Salty dust filled the early morning air. Before me, my handiwork lay still, his blood growing cold as it mixed with the slush beneath him. Two small boys, aged roughly seven and three, stood beside the dead man on the gravel pathway, their eyes wide and their faces filled with fear. The demon had told them to stay inside, told them to run away for their own sake, but they had stayed beside the husk that had claimed to be their father. Foolish children. They knew now the error they had made. I hadn't wanted them to see, either, but perhaps they would understand now, be able to understand the pain I'd felt these past few months. I never liked making orphans, but sometimes it had to be done. They’d be better off now. They had to be.

  I wiped the demon's blood from my blade, then sheathed it at my hip, the steel sliding smoothly into its holster. The children's tears streamed down their faces, the elder of the two dropping to his knees, and yet, they made no sound.

  “Your father…” I began, my voice threatening to shake, “...was not human. His soul has been gone for a long time. I don't expect you two to understand, but… this is what's best for this world. I will make sure you never have to understand why.”

  Both of these children looked upon me, their faces still in shock, still terrified. I could not ease their pain.

  Their pain is not yours to lessen, my master whispered into my mind. Go now. There are still more demons to slay.

  I turned away from the scene, taking a few steps before stopping. I heard a slight pause in the children’s weeping as I felt their gaze on my neck.

  “Bury him properly,” I said at last. “This demon fought honorably. He deserves that much.”

  I continued my tread off the beaten path, marching on until their cries had died away and I was sure I hadn’t been followed. The air seemed only to grow colder and colder as I crunched along through the snow. All but a handful of trees around me lay bare, and even those few evergreens seemed to shiver in the night. I wanted a blanket, perhaps a nice warm stew, and to lay down for a while, but I knew my god had other plans for me.

  You disobey my command once again, Harrus.

  “Those children… They will end up like me,” I mumbled. “They don't deserve that.”

  Is it really so terrible to be you?

  I laughed. “What I wouldn't give to be someone else.”

  You are my servant, Harrus. An important servant, yes, but nothing more. Disobey me again, and I may let your memories haunt you once more.

  I scoffed at the god's threat. Even with his protection, the memories still occupied my every thought. It was painful to remember, but it served to remind me of my mission. My mission to rid this world of demons.

  I felt some kind of presence nearby, its touch gracing my cheek before flying past me toward the body of that demon. The spirit of death. Ever since I witnessed murder with my own eyes, I'd felt her presence. She never seemed to frighten me, though she always brought with her a great sense of dread. Death came for all those in my sight, yet never would the reaper touch my soul. While I may have been Thoen’s warlock, death had always seemed to have some greater plan for me.

  I chuckled a little at my thoughts. What I wouldn't have given to be someone else.

  My nose caught the faint whiff of charred wood. My eyes snapped upward on their own, locating a steady stream of smoke over a distant hill. A fire. I imagined myself standing over at the base of that hill, then stepped forward, a cloud of smoke appearing before me. With another step, I emerged where I'd imagined, the fresher snow crunching beneath my boots. Teleportation. The magic of cowards. Unfortunately for me, it was all I could seem to learn. My caretakers told me it came from my mother's side. Of course it had. Anyone who'd abandon their child on the doorstep of witches had to have had the weakest of wills. I had no desire to ever meet my mother nor my father. None beyond a loose curiosity, of course. It would've been nice to know where I’d come from, I supposed, but I doubted my lineage was anything significant. After all, I was a tool. A valuable tool, but a tool nonetheless.

  I softened my steps, the crunching of snow under my feet diminishing in volume. I could hear the crackling of the fire now, the glow of the embers giving me far better visibility. In the clearing stood a singular man, cloaked in crimson red, his hood completely covering his face. The sleeves of his cloak had been torn off, revealing densely feathered red wings, and a golden rope was tied around his waist.

  “Blood,” the cloak muttered. “A soulless human. Not your own. It's been cleaned off your blade. Poorly, I might add.”

  I gripped the handle of my weapon and paused my breathing.

  “I can smell it,” he resumed. “It's so close I can almost taste it. You're not very good at hiding…” He sniffed. “Hmm. Curious.”

  I took a few light steps to my right on the top layer of the snow, circling around behind the demonic harpy. I wasn't sure if he had a visual on me, but better safe than sorry.

  “You won't catch me,” he continued. “My feathers are resistant to your fireballs. All I have to do is fly away.”

  The hellbird had likely smelled the smoke from my teleportation. I smirked. I had an opportunity.

  “Rush me, slayer of demons!” the hellbird called. In a single swift motion, he took a step back, swinging open his cape and unveiling a long, sharp rapier. “I haven't had a good fight in a whi-!”

