He’d been the only one for so long. Then came Logi. Eldrid. Brandr. A brotherhood, a family. Men to bring laughter to Helviti.
How could laughter exist in the underworld?
Then Ember, the first female daemon, and she had shaken their world, their order. Brandr and Logi had both fallen for her. The rivalry had ended with Brandr dead.
That was when Daemon had learned that even the Cursed could die, just like the Blessed. So then, they were not pure spirit, like the beings the old dominie had taught them about. They were something else. Something less.
He’d never told the tyrant that Brandr was gone, fed into the lava, that in death his body burned like any man’s. It was information he didn’t want anyone else to have.
It was extra provisions, for the first time. Food and water and leathers they could stash away and store up, bit by bit.
When Elianne had come, he and Eldrid had sworn neither of them would pursue her. They would not sacrifice brotherhood for this creature, no matter how lovely her face, how fetching her form. It had been easy to resist the tug, at first. She was so distraught. So angry. So confused.
But of course, they’d come to know her well in the eternity that she’d been here. She’d become a friend, a sister. Her laughter had joined theirs, she and Ember had taken up the care of their miniature village.
She didn’t often reach out to soothe him though. She didn’t often bend her head to catch his gaze as she did now, her rare red hair gleaming like the lava. She didn’t often force him to remember that he was still a man simply by being a woman.
“Are you all right, Dae?” She never called him Daemon, though everyone else did. He could still remember the day she’d lifted her chin, looked him in the eye, and said,“You’re not. None of us are. I don’t know what we are, but we are not daemons. I will not call you such a thing. I’ll just call you…Dae.”Day—a measure they didn’t have, down here. A turning of the sun he hadn’t seen in too long.
He shook off the thoughts, the reflection. Shook off, too, the yearning her touch inspired. Forced himself to smile. “Only mourning the loss of our supplies.”
Her fingers fell from his, and he told himself to be glad. She glanced over at the crevasse that had opened, and he could tell from the degree of her frown what she was thinking. Even before she said it. “The Giver is making his will known. We must not leave.”
His throat closed like a tube of magma cooled too fast. So many years he’d toiled down here, doing exactly what first one tyrant and then the next ordered him to do. Thinking, praying it would serve as penance in the eyes of their angry deity. Thinking, praying he could work away whatever sin he’d committed as a young man, to condemn him to this fiery hell. Thinking, praying he could earn salvation.
Of course she still thought the same. She’d been down here so much less time than him, less even than the others. They’d all had to work through it on their own, a process likely to stretch into eternity.
She still believed this was the will of the Giver, that they be here. Even if she dismissed the idea that they were all daemons.
Not the rest of them. He and Logi and Eldrid and Ember had decided shortly after Elianne joined them that they couldn’t stay here forever, to die here and be fed to the volcano like they’d been forced to do with Brandr’s body. They’d save the food provided for their fallen comrade. They’d walk barefoot sometimes to save the footwear they were given, saving it for a real journey. They’d wear their fire-resistant leathers long past their better days to save that allotment too.
And then, they’d find a way out. They’d carve a lava tube into the frozen wastelands, perhaps. Or burrow down, then come up on the sea floor and beg help from the first mer they found. Orthey’d dig all the way under the Frozen Sea and emerge in Ellas, if they could go so far.
Elianne insisted they were fools to dream of escape. And now she nodded to the place where their shelves had once been, their supplies stored. All eaten, now, by the insatiable lava. Their food, their clothes, the tools they’d fashioned from bits and pieces of the little the tyrant provided, even the ink and needles they’d been granted for their tattoos. “You see what our hubris has done? Now we have nothing, not even for today. Instead of escape, we’ll be lucky to survive until the king comes again.”
Daemon pushed to his feet, fast enough that a hank of fair hair whipped him across the mouth. He flipped it away, wondering if it was time to abandon the strip of blond down the center of his head and shave it all off again. “Don’t call him that.” He didn’t mean to issue the command. Again. But it had become habit.
As had her response. The way she too stood, nearly as tall as he was. The way she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. The way her braids, like burnished flame, bounced as she shook her head. “Isidoristhe king. We may not like him, but he is still our Giver-given ruler.”
“Not mine.” He spun away from her and stomped toward the newly-opened abyss, hoping that in his haste he’d overlooked a few surviving shelves.
Nothing. The entire wall had collapsed into the flow beneath their chamber. Years of saving, of scrimping, of going without, gone in a flash.
Frustration had him pulling the magma up far more quickly than usual, wicking the fire from it in a blast that heated the room, shaping it into a new wall, new shelves with a slash of his hand. Then he spun back to the woman he didn’t want to love. “We start again. Perhaps the Giver is testing our resolve—we will show him we are earnest.”
Elianne narrowed her eyes. She was always at her strongest when she was telling him he was wrong. The rest of the time she might sway and second-guess, but somehow when it came to questioning him, his motives, his goals, his plan, she never wavered.
He was wrong. Always. Whatever it was he said, he was wrong. That had become her bedrock.
Flames, it shouldn’t make him want to kiss her. To see if that could be something they could agree on.
“This is not a test, Dae. This is proof that your plan was against his divine will. And speaking against his chosen king is blasphemy.”
A huff of laughter slipped out, but there was no amusement in it. “The tyrant doesn’t even believe in the Giver.”
“Of course he does. He simply serves him quietly.”
Daemon told his fingers to stay uncurled. His face to remain neutral. His breathing to steady. “Well, I suppose you know him better than the rest of us. When next you sneak off to the ice wall to meet him, tell him we lost our supply of food and need more.”
