Learning the ways of gods and demons is no trivial task for each demon follows its own rules which often contradict the others in nonsensical patterns of impossibility. Zarapeth, the demon lord of vampires, for example, is weak to the common garlic flower of all things. While his enemy, Raeshara, the werewolf queen, despises silver. Then there is Lorogrush, the faceless, bodiless ooze who is attracted to the strong smell of garlic and repelled by fast flowing water which Zarapeth adores. Auriomauch, the demon lord of birds and death and god of the ancient Rostar people, has his strengths and weaknesses as all demons do but finding them is difficult, even in a library as vast as the great one at the edge of the world. The days of having a department dedicated to demons are gone, leaving just fragments of knowledge drifting about the faculty. The demons are unconcerned, they have no interest in human knowledge, they do not think that way. The Archivists are confident they will never have to worry about demons again.

The man stumbles up to the great towering library through the storm, clutching his lute with ragged, trembling hands. Around him shriek the ravens, cawing and cawing, screaming and screaming. They tear at his hands, at his back, at his face. He bats them desperately away from his eyes, fearing that squelch as one of their claws finally blinds him. One of the strings on his lute is already broken, torn off by a particularly big raven. He recalls it snapping onto his fingers as being particularly painful. That lute was all he had now against the shadow that had been following him. The shadow that looked like a man but was not a man. Always out of sight but never by much and always with the ravens.

It had started when he’d been relaxing in the mansion he’d stolen and filled with young men and women lured by his music. He’d been lying on the bed with the window open to let in the sun and a great ugly black crow had landed on the windowsill. It had looked at him and then attacked, leaving feathers and eventually blood all over the room before he’d managed to kill it. Then there had been more of them each day and soon the shadow appeared.

The magic of the lute usually worked on animals and birds best of all but it was useless against these birds. No matter how well he played they just shrieked over it and attacked him regardless. He started healing himself with the lute and barricading his houses but the birds still found him. And the healing was starting to be less and less effective. Gone were the days when he could use the lute’s magic to remain alive while missing all of his limbs and his heart. Now a small cut on his hand would take days to heal and with all the birds he didn’t have days.

So he had stumbled toward the library, the one place that might hold a solution to his problem. But as he approached the ravens appeared, more than he’d ever seen before and how they hounded him.

He bewitched the Lady Essry and her entourage who he met on the way to defend him but the birds got around them easily and then one of the strings broke. That was the point where things began to grow dire. The lute could no longer control others with its music or heal and he had no spare strings to repair it. So he left them bewildered on the path and staggered on himself, blood pouring from his many wounds. The shadow hounding his every footstep, until finally, he reached the library.

“Um... How can I help you sir?” Zarat asked the man at the library doorstep, struggling to maintain his composure.

The man fell forward and slammed the doors behind him, only a few ravens came in but they were still relentless in their attacks. Outside the other ravens continued to scream.

“You... you can... stop them...” the man pointed at the ravens.

“Um... yes... well...”

Some Archivists emerged from within the library expecting to find the Lady Essry. “What is this Zarat? Where is Essry? Who is this vagabond who-?”

“We do not have time for this,” muttered the man drawing a thin sword stolen from Essry’s guards. Zarat turned to see the Archivists and was not paying attention when the sword skewered his neck, killing him instantly. He felt the darkness envelope him, drowning out the screams of the ravens as the gasps of the Archivists. But there was a booming voice far louder than the darkness beckoning him back. The voice of the amulet of the dead, the voice of Havath, and that is not a voice you ignore..

The Archivists backed away but they didn’t get very far before Zarat’s ghost rose from the crumbling corpse and took the bloody sword from his own neck. On the man’s orders it killed all three Archivists then began to chase the birds who were much faster and harder to kill. Once they had been driven off the ghost returned and awaited further orders from the man who was relishing his few moments of peace, the only ones he’d had for hours.

“What do you know of demons scribe?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Zarat replied confidently.

The man cursed and touched the amulet hanging at his neck again. The ghosts of the recently killed Archivists rose and he asked them the same question. They looked at each other blankly and discussed among themselves before coming to the conclusion that they also knew nothing.

The man cursed louder this time and swore he saw the shadow out of the corner of his eye. He was on the threshold of panicking now, this place had been his last hope. The birds outside were still screaming.

“What is it you want to know about demons?” one of the Archivists asked. “Because we do have plenty of knowledge of other subjects.”

“I want to kill a demon!” the man shouted in panic. “I am being hunted and I want to live!”

The Archivists looked taken aback. It was unlikely any of their aforementioned knowledge of other subjects, would help with that.

“We used to have an expert on these things,” one of them said, drawing the man’s desperate attention. “You could look through his things.”

So the man and his ghosts travelled up through the library. Other Archivists they met shied away from this blood covered vagabond flanked by spirits. This was an unusual sight, even in the library, but they had far more important duties to attend to as they awaited the arrival of the Lady Essry.

They found the abandoned office, all the books covered in dust and cobwebs and began to read, the ghost of Zarat keeping away the birds. The man found it difficult to concentrate though with that shadow always looming in his mind, and the books were not helpful. Each one written about a different demon or merely a collection of tales about multiple demons with absolutely no order for any of them. The few places it did mention fighting them offered contradictory information about each demon. They had only been there for minutes before the man decided it was hopeless.

