A/N: ATTENTION READERS!This interlude, which takes place during Chapter 10 of The Demon King, is VERYVIOLENTand GRAPHIC. If you have a weak stomach or sensitive morals DONOTread this! Due to its explicit nature, I may very well take it down from this site at a later time. Should you decide to read this, you have been warned, do NOT complain about how bloody it gets. The only reason I'm even posting it, is because without it, The Demon King loses some of it's impact. Several of you have already mentioned that it seemed like Hinamori wasn't punished enough for the centuries of torture she inflicted on our boys. This is that punishment! If you've made it this far, and like bloody, gory movies, then enjoy. Ja ne, minna.
The short, mousey-brown-haired woman looked up from stirring the pot on her stove, and blinked. "Ai-Ai-Aizen-san!?" She ran towards the tall, intimidating demon that had just appeared in her small cottage, wiping her hands on her apron and babbling, "I always knew you'd come back to me! That dirty witch said you couldn't be tied down, but I knew! I knew you didn't think of me that way! I knew if I gave you enough time you would see that I was right and agree that being with me was better than being on your own. Oh, how I've missed you, Aizen-san! No one knows me like you do, and now that you've come home all of the last centuries of waiting will be worth it. I bet you didn't think I'd still be as young as I am, did you? I tricked a kitsune into giving me her immortality! Silly little thing didn't think I'd follow through with it though. She tried to escape, tried to get to that Mage, but I fixed that. I ran her over with my carriage! Pity, I think she had a kit. Too bad the thing had to grow up all alone. But that's the price it had to pay for being one of their kind, right Aizen-san?"
Aizen's black wings were triple-folded in on themselves, flat against his back, almost looking like tattoos they were so flat. His expression was decidedly, frighteningly, neutral. He raised one hand and patted her head—rather like one would a dangerous animal.
"I," he said slowly, "actually happen to be rather fond of kitsune. One has been my best friend for several hundred years. And," his illusion began to weave from a flutter of his fingers, changing his words and covering his actions, "he happens to be with kit now. I love him very dearly as a friend and you have caused him horrifying harm by keeping him from his mate."
His fingers, his claws, were digging into her scalp, but she wouldn't feel the pain. Not yet. His eyes came up to inspect the area, looking for something suitable to tie her up. When he broke his illusion, she was going to go insane from the pain and agony.
She giggled dismissively, closing her eyes against the pressure beginning to bubble in her brain. "Oh, Aizen-san, you've always been so talented at humor."
Her chin twitched and a small trickle of blood began to appear rolling down the side of her face, bubbling up from somewhere within her ear. She swallowed reflexively, and smiled, a strained, chilling expression. Then her hands came up to grip the wrist of the hand on her head. Her fingertips sparked with lime green electricity, and a woven band of power began to form in the gap between her hands around his wrist.
Until worlds come to ruin, powers be bound, his not-voice thundering from the force of his anger, from the sheer power he was pouring into the deceptively simple spell. My will persist, spoken without sound. Destroy that which has been held so dear, so that it cannot be used to inspire more fear.
His claws didn't so much as budge as his spell, powered by the force of his millennia-old, torture-tempered, agony-strengthened will, came down on her with more force than should ever exist in the world at any given time and her half-formed spell stuttered out. When no incantation was used it took longer for the spell to take hold and the results were weaker, despite the immediate result being initially faster to appear. Foolish Warlock. As if her pitiful, cursed, half-magic could overcome the power of a Horseman who despite having his very soul ripped apart more times than he could remember continued to grow and strengthen and stay sane.
Her smile faltered, but she still stood strong, somehow...something...a deflection shield or something. "Did you think I was not waiting for you, Aizen-san? I have had many, many long years to plan for this moment. You've always been mine. Just as I've always been yours. Can you not feel the power between us?"
The cottage's windows rattled against the storm of power whipping through the home, tearing books and knick-knacks from their shelves, upending furniture, pots flying about the kitchen. The dishes fell out of their cabinets to shatter on the floor. The fireplace burst into magenta flames only to shoot straight up the chimney. The door exploded off of its hinges. The rug unraveled itself. The wallpaper peeled. Paint, several layers thick in places, chipped and then flaked off. Symbols appeared on the now bare walls and floor, written in a dripping substance shimmered in the light with a silvery cast—Unicorn's blood.
