be the healing for her wrongness, that they would ‘fix’ whatever problem she had. Maybe if she dressed nicer, people would realize that she didn’t actually have such a weird body. Maybe if she took better care of her face, people wouldn’t think it was so ugly. Maybe if she learned to take care of her hair properly, according to its unique needs, people wouldn’t look at it like they would at a rat’s nest.

But the problem is that, after each and every one of these attempts, people just still wouldn’t look at her to begin with.

So she just moved on to the next thing and then the next thing and, one day, she simply ran out of things to try and that was that.

— Everyone laughs up ahead.

Guezel freezes up, stiffening like a board as she stands perfectly still and looks at them. They’re laughing about her, right? Sweat pearls on her skin almost immediately, soaking the fabric of her robe even more than it already is in this furnace of a dungeon, a cold chill running up her spine.

But they’re not.

They just keep walking, talking about something that isn’t her.

— She hates when people laugh in public. As soon as she hears it, no matter where or when, her first thought is that it’s about her. Again, this hasn’t actually happened in a long time, but it had happened so often when she was younger that it’s simply imprinted into her now. The sound of laughter, without fail, brings her dread.

Guezel looks around herself at the corridor they’re in. It’s one of many of one-hundred and some. They had reached the next room of the Demon-King’s castle, only to find out that it is a labyrinth of sorts. There is a core room lined with dozens and dozens of tunnels, and it’s impossible to say which one is the right one, so the crusade sent several scouting parties into each tunnel. This little group here of theirs is one such thing. She wasn’t chosen by these other members of the crusade, so much as they were assigned to be together by the raid leader.

— Something clacks against her boot.

As if provoked by her own thoughts, the lace of her boot seems to have come loose and undone, the aglet striking against the leather. She sighs, kneeling down, not bothering to say anything because it wouldn’t get her anything other than a sour look at best or vacant disinterest of people who had pretended not to hear her at worst. The priestess works for a minute in the dark, fumbling with the lace to try and tie it up right, before rising back up, shaking out the leg to see that the boot is sitting right and then looks ahead of herself, toward the emptiness.

They didn’t just keep on walking, it’s almost like they went out of their way to walk faster. She can’t even see them anymore.

Guezel lowers her head, staring at a puddle for a second, that some white strings have fallen into, before she realizes that the eyes in it are staring back at her and she breaks contact, quickly shuffling onward to try and catch up with the group.

There’s a fork in the path.

Guezel stands there at the end of the tunnel, looking at the diverging branches that break off — one to the left and one to the right.

The rest of the group isn’t in sight and she can’t hear them either. The priestess, worried, rubs her arm and looks around the area for any markings, like scuffs on the ground, that could maybe give her a hint. However, she can’t see anything. The floors are made up of meticulously lined brickwork, none of which is displaced, and there isn’t any layering of disturbed dust or sand or anything of the sort.

Silently, she swears beneath her breath, a cool anxiety building in her again. She doesn’t expect them to wait, but the fact that they didn’t even make some kind of mark to let her know which way they went is really a new blow that she hasn’t experienced yet before. They knew she was in their group and walking with them. Surely they had to notice that she wasn’t there at the junction.

Should she go back?

Guezel looks back over her shoulder, down the long corridor that leads back to the chamber they started from.

…But if she goes back, she might get in trouble.

She might get accused of cowardice or dereliction of duty. Sure, she could say she got separated from her group, but would anyone really believe that? Probably not. They wouldn’t really care if it’s true. One look, and they’ll be sure it is and she’ll be punished. These things have happened before. She’s had plenty of extra chores and duties in the cathedral hoisted onto her for things like this.

But that they’d do it in the Demon-King’s castle, where their lives are actually on the line, is far more grim than even she had expected. It’s heartless. All by herself, she could actually die here.

The priestess looks back toward the two paths, closing her eyes and listening as she tries to make a choice. She has to take one of them. Going back isn’t an option. She’ll just quietly move through. If there’s anything scary, she can always run back the way she came. At least she’ll have proof that she tried her best if some monster is chasing her out toward the rest of the crusade.

As sad as it is, that might be her best bet at this point.

Fumbling with her thumb, which rests trapped beneath the shoulder strap of her bag, Guezel nods and then heads left. She’s not really sure of any particular reasoning for this choice. It’s just a fifty-fifty pick guided by her gut feeling.

There’s nobody here.

