The Damned Demon - Chapter 927

Chapter 927: I Am Home

The gate was wrong.

It wasn’t just the shape of it—an arch that curved too sharply at the crown, like a grin cutting into the stone of the Seventh Floor. It wasn’t the color—black that wasn’t black, but a swallowing absence that drank the torchlight and gave nothing back. It was the feeling it put in Asher’s bones: the old shiver that comes when the body understands it’s standing at the lip of something that wasn’t made for mortals.

The Seventh Floor had always been a legend inside the Tower of Hell, but this door didn’t belong to any legend he’d heard. No guards. No monsters. No puzzle to pay for passage. Just a slab of air torn open and told to be a door.

Asher stepped closer. The glyphs around the jamb looked carved and yet freshly bleeding—symbols he half-recognized from other lives, other bodies. They writhed if looked at too long. He ran a thumb over his fingers and made himself breathe slow. The moat’s heat from outside didn’t reach here; the corridor felt like a throat holding its breath. Duncan’s last words still hung in his skull like a bell after it’s struck: Enter. Walk through. You’ll find them where you need to be.

He should have felt relief. He didn’t.

He felt the old dread, not of death but of beginning: starting over, starting from the bottom, starting with empty hands while the world sharpened knives and called it fate. What if he really did have to climb again as a weak demon with zero mana and a name nobody respected?

What if they looked at him with those wary, first-meeting eyes—Rowena, Isola, Ceti—and he could not earn their trust without cutting corners, without manipulating pieces he had sworn not to move this time? He saw a flicker of his daughter’s small smile and felt his insides twist; he would not see her again until he won Rowena’s heart all over. Could he do that without breaking himself in half?

And then there was of course Aira…He can still save her and reunite with his son before he can get further miserable.

But this was the price for life. A small price next to ashes.

He reached up and palmed the arch. Cold sank through his skin and slid into his wrist like a needle. Asher exhaled once. Then he stepped through.

For a breath there was nothing but sensation—the tight, thin feeling of being pulled through a space not meant to fit him. A soundless pressure flattened him along a direction his body had never learned in any life. Gravity forgot which way it owed him. And then the world snapped into place.

Snow hit his cheeks. Air rushed in raw and clean, smelling like iron and smoke. The sky hung heavy and low, thick with clouds, the kind that promise to bury a land and keep promises. Snowflakes brushed his face, clung to the lashes of his new eyes.

He knew this place.

The ground was a brawl of white and dark red. Blood had pooled and run in thin, restless streams across the crusted snow, threading through footprints, soaking broken planks from a small wooden structure caved in on itself nearby. Two demon bodies lay twisted; a third had fallen face-down by a drift. The cold made the gore look tart and vivid.

Asher blinked hard, heart banging once against his ribs with something like recognition and grief. This was where it had begun last time—where he had woken as a night elf in a world that hated him, blood steam rising from strangers he didn’t love, and Hunters playing at glory with dull blades.

And then a battle cry cracked the air.

Footsteps. Fast. Breath huffing in throats that hadn’t learned how to breathe around fear. The snow gave under boots behind him, and before he could fully pivot, cold metal slammed against his back with a clang that didn’t even cause a dent in his skin.

It didn’t cut. It didn’t even bruise. The force of the strike bled out across his spine and went nowhere—as if he were a mountain and the weapon had mistaken him for flesh.

“YARGH!”

The impact shuddered up through the attacker’s arm; the young man with the dagger shrieked as his wrist popped and his fingers sprang open. The cheap iron blade snapped into two bright, useless pieces and skittered across the snow.

Asher turned.

Three young Hunters stood there, faces raw with cold and fear. They were exactly as he remembered them: shoddy armor strapped over borrowed bravado, the hunter bands on their arms a touch too new, a touch too tight. The bulkier one had thrown the strike and now clutched his trembling wrist, eyes wet and wide. Another—scrawny, mouth open—stared at the broken dagger in a stunned silence that looked like prayer. The third—a young woman whose giggle had sounded like cruelty last time—took one step back and swallowed.

