Chapter Text
I get to space out.
A dark haven crept its wet fingers up through the nervous area behind the demon’s slitted eyes, a thing the boy welcomed for its bestowal of safety. Kalego did not wonder twice about it—silencing the external, he plunged out of natural feeling and into sprawling thought.
How accustomed the little devil was to attending the overfull mindspace in times of trouble. To Kalego, this seemed his duty to his family, as being no more than a pup the young Naberius had little else to give except himself. Here he could attempt to make up for the space he occupied within the clan compound; the efforts his existence asked of the adults. Here, Kalego was agreeable: a tense but pliable buzz of static air, to be utilized towards the aims of his clan in the ways the Elders deemed acceptable.
Removing himself was nothing new to the small boy. Child though he was, the landscape of the young devil’s mind was called by his position to collapse into a fury of numbly enduring more often than not. If it were to be compared to the physical aggregations of the worldly demon realm, then this secret space the demon boy inhabited—vacuous and throttled—might by him be experientially likened to treading a caveborn jungle, sightless in the black weight of the underground, guided singly by the awareness of one’s relentless palm tracing the choking roots and vines along the matted surface of the unseen wall.
Cluttered; careful. A hundred things to trip over. Each step, each movement strained and deliberate. In that darkness, in the overbearing, tomblike pressure, separated from everything that defined demonity, Kalego separated even from himself.
I am somewhere that doesn’t hurt. I am nowhere. I am everywhere. I can predict what will happen, and look out for myself that way, even if I have no eyes to see.
Spacing out was… odd.
He threaded his claws along the wall, trimming the stone. This was his home; the mansion in the mountain. The Elder in front of him swam in and out of his consciousness, for although the boy Naberius retained sighted eyes, his head denied them him; preferring to paint the being of the Elder in its own flat tones, reducing the august demon to the concept of a shape.
I would shiver otherwise. I would show.
He is a Naberius, before all else. Before Kalego. Everything deferred to the Naberius scribble; everything was thrown into the pit.
Naberius. A tangle of emotions, systematically confined.
Naberius.
He didn’t have what it took to untangle.
“We are here.”
A dumb nod, by a boy. Tongue heavy; eyes avert. The Elder ushered the young demon to go through the door. Wing roots tensed, Kalego full aware that this unusual gesture by the man—the Elder following subordinate through this juncture, instead of keeping the lead for himself—served to indicate the precarious nature of Kalego’s wings.
That is: they belonged to the clan, to the Elders.
The wholeness of Kalego’s body remained because it was yet allowed, and it could be shattered at their behest.
A picture of ragged membranes; tooth-rended, claw-tried, draping off of weeping spines like mauled red curtains; a hideous image, sizzling as fear through a mind accustomed to horror. Kalego shivered, slightly, moving through the door jamb, his superior following close behind. The child’s senses played mockeries of pain deep down his back. His head pounded with his fitful heart, and would not let his eyes see.
The edge of a carpet. The tops of his boots. A stain that hadn’t come out. Kalego spaced into these things, no longer a demon, but distilled attentiveness. He was collapsing, and the string of thoughts caught him, and led him through the dark.
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One abyssal survival scene of hundreds.
It’s the bulk of a decade later, and Kalego has forgotten how to come out, or even that an outside exists. He lives inside the inkwell of his own liquified consciousness; like his name, caliginous to the core.
The day does not narrate, it goes past and he forgets. Every surface is tarnished… not one thing can be trusted not to break, least of all himself, and the daze, the flurry, carries him evening to evening, a void wherein feeling sinks and is lost.
He cannot catch it; feeling. Still, the demon manufactures some semblance of sensation, and this makes him capable of moving in the netherworld, despite his existence confining itself to the bleak recesses of whatever it is he is solving and managing at any given moment between his horns.
Kalego is thought, Kalego is solving the problem. Kalego is mitigating frustration. Kalego is not pain. He is useful.
He is good.
