Demon Core - Chapter 38: A Laying of Hands (2/2)

Seldom has a light of such intensity been seen on the surface of the living world, the flash of metal sliding against demon claws showering out a wave of sparks that fly through the air, glittering as would the boundless stars in the night sky, to which the sparks seem to wish to ascend. Yet they all die out, glistening to lifelessness as their rising climb is met with wind and time, and they crash and fade down toward the empty void — only to be replaced by a new thousand more as metal and beast both scream.

Impossible.

Swain’s endless eyes, in rage, glare at the single, simple man who stands now before him, his massive grip and claws holding the blade of the sword that he has now caught. The iron metal glows, softening and radiating a vivid orange shine, as the furnace-heat of the Demon-Core superheats the metal.

And the man holds on to the smoking hilt, his leather gloves hissing, as he stands before the beast that towers above him in everything from power to stature.

“I will not ask you again,” snarls the Demon-King, his legions of the damned cowering, hiding by the thousands, as they dare not lift their heads from their lowered positions in the presence of the destructive wrath of their true master. Swain’s eyes narrow. He needs it; he must have it. Whatever this man is in possession of, whatever secret he holds, it is the thing he is hounding. He can smell that familiar scent, feel that familiar touch on his skin, and feel that prickling that he cannot identify.

But he reeks of it.

It’s drifting from him like an over-applied perfume, like the foulness of a skunk, the smell absolutely permeates everything around him, and it infuriates the Demon-King to no end.

“Good,” replies Knight Errant Orson. He lifts a hand to his mouth, his teeth biting the tip of the smoking leather glove and holding it as he rips it off of himself, before gripping the steaming, hissing metal with his bare palm. “Then we won’t have to waste any more time,” he says.

— The man twists the handle of the sword, as he had done before. The Demon-King, knowing the destructive power of whatever ability this is from its prior demonstration, immediately lets go as the world flashes to the blinding whiteness of a day that might never end. Waves of cascading power stream over him as the sun rises before his eyes. The Demon-King roars in rage, his massive arms lifting to shield his face from the shine as he barrels forward, swiping with his other arm out to strike whatever presence he can make contact with.

The night itself seems to move with him as he charges toward his incomprehensible opponent, a mere human with nothing special about him. Both the ceaseless blackness of the storm and the night that never stops collide with the opposing shine of the counter-threat, of a sunrise that threatens to never end as the Demon-King and nothing more than a man with burnt hands fight.

Orson flies, tumbling as a massive, barreling fist makes contact. The man tumbling and flying over himself, but saving his landing with grace that is unexpected of a man of his years, of a man who has been living the quiet life for so long. The old knight slides on his boots, his heel pressing back against the body of a dead, blackened tree, the tips and branches of which are on fire. Cinders drop down from above, silhouetting him with a red curtain as he bashes forward, the glowing blade cutting through the encroaching shadows and nightmares as Swain, pulling his fist together, carves a simple, elegant poem into his own flesh with a searing nail as he subconsciously recalls a familiar monster, one that he connects with this scent, as he recalls a feeling that he once felt, and as he says everything that he has to say from the pits of his soul with a simple, beautiful word.

A Thing that Hungers

Die.

A large, spiderish, skittering hand shoots out of the darkness, sprinting on the hunt. Each segment of the sharp thing is as long as a man’s full grown hand. Attached to its base is a long, leathery arm that drapes over the smoldering floor all the way back into the burning forest. It immediately shoots toward Orson, desperate and hungry to grab fresh prey, after having been in slumber for so long now, ever since that night.

The Knight Errant sidesteps, his sword cutting into the palm of the shadowy hand from the darkness that grabs hold of the first thing that it can.

But instead of fighting it, he simply lets go of the sword, never stopping his stride as he runs toward the enraged, roaring Demon-King, who catches his fist, sending a shockwave blasting out in all directions.

“Being a hero is dumb,” recites Swain, narrowing his eyes as he looks at the man.

“Sounds like something an idiot would say,” replies Orson, reaching into his belt and pulling out a knife that immediately plunges into one of the eyes on Swain’s body. He screams — not in pain, but because of his words.

A massive fist cracks into Orson’s chest, sending the old man flying back, crashing as he slides through the ash and then further still.

“Never call her that again,” warns the Demon-King, his hand pointing at the man with broken armor who lays on the ground, his arm still extended as he then stops mid-pace.

…Who? Her?

Swain stands there, cinders and smolders falling all around him like the dust from feather-downs.

His eyes look at his palm and then all around the world, at everything he can see, sense, feel, and touch, as he tries to understand what he himself just meant, what he is trying to figure out, and what this feeling is that torments him so.

That person, that girl who made him become what he is now, the one who started all of this… Everywhere he goes, her presence is becoming stronger. Everywhere he looks and everywhere he turns, he can see her, smell her. It’s like her spirit is with him, following him in the spirit world and mocking him every step of the way.

It’s enraging.

And this man, this wretch…

Swain lifts his gaze, looking back at the knight who is rising to his feet, unhooking his smoldering, broken breastplate, and letting it fall to the ground.

This creature is hiding the thing that he needs to identify her once and for all.

