Prologue (part two)
By Breaeden Swordwind
Time passed as is its wont and the boy eventually found civilization. He skirted it at first, not wanting to enter but did, though before he swore to himself not to linger. He was uprooted now and had no desire to bind himself to the ground just yet. He walked into the first town and just stared. People busied themselves walking from place to place. Occasionally someone would walk into a building that had a sign hanging over it. Most of the signs were craved in the shape of an object, presumably related to the activities carried out beneath, though some had writing. On one such sign written in blazing gold upon luscious burgundy was, "The Courtesan's Midnight Ride". He made a point of not entering that building.
The building he did enter was adorned with a sign that was shaped like a loaf of bread. Smells of baking wafted lackadaisically into the streets instilling such travelers as the boy to take passing curiosity as to what delectables the shop might contain. The door of the bakery closed behind him and he slipped up to the counter. Behind the counter was a door and to both of its flanks were shelves with bread, several kinds but all equally appealing to the eyes of a boy who had been living off of shrub berries and the occasional rabbit.
From the door to the back stepped out a grizzled old matron. Beneath her eyes hung bags that dangled to her cheeks, which in turned seemed to droop. It was as though being near the heat of the oven for so long had caused her face to melt. "What can I get you?" she said in a very vernacular German that took the boy a moment to decipher. The women chewed the air inside her mouth as she waited with a sedate impatience for his response.
" I entreat you, purveyor, for a loaf of bread and your freshest pastry", he said in his stilted manner.
"What?" she asked with her intolerant calmness.
"Er… could you sell, me…uh… a loaf of bread and a pastry." He shot of in single word bursts, looking chided.
"Oh, why didn't you say so?" she snatched a loaf of bread and half-apathetically tossed it behind her back at him, "Be right back with that pastry" she sighed at him as she opened the door to the back.
This was his chance. He bolted. The door slammed behind him and he was already past the last house of the town before the old women managed to return from the back room holding the forsaken snack.
He moved on to the next town and had similar luck with his thievery.
The towns of Europe were now markedly coalescing into more the just village hamlets where each person was his own carpenter, baker, and farmer. People had now known, even in the more remote areas of the former Christendom that a person specialized in his labor was advantageous, however with recent wars and conflicts of the Reformation had led to deaths and instability. People knew that they could not risk placing their entire livelihood on the backs of specialized workers who might be dead at any moment. Though in many areas were still heaving under the turmoil of the Reformation but with the death of Martin Luther four years ago The Holy Roman Empire collapsed into a brief respite. A respite that the people used to go back to there jobs as sellers and blacksmith, as seamstresses and butchers.
This was the climate that the boy found as he traveled the roads of Germany for the next three years. He survived off of stolen meat and river water. Occasionally the river water would leave him sick or a poorly cooked, half-rotten, cutlet would poison him for a time but he survived. When his cloths became worn he stitched them. When they were to worn to stitch he nabbed new ones at the nearest town.
Most townspeople paid him little mind, there were many men and boys who had been shuffled up by the recent wars and drifted from town to town in the drunken haze of day-to-day existence.
His arm never recovered from the burning it had taken. Though it grew with his body and looked normal to the passing onlooker, the boy could neither move the limb nor feel the winds that blew upon him as he traveled the roads. It would be assumed that this would be a handicap to the slight-of-hand that he needed to obtain his daily bread. However, when he spoke with shopkeeper the merchant's eyes would become so fixed on the arm that didn't move that he could slip a few coins from the counter or a small pastry up one of his long sleeves without being spotted.
The two growth spurts he was due for came and went. By the end he was on the taller end of the spectrum for his time. His hair scraped many a door archway when he enter the shops he would be looting. His face was hard, but had a cool handsomeness to it. The back of his jaw was slightly curved but not so much so as to be construed as effeminate. His eyes were somewhat large for his face and the golden iris that resided within them seemed to be too lazy to focus in on people he wasn't directly talking to, preferring instead to gaze at the horizons. The horizon that was at the edge of the world and the one that was in his head.
