Chapter 1: Arrival

Color blinded me.  It infused me, ripped through me, devoured me, crippled me, mended me, chilled me, burned me, embraced me, deafened me, destroyed me…

My entire existence was agony.

For how long it lasted, I had no idea.  When it started, I could not remember.  What it was, I could care less.  When it would end, I could not even comprehend the concept.

Just agony.  In every fiber of my being.  Just agony.

And then it stopped.  Like someone flipped a switch, the pain, the color, the saturation, the invigoration that led to degeneration and reformation to be dissolved again… it was over.  And all I could feel was a cold floor under me as I stared at a grey stone ceiling.  Square stones, held in place by a grid of wood beams secured with metal fasteners.  I only had enough time to notice the construction of the ceiling because I couldn’t move any part of my body, even my eyes.  From the side, I could hear movement that approached me.  Then I was manhandled.

I couldn’t see what was happening very well, but some people in what seemed like matching outfits with dull metal parts on them attached something around my neck and wrists.  Handcuffs maybe?  Are these guys campus security or something?  Wait, they’re saying something, words I can’t understand, in a language I don’t comprehend.  It’s definitely not asian, and it doesn’t seem to be latin based.  None of the slinky vowels that the African dialects had in that video game I played had.  Sure as hell wasn’t english.  As the men began to drag me across this room, a big room it seemed, I wondered where the hell I was.

Then that butt ugly face filled my view.  It said something to me in that language, and waited for a response.  The ugly guy who’s face looked like a lumpy slab of meat with salt and peppered hair glued on spoke again, saying the exact same thing.  Over and over.  Somehow, the words started making sense.

“-ur name!  Say your name!”

The guy was close enough, right in my face, for his breath to fill my nose with the stink of his yellowed teeth.  Or it should have.  It was right about then I realized I wasn’t breathing.  When had I stopped?

Lumpy face started shouting louder, always saying the same thing.  Then he grabbed my neck and began to squeeze.  It didn’t really do anything to me, what with the whole not breathing thing, but it pissed me off something fierce.  If I could move I’d give the guy a nut shot, then headbutt his nose.  I may not be strong, but my father taught me never to be a victim, and school taught me that the winners write history.  ‘Win when you have to, however you have’ to is one of my mottoes that I make up whenever I feel like I should have one.  But once again, it’s a moot point since I can’t move.

Oh, the guy let go, finally.  Seems someone was called over.  Oh!  A pretty brunette in something like a lab coat. She seemed to be a little older than me, but not by much.  I didn’t have much time to study her because she instantly shone some kind of bright light from her fingers into my eyes, each in turn, when she knelt over me.  Great, I can’t move and now I can’t see anything but sunspots.

“No contraction in the eyes,” the woman said.  “Another corpse.”

Whoa, wait, I’m dead?  I don’t feel dead.  Don’t go killing me off like this, lady!

“Well, at least this one didn’t explode,” quipped Lumpy.

Explode?  Hey, what the hell- that’s… why… everything’s going fuzzy?

“Drop the body– dissect—- more experiments–”

The sunspots cover everything now.  The sounds around me dissappear.  The sensation of my back being dragged across stone fades.  Maybe this really is death?  I wonder… what comes… next…

* * * * *

In one of the many gold and white marble cathedrals of the Holy Capital, amidst the smell of stale incense used to fight the combined musk of hundreds of believers that pack themselves into the building on a regular schedule, a violent purple light illuminated the area behind the wall sealing off the sacred ground.  Pulsing at a beat too quick to be called anything but a warning, the ceiling itself reflected the urgency to the acolytes who maintain the church and the guards who protect it until the cardinal in charge of the cathedral was led in.

The cardinal, garbed in lavender, white, and gold, strode purposefully to the great door where he cut a thin wound to his palm and pressed the hand dripping with his living blood against the door’s seal.  The lock and the chain shackles that bound the door unwound themselves at the cardinal’s command, allowing him to stride past the doors as they opened under their own power, the ancient hinges working soundlessly.  Inside the sacred ground was bare earth instead of marble and stone floors in a perfect square, with a single object in the center.

It was not a statue, even though it held a sense of beauty blessed to it by its workmanship.  It was not a pillar, for it supported nothing but it’s own enormous weight.  What it was, was a tool.  In the shape of a beautiful winged woman, bent over a sphere that repeatedly radiated the unsettling violet light, several shades darker than the lavender the cardinal wore.  Upon seeing the light’s source for himself, a cold sweat broke out on the cardinal’s body as he mechanically stepped closer to the tool, his own moderate stature being dwarfed by it’s size.

In a voice filled with personal horror, the cardinal spoke aloud to no one.

“It is true then.  A Demon King has been born.”

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