He who can see all across the world, the terrible Demon-King who can look into the fearful shadows behind the hearts of men to learn their darkest desires, their wretched secrets and thoughts, he who can smell and taste the fear of mothers and the crying of fathers, the beast that partakes in every hunt — this last, miserable little secret is being kept from him by nothing more than a man once again.

He hates them.

The ground around Swain cracks as he steps forward in rage. What are they, in their ugliness, to keep such a thing from him? The absurdity of it all.

The old knight picks up an old sword that was leaning against the bridge before turning back toward the king of all things foul and bleak and his legion of crawling, biting, screaming things that stretch from one end of the horizon to the other.

“You won’t be able to hurt me with that sword, knight,” mocks the Demon-King, readying himself to end this. The knight’s old sword is being dragged off into the darkness by a clawed hand, belonging to a thing that chews on metal as readily as it does bones and meat. “Your light tricks won’t work anymore without your old one,” he mocks, a deep laughter filling the air as he moves toward the man on the bridge, the heated wind pressing past them both, swirling as the updraft from the raging river below and the heat of the Demon-Core collide, creating firestorms across the landscape all around them.

Orson engages in his greatest mockery yet of the terrible king, undergoing an unforgivable act as he leans his head back and laughs. All across the world, the burning of every flame there is intensifies at once.

“That?” asks Orson, looking back at the Demon-King and then nodding his head to the side. “That was my new sword,” he explains, readying himself in a fighting stance. The metal rises up into the air. “This here is my old one,” says the knight-errant, with a smile that sends Swain over the edge, as it carries with it a repugnant, mocking shine of something so good and unearned that it worms its way down through the core of the demon’s heart and writhes there like a parasite, touching and feeling around all the dead matter within.

The scream that follows can be heard resounding around the world, as the true terror and a single man of no notable renown charge back toward one another. The man presses forward, clicking a mechanism in his sword, as the world flashes with incredible power and glory in contrast to the raging storm of the Demon-King that comes to crash against it like a drowning tide of a great tsunami.

Fresh quakes rattle the deepest buried bones of the regions around them, far down below aeons worth of turned over topsoil, as intents collide.

The grace, the beauty, and the power of the things this man is bringing to the forefront against him — how? Why?

Metal and claws slide against one another, Swain pressing the offensive with massive, lumbering fists, cracking stones, and striking with trails of fire behind them to reach the dodging knight. The firmament of existence rattles, as the foundations present between heaven and the world are brought to cracking from the force of the blows being exchanged on one hand, flowing into the true avatar of unending darkness and yearning, and on the other into but a man, to which the effects are visible after a few more exchanges of this nature.

The Demon-King stands there, his eyes welling with discontent as he stares at the man, whom he holds aloft with one arm, his body burned, battered, and broken.

And despite all of his rage, Swain has learned his lesson from last time, when he was robbed of his chance to receive an answer.

“What is it?” asks the Demon-King, trying to decipher the thing that this person is painted in, trying to understand the nature of the fabric that wraps his heart and soul — those beautiful threads tickling and taunting him to know their name. “Tell me,” orders the monster, the melted, glowing sword clattering against the blackened stones of the bridge. The water of the river below boils as it flows, deadly steam rising up all along the river.

What power could there be in the world — what secret force — that would allow a simple, common, nobody of a man like this to stand against the strength of the Demon-King for even a moment? What does he know, what does he possess that all of the kings and heroes of the world do not?

He must know.

He has to know.

“TELL ME!” orders the Demon-King.

Knight Errant Orson looks at him through his bleeding vision and dirtied face, laughing as he reaches his end. The heat of the Demon-Core cooks the blood within his beating heart.

Slowly, the man’s hand reaches out toward Swain, the old man laughing all the while as he seems to find something quite funny, as the ungloved palm touches Swain’s forehead — this being his wordless answer to the question that he answers truthfully, on his knight’s honor.

Knight Errant Orson’s fingers slip and fall away from Swain as his eyes roll shut and his body dies within the demon’s grasp.

And while an answer was given, it is not one that the Demon-King can understand.

And even if the man is dead, his laughter resounds around in Swain’s head, like that of a child looking at him and realizing something obvious, something stupid, that he himself cannot have noticed yet — like a bug on his clothes, a smear on his cheek. The Demon-King’s claws rip into his own face as he tries to find it and understand what it is — that STENCH in the air that continues to linger even now all around him.

The sight of this particular beauty that he desperately seeks is simply hidden from his eyes, no matter how plentiful and sharp they might be.

And so, the Demon-King turns his rage toward humanity at an even greater pace than before, as one million horrors of the dying world tear over the bridge, through the river, and through the grasslands, as they storm toward the human-capital and its defenses.

Swain looks back at the corpse of the man, and even his dark tides seem to flow around, rather than over.

It doesn’t matter.

Soon, the Demon-Core will burst, one-million souls having been collected, and then…

— He returns to the carnival, where the carriages and his gallu are waiting for him as always.

…And then he will end this once and for all. He will find out what that feeling is when he finds the person — the girl who made him into this — and tears those filthy secrets from the heart of her ghost, before sundering both the spirit and the physical domains and bringing on an era of endless nothingness, forever, and ever more, in which only the thought of beauty itself can remain, uncorrupted by the ugliness that is existence.