Demons are a selfish race. We don’t care much for others. The war was probably our fault, humans are fun to manipulate after all. Heaven and its angels have always promoted themselves as brave protectors, but they’re just as bad as demons in the eyes of the humans they swear to protect.

          Where angels descend, humans die. By demonic hands obviously, but correlation and other nonsense. Personally, I never went out of my way to hunt humans, they’re too weak to be fun to kill. Angels on the other hand, if killing a human would lure out an angel, I’d do it. When I was younger, that was my favorite pastime.

          Old age catches up to us all though. I never had a proper mate. All the females were too annoying and the brats they birthed either died at war or by my own hands. I only had one son, the rest were girls that were as bad or worse than their mothers and killed humans without cause or reason, not even just for fun.

          Demons are a selfish race, which means we cannot stand to have threats to our survival. Wanton killing caused humans and angels both to attack at full force instead of the half-assed mock battles were only minor injuries happen, like maiming. Brats that kill for the sake of killing had to be put down.

          That General knows that too. She saved me the effort of killing my son for me after all. I still remember her children, both had her gold eyes and each put up one hell of a fight.

          They’re part of the reason I grew tired of it.

          I didn’t fight when the brat who calls himself king told me to retire; to be honest I haven’t fought in years. I may be old, but the only mark time has left on my body is the abyss black hair that flows to the ground. Bone White and I both probably look the same as we did almost 2,000 years ago but with different hair colors.

          I don’t know why this kid, over a century younger than me, decided to follow me around. Calling her a kid might be off since she’s probably the closest living being to my age. Either way, for a race that doesn’t care about others, it's rather nice to have someone around. For now at least. Angels let down their guard easy enough, I could just ditch or get rid of her when I got bored.

          “Put that pawn back, that's not how they move." She pointed back to were it started as I tried to smash her pawn on the other side of the map.

          “Which one moves forward again?” I rocked the piece on the board, it was hard to set up a plan when she kept throwing bombs in my way.

          “Castles move straight forward like you’re trying; pawns only move one space.” she tapped the square right in front of it, a perpetual smile still on her face. It hadn't faltered from the moment we met.

          “Hm, your turn. Do whatever you want, and try to smash my piece with force. ”

          “So I could lob this at your face and have zero repercussions?” Her face brightened, showing a marked difference between that phony smile and a real one.

          “…you can try.” I leaned back, half-hoping she would, only to be disappointed. 

          “Tch- " she set the half broken piece back down, "this doesn’t make sense to me, if there aren’t rules how can you win? Feels like this could devolve into just a normal fight.”

          “A fight with chess pieces.” I helpfully chimed in. She rolled her eyes at me and I couldn’t help but feel amused. 

          “How about this, we have enough rules to have a goal you can win, but not so many as to make it boring?” She tapped her finger on the pawn and smiled slightly.

          “…Sounds like that could actually be fun.” Surprise sunk in as I looked at her vaguely evil expression.

          “Which rules do we want to keep?”

          “Capture the king? No, capturing the queen seems more fun since it can actually move. A running target is far more fun than a rooted one.”

          “Kings can…oh never mind. Should we keep the movement patterns? I don’t like how knights move so let’s change that.”

          “Good idea. Horses only move 3 spaces while entire castles run across the map? Ridiculous.”

          “How would a castle even move? Pick it up and throw it?”

          We both paused while we pictured that image. The only real problem I could see with that is keeping it from falling apart when picking it up. Most have a very loose foundation and they tend to just collapse under it's own weight when you try to pick it up. If it was just one well built tower though... I could do it. Looking over in her eyes I saw the same confidence that I had. We both nodded and moved on to continue to massacre the rules for a game that Heaven was so proud of.

          “Alrighty, that should do it! Plus, all and any disputes are to be settled via arm wrestling, which is fighting without any collateral damage.” Chipper as ever, she patted the stone slab that functioned well enough as a table. She was surprisingly good at digging for an angel.

          “…what kind of arm wrestling do you angels do?” No collateral damage? How?

          “…that should be my line. What kind of arm wrestling do you demons do to have collateral damage? You just sit there and try to slam the other’s arm into the table.” She knocked her knuckles against the slab.

          “Do you not break arms and tables?” I'd known her for all of around, two, three hours tops, and I already found that hard to believe.

          “…you make a valid point.”