The Devil's Child
He does not remember being born.
He only remembers being found.
Left on the side of a silent road as an infant, the boy is taken in by strangers who choose to raise him as their own. They give him a name, a home, and something dangerously fragile: love. His mother, especially, refuses to see anything wrong with him, even when others begin to whisper.
Because from the moment he learns to think, the boy knows there is something inside him.
It breathes when he sleeps.
It stirs when he feels anger.
It whispers when he tries to be kind.
Strange accidents follow him. Animals avoid him. Children fear him. Adults watch him with suspicion. Sometimes he loses time, waking up with blood on his hands and no memory of what he’s done. Each time it happens, the same conclusion forms in his mind.
He is broken.
He believes the thing inside him is forcing him to act. That it bends his thoughts, twists his emotions, and paints him as a monster in the eyes of the world. He prays for it to leave. He begs in silence for it to die.
But when it finally reveals itself, the truth is far worse.
The entity inside him is not a curse that can be removed.
It is a spirit bound to his soul, fused into his existence since birth. Not summoned. Not possessed.
Created with him.
Their lives are inseparable. If the spirit dies, so does the boy. If the spirit is expelled, the boy’s heart stops with it. They are not host and parasite.
They are one fractured being.
As the spirit awakens, so do its memories. It remembers things the boy never lived. It carries knowledge of rituals, blood, and forgotten realms. And through their shared body, those memories begin to leak into him, eroding his humanity piece by piece.
People who once feared him now hunt him.
Organizations seek to dissect him.
Cultists call him a vessel.
Demons recognize him as kin.
And slowly, painfully, the boy realizes something even more horrifying.
The “evil” everyone sees in him does not come only from the spirit.
Some of it is his.
Every time he gives in to rage, the spirit grows stronger.
Every time he kills to survive, their bond deepens.
Every time he chooses darkness, he becomes less human.
Yet without the spirit, he cannot live.
Trapped between extinction and corruption, the boy must decide whether to cling to the fragile love his mother gave him or embrace the monster growing inside his bones.
Because in the end, he is not a victim of a demon.
He is becoming one.