One of the books said there were thousands of demons, he didn’t have time to read up on that many, and who knew where the book on Auriomauch was. He sagged back in defeat, struggling to hold back tears.

“Actually,” one of the Archivists pondered, drawing the man’s attention with fury. “There might be a way...” This Archivist was Gendu, an esoteric scholar who studied all manner of subjects to the annoyance of his peers.

“What way?” the man demanded. “Is there some weapon? Some creature that can do it?”

“No,” Gendu replied. “Or at least not to my knowledge. But there might be a place.”

“A place?” The man asked.

Realisation dawned on some of the other Archivists’ eyes. There was indeed a place that was sometimes whispered about in scholarly circles. It was known to exist, it was just frowned upon to mention it for fear of someone actually going there. The most dangerous place in the world.

“The monolith,” Gendu continued. “Anything can be killed there, anything that touches the monolith dies. I assume it would work on demons.”

The other Archivists nodded, this was something they knew about, not like these strange demon books.

“Do you know where it is?” the man asked.

“In theory,” the Archivists nodded.

“Take me there,” the man demanded and they left, into the storm of birds which was growing bigger by the minute.

The man travelled in a covered caravan while his spirits fended off the swarm outside it. The horses were attacked by the birds in order to slow it down and they had to replace them. The man tried killing one and using its spirit only to learn that the amulet did not work on animals, so they continued on, replacing their horses at each town they came to. The cart, a whirling maelstrom of screaming birds and desperate spirits.

It took multiple days to reach the monolith so the man fitfully slept, still clutching his broken lute, not having the time to stop and fix it. In his dreams he was in an empty wasteland shrouded over by a black sky. He wandered through the wasteland, all of his many tiny wounds and scratches opening up into huge gaping, festering sores. The shadow which looked like a man but was not a man stood over him and laughed. A musical discordant laugh that sounded like a bird but was not a bird. His festering wounds began to bubble and twist and then from them came ravens drenched in his blood and flesh. His heart beat began to intensify and then from his chest burst a great vulture and it led the ravens up to the black sky to join the blackness there. For the blackness was a great teeming swarm of birds, screeching and crying out for his blood. And the swarm descended.

As they went more birds would join the swarm, draining the countryside of sparrows and blackbirds and hawks and all manner of songbirds. The swarm above the caravan grew bigger and bigger and the man had to have his spirits kill more people to make more spirits to hold them off. Eventually they had passed the last town and when the horses died, torn apart by birds the man had to walk. He had healed a little bit in the caravan but birds would still often get in there so he hadn’t healed much. First he ran but he soon grew tired so he walked, still clutching his lute to him. He had tried abandoning it once, right at the start before he’d left for the library. It hadn’t changed anything so he kept it with him now. If he was going to die he’d rather have his lute with him and if he was going to live, well, he could get right back to where he’d left off.

As he walked the birds found him and all of his spirits could not hold off the swarm. They tore at his back, his arms, his face, and this time there were many many more. He could barely move without having to bat aside heavy flapping bodies, raking him with sharp claws as he hit them. And many he couldn’t hit at all, nimbly dodging around his flailing arms to bite and claw at him as he walked. Luckily his spirits stopped most of the bigger ones, the hawks and eagles and vultures, leaving him to deal with only the smallest. But the smallest were still devastating.

As he drew closer to the monolith the land around him started to die. Dead twisted trees on dead and twisted ground. Feeble scrub, hungry and desperate for water but still thick and tangled everywhere. And there was The Shadow of course. With the birds and his arms obscuring his vision he almost couldn’t see it but it was always there. Under a tree or ahead, alone, on the path. Sometimes right behind him reaching for his neck. But it never quite touched him, he wasn’t sure why. He did not know the ways of gods and demons.

The monolith was not as impressive as he had expected, it was simply a large thin rock about ten or so metres tall, surrounded by a large ring of smaller rocks. There were no trees in the ring, it was empty and as soon as he entered it the birds let him be. They flew away to land menacingly on the many dead trees and branches that looked in on him. The man and his spirits filled the circle, keeping a safe distance from the monolith at its centre. The man strayed as close as he dared to it and the spirits ringed around him, facing the birds.

The man walked up to the rock and looked at it, it looked disappointingly normal. He ordered one of his spirits to come to him. The spirit was an old man who had worked in a forge in one of the villages. The man had never bothered to learn his name.

“Touch the rock,” he demanded.

The spirit didn’t want to do that. Even as a humble blacksmith he knew there was something wrong with that rock, no matter how ordinary it looked. But the voice of Havath compelled him. He touched the rock, and he was pulled in. Like air being sucked in by a breath he disappeared into the rock without a trace.

The man frowned, so it did work. Now all he needed to do was get The Shadow to touch the rock. He sat down and began to think of a plan.

