Chapter Text
There was a long, loud knock at the door. One that was so persistent and patterned that it could not be chalked up to the heavy rainfall, the howling storms, or the booming thunder outside the stone castle.
Almost all of the castle's workers had retired to their chambers to be well rested for tomorrow while the prince read mystery novels on his throne by candlelight and his butler stayed by his side, knowing that if he wouldn't bring him to bed at some point, the prince would stay up all night reading again.
The lone pair assumed it was just the rain when they first heard it, until the noise grew louder and louder...
"Young master, are you expecting any guests?" the butler straightened his tie as he addressed the prince, noting the nervous eye the recently orphaned teen gave the door.
"No. Especially not in this weather and at this hour..." Prince Norman hesitantly put his book on the throne's armrest and got up. "Pretty much everyone living here's either asleep or being quiet, It's pouring buckets out there, the thunder will scare any horse off the path, and from what I seen outside, it don't matter how strong your lantern is, it's going out."
"I see..."
"That means whatever's out there is either desperate, crazy, or... ...Something really strange..."
"..S-shall we retire to bed ourselves then? As you said it is rather late..."
"Not quite yet..." the prince approached the front door of the castle."If whoever's out there has been knocking this long without giving up, it could try to break in if it knows the entire castle's asleep.."
The butler nodded and followed to help his charge open the large, heavy door. It was a struggle for the teen and the old man, one of them half considering waking up a guard or two to help them open the damned door, but when it finally creaked open, the pair were met with a truly foul sight.
Draped in a cloak of old rags and bearing a crescent grin of teeth that were far too long for any human to own, stood an 'old man' who reeked of death, of rot, of liquor, and of every fowl smell that came to mind. The man was hunched over and his knees were bent, but in spite of this, he still came to Norman's eye level, and as the teen was rather tall himself, he assumed that if he were to stand up straight, the old man would be either seven or eight feet tall.
Norman and his butler stepped back from the old man as they noticed that a thick, strange, black ooze pooled on his feet and on his crooked leg. An ooze that neither the teen or the man had ever seen in their lives before.
"A Devil."
The words passed Norman's lips before he even realized he just gave away that he saw right past the man's disguise and he could swear that the man only chuckled at the accusation.
"It's rather devilish of you to let a poor old man die of cold in this pouring rain, young prince." The devil spoke to him through an unwavering smile that didn't move as he spoke. "Would you please let me stay the night?"
Norman internally cursed himself for saying that, now that the man knew that he wasn't fooled, he couldn't feign ignorance. He took another step back as the man dug in his cloak and with an over sized hand with four fingers, pulled out what appeared to be some sort of strange metal contraption with a bright beam of light coming out of it. The strange device produced a constant whirring noise as the two wheels mounted on top of it spun with a gentle hum. "Do you like stories, boy?"
"...What is that thang?"
"This, my dear boy, is a phenomenal trinket from a far off land... It can bring stories to life! simply point it's light at a dark, clear wall, and the characters will move in the light! Let me stay, and I'll gift you this marvel of a golden age as a gesture of good will."
Norman thought long and hard about the old man's deal. He didn't want a demon's machine anywhere in his castle, he didn't want this stranger's weird, most likely poisonous gunk in his castle, he didn't want this stuff hurting his castle staff... And at the moment, he felt that the best way to do that was to keep the stuff out of his home was to keep the devil who made it out of his home. But at the same time, Norman was a smart kid. He knew that the old man wouldn't take too kindly to the word 'no'. In fact, the man could even get violent...
So he moved his hand out of the devil's view and gestured to his butler to wake the guards. Not breaking eye contact with the old devil, the prince gave a timid smile and cleared his throat.
"I'm awfully sorry, but I'm afraid I have no room for you here."
"...What?" While the man's smile did not waver, his voice did. Before the demon broke into laughter. "Why young prince, I'm sure anyone with a castle as well furnished as yours has plenty of rooms to spare! And I'm offering you such a generous present... Surely you can have a generous heart in turn for a poor old man who had to- had to travel many miles in the freezing cold in the dead of night! And with the heavy storm no less..."
"I'm sorry, but while there is room for the castle staff, there is NO room for strangers bearin' suspicious gifts. You claim you've traveled so far in the rain, but your cloak itself is dry as bones. In fact, the only wet stuff you have on you is some kind of slime that I've never seen anywhere; not in the swamps, not in the sewers, and not even in the caves where strange beasts dwell. Now would you kindly leave?"
The man's smile shook on his face as his bones let out a sickening symphony of cracks and snaps, a long, whip like tail ending in a sharp spade slithered out of the demon's robe and coiled around the prince's neck. A pair of horns engulfed the top half of the man's head and he let out a low, bone chilling growl.
"Do you have ANY idea... what a huge mistake you've made?!"
"Feels less like a mistake an' more like a 'Damned if I do damned if I don't' situation." The prince stared the eyeless demon down, trying everything he could to not show it how terrified he was right now. "I know how yous devils work, it's never a right answer and a wrong answer, it's two wrong answers. Just the other day, the princess I was in an arranged marriage with was offered a golden comb by an old woman she had never met before-"
"So? How does this relate to anything here?"
"-When she used the comb, its teeth dug into her skull and poisoned her. And I reckon that if she didn't take the offered comb, she would still end up dead. I know that I was riskin' my life by saying 'no', but I was supposed to be the king of this here castle, and a king is supposed to do what's right for his subjects. And what's right for them means keeping you, that machine, and your weird goop out of this castle."
He really hoped that his butler would come back with the guards soon, he doesn't know how much longer he can keep pulling a brave face...
The inky demon squeezed his hand around the machine so hard that the thing dented and the reels broke and fell to the floor. The demon's tar-like ooze began to seep into the device. Before Norman could wrap his head around what the demon was doing, he slammed the inky machine into his own head as hard as he could.
"You failed your subjects the second you rejected my kind offer... So, if what's right for your subjects is that machine and my 'goop' staying out of that castle, then that's all what you and your subjects will EVER be..."
The prince gasped and sputtered on the floor as the machine ate away his true head and firmly attached itself in its place, the tar-like substance seeping from the neck wound down his entire body, eating away at his flesh and bone, replacing them with black magic and metal.
"I shall leave this castle, and you and your subjects will stay beings of black magic until an outsider made of black magic like myself is welcomed in with open arms.."
By the time he finally managed to get himself off the floor and figure out his balance enough to throw a punch at the demon, the prince was left clawing at empty air as the demon vanished into nonexistence. And as he realized he was gone, he fell to his knees. Because he could not read the future he had doomed his entire castle to a life as strange, disgusting monsters with him as the most hideous of all of them.
When he tried to sob, he didn't have any tears he was able to shed no matter how badly he wanted them to fall. And all that came out of the strange, mechanical box in his torso that seemingly replaced his vocal chords was a beastly, ear-splitting screech.