A hissing scream tore from my throat and I clutched at the wound. Something hit me from behind, cracking legs and sending me to the ground.

Vitae rushed to the wound, draining my pond, drying my Garden. I managed to scrabble upright, working limbs tearing through moss and loam.

Only for a boot to plant itself on my chest, pushing me to the ground. Eight eyes locked onto my assailant, and I froze, legs twitching like a crushed spider.

She was huge, head and shoulders above Father’s height, and she wore a simple, sleeveless tunic over loose trousers. Muscles rippled across ashen skin, and one of her clawed arms held a wicked-looking axe that dripped with my blood. Two long horns, one broken, erupted from her temples, and her tusked mouth was twisted into a sneer under burning golden eyes.

Another demon. Stronger. Submit!

The boot pressed into me driving air from my lungs with a whoosh. By now, my vitae had slowed the bleeding, and my heart thumped wildly in my chest.

“What…” I rasped.

“I’ve been watching you, spider.” Her voice, subdued as it was, shook the earth.

“Then you saw—” I cut off as she crushed the last of the air out of me.

“I saw you lure and kill the human.”

Do you know what he did? What he was going to do! None of the words could come out, only a wheeze.

The demon pointed her axe down at me. “You’re still alive for two reasons. One—” she pressed the point into my right shoulder. “You didn’t eat those two humans in the woods. And two—” She pierced my other shoulder. “I want to know why.”

As her baleful gaze drilled into me, I felt my mind searching for a lie, for anything that would get her to spare me. Blood, iron-tasting and horrid filled my mouth as I bit my tongue to stop the lie. Choking, unable to breathe, I turned my head and spat dark blood off to the side.

The foot on me raised just a little as the axe blade pressed to my throat. I swallowed, still tasting blood. To slip into my Garden here, to take the time I needed to think would be my death.

I couldn’t see a path to slither out, and if I was going to die out here, unknown and unfulfilled, then I’d at least die clinging to the scraps of honor I still had.

“They didn’t… deserve it,” I managed to choke out, gasping.

“And he did?” The flat of her axe knocked my head to the side, forcing me to stare into Gale’s dead eyes.

“I don’t know!” I coughed, choking on bits of dried blood from my damaged tongue.

“Hmph.” The axe moved away. “I’d know your name.”

I kept my gaze fixed on Gale’s body. “Silk.”

“Just Silk?”

“I do not deserve my family name.”

Rough hands pulled me up by the shoulders and shoved me into a sitting position. Those golden eyes still burned, but the sneer was gone. “Family name?”

If I was going to die… “Graystone.” I clutched at my stump with my one good hand.

Her brow furrowed. My peripheral eyes caught her hand moving and a stinging cut opened up on my cheek. Like she was sampling a spice, she licked the blood, then spat. 

Another blink, and the axe head flashed in front of me, the wind from its passing flicking cut hairs across my vision. Azalea, Mother, all my ambitions seemed so far away.

“Please be swift,” I said quietly.

Instead, the axe retreated, and I watched the demon stoop to pick something off the ground. “How long?”

“What?” I answered, fighting another coughing fit.

“How long have you been like this?”

The earnestness of her question caught me off guard. So much so that I barely registered my severed limb that she held before me. “Not yet a month.”

“How?”

I stared at my arm until she moved it behind her back. “What do you mean?”

“How did you become a demon, kid?”

“Kid?” I looked up, but couldn’t read her expression.

“Answer the damn question before I change my mind.”

“Change your… I…” A sob forced its way through when the words wouldn’t. Something about strength and failure and none of it coherent. Instead of a vicious hunger, this vitae starvation just felt like a cold embrace. 

The demon’s form blurred, and the trees with it as I blubbered like an infant. From my toes up and my leg-tips in, numbness spread. Distantly, I felt something pull my hand away from my ruined arm. Something pressed against my stump, a prick of feeling in the cloying void, and then darkness closed around my vision.

Sleep would not take me. The ghostly outlines of the world around me never quite blurred into nothing. I felt myself being lifted, unable to resist, and I watched through a haze as the forest moved by. First, a slow trot, then a rushing speed that made me wish I could blink all my eyes.