A Naberius, good. There are certain ways to be which are inherently correct, and Kalego is mastering them, correcting himself before he is found wanting for correction. The poison pools on his tongue; other tastes forgotten. The poison tastes like meat, or wine, or whatever he wishes it to seem to him, as he is the best at this. The sense disconnected from reality, because it must be; like the synapses of his skin, like the glassy enclosure of his vision, defending him by means of the disconnect. Kalego cannot bear sincere feeling because feeling sincerely brings bad.
That there ever was a choice to feel, or to not, is lost to this grave, upstanding youth. Naberius Kalego lives a life on rails: defined by family name, and family ideology. There is a right answer to every situation, and Kalego is a boy who is right.
The shape of sensation, but not the thrust of it. The concept but not the experience. He tells himself about things but is not there; a boy describing an existence from a distance so abstracted that the heart of the story disperses.
Kalego is nought. The Naberius is.
He will go to school. There he will learn and manage more. His texts have pulled him in; the cold pride he wields in how ruthlessly he studies, and manages, and solves. At the academy called Babyls, the boy will solve more, and better, in the Naberius way. At the academy, silhouetted against a foil of demons who are wrong, his correctness will be proven. They will see him and know: even the least Naberius is their better.
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Touch. Touch. Touch. Are you okay? Oh… a breath taken through the slots of a mask, with a hiss. I’m here. I’ve—I’ve got you, Kalego. I’ll get you bandaged up.
Touch, and cold. Mud sludging up his back, wet and rank with the scent of writhing hellworm. A wing awry; stinging. Was it supposed to feel like that? The wings usually hurt. His vision a blur, but a face stayed near, and the claws of his teammate worked, worked, worked; a strange feeling, but it called to him as if from the opposite side of a canyon. An eerie echo sounded through Kalego, disturbing settled ground.
Touch. Touch. Touch. Strange. Can you stand? It’s not safe here. You can’t fly now. We’ll have to hide. I’ve got you; there you go. One foot at a time.
He staggered, hunched over the shoulder of a boy his age and contained within his grasp. Small as the boy was, he was strong as well and proved a firm support. Come on; you can do it. We’ll shelter under the trees. It’s not far now.
A rare rainfall doused the netherworld, a phenomenon unpredicted even by the adults who formed the harvest festival’s organizing staff. The brimstone soil yielded up its every scent, as did the foliage, rampant and drinking in the sacred provision to fuel its future days of wickedness; for even the vegetation here, as Shichiro had described, in some cases operated sapiently, enacting its evils with according intellect.
What was this? Kalego blinked the rainfall out of his lashes. What was this? Hell was alive.
A body carried him. Greenery rattled under the feeding storm. Moisture was everywhere; it seeped into all that was desiccated. Things which wilted turned their heads up in revelation. That seemingly dead lay prone in the downpour until it, too, struggled a quiet semblance of life to beat within again. Shichiro’s wet hair was slick and silvery as the clouds, but the water running off of nose and mask was warm with gathered heat.
Why wasn’t he afraid?
Scraped wing pulled feebly at its impromptu bandage. Was it experience? Those gloved hands had wrought healing for many a beast of the underworld, pulling the bandages smartly into place for Kalego as he had seen them do for other wounded critters. An arm pinned itself around his back, and Kalego himself rested much of his weight upon the back of Shichiro’s shoulders; the ridge of wing roots tangible underneath him, close enough to bite. Kalego could smell his own blood.
He should have been more afraid.
Shichiro, he said thickly, not comprehending.
It’s okay. We’re nearly there. Just a few more steps.
Weirdly grinning, and embarrassed by what, he did not know, Kalego let himself be led under the shielding roots of a tree, and surrounded by a thick, lush tangle of vines which Shichiro conjured out of the ground to enclose them. Inside the enveloping foliage, it was space black.
But Shichiro was shuffling, could be heard wiping his paws off, breathing, rubbing an arm across his eyes which were surely as wet as Kalego’s own. We’ll be safe here, he said, but he needn’t have put words to it. Kalego could hear him, real in the darkness, tangible and sensory and with him.
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He doesn’t—he shouldn’t—he can’t.
Racing, dark, hollow; threatening to swallow. A pinching paw near to consuming the young demon, a boy frantically fighting for presence.
