Curiosity of the Demon King Pt. 10

(note: contains mild self harm)

--

The boar princess, Suvir was not asleep when the daughter of the demon king left her side. She ignored the sounds of the doors opening, of her supposed servants entering and taking the draconic succubus along with them. She ignored what she suspected of their intentions and did her best to huddle up and at last fade into sleep.

She wasn't stupid; she knew damn well that she was meant to be a sacrificial pawn, and couldn't put the facts in line with that woman's, Fosi's actions. So close, Suvir had been to eliciting an execution, but then Peris in all his glory had come in, and she faltered. It only made sense that she would be taken care of for her failure if nothing else. Her father would not let her weakness foil his plans...

But now her enemy was protecting her for some reason... Her father's enemy, she corrected herself. Suvir herself had no stake in whether a few acres of land belonged to one ravaging horde or another so long as it did not border her own abode. Even if it did, she'd been a hostage before and had barely known it at the time thanks to the privilege of nobility, though she did clearly remember the public mauling of her captors.

The princess' feet landed on the bare stone by her borrowed bed once she'd absolutely failed to sleep, heart aching below a cupped palm. She stepped across the room to her few things and slowly, deliberately withdrew a bundle of cloth, unraveled it to reveal a thin dagger.

Insulting the demon king within his own castle, to the face of his blood and under the eye of a blood brother should have been enough... Was this newest lord as cowardly as everyone said? Did he actually fear the retribution of the boar clan? Suvir turned the blade in the air, in the light of a single candle, and set the tip against her chest, below her ribs, aimed it upward toward her heart... She could steal Fosi's efforts from underneath her with just a little strength, fortitude of will... just by falling forward...

To help her father, and her people... father required her death...

Her hand trembled.

She panted, knelt on the floor.

The tip pierced her clothing and a bead of blood soaked into the fabric.

Suvir hardly felt the pain, but she tossed the blade aside and clutched her hand against the small wound, touched her head to the stone and wept.

-o-

When Fosi returned, hours and hours later, Suvir pretended to have been sleeping all through the night, did not rile as the woman crawled into bed and put an arm around Suvir's belly to hug her. Fosi smelled of fresh soap and her skin was hot to the touch; she'd just had a bath, but there was no mistaking the smell on her breath...

Soon morning came, Merrili the bull wench brought breakfast for the two and a change of clothing for Fosi. The woman had to have someone else help her with dressing, as if she'd never put on the sort of dress she was provided with, while Suvir hid her bloodied clothing under the fur that had served as her blanket. The wound was small enough at least that it had already closed and scabbed over without any dressing.

Breakfast was not the despicable white soup Suvir had been forced to eat the day before, but a bone broth with large chunks of meat and bread, both spiced more than she tended to get back home.

Fosi didn't seem much for conversation, eating with only the barest attention paid to Merrili's questions.

"And for princess Suvir?" Merrili asked. "Shall I inquire about filling out her staff? It doesn't do for a noblewoman to be without her own maid for any length of time. I apologize, princess, but I can't see why they sent you with only those two brutes."

Suvir swallowed her bite and repeated a lie she'd learned by rote. "The rest of them were killed in battle on the way. Ovel and the other one survived because they are my father's soldiers, sent to protect me..."

"I'm sure," Fosi said with the dullness of disbelief, below the notice of her own servant.

"Of course, if your father hadn't chosen to set up in a damned hole of a castle, surrounded by monsters and ferals, we might have fared better." Suvir huffed, crossed her arms over her chest. "Any number of more opulent locations for the taking, had he been strong enough to clear out the remnants of the past lords, but I can understand that at least. He is the weakest among them, isn't he?" She was crossing her toes in terror as Fosi's tired gaze drifted over her, but forced herself to continue. "Hmph, no small wonder he's hiding away somewhere farther than even here. I bet he's just too cowardly to face his peers."

Fosi stood up and came around Suvir, who prepared herself for her fate. And Fosi... pinched her cheeks.

"Owowowww, stop it~" Suvir whined.

Laughing to herself, Fosi released her grip and Suvir massaged her reddening cheeks. At the side, Merrili demurely covered a smile.

"What was that!?" She pushed back from the table and spilled their drinks in the process, toppled her chair, stamped her foot.