Asher followed their gaze down to the jagged metal at his feet. He hadn’t moved. Hadn’t summoned a flame. His back didn’t even sting.

Relief hit him so hard his knees almost loosened. He kept his face steady anyway. Inside, he laughed—a short, breathless thing. He had retained his powers and strength!

The immortality clawed its way up through his bones and looked around like a wolf returning to its den. He was not trapped under a mortal ceiling now. He would not have to pretend to be small.

He was now like a god to these people here.

He lifted his face and looked the young Hunters over. They looked back with the stare of people who had just swung at a thunderstorm and been surprised the thunder didn’t flinch.

“Run,” Asher said. Not a snarl. Not a roar. Just a tone that belonged to men who didn’t repeat themselves.

The bulky one hesitated—pride doing what pride does. Asher let his new dark halo of sight show him the path where that pride ended: a throat nicked by panic, blood on snow, a promise of vengeance that would never matter. He tipped his chin a fraction.

“R-Run!!” Another one of them shouted in sheer terror.

They ran. They didn’t look back. The scrawny one tripped at the edge of the clearing, caught himself with both palms, scrabbled upright, and sprinted hard enough to leave pieces of his nerve in the air behind him.

Asher scoffed as he watched them go until their footsteps blended into wind. Then he stood there in the snow and let the relief steady into something usable. He rolled a shoulder, felt nothing but competence. He bent, picked up the broken dagger, and rolled it between his fingers. Once, that blade had been trouble. Now it was a child’s toy left in the grownups’ room. He set it on a chunk of splintered timber and let it be.

Now that he was still an immortal…he was much less worried about the path forward.

Voices filtered in from beyond the drift. Marching—five of them by the rhythm—and the stamp of boots that knew this cold. Asher turned to find their approach already lined up with the memory in his head.

The guards—skin dark as pitch, eyes with big pale pupils that locked onto him—crunched into view through the snow.

“There he is!” one said, relief bleeding into his voice before he could throttle it back.

“Phew,” another muttered, rolling tension out of his shoulders. “Told you he wouldn’t get far.”

“Look at this mess,” a third said, softer, eyes touching on bodies and blood. “Fucking Hunters.”

Asher did not speak. He kept his face empty in the way he had learned made men underestimate him. Last time he had asked questions too soon, given them leverage without meaning to. This time, he let the shape of the scene carry itself.

They circled him, not hostile but uncertain—like men who had been sent to fetch a valuable, fragile thing and found it standing up on its own. One of them looked him head to toe and glanced back at the others, a silent question about the lack of wounds he dared not voice.

“Your Majesty,” the nearest guard said, words rehearsed and a touch stiff. “Please come with us. We’ll get you to safety.”

Asher lifelessly stared and stepped into the space they opened, not wanting to reveal himself yet. He did not look at the bodies again. He did not look back toward where the Hunters had fled. He walked where they directed him, the snow swallowing the sound of their boots.

They said little on the way; nerves made men quiet. He kept his mouth closed and let the world answer his questions. The path threaded through a stand of leafless trees and down a slope into a road cut hard as bone by years of traveling feet. The guards moved in the pattern of routine—one ahead, two at flanks, two at Asher’s shoulders. Every so often one cut a glance sideways to confirm he was still there, as if expecting him to wander off the way rumors say he had before.

They crested a hill, and the carriage came into view—dark wood and iron, harnessed to demon horses with eyes like smoldering coals. Heat rose from their nostrils in patient clouds.

Beside the carriage stood a woman that made Asher’s heart skip a beat.

She was tall and carved for battle—silhouette clean and uncompromising beneath a silver breastplate that fit like the idea of armor more than metal. The plate left her shoulders bare, collarbones etched like the first lines of a song; below it, her stomach was a flat length of disciplined muscle broken only by the subtle map of a six-pack sculpted to perfection.