The warlock's hands fell back down to her sides, and a sheen of sweat appeared across her skin. A tremor ran through her, and she shakily opened one fist to grasp a wand made of bone as it flew across the room. All the while her smile cracked her features.
Aizen's hand darted out faster than thought, grabbed the wand, and he released her to step back with it, eyes flat and cold. "I had been content in the assumption you had died a great many years ago. I have never belonged to you. I never will. The core of your soul and the core of mine are so radically different we could have been born of the same mother and I would still never feel so much as the slightest affection for you much less anything more substantially positive."
He twirled the wand. Bone. Dragon bone. This disgusting little chit! Dragon bone and unicorn blood, the most magical, perfect creatures on the earth, and also the most rare. He was going to make her suffer horrendously.
"You have forgotten, haven't you, Hinamori," and her Name burned them both—his tongue like acid, to touch the Name of one so corrupted, and her, when the Name he called her was touched by the Magic she betrayed. His magic flashed to stop the spread of the hole in his tongue and he curled it, as she shuddered, her smile cracking just a little further.
"You have forgotten who I am. What I am. Aizen is my human name. I am Famine. The Third Horseman. I cause pain and suffering wherever I step, I bring Death in my wake, and except for those who follow me in the Cleansing, I am The Most Powerful creature on this earth. I cannot be stopped. I cannot be controlled. And I cannot be bound!"
Through his speech his feelers, delicate and yet stronger than steel, began to curl over his head, his irises were turning purple as black overtook the sclera, and his wings flared, still pitch black, sucking in all color and light until nothing remained around them but darkness. Darkness and his voice.
"You are going to know exactly what you did to me, Hinamori. You are going to learn that there are forces you cannot control, and that provoking these forces will never end well."
The warlock shrieked, launching herself, her fingers curled into claws, at the darkness. "You are MINE!"
Everything she touched burned, her flesh bubbling and peeling away in her desperate attempts to find the creature she believed to be her soul mate. Her eyes were wide, and hollowed. She screamed and writhed, throwing herself against anything and everything she could to try and escape her prison. Green electricity vaulted from her ruined fingertips to bounce around, immediately swallowed by the inky nothingness only to be rebound at her as though she was being shot by another of her kind.
"Oh no, little Warlock. Now, you are mine, but not the way you had always so dearly hoped." His voice came from everywhere and nowhere all at once, from all sides. "Now you are my prey."
Abruptly, there were claws digging into her back, fingers grasping her spine and thousands of other hands held her immobile as the first hand pulled, inch by horrendous inch, her spine was dragged from her body, nerves and tendons snapping, muscles twisting, bones breaking.
She was held suspended, surrounded, the bindings of her own spells holding her life to her body in crackling electric lime green. But her eyes swam, searching, reaching, demanding that he show himself even as the physical ability for speech was torn from her body.
"You know the kitsune you so callously stole the immortality from? She was the mother of my Gin. Did you hear that? MY. GIN. That boy is my dearest friend. He has been searching me out companions year after year after year. Keeping me sane, because do you know, you vile little creature, what would have happened if I had lost my occasionally tenuous grip on sanity?"
Claws plunged into her belly and hooked around her intestines, then yanked them out just as they had her spine, and a second hand joined to wind the long ropes into a coil. There was, other than his voice and the hands, not a whisper. Not a breath. Not a bit of light or motion. No warning at all.
"No, of course not. You never could see beyond your own foolish little whims. Should a Horseman go mad," his voice turned clinical, detached. Almost like he was teaching her. "Several things will happen."
Her head lolled back, wide eyes in a perpetually frozen face. Her own magic forced her jaw open, and her hair was frazzled. Her hands twitched, though mostly paralyzed by the loss of her spine. Blood poured from her abdominal cavity, staining the front of her ruined clothing as black as the nothingness around her. Her mouth trembled as it tried to form words.
