The city was a wound that would not close. Neon signs bled lurid colours across the wet asphalt, their reflections writhing like serpents in the puddles under Kieran's feet. The walk home was a journey through a foreign country, one he'd lived in his entire life but had never truly seen. Before, the cacophony of a city at night—the distant wail of sirens, the hiss of tires on wet roads, the murmur of unseen lives behind lit windows—had been a kind of white noise, a blanket of sound to wrap himself in. Now, every noise was sharp, distinct, and laden with meaning. He could hear the frantic, off-key desperation in the siren's cry, could feel the weary friction in the tires' complaint against the road. He was a creature with its senses flayed, raw and exposed to a world that was suddenly, painfully loud.
He moved through the oblivious crowds like a phantom, a wolf in a flock of sleeping sheep. A woman brushed past him, her perfume cloying, her thoughts a chaotic buzz of grocery lists and a petty argument with her lover. A man in a tailored suit strode by, his mind a fortress of ambition built on foundations of quiet deceit. Kieran could feel the shape of their souls, the faint, grubby stains of their minor sins, the threadbare quality of their fleeting joys. It was overwhelming, a torrent of psychic effluence that threatened to drown him.
Insignificant, the Demon's voice stated from the throne of his mind. It was no longer a whisper, but a resonant, ambient thought, as much a part of him now as the beat of his own heart. Their concerns are dust motes in a sunbeam. They live and die, and the world does not notice. We are not like them. We are the sunbeam itself—we illuminate, and we burn.
The key in his hand felt alien as he slipped it into the lock of his front door, the familiar metallic click sounding like a cell door shutting behind him. Home. The word itself was a shard of glass in his throat. A sanctuary is a place of safety, a bastion against the monsters of the world. But the monster was not outside. It had the key. It was walking through the door.
The house was dark and silent, breathing the slow, rhythmic breath of sleep. He could feel his mother's presence upstairs, a warm, gentle glow of slumbering consciousness, so achingly fragile it felt like a candle flame he could extinguish with a single thought. The realization sent a tremor of pure, undiluted horror through him—his own horror, a vestige of the boy he had been. He was a contagion. A walking plague in the one place he had ever been safe.
He crept up the stairs, each step a potential betrayal, a sound that might wake the world of before. His bedroom was a museum of a dead boy. Posters of forgotten bands, books with dog-eared pages, a half-finished charcoal sketch of a weeping angel on a drawing pad—relics of a life that had ended in a rain-slicked alley. He ran a hand over the rough texture of the drawing paper, feeling the grit of the charcoal. He remembered the impulse to draw it, a futile attempt to render his own grief into something tangible. It seemed pathetic now, the work of a child trying to capture a hurricane in a teacup.
A maudlin tribute to a flawed concept, the Demon observed coolly. Divinity does not weep. It judges. It smites. It is an anvil or a hammer. We are the hammer.
A morbid compulsion drew him from the bedroom and into the sterile silence of the adjoining bathroom. He stood before the mirror, a simple rectangle of silvered glass that had, until this night, held no power. Now, it felt like a portal, a scrying glass that would show him the truth he both craved and dreaded. His heart—his human heart—pounded a frantic, terrified rhythm against his ribs. His hands, guided by a will that felt only partially his own, reached for the hem of his damp, grimy shirt and pulled it over his head.
For a breathless second, he saw only the familiar landscape of his own body: the pale, lean torso of a seventeen-year-old boy, the faint outline of his ribs, the bruise already purpling on his cheekbone. He was just Kieran. A victim.
Then, he turned, exposing his back and arm to the unforgiving light. And he saw the cost.
He gasped, a raw, strangled sound. It was worse, so much worse, than he had imagined. A filigree of black, like scorched veins or a script of pure darkness, erupted from his right shoulder blade. It branched across the pale expanse of his back in a pattern of horrific, geometric elegance, twisting into blasphemous-looking sigils and labyrinthine knots that seemed to mock the very laws of nature. The pattern snaked down his arm, wrapping around his bicep and forearm, culminating in a sharp, wicked-looking seal on the back of his hand. It was not a tattoo, not ink injected into skin. It looked as if the night sky itself had been branded into his flesh, as if a piece of the abyss had been made manifest and woven into his very tissue.
As he watched, transfixed in a paralysis of horror and awe, the brand began to pulse with a faint, internal luminescence. A soft, violet-black glow throbbed within the lines, a slow and steady rhythm in time with the humming power he felt in his marrow. It was alive.
It is beautiful, is it not? the Demon's voice was laced with something akin to pride. It is the seal of our covenant. The chronicle of our bloodline. Every ancestor who bore this mark but was too weak to wield it, every injustice they suffered, every silent scream they swallowed—their legacy is now our strength. Their pain has seasoned the soil from which our power now blooms.
Kieran reached over his shoulder, his trembling fingers tracing one of the lines. The branded skin was smooth, unnaturally so, yet it radiated a faint, unnerving warmth. "What have you done to me?" he whispered, his voice cracking.
The eyes of the boy in the mirror hardened, the flicker of violet-black fire returning to their depths. His reflection was no longer his; it was the Demon, looking out at him, through him. I have done nothing, it corrected, its voice resonating in his skull. I have merely accepted the invitation you screamed into the void. You prayed for a savior. You begged for an end to your suffering. The universe, in its infinite wisdom, provided one. It provided me. I am the rage you swallowed. I am the answer to your prayers.
"I didn't pray for this," Kieran choked out, tears welling in his eyes. "I didn't want… I didn't want to hurt them like that."
No? The reflection tilted its head. You wanted them to vanish. You wanted them to feel a fraction of the agony they inflicted upon you. You wanted justice. Do not mistake the savagery of the tool for a flaw in its purpose. The world is a festering wound, Kieran. One does not heal such a thing with a gentle balm. One cauterizes it with fire. We are the fire.
Kieran stared at the monstrous scripture on his skin, at the cold, terrible certainty in his own stolen eyes. The tears fell, tracing clean paths down his grimy cheeks. They were the last tears of the boy he used to be. The Demon was right. He had wished for this, in the darkest, most secret corners of his heart. He had wished for a reckoning. He had simply never imagined the face of that reckoning would be his own.
He felt a profound, soul-deep weariness, the exhaustion of a soldier after a war he had not even known he was fighting. He was damned. This mark was his damnation, a permanent stain on his soul made manifest on his skin.
As this crushing realization settled upon him, a soft, innocuous sound shattered the charged silence of the room.
Knock, knock.
A gentle rapping on his bedroom door.
"Kieran? Honey, is that you? Are you alright?"
His mother's voice. Warm. Loving. A relic from a world of light, a world that was now separated from him by nothing more than a few feet of hallway and a closed door.
Every muscle in his body went rigid. The Demon's cold composure and his own frantic, human panic crashed together within him like a tidal wave against a cliff. He had to answer. He had to sound normal. He had to stand here, branded and monstrous, and lie to the one person in the world he had left to protect.
The boy in the mirror—the monster wearing his face—offered a slow, chilling smile of absolute confidence.
He took a breath, and the voice that came out was a perfect imitation of the boy she knew, a masterpiece of deception polished by an entity that had existed for eons.
"I'm fine, Mom. Just tired. Everything is fine."