Drifting around like this made him realize how wide the world was. Indeed, he felt that he could walk forever and never see the same place twice. The thought made him lightheaded and dizzy. So much space was pressing in on him.
Traveling was still widely considered unsafe as bandits prowled the roads and a merchant would often sleep with sweaty ponds when moving his shipments. However, next to roads the merchant could now find the bodies of vagabonds who had apparently been slain by the one or ones they had intended to ambush. Once a merchant found amidst such a scattering of bodies a young women crying. The girl's blond hair was frayed and knotted and she clutched a dagger to her chest. "Did you kill these me?" asked the merchant as he bent down to her.
"No", she responded, a twitch playing near her left eye, which, along with the right, was distant and unseeing, " I led them"
"Then what happened?" said the merchant in the facsimile of a consoling voice. He had noticed the girl's beauty and hoped she might allow him to…comfort her further.
She coughed up five words, "A boy with yellow eyes". Letting the merchant help her up she gave five more, "killed all men, not me"
The boy spent his nights reading the paper fruits of the printing press, which was silently celebrating its one-hundredth birthdays. The fire would burn near him, illuminating such texts as "The Prince" or "March of Folly". When he was tired of reading, he would lie back on a root or fallen tree and sculpt images in the fire.
While traveling through Rouen, traipsing close to France, he bumped into a man. The man had blond hair that was slightly shorter then the boy's own mane and on his hip placidly dangled a rapier. The man's cloths were clearly of a fine cut but had been dirtied by extensive traveling. They were both sitting at a bar, the man had a drink in a large a glass but was drinking it only in his mind and the young man had no drink as he had not the money to spare.
"Do you know," sighed the stranger in French, "What it is like to be looking for something but not knowing what it is?" The boy let the words float in the room and fade away in the pre-twilight calm. This place would be filled with raucous men once the sun set but for now it was silent, with just the sound of the bartender order the waitress about in the preparation for later. " I didn't think so." The Frenchman continued, " I have been cast out by those I trusted and managed to hide myself in a cave. Only, that wasn't how it was supposed to be. I feel like my path in life took a wrong turn, an epiphany that was supposed to occur didn't happen. All I have is a half-memory that I should have met a girl."
Amy. The thought came to the boy from somewhere out of mind but appeared in his head all the same. He couldn't decipher what the word meant. Only that it was important. The German stood up and walked out of the inn as the sun hit the horizon. The color of the sun began to be crushed against the horizon and bled outwards. The sun dies every day.
After his three years of wandering had passed the boy decided to try settling down outside a town in Saxony. Near the town, well it was hamlet really, were two adjacent cities where lines of trade passed and the boy could make a killing as a thief.
It was fall when he arrived and the trees were burning in their leafy pyres and would burst forth from the twig ashes to the bud of spring like the Phoenix of lore.
Near the village the boy built a small but functional lean-to. It had a triangular back in which two walls met, there was not enough space between the walls for sleeping but he could squirrel away what few things he had, such as his sword. Where the third wall to the complete the triangle would have been was the entrance. It was nestled in a little valley by a creek. He slept there at nights and during the day went to either of the two nearby trading cities to steal whatever he needed.
He was returning from such a day of stealing with a decent haul of two loaves of bread and a new hatchet he would need to gather wood for the coming winter. The sun was still high in the sky but it threatened to plummet quickly as fall suns had a tendency to do. He was coming over the ridge when he saw a girl looking into his home. He stood back a second to assess the situation. The girl didn't have a weapon and her way of moving was a bit awkward for a person with any skill with a weapon. He deemed her not a threat and walked up behind her.
He was within spitting range before she noticed him. The girl turned sharply. She was pretty and of an age with him. Her bark brown hair fell on the coarse fibers of a peasant dress. Her cheeks took up a faint reddish hue that the boy didn't recognize, "Oh, I'm sorry. Do you live here?" she said, her voice vibrated slightly. She was uncertain.
He nodded.
"Oh," she said sitting down on the dirt floor of the lean-to, both legs stacked one on top of the other, "You don't mind if I sit here do you?"