"If a horseman of my considerable age, power, and knowledge were to go insane, without the benefit of a King or Mage to control me and bring me back to sanity, I would unleash the full extent of my power across the world. Humans would die in the millions, as would all creatures that do not exist purely on magic, starved to death. After roughly a month, I would self-destruct, turning all my power upon myself and committing suicide. However, as most humans would be dead, do you know what that means? It would take centuries, if not millennia, to be reborn. In the meanwhile, those living beings that remained would destroy the world in their struggle to survive. And by the time I could return, there would be nothing to return to."
Hinamori's chin quivered, and her tongue, dry and cracked, flexed. "Y-you...are...m-mine..." She croaked through stripped vocal cords. "I...I'll...h-have you...if I...haf...have to...d-destroy th-the world to...to get...you."
Aizen's deep chuckle was demonic. It didn't even sound like him. "You will not. But since you insist..."
Abruptly the coils were looped about her own neck, a noose formed out of her own long, ropey intestines, and she was assailed with the knowledge—and feeling—of the other end being grasped in a vicious hand as it was put over a hook and yanked brutally, suspending her, hanging her and choking her even as her organ tore. Then…then a line of vicious pain started winding its way around her body, a single, continuous line that felt like a razor wire.
She refused to scream, though the effort to do so made her shake and bite through her tongue. Further speech was impossible, as she convulsed in pain. The wire began to pull tighter, and tighter, slowly, agonizingly, so she could feel each slice, each trickle of blood, as she was cut into strips like a twisted, horrible human Slinky. She was still hanging, and the hand holding her up jiggled the 'rope' to make her bounce, making the wire slice right through her bones.
Being torn into pieces was almost like selling her soul again. Her mouth moved in a chant of some sort, but no sound came out. Her eyes were still wide, though mostly unseeing now, as her neck was sliced nearly cleanly across. The electricity sparking through her system was getting weaker. Though her life still wouldn't end, her magic was draining away.
Being a warlock meant giving away her soul, her very ability to tap into the natural, divine magic of the world, in exchange for the oftentimes stronger magic from the Other World. It literally killed her, because only the dead could wield such things, but it kept her alive as well. Inside of her blood cells tiny sparks of electric lime green existed to keep the effectively dead tissue working. Ordinarily this meant decay and rotting, but having stolen the immortality from a kitsune, and fortifying her home with unicorn's blood, then using a dragon's bone as her main wand, meant that none of those things affected her. However, these things came with an extremely high price. The more blood she lost, the less magic she had, and being essentially dead meant her blood would not be replenished the way living beings made new. Each platelet that spilled from her body took magic with it, and that terrified her more than anything Aizen had done so far, because once all of that magic-infused blood was gone, even if he 'healed' her body, she'd never be able to call upon her warlock spells ever again. And this was precisely why Aizen was bleeding her so brutally. He was going to drain every once and drop of blood from her before he put her back together again.
Finding she was only so much conscious mincemeat, he gave a snarl of irritation and the snap of fingers echoed before suddenly, she found her body piecing itself back together. It hurt nearly as much as the initial destruction.
She tried to call her power as her jaw reformed and her neck reconnected, but the spark that appeared was dull, and she shrieked. "You can't do this to me! All that I've worked for! All that I've sacrificed! You will be mine!"
The backhand that hit her mouth dislocated her jaw again. "Shut up. If you had worked toward something that did not destroy everything I stood for, all that I am, and the very reason I exist, you would have found true peace, real love. Instead you chose to align yourself against the King, and against Nature, to chase a phantom shadow you could never possess."
His claws came to her neck and sank in, thumb cutting her carotid while his fingers sliced her jugular.
"Thanks to you, I will never belong to anyone," his voice was quiet. Dull. "The only mate I could ever have had, thanks to the dictates of your spell, can never be mine. The few times I have kept him alive to meet him, his previous lives have killed him. His is a soul too damaged to ever connect with mine. And this is your own fault, your spell choosing the only mate I will ever have for me, and it backfired, you stupid little slut, because your spell didn't choose YOU!"
His voice rose to a shriek of such pitch her eardrums burst, blood streaming from ears, nose, eyes, and mouth as the sound created pressure inside of her skull.
The last flickers of that electric, unnatural power drained in those moments, and she screamed, though she didn't hear it. She could feel the last of her magic slipping away, dooming her, that if she survived this, to be a huddled, broken old woman. Even now she could feel her skin drying and her hair becoming brittle.