Crossing between the realms takes a long time and a lot of magic but Auriomauch was doing it anyway. The man and his spirits had to wait a few more days though. The spirits brought water from a nearby stream and managed to kill a few birds which the man cooked and ate. It wasn’t the life he wanted but he was perfectly happy to live like that than not live at all. So he waited. And on the fifth day of waiting, came Auriomauch.

No longer a shadow he was now whole. In the shape of a man but made of the bones of birds, skulls and wing bones and ribs and claws all woven and meshed together into the shape of a man with a huge ibis skull for a head. And he was wrapped in a thick cloak of black feathers that flaked off behind him as he walked and slowly drifted into the air, covering the sky like ash from a volcano. The man stood behind his spirits and the spirits rallied before him, facing this demon as it walked down the path toward them. Auriomauch was big, much bigger than a human, about half as tall as the monolith. As he drew closer it was clear that the ibis skull was not from any ordinary bird, the man was glad he hadn’t had to face anything that big on his journey.

He planned to have Auriomauch attack him and as he did the spirits would grab him and redirect him into the monolith. It was risky but he hadn’t been able to think of anything better and it seemed everything was a risk at this point.

The demon reached the edge of the circle and flung its feathered cloak wide, sweeping a bony arm across the circle, and with one sweep it banished all the spirits. The man’s eyes went wide, that had been his only plan.

The birds began to sing, thousands of them in discordant shrieking as Auriomauch stepped across the circle. The man backed away, then turned and ran, dropping the lute behind him, he had nothing anymore, no lute no spirits, no magic. And he was facing down a god who had come all the way to this world specifically to kill him. Tears began to pour down his face as he stumbled and staggered around the monolith, staying as close as possible to it.

Auriomauch walked closer slowly, seemingly in no hurry to catch up with him. The man peered around the monolith and saw the huge clawed bird feet made of bones crunching down onto the earth. He saw one crunch down onto his lute, shattering it into a thousand pieces. He staggered back, no longer trying to stay close to the monolith, just trying to get away. The god stepped around the rock and towered over him, he tripped and fell to the ground, looking back up at the towering creature in front of the towering monolith. The birds sung even louder, drowning out any chance he had to think or act. The terrifying skull stared down at him with empty eyes. The huge clawed hand raised up to end his miserable life. He clutched the amulet and panic filling his heart instinctively threw it.

It hit Auriomauch in the chest, clattering against the meshed web of bones there. And suddenly the spirits of all the creatures the god had killed appeared. There were thousands of them, hundreds of thousands. They filled the circle, they filled the forest, they filled the sky. Horrible demonic monsters floating above them in spirit form, legions and legions of dead humans or creatures that looked like humans filling the forest, and other gods like him, staring back at him from beyond death.

The amulet bounced off his chest and fell and all the spirits disappeared but their appearance took the god by surprise and he stepped back. His feet took the form of bird claws and bird claws have a claw pointing backward. The demon stepped back on his long legs and his back claw scraped the very edge of the monolith. He jerked to a stop. His foot disappeared into the rock, then his leg. He flailed with great raking claws and the man got up and ran.

His heart pounding in his chest, tears still filling his eyes, he stumbled toward the edge of the circle. But he’d done it, he’d won. He’d-

One last flail of the long claws of Auriomauch caught him. Wrapping around him and raking across his face. He spun with the claws and slammed into the dead dusty ground, crying in pain as blood dripped into his mouth, his nose, his eyes. He turned and saw through the blood the last trace of the god disappear into the monolith. All was still.

The man writhed in pain on the ground for a long time, his face torn to bloody ribbons by the god’s claws. But eventually he picked himself up, took the amulet and walked away. The birds had stopped singing.

Mist descends upon the barren land about the monolith. The birds are gone now, the man is gone now, there is nobody left, except the god writhing inside. Floating through the mist is a woman, dead, with eyes rotted away. She carries with her chains, chains that disappear into the mist behind her, fading away as they stretch back to her realm. She reaches the monolith and wraps the chains around her, moving slowly as though underwater in her mist. Once the chains are secure she reaches into the monolith and touches it with a finger. She is instantly jerked forward but the chains snap taught and hold behind her. She doesn’t show it on her dead face but she is in pain, extreme pain.

She struggles, torn between the chains and the monolith, her arm moving slowly about as it searches the rock. Then she finds what she is looking for and grips it. Then she begins to pull. She digs her feet into the ground and pulls against the grip of the monolith. She flicks one of the chains and something back in her realm begins to pull as well. Together, inch by painstaking inch, they drag her arm out of the monolith. Behind her arm comes her hand and it is holding the bony claw of the bird god. Slowly but surely they drag him from the rock, eventually he can get his feet onto the ground as well and he begins to help them pull.

The rock roars in a silent roar that only they can hear as its prisoner is released. But he is not truly released, not fully.

Auriomauch sags to the ground in the circle, covering himself in his cloak of feathers. He has been defeated by a mortal, how embarrassing.

The demons do not speak to each other as humans do but they convey information in their own way. Through thoughts and feelings in the mist.

“You are still bound to the monolith,” Malafrien conveys to Auriomauch. “You cannot leave the circle now.”

Auriomauch looks up at her, he conveys acknowledgement. Then he asks, “Will you stay with me?”