Chapter 1

Part C

Samael sat on the floor, distractedly rubbing the belly of a large blue wolf who laid petrified on its back, legs up in the air, eyes full of fear and not daring to move a muscle. She was back in her human form and laughing awkwardly. “Hahahaha. I almost messed up.” Lucifer had warned her against letting her devilish aura slip out while she was in the Midworld. But she had slipped up almost instantly.

Midworld denizens, he had told her, were not fond of demons. He had not been particular as to why. Uncharacteristically, Gabriel had declined to elaborate further, which was weird, since the angel usually jumped at every opportunity to turn even the most boring, mundane subject into a lecture. Here, she had merely reiterated Samael should tell no one what she was, where she was from, or who her relatives were.

She had been particularly insistent upon that last point.

Her gaze lost in the stars, Samael mulled over their advice. Her musing ended up with a helpless shrug. “Oh, well… It’ll work out… probably. What do you think, Slei?” The donkey blew air between his lips and returned to munching on a thorny bush. “Right.”

What she really would have liked to know was how long she was supposed to stay in the Midworld. Devil of a few words, as usual, her father had specified no timeframe. He had called it a training trip, told her he would come to pick her up when he deemed she had succeeded, then given her barely any time to pack before he threw her into a portal along with Slei.

Those actions in themselves were not uncommon. Lucifer did stuff like that all the time. He wanted his daughter to be strong and to think quickly on her feet, whether she was suddenly thrown in a lightless underground labyrinth crawling with giant poisonous bugs, thrown in a sea of boiling tar in the middle of a shoal of hungry fishes, or thrown in the sky through storm clouds within the territory of a flock of flesh-hungry rock birds.

That he had allowed her to pack at all, she believed, was a testament to how difficult he expected the current task to turn out.

On all previous occasions, however, Samael had been sent to some remote region of Tartarus, from which she could always manage to find her way back. Here, lost in the woods of the Midworld, she had no clue how to return. Portals were a subject her aunt had only touched upon, mostly teaching Samael the basics of how to sense them. Some monsters in Tartarus used short-distance teleportation to sneak on their prey, so it had been useful knowledge.

“Sooo… What do I do now?” Samael pondered out loud. She was not in immediate danger, and she had no way of going home, so she found herself at a bit of a loss. Lucifer had said he would come to fetch her, so she reasoned finding a portal was not the goal here.

Samael scrunched her brows, thinking very hard about what might be supposed to accomplish. She quickly groaned in frustration. Questioning her father’s plans was not an activity she had much practise in. Lucifer’s expectations for her were usually pretty straightforward: “kill this”, “don’t die”, or a combination of the two.

Already, she could feel her brain heating up and a headache looming. “Think… think… think…” What did she know?

Lucifer and Gabriel had both warned her against revealing her nature to the Midworld people. In fact, her aunt had taught Samael quite a few things about mortals over the years.

So they probably expected her to encounter people.

But here, there was no one nearby that she could see. The wolf likely did not count.

“So… I should… go looking for them! Hahahaha!” Letting out a relieved sigh, she laughed, happy to have figured out her next course of action.

She was actually getting excited now. Her father and aunt had never allowed her to meet other demons, so the idea of meeting someone new was extraordinarily novel and enticing. “Alright! Let’s find some people! Whooohooo!” Jumping to her feet, she enthusiastically took off into the forest.

Slei took another bite of his bush.

The wood crunched between his teeth.

Samael ran back into the small clearing at full speed, skidding to a halt right where she had started a moment ago. Her gaze found the donkey. “Slei. How do I find people?” His blank stare conveyed all she needed to know about his thoughts on the matter. Samael laughed awkwardly and rubbed her forehead. “Right. You wouldn’t know either… Hmmm…”

Her gaze thoughtfully panned around. It fell on the dyrewolf, who had been silently tiptoeing away from the abnormal pair. Samael’s eyes narrowed. “Hey… you.”

With a scared yap, the wolf leapt forwards. Before it could even reach the nearest shrub, an iron grip wrapped around its tail and pulled the terrified, whining beast backwards. Its claws left deep furrows into the humus in a vain attempt at resisting the inexorable pull. A face moved into its sight—a face so dark it disappeared in the night, leaving only a pair of glowing amber eyes and a grinning mouth.

“Hey, do you know where I can find people?”

* * *

Meanwhile, in Tartarus.

“YOU DID NOT TELL HER?!?!” A furious Gabriel stood towering over a seated Lucifer. She had just come back from dealing with urgent business in Elysium—the angels’ equivalent of Tartarus—and found the imposing devil with his face in his hands and bawling tears of black tar.

“Waaaaaah! I couldn’t tell my little sour plump I was sending her away to the Midworld fore-e-e-VERRRRRR!! Waaaaah-aaah-aah-aah! Come back, murder kitten! Daddy doesn’t hate you-u-u-u-uuu! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!”

Gabriel slowly dragged her hand over her perfect angelic face—right now looking very tired. “You idiotic father-daughter pair… If I weren’t immortal, you two would be the death of me!”

“Waaaaaaahaaaaaah! My bloodthirsty hellpuppy!”

“And stop whining!!” Her fist landed on Lucifer's head with enough force to topple a mountain. The distraught devil only bobbed his head slightly and cried harder.

Unnoticed by the two preoccupied primordial beings, a pair of star-filled, solid dark purple eyes—like a violet night sky—slinked away from its peeping spot and vanished into the shadows.

* * * * *