“Can confirm,” Chester says. “That’s standard sixteen-year-old behavior.”
“Yeah. I’m frankly shocked your species has survived this long,” Obie says, and Chester snorts. “I didn’t need the food, of course, but I quickly realized that Adadidneed it. She needed food, and warm furs to make blankets for Kai, and dozens of other little things I could learn how to find. I didn’t need to sleep, and I didn’t have human limitations on speed and strength, so I just… provided for her. Everything she needed. Everything shewanted.I’d—I’d rift across the world to pick flowers for her, just to make her smile. She meant… everything to me.”
“What…?” Chester is already dreading the answer that he knows is coming. “What happened to her?”
Obie’s eyes soften. “Nothing, puppy. The hunters didn’t find me for another few centuries.”
For a split second, Chester is sure he misheard. “For another fewcenturies?”
“Yeah.” Obie smiles. “The rest of the tribe warmed up to meeventually. Given enough time, humans will pack-bond with anything. They brought me into their camp, and they taught me about what it means to be human, and they shared their lives and their memories with me. And I took care of them, just like I did for Ada and Kai and Kai’s children and everyone who came after them.”
Chester’s heart twinges. “That sounds really nice.”
“It was. They sort of treated me like a god, but they didn’tworshipme as one, you know? To them, I was a… provider. A protector. I brought them food and furs, and I watched over all the little ones, and I always kept the fire going overnight to keep the predators away, and—” His voice catches. “They knew they could sleep soundly with me there. They knew I’d keep them safe. And—and I did. Forgenerations,I did.”
The past tense is clearer this time. Chester braces himself for the worst. “What happened?” he whispers.
Obie’s smile is grim and his eyes are darker than Chester has ever seen them. “Well, humans will always find a reason to hate each other. We’d had conflicts with rival tribes over the years, and I always kept my people safe, but—but I didn’t like killing the other humans.” His jaw clenches. “That was our downfall, I think. That I wouldn’t kill them. Leaving them alive meant that we made enemies, and once all those enemies realized they had a common adversary in the tribe with the god, they put aside their differences to attack us.”
Chester takes a shaky breath. Lets it out slowly. “How?”
“They put together a binding spell.” Now, it sounds less like Obie is coaxing the memories out of a well and more like he’s scraping them out of a grave. “I’m still not sure how they did it. Rudimentary human magic already existed, but I don’t know how they created a spell powerful enough to bind me. It couldn’t compel me to do anything, not like the binding spells summoners use today, but it held me down. And I’d—I’d never been powerless like that before. Neverbeen that vulnerable, thatdefenseless.I… don’t think I ever knew real fear until that moment.”
Chester feels sick. “And then?”
“They slaughtered my people.” Obie’s voice is flat. “The elders, the babies—all of them. They killed every last one of them, and I—I couldn’t do anything except watch. Watch and beg andscreamfor them to have mercy.” A tremor runs through him. “They were relying on me. Chester, they trusted me to protect them, they trusted me to save them, and I couldn’t—theone timewhen it really mattered, I couldn’t?—”
The words choke off on a sob. Chester’s heart splinters right along with it, and without thinking, he crosses the distance between them, wraps his arms around Obie’s shoulders, and pulls him close, trying to hold him together.
Just like Obie has always done for Chester.
Obie’s arms snake around Chester’s back, his fingers digging into the fabric of Chester’s shirt. “There was so much blood. So many bodies.Humanbodies. Those first hunters? The ones who would someday become the purebreds like the Nasirs and the Solomons and the Longs and—and the Nehemiahs? Their first hunt was killing humans.”
Chester squeezes his eyes shut. “Sounds like not much has changed.”
Obie barks out a bitter laugh. “No. It really hasn’t.”
“And you?” Chester almost doesn’t want to ask. “What’d they do to you?”
Obie’s fingers twist tighter into Chester’s shirt. “A lot. They couldn’t figure out how to kill me, but they—they kept trying. They set up camp right there and tortured me for weeks. Experimented on me. Tried to figure out what I was. After a while, they settled on the name ‘demon,’ and it stuck.”
The first interrogators. Chester has never hated his training, hislegacy,as much as he does right now. “How’d you get out?”
“All magic has an expiration date. Luckily for them, they knew it, too. They got a head start of at least a month. Left me bound and alone and bleeding next to the mass grave where they dumped my family like garbage.”
Nausea licks up Chester’s throat. He swallows hard.
Obie’s voice is quieter now. “I wanted revenge, obviously, but—but I didn’t get it. They got startlingly close to killing me, and they did some nasty things to my soul, too. It took months for me to heal, months for me togrieve.Months for me to fashion a shovel and bury my people properly. By the time I finally tracked down those other tribes, it’d been decades. Most of the humans who’d hunted me were dead. And I couldn’t bring myself to hurt their children, you know? They hadn’t done anything wrong.” He scoffs. “Not yet, at least. I didn’t realize their parents taught them everything they learned from torturing me. So when spellcasters started summoning demons from Tamaros…”
Chester finishes the sentence. “They were already ready to start killing them.”
“Exactly.” Obie takes a deep breath, disentangling himself from Chester’s arms. “You won’t find my people in any history textbooks. We may have been large for that era, but comparatively speaking, we were small. There’s never been anyone to mourn them except me.” His eyes flash. “History forgot about them. I didn’t. They might’ve meant nothing to the world, but they meanteverythingto me. So when I say that the Sanctum will burn if it’s the last thing I do, you can know that I mean it.”
Chester’s eyes burn. “I know you mean it,” he whispers, and for a split second, he imagines?—
Imagines being a scared sixteen-year-old—powerless in everysense of the word—who accidentally won the unending devotion of the most powerful being in the entire dimension. Imagines being her son, the one who grew up with a god watching over him, the one whose earliest memories were probably of tugging on Nostringvadha’s wings while the demon smiled down at him.
Imagines being a child in that tribe and knowing there was a god who would love him and protect him. Imagines reaching adulthood and watching that god help his own children and grandchildren survive.
