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Voices. Voices. Crackles of fire.
Chan shudders. He peers over his shoulder, eyes wide. Darkness seeps into his dilated pupils; nothing comes into sight. The torch he lit, stuffed into the ground, covers only so much of the crawling forest. He stays within the circle. He has to, for what lingers behind large tree trunks and wiry bushes, seeks his body.
He doesn’t seek them. He never has.
Trickling water. A wolf howling.
Chan crouches down, buries his face in his hands, and lets out a silent scream. His teeth graze over the calloused skin of his palm. A canine cuts an old wound. Greenish-black substance pours out first, his eyes widen, then his heart skips one beat, two beats, three…
“Blood,” Chan whispers, lapping his tongue over the wound. He purses his lips, eyes flitting from tree to tree, before suckling on it. No blood can enter the air. No blood can soak into the soil. Monsters will come. Terrible monsters, out to get him.
Not his monster.
Chan hurries to close the wound. Saliva mixes with blood and pus, and he groans at the metallic flavor that blankets the very back of his tongue. The taste is curious, one he doesn’t mind, one he might soon come to enjoy.
Scattering crawlies. Chan eyes a beetle, holographic even in the depths of night.
He buries his face in his hands again and sways back and forth in his crouched position. Memories of his mother seeing him when she gave birth to him flood his mind.
“What is that?” she said back then, pointing to Chan’s yellow irises.
Jaundice, the doctors had said. But no child with jaundice had eyes that remained yellow.
Chan strains his neck, feeling something crawl up his back. That’s not for him. He stays quiet, silently asking the monster to go away; he’s here for something else—someone else.
The torch flickers, flames dance high in the air, and some even swipe down at the soil, hoping to find purchase to wreak chaos. “Not here,” Chan urges, hand swiping over the moist ground. “No fire tonight.”
His mother pretends she doesn’t hate him. She showers him with gifts from an arm’s length away, and she smiles at the other people in the city, whenever the two of them are out walking. They see a mother and a son, a happy family despite Chan’s awful eyes—she tells him to wear glasses, so he does.
But behind closed doors, his cheek is always red, stricken by the palm of a woman who swore to always love him. He doesn’t understand. He never has. When he sees the other kids. Well, they aren’t kids anymore, are they? But Chan remembers them as kids, for he too was once. At least he thinks he was one. He never played. Didn’t interest him.
A deer dashes through the opening. Chan gasps, belatedly remembering to cover his mouth.
Hurriedly, he draws circles into the ground, the ones he remembers. He doesn’t remember a lot of things, not how many years he is, how many people there are in the village, or how many times he went to the city, not too far from here.
He does remember all the cats he killed, the dogs, too. Not good. He doesn’t like that he remembers those things. But he has tried to pray to the man his mother prays to, but he has never answered. He doesn’t think he answers his mother either.
But the circles, those come easily. He has looked at them a lot, in a book he nicked from the shop. He’s planning on paying for it, but no one wants to hire him. He doesn’t understand that either. Chan knows how to count coins…
“One, two, three, four, six, and then eight, darn it,” Chan mutters to himself, eyes on the circle that bends the wrong way. He shakes his hand and rubs the side of his hand over the entire canvas made of soil.
A beetle crawls up from the dirt, he flicks it away, shunning it from his territory. Because that’s it, isn’t it? He has this need to have more, to get more, to have people look at him. He doesn’t want to see their smiles, he cares for no such things. He can smile on his own. What he wants is to see them crumbling to the ground when he walks through the village. To see them cower in fear and beg to the man in the sky.
They should be looking at what’s underneath the ground, deep inside the Earth’s core, where it’s so sweltering hot only the true beings can prevail. Chan admires those. He’s read about them in his book.
Heard them too.
In the night, when he dreams.
Come to us, they say. Join me.
And so now he’s here. Keeping the monsters that also want to claim him. Maim him. Chan has no interest in them. They are bothersome. Bloodsuckers, soulsuckers, moonhumpers, a bunch of fairytales, stronger only because of the fear children have for them.
Chan fears them, too, but only because he knows they won’t spare him if they have him.
He draws a circle, connects it with another, then another. It forms a sort of triangle. In the middle, where several curved ends meet, he places a flint stone. Licking his lips, Chan lets out a hum, one he’s heard in the midst of night, when he was supposed to be asleep.
Soiled lamb of the Heinous One above, sing your lullaby, sing your bleat, and I will come to thee.
He hums it over and over again, feeling the very words crawl up his spine, claws sinking into his cerebellum and shaking it. Vertigo comes, but Chan prevails. He draws four more circles and places a flint stone in all of them.
As he places the last one, a howl carries through the wind. Chan smiles to himself. He wraps his hands around his knees, still squatting despite his ankles screaming. Then he starts a low chant.
“Underneath, underforth, underfar, I seek thee.”
The wind grows stronger.
“Chained by shackles, thy form screams. Hear my word and find the key.”
A monster from behind reaches out, hating his prayer. Chan shakes it off, furrowing his brows.
“Out of the ashes, into the soil, the surface calls forth.”
The flames lash out. The world hates him. The world tries to stop him.
Chan laughs.
“Underneath, underforth, underfar, I seek thee.”
His laugh blends with the chant. It grows until it sounds like a booming choir.
“I seek thee. I seek thee. I seek thy—”
All light disappears. Chan is swallowed by darkness. A scream ripples through his chest, but no sound comes out; all is swallowed by shadowy tendrils. He topples back, not by his own volition, but because a clawed hand commands it.
His back hits the ground. Soil and dirt grab onto him. However, they can’t do anything, for the creature that looms over him is far more terrifying than any of the other monsters in the forest.
The claws reach for his face, and a bellowing, deep laugh echoes between Chan’s ears. His voice returns to him in the form of a gentle hum.