  My sword plunged into his back. During his grand display, I'd drawn my blade and teleported directly behind him. The hellbird coughed, stumbling forward as I pulled my blade out the same way it went in. Blood spilled out onto the ground, along with the yellowish green of stomach acid. I hadn't planned to hit his stomach, but harpian anatomy was a bit different from what I was used to. The demon fell to his knees, dropping his rapier and beginning the awfully long process of bleeding out.

  “Tell me,” the hellbird wheezed through his collapsing right lung, “Does your work haunt you while you sleep?”

  “My master holds off those dreams,” I answered. “And demons have no souls to haunt with.”

  “I see,” he chuckled. The hellbird rolled over onto his back, away from me and away from his weapon. “My first sight…” he began. “She lives a few miles down the road. Give her my sword, won't you?”

  “What is her name?” I asked.

  “Alana,” he whispered, a smile on his face. “Alana will… mourn for me.”

  After a little bit longer of chuckling and coughing, the demon breathed his last, and his body collapsed. Slowly, a silvery gas began leaving the body. Eldritch magic. The only thing that kept these animated corpses alive. I opened my master’s bag, and the magic was sucked inside, sealed away for later sacrifice.

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  That makes ten tonight, Thoen whispered. You’ve done enough for the evening. You may rest now.

  I bent down, picking up the rapier at the demon's side.

  No, Harrus.

  I stabbed the blade into the ground.

  “Why not?!”

  It is not worth your time.

  “A woman loves him! Allow me to fulfill his final request.”

  I warn you no more, my servant. If you pick up that sword one more time, I will send you to the underworld myself.

  I sighed, staring at the sword embedded in the snow, then at the hellbird’s corpse, then back at the rapier.

  “Fine.”

  I glanced over at the horizon. The golden glow of sunlight began to shimmer. I began walking away from the scene and back toward the path.

  “Do you really need to destroy the sun, master?” I asked softly. “It's so beautiful on these mornings.”

  The sun does not protect you like I do, Harrus. The sun burns your skin, ruins your eyes, and melts your mind. In my future, the moon's light will be the most beautiful thing in the sky. It will be there in the center of it all, glorious for all the world to see.

  “And what of life on Earth?” I asked.

  You needn't worry, my servant. On the Day of Darkness, you will be made my herald. On the Day of Darkness, all of my followers will be saved from annihilation. You will inherit a beautiful new world, one devoid of mortal suffering. All the world will be mine to lord over, and you will be my tenant.

  I wiped the blood and bile from my blade, then sheathed it after making sure it was actually completely clean this time. A heavy guilt weighed on my shoulders, one that my moral compass couldn't reconcile. Fortunately for me, my master had a magnet to correct my mind’s lapses in judgement. I closed my eyes and began to recall my campsite, surrounded by ancient trees and dried grasses. I smelled a quick puff of sulfur, then I found myself at the scene. I unbuckled my belt and cast it aside, then my cloak, then my satchel, then finally laid down on the pile of blankets by the fire pit, completely exhausted.

  That hellbird had made ten demons slain tonight. Ten lives that would never return, ten lives with no afterlife. Good riddance. Demons had no place in mortal society; their violent, unpredictable outbursts far outweighed the benefits of keeping them as labor. Some, when recruited into armies, would even turn against their fellow soldiers, destroying any who dared cross their path. Eastern Asia and Central Africa even had whole communities of demons living away from human and general mortal culture. They only continued to live because my magic did not reach that far and because Thoen hadn't ordered me to eliminate them yet.

  I glanced over at my belt, my saber having slightly slid out of the sheath. For so long, I'd been against the idea of killing. Sure, I'd always had an unnatural talent for the blade, even teaching myself to read so I could learn better techniques, but… hunting demons isn’t really self-defense. It was more of a preventative measure than anything. A necessary evil for the greater good. It sounded like a lie to me, of course, but it was a lie I was willing to believe. Especially after what happened to my caretakers…

  The thought left my mind almost as quickly as it had entered. My pact with Thoen was simple: he wanted me to harvest the magic of deceased demons, and I wanted to rid myself of the memory of that night. I still knew factually what had happened, of course, but the vivid memory of the event would never stay longer than a fraction of a second. I felt no pain, no sorrow from the memory. It was an emotionless memory, devoid of anything but a single still image of the moment itself like a painting on the wall of a museum. Our pact was purely transactional. I felt nothing toward Thoen beyond a slight annoyance. The god had always come off as grandstanding and pompous, trying his best to take up space that he frankly didn't deserve. His outward expression mattered little to me. All I cared about was my vengeance and the relief of my pain. And he was glad to give it to me.

