Inside the mother demon’s belly, it wasn’t dark. The swirling neon colors glowed like lamps, and I could see everything around me. I could see Knell’s sinking body, just out of my reach.

Only a few minutes before, I had been above ground, wading through a swamp of colors, determined to reach the Font. Then there was another earthquake, and before I knew it I was stuck here.

If I had known that the demon in the Font was newly hatched, I wouldn’t have come here alone. Even without understanding the reproductive role of a mother demon, all hunters knew how dangerous they could be.

But this area was infamously riddled with dormant Fonts where the mature demons would settle, causing them to erupt again. Even the angels assumed this Font had erupted because a demon had come here from elsewhere. No one had expected a new one to emerge.

I could hear voices around me…something like a crowd of children, whispering indecipherably. I wondered why the demon would make that noise. It wasn’t the sort of thing that would scare me. Not that I needed to be scared; I was already caught.

I sank a little further into the colors. Most of my body was immobilized; I only had one free arm. And it wouldn’t be enough to strike a decent blow against the demon, especially one of this size. I had nothing left to do but wait to suffocate and die. Knell was my only hope.

I tried to claw through the colors and reach for him. If a demon could be destroyed with a touch, couldn’t it also be awakened with one? Desperately, I stretched out my hand, until-

“You’re an enemy of humans, angels, and demons alike. Everyone hates you. And no one will ever love you again.”

Knell sat up and blinked, looking somber. “Everyone hates you,” he repeated. “Everyone hates me…”

Absorbing the colors from the mother demon, he solidified his form: his blood-red jacket reappeared, minus the crumpled wings. His angel-green skin and hair became dull gray and jet black, and his eyes swirled into pools of rainbow colors.

Then, he lumbered over to me and pulled me out of the muck.

I just stared at him. On the one hand, I was glad that he was alive and still seemed willing to help me. On the other hand, his ability to resurrect himself in that way proved that he was definitely a demon, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

“I’m not a demon,” he said, apparently reading my thoughts. “You can’t believe that…it isn’t true!”

“Then…what are you?”

He sat down a few feet from me. That miserable expression, the same one he had shown while he was holding the delta, reappeared on his face. I waited expectantly.

“…I used to be a human, like you,” he began. “Then the attack came. A Font erupted, just like this one, and lots of demons flocked to it. They started killing everyone in town. One of them was going to kill me.

“I couldn’t fight it, but I didn’t want to die, so I tried…talking to it. With my mind. I told it that it could eat me and have my energy once, or live with me and have my energy forever. I was scared, but I convinced it, and it worked.

“I fell asleep after that, and when I woke up, I was already back home. The hunters had come and gotten rid of all the demons, and everything was going back to normal. I was glad my parents survived, and they were glad to see me, too. My mom even cried. Those were the good days…

“Back then, it was “me” and “it”. It was always a part of me, always talking to me in my head. It told me how to do math problems at school, and it made me strong: I could beat anyone in a race, and I was a master at dodgeball. It told me jokes, too, and it always helped me get out of trouble. I actually liked it, and I felt like I wouldn’t mind being friends with it forever.

“Then my parents noticed. They started whispering about me at night. About how my grades had suddenly gotten really good, and how I was always hungry. It told me that I had to lie low and pretend to be normal, or something bad would happen. And I did, but something bad happened anyway.

“I dropped a plate in the kitchen one day. It broke, and the pieces went everywhere. They cut my face and all over my arms, and…I started bleeding colors. Both my dad and my mom saw it, and that’s when…they changed. They started looking at me like I was something else.”

A lone tear rolled down Knell’s face. He sniffed, but continued. “After that day, no one would talk to me. I had to stay in my room and I wasn’t even allowed to go to school. It started panicking, but I couldn’t read minds yet so I couldn’t tell it what was going on. No one gave me any food, but I got really, really hungry, so I started eating the stuff in my room. My bed, my chair; I ate most of everything I owned. That probably made things worse, but I couldn’t help it.

“Then one day I…I woke up with silver handcuffs on. That was when they started trying to kill me.”

Tears were streaming down his face at this point, but his voice didn’t crack at all. He simply went on. “That was when I figured out what they thought I was. They thought I was a demon that replaced the real me. They thought I was tricking them, but I wasn’t. But they didn’t believe me. No matter what I said, they wouldn’t listen to me. The silver hurt me, and that was all the proof they needed.”

“I don’t remember a lot of what happened after that,” he said, trying to wipe off his face. “They still wouldn’t feed me, so I got really hungry, and that made me weak. And without me, “it” had to take over. That probably made things worse, too…I feel like it might have bitten someone. I really hope I didn’t eat anybody…

“…Anyway, the last thing I remember was being in a hole. I was all burnt up, so I think they’d tried to set me on fire before. Now they were trying to bury me. I wasn’t going to suffocate, but all the dirt was heavy, and I felt like I was being crushed. I was scared…that’s when I changed my shape for the first time. It told me to pretend I was a worm, crawling in the earth. So I did that, and I turned into a worm. And I crawled away, and I crawled for so long that when I finally came out of the ground, I had no idea where I was. That’s how I escaped.

“And that’s why I decided that, from then on, I’d pretend to be an angel. Nobody questions angels; even if they do weird things, no one cares. I didn’t want what happened to me before to ever happen again, so…I just hope you understand.” With that, Knell buried his face in his hands.