I watched them leave, the afternoon sun casting long shadows from the bamboo cottage.
The quiet that followed felt earned—a moment to breathe, to let my mana knit itself back together.
"Great! That means everything’s done, right? YAYYY!"
Sienna’s voice rang out a beat ago, too bright, too real. Her joy still clung to the air like perfume, but already the silence was reclaiming it.If only it were that simple, my little dove.
I turned back toward the cot.
Eiri, the Geflügel, lay nestled beneath soft linen, her tiny breaths steady and calm. She was safe. Stable.
For now.
But she wasn’t the only one in this room: the patient I treated earlier.
My gaze slid to the far corner, where another figure lay slumped on a larger bed. A woven reed screen divided him from the rest—deliberately so.
A man—or something, a creature, that is trying very hard to look like one.
Dark, threadbare clothes clung to wiry limbs. His face was shadowed by tangled hair, but I didn’t need to see the details to feel the truth crawl across my skin. The air around him shimmered with barely-contained pressure.
Magic? Yes, but it’s twisted. And also sharp.
A bitter tang of ozone mingled with iron and burnt ash.
And just above the temples—where horns should have curled—there were only two ruined stubs.
This was no Geflügel or any ordinary monster. This was a demon.
He’d arrived barely alive, slumped over the shoulder of a nameless figure who vanished the moment I opened my door.
"A critical case,"
The stranger had rasped, leaving me with barely a corpse and no answers.
The diagnosis had been savage: Lungenentzündung, yes—but tangled with something far worse. A parasitic energy gnawing at him from within, feeding off what little life he had left.
It wasn’t just your average healing. Rather, it was akin to exorcism.
Surgery. Alchemy. And most importantly, gamble.
And it had cost me everything short of my soul.
I limped toward him now, the ache in my bones humming in rhythm with every careful step.Why was a demon—this demon—here? Why had I, of all people, taken him in?
I already knew the answer.I knew his name.
And I knew his connection to Selene from her Mytheia.
That’s what complicated everything up until now.
Meanwhile... soon after, a groan tore from his throat.
His eyelids twitched. Then opened. Slowly but sure with a ragged breathe.
* * *
My eyes creaked open to dim light.
No burning lungs. No fever gnawing at my ribs.
No black void dragging me under.
Just breath—clean, full, undeserved.
And her.
She stood above me like a sin carved into flesh.
An elf.
Obviously, not the delicate kind you’d find chanting hymns to the stars.
No.
She was sharp where others were soft, still where others trembled.
Power radiated from her in dense, quiet waves that pressed against my skin.
Her eyes locked with mine—glacial, calculating, impossible to look away from.
They didn’t sparkle. They cut me into pieces.
Diamond eyes in a face sculpted for cruelty or compassion—either would’ve fit.
But what stole my breath wasn’t her magic.
Rather, it was her mouth.
Full lips. Slightly parted. No lipstick, no pretense.
Just the natural, devastating softness of someone who didn’t even need to try to be pretty.
I imagined those lips on my skin, trailing heat across my throat, whispering threats in a language I didn’t know but would beg to learn.
I wanted her teeth in my shoulder so bad, nibbling me.
Her hand on my throat, choking me forcefully. Her voice in my ear, telling me I wasn’t worth saving as she straddled me anyway.
I wanted to sink my face between her breasts, to taste the skin there—bite, suck, squeeze until she gasped—not from pleasure, but from the shock that I dared.To palm her chest roughly, like it belonged to me for a moment, just to hear if she’d growl or moan or slap me cold. I didn’t care. I wanted the sound. The reaction.
I wanted to rip that top off her body and bury my face in her chest—bite, suck, devour, until her breath hitched and her voice cracked. I wanted to squeeze those perfect tits like I was claiming them, rough and needy, just to see if she’d slap me or drag her nails down my back in return. I didn’t want tenderness. I wanted marks. I wanted the tension to snap.
I wanted to ruin her—except every part of me knew she’d ruin me first.
I pictured her riding me, calm and cold and relentless, not for pleasure, but control.
No sweet nothings. No kisses.
Just domination, breathless and final.
And gods—I’d let her f*ck me ’till I dried.
I wanted to reach for her.
Bury my fingers in that silver-blonde hair.
Hear her moan, break, bite.
I wanted her like a dream fever.
And the worst part?
Unironically, I didn’t even care if she hated me.
Especially if she hated me. That’d be even much better.
Disgust twisted through my gut like a thorned root.
Tch.
I scoffed aloud.
Look at me.
Panting over an elf like some simpering mortal, as if I hadn’t gutted her kind in wartime without a second thought. As if I hadn’t sworn, long ago, never to kneel before anyone—let alone a woman who looked like she belonged on the cover of a holy scripture.
I was a demon.
And here I was, hard beneath the sheets, delirious and broken, desperate for her like a starving beast begging for scraps.
How utterly pathetic.
"Don’t move," she said. Her voice was silk caught on steel.
My body—traitor that it was—obeyed.Not because of weakness.Because it wanted to.
She didn’t look pleased. Or disgusted.She looked busy. Focused. Like I wasn’t even worth the curiosity.That cut deeper than any blade.
She was everything Selene had warned me about: untouchable, brilliant, cold.But she hadn’t warned me about this.
The hunger.
The way she made me feel like I’d been hollow all along—and only now realized it.
I should have hated her.
Instead, I was already drowning in her shadow.