"A punishment, of course," Fosi said. "Merrili, do kindly clean this. I'll be taking the princess for a walk." She took Suvir's hand and pulled her along into the hall, leaving no room for refusal. "I want to have a little fun this morning."

Suvir clutched her skirt with her free hand. "You mean... with me?... Again?"

"Hm?" Fosi looked back for a moment, seemed to realize the implication and smirked, but was too tired to take the sadistic glee that Suvir would have expected of her. "Are you saying that you enjoyed out little game in the bath?"

"That is not what I'm saying!" Suvir pulled, but she wasn't able to release herself from Fosi's grasp. This woman was far too strong to be a proper princess!

"It's alright, princess. Of everyone here, I know best how you feel now."

Twisting her hips, Suvir managed to release her hand. Her freedom lasted all of a second until Fosi came from behind and hugged Suvir to her breast.

"I do mean it, actually," Fosi said quietly, backing up to a wall where no-one passing could hear them. "And I know that you won't believe me, but we two have more in common than you think. Your father wants so much from you and you're so afraid that you won't be able to live up to his expectations. Once, my father was given to one of the dragon clans by his own father, to replace a son of theirs that granddad had killed in a fit of pique."

"Wh-" Suvir choked on her words, hyperventilated briefly and went limp in the woman's arms with an instant of feverish terror.

"I- My father tells me that he was used as a bargaining chip many times. As his... daughter... I only recently knew anything about my heritage that wasn't filtered through the cultists who raised me..." It sounded hollow, had the cadence of a white lie, but Fosi was smiling under her tired eyes. "For now, I'd actually like to have some fun in my own way. Surely you'll accompany me?"

"You'll just drag me if I say no..."

Fosi shrugged.

-o-

The daughter of Avlakoi brought Suvir to the edge of the training grounds where men were throwing themselves against one another as they had been when she arrived the day before, and Fosi left the princess' side for a time. Suvir was given to think that there was hardly any daylight hour that one could come outside and find nobody smacking one another with wooden weapons. It was strange to see such a variety of demonic forms all in one place; she identified nearly every clan's genes in attendance, mutts beside, and some whose bloods were so muddled and muddy that she could hardly tell for the mismatch of talon and fur and scale. But no monsters. Avlakoi did not keep those atavists for some reason...

This, at least the rest, was the standard of the demon king's minions reaching into antiquity and before writing. Representing all of their kind in the war against Heaven, the true king would emerge from prophecy and command the myriad and the many, taking strength from wherever it existed. The false kings of the past left behind feral and monstrous things in their wake that haunted their vacated fortresses, forlorn offshoots of demonkind for whom death was a kindness that reunited them with the ancestors. With such blood, their savagery would not be quelled with the defeat of their masters, would not be confined to the enemies they'd been bred to fight. Here, though, Avlakoi did not have any mindless soldiers, even among the mutts.

Then, among them, Peris~

Tall, with muscle like steel cord, Peris cut a gallant figure. High cheekbones that would have made for a beautiful woman seemed only to enhance his manliness by crossing the aesthetic gap. Fierce, focused eyes, held surety behind them as he fought some gross, black thing with a beak. Suvir watched with rapt attention from a table that a servant had brought out, belaying the feeling that she was out of place until she had her fill.

Ah, he wasn't wearing any padding; too skilled to need it against these whelps. Or a shirt... Sweat glistened on his body in the mid-morning light even as Suvir wrapped her arms around her own thin body to withstand the chill in the shadow of the castle. The portraits she'd seen did him no justice, not the way that seeing the real thing in motion did.

Someone came from behind and startled her with a blanket. For an instant, the chill had felt like the tip of a blade against her ribs.

"My apologies, your highness, I did not mean to give you a start." Merrili curtsied.

"Hah! It's not like you scared me or anything. Hmph, at least you know how to make yourself useful."

The servant simply stood back and smiled, and Suvir grit her teeth.

"So this is what that mutt of a mistress of yours considers fun?" Suvir gestured across the training field then rudely planted her elbow on the table and rested her cheek on a tight fist. They expected her to be a boor, as a boar, so why not leverage that? "I'll make a guess right now: that one there with the beak is her favorite boy toy. Oh, I'd heard she let a wolf demon fuck her brains out, but you know that can't be the only time, just the first time she was caught, ha!" She had to clamp down against nausea behind a false smirk. And Suvir's own 'servants' too. But... why? "You should know, so tell me: how many of them does she fuck in a day? This is how she picks?"