Guezel looks around herself, staring at the chamber she’s arrived in. It’s an underground cavernous space. Water crashes in the distance, coming from a small fall that runs down the wall into a large pool of unnaturally bright, blue water that shimmers as if glowing with its own light. Ruins of an ancient, white marble temple lie strewn about the area. Collapsed pillars and archways dot the space, hidden, in part, by the fine mist and softly roaring voice of the falls that never dry.

“Hello?” calls Guezel quietly, looking around at the chamber.

Is this the next floor of the castle?

…No… it doesn’t seem like it. She didn’t ascend or descend. She’s still on the same floor.

The wary priestess looks around the area, scanning the ruins as she walks, trying to find her group. There doesn’t seem to be much of anything here, actually. There aren’t any people. There aren’t any monsters. There’s just the ruins, the water and her.

As odd as it is, given that her life is on the line, she’s very thankful for this.

Guezel can only imagine what would have happened if she had actually found her party. As always in such situations, she would have gotten some snide remark about finally catching up, or that they thought she had ditched them — the shamelessness of the statement never quite seeming to bother them as they make it.

The priestess climbs over a collapsed pillar, brushing the deeply green ferns that grow over it aside, as she steps toward the water, looking at it.

— She can’t see her reflection. The disturbance from the falls causes too many ripples and too many waves and the image is distorted and broken and, for this, she’s innately grateful without being able to say or even think of any reason as to why. It’s a trained, inner reaction.

When one really hates oneself, one goes out of their way to avoid one’s own reflection. This can be as simple as simply averting one’s gaze when entering a washroom so as to not see oneself in the looking glass. It can mean never going outside on rainy days, never staring into the windows of shops upon passing for fear of seeing something too much within the glass.

The turmoil of disturbed water brings her peace.

She rises up, looking around the room and then sitting down, leaning with her back against a crumbled pillar as she stares at the water, cascading down from above.

How did she get here?

Guezel leans back, resting the back of her head against the stone and listens to the water as she thinks about, well, vaguely everything.

She’s not even sure why she signed up to go on this crusade. Demon-King this, Demon-King that.

She doesn’t actually care.

The world wasn’t ever really nice to her, so she’s not that worried about it, honestly and as for herself, well, she’s not that worried, honestly. It doesn’t matter. Somehow, she just ended up here. Even back when she became a priestess after her childhood education, because she didn’t know what else to do with her life, even if she’s not exactly pious. Plus, that allowed her to excuse herself from… other, more physical matters of body and heart, from which she wouldn’t likely be able to partake anyway. She’s always just sort of drifted from one thing to the next, not because it’s what she wants from life, but because it’s just… what was next.

“Did you get lost too?” asks a voice from the side.

Guezel jumps to her feet, the stones beneath her boots crunching as she turns, looking in surprise at the person, sitting there behind her atop the broken base of a crumbled pillar, leaned back and legs outstretched, a pad of paper and pen in his hands. He looks her way. “It’s a big place,” says the strange man, a laissez-faire tone to his voice.

Instinctively, she lowers her eyes, allowing him to make eye-contact with the top of her hood.

“Who’re you?!” she asks, not recognizing him. Although, to be fair, it would be more surprising if she did, since she doesn’t actually know anybody. But she does know that he wasn’t a part of her group.

“Lost,” replies the man, tapping against his stack of paper. “A few too many lefts and rights here, you know?” he asks.

Oh.

He must be with one of the other groups. There’s probably a second entrance to this chamber somewhere in the ruins.

“Yeah,” replies Guezel. “Any idea which way we have to go?” she asks.

“Sorry,” he replies. “I guess if I knew that, I wouldn’t be here thinking it out,” says the man.

“…Right…” replies Guezel. Of course. That was a dumb question. She shouldn’t always ask dumb questions.

“— But it’s not a bad place to be lost, right?” he asks, as the scratching continues. “Very scenic.”

Guezel presses a smile out with pursed lips, as she was trained to do in priestess social training. It’s good to smile when people make jokes. It helps social cohesion. It’s not that it was a terrible joke and she wouldn’t smile at it normally, but these sorts of things just don’t really reach her anymore. “Yes,” replies the priestess, her feigned maybe-real-maybe-fake smile not reaching him anyway since her obscured face is aimed toward the ground.

“Have you been here long?” she asks, turning back to the water. “Why not just go back the way you came?” The woman sits back down on the ground, leaning against the collapsed pillar again, fumbling with the ends of her sleeves as she looks down between her boots at the ground.