At some point, I realized it’d stopped, that the firmness under me was no longer flesh. A dark shadow busied itself with what slowly resolved into the orange glow of a well-built fire. 

Not until something was pressed against my lips, however, did I feel awake.

“Drink.”

The word was distant, distorted, but the moment my lips touched the liquid, vitae lit like fire through my veins. It welled through the ground of my garden, suffusing the plants, filling the pond, and blooming crimson flowers along the black-thorned vine that wrapped my “tree.”

All too soon, it was over, and a firm hand shoved me back. Once I realized I was screeching, I swallowed the sound and felt the rawness of my throat healing over. Color saturated the nighttime forest, more vibrant than I had ever seen. The few leaves on the nearly naked branches above whirled in slow motion. Each curl, each twitch in the wind brought them more up to speed until time snapped back in place with an almost tangible crash.

Breath entered burning lungs. Wracked with a spasming cough, I grabbed a flask offered to me and downed it. The water tingled with a faint alcoholic burn as I gasped air and finally looked around.

I was on a bed of branches, under the lee shelter of a sharp rise. On a fresh-cut stump by a roaring fire sat the demon from earlier. She picked up the axe as I watched, and began to polish it in practiced motions, the oilcloth leaving its cutting surface to shimmer in the firelight.

“Ruin of Ashen Skies,” she said, her voice a little smoother than before. “Call me Ash.”

I pushed myself upright, only to notice my arm was reattached. A faint dark line ran around it like a band, a scar that I doubted would heal. Behind me, my spider limbs twitched as tingling numbness left them. “What did you do to me?”

“I gave you my blood,” she answered, as though the answer were obvious.

“W-what?” I gagged, but nothing came up. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

“Pity,” Ash answered simply, pausing to pick at the axe surface with a claw. “And potential.”

I snorted. “Potential? Me?”

She raised one eyebrow, but didn’t even look up. “Yes. You’ve got his blood, and you aren’t him.”

“By ‘him,’ do you mean L—Obsidian?”

“Don’t give that bastard a title,” Ash growled. “And yes, him. And give my flask back when you’re done with it. Glad I watered the stuff down.”

I fumbled at my feet and found an ancient flask among the branches. Battered and beaten, my hand froze when I swept a damp leaf off the face. There, staring back at me was the symbol of House Graystone. Older, simpler, and half scratched off, it still leapt out at me like the ancient records I’d seen it in.

“Ya done starin’?” Ash walked over and snatched it, gleaming axe in her other hand.

I watched the oilcloth touch the symbol. “Don’t damage it!”

“Or what?” Ash snorted as she sat back down. All the same, she carefully wiped the flask clean and stowed it. “That’s all in the past. What you need to worry about now is survival—you’re a weak little thing, but you’re not completely stupid. Then again, demons like you are better at living near humans. Aaand I suppose I’ll be helpin’ you with that.”

“What?”

She glanced over at me and huffed. “You need to stop saying that with your mouth hanging open. If you’ve got a family name, you should’ve been taught better, right?”

I nodded, embarrassed. “What about you?”

“Nobody important. Now I’ll pretend you asked a good question, like how I’m gonna help you. Simple answer is training. You looked like you had no idea how to fight and that makes sense.”

I shook my head. “I need to get back to Azalea. She probably thinks I’m dead—she was with me on a train and—”

“You fell off a bridge,” Ash finished for me, before heaving a sigh at my quizzical expression. “Yeah, I know. I was watching that train—something finally broke open the cloudheads’ little mining operation, and I wanted to see where it was all going. Thanks to you, it’s downriver now.”

“I won’t apologize,” I said firmly.

“Don’t expect you to.” She finished up with her axe and rested it across her knees. “You never actually answered how you were transformed.” I must’ve made a face because Ash actually smiled, the expression a little strange with tusks.

“I’d rather not speak of it,” I said with a shudder at the memory. “But your blood was nothing like his.”

“Oh, I doubt that.” She stared off into the fire, letting the silence stretch. “But I guess that answers the question. You just fill a cup up or…?”

Instead of replying, I just shook my head. Mercifully, she shrugged instead of pressing the issue, so I risked asking the foremost thought on my mind. “You reattached my arm. Why?”