He shook his head as he set the bread and hatchet on a blanket that rested in the back alcove of the lean-to. He then began to gather what sticks he still had left over in his lumber pile to make a small fire, not enough to provide heat but to illuminate.
"What's your name?" the girl asked and looked into his eyes. Hers were a green that stabbed the mind and had a certain spark in them, which he couldn't define but would notice once he started to feel lust.
He shrugged, to the nine Circles of Hell if I know. The shrug expressed his attitude to the thought of his namelessness better then all the words in all the languages he knew.
The girl picked up a bit of this but decided he needed a name if only so she could have something to call him. " I know! I learned this name in church. I wasn't paying attention so I don't know whom it's about but I think it sounds like someone pure and holy so you will like it. It's Luzifer".
The boy almost laughed. Of course, he knew what it meant, but he didn't care much. It was the first name he had been given the name the rest of his life would come to define. He wasn't about to turn it down. He nodded in acquiescence to his new title; actually it was more of a bow. He never thought someone could so perfectly peg him to words.
The twigs were set up in a pyramid like a replica of some sacrificial temple of an ancient culture now lost to time. He took some flint and steel he had stolen some days before and struck it once. A slight dying spark flew into the darkness. He impelled it to burn. As soon as it hit the wood a flame surged up from the sacrificial temple that was, ironically, being sacrificed to illuminate them. It came up with such suddenness that the girl fell onto her back. " What was that?" she gasped, several hair endings were singed beyond repair and giving of faint trails of smoke.
" Es algo Yo hago." The boy said in a tone that would leave no room for a discussion. That is if she had known Spanish.
"What?"
"It's a menial task I am able to perform." He said in his still blunt tone, but she still looked confused. "It's…something…I…do," he reiterated struggling to pick out the best words for the current situation.
She grunted slightly and pulled up to the fire. The sun was setting, its gaze had already retreated behind the trees and could no longer spy on them with its demon-red eye.
The boy…no…Luzifer now, grabbed the bread he had stolen and gave her one of the matching pair. "Thank you, Luzy" she spoke through a bite of the heart teeth breaking crust. It was the best food she had eaten in a while. German peasants were infamously worse off then those of both England and France, and she had spent many a meal wanting.
Luzifer noticed she was staring at his eyes but didn't bother to move his attention from his food. Darkness enveloped them and when she noticed it the girl started. " Oh damn, I have to go, my father gets angry when I stay out late. Cavorting with demons he calls it." Luzifer, I like this new name, laughed into his bone-filled mind, " I'll come out tomorrow after noon okay?" he nodded barely acknowledging her words. Introvert would have been an understatement.
She ran off the stopped and turned around, " My name's Blasa!" she yelled and ran off. Her name hung in the air around the fire, and Luzifer etched it into the twisting yellow and red tongues of flame.
She returned the next day and they talked. The day after she came and the one after that so that it became a ritual that she would come to see him from after the sun had begun its decent until it committed suicide falling against the horizon. The two of them laughed and played in the flush of adolescence, those last bursts of pretend play before the shackles of full adult hood. Blasa was adventurous and loved trying to chase down Luzifer or get in tasles with him. Luzifer was calmer, though he humored her, preferring, to forget his past in the unthinking quiet of his swordsmanship. When it began to get dark Luzifer would start a fire with his one strike of flint on steel and read the girl books he had stolen at town. The girl herself was illiterate but Luzifer took it upon himself to teach her to read German at the very least.
Eventually, the boys mind began to age and the slight tendrils of lust began to appear in his mind though he had no comprehension of what the meant. His eye began being drawn away from the girls face to other parts of her body. He felt eternally uncomfortable when she came close to him. When, he looked in her eyes he saw that same glint in her eyes and finally found a word to match it. Seductive, caring, innocent.
For days he fasted, having read in his childhood that in the Far East monks did so when they were confused, and offered all of the results of his thievery to Blasa. He was in the darkness after she had left when dizziness came over him. Collapsing to his knees he stared into his fire and felt his right hand begin to tremble. He was thinking of Blasa. He could feel the wispy fingers of emotion began to wrap around his mind, pictured her in his mind. No, something was wrong, she was ungarbed. Why wasn't she wearing cloths? Why did it feel so disgustingly good? The boy's heart beat harder then he had ever felt and it pumped confusion through every pore of his body. His trembling right hand began to move down his chest stopping between the torso and the legs. A palpable aura of despair began to come over him as he felt himself desire something he could not construe.