“A while, I guess,” he explains, a scratching coming from his paper as he works. She can only assume he’s a scout, making a map for future documentation. “And I tried that, but somehow, I circled back around and ended up here again,” says the man. “It’s a funny place, the castle.”

“…‘Funny’…” repeats Guezel. “I’m having the time of my life.”

“I bet,” he replies. “Hey, weird question,” says the stranger. “Can you do me a favor and stand next to that column there?” he asks.

“Huh?” Guezel lifts her gaze, slightly, looking at him from below the fabric of her hood, toward his outstretched pen that’s pointing toward a column by the water.

“Just for a minute,” he asks, lifting his sketchpad and showing it to her. “I could really use a person to show scale here.”

She looks away and toward the pillar, fumbling with her sleeves. “Can’t you just… draw a person without me doing that?” she asks.

“It’s not the same thing,” he explains. “Having a reference lets me see that the details line up.” Guezel frowns, fumbling with her hands and looking at the column, covered in ivy and flowers — very out of place in the Demon-King’s desolate, dry, and hot castle.

“I’d rather not…” she mutters quietly, feeling paranoid about this. Is this some kind of set-up? He’s trying to get her to do something stupid, right? Her mind races, trying to go through all the possibilities, given her experience in such manners up until this point.

The first scenario in her head tells her that he’s going to calmly sketch as she stands there and then show her some picture of an ugly witch’s face.

— Maybe the others are here after all?

Guezel looks around the room nervously, expecting half-snickering faces to be barely peeking out of the ruins, watching her and waiting for her to make a fool of herself, so that they can justify their usual laughter at her by just saying that she’s foolish, when in reality they’ve once again gone out of their way to make her look so.

But there’s nobody there.

“Please?” he asks. “I’ll only need a minute. Just to make sure the sizes are all right.”

“Can’t… can’t you just stand there yourself?” she mutters.

“I would, but I’d have a very hard time drawing me standing there then,” he explains.

Ah. She asked something stupid again.

Of course he can’t stand there and draw himself for reference. How would that even work? He wouldn’t be able to see himself in the frame of the scene outside of his imagination, which isn’t helpful for a detailed sketch.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Never mind. I’ll work it out,” explains the stranger.

She’s not really sure why, but her voice calls out. “Wait.” Maybe she still just has some innate desire to be useful, in the hopes that this might convince people to like her. She had tried this during her years of becoming a priestess, diving deep into industriousness and productivity to compensate for her lack of exterior grace.

It didn’t work.

All that happened was that people just unloaded even more work onto her than they would usually do, and she, dumb and desperate enough to want to be accepted, took it on until eventually it all came crashing down on her.

Nervously and quietly, she shuffles over to the pillar by the water, looking down at the ground.

“Like this?” she asks, watching her boots press into the wet stones below.

“A little to the right, so you’re in front of it please,” he asks.

“…Here?”

“Thank you, that’s perfect,” says the man. “Hold it there for a second. Mind the water.”

Guezel stares at the ground, her heart striking in her chest as she stands there, very much akin to a fearful animal. In a way, her life isn’t different from that of a mouse’s, standing in the middle of the field and always watching for the shadow of a hawk that will come at any second to snatch it away, like it had done so often before. Her life is that of a prey animal, in a society that claims to have no such things. She knows it. She’s fought against it as best as she can, but nothing’s worked.

A mouse can’t stop being a mouse.

Ugly can’t stop being ugly.

She stands there tensely, listening to the scratching coming from the pillar and the droning of the waterfall, as her sweaty fingers nervously rub against one another, her fidgeting boot sliding back and forth over the slick stones.

The priestess turns her head, looking back over the water and staring at it for a time, noticing something familiar.

There are white strings washing down the fall, floating into the pool. She thought it was foam at first, but as she leans down, looking at a few of them floating past toward an unseen drain in the pool, she recognizes them as thin, silky white fibers — the kind she had seen here on the way several times.

Curiously, she looks closer, and then her very expensive and beautiful, but not exactly functional, boot loses its traction on the slick stones, and she falls in, not able to let out more than a squeak before she tumbles into the water, immediately tumbling as the current and her momentum cause her fabric laden body, weighed down by the heavy bag on her back, to spin around, disorienting her.