Merrili's smile faltered for a moment, barely noticeable unless one were watching intently, but pointed. "You are wrong about her."

Suvir stood up and slapped the woman. Her hand stung but Merrili stood fast even as a red mark appeared. She said quietly as her chest ached, "Have you not been taught not to talk back to your betters? Does this newest false demon king fail to discipline his servants even to that degree?" Too loud, too loud, some others close by had heard and turned away. But that had to do it... Actively calling his validity into question... Even this servant woman might... And yesterday, trying to strike this one had earned Fosi's one and only threat of execution... Suvir closed her eyes as Merrili stepped forward and-

-thumped her on the head with an open hand.

"A-a-assaulting a p-princess will..."

Merrili held a single finger up to her plump lips. "Just watch. You can always have me flogged later." The woman rubbed her cheek as though to erase the mark before her mistress had the opportunity to see.

On the field, Fosi emerged wearing padded armor and carrying a blunted glaive. As she passed, soldiers stopped their sparring and nodded reverently, no, with familiarity.

"What is she doing?" Suvir said.

Fosi went to Peris and let her weight fall onto her back foot, held the blade of her glaive above her forward foot with the flat facing her opponent. In acknowledgement, Peris raised his own practice longsword and stepped into a slow strike at Fosi's head.

Of course Fosi warded off the attack; at that speed, even Suvir would have been able to defend herself, with her thin arms! But from the moment their metal rang, the two of them increased in speed and strength by stages, either one trying simply to outdo the other's most recent attack. Steel flashed and clanged like bells as they progressed toward their most ferocious states.

Peris matched his lady easily, as Suvir expected, moving jabs to the side with the flat of his blade and casually batting away Fosi's more concerted strikes. His face while he was engrossed in combat was gorgeous, those noble eyes that Suvir wouldn't have minded looking down upon her as she lay back and~... But, he still wasn't winning outright. Even if Suvir wasn't learned enough in the ways of war to fully appreciate what she was seeing, she could tell that Peris actually couldn't win, not easily as she'd expect against a mere succubus. Fosi was pressing forward, defending against fewer strikes since she'd already filled the air with vigorous motion that demanded answer.

The other soldiers had mostly chosen to stand back and watch, taking a breather from their own practice, one or two holding their chins in deep thought and concentration to study what they saw. Fosi wove the glaive's blade in and out of Peris' space, favoring wider movements which avoided getting the haft of her weapon stuck on her horns, had wrapped her tail around her hind leg to protect it from glancing blows. What little Suvir did know about war told her that the draconic clan favored polearms, spears and picks and glaives, for their usability while in flight, for passing attacks that plunged out of the sky and literally enraptured their enemies.

But Fosi didn't have wings, and she seemed to be trying to tighten her positioning to account for that fact... Had she just learned the form she was using from someone who did have wings? Her father? When?

She was keeping Peris at a distance with her jabs, stepping back when he did approach and circling to ensure that she didn't get trapped between him and the crowd or a wall. It mattered less that she wasn't landing her blows, when Peris couldn't dig through the structure of her defense to get at her either. So that's what they meant when they said combat was like chess, Suvir thought; it had always seemed to her from what little she'd seen that the stronger fighter would just overwhelm the weaker one and bludgeon them to death. Here, she saw a strength that came from Peris' polished form that she could imagine killing any number of baser soldiers. For an incubus to have such strength, it was incredible.

And... Fosi was no slouch either, even if it was clear that she couldn't keep up her active defense forever, huffing and puffing after a few minutes. She could obviously take on at least, say, those two condemned men that father had sent along with Suvir...

So why hadn't she?

It ended quickly once weakness appeared in Fosi's form. A strike from above was a little too slow, Peris was able to couch the force of the impact near the heel of his blade and let one hand fall from the hilt, stepped forward and captured the shaft of Fosi's glaive. He pulled her forward and embraced her, pressing the tip of his blade against her belly.

