Charlie swallows hard and nods. “Yeah, okay, I’m down for the scientific method shit. I’ll just…stand here and be demon bait.” He holds the book up like a shield and then points a finger at the harnessed demon. “I fed you, don’t you forget that, Maurice.”
“You named it?” I ask.
“Listen, it was scary out there. I had to name him.”
I roll my eyes at Charlie and look over at Jaak to see how he’s doing with the demon twig. “You ready?” I ask.
“I am but…I think it’s dead,” Jaak says, giving the branch a shake. The demon just flops in its harness. “Gamemaster, your demon charge has expired!”
Charlie makes a face. “Aw, man.”
I shake my head. “It’s not dead, it was just mean-mugging me. I saw it,” I say, taking a step closer to the demon. I snap my fingers near it and then clap to see if I can get a reaction but nothing happens. “Hey!” I yell at it. The demon remains motionless, so still that I start to wonder if Jaak is right.
“Maybe it is dead. How did we kill it? We didn’t even touch it?” I feel bad for the mini-demon. Yes, it’s an instrument of my demise but there’s something pitiful about the way it looks hanging limply in its harness.
“I feel bad. It looks…so small. I’m sorry, little guy.”
“Maurice,” Charlie reminds me.
I nod. “Right, I’m sorry, Maurice.” I reach a hand out to take it down but the second my hand gets within snapping distance Maurice launches himself out of his harness and at me. I duck and the demon flies over my head.
“Oh, you little faker! How did you get out?” I yell at it.
Maurice the mini-demon doesn’t answer. He lunges. Not at Charlie and his book, but at me. I scream and kick. I don’t think, I just move. My body is faster than my thoughts and I’m only realizing that I’ve kicked the shit out of the demon when it’s flying halfway across the yard. I reach out a hand to stop it but when magic fires out of my hand the demon explodes.
“Maurice!” Charlie screams in horror.
I wince. “Oops, I didn’t mean to do that.”
Jaak tosses the stick and comes to my side. “That demon deserved a worse death. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. It just caught me by surprise, that's all.” Jaak doesn’t look convinced. He smoothes my hair back and kisses my forehead so I have to put a hand on his chest to stop him from checking me over. “I promise, I’m fine. We’re going up much worse than Maurice today.”
His face goes grim. “The World Eater. I thought I had left such a being behind. It seems my life’s path is never to be free of them.” There’s something in the way he says never free that makes me pause.
“Jaak, you’ve fought this thing before, haven’t you?”
He looks away from me and towards the trees. “No. Worse than that.”
“What could be worse than that?” I ask.
“I have served one.”
Chapter Thirty Three
“When I was young a World Eater came to my home. It was massive. It blacked out the sun and the sky. There were no stars, no moon when it settled on our world. For days it stayed unmoving in the sky. The only thing we could do was despair and mourn the life that was to be lost, sacrificed to its hunger.” Jaak pauses and I put my hand on his. We’re inside, in the living room with the book safely tucked away in the basement with more magic than I probably should have used to guard it. I spelled the entire place until I felt lightheaded. My power came rushing back the second I used it, not at all like the first time I accidentally used it at the Hell Maw with Jaak.
I look at the demon beside me. The morning light makes him look angelic. The only thing I want to do is comfort him. Such a far cry from that very first night he spoke to me through the crevasse before I knew who he really was to me.
“Take your time,” I tell him.
He gives me a wry smile. “As much as I would like to, the end of the world is near, my heart. Haste is needed for this story but it must be told all the same if we’re to understand what we face today. The World Eater is a Titan of old. So ancient that evenwhen there was nothing it existed. There have only ever been a few at a time, the last born some hundred millennia ago.”
“What do they do?” I ask. I can’t wrap my head around why something like this would even exist.
“To keep order, maintain balance among the worlds. Though who determines the balance is to be challenged,” he says, voice hard. “There are rules made by entities that have long forgotten what it means to be alive. The World Eater was a tool they created to maintain their asinine ideas of harmony. When the World Eater came to my home, we knew the end was near. It could have claimed us, devoured our world and simply moved on but it did not. It lingered, announcing itself in the heavens until despair filled us. It wanted our fear. Our resignation of a fate it alone decided.”
“That’s fucked,” Charlie whispers.
