The monster knew he belonged to the dark.
It was a tale crueler than his curse or his castle: monsters belonged to the dark, rotting in their ruin and misery, just as heroes belonged to the light, radiant and beloved in their goodness. Monsters deserved, as he did, to breathe foul, lightless air. They deserved to live and die where they would not be seen. Every myth and legend declared it. Every decent parent warned their children of it. Every glare that condemned him revealed it.
Monsters belonged to the dark—
And it made him angry .
He slammed a fist into the nearest wall, desperate to feel something other than the empty, meaningless pit that had become his life. His hand broke open at the force, bleeding shadows instead of blood. They poured down his skin, ugly and dark, rising to the air in a murky haze.
Hideous.
Anger clawed up through his throat, stretching and burning him like some feral animal until it replaced the pain he should feel instead.
“You mock me,” he snarled, sliding to the floor in a miserable heap. “You never cease to mock me.”
The dark could be beautiful, but it mostly felt painful. It might graze his skin like a brush of moonlight, but it could just as easily twist itself into something evil and foul. Darkness was more frequently a cloak of sin, a scream in the night, or a pair of eyes unseen. It could be lonely, too. Achingly, despairingly lonely.
The shadows crept toward him, rolling around his neck in a deformed cloud. Perhaps a minute passed. Perhaps a century. The monster couldn’t tell. His breath felt cold, his hands heavy and numb as they bled shadows instead of blood.
It does not matter. None of this matters.
His mouth curled into an unnatural sneer. He wanted to laugh, but the rising sensation of doing so was uncomfortable. Still, a dry, half-dead chuckle shivered in his mouth, eager to stretch its long-forgotten limbs.
Laugh, damn you.
Laugh that you’re still alive.
Laugh that the dark hasn’t swallowed you whole.
The chuckle dropped hollow and silent in his throat, interrupted by an ear-splitting scream somewhere beyond his chamber.
“A trespasser,” he muttered, pulling gauntlets over his ruined hands. He clinked the taloned fingers together as they snapped into place. “Truly, this is—”
Another shriek interrupted him, forcing his bedchamber to rattle and bend. Books stumbled free from their shelves, a chandelier creaked precariously overhead, and painted vases, overflowing with dry, dead things, shattered against the floor. He glanced at the mess. Cursed as if it mattered. Avoided stepping on broken glass as if he cared.
As the shrieks swelled past the monster’s tolerance, he pulled a blade from where it hid inside his hand. He knew what waited for him in the shadows outside his door. The screaming creature felt what the monster did: the unease, the misery, and the cold.
And the hunger.
Oh, the hunger.
The trespasser threw itself into the monster’s door again and again and again , finally splintering part of the wood. Two of its claws, stained dark with something rotten, pressed through. The monster raised his hand, summoning shadows that rose from cracks in his castle’s ancient floor. They surged at his command, roiling toward the door and arching it into a crescent, snapping it in half.
And there it was.
Demon.
Its features were lopsided. Mud-stained horns dangled at crooked angles, and milky eyes drooped into a face wrought with scars. Thick, embroidered cloth draped across its armored shoulders, winding into the dark hallway behind it.
“Are you here to torment me? Or, let me guess—to demand what you’ve craved for the past few centuries?”
Silence.
“Speak,” the monster insisted, skimming his blade across the demon’s cracked lower lip. “I command you to respond.”
“Let…me…out, ” the demon snarled piteously, unable to string any other words from its ruined mouth.
“A demand, then. Should I adjust your fate since mine is already lost?”
The monster felt delirious speaking with the demon, asking it questions as though it could understand him. But there was something different about this one. Something in its eyes. Or in the way it stood, perhaps.
The way it refused to look away.
The monster turned, stalking toward a wall of fabric at the far end of his chamber. Once lustrous and radiant, glistening like a shadow-dark sapphire, the fabric existed now as a tattered, dirt-covered rag. A discarded memory of what once was.
The demon did not follow. It lingered in the monster’s doorway, shivering.
“Do you not have control over your limbs? Follow me .”
The demon stumbled forward. Its shoulder cloth, wound tight around its neck, trailed behind it like a panicked serpent. As the demon moved further into the room, its features turned clearer—and more unsettling—as the candlelight exposed them.
For a moment, the monster hesitated.
He knew he shouldn’t be doing this. He remembered so little, so damnably little, but he knew this wasn’t his purpose. And yet, in the wavering abyss of his soul, a truth flashed. It was one he had been loath to admit.
No longer did he care.
The curtain parted at a twitch of his hand, folding like a set of prehistoric wings. Nighttime wind burst through the gap, swirling the stale, too-old air of his chamber and lifting his things in a flurry of movement. He took a deep, steadying breath as he leaned over his balcony, battered by scents he would never again touch or see: the soft swell of blooming gardenias, fragrant dirt after a showering of rain, sun-warmed fur, and the spiced scent of pine.
Things always beyond his cursed reach.
“Leave this place,” the monster proclaimed, gesturing wildly at the ledge.
The demon shuddered, bowing as it held his gaze. Even if it was just a demon, the monster couldn’t remember the last time he’d been looked in the eye.
“I said leave this place !” the monster howled again, digging his sword into the demon’s chest.
The weight of the weapon forced the demon off the ledge. It thrashed as it plummeted, its long strand of cloth twisting around its limbs. If it made a noise upon landing, the monster didn’t hear it.
He sank to his knees. Watched as the moonlight curved around his hands.
Why did he let that one go? Why did he no longer care?
He couldn’t remember.
His eyes were heavy, and his shadow-bound heart was full of hatred.