The chausses she wore hugged long, powerful legs and left the upper curves of her thighs visible in a way that would have been scandal if not for the way she carried herself—the way she made the armor look like a threat and not an invitation. Her skin was a deep red that looked warm even in snow. Her hair—dark red, cut with deliberate bangs—framed a face that would have turned heads in any court, only to shame those heads down with the look in her eyes. Those eyes were a dark, glimmering blue, piercing and impatient.

She was generously built, her breastplate straining in a way that would have been a distraction for a lesser soldier or a lesser man. But Asher felt only relief, like cool water after fire. The sight of her alive made something unclench in his chest.

“Ceti,” he breathed, unable to stop himself, the name leaving him warm. It wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be.

Her head snapped, eyes narrowing. The guards stiffened behind him.

“You… can speak?” one of them blurted before he remembered himself.

“How…” Ceti’s eyes widened in shock as well.

But then she furrowed her brows, “Do you know your name, Your Majesty?” she asked, voice flat and firm. She didn’t move toward him. She didn’t move away. She measured him the way she measured incoming arrows—by trajectory and threat.

Asher let himself smile, small and unguarded in a way he had not allowed in too long. He held her gaze, let the warmth he felt actually reach his eyes. “I do,” he said, evenly. “And I know yours, Ceti.” He breathed in, slow, and added—gentler than the words deserved to be said aloud, “I can’t say enough how… glad I am to see you.”

A flicker. It wasn’t much—just the smallest seam opening between composure and surprise—but he saw it. Color rose, an almost imperceptible warmth under the red of her skin. Her eyes broke from his for an instant and came back harder.

“Don’t babble nonsense,” she snapped, perhaps a shade sharper than she’d intended. “Address me properly as Lady Ceti—and keep your distance unless told otherwise. Into the carriage. Now.” She couldn’t understand why she lost herself for a second in the eyes of this useless cripple.

Asher’s smile tipped wider at the edges. He dipped his head with a deference that didn’t feel false and stepped up into the carriage. She followed, seating herself opposite with a precision that said she had no intention of being comfortable in his presence.

The door shut, the horses started, and the motion of the carriage smoothed into a steady roll. Inside, the world narrowed to wood creak, harness jingle, and the contained heat of two bodies cohabiting a small space where the air remembered being an argument.

Asher watched her. Not obvious—he knew better than to stare—but he didn’t hide it either. He let his gaze be what it was: relieved, a touch elated, the kind of look a man gives a sunrise after a night he almost didn’t live through.

Ceti felt it. She pretended not to for a full minute. Then she turned her head toward the window and let the landscape take the brunt of her discomfort. Her jaw worked once. “Stop staring unless you don’t want your eyes,” she said at last, the words too calm to be relaxed.

“Apologies,” Asher said, meaning it and not meaning it at once. “It’s just—” He stopped himself before he said you were dead. Instead he settled on, “—it’s good to be awake.”

Her eyes cut back to him, suspicious. “So you remember things now,” she said. “What? A convenient miracle?”

“Something like that,” he said, and left it there.

She huffed—annoyance or acceptance, hard to tell—and turned away again. Questions moved behind her eyes like fish under ice; he could see them schooling there, then flattening when they hit her discipline. She didn’t ask them. He didn’t push. The carriage hummed along, and between them lay all the words that could not yet be said.

By the time the castle’s silhouette knifed into the sky, the familiar dread and affection had braided together in Asher’s ribs. The fortress rose in the color of dried blood, a hundred miles of architecture that wanted the world to know what it could survive. Towers speared the sky; banners moved in stiff, resentful wind. The drawbridge lay like a tongue over the moat’s steam, and the guards who lined the approach were not the uncertain village men from before. These were soldiers—eyes forward, armor black and immaculate, spears held at exact angles only long memory can teach.

The carriage rolled to a halt. Ceti stepped down first, every inch the Battlemaster absorbing her kingdom’s gaze. Asher followed. For just a heartbeat, he let himself simply look: the stone, the shadow, the weight of the place that—by law and luck—called him consort.

They went inside, footsteps echoing off high arches. Servants and stewards—demons of a dozen races—paused to bow deeply as Ceti passed.