Now, Aizen was ready for his final torture. He closed all her current wounds, reversed them, and dragged her back out of his dimension. Her house had burned while they had been occupied, he was startled to see. Burnt to the ground and the fire gone out so there was nothing left but char and embers. He created a rack from his magic and tied her to it spread eagled, her clothes long gone, and took over a long, wicked, horrifyingly sharp knife. A skinner's knife, to be precise. As she was dead, but immortal, this would not kill her, he had made sure of that before he left the Illusion. He started to make the incision at the top of her skull, making a single long, curved cut, as though he were scalping her, careful to leave the muscles beneath and cut only the skin.
She continued to scream, as though now that she had lost her power and he'd shown her that she was not his key like she had previously believed, she had nothing but the sound. She didn't even beg for mercy. She knew better, but couldn't control the absolute panic that gripped her.
And he skinned her. There were no other terms to describe what he did, cut by cut, every agonizing moment drawn out as he took the utmost pleasure and care in not nicking or mangling skin or flesh. He plucked her tendons like harp stings when they were exposed, stroked bare fingers along her muscle fibers just to induce more pain, peeling the skin away from her body and cutting the membrane that attached it to her muscles. When that was done, he put the skin in a pocket space. He didn't know what he was going to do with it, but he was certainly going to enjoy contemplating the possibilities.
Then, to make sure she didn't bleed away the rest of her magic-holding cells and die before he could return to his King with her, he threw her bound body onto the embers of her home. The unicorn blood in the ashes rejected her even as the coals burned and flames leapt up to sear her, greedily devouring the small amounts of body fat he had carefully left clinging to her muscle.
Bending over her, he began, in the way of the dragonfly and the maggot, to eat her alive. Every bite he took regrew, every slash he made healed itself, thanks to the magical properties of the ashes that cauterized her tortured body.
Suddenly, a ripple of power cut through his attention, and the demon looked up from what he was doing, blood dripping from his chin. He gnashed his teeth, the sharp, deadly points of a carnivorous insect. He shook the nearly deceased warlock in his frustration. He was being Summoned…now!? He'd only just barely gotten started.
Another growl and he returned to his place of power. There set up as it should always have been was the Court of Souls. The King on his throne, dressed in the traditional garb of his station, and flanked by the Mage and the Jester. The Four had taken their places, and for a short while, when the King addressed the one on Trial, after the Mage healed her, Aizen, too had watched from his corner in the South. The pathetic thing begged for mercy, and the smile that broke across the butterfly's face when the King refused to give it was hardly appropriate for the setting, and all the more menacing for his appearance. Then he stepped forward to do as his King commanded.
Applying his fingers to the skin of her belly, he smirked cruelly as outward from his points of contact bumps began to move under her skin and she began to scream. Grimmjow went green in the face—flesh-eaters! He hated those bugs, and they were in her skin, eating her from the inside out?! Then, it got worse. After attacking her inner organs, her stomach acids came spilling out, burning the bugs and causing them to flee, eating their way out of her and, upon exiting her body, turned to dust; meanwhile the acids from her stomach were consuming what was left of her organs with a burning agony like that of liquid lava.
Her muscles spasmed, making her arch and writhe against her restraints. Screaming broke her vocal cords, and blood gurgled in her throat. Tears streamed down her face, turning bloody, staining the stones beneath her. Lost in a haze of pain, the warlock couldn't think, or even breathe, but she heard every word spoken above her as the King's voice accompanied the momentary relief at the end of the demon's spell.
"Hinamori, you have been Accused by direct confession of willfully deceiving a young mage into placing a curse upon the Four. You will suffer by their hands until I have determined what your ultimate fate shall be. No mercy will be given to you. When your body is at the point of expiration you will be healed and the punishment will continue." There was a small pause. "Mage, again."
And Shiro healed her body, agony etching across her features as the damage was rewound like a tape being played backwards, causing her to suffer the same spell twice.
Aizen grinned all through the healing. Next came the bits and pieces of little shards, points of pain traveling all over her skin, inside it, irritating her eyes, her lungs, driving her mad with itching and pain while causing minimal damage. Fiberglass, a most useful human discovery. It could have terrible, terrible effects, and that was exactly why Aizen used it now. He left the fiberglass on and inside her for several minutes, watching her struggle against the pain and itching.