Not now, he pled inside. I want to be here!
Kalego did not want to go; didn’t want to leave reality behind any longer, even if it hurt.
It did not all hurt.
Magic existed in the nether. What Kalego’s first academic year had wrought on his mind was this: being was so much greater in scope than the demon boy had ever had the privilege to grasp in his ancestral home. The school of Babyls and its weird, wonderful demons from all across the netherworld offered up a veritable banquet of things for Kalego to feel, to experience. To try! Camaraderie! Not every demon was a Naberius; not every demon aspired to control and conquer. And it was—it was—it felt—
I want to hold on to that.
It’s been a year of Kalego challenging himself and discovering that he can feel good—and that he wants to.
The separation was healthy. Not from himself; but from his family. Kalego had excused himself from checking in at the Naberius compound whenever the possibility to go home had arisen, citing the demands of his schoolwork, and insisting he not trouble his clan with his presence when holidays could be more practically spent entrenched in his studies.
The clan has called him to return this time, however. No excuses. It’s break.
It’s been a year.
The young Naberius wrestled back the intimidation of the Elder; he wrestled back the abyss.
I don’t want to keep going back. I can’t! If I go into that space, I—won’t feel. I won’t know.
A small gargoyle face, tangled up on one side in a sceptical expression that seemed to see through all of Kalego’s lies.
Are you sure you’ll be okay going home? The boy said, hefting his bookbag up over a shoulder uncomfortably. You look like you’re going to lose your lunch.
I’ll be fine, he snapped. The shadows in the gargoyle’s face deepened. Silently, a gloved hand found the back of his own. Shichiro didn’t say a word.
If Kalego disappeared, he might forget it. What it meant to him.
Pain was inevitable if he let himself feel. This truth he’d noted to himself; and thought himself steeled for pain’s onslaught thereby. While at Babyls, it was easier for Kalego to convince himself that fresh hurt wouldn’t shatter him again like it had during his upbringing at the compound. The protestations of the boy demon’s stomach however cried out a warning which his body had learned in the absence of his mind: to flee back to his family, it told, would be to offer himself up to the jaws of the beast.
The young Naberius hadn’t dared acknowledge this alarm. For Kalego’s sanity, he’d buried this fear in the coldest recesses of his grave and devilish heart, plastering it over with reassurances that he was stronger now, he’d grown, and that it didn’t matter what he faced; he could endure.
But Kalego had come home, and here, his panic manifested as legitimate.
I can’t—I can’t—
He choked on sour spit.
What was he fighting? What for?
A broken wing took a long while to heal. Shichiro’s careful claw-tips had tended it, in the wake of the harvest festival disaster, ensuring Kalego was not neglected a single day; the gargoyle, through this act of camaraderie, unknowingly suffusing the sensation of his paws into the membranes of the wounded organ.
The Elder held it aloft, not careful in the slightest. Red-hot pain seethed from wing wrist to roots. Kalego’s equilibrium reeled at the contact and for a moment he thought he might fall over, but if he were to do so, the delicate flight structures would pull with all the weight of his form, threatening them further and increasing his agony in abundance. Retching; gagging; a boy’s body not made for this sort of experience, for this prolonged torment.
But I have to—I have to feel, or—or I’ll forget, I’ll forget what I want—I’ll forget me—
Conspicuously the emotive responses Kalego conveyed upon this visit were disappointing his better demons.
“You’ve backslid,” his superior told him.
“What are they teaching you at that school? And coming home like this!”
The fellow yanked again at the half-healed appendage, and Kalego stifled a howl; but the fact that said stifling required a motion of throat and chest to bring the sound to heel was foul for the greater demon still, and the fellow looked down upon Kalego through onyx eyes scathing with disapproval.
Bile climbed Kalego’s throat. This is too much. This is wrong. What am I fighting? I have to fight!
Vision made an ever-narrowing circuit, vitreous and collapsing. He was panting.
I want to get better about it, I want to get better, I want to… I want to stay…
This, day one. The demon would break for two weeks long.