That's when his guiding light appeared. It was his self-loathing. No! I will not let my body dominate me! I will not be weak! Never again! He threw his lust into a corner of his head and shackled it to the wall. He then tore mental bricks from the walls of his mind and started walling in the alcove. Putting each piece together with mortar made of a mix of pride and hatred, he buried his lust alive. After he was done he moved the bones of consciousness over the new wall so that it looked like it had never been disturbed.
He opened his eyes and the dawn blinded him briefly.
Months passed without incident and it was nearing the end of summer, within days of being the anniversary of his arrival at the area when he made a mistake. While he was in town he got into a heated fight with a large group of guards from a supply train that was bringing goods from the Silk Road inland to the swelling and gloated noblemen who demanded expensive sacrifices of wealth to sate their infernal lust. Are they any less infernal then the ones buried alive inside me?
He was able to kill all of the highwaymen and leave their bodies in varying stages of dismemberment but he had taken a crippling wound to the leg. It was a deep cut and as he began the long walk home it sent pains of sweet agony surging their way up his frame. He only managed to take small steps at a time, maintaining a death grip on the trees in order support the weight of his increasingly heavy body.
The sun was setting and he was still half a mile from his lean-to. Between, bouts of pain that caused him to crumple like the rag doll Blasa had given him because she felt she was too old to depend on a doll. "I hope it eases pain for you like it did for me" she had orated in a seemingly preordained speech. Heh, now it only reminded him of pain.
AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH! A searing numbness throbbed through him. His knees folded neatly on their hinges and he collapsed to the ground. It was over. He knew he couldn't get back up again. It would be too painful.
That's when he saw something come over the next hillock. A person…. a girl…BLASA! He sighed; she had seen him and was coming closer. What was she doing here any way?
She gradually she slowed down from the dead sprint she had been in since she saw him. She wasn't winded in the least and looked like she could have done it for hours. "Are you okay?" she exclaimed punctuating her question by having her seductive eye-gleam turn to one that spoke of concern.
In his way of avoiding words when he deemed them unnecessary, he merely showed her the deep cut in his left leg. She gasped slightly, "Here I help carry you back to the shack". He shook his head and began to stand, but hot lava pulsed through his nerves when he began to put weight on the limb. He screamed a demonic roar that he would later become famous for. It seemed to encompass all the negative emotions in a human, pain, longing, hatred, desperation, and hopelessness; it was the shriek of a bat, the roar of a lion, and the howl of a wolf all bound together. It sliced its way through the forest for miles. Meandering through the forest to the ears of Blasa's too-pious father. Demons in the wood, the man thought with a certainty only blind faith could create.
The scream didn't seem to affect on Blasa who only showed the boy greater concern. She stopped and rested his left arm across her shoulder and held him no matter how he squirmed. Finally, too much in pain to fight for his pride, he conceded to her and let her support him back to the camp.
Once there, she set him on the ground, very lightly for fear of hurting the boy further. He rolled over to near where a fire was burning. She must have used my flint-steel, and started it; he felt pride tinge the recesses of his mind. He cleared away the thought when he heard a rip.
He shot his eyes over to Blaza who was ripping off the hem of her skirt in order to make long strips of cloth. He stared somewhat vacantly then realizing what she intended immediately evacuated his attention to the fire. He began sculpting images in the fire as soft fingers began to wrap torn skirt cloth around the wound. Had the setting sun not baptized the forest and the faces of the people there the two might have noticed that they were both blushing.
Emotions, he spat into his head, gehfühle, эмоции. He could feel them squirming with him. Like, worms moving through dark soil.
The sun was down; doesn't Blasa's father get mad when she gets home late? "Do you not need to return to you abode?" he asked in distracted way.
