I was born into a family that treated a crust of moldy bread like a royal feast.

  I am the spawn of a rapist and a gutter-whore—a woman who sold herself in reeking shadows, taking in the viscous seed of sweating men, drooling orcs, and shapeless horrors that came in a spray of black pus and acid. My first breath was drawn in an alleyway thick with the stench of fermented piss, dried shit, and ancient death. Red-eyed rats skittered across my sticky skin, gnawing at my umbilical cord before the cut was even made. The air I lunged for was a soup of clotted blood, ruptured placenta, and rancid semen. Passersby looked down with hollow eyes and slack jaws, weighing my fresh, newborn meat like the next item on a butcher’s block.

  My first cry was a jagged, pathetic thing that sliced through the rot. It was a herald.

  Their savior had arrived.

  HA. No.

  I didn’t come to save anyone. I was a sack of leaking meat and exposed viscera, dumped into a black slurry of other people’s fluids. Then I saw her—the woman who’d carried me. A bloated mound of purulent fat, her skin a map of weeping sores and scars that looked like fissures in cured meat. Her face was a landscape of rot; her lips, cracked and crusted with scabs, split wide with every desperate wheeze.

  But her eyes—they were the worst of it. She didn’t see a son. She saw nothing. Those eyes were empty pits, pupils blown wide in animal panic, irises black as a lightless abyss. Her mouth curled into a snarl of feral urgency as yellow, broken teeth gnashed together.

  She wasn’t scratching at the cord. She was butchering it. Her jagged, grime-crusted nails—long, shattered, caked in old filth—dug into the pulsing, bloated umbilical flesh. She sawed. She ripped. She tore. My skin peeled away in ragged strips as hot blood painted her greasy face. The pain was absolute—for her, and for me—but she didn’t flinch.

  When her nails failed, she bunched the cord in a sweaty, trembling fist, fingers sinking deep into the warm, raw meat. She brought it to her teeth.

  Crunh. Crunh. Crunh. Crunh.

  She worried at it like a cornered beast. Teeth snapped against gristle and tendon; saliva, thick with blood, coated her chin. The cord shredded into tatters—white and pink fibers hanging like wet yarn. A spray of arterial red hit my face. I felt a brutal yank in my gut, as if my very insides were being reeled in.

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  Then came the wet, definitive snap. Flesh gave way, tendons popped with a viscous crack, and a final gush of blood and black meconium splattered the cobbles. The cord was severed. My mother had won—at the cost of her own mangled meat.

  I wanted to howl with laughter. All I could manage was a wet gurgle, a bubbling wheeze from lungs drowning in amniotic fluid and gore.

  I saw her gaze shift: a flash of wild, frantic hope. She scrambled to her feet, her fat quivering like rotting gelatin as she stumbled over her own swollen limbs. She ran. She didn’t look back. Not once. She left a trail of blood and afterbirth, indifferent to whether her “creation” choked on its own filth or was picked clean by the rats.

  I stopped crying. For the first time, I seized the reins of this useless vessel. A smile curled across my infant mouth. Sticky lips parted to show teeth—white, needle-sharp, and far too perfect for a newborn. Watching her face-plant into the mud gave me a surge of internal laughter that burned like lye.

  Now for the real problem: I’m fucked.

  HAHAHA. I laugh in the silence of my mind so I don’t shatter this pathetic body. Though it would be so easy...

  Clac-clac. Tap-tap.

  With every scrap of will I could wring from this fragile husk, I wrenched my head one hundred and eighty degrees. An impossible crunch of dislocated vertebrae followed—a searing white heat that shot down my spine like liquid fire. I saw them. Three entities. Humanoid in shape, but devoid of substance. Bodies of shifting liquid, like black runoff tainted with pus. Their eyes were a mockery of humanity: hollow sockets where pupils drifted and irises dissolved in nauseating patterns.

  The sound of their gait was unmistakable. Clac. Tap. Liquid flesh slapping stone. Fascinating aberrations.

  My smile stretched until the corners of my mouth tore, fresh blood weeping from the seams.

  Strange things. I want them. I need them.

  Blup. Blup. Blup.

  Gark. Ghap. Hup. They spoke in a guttural, bubbling tongue—the sound of gas escaping a bloated corpse.

  Pick me up.

  I didn’t need a voice to command them. My thoughts were glass shards of pure malice, piercing the air until they buried themselves in the gelatinous core of their “heads.” I visualized their ruin: tendons snapping, meat dissolving, wills crushed under my heel. I pushed with every ounce of my newborn rage.

  Clarck.

  A wet snap, like a skull yielding under a boot. My mouth split in a monstrous grin.

  They are mine now.

  Carry me. Serve your master.

  Their masses shuddered, liquid churning in a panic. They tried to fight it, but in the end, they buckled. Hands formed from their own viscous essence hoisted me up, cold, sticky fingers wrapping around me like a second placenta.

  That night, under a star-choked sky that watched over a puddle of blood and shit, Demon King I was born.

  The Throat-Slitter of Heroes.

  A babe draped in viscera, smiling while the world began to tremble.