Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Demons — Demon who joined your adventuring party as an "elf". Thankfully none of you had seen an elf before
"Are you alright, Bael?"
"Fine, thank you." Baelammanoth smiles glassily. "Merely...feeling my condition today, somewhat."
He's stayed with these people too long. You can write off a lot with a limp, "Oh, you know, it's the elven predisposition to weak constitution," among well-intentioned folk who've never met an elf, but he should have parted ways with them when their wanderings turned away from busy towns to a string of villages, heading slowly in the direction of the greatwoods.
He liked them, was the trouble. He'd lied to himself: that he'd last, that they'd reach somewhere sufficiently populated before his body failed. That heading towards the greatwoods wasn't such a problem; that he'd divest from them before they met an elf, or anyone who knew elves, or anyone familiar with the spawning-woods of the False Elves.
"You're looking pale," says the cleric, sympathetically. "Are you sure there's nothing I can do for you?"
He looks pale because his body's finally shutting down. You can only keep them going so long, and he's pushing it; needs a town, needs somewhere with people, people who won't immediately be missed. People he doesn't care about.
Because he's got needs, and if this body altogether dies before he finds someone, his true body's going to run on instinct and make the choice for him. The cleric with her crinkled smile and terrible singing. The swordsman, with his babyfaced air of innocence and ruthless willingness to use it on small-stakes tavern gamblers and barmaids alike.
He shudders.
"I'm fine," he says, and forces blue-tinged lips to sluggishly smile.
At least the first time, he hadn't known any better, nothing more than an insensate puffball of a thing, swelling in the forest leaves. Knocked by a booted foot, a protoplasmic mass launched faceward by trapped gas, acidic radula scooping off the face and selectively eating the brain; sealing and smoothing over the missing front of the head with perfect mimicry, becoming sensate in the merger with the raddled and dying brain tissues, instinctively forcing necromantic processes into the body to keep it alive. To put it under control.
And in the necrosymbiosis, to be a new person.
You can blame so much inability to human correctly on being an elf, so long as you stay far away from real ones. But the body doesn't last for ever. Bael needs — and this time, understands what he's going to do. He's going to ambush somebody. He's going to eat someone's face. He's going to kill them — understanding it, he's going to murder them, steal their body and puppet it away.
Destroy the old one, somehow, because leaving empty-faced necromantic doll-corpses lying around when you abandon them is a good way to rip apart entire communities with terrified paranoia, not to mention the risk of actually getting caught.
"I'm fine," he repeats, quietly. "Looking forward to sleeping in a real bed, next time we stop somewhere with one."
He can't help what he is.
Better, at least, it's a stranger.