Again she screamed herself hoarse, and writhed. This time she twitched violently as the teeny, tiny fibers reached her more sensitive areas, snapping and dislocating her shoulder in her attempt to get away from the sensation. This cause an even greater scream, the bone grinding against the socket.
The butterfly demon just watched, and relished, for several long minutes before putting his hands on her ribs. Then he pressed in with his thumbs, and snapped each and every rib in the cage, slowly, methodically.
Shiro looked to Ichigo, suddenly very afraid of his twin, as the orangette watched each new torture with an impassive face. Her unfocused brown eyes sought his faintly glowing amber, but all he gave her was disdain. She gurgled, blood trailing down her mouth again, joining the other stains, as they were not removed by the healing spell either. Just as the light in her eyes was fading, the King nodded, and the Mage went back to work, bringing her back from the brink of oblivion for a third time.
She actually formed words after her lungs and throat were healed, "NO! No, no, no! PLEASE! Kill me! Make it stop! Mercy! I beg of you, PLEASE, YOUR MAJESTY!"
"Famine...continue."
Famine continued. He consumed her, literally, set a horde of ravenous moths on her bare flesh and let them eat right through her. After that he took his time snapping every tendon in her body before proceeding to remove each of her individual muscles with a small knife. He cut out her insides and strew them over the ground, then danced on them where she could see.
Then all too soon it was over, and the King was standing to deliver his decision. A carefully worded Directive, set into the fabric of reality as certain as the laws of physics and the motion of the planets. A ripple of pride ran through the butterfly when the King blinded the warlock with his own hands. The connection the two held over that brief glimpse of what the Third had gone through over the centuries evidently affected the orange-haired young man deeper than anyone had noticed. It made the next order his lord had for him even easier to follow than any previous.
Aizen snatched the blinded creature with sharp claws in the back of her neck, digging through muscle and shoving aside tendons to latch onto her collarbones and spine. She was not allowed to die and he would heal the damage once he reached his destination. He had the perfect place in mind. With just a few strokes of his wings he was airborne, the warlock hanging from his hand and arm like a side of beef on a hook squealing, screaming, and thrashing in pain as the pads of his digits pinched nerves brutally between finger and bone while his longer-than-normal claws gouged the bone, cracking it, digging in so the soft, goopy marrow leaked out. Oh, it was a bonus that holding on so hard gave him the most secure grip, but to be truthful, he did it just to watch her in agony as he set off for where he planned to dispose of her.
His flight took hours. He was doing this manually—he refused to grant her the bliss of a short trip by Flashing or using his magic. Her reactions came only in short bursts now, her energy gone; sometimes a jolt or jostle would send her screaming and writhing again, but mostly she hung there like a dead thing, whimpering, throat raw and blood running down her chin from coughing it out of her lungs repeatedly. He thought she'd even bitten through her tongue at some point, though it would do her no good. At last, he saw what he was looking for. As he swept into a sharp dive, her wails began anew from the change in angle and his tighter grip so as not to lose her, not when he was so very close.
He pulled up hard, her body jolting forward as his wings beat hard to brake, and he came fluttering to land upon the Isle of Tears. A little-known land, entirely self-sufficient, not connected to any others except by the occasional fishing vessel that stumbled across it. It was an agricultural society, quiet, perhaps considered primitive by technologically-minded people who were so ego-inflated today, but they were happy with their simple lives. And there was one, tiny, itty-bitty detail he just loved.
The Isle of Tears was populated entirely by Witches and Wizards.
This traitor would be taken care of here. Their own creed would drive them to help her, to keep her alive, because they could survive no other way and were peaceful, but Momo could never truly associate with them, never know the comfort of human contact, as their touch would burn her. She would be well and truly stuck, surrounded by constant, eternal reminders of what wrong she'd done and what joy she had given up, what Magic she had betrayed when she turned her back on all that was good and balanced. Aizen healed her and left her whimpering, sobbing form, naked, in the center of the village to be found and blinked out of sight, out of existence, to return home.