Fighting against the water, she kicks and tries to swim out, but finds that it’s impossible to do so, despite the surface now being above her. Her back has gotten caught on some rocks or something below her and, since she’s still wearing it, she’s also tethered to the submerged underground. Of course, the obvious thought is to just remove the straps of the bag and swim up, but given the icy coldness of the water and the sudden disorientation, mixed in with the fresh animal panic that she’s about to die inside of the Demon-King’s castle after all, somehow she just doesn’t manage to make this simple thought come into reality.

Guezel flails, trying her best to fight against the current. Not having had the opportunity to hold her breath before having fallen in, her lungs are already starting to burn, along with the rest of her body, which stings deeply from the icy water.

— She exhales, her body instinctively trying to open her airway even if she’s underwater as it forces her to let go of her throat muscles, bubbles rising up from her mouth straight toward the hands that reach in and grab hold of her robe, which had cost her a full four months of her monthly salary to have tailored.

A moment later, she’s pulled out of the water by a very strong grip that has absolutely no problems removing her and her bag in one yank.

Coughing out water, Guezel crawls to the embankment of the pond, apologizing profusely to the stranger who just saved her for her having messed up, as she looks down at her hands and the white threads wrapped around them. She shakes them off and looks at him — but only his boots and legs. She doesn’t want to lift her head so that he can’t see her face.

The wet stones, the white strings, the water — everything rumbles for a second, as some disturbance, a vibration, moves through the ground.

“You need to hide,” he says, ignoring her out of place apologies. “It senses you through the water.”

“Huh?” she asks, slowly lifting her gaze and only reaching his chest, before a long, protracted groan comes from the distance, down from the tunnel she herself had come from.

“Ah, hell…” he mutters. “I thought it was further away,” says the man. “Get down!” he orders and a second later, Guezel is yanked back to the pillar that she was sitting at before, the fabric of her soaked hood now suffocatingly clinging to her face together with her wet hair as they hide.

The stranger shushes her from next to her as she quietly looks, watching as a… a thing… begins to move into the chamber.

At first, she thought the tunnel she had come from was sealing itself back closed with some soft, white flesh, as if it were a regrowing scar. However, it’s not. Rather, what then comes is a large, soft, meaty thing with a white body and a black, round head at its elongated, wormy end that is too large for the tunnel but traverses it anyway. A maggot. No… something else…

Strands of white, shiny silk are wrapped around its body, torn and cut from the jagged stone walls of the castle that it is too large to move through. Its shiny mandibles click and chitter excitedly as from its head emerge several stalk-like growths like thin mushrooms that rise into the air, pulling free from the imprisonment inside of its own body several silk cocoons that dangle freely in the air like the many broodsacks of a spider.

And inside of them are, what are undeniably, people.

Geuzel’s instincts are to scream and run, so she proceeds to start wanting to do exactly that. But before she can even move, a hand that smells of dyes covers her mouth, smearing her face with color, and another one presses her back into hiding, leaving the same marks of touch on her wet robe.

The Thing that Weaves’ stalks turn toward them as they hide back down and there’s a sickly, wet, squelching as it begins to move. Its soft, supple and grubby body sliding over broken stones and rocks, sliding over debris and rubble as the mass moves toward them, squicking and icking like the sound of a fist pressing ground meat flat over and over until it loses all coherence and becomes an undefinable paste.

The stranger holds her there as a shadow moves over them, the air above their heads filled with nothing but pliant, soft, wet flesh. Her heart threatens to break her ribs with every strike it makes, as hands press against her face and body, holding her still as the maggot crawls over them, over the collapsed pillar, its sagging lower half sliding only inches over their heads, close enough to touch with a tongue with only a little exertion.

The screaming voices of her party members, the people she had lost contact with on their way down the tunnel, comes to her ears as she lays there against the man and the column, moving through the body of the giant thing, coming from the cocoons it holds on its long stalks. A slick, slimy ooze leaks down from the stone pillar they’re against as it scrapes against the maggot, its lubricating jelly that protects its soft body from its movements in the tight passages of this region glooping downward in abundance — a thick, colorless mucus that runs over his shoulder and between them.

It passes by, crawling into the water, its massive body filling the pool entirely as it feels around, and then, finding nothing, crawls up the side of the fall, simply arching its massive body over the overhang and pulling the rest up with little effort.

The two of them watch as it, up on the cliff, reaches up toward the ceiling, the elongated stalks on its head pressing out further and further, stretching themselves into firm rods that reach the barrier above, pasting them with a sticky substance that then holds the people-filled cocoons in place, impossibly high up above the ground.