  Without moving any other part of my body, I threw my arm forward over my head and grabbed a thick book. I pulled it into view, lifting my head slightly to better see its pages. I'd bought this volume at a significant discount, that being the value of the merchant's life. It had been painstakingly copied by professionals, and it contained some general information on various types of demon. Human demons, generally just called demons, were the most anatomically different compared to their mortal versions. They had a long whip-like tail with a spiked point at the end and had bony, cone-shaped horns that extended out of their foreheads anywhere from a sixteenth of an inch to five inches. Hellbirds, or demon harpies, only had the minor difference of red, fire-resistant wings, along with horns similar to human demons. Dragonborn demons, sometimes called dragonreborn, were fairly difficult to check for; the only major physical difference was their tails, which were twice as long as normal. Dark elves, or elven demons, were the easiest to spot; standard elves were all fair-skinned, while dark elves had charcoal grey skin. The final type of demon listed was the merfolk demon: the siren. Physically, sirens looked identical to merfolk until nightfall, when their scales would rapidly grow over the rest of their bodies and color them pink with blue spots if they were female or blue with pink spots if they were male.

  I turned to the page on sirens, glancing for a moment at the wall of text before turning to the next page. Here, two pages were dedicated to two drawings of the female siren as it would appear at night; the left, its in-water form, and on the right, its out-of-water form. Merfolk, including sirens, could not reproduce while in the water, as their tails would completely cover their mammalian genitalia, and would thus take on a mostly-human form to go on dry land for roughly an hour. Of course, as this was a scientific text, the book did not leave out any details in its depiction of what any of these demons looked like. After a brief moment, I closed the book and set it down. I began wondering to myself why I had been looking at the siren section of the book for the third time this week, especially when I lived nowhere near the ocean. In only a moment, I figured out exactly why. I pushed the book away, ashamed of myself, then pressed my face harder into my pillow.

  I began to wonder why I seemed to have such a fascination with such… images. I had “bought” the book with the intention of learning, but it now served a completely different purpose. I felt my eyelids grow a bit heavier. The warmth from the morning sun had already begun to lull me to sleep. Sirens, interestingly enough, were nocturnal. It was an easy way to tell them apart from standard merfolk. I blinked, seeing a brief depiction of a feminine siren swimming up to the shore. I opened my eyes again. The book was far away from me now, its accursed images too far to haunt my dreams. I rolled from my back onto my stomach, grabbing my pillow tightly. I closed my eyes once more.

  The siren of my dreams had clawed her way up onto the beach, and I watched her tail slowly split apart, starting from the tip of her tail, her pink scales slowly shrinking away under her sun-kissed skin in the moonlight. I opened my eyes again. I found that I'd begun drooling a little on my pillow, and that my grip on it had tightened drastically. I released some of this tension by taking a deep breath. I closed my eyes one final time.

  The siren had almost finished her transformation, her lower half now completely human save for two small patches of pink scales on the outside parts of her thighs and calves. I watched her slowly rise up onto her knees, crawling toward me slowly. In only a few moments, she hovered over me, her arms planted by my sides. A few drops of blood dripped down from her neck as her gills closed completely, landing on my chest, which was, for some reason, completely bare. Her eyes were filled with a wild energy, one that I hadn't seen in the book, and she had begun to lick her lips. Glancing down her body, I noticed that the small patches of scales were completely gone. I felt her breathing on my face, her breath salty and smelling like seafood.

  I smiled to myself. I knew I was dreaming. I knew it wasn't real. But because of that, I knew that nothing that happened in this dream would have any real consequences. I looked into her eyes, glassy and entirely fictional. I could do anything I wanted here. This siren didn't even have a name. It didn't need one. Its entire reason for existing in my mind was simply to fulfil its unholy desires. I reached up, cupping the siren's cheek in my hand. Its skin was soft and still a bit wet. I felt the corners of my lips turn upward.

  I pushed her away, the thought collapsing around me as I did so. My eyes opened, and my mood turned sour once more. How vile of me to imagine such fantasies, especially with the enemy. Demonkind was evil. They were the people that had killed the only mothers I'd ever known. They deserved more than death, they deserved absolute destruction. I was the bringer of their demise. To even dream of spending time with one, especially in a way so intimate…

  I was the incarnation of destruction. A servant of the moon. A ruthless killer of all soulless monsters. A defender of all those truly alive.

  I thought back briefly to the image of that siren hovering over me, thinking about how she'd looked and how she'd made me feel. She hadn't even needed to begin singing her song to have me completely entranced. I shook my head once more, slaying the very thought as it crossed my mind. I wished it didn't have to die, but it was necessary. Vital to keep me focused on my mission. There was no time for this, not even in sleep. As I finally closed my eyes, my mind clear enough to sleep without my wretched temptations, only one thought persisted:

  What I wouldn't have given to be someone else.