He was looking down into her eyes, his lips parted slightly. Suvir could see that Fosi wanted to pull away, but she wasn't willing even in defeat to hand over control of her weapon. The woman was shaking as Peris lowered his face toward hers; it wouldn't be out of place for a victor to do as he liked, just a little, to take pleasure from his victory, though Suvir had never actually seen a woman fight a man on such even terms... Fosi closed her eyes in resignation, then Peris seemed disappointed, sighed, and released her.

The woman was rolling her neck when she came to Suvir and took the other seat at the table. "I needed that," she said. "Princess, do you have any hobbies? I could probably find a drake small enough to teach you to ride. Though, I'd have to learn first, haha."

Suvir sat stark still. "Ride?"

"As a mount, princess." Fosi rolled her eyes.

"Oh, I see... And you do this... man's work, every day?"

Fosi wiped a bead of sweat from her brow and melted out on the tabletop with a warm sigh. "Don't you think physical exercise is refreshing? Or are you the bookish sort?"

Suvir watched Peris find another sparring partner, his own stamina not noticeably diminished by his session against Fosi. She could get used to watching men fight if they were men like that, with hard, glistening muscles rather than the hairy, barrel-chested men found back home. He was even better than the stories that her maids had told her, but how could you distill into mere words the effect of a handsome man's presence on a body? She wiped a spot of drool from the corner of her lip and straightened in her seat when she realized Fosi was watching her with her cheek pressed to the table, knowing eyes and a tired smile.

"I-it's not like I'm interested in fighting or anything!" Suvir said. She held a proud hand to her chest. "But I do see that his reputation is well-earned. I wouldn't mind gracing the event with my presence for a while longer, since I have nothing better to do."

"We'll retire in a short while to my father's study." Fosi steadied herself on an elbow.

"I'll finally meet the coward, then?" Suvir's breath caught in her throat, but she was able to put out the right words, the ones that were expected of her.

From out in the training grounds, she saw Peris' gaze flash across her as if he'd heard and she shivered at the disdain she saw in his expression.

Of course he would hate her, she'd made sure of that. If the demon king were in attendance, of course she would have been executed on the spot, if he weren't a coward... No king should suffer that sort of abuse, or allow his kin to suffer it, but Fosi had made sure Peris stayed his blade, for the moment.

Why!?

"No..." Fosi said. She didn't respond to the accusation, but her eyelids were heavy and she yawned.

What had happened last night? Suvir hadn't seen those two, but she could smell their stench on this woman. After more than a week in only their regrettable company, Suvir could have picked out their musk in a crowded room. "Then, what?"

"Clerical work. I had precious little time to finish it off yesterday since I had you to entertain." Fosi smiled lazily with her eyes closed. "I could push it back, if you wanted to 'play' with me again. It doesn't pile up the way it once did."

There was no way she was being serious. Now that the thrill of mock combat had left her, Fosi looked as though she would fall over at the slightest poke. "No," Suvir said.

"Hm."

"And precisely what is 'hm' supposed to mean!?" Suvir rose up and slammed her hands on the table. "I'll have you know that I'm not some feckless slut like you! And I'll not fall to the passing pleasures of the flesh as you have!" She smirked nervously, showing a long, sharp tusk, looked around and felt the oppressive air of all those watching her outburst. Nausea threatened to overtake her, but she had to continue. "In fact..."

After several uncertain and uncomfortable seconds, she couldn't think of anything else to say, so stomped away to refuse Fosi an opportunity to respond.

Fosi called for the bull-maid to follow Suvir anyway.

-o-

It really was a pauper's castle, Suvir thought as she hurriedly went nowhere in particular. There had been so many other vacant castles and keeps dotting the land that one only had to slaughter monsters to obtain, so why had Avlakoi chosen to take what had once been nothing but a border crossing held by a minor nobleman a hundred yeas prior? Suvir felt that she could circle the grounds within an hour without losing her breath, and there was so much of nothing locally that Avlakoi had himself had to commission the road being widened into more than wagon ruts before her arrival.

That action had drawn attention from men who had nothing better to do than think of how each of the others was moving against him. With that road widened, Avlakoi could march more troops, have more materials and rations delivered in preparation for war, so the right thing to do would have been to harass the workers at least to delay completion of the project. With a delay, Vormise could organize his own efforts to counter whatever move the demon king was planning, and they would be left with a respectful standstill maintained.

But the man himself had lowered himself to working on the project personally, and that would have been too much provocation, to attack him...