“Why? You passed out and I figured if I was gonna save you I’d better reattach your arm. I’m Penitent; I try to pay it forward, you know?” She stared at me and her smile faded. “Before you say ‘what’ again, I should’ve known you wouldn’t know. Penitent’s probably just another word to you, yeah?”

“Yes. Is that a type of demon?” I risked scooting a little closer to the fire as the autumn wind picked up.

“Yes and no? I’m not a scholar, never have been. I can teach you how to fight, I can teach you some tricks for keeping your vitae efficient, but I can’t teach you much about the history I haven’t lived. So you’re getting the fast version. I’d ask you to scoot closer to the fire, but I know your type don’t like it.”

She fluidly stood from the log and sat next to me. I tensed up, but relaxed as she continued on, in a softer voice. “To keep it simple, there are four Conceits of demons: Might, Revelry, Glamour, and Penitence. The other types’ll say there’s only three, that us Penitents don’t count. What we are is pretty simple: monsters that’re trying to make up for all the suffering we’ve caused. You with me so far?”

I nodded, then spoke up when I realized she was looking for more of an answer. “I am. Mostly—does a demon’s form have anything to do with this?”

Ash made a so-so gesture. “Not in the long run? Maybe? I’ve always thought it didn’t matter. I wasn’t always Penitent.”

The way Ash looked at me reminded me of a tutor I’d had as a child, and I felt compelled to continue guessing. “Assuming the other Conceits are like Sects, I’ll guess that Might try to be the strongest, Revelry are probably hedonists and I’m not sure about Glamour? Blending in with humans? ”

Ash shrugged. “Figured you’d get your own type, not all the others instead. But yeah—”

“My own type?” I interrupted.

“Glamour,” Ash said. “Demons that pull strings from the shadows, live amongst humans, and gain that kind of power over them.”

“Soft power,” I clarified. “And I’d like to think I’m Penitent.”

“You’re not.” Her terse reply came with a sharp tone. “How many people have you killed?”

“Three.” I tried to think, and something blurred at the edge of my memory like a forming headache. “Or maybe four, actually?”

“How many were like Gale?”

My shoulder slumped and I pulled my legs around me like a cage. “They were all worse. Two… no, three were at the mine.”

“So that was you then?” Ash’s smile returned. “And there are a lot of humans and cloudheads far worse than you.”

“How many have you killed?” I asked before I could stop myself, realizing I’d gotten too comfortable in Ash’s presence.

For a moment, I felt like a matchstick in a winter storm, but the feeling went away as her aura pulled back. “More than I could ever make up for,” she said softly. “You mentioned three at the mine?”

“Y-yeah,” I answered when I got some composure back. “One was a guy named Kobel outside the mine on a hillside, the other was a girl named Cass, about my age, in the mine. And the other… I don’t remember. In fact, I might… No I’m probably remembering wrong.”

Ash tensed, surprising me, and she fixed me with a glare. “Can you remember anything?”

“They… He had a higher-pitched voice. Kinda reedy sounding? I never got his name.”

“Shit,” Ash swore. “Fuck!” She leapt up and surprised me by swinging her axe at the fire. A cloud of choking black ash swept across it, dousing the light in an instant. “Stay here, stay quiet. If I don’t come back by dawn… well, I guess you won’t be able to run, so make your peace.”

“Ash!” She was gone in a flurry of gray flakes, and I was left alone, staring out into the woods at night, reeling from the conversation we’d just had. It felt like I had more questions than answers, like I had so much I wanted to ask her and tell her. Another demon, one I could talk to.

More than that, a pit of worry gnawed at my stomach as memories started to bubble to the surface. A second person alongside Cass in the mines, a second voice, someone I hadn’t told my family about. A body that hadn’t been there.

***

It wasn’t long before the silence pressed uncomfortably around me, and I realized something: this was the first I’d been alone since Azalea had found me on the mountain. Well, aside from brief respite at the estate, but a servant was always a bell away. Before Fletcher found me, I’d hardly been lucid.

Now, however, I was alone with my thoughts. And they roiled. Family, Sect, Azalea, Demons, Bloodstone… How could anyone cope? Was I so arrogant as to think I could, that it would all end here, curled up like a dead spider in a forgotten and dusty corner?