“Welcome back, Battlemaster.”

“Welcome back, Battlemaster.”

She absorbed it without acknowledgment beyond the bare nod, a queen’s right hand who had learned that prestige is a sheath that keeps a blade from cutting its owner. Asher walked a half-pace behind, silent, storing away looks and whispers.

They did not have to go far to find the man who had been waiting for a chance to measure him.

“Ceti,” came the voice, sharply pitched to carry. “Where did you find him?”

Asher turned to see the vampire he remembered: tall, corpse-pale, mustache groomed like a line of ink, dark red eyes that made judgment a hobby. Seron—uncle to the Queen, advisor, a man who believed worry made him necessary. Black-armored vampires flanked him in tidy columns, the smell of oiled metal and old blood clinging to them like cologne.

Ceti bowed. “Your Highness, in a small village near the outer ring. Hunters had attacked. We arrived to find… aftermath. We brought him directly as ordered.”

Seron’s eyes slid to Asher and stuck there. Contempt was easy for him; it fit him like an old coat. “Convenient,” he said, letting the syllables chime off stone. “We turn the realm upside down in search, lose men in the process, and he strolls back without a scratch. My poor niece.”

Asher met that look, and this time he did not keep his face stone. He smiled. Not provocation. Not submission. Just a small, human curve of the mouth one might give a neighbor on a morning that promises rain. “It’s good to see you too,” he said.

For a moment—just a blink—Seron’s composure slipped. He had been prepared for resistance or stupidity or silence. Politeness wrong-footed him. His eyes sharpened. “You… can speak,” he said, as if the words tasted odd.

Ceti cut in, brisk, efficient. “He can, Your Highness. It began today. I verified he’s not compromised.”

Seron’s mouth tightened. “We’ll see what I verify,” he started, the line of armored men behind him tensing by habit at the tone.

Asher didn’t bother to answer. He didn’t need to. The castle itself decided what happened next.

A voice, cool and clean, cut across the hall from the stair.

“What is going on here?”

Silence fell as if dropped from height. Everyone kneeling remembered why their knees knew how to bend. Boots scuffed stone as men went to the floor all along the hall. Ceti bowed low without being asked. Seron dipped, graceful and resentful in the same breath.

Asher stood. Not out of arrogance. Out of astonishment and something much deeper.

She descended the steps with a grace that didn’t advertise itself. The dress she wore was a thing of black velvet that loved her body without asking for praise—shoulders bare, collarbones clean lines, the neckline a slow plunge that revealed the promise of strength and softness both.

The waist drew tight, a bow resting against her belly, and below that the skirt gathered and fell to just above her ankles, moving like water that had learned to be silk. Her skin was pale in the way of moonlight on white stone, unblemished, almost glowing in the torchlit hall. Her eyes—hazelnut in shape, but lit from within by a deep, bright crimson—saw everything and conceded nothing. Her hair fell like night itself, long and straight, swinging as she walked.

Rowena. The Demon Queen. Ruler. Wife in name, in law, in a future that had broken and been pieced back together by stubborn hands.

She saw him. It hit her face like a step missed in the dark—surprise opening her lips before she closed them again. “Asher?” she said, the question not in doubt but in wonder.

He could have chosen a thousand words. He chose only one of the oldest ones he had for her. It loosened in his chest as if kept there too long.

“Rona,” he said with a fragile smile, voice soft and hoarse with happiness and relief he didn’t bother to hide. His eyes burned and didn’t care who saw.

“I’m home.”

———

THE END

Finally, The Damned Demon comes to an end, my dear readers. This has been a very long journey and I can’t express enough how thankful and grateful I am to have you readers beside me as I wrote these chapters.

I did find it hard to write chapters most of the time due to my hectic schedule but because of you guys, I was able to push through and finally complete this novel. I didn’t want to disappoint any of you by letting this remain unfinished like my other novels.

That is why I promised myself to see this through until the end. And so, we finally reached the end of the line.

Thank you to all of you again for supporting this novel and keeping Asher company throughout his difficult journey 🙂