“You seek me, you say,” the being, the demon, says. It swipes down, large eyes, grey skin, and spots of freckles form a time long past.
“I seek thee,” Chan whispers, his body straddled by the demon.
It tilts its head. Bloodied teeth gleam when it cracks its lips apart. “With a chant,” the demon says. “How do you know it?”
“From birth, no—” Chan starts, his mouth held agape by the demon. “From the womb, from the very conception.”
A low rumble courses through the demon’s bare body. It’s not devoid of cover, but no clothes cling to its shape. “I see…”
“And in my dreams, calling out to me,” Chan continues while his tongue darting out for the finger the demon holds there. A heavy metal once more coats the back of his tongue, but this time, it tastes familiar.
“How did you know how to draw the—”
Chan’s breath comes to a halt as the demon stops talking. It swoops down, closer than ever before, closer than any other monster has been to him. Saliva seeps into his mouth, and drinks it up like it’s the sweetest nectar. A reminiscent thought strikes him, but he can’t place it, can’t read it.
“Your eyes,” the demon says, its own black ones staring straight at Chan’s.
“My mother hates them.”
The demon shakes its head, casting away Chan’s words. “It’s faint… but there,” the demon says and points one claw directly into Chan’s eye, “it is. There you are.”
Chan stills. Something at the back of his throat presses against his esophagus. He garbles a reply, but the demon only smiles.
“Those lips, that nose, those yellow eyes,” the demon says, nearly purring. “They cast you away, didn’t they? But here you are, hiding in the body of this… manchild. I knew you would find your way back to us, to me, one way or another.”
So familiar. So gorgeous. Chan’s breath hitches. He stares up at the demon, wanting to whisper, “Who are you?” But his lips are captured by the demon, and the rush of something ancient, something terrible, courses through his body.
Chan's eyes open—wide and full of terror. The demon on top reels back and laughs, its hands fly up in the air, and he calls out. “He’s here! He’s here! And you will all die!”
The forest cowers, Chan hears and feels it. Even more so when black bile rushes up his throat and starts to coat the ground. He tries to free himself from the demon, but the strength holding him down is far too much to fight.
Blood-curdling screams free themselves from his throat, and he thrashes. Thrashes until the skin on his body rips open. Red blood pools under him, but the color remains only vibrant for a brief second before it turns black. Pitch black. Darker than black.
From underneath him, pushing out his shoulder blades, Chan feels the stump of bone grow. He reaches behind the best he can and screams, clawing at the skin still there. As he digs, as he helps, the first crack fills the air and a horrid bony wing springs free.
The demon on top wails and laughs, delirious in the sight of Chan’s transforming body.
“He’s back, he’s back, he’s baaaack!”
Another wing pushes out of his body, but the pressure on his forehead is what demands Chan’s attention. He claws at his face, gasping for air as two horns rip his forehead apart and spout.
Blood seeps from him.
Blood coats the ground.
Blood covers his tongue, long and snake-like.
And Chan looks up. Looks at the demon he knows so well. The demon he hasn’t seen for centuries.
“Felix,” he says, and reaches out.
“There you are,” Felix hums and lowers himself, back arching as he makes Chan’s chest his resting place. “I missed those yellow eyes."
Memories come rushing back to him. He feels the spears of the angels above crush his chest and his neck, binding him to the ground. They trapped him. Caught him like a mere animal in a cage. He had been reckless, too drunk on power. Thus, they had caged his soul and cursed him to live broken amongst humans for centuries.
But now he was back. Back with his lover. Back to wearing the crown of the Underworld.
Their lips crash together, and Felix mewls into his mouth, as if he had become an incubus in the time that Chan was gone, but he figures the desire he hears is because he was so sorely missed.
He rounds his hands around Felix’s bare ass and pulls him close, grinding his body up and into him. Felix’s leathery skin, shrouded in continuous shadows, feels soft under his touch, and when the demon on top rips the remnant of Chan’s clothes off him, those shadows grow into tendrils.
“You found me,” Chan says, his teeth nipping at Felix’s lower lip.
“I searched,” Felix confesses. “Littering our works all over the Earth, in hopes that your shape would see it one day.”
Chan remembers his weak human self, walking through the bookstore with such purpose that he didn’t even question why he stole the book. “I felt you back then. I just didn’t know it.”
His hips buck up, and Felix moans into his mouth. “And then you heard my song.”
“Your song,” Chan repeats. “Your beautiful voice… Moan for me, my culver.”
Chan’s fingers dip between Felix’s crotch. He slides them over his entrance, coating it with the viscous black shadows that gush out of him. A century apart, and he still remembers how to tease his insatiable lover.
Felix gasps and claws at Chan’s body, his saliva once more dripping into Chan’s mouth. The nectar from his lover is meant to subdue his prey, but for Chan, it only invigorates him. Thus, he frees his cock and slides it over Felix’s entrance, waiting for those wicked pleas before he pushes it inside. But they never come, for Felix opens his mouth and says,
“Oh, Chan, I could almost let out a prayer for the—”
Chan doesn’t let him finish such a sentence. He rams his cock inside and bucks his hips. “Wicked little creature,” he laughs, pinning Felix to him. “You haven’t changed at all.”
“Neither have you,” Felix moans, a smile forming on his beautiful face.
He fucks Felix in the middle of the forest, where monsters and creatures stare at them in utter fear. What they see isn’t the reunion of two lovers. What they see is the return of the Devil, the Lord of the Underworld, the ruler of Hell.
He walks amongst them now.
Pledge their allegiance, and he might be fair.
Resist him, and the flames of Hell will consume them for an eternity.
And the God above? Well, Chan looks straight at him as he fills his lover up with his seed.