CHAPTER 422: THE CHILD OF DEMON-I

"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.

She turned to the speaker and found a man whose face had been half-eaten by scar and fire. Scars were currency here; he wore his like a map. She did not flinch. She bore one of her own — a ragged brand across her back from the first fall into the inferno — and the sight of him was merely familiar, not frightening.

"Do you truly wish to leave this place?" he asked.

"I want to be stronger," she answered, small but sure. He claimed to be lost, to have forgotten himself; she believed only the first part. The rest was a lie she didn’t yet have words to name.

"Stronger means killing," he said, the truth sounding like gravel.

"Is killing bad?" she asked with the blunt innocence of a child who had not yet learned how to weigh a soul.

He was quiet for a long moment, then answered with no absolutes. "I do not know. I think it may be."

She looked past him at the burning meadow that had been both cradle and crucible. "But I do not want to die," she said. Her voice was simple, desperate. "If killing is worse than dying, then I would rather go. But if it is not, if killing grants me another day, then I will learn to kill. I will survive. I will walk through this fire and not turn to ash."

The didn’t answer at once. Perhaps there was no true reply in him, either his morals would not let him lie, or he simply did not know the truth himself. The scarred man watched the fire for a long moment, his jaw set like stone.

"What’s your name, child?" he asked finally.

She smiled, a crooked, defiant smile that did not belong to the ash around her. "No one here has a name."

"How about Cinterella?" he offered, and the sound pleased her. She nodded quick and bright. "Then Rella," he added, as if a nickname were a small coronation. She did not mind. Names were small gifts in that place, and she accepted his as one.

"Shall I help you?" he asked.

"Out of here?" Her violet eyes flared with hungry hope—the wish she had held like a secret ember. She did not know then that leaving the meadow was only the first step toward an altogether grimmer path.

"I’ll bring you out of here." He raised his chin toward the black silhouette of the castle on the hill, its ramparts flaring like a crown of coals. "There’s no reason for me to remain."

She frowned, curiosity sharper than fear. How could a man carved by fire and scar survive where so many perished? He wore wounds like a map; the skin across his throat was ragged, and deep puckers scored his hands. He had walked through the worst and returned.

"Why do you help?" she asked. "You have more scars than I do. How do you— how did you survive?"

The man’s mouth bent in a hal -smile. For a breath he looked older than the flames that licked their ankles. "There are many ways," he said with a voice so gentle that it put the meadow to shame. "Some kill what would kill them. Some bargain. Some learn to be useful to those higher on the hill. But there are also others like you, those who teach themselves to be unbearable to the fire."

Rella’s eyes lifted, a sense of hope. "Will you teach me?"

He studied her for a long heartbeat, the shadow of something unreadable in his gaze. "I will teach you survival," he said at last. "But know this— survival is no courtesy. It costs. You will take what you must, or you will be taken. There is no other law here."

The meadow’s flowers cracked and spat sparks; a heat wave shimmered their faces. He moved first, stepping over coals that hissed like small serpents. She watched the soles of his boots—how the edges did not blister, the way he shifted weight as if walking a plank. He extended his hand.

"Come," he said simply.

She took it without hesitation. His grip was calloused and warm. When he hauled her up and over the first lip of burning earth, the heat tore at her lungs and for a dizzy moment her knees went soft.

"Rella," said the man then, "You have to survive." and white wings spread from his back, wide open, spreading to the fire that those tongues of fire had quivered as though fearing how white those pure snow wings were.

Rella’s violet eyes shone as she repeated the words that man said over and over again in her head... and now... she refuses to die. She had just escaped Hell, how could she die?

She still hasn’t returned that man’s kindness and fulfill the promise of surviving death.

She wasn’t going to die.

"STOP!"

A loud roar echoed, causing the entire servant’s house to quiver and tremble, shaking to pieces until it broke down, dusts falling from the ceiling like it was snow, quaking strong enough until it had stopped Arabella’s hands that were about to rip her own wrist open.

Arabella felt her own hands had moved away despite the fact that she hadn’t moved any of her fingers. Her body was being controlled and the person who had controlled it was none other than this... demon inside of her.

Violet eyes, angry and full of fear of death.

"A demon fearing death, well aren’t you quite humane?" Arabella mocked, staring at the demon from the broken mirror.