Victor’s recovery was a short process. The night proved to be the most difficult to face -- the healing kicked in full effect when the black sky cradled the moon. He writhed in the hospital bed, his body assaulted by stabbing, broiling pain.

“Doesn’t feel great, does it?” Taro said, appearing before Victor in the vexing moonlight, shimmery and transparent. “Getting healed as a demon, I mean.”

“I’m not a demon,” Victor snapped through gritted teeth as spasms wracked his body. “I’m a human. This shouldn’t hurt so badly!”

“You have anti-enerium in your blood,” Taro said. “In every fiber of your being at this point, anyway. What you are experiencing is the interaction of enerium healing with anti-enerium. Or, rather, ethreallics with daemonics…”

Eventually, Victor fell into an uneasy sleep. When he awoke again, the pain had subsided, easing into a gentle relief.

Victor immediately threw the covers off his bed, tested his footing to check for any pain (there was none) and immediately sprung out the window. He could have walked out the front door to discharge himself from the hospital. There was no reason for him not to do this, given the fact that the healing had indeed reached its completion.

Victor’s rebellious action was similar to a child misbehaving by holding their breath in order to get something from their mother, when all along the woebegotten mother would love nothing more than for the child to die to begin with.

Regardless, he sprung from the window and landed neatly on the rocky gravel, the gentle morning wind whispering quietly through his hair. He stood upright, brushing off his knees which hit the ground. Then, he walked forward a few steps until he stood on an empty stretch of grass. Closing his eyes, he pressed his hand against the floor, imagining a black circle surrounding him on the ground.

Pain prickled through his skin, through his veins until it cultivated at his fingertips.

When he opened his eyes, he was standing on a circular platform crafted from the dirt. He shot to the sky, a streak of dirt trailing far behind him.

Taro, his transparent form gleaning, appeared beside him. “What do you think you’re doing now?”

Victor didn’t respond. He shot forward, speeding between the trees, following the empty paved road. As this was an intermediary road, there were few people milling about. In fact, on his journey, he encountered no one except a few stray common green dragons milling about by the roots of grand oaks. But those don’t really count as people.

“Come on,” Taro said, furrowing his eyebrows. “Are you listening to me?”

Victor kept his mouth firmly shut as he zipped through the greenery, across hills that sloped like rising waves.

“Well, if you’re not going to listen to me, I guess I’ll just talk at you,” Taro muttered. “Based on that path you’re taking, it looks like you’re going back to Seer City.”

Once more, Victor did not offer a response.

“Well, if that’s what you’re doing, then I’d recommend you reconsider,” Taro said. “I

mean, the Annihilation was a complete success. Everyone was killed, just as they were supposed to be. There’s nothing left there.”

“Except Madeline.”

“What?”

“Madeline wasn’t killed,” Victor said. “Maybe there were other survivors.”

“There were no more survivors, I can assure you,” Taro exclaimed. “And if there were survivors, they would be gone by now. If the survivors haven’t left, then they’d just die. You will see nothing but bodies and destruction. Is that what you want?”

“I need to confirm it for myself,” Victor said. “That Seer City really is gone.”

“What will you do once you see it?”

Victor sped to the city border. At once, the devastation appeared before him, sprawling forward from the exact line which dictated the start of Seer City.

The buildings sagged beneath their own weight, massive holes blasted into the sides and through the top. They tumbled upon one another, crossing over the snaking roads. It was as if a tornado had ripped through the very fabric of the city.

And then the bodies.

There were bodies everywhere. Men, women, and children. Blood puddled in every location, smeared onto the streets and the buildings. The bodies were contorted into unsavory positions, heads cracked open to reveal brain matter dripping from the skulls.

Victor knelt down before the carnage, hands splayed out before him, shaking.

“I’m sorry,” Victor muttered to the empty street. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help you. I couldn’t help any of you.”

Victor fell forward, banging his fist weakly on the bloodstained cobblestones. “Damn it...Damn it, I wasn’t powerful enough to stop this. I wasn’t powerful enough and now everyone…”

Taro stood behind Victor, a mixture of confusion and sympathy splattered across his expression.

“You didn’t want this to happen,” Taro said gently. “I know you didn’t. This isn’t the kind of villain you wanted to be.”

The sound of debris tumbling from the rooftops was the only reply that Taro received.

“You wanted to be cruel, but only to those who deserve it,” Taro said, leaning back

against a building streaked with blood, once dancing with artistic streaks of color.

Victor couldn’t stop the tears from falling down his face. They were quiet and Taro pretended not to hear them.

“You just want to return what you have been given,” Taro said. “You want the world to take it back. All the pain that you’ve been forced to endure. It has made you stronger, right? You acknowledge that. You’re able to use daemonics so easily because of it. Because of your pain, you’re a natural savant. But, you never asked for it. You never wanted this gift.”

Victor sunk lower onto the ground, pulling himself into a small, oblong shape. Vulnerable, like a turtle bereft of its shell, he lay before the blue sky smiling down at him in a humorless leer.

“You didn’t want this gift,” Taro repeated. “Who would? You wish you could go home and see your parents and sister again. But you know that can’t happen anymore.”

“She doesn’t want me,” Victor muttered. “My mother, I mean. I was always a burden to her. A financial burden, an emotional burden...”

“But you wish you could go back, don’t you? Back when things were easier and made a little more sense.”

“But I can’t go back. Everything was taken from me.”