Suvir felt her nails digging into the skin of her palm and forced her fingers open.

She was a delaying tactic. Vormise certainly didn't believe he could actually win a fight against Avlakoi, but he didn't have to if he played his cards right.

Or... Vormise might just want to trade one daughter for another. Just to kill that bastard woman, that affront of an existence, it might seem an acceptable cost. Avlakoi, if he was anything like her father, would offer that woman's life as compensation, because he was a coward.

In her wandering, Suvir made her way back up to and past the room she'd borrowed the night before. What they had called a noble wing was also squalor.

"It should be a villa..." Suvir said to herself as she turned a corner and came face to face with several old men.

Those who were rarely spoken of, whose stature suggested their clan's relationship with the king, were the liaisons to each of the other great families. They sat in a larger room with a fireplace and comparatively luxurious furnishings, each wary of the others' presences as they lounged and frittered away the time, professionally useless as they were at the moment. Two sat at a large window with a table between them, a board game atop it that neither touched during the seconds of Suvir's cautious approach.

A lion demon and a fish demon with grey hair and filmy eyes respectively nodded sideways to Suvir but did not take their eyes off of the game.

She coughed into her hand. "I am-"

"The replacement for that pickled bastard?" The lion demon brought up a sharp-clawed hand to carefully pinch and move a single piece across the board.

"Yes..."

"Did they fish you out of the gutter as well?"

Suvir reddened but did not slam balled-up fists on the table as she wanted to; her death would mean nothing at the hands of one of these men, just a war. "Hah! I'll have you know that Methystus was my uncle, and I don't have to hear a word against him!"

The lion man threw back his head and disturbed everyone else in the room with laughter. "Oh, that's a good one! As he told it, the royal family went out of their way to find a piss-soaked drunkard hanging from a branch family to send here, but you'll have to grow a thicker skin if you want to last. Come, come, princess. Come and play a round so that this gill-head can have a break from losing."

As if it were already decided, the fish demon moved down the bench while the lion reset the board. Herself feeling a bit numb and with nothing else to do, Suvir sat and thankfully found by bumping shoulders that her father's opinion of the fish clan's sliminess was incorrect. She noted that Merrili had taken a position in wait with some other servants, safely out of the way but never letting Suvir out of her and, by extension, Fosi's sight.

"Fine." Fosi sighed. "Then what is this game?"

The lion demon smiled, a subtle and predatory expression on a face like that. He seemed like a retired soldier, with a frame that would have made him a veritable force on the battlefield until a tragic injury that could still now be seen through an open shirt in a riven tract of fur across his chest; now, he'd shrunken into a raisin around his once-mighty form. "Introductions first, princess Suvir. I am duke Krineer and the reticent fish-lip by your side is sir Tartr, who is in fact incapable of traditional speech."

"His shape can't do it?" Suvir asked, afraid to look too closely since the reddish folds of the man's gills were at the height of her head.

"Nearly had his throat ripped out, once," Krineer said.

Tartr raised a webbed hand and pointed to four claw scars under his chin likely paired with a single scar on the other side.

"Oh."

Krineer shrugged. "Scars are a mark of honor for a man, especially on the front. Though, I'm biased." He puffed out his chest such as he could, making clear that the reason his shirt was unbuttoned so far was just to show off. "As for the game, it's Pith. I received a set as a gift from sir Peris some time ago and have had a terrible time finding someone else here who has taken to it as well as I have. One can only have a game with the same man so many times, but if any one of you lot had a strategic bone in your body, I wouldn't have to keep challenging Peris himself!" he shouted to the room, to a response mainly consisting of rude gestures and laughter. "Ha ha, you see? It's meant to simulate the foundation of the seven great houses. The game was made by human cultists a century or so ago so that they could share in our grand story. But of course one would want to play with each and every one of the founding families, and one can't have seven variations of the pieces and still have the commoners play, too expensive. Fascinating history, don't you think?"

Looking over the board, he'd been talking about how either side had representatives from each great house. "So, they set us against each other?" Suvir said. Yes, that made more sense than it should.

"You grasp the irony perfectly." Krineer lifted one such piece, an ivory carving in the shape of a boar demon soldier, wielding a heavy studded club as was traditional. "This piece is one of your people, and as such it runs wild around the board while attacking everything in its path, then it falls dead from the wounds taken in passing. Interestingly, it can't be used to take out either the bat demon or the dragon pieces, since they can fly above the board I imagine."

