Once upon a time there was a Demon King. A lot can be extrapolated from a title like that. There’s a vague sense of fire, maybe some horns, an army of easily-disposable vaguely-stereotypical minions with faceless helmets that no self-respecting hero would feel bad mowing down. Some things just come with the territory. But this Demon King was, on top of the horns, hooves, angry scowl and general fire-and-brimstoney-ness, also an absolute and utter bastard. He was Evil. That wasn’t something that was attributed to him by outside parties, or would ever be hotly debated. There was a vague sense that, if he was ever cut in half, the words ‘Evil Bastard’ would be written on the most legible part. Maybe alongside things like ‘Puppy-kicker’ or ‘Probably Racist’. 

This Demon King had inherited the throne from his father, who inherited it from his father’s father, and so on, usually through the tried-and-true method of patricide. After seven generations of this, it had become a family tradition. A Demon King who was stabbed to death by his first-born son was considered to have Died of Natural Causes. It was just how things worked. Demon King after Demon King would rule over the lands to the north of what people would refer to as the ‘civilized world’, in that vaguely ethnocentric, condescending way people usually did when they didn’t want to be overtly discriminatory but did want to project an air of superiority. There, Demon Kings would amass small armies, harass some settlements with them, get pushed back, only to be inevitably murdered by their children. 

Up and until this Demon King. This particular Demon King was loud, ambitious and powerful (although mostly loud), and he had amassed an army larger than any Demon King had before him. This was largely due to the groundwork that had been laid by his father who had been, as Demon Kings go, fairly benevolent, focusing on agriculture, infrastructure, and only the minimum necessary amount of pillaging. But his son’s plans had been bigger.

This new loud Demon King thus amassed an army large enough to actually be noticed and started to march it south, towards the ‘civilized world’, conquering everything in his path. He also had to, because a total mismanagement of forces and supplies meant that the army had to keep pushing in order to keep from starving on its feet. But he was a loud Demon King and it’s very hard to stand up to a ten foot tall demon lord and go ‘Um, excuse me sir, but the men are getting quite upset and we ran out of toilet paper some days ago and would you maybe be willing to take a break so we can all sit down and have a good meal and we’d really like that toilet paper’ because anyone brave enough would usually find themselves becoming a sticky reddish-brown smear on the floor, walls and ceiling. 

At some point, the Demon King conquered a castle and found himself sitting comfortably for a few days, only to be confronted by a Human Male Hero -- the most default of heroes -- and his entourage. He was challenged to a fight he did not take seriously, and very quickly realized he should have taken the Hero seriously. He realized this at the same time as he realized what it was like for an ant to be stepped on when an improbable amount of castle fell on him. 

This was the end of the Demon King, the most ambitious (and loud) of his kind in generations. However, Demon Kings usually spawn Demon Princes and Princesses, who usually grow up to be tall and Kingy themselves, although they were going to have to do without the patricide this time. This Demon King had tried to avert death-by-heir by not having any sons, which he’d achieved mostly through magic, and although the intent had been there, avoiding a tradition like that usually ends up biting you in the ass anyway. 

It hadn’t, but it definitely could have. For one, he’d had an eldest daughter who had been more than willing to end his line early -- he had been as good of a father as he had been a person -- and she would have if the Hero hadn’t ended the Demon King’s reign rather prematurely. Now, the teenage Demon Queen had been plopped down on the throne and had taken it upon herself to do things differently. For one, she wasn’t powerful or loud enough to lead any armies just yet, but she had a knack for math and a weird tendency to see her subjects as people rather than disposable action figures. She got rid of the faceless visors, for one. That had gone a long way in humanizing her guards. Not that she had many of those, having sent most of them home to assemble something of a society in her lands while not engaging in any procreation whatsoever. She had plenty of older relatives who could take over, if she ended up tripping and falling onto some Hero or another. 

As the years went on, she grew stronger, and became the Dragon Demon Queen. There are many kinds of Demons, and there are many kinds of Queens, and every once in a while there are those that end up being something a little extra. Over the years, there have been Lizard Demons, Snake Demons and even Unicorn Demons, although that last one usually led to people awkwardly giving the father an uncomfortable side-eye. Being a Dragon was quite rare and, even part-time, it was a pretty nice bonus to have for an aspiring Demon Queen. Her mother had been part-Dragon, and without getting into the strange genetics of being part-firebreathing-lizard, it was quite rare for a descendant to be able to turn big and scaly. It wasn’t something she could hold on to for extended periods of time. This had less to do with magical reserves and more to do with the fact that becoming the size of a large barn also gave her the caloric requirements of a large-barn-sized lizard, and it was simply not something she was up to most of the time. 

