11. STEP THREE: SCOUT OUT THE ENEMY

Kihrin’s story

The moon Jhyr

Later that same morning

The sky above me on Jhyr was more colorful than I would have expected. The sky itself was dark, but the stars were scintillating holes pricked out of the black velvet. The stars didn’t twinkle—I suppose they needed an atmosphere for that. The planet, Ompher, lay against the darkness, a bright blue cotton-wrapped jewel of a world. I couldn’t see the red-orange sun, but its light still reflected off the planet above, while Tya’s Veil glimmered in the upper atmosphere, doing its job of keeping that same red giant from boiling everyone on the planet alive.

That last bit was my fault. Or Vol Karoth’s fault. I shuddered to think how close I’d come to destroying everything I’d ever loved.

And the risk wasn’t over yet, was it?

I made small talk with the demons while I tried to ignore the hunger that scraped and gnawed my insides clean. Also while I picked up rocks and tried, again and again, to not destroy them. “What did you mean earlier? When we ‘abandoned’ you?”

It means exactly what we said. You abandoned us. You left us behind. You escaped and thought nothing about how we had been left trapped in a cold, dead universe.

I started to protest that the damn things weren’t going to give me a straight answer, when a worse idea occurred to me: that they were.

We didn’t understand much about demons. We never had. We knew they fed on emotions, heat, tenyé. They were gestalt creatures, comprised not of a single soul but of a hive mind of souls. Sometimes instead of adding a victim to their own hive mind, they would infect and twist the soul, turning it into another demon, like a wasp laying her eggs in a cicada. They came from another universe.

But then, so did we.

“Help me understand,” I said. “How could we have abandoned you if you were the ones who invaded us?”

The demons waited without answering, somehow feeling both smug and hateful. Like they were waiting for me to work it out.

Had anyone ever asked why demons were what they were? If they were a race, how could Xaltorath and Janel have independently turned themselves into demons without any demonic “infection” at all? That implied demons weren’t a race but a process, like becoming a god-king or one of the Immortals.

And if that were the case, what had they been originally?

Maybe I was overthinking this. Maybe we’d always been overthinking this.

“Were you human?” I finally asked.

By whose definition are we measuring? What does “human” mean? The demonic voices howled around me. If they had any power to do so, they surely would have been attacking. I could feel their fury vibrate against my skin.

That hadn’t been a denial.

“Did you start off as human? Originally?”

I could tell they didn’t want to answer. Their anger turned sullen and refractory. I suppose that might have been the end of it. Perhaps they’d thought there was nothing more I could do to them, that I couldn’t make them answer.

But I could. And I did.