"Because we're stupid, right?" Suvir asked, staring directly up into the lion man's slit eyes, and he was still smiling.

It had been some time since courtly training had come of use to her. Suvir wasn't used to actual practice, but she did at least know how to insult the person across from her without giving them leave to attack.

She said, "The lion piece, then, must lie in wait and ambush those which move into its reach." Like a coward would.

Krineer lifted another ivory piece, a muscular lion warrior with a plush mane wielding a greatsword, its tip planted into the false ground. "In fact, this one moves up to three spaces in any cardinal direction and kills whatever it finds there, as if pouncing."

"Yes, that does seem like what a lion demon would do."

He went along with explaining the rest of the rules, and then more of them, and then even more. It seemed to Suvir that it would be more fun to flip a coin over and over rather than memorize every special circumstance that these pairs of pieces could find themselves falling into. The man went on about the "true" version of the game where the board was three times the size on each side with as many more troops and games could go on for hours between skilled players; he wanted to play that version. Even Peris, who apparently did like the game, and remained the only reason Suvir listened as closely as she did, wasn't interested.  Then, well before she actually felt like she understood, Krineer started a game and ended up having to correct her mistakes as she made them.

Then there was Tartr, who watched quietly since, Suvir thought, there was nothing else to do and he couldn't speak his mind if he wanted to.

She would have wanted to, if she were forced to be silent...

In fact, her eye drifted across the scene and she saw one scar after another on the noblemen assembled. One man, a horse demon, was missing an arm and had a wooden leg on the same side. He was the only one currently using a servant, to turn the pages of a book.

"This is what you do all day?" Suvir asked as her most recent play was moved back for being illegal in some way.

Krineer briefly explained the rule she'd violated and moved one of his own pieces. He was winning handily, but seemed to enjoy winning against a new player more than he would against someone who was just bad at the game. "Better than getting sloshed all day, I say. The great Redscale has little need of us on any given day, and it's so difficult to get legislation by him that mostly we don't try anymore."

You call that man 'great'? She said, "Redscale? Do you mean to say Avlakoi?"

"A fitting name, don't you think?" Krineer laughed. He had to reset the game after winning and started again without asking Suvir whether she wanted to play another round. "His name to us before that one was given unto him. You know, I imagine, that the dragon clan doesn't name its children until they've earned the right to one by surviving adolescence. When he worked as a mercenary before the last great war against Heaven, he would come onto the battlefield as a blur of red scales and leave naught but mangled bodies in his wake. By the end, when the enemy had been routed, his scales were ever more red with their blood. Not an especially complex naming, but then mine own means 'one with a great mane'." It was actually a bit patchy, now.

"You fought alongside him, like sir Peris?" Suvir tried to tamp down her excitement at the prospect of hearing a war story straight from the source.

A deeper smile and a low, soft sort of laughter that was more like a growl. "Alongside him? No."

"But you said..."

"Against him." Krineer drew a claw across the scar on his chest. "Battle of Idiot hill; I'd just planted the flag when Avlakoi dropped out of the sky and raked me. He burned the flag and held ground as his mates surrounded us and, ah, shouldn't say all that in front of a lady, should I? The man himself said it'd be a shame for me to die there without a proper fight, so he had his men patch us up who hadn't died already and held us hostage. Last time I checked, most of those men had joined up with the mercs when my nephew refused to waste the lion king's money buying them back."

Suvir gawked. "Idiot hill? I've never heard of it."

"Fiasco on every level. I don't doubt your highness wouldn't be told about it for how embarrassing it was on all sides." He won the current game and set the board up again without Suvir's input, but she was now at least interested enough to play more. Like the old man he was, Krineer continued, "A war what lasted all of two days, to secure vengeance for a stolen steer that had wandered into a neighboring farmer's field, across clan lines. By the time our troops arrived, the farmers had found the steer in question and the one who'd lost it had paid the other one a dozen eggs for his trouble. But no, we'll not waste a chance to send out our boys to die for glory and honor, so as long as the military arrives, there has to be a battle or you've wasted their time! And so we sharpen the teeth of the population by grinding them against each other."

"Seems like a waste..." Suvir's heart was catching in her breast. "For something so little..."