She sighed as she walked to the back alcove of his lean-to and grabbed some meat Luzifer had smoked one day in a fit of boredom. Well those were the ones that weren't burnt beyond recognition. " Well, I should but your too wounded I need to stay here and make sure you survive."
That comment had pricked his hubris, which began to twist inside him. It was normally an orb that just floated through him, but now it deigned it was time to take action. "I killed ten мужчины in urbs today, tres de them after I received this sår." He was so angry he was completely unable to speak in a single language and his words were a slur of dialects.
"And what are you gonna do if more come?" she said, apparently she had been able to piece together what he said based on context. She sat down next to him, awkwardly close at that but he wasn't in the state of mind to notice.
"What are you gonna do? You can't fight," He snarled, with a slightly calmer mind then before. He even managed to say the both sentences in unbroken German.
She merely rested her head on his shoulder and stared into his eyes were hers. Her eyes had a gleam in them, that contradicted her serene face…was it impatience? While he was distracted she slipped her arm around him and put a knife to his throat. She cocked an eyebrow coyly.
He had never noticed her feelings much. In fact she felt it was…what word does he use for low odds…oh yes, dubious…she felt it was dubious that he even noticed them at all. But she had started to like his strange yellow eyes and wasn't bothered with his dead arm. Some nights he would tell her stories if she asked him nicely. They were about his travels. They were both glorious and grim, he didn't sugar coat the reality but she fell in love with the stories anyway. She looked up to him and watched Luzifer practice with his sword and decided one day to ask him to take her with him and travel the world.
Before she could do that she needed to get strong so she wouldn't be a burden. She knew Luzifer and was certain he would need to be convinced of her…what's the word…viability as a partner. So she stole a knife from her father and had been practicing with it before she went to see Luzifer every day and at night when she was supposed to be sleeping.
That is all to say that by now she was quite comfortable with holding it to Luzifer's throat.
However, one thing he had noticed, for while now, was that she was hiding a weapon up her sleeve. He might have been an emotional unperceptive but you couldn't sneak around him when it came to things inflicting bodily harm on other things. He merely smiled at her. There was more pride in it then mirth, and more arrogance in it then pride.
He pushed his arm away from his body bring her blade hand that was latched around it away from his exposed neck. He grabbed her wrist and whipped it slightly while applying pressure to the area between the bones. Her hand released the knife, which skimmed along the ground a few feet away. A technique he had applied on another girl more then a year ago.
"Not bad but not nearly good enough to beat me," he said holding that arrogant smile and staring into her wide eyes, "you may tarry here for however, long you please." He said as he lay down to go to sleep.
She stared into the space his head occupied until a moment before for a moment then lay down beside him. Their backs touched but Luzifer's lust remained silent in its prison.
It was late in the afternoon when Luzifer woke up. He was more refreshed then he had been in quite a while. He looked around and saw Blasa sitting by the remains of the fire twirling her knife over her wrist. Luzifer twisted his neck to crack of bones resetting and got up. Blasa heard and turned to him, "Are you alright Luzy?"
He nodded in his stilted silence. She just smiled at him. "I'm gonna go home to my family. My dad's going to be pissed as it is and I don't wont him to get even more angry." Luzifer let his head fall to his chest and then brought it up once again.
Blasa touched his cheek causing him to wince away in feigned pain before she dashed off. Luzifer just watched, picking up a large rock in his living arm. The commotion of the girls passing caused a rabbit to bolt across a small clearing in the woods. Luzifer whipped his right arm releasing the projectile. It skipped off the ground and hit the innocent animal square in the skull with a sickening crunch. Luzifer smiled at himself picking up his dinner.
He skinned and gutted the animal and started to cook it. When he was disemboweling the hapless creature the guts plopped out as one in a strange manner. He didn't notice and well he didn't for he was not familiar with telling the future from rabbit entrails but if he had been he would have known there was death in his future.
It was dark and he had almost finished cooking the rabbit when he heard noise in the woods. He looked up and out of the darkness burst Blasa, heaving labored breaths between convulsive sobs. Luzifer set the rabbit on the ground and slide around the fire to her side as she collapsed in front of the blaze. "He beat me Luzy," she screamed, grabbing his dead arm and pulling him dawn to he level. She was on her knees in the must pathetic manner. She pumped her heart through her eyes to his golden ones, "He said is was communing with Satan that I was going to bring ruination up the town. Luzy your not Satan right?"
