Devil Child

Prologue

He could see her being born. The blood of the wombs with its security coming out and dying on the filthy bed. It was amazing that anything could survive these dark times. An orphan with no one to care or nurse her.

Another miracle. First her birth and now this. The wet nurse dying as the child's poisons intoxicated her body with their foulness. Her dying screams that shatter the defiled air as a dirty toddler looked on with no understanding of what was happening.

The two year old girl, thin and skinny, needing food for the next of her carers and feeders where dead, again. In the most agonising way that the girls magic could make happen in the limits of the child's mind.

Again, every year as the snow falls in twisting weaving masses in the north or the lush vegetation is rotted and decayed to a barren dust bowl in the south. There is no middle ground. As long as this being is on earth there will be no peace, there can be no security or good times.

Just death. Painful, shameful death with no relief. Not even a little time out on the corner. Skeletons bare their bones to the mercies of the harsh sun, or corpses are forever held in lonely limbo in the hardest, blackest of ice.

Where ever she goes they will follow.

Except one. She kneels by the grave. Its cold stone biting into her soft flesh as she hugs it.

In Beloved Memory

Anne Carry Summers

Our sun will always be subdued.

The sun is forever eclipsed for the girl screaming at her grave. The memory of the body in the coffin as the worms crawl their foul onslaught to the circle of 'life' was so good. She was bright. She was sunny. She was friendly, a phenomenal friend that had always been there for the red eyed girl as the tears refuse to come.

A Devils' child surly can not cry when its purpose is nearly complete.

That's what they all said, and yet Ann had never believed that. She said there was just 'stuff' in everyone, and people interpreted the actions that this 'stuff' caused in their own way. Good and Evil. Angels and Devils, Demons and Warriors. The World and I.

How where they to know what the world was meant to be? How could they possibly know how to get out the labyrinth from their muddy view of the ground? How could they possibly know their place in this life, let alone another's?

And yet here she was, because she had trusted the Devils child a memory of love.

The tears fell on the freshly turned earth. They fell as the turf was placed over that, forever sealing her fate. There is power in everything. And power is what you make it.

All in all he was quite proud of his creation, it breathed, it lived, it was the soul of chaos. For order could not exist without chaos, as chaos would not be noticeable without order.

They had never got the hang of it. Ordering and mixing so it was perfect.

That was where he came in, the blotch, and the one that prevented what they wanted.

He knew that if they did not have balance, if they did not have choice it would grow lifeless as the wastes of space. A prologue to what would happen to that little glimmer of life on that tiny, minute planet.

He wished that he could tell his daughter how much he loved her. He wished he could hold her and tell that it would be all right because he knew how it would end. He wished he could just be there for her as her world fell down. He wished he'd never had to watch his only love die and leave him as she bore his child.

But he could not interfere with what must be. And what must be would happen, whatever a being wished.