Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Demons — Demon who once found you, half-dead and helpless, to seal a pact that now must be honored
They say that the Warlady's father, fearing the waning of his power, summoned demons to parlay over her sleeping-mat when she was ten years old, and he agreed to decades more of unbested rule in return for casting her to the very lowest floor of the Many-Terraced Chasm, the home of the King-Demons, for her to be devoured.
They say that on the lowest floor of the home of demons, the Warlady, a girl of ten years, met with a terrible King-Demon, and that they fought, fist and foot, to the defeat; and that, taking the submitted King-Demon in hand as the demon-spear Skalakk, the Warlady set her foot upon the stair to the next highest of the Chasm's terraces.
This they say.
One year and one day later, on the highest terrace of the Chasm, the Warlady stepped over the steaming corpse of the Gatekeeper-Demon to put her foot to the stairs leading to the great door of the home of demons, her back to mountains of demon bodies and lakes of demon blood, spear in hand, and left the Chasm for the mortal world.
Hearing of her return — and with her, the inevitable coming-due of his ruined bargain — her father fielded his army to prevent her approach to her childhood home. Spear in hand, she cut through it like harvest stalks before the farmer, slew him, and ascended the throne.
This they say.
Fierce and bright she ruled, an unparalleled force. Nations from the wind's corners put their necks beneath her sandal; and among them, a far land sent its fairest, a jewelled princess, who found a tender place within the Warlady's heart permitted to no other, and they sat together as together the sun and moon rule the sky.
They say that Skalakk, endlessly patient and cunning in the way of King-Demons, sat in patience, the weapon in the Warlady's fist, whispering a slow drip of cold poison into her. And when at last it clouded her heart, the Warlady walked out alone upon the snows of the Great Mountain below which she kept her throne, and kept vigil beneath the staring sky; and she returned with the heart frozen within her, sealed into a cask of demon ice, and she drove her beloved from her, and the demon Skalakk laughed upon her hand in the form of a great carrion bird.
This they say.
Dark and bird-fleet, the King-Demon walks over the Great Mountain, black and shining. The snow is falling with the thickness of tree-blossom, gaps yet between the soft, cold smudges of it. The wind whisks it into sucking whirlpools and ungentle buffets.
"My lady," the demon says, to the turned back of the woman seated upon a rock. "Come down from the mountain."
"No," the Warlady says through blueing lips, looking out over the empty distance.
"My lady," the King-Demon says. "We made a pact, upon the floor of the Many-Terraced Chasm. Come down from the mountain."
"There was a sun inside my chest," the Warlady says. "And now it is gone out. There is only the cold dark inside me, and I have climbed the mountain to find the cold outside me. Soon it will be dark, and between the two cold darknesses, my body, too, will cool, and I will sleep and suffer no more."
"We made a pact," the King-Demon says, and walks around the Warlady, in a dark and coiling seeming of vines and feathers and naked flesh, and the Warlady curses.
"Leave me," she says.
"No," the King-Demon says, and sets one knee to the snow before her, bows its head. "Come down from the mountain."
"She asked me what I plan to do about the king in the east," the Warlady says. "And I told her: I plan to discuss peace with him. That I am not a bottomless thirst for blood given flesh, that it is too far, would cost too dear to take his land and then again to hold it. And she — laughed at me, when she understood I meant it, and turned scorn on me, and said what is the point of being the whore concubine of the most ferocious animal in the world, if not for the endless bloody glories she covers me in?"
The King-Demon is silent.
"I thought myself loved," the Warlady says, barely words, so soft they are. "One person in the world, I was loved."
"You are loved," the King-Demon says.
"I am not," the Warlady says. "I am no more than a coin to buy conquest with, as I was to my father."
"You are loved," the King-Demon says.
"Oh? Can you taste the truth inside human hearts?" the Warlady says sourly.
"No."
"Then how would you know, any better than I did? She does not love me."
"You are loved," the King-Demon says.
"You don't know what's inside human hearts."
"No." The King-Demon lifts its gaze. "So what heart do I know, Warlady?"
"Is this a demon riddle?" She snorts a little. "Oh...mine, then, I suppose. To my father I was a coin, to my beloved I was a coin, I should find love in myself for myself, is that the lesson? To scorn the value they put on me, and set my own."
"If I say yes," the King-Demon says, "will you come down from the mountain?"
"Are you a monk now," the Warlady says. "It sounds very like the solemn nodding a monk would do, promising you it's all very deep."
"No," the King-Demon says. "I am no monk. We made a pact."
A figure as tall and dark as the night stands over the broken bones and tears of a child, fallen among the rocks of the lowest terrace of the Chasm, where the King-Demons live.
"What will you do for me?" says one; "Anything," the other.
And so the demon pours itself inside of the child, binds her bones and bleeding from the inside; and wraps itself around the outside of her, as armour; and places itself in her hand, as a spear, and they begin the long journey out.
"I don't want to see her," the Warlady says.
"Then she will leave," the King-Demon says, and spins itself around the outside of the Warlady to hold close the heat of her body; sinks under her skin to ease stiffened joints and stir sluggish blood; and the Warlady — slowly and resentfully, snow in her hair, numb-fingered — comes down from the mountain.
The foreigner princess spits curses at the King-Demon's face, in its courtly seeming; a girl-thing, less tall and less imposing than the Warlady or her bride, paler than any living person, thinner than any living person, clad in drapes of shadow and jewels of dew.
"The Warlady desires to never see your face again," the King-Demon says, placid and servile in tone, as this seeming always is, and the princess catches its wrist in a way that might be painful, were it the too-slender human servant it seems.
"This is your doing," the princess hisses into its face.
"The Warlady did not specify how this was to be achieved," the King-Demon replies, and meets the princess's gaze for the first time since she stepped into the Warlady's court. Its eyes are like bottomless wells, stained black by night so that it is impossible to tell whether water or endless blood lies wetly below. "I send you to exile in case one day, in her love, she asks where you are, and I do not disappoint her by saying: destroyed."
"Love," the princess breathes, venomous. "As if there's room for love in her, except for you—" and the King-Demon laughs, then, on and on without pause for breath, in a bitter noise like the screaming recrimination of many crows, until the princess flees its presence.