"Men have died for less by the orders of their kings. Do you know, though, that at the time I cursed Avlakoi for denying me a warrior's death on the field of battle? Over the years, I've become glad that I had the chance to find a more meaningful life, to watch my nephew grow up and to give him my advice. Don't you think it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness? I'll borrow the phrase."

Suvir felt sick, she wobbled in her seat. "He was your enemy..."

Krineer smiled, genuinely, past the facade of his fierce muzzle. "You'll learn, I think, how little that matters over time. Go on then, princess; it's your turn to make the first move.

-o-

"Enjoyed your time alone, I trust?" Fosi said from the other side of the room as Suvir stepped over the threshold into the study of the true demon king. She was sat at a desk which was designed obviously for a very large man, and the vastness of the scalar difference put Suvir into a state of awe. It was one thing to hear that the man was more than eight feet tall, as a simple fact, and another thing entirely to stand before his furnishings and see how small she was in comparison. Even Fosi was dwarfed by the scale, and she was taller than Suvir!

There was a small pile of paperwork on one side of the desk that Fosi was working her way through diligently, not bothering even to look up at Suvir, who very well could have armed herself while she was out of sight, now dangerous. Actually, after seeing the woman nearly match Peris' skill, Suvir dismissed the thought that a small woman like herself could be dangerous to this one. Merrili had left the two of them alone, disappearing into the castle, apparently also secure in the knowledge that her mistress wouldn't mind the singular company of the boar princess.

With her stomach churning, Suvir took a seat in one deep chair that had its back against the wall, next to the room's tea table. "I have been walked like a hound, yes," she said.

"I find that exercise does wonders for mental composition." Fosi scowled at what she was reading and slashed across it with her pen before placing it eerily carefully on the pile on the other side of the desk. "Can't let the anger interfere with the order of the page edges," she explained without prompt. "It only makes more work later on when things get disorganized."

"Ah..." Suvir said. "That sure looks like a lot, don't you have accountants who could take over the day to day, or is all of that so special?"

Fosi cracked her neck. "This is what's left after the bean counters get their hands on it. Budget proposals, funding requests, resource management, military reassignments, and all sorts of other things my father takes upon himself." She spread and stretched her fingers in the air for a second to relieve stiffness, stared at them a while longer. "Can you imagine how long all of this would take with claws?"

"He does it all by himself!? Then what is the purpose of having other nobles here at all?"

"Hm." Fosi pursed her lips in thought for a long while. "My father would ask if you've studied the history of lord Baryon. Primarily, he was a wolf demon from a backwater village, barely knew a thing about the politics of the realm before he was drafted for the grand war of the time. And of course he would be drafted, given that he was more than twenty feet tall, if underfed due to poverty. After the fall of that particular false demon king and the transfer of Hell's mark, Baryon began delegating his administrative powers to friends and allies, or those at least who called themselves his friends and allies.

"He wasn't much for thinking work, and he didn't have thumbs, so he needed a scribe to do any sort of governing. He couldn't read, so that scribe became his eyes. Over the eighty years that preceded the next emergence of Heaven's champion and the beginning of war, his so-called friends and allies broke the bones of the realm's economy and scooped out the marrow for themselves.

"But I have to respect his conviction, following his learning of what he'd done and how ill-prepared demonkind was to make war upon humanity. Baryon called on the power of Hell immediately and was transformed into a ravening beast, taller at the shoulder than a castle wall and powerful enough to snap his jaws through stone and steel alike. He went into the human realm and killed nearly every man, woman, and child within one-hundred miles of the coast before he was at last struck down by the champion of Heaven."

Suvir felt the woman take a reverent break and said, to fill the air, "So, he saved a lot of our lives..."

"No." Fosi shook her head and went back to her papers. "Normally, the end of one of the great wars ends with a peace treaty which acknowledges each side's respective strength, neither one in shape to push the line farther. Surrender followed Baryon's defeat, then the execution of every military-aged male in our realm as a condition of our continued existence."

"... That's horrible... Why haven't I hear about this?"

"It did occur more than ten-thousand years ago, for one thing," Fosi said and shrugged. "My father found the account on moldy parchment found within the festering carcass of an abandoned castle; we have far too many of those. It's entirely possible that all of what I've said was a parable. Yet, if so, it is a good one. This paperwork really isn't that bad, so to speak, nor complicated. My job at the final stage is simply to seek out those proposals with no reason behind them save the enrichment of the sender and reject them."

