Chapter 4 — The Dead Zone
Here is what they don't tell you about demon monarchs: they talk.
Kael had imagined the Slyth would eat him immediately, or bind him immediately, or at minimum do something at a speed that matched his panic. Instead the great beast settled onto its ridge, folded its bone wings, and regarded him the way a mountain regards a particularly interesting beetle — with patience.
"You are trembling," the Slyth observed.
"That's my whole thing," Kael said. "I'm famous for it. Ask anyone."
"A millennium I have waited," the monarch rumbled, "since the last soul bore my brand. He stood before me in this place, and he did not tremble. He was a king in your world. A killer of thousands. A soul like a blade." The furnace-eyes narrowed. "You are a boy who is afraid of geese."
"ONE goose. It was a whole thing. How do you know about the goose?"
"I know everything your soul contains, little vessel. I am reading you as we speak." The Slyth's head tilted, slow and geological. "You are a coward. You have never fought. You have never bled. You have never wanted anything except to be left alone." A pause, long and terrible. "And yet. My brand chose you. The brand does not err. Which means there is something inside you that even I cannot yet see."
'Great,' Kael thought. 'Even the demon king is disappointed in me.'
"So I will tell you what happens now, little soul. You will not die here. The contract of a monarch is not a meal. It is a marriage." The Slyth's throat-furnace flared. "Your soul and my power, bound. My brand is already on you. What remains is the binding — and the binding requires a familiar of my realm to carry it into you. A lesser demon. One of mine. It will live inside your soul-room for the rest of your life, as my voice, my eyes, my chain around your—"
SNORE.
The Slyth stopped.
"...What," it said, in a voice that could have frozen the red sky, "was that."
It hadn't come from Kael. It had come from behind one of the floating orbs — a tiny, shameless, utterly relaxed sound.
Something white hopped out from behind the orb.
It was a rabbit.
Twelve inches of it, if you were being generous. White fur. Red eyes. Long ears, one of which was flopped over at a disrespectful angle. It hopped out into the open between Kael and the twenty-foot demon king, sat down on its haunches, and scratched its ear with its back foot.
Then it looked up at the Slyth and said, in a voice like a drunk nobleman:
"Are you STILL doing the speech? Oh, this is painful. 'Little soul, little vessel, marriage, chain' — you've been polishing that monologue for a thousand years and it's still boring."
The Slyth went utterly still.
"Spark," it said. The name came out like a landslide.
"Slyth," said the rabbit. "You're looking vast. Is that new? The vastness?"
"You dare enter my court? You are banished to the dead zone. You are NOTHING. You are the runt of my realm, the exile, the least of all that crawls in the black plain—"
"And yet here I am," said Spark cheerfully, "standing in the middle of your big moment, ruining it. Funny how exile doesn't stick when you're fast."
Kael looked at the demon king. Then at the rabbit. Then at the demon king again.
'I'm hallucinating,' he decided. 'The fear broke my brain. I'm lying in the circle having a stroke, and my dying mind has produced a talking rabbit. Makes sense. Fitting, even. The Streaking Summoner, dead of rabbit.'
"Hey," Spark said suddenly, looking up at Kael for the first time. The red eyes were ancient and amused. "You. Meat-sack. Stop having a stroke. This is real, I'm real, he's real, and you have a choice to make in about ten seconds, so sharpen up."
"A choice?"
"The big lizard was telling the truth, for once. A monarch can't bind a human soul directly. It needs a lesser demon to carry the contract — a relay. Lives in your head forever. Voice in your skull. Chain on your soul." Spark's ears pricked forward. "He's about to assign you one. One of his loyal little soldiers, so he can watch through its eyes and steer you like a cart for the rest of your life."
"ENOUGH," thundered the Slyth, and the ground cracked, and the sky pulsed, and the little white rabbit didn't even flinch.
"OR," Spark said, louder, "you could take me."
Silence.
The red clouds churned. The Slyth's four eyes went from the rabbit to the boy, and there was something in them now that hadn't been there before. Something the mountain didn't enjoy feeling.
Alarm.
"You would not dare," the monarch said, very quietly.
"Try me, you overgrown brazier. I'm already banished — what's the punishment, double banishment?" Spark turned those ancient red eyes back to Kael, and for one instant, just one, the amusement drained out of them, and what was left was something honest and wild and desperate. "Meat-sack. Kael. Listen to me. I am the weakest demon in this entire plain. I cannot protect you from him. I cannot protect you from anything. But I will never be his eyes. I will never be anyone's chain. If you bind with him, you are a puppet forever. If you bind with me—"
The rabbit grinned, all sharp little teeth.
"—at least the idiot driving your soul will be an idiot who chose you."
"YOU DARE—" The Slyth reared up, twenty feet of fury, flame boiling up its throat, the whole dead horizon shaking—
"Ten seconds are up!" Spark shouted. "WHAT DO YOU SAY, MEAT-SACK?"
And Kael Vance — coward, F-student, Streaking Summoner, who had lost a fight to a goose — looked at the demon king made of fire and bone, and then at the twelve-inch rabbit who had just called him a meat-sack, and said the only thing his terror-addled brain could produce:
"...The rabbit seems nice?"