"Child," a soft voice said through the roar of the hellfires, as if pity itself had found a throat. Around them the flowers burned with an intensity that tore lesser things to ash. Most demons born in that scorched meadow were consumed before they could learn to claw for strength; even to touch those blossoms was to invite annihilation. Yet she would not die. She refused the easy surrender that had taken her kin.
In that furnace of a place, nothing was free. Strength was a coin paid in blood and bone; survival was for the cruelest, the quickest. Still she stood, a small figure with black hair and violet eyes, staring up at a distant silhouette: the castle perched above the blaze, its ramparts wreathed in living flame, a place only higher-ranked demons might dare to tread.