He closed his eyes and touched her face, it was bruised. He put a slight amount of pressure on it so her gaze shifted to the fire. A devil appeared in it, made of wreathing threads. The devil looked evil then a flaming sword stabbed the devil and it died. Blasa tried to turn to look at Luzifer but he kept pressure on her cheek and she watched the fire. Forged in the flames was a gruff man, a reasonable facsimile of her father. The figured dissipated into small sparks that flew into the night.
The pressure on her face from Luzifer's hand dissipated and she turned to look into them. Deep in those yellow eyes was a glint. "I have said all that I can" the glint said. Blasa buried her head in Luzy's chest and was wracked by sobs. But these sobs were happier then before. Luzy…dare she think it?…cared about her.
Luzfier was pained as she held him. Her remembered what had happened to the last woman who had cared about him. Memories of blood and a shattered skull danced mockingly. Tomorrow he would leave. She would work things out with father and return home. Once, that was over Luzifer would leave. If he staid any longer only bad things would come of it.
Pushing these thoughts out of his head he let his arms hold her until they were both asleep. A wing of light and one of darkness folded around them.
He woke up alone. As was his habit he sat up and moved his neck in a circle. Standing up he yelled out, "Blasa!" but she didn't respond. She must have gone home. He hoped she managed to work the problems out between her and her father.
Then an impulse hit him. It was time to leave. He couldn't trust himself around her anymore. He would one day murder her like he had done to his…
He grabbed the hatchet he had stolen along with a hunting knife he had also "acquired". He grabbed a stolen satchel and filled it with a blanket and his flint steel. That was it. He would travel light. It was back to foraging berries and banging bunny skulls with rocks. Finally, to punctuated his preparedness to go he pulled the strap to the scabbard on his back tight. No point in letting his sword sag during the long walk.
Luzifer began to take the first step when a voice hit him, hit him like a flail square to the groin. "Where are you going?" asked Blasa.
He turned, "I am taking my leave of this place. I will only bring you further anguish."
Blasa ran up to him, grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. While he was still off balance she took his living hand and clasped it in bother of hers, "I can't go home now. Please take me with you. I won't be a burden."
Luzifer shook his head. "Why not? I'm strong. I can survive out their with you. Please, Luzy, I love you"
The last three words only strengthened Luzifer's resolve. "No"
She grip on his hand tightened, "Why, Luzifer? If you love me at all then please tell me why"
He tore his hand free and his words came faster and more fluently then they ever had, " Why? Because I'm a murderer. The last women who cared about me I killed. She was my mother! I cracked my mother's skull on the castle floor! I don't want that…I won't let that happen again. Not to another person I care about!" he was beginning to lose it. He had never had his feelings get the better of him like this and there seemed to be no reining them in.
She moved closer to him and wrapped her arms around him. "It's alright Luzifer. I know you didn't mean it. You are too much in grief to have done it in cold-blood and even if you did I know you won't hurt me."
He grew cognizant of how close to him she was. His lust was pound on the wall that bound it in a corner of Luzifer's mind. He pushed her away. He was twitching frantically. He was completely breaking down. The only part of his body that wasn't moving was his left arm, his dead arm. His emotion coursed through him. "NEVER AGAIN!" he shouted repeatedly changing his language with each utterance.
Seeing him so out of control, Blasa stepped in and put her hand on the back of his head and looked up into his wild, golden, eyes. His body went as dead as his left arm and he stared back at her. "It will be alright Luzy. I'm here." With that she stood up on her toes and pulled his head down so she could kiss him.
Luzifer was at an impasse. He had to push Blasa away from him but if he did his lust which was now shaking the foundations of the wall binding it would escape and he would loose control of his body. All the months of repression had only made his lust stronger.
He decided he would deal with his lust and then push Blasa away. She increased the force with which he kissed him and his body just stood there motionlessly, receiving it but no more.