"Oh."

Fosi paused again, much longer while she looked out the window, across the briar-covered wasteland that this castle squatted within. "Suvir, you know what the final sacrifice of the true demon king is?"

"S-sacrifice?..." Suvir clutched her skirt, she hadn't been prepared at all for this much thinking.

"Not every demon king has been a powerful combatant in himself, but he doesn't need to be. In the final battle, in the final moments of the prophecy, he is meant to call upon the fury of Hell through the crest which marks him for the station. The bearer is flooded with infernal mana and the wills of our ancestors to give them strength. This, apart from ageless immortality to see the fight through, is the crest's only power. In using it, the true demon lord will burn away their mind and soul, dying not even to appear within the arms of the ancestors, becoming a monster of incredible mutant potency in order to challenge Heaven's champion."

Suvir felt more and more uneasy, wiggled in her seat while staring at the ground between her feet so that she had no chance of catching Fosi's eye. "I s-suppose I have heard something like that..."

"Do you think it's right to sacrifice one person's life for another's wants?"

Of course Suvir couldn't answer. She retreated into her mind so deeply that she didn't notice Fosi getting up until the woman had already scooped Suvir up and shifted the girl into her lap.

"I apologize, my father wouldn't want me thinking so selfishly."

"You don't want him to die... That's not selfish..." Suvir said.

"Hm." Fosi shut up and closed her eyes in thought, ending with a deep sigh.

And Suvir remained ensconced in her arms until Fosi'd had enough and decided to continue with her work.

-o-

Later, the sun fell.

Fosi helped Suvir into her nightclothes, having insisted despite the fact that Suvir was fully able to change by herself. Then they talked about nothing much at all while Suvir's mind numbed, head filled with what might happen that night.

But Fosi was talking about makeup and clothes and boys like she'd never done so before, more matter of fact about some things and far too fidgety about others she really shouldn't care about. Well, the intel given to Suvir said that this woman had been cared for outside the kingdom all her life, kept away from demonkind and all others but some cultists. This woman who was so much more capable than Suvir, who walked the halls of the demon lord's castle with a sure step and held the respect of his subjects, was in fact more sheltered than Suvir herself...

Yet she talked about death so easily...

"I think you and sir Peris got off on the wrong foot the other day," Fosi said, kneeling with Suvir in a pile of crumbs on her bed. "Tired after a long trip, and all the politicking, I'm sure he'd accept any sort of apology. He does like cute things, so I'll tell you right now that you should run to him if you're ever in trouble."

I'm more likely to be in trouble with him...

"You saw how cool he looked in the training grounds, didn't you? I know that you saw him spar with me at least."

Of course I saw! What kind of woman wouldn't take the chance to see that?

Fosi said, while brushing away crumbs, "I don't think it would be a bad thing for the boar and ram clans to have one more link between them, even if it were between a succubus daughter and an incubus son. Peris is still a prince, no matter what his father thinks of him."

But I won't be able to marry him... or anyone...

"Feeling sleepy? That's fine, we don't have to talk all night if you don't feel up to it. C'mere."

The woman held Suvir against her breast for some time, until Suvir calmed her breath and was still enough to fake a deep sleep. It had to be an hour or more later that Fosi again slipped out of bed and quietly made her way out of the room.

It was no concern of Suvir's where the woman went. If Fosi liked doing things that would leave her smelling of boar-man cum, that was her own business... So long as she was keeping them occupied, they couldn't...

Suvir felt her heart in her throat and she couldn't lie still. She again came barefoot out of bed and went to where she'd stashed her dagger.

The grip felt so cold, and her fingers ached with the strength of her grip. Rough, cast iron, they hadn't sent her with anything that would be missed. She brought the tip up to the vein in her neck.

A maid had once taught her where it was, what she should do if revolution or barbarians broke down the castle gate. All it would take was one small incision, a little pain, and then to lie down on the stone and let the chill take her. One nick, and then sleep.

Dying for something grand, that was worthwhile.

But for something petty...

For something petty... she'd be worthless...

Suvir came up to her feet, dagger held safely at her hip, and she stepped out of her room.