Slate would have carried on. Slate would have shouldered another burden…

Slate had shouldered too much and broken.

That weight slid off Silk, only for her to pile more on: power, influence, justice. What could I keep—what could I carry?

My heart calmed as my thoughts finally found focus, and I slipped into my Garden, thinking of future plans… and revolutions.

Like I’d felt earlier, my Garden flourished. I sat cross-legged on silky, vibrant grass at the edge of a serene pond. Beyond, bushes in full bloom trimmed themselves as groundcover unfurled beneath them. Paths carved and wound, giving the soil space to breathe. Harmony and balance despite everything.

When I opened my eyes, exhaling a deep breath, I was surprised to see Ash sitting on the stump, staring off into the forest.

“You came back,” I said simply, my voice once again smooth and confident, a comforting timbre.

“You weren’t followed,” she said simply. “Which means you’re safe, for now.” With a roll of her shoulders, she looked at me askance. “You look like a cloudhead, posed like that.”

“I suppose I must. Why do you call them cloudheads? Weren’t you one once too?”

She gave a hollow laugh. “No. That bastard liked to pick the desperate for his army—easier to control whatever they became. But we shouldn’t waste time talking ancient history. If you fought who I think you fought, they know what you are, and they’ll find you.”

“Can I get strong enough to kill them before they kill me, can I really not hide?” Something in her tone, something about the ancient monster I realized she was, made me take her words at face value.

“Before they kill you? Hah! Oh, they’re after worse—they’ll want to recruit you. A cultivator turned demon with that accursed bloodline who’s managed to keep her sanity? They’ll want you and your power.”

“Who’s they?”

“The Demonic Sect. My guess is that they’ll see you as one more step toward ‘true demonic cultivation.’ You’ve probably got nothing they don’t already have, but if you’ve figured something out that they see as theirs, they’re not gonna let you just walk around freely.”

“So they’re real then? Over the mountains?”

Ash nodded. “Yep. More or less, anyway. They’d go after me too if I weren’t broken.”

“Broken?”

“You know”—she kicked at the firepit and it sprang back to life with a cough—“you’re a strange one, going from big words and fancy talk one second to simple questions the next. That guy you almost forgot’s a scout for the Demonic Sect if you haven’t figured it out.

“And I’ll have my work cut out whipping you into shape.”

I took her abrupt subject change in stride, more than used to similar, more subtle tactics. “Why would you care? Why risk anything for me—I killed Gale, after all.”

Ash shrugged her huge shoulders. “He looked like a bit of a bastard, but you’ve got a point. I guess I’ve just got a feeling that the little Glamour demon’s a worthy Penitence. Fate’s never been something I’ve taken a lot of stock in, but this is all a little too convenient. Besides, your form is terrible, like a posh dog trying to imitate a wolf.”

I thought about Mother’s harsh training… and the unfortunate benefits it tended to have. “...Alright, but I need to reunite with Azalea as my first priority.”

“She’s human?”

I nodded.

“And she knows what you are and you’d trust her with your life?”

I nodded, with just a slight hesitation. Would I really trust her that far?

Ash’s eyes narrowed. “Fine. But I’ll be taking her measure.”

“That’s not for you to decide.”

The massive woman just barked a laugh. “You might be something when you can back those threats up, kid. So, where is she?”

“Hearthome. I know a place where she’ll visit, and I think it’s related to organized crime—mundane organized crime. We got it from one of the miners.”

Ash clicked her tusks. “Might be a bit difficult for me to get in. Most folks won’t think much of your silken skin and aversion to flame, but I smell like a firepit stuffed full of rotten eggs. And that’s on top of being a head taller than most humans. Used to be a lot easier when all the cities smelled like sun-ripened shit.”

Before sewers? I was starting to piece together just how long she’d been roaming around. And I was even starting to believe that hint she’d let slip about being recruited by Obsidian himself.

“Then I suppose I should thank you for offering to train me.” I stood up on wobbly legs and offered a bow.

“Stand straight, damnit. I’m a little surprised you’re so willing after I took your arm off.”

I found a hint of a smile curling one corner of my lips, and I thought of Azalea as I replied. “Well, you put it back on! You do know the way to Hearthome, right?”