Stepping up to the wall in his mind behind which he had interred his lust he waited briefly. Suddenly, two bricks flew out giving the opening he needed to attack. A sword appeared in his hand. It was the beast-blade that the knight who killed his father had wielding. It felt comfortable in his hands as he stabbed it through the slot in the bricks and piercing his lust's personification in every man's weak point. With drawing the sword he put the two bricks back in place. His lust went silent.
Snapping back into reality he pushed Blasa way and began stepping back. Now that he wasn't focused just on his lust all his other emotions started attacking him with increase fervor. He couldn't bear the, "Run away Blasa please!" He put his hand to his sword hoping that it would scare her off.
It didn't she began to step in to close the distance again.
Like many men who survived off of fighting he would often turn to his sword to bludgeon his argument into his foe. Only this was no bludgeoning motion. It was all edge.
It was supposed to have been a deterrent slash but he had felt it go through something. He looked up at her. She had a huge gash from her left shoulder to her right hip. He watched as blood pulsed out from the wound in time with her heartbeat, which, judging from the rapidity of the blood growth was beating fast.
She buckled and fell to the side he caught her in his one good hand He dipped his hand down till her hair was grazing the earth and his face was a foot above hers. Had anyone been spying on them at that moment he or she would have though that they were in the most passionate moment of the dance.
He stared into her glinting green eyes. The seductive spark was in them for a moment then faded.
Scared, he brought her close to him and let her head rest on his shoulder so she would breath on his neck causing her bloody chest to touch his bloodless one He didn't feel anything. She's not breathing! It's happening again!
He let her body fall to the ground. He collapsed to his knees. He let out, once again, his demon roar-shriek. It filled the forest for miles and miles. In all three towns the people stopped working in order to look at the forest as the scream went on for minutes upon minutes with out ending. They were entranced. For that brief time their joys were lost to the pain in the voice. It was intoxication and agonizing at the same time. Like the perfect drug.
His voice rasped after an hour of screaming. The spell on the people was broken and they retuned to their daily joys. However from that day on the forest was known as Dämon Wälder.
Luzifer look at his sword which was lying on the ground innocently, though covered with innocent blood. He punched it causing a slight crack to run through it, one that he would not notice until it was too late.
He picked up Blasa's corpse and walked it to a tree within sight of town and set it down. The people would find it and bury her. He gave her the Last Rights, which he had learned, since she was probably Christen even if he was less committed to religion.
Before he left though he grabbed the knife that she had practiced with, the one she had tried to hold to his throat. He slid it on his belt opposite four others he had stolen over the years. It rested over his right hip. He knew without his left hand it would be awkward to draw but he didn't plan to draw. It would just be another burden to bear.
Abelard watched as the form set his daughter down by the tree. Watched suspiciously as it gave her the Last Rights. Probably Lucifer's Last Rights, he scoffed at the demon that had stolen his daughter's soul. The demon looked to the town briefly and Abelard could see the boy-demons yellow eyes. They made him sick. Suddenly the demon vanished into the woods. Abelard took this opportunity and ran up to his dead daughter. He swore softly to himself that he would kill that demon.
He told his wife that night that a demon had taken their daughters soul. Even, if he was wrong on some details, he was, on the whole, precisely correct.
Luzifer watched the sun set in the woods. It looked down like the red, disapproving eye of god. Suddenly, as it began to pass below the horizon, looking more and more like it was staring angrily at him, it flashed green. That's not the eye of god that is infuriated its…Blasa.
He stood there briefly. Something stuck him mentally. It has been exactly one year since I met Blasa. He began to speak with a guilty voice that scratched on his aching throat, "One year down and I am no hero".
Luzifer began to walk away. The sun froze in its decent to stare at his retreating back. A cloud formed above the sun, forming a little stream that ran it's way upwards. Poor Luzifer, with his self-loathing, he never turned around to see the sun's cloud-tear. If he had he would have realized it wasn't angry; it was sad.
This is a hell of a long chapter. Fully twice as long as the first. For those who have read this far I have but one message for you. REVIEW. Only two of you apparently could do that. See its down in the bottom left corner. Now get chopping.