And now, for the first time since she got here, Guezel looks up at the ceiling, which she had failed to notice at all, given that she never looked anywhere but down.

Covering it, all around the stones, are silk cocoons the size of people, dozens, maybe hundreds, she doesn’t know. There’s so little light and so much movement above from the squirming, fighting contents of the soft prisons that the ceiling itself, which ought to be stone, looks like it is, as a whole, the same supple moving body of the maggot that had birthed it.

It ripples.

Her panicked, labored breathing that still hasn’t recovered quite yet from almost drowning, can’t quite keep pace with her attempts to sustain her life, given that her mouth is still covered by the man’s hand.

“You can’t touch the water,” he whispers. “It hears you if you do,” he explains quietly into her ear, causing her to think back to the many puddles she had seen on the way.

They weren’t just puddles of water from a leaky dungeon.

They were alarms.

Each and every one of them a signal to the thing, to the maggot, that something is coming its way.

A hand slowly releases itself from her mouth and then from her body. “You should go,” he says. “It’s going to do a lap. It won’t be back the way you came for at least another two hours.”

She crawls away, the terror of dying now weighing far less in her heart than the terror of being touched, let alone so closely. Guezel quickly scrambles over the rocks, wiping her face with her dirty hands, looking down at the smears of ink on her fingers as her head buzzes, far too much air reaching her now all at once from her hyperventilations, her vision shaking as she looks away and toward the ceiling.

What the hell is this place?

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” says Guezel, realizing something. “I don’t… I don’t…” she breathes, holding a hand against her heart as if to stop it from breaking free through her aching chest.

“It’s not so bad,” he says. “You get used to its quirks,” explains the stranger. “It has a rough exterior, but when you look past that,” he says. “There’s a real beauty to it.”

“…Beauty…?” she mutters, not sure if she’s hearing him right.

This is the most horrifying thing that she’s ever seen. Even the floors until now, with all of their terrors, haven’t really hit her quite like this one just now. But maybe that’s because this time, rather than being in the back of some defensive line, she’s right in the middle of it, by herself, alone.

One gets used to being alone in life and, under normal circumstances of everyday life, that’s… fine. A person learns to make due and then, after a while, they even begin to love solitude.

However, the danger of this trap only becomes apparent when one is no longer in a normal circumstance.

Being alone, in the wild, can very quickly mean death in all manner of gruesome ways.

So what does one do, when one has no choice but to be alone, despite their best efforts? What does one do when one becomes desperate?

— Anything.

Survival is paid for with any price.

Her breathing starts to slow itself as she, with her lizard brain hissing for her to come up with a way to not have to go back alone, to not have to be alone after what she just saw, because doing so would mean to die as far as its shrieking voice is concerned, exhales one final time in a slow, controlled breath. “I’m okay,” says Guezel. “I’m… I’m fine,” she lies, running a hand over her shoulder and looking at the thick mucus that’s stuck between her fingers. “Let’s… let’s finish that sketch, okay?” she asks, rising back to her feet and then standing next to the pillar.

Now, to a reasonable person in this situation, this idea of a drawing would be beyond absurd. After they both came this close to becoming prey to that monster, after they both came a breath’s distance from true horror, the idea of suggesting that they finish something as inconsequential as a sketch of this forgotten, off-branch of a room, seems like evidence of a total loss of sanity.

But that’s because they aren’t thinking with the mindset of a desperate, wounded creature.

In her mind, the drawing mattered to the stranger, so by insisting on its continuing, she’s doing him a favor to repay him for saving her just now. This act is a bargaining chip, it’s her offer of reciprocity that will allow her to not have to face the future and to sate the hissing voice in her head with the only solution it offers, even if it makes little sense logically.

“Are you sure?” he asks, as she leans against the same column as before, making sure that her footing is better this time. “Thank you,” says the man. “I appreciate it.”

“Just… don’t… I mean, yeah,” says Guezel, nodding and looking at him — sort of — through her lowered hood. “Can we go back together after this?” she asks, doing her best not to hear the muffled sounds coming from far above their heads that she is now able to distinguish from the sound of the roaring water.

“Sorry,” says the man, sitting down where they just hid on the broken pillar as he grabs the paper from the side and returns to his work. “I can’t. But you’ll be fine. Just go straight back down the way you came.”

“Huh? Why not?” she asks. “I thought you’re lost too?”

“I am,” he replies, the sound of scratching on paper coming to her ears. “But I have to go another way,” explains the man.