“You can’t go back,” Taro agreed. “And now you want the world to pay you back. But it hasn’t paid you back yet, has it?”

Victor returned to his vow of silence, the only sounds emanating from him being the quiet sobs of a man broken beyond repair.

“You think that the world doesn’t deserve to be fixed by you. You think that whenever you help someone, you are just supporting this broken system. You’re supporting a callous universe that doesn’t care. You wonder why you would help a universe that left you in hell. There’s no answer for it, you know, Victor.”

“There isn’t,” Victor muttered.

“You want revenge, but there’s no revenge to be had,” Taro said. “There’s nothing to get your vengeance from. You could kill the demons that killed your father.”

“That wouldn’t solve anything,” Victor said, his voice hardly rising above a whisper, torn and ragged.

“I know. Because your father was a demon hunter,” Taro said. “A very well known one. I myself was warned about him, you know. I encountered him once.”

Victor looked up at Taro, tears dripping down his soft, agony stricken cheeks. “You met him?”

Taro nodded. “I did meet him. But he decided to let me know because he found out that I was a college professor. Or, he realized it suddenly. I actually have taught him before. I was a teacher of him once.”

“His teacher…?”

“Yes,” Taro said, matter-of-factly. “He was a good student. But in any case, that’s besides the point. The point is that -- I know I called your father a demon hunter, but…”

“You were just being polite,” Victor said, nodding his head briskly. “In Blackheim, there is no such thing as demon hunters. Those are killed serial killers. They’re just straight up serial killers.”

Taro nodded. “Blackheim is the only place in the Drakyn kingdom that legally allows anti-enerium beings like demons to exist without a permit. Sure, some demons are allowed to go to other places to teach once they’re deemed to not be a threat, but Drakyn is the one place that’s truly for us…”

“And I was just a battery,” Victor muttered. “They situated humans like me and my family in Blackheim to be a battery. We lived there only to feed demons.”

Taro sighed. “It’s not a great system. But there are sacrifices to be had to keep a kingdom functional. To keep as many people safe as possible. By restricting demons to one area and having a few families act as feeding sources…”

“Then you reduce the overall amount of pain and fatalities caused in the entire kingdom,” Victor said, nodding slowly. “I know that much I know. My family moved to Blackheim of their own accord knowing their role. But they were poor and needed any help they could get. So they were able to live somewhere safe and warm...At the expense of their sanity.”

“But, because of what you experienced,” Taro said quietly. “You have grown immune to many strains of the Despondency disease since you were born in Blackheim and have been exposed to so much.”

“I never wanted to be though,” Victor said. “I’d trade all my powers and benefits and skills that I’ve gathered from my life in Blackheim to have never been born there at all. To have been safe…”

Taro shook his head. “I know that to be true.”

“But with all this power I have…” Victor muttered. “With all the status I have achieved...you’d think I’d be able to stop a few demons, you know? You’d think all this would be worth it in the end…”

“But you’d be wrong,” Taro said simply. “That’s why you need to get stronger. So you can prevent something like that from happening again.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t possessed me…”

“We would’ve had to retrieve two of you instead of just one,” he said. “You probably would’ve been killed. Without Marquitta, you wouldn’t be able to get out alive.”

“Why couldn’t Marquitta save anyone else? Why just Madeline?”

Taro shrugged. “I don’t have the answer to your question. All I can say is that she did the best she could, I’m sure.”

Victor let himself flop backwards onto the ground, eyes staring vacantly up at the sky above.

“I don’t remember contracting to you,” Victor said.

Taro blinked. “Excuse me?”

Victor rolled over onto his stomach, body coated with soot and stained with blood. “I just don’t remember doing it. One day I woke up and you were there. It didn’t surprise me. For some reason, I expected you to be there.”

Taro looked away. “You expected me to be there because you contracted me. What the hell else could be the explanation for my presence?”

“When I first saw you,” Victor muttered, “I just greeted you like normal because I expected you to be there. I remember the physical act of you being contracted to me. I knew why I wanted to contract to you, but…”

“But what?”

“I don’t remember doing it,” he said simply. “I don’t remember having the discussion with myself in my head. I don’t remember making the decision.”

Taro shrugged. “I mean, but you clearly are contracted to me. I will say that sometimes memory gets scrambled during demonic possession.”

“Not just memory,” Victor clarified. “A lot of things can get scrambled up during possession. Which is why I wasn’t really surprised to be confused by you.”

Taro crossed his arms. “Well, you want me here with you still, don’t you?”

Victor blinked. “Of course I do. I mean, I know why I contracted you. I know the reason. And I still agree with it. I need you to help me become the most powerful daemonics practitioner that the world has ever seen.”

Taro nodded. “Glad to hear it.”

“I should be heading back now,” Victor said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I need to get dressed. Probably buy some new clothes, since my building has unfortunately gone up in flames. I doubt anything survived that.”

“Probably not,” Taro agreed. “Probably not.”

Victor cast him a sidelong glance. “You’re pretty sympathetic for a demon.”

“You didn’t have to add the ‘for a demon’ part.”

“But...unrelatedly,” Victor said, standing up. A distressed expression came onto his face, eyebrows furrowing. “I have a question for you.”

Taro was apprehensive. “A question?” he repeated. “What kind of question?”

“Mary…Moriana” Victor said.

“What?”

“Mary and Moriana. Who are they?”