Stories of this new Demon Queen had made their way down south, because of course they had, so she put her castle on a high mountain and went on with her day, occasionally flying down in her purest Dragon form to have a look at things. Nobody would be stupid enough to climb all the way up the mountain just to pick a fight with the most powerful of one of the most powerful species on the planet. Not even her younger sisters. 

And then someone had, right as she was having an off day, and she made a few mistakes in a row. The first was that she underestimated the Hero and his companion. While it wasn’t unwarranted -- the Demon Queen could bench-press a medium-sized elephant -- she still didn’t anticipate sheer skill, training and a little magic to go as far as it had. So she’d assumed that using her normal form would do just fine. The second mistake she made was that she also held on to the belief that there was no need for a back-up plan, or rather that her back-up plan would be to the detriment of her image. After all, it wouldn’t do for her to face the Hero while eating a bag of chips or having a large bowl of soup. She didn’t want to feel bloated or look silly. 

This, as we know by now, meant that there had been no Dragon in the Demon Queen when the fight didn’t go the way she’d thought it would, and she would be rather unceremoniously turned into a Demon Shish Kebab by the Hero. As she plummeted to her death, casually chatting with the Hero, she regretted a few things. She’d tried to be a competent ruler who would have, one day, been able to outshine her father, but it had been for nothing and the only remarkable thing about her now would have been her gender. She also regretted not eating more so she wouldn’t have died in the first place. But most importantly, she regretted not having enjoyed things more. 

In her last moments, she allowed herself to feel a little sad, because when you’ve been impaled and are actively falling to your death, you’re allowed a little self-pity. As a treat. She wished she’d tried more things, maybe met more people. Had a friend or two. In the end, she’d been alone a lot, and loneliness hadn’t hit her before. But it did now, for just a second. And then the ground did, and everything went black.

After everything was black for a good long while, it abruptly stayed black and she found herself in a weird space that felt both extremely impossible while simultaneously being very lacking in magic. It reeked of physics. Wonky physics at that. The kind of physics that professors love talking about because they think it makes the universe sound cool, like particles being in two places at once or talking to each other while bonded, which say a lot more about the relationships physics professors have with the people they are bonded to than it says about quantum particles. 

After she ran around for a little bit and tried to blow a hole in the fabric of this reality -- only a small one -- she found herself frustrated and sitting on a large stone bench. After a while, she was joined by a human, who had some difficulty climbing the bench, which was sized to her. The creature was very short, compared to her, and seemed… not at all afraid of her. The few times she’d interacted with people there had been a lot of running and screaming. Occasionally some attempted stabbing, which had never ended well for the stabbing implement. It had been amusing the first few times, but after a while she’d just stopped trying to talk to people. 

But this one didn’t seem to mind her height, her horns, her eyes, all of that. It just sat there, cross-legged. 

“Hello,” she tried. A part of her wanted to shake the figure and try to get an answer out of it, but she also knew that anyone or anything that looked so lost and despondent would probably not know a lot more than she did. 

“Let’s just get this over with,” the Human said, and laid back. “Not how I thought it would go, but I’m ready.”

“Ready for what?” she asked. She was a little curious about the Human. 

“To die, of course. I didn’t think I’d warrant being picked up by the Devil -- and I hadn’t expected her to be a her -- but I figure it makes sense.” The creature rambled on and after a moment she wasn’t really listening anymore as it talked about Sunday School and other things that made very little sense to her. She looked at it with a mixture of pity and contempt. Try as she might, she wasn’t really in the mood to console this thing, and she kind of wanted to know where she was and how to get out of here. It was more than a little dull, and other than the softly-mumbling person, there wasn’t much here to discover. 

The Human was about to go into another tirade about something or another, and she’d had enough. She put a hand over its mouth which practically covered its entire face. She was about to shush it, when she suddenly found herself experiencing exactly-but-not-quite what it was like to be a freshly squeezed lemon being sucked through a garden hose. Somebody screamed. It might as well have been her. 

She was absolutely certain she was dead this time. Well, she would have been. Almost was, even. But there was a niggling doubt at the back of her mind. For one, she expected death to smell less alchemical. She was also pretty sure that death didn’t go ‘beep’ every second. There was also a distant chattering of voices. The biggest argument against this being real, proper death, however, was the fact that she was experiencing the grandmother of all headaches, who had brought her entire extended family and was barraging her with several mother-headaches, granddaughter-headaches and several niece- and nephew-headaches, all enjoying a family headache potluck somewhere between her neck and her forehead. 

“Fhgllrrrr,” she said. Her tongue felt heavy in her head. Her head felt heavy in her head. Her entire body felt like it was being weighed down by, well, itself. It was an unpleasant experience, which she was about to exacerbate. She opened her eyes, and looked around the hospital room.