Guezel, now meekly lifting her gaze past her lowered hood, looks at him from close for the first time — at his face, which is gray and ashen, and his eyes, which are yellow and unnatural in their tinge.

He isn’t human.

“What are you?!” she yells in surprise, her soaked rucksack pressing against the pillar as she watches him work, indifferent to her sudden surprised reaction. He sits there, his hair hanging down over the paper as he draws, finishing his strokes with ink that doesn’t quite stay where it should on the page — as if it were a living shadow rather than pigment.

The man holds his drawing out in front of him, tilting it and then his head as he examines it, an unnatural shadow coming from behind him and covering one of his eyes as he tilts his head, the two of them looking at the sketch, before then turning his way.

“Lost,” says the gallu, a demon of the Demon-King’s creation, as he rises to his feet and moves toward her. Geuzel’s instincts tell her to run, but she doesn’t because… she doesn’t. Her legs just don’t really listen to the voice in her head as the man approaches her standing before her and towering over her. She looks up in terror at his face, staring down her way, his yellow eyes cutting into her as he stands far too uncomfortably close, which in the context of her social understanding is anywhere near her at all, let alone a breath away, which is terrifyingly close — demon or not.

He lifts his hands, and she flinches, not because of that, but because she suddenly realizes that he’s been looking at her face for seconds now from this close.

“What do you think?” asks the demon. Her terrified eyes slowly turn, looking at the paper he holds out to her, at the drawing. “I’m never sure about pieces like this,” he explains. “I always think they’re a little… I don’t know…” He sighs. “I feel like I need the edge to my work and in things like this, I feel like people just won’t like it because it’s missing the grit,” explains the artist. “But then I also worry that they won’t like my other pieces because maybe they’re too gritty,” he says.

Depicted there is a woman, her, standing by the water in the room, this room, that they’re in. But rather than the column of stone being behind her, the column is depicted as a cocoon like those on the ceiling — but this one is broken and ripped apart and from it, she emerges, radiant.

“You see, the problem is that, well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” he explains. “So, what do you do when your best work isn’t appreciated by the masses?” asks the demon artist. “The largest collection of eyes?”

Guezel looks at him, deeply confused and terrified and also confused in many other ways that are hard to explain. Nobody has ever drawn her before, not like this in detail and not in a way that is flattering in any sense at all.

“I… I-!”

A finger touches the bottom of her chin, lifting her head that has already started lowering itself again to hide her face instinctively.

“— You realize that it doesn’t matter what they think,” explains the man, shaking his head as he looks at her from close. “They’re animals. Mindless. They can’t see it,” explains the artist.

“See… see…” She gulps, accepting her death. “See what?” mumbles Guezel.

“What matters most,” is all that he replies with. “Real beauty,” says the Demon-Painter, Abydos, as he swipes a finger over the drawing in his hands, bringing it to life, the woman on the paper moving and flying around the scene, the living shadows causing the scene to dance with joyful colors that all stem from black.

And now, she’s as good as dead, metaphorically pierced through the heart.

“I can’t go with you,” says the man, pulling away, which causes her a strange mix of terror in ways she can’t grasp due to her inexperience. He looks over his shoulder, back at her, the shadow that sprouts from him reaching out a hand. “But I need a model,” he says. “If you want to come with me,” asks the demon, his voice surrounded by droning water and the muffled screams of people who are ‘on her side’.

Her outstretched hand reaches out before her mind can form any other thoughts, immediately grabbing hold of the shadow’s grasp without so much as a moment’s hesitation more.

A soul isn’t easily corruptible if it is molded within a solid firmament of compassion, understanding and nourishing wholeness. However, in the total absence of such things, an intrusion into the sanctity of the spirit is very easy, as it will latch on to literally any spark of that which the human soul innately craves and has been deprived of for so long, that for which it always hungers and, in those who are void of its presence, starve for.

— That being the evidence and truth that such a thing as unwarranted, indiscriminate kindness is able to exist somewhere in this world. It is a beauty that surpasses anything else in the material world, and it is perhaps the most wicked weapon fielded by the Demon-King to date.

The perhaps naive priestess goes with the demon, throwing away a lifetime of training, lifestyle, and other such investments, shedding them off as if they had never really mattered at all, much as if throwing off threads of a broken cocoon.

The Demon-King’s castle claims a soul for itself to make use of in the coming skirmishes, taking it for itself not through death or resurrection, but just by asking.