“I was the one who created him. Yet someone like you gives him a simple little name, and he follows you around like a dog.”
Corin turned to the baritone voice that reverberated through her bones and hollowed out her body. A skulking shadow of long limbs and gnarled horns emerged. Scales of green skin, thin like paper, had cracks over protruding bones. Every nick and notch from centuries of treachery sank into his face. He was immortal, yet dead in every way, an emaciated corpse who refused to pass. Draped over his scaled chest was an amulet, one with a shape and hue just like the one embedded in Malicine’s staff.
“I’ve reigned over this world for as long as you can imagine. After a while, one grows tired. It doesn’t change the fact that the world you left behind is rotten, that the people who wronged you are still prosperous.”
He paced around, leaving ash in his footsteps. The circle of soot contained perpendicular lines, drawing a symmetrical pattern that looked too complex for Corin to discern. She heard the rattling sound of iron chains somewhere nearby.
“I realized it’s not enough that I go back to your world and cause destruction. That doesn’t make things even. I need to change the tides altogether.”
Corin realized he wasn’t talking to her. She looked around the darkness for Malicine as the sound of scraping chains grew louder. In her hazy vision, she finally made them out. A bruise had formed on the back of their head. Their limbs twitched with unnatural movements, like they were fighting to regain mobility. Even their attempt to lunge for him proved useless. Iron chains violentlytugged their body back to the chair, their head knocking against the curved bones of the throne.
“You’re not real, Oleander,” they hissed. “And I’m not interested in revisiting this memory.”
Malicine was here. Not part of a mirage, like the other demon was, but here. Corin banged her fists against an invisible barrier and shouted for them, but Malicine was too far away, trapped inside their own nightmare.
“You said you’d help me rebuild this world. I’m simply accepting your offer,” Oleander said. “The problem is you won’t make it out alive.”
Chains rubbed against Malicine’s skin and tore open a wound. A drop of blood landed on the ground. The single splatter lit the ash in a tiny flame, and Oleander’s amulet glowed once more. Malicine stared at the glimmer of the light, how the gem hungered for a taste of them.
“You were only looking for me because you wanted my blood.” Corin felt the cracks in the stone of their voice, the resignation of their new reality. She grasped for a way to get through the barricade and reach them, but realized her hands had disappeared with the rest of her body. She had been dissolved, ceased to exist within Malicine’s memory from a time long ago.
“You should be flattered. I’ve sacrificed many demons to make my magic stronger, ended so many lives to tailor energy potent enough to create a new portal. None of them were right,” Oleander said. “Then I realized that energy could never come from any demon born in one time. The type of blood affects the type of portal created, after all. It must come from someone whose blood is so special, it comes from multiple places. A creature whose mother belongs in one time, and whose father in another. Someone whocould never belong anywhere, in any time. Someone like you.”
His hand stroked Malicine’s cheek, the tip of his nails scraping their skin. They spat in his face. Dribble slicked down his chin, and he wiped it with the back of his hand. The corner of his lips twisted in disgust. It didn’t compare to the glare that Malicine bore into him.
“You killed them all.” Corin watched flashes of burnt bodies and blackened bones pass through Malicine’s memory and flicker into her own vision. “That fire wasn’t an accident.”
“I never said it was. They set it upon themselves, thinking it would be better to die than to aid my cause. Quite poor timing for them to think a mass suicide was the only solution, when I had just learned I no longer needed them.”
Corin stared at the floor beneath Malicine, where ash had scattered to form the shape of a circle. She imagined the lines turning from gray to red, their blood filling the gaps like spilled ink. This was no simple cut, not a trim of the skin like it had been whenever she heard about creating portals. The Demon King was preparing a bloodbath.
“Don’t be so petulant,” he chided. “Without me, you would have never existed. Neither would all the other demons that found recluse here. I have the right to do what I want with your lives, because I already owned it from the beginning.”
“Nobody has the right to own another life.”
“Are you certain about that? History would beg to differ. Faeries have served humans, and even humans themselves have owned each other. When people fear others, they seek differences and find ways to demonize them. Something as arbitrary as your skin, pedigree, the way you speak—all rules made up so that certain people can stay in power. A world cannot exist without such asystem. But when I create a new world, there will be new rules. And then I will show them what true power looks like.”
Malicine tried to laugh, but the sound died on their lips.
“Does something amuse you?” he said.
“You don’t care about making things right. You just want to be in their place. The ruler instead of the ruled.”
For a moment, Oleander turned silent. Then he knelt and pressed a palm flat on the ground. An orange glow emanated from his fingers. The stones beneath melded into a blade. He pulled an obsidian knife from the floor and pressed it against Malicine’s neck. The edges brimmed with volcanic red. A trickle of blood flowed down their throat as half-moons burned into their skin. Oleander’s amulet gleamed in response, as if it knew the artery in their neck would feed it the most blood once cut.
Panic surged inside Corin. She needed to do something, even if she no longer existed in Malicine’s nightmare. She pressed figments of herself against the stone walls of the tower and tried to feel her way around the scene. Her non-body slipped through the cracks as Oleander spoke.
“Our skin may be the same, but don’t make the mistake of comparing yourself to me.”
A pained gasp. A trickle of blood from a blade piercing deep. His voice boomed again, a toneless sound that drilled inside their ears and infected their mind.
“I am more powerful than you will ever be.”
Malicine,Corin wanted to scream.
“You are only half of me and what I can do.”
I’m here, Malicine—
