Samael
My little firefly flitted from her mud house.
I watched her, so small, running through the forest.
She had been here for a handful of years, but only a drop in the ocean of my eternity. I had allowed her to shelter inside my dominion, here in the mountain, to build her little house and create her little wards.
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Truth be told, although it felt sour on my tongue, I liked watching her. I liked her meager green flame. It was so small, so delicate.
I saw the gnawing hunger inside of her. She would need to feed, and soon, to calm that ache.
I watched her heart beat as she ran through the trees, toward the human that had breached her defenses. It was my energy she ran through, thrumming underneath the ground, underneath everything that lived in this space. I had been here long before there were trees, long before there were blades of grass. I had watched the evolution of the planet and everything that lived here. It was my energy that allowed the river to cut through the rock, allowed the trees to leaf out.
I watched the man crash through her carefully placed defenses. The shackles he carried clanged against his body, and I felt the surety of his emotions.
He was going to capture her. The shackles were for her.
The earth below me shuddered, as I felt a spark of – what was it? – indignation.
I blinked, as I realized. The emotion was so foreign, so trivial, so… beneath me. I narrowed my eyes and gritted my teeth, shifting from where I was sitting and listened to all the chains over my body slither and hiss from where they had rested.
A tremoring pool of ancient metal, they were the shroud that covered my corporeal body.
I looked at the chains he carried, and I smiled and stood up.
She was small, weak, with all her petty magic.
But he was laughable.
I could have let this play out, I could have let the two of them duel it to the death until one of them watered the ground with their lifeblood. But the man had a special type of gall to hunt her, in my realm, on my piece of this planet.
I took a step toward the open night air, wrapping my chains around my forearms until not an inch of my brown leathery skin could be seen.
He would not capture her. Not this night, not any night.
As weak as she was, I liked my little firefly, and I would not let his trifling braces bind her. I fingered the links of my own chains, imagining them around her wrists, around her waist, around her neck. I imagined bringing her to her knees, as she stared up at me with those green fire eyes, so afraid.
Another emotion trickled through my mind: desire.
I desired her fear. And what I desired, was mine.
She had lived within my realm for so long, but the thought of a human taking her, when her fear obviously belonged to me – when she obviously belonged to me – was the catalyst that propelled me into the night. As the chains dragged behind me, lines of frost appeared, blackening the tiny plants in their wake.
Terror, to ice their veins.
Her submission would be beautiful, and it was going to be mine. I would not let the human man steal her tonight, for she was in my domain, like everything else in these mountains.
It was time for both of them to realize that.
Aleister
Another one of her wards fell to my advancement; it felt like the earth itself shifted under me. It raised the hairs on my arms, and a strange sense of dread crawled through my mind.
I had never felt fear like this before. Cold, dripping trepidation. The leaves of the trees, which just a moment before, had sounded so ordinary, now took on a new, terrifying timbre. It stopped me in my tracks. I stood still, and listened to the evil clatter of green above me.
I could not take a full breath. It took everything I had not to run in the opposite direction, back to town, back to the safety of other people.
No, I told myself. Not when I’ve gotten this far. Not when I’m this close.
I let the terror sweep through my body and the chill set into my bones. I had never been this close to her, and the strength of her power was nearly overwhelming. The temperature had dropped, from the wet heat of the summer to the near freeze of winter, and I shivered.
She was so powerful.
And she was going to be mine. As soon as I swallowed past the fear that she manufactured.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and watched it fog in front of my eyes.
She wasn’t going to win. I closed my eyes, imagining her kneeling in front of me, as all her power and magic flowed from her to me. I imagined owning all of this delicious power, subjugating that beautiful green fire and enslaving her forever.
A smile crawled across my face. The air nearly froze my teeth, numbing my lips.
I took another step forward, taking comfort in the thought of my impending victory.
She would kneel, she would submit. She was going to be mine.
I pushed through the thick veil of anxiety, feeling for her presence. She was my prey, and I had hunted her for so long. I would not allow her to escape now.
I would not allow her to win.
My eyes turned to a spot in the darkness, through the screaming canopy of whispered warnings. She was there. I knew it, without knowing how exactly I knew it. I thought I almost saw a flash of that green fire, so dark as to blend in completely with the forest around her.
The air settled, like the calm before the storm. Foreboding prickled along my skin.
I blinked, and I could see the fire in her eyes, the glow racing toward me.
She ran like the promise of destruction, a valkyrie, a goddess of power and lust.
I stalked forward, grinding my teeth against the wave of fear that threatened to override my momentum, my boots crunching over the frozen earth beneath me. Soon, she would be beneath me, feeding me all that delicious power. I fingered the cold iron shackles I kept hooked to my tool belt.
Soon, these would be around her wrists. She would be mine.
Lilith
I ran toward him barefooted and silent through the forest. His power flexed against my shields, and I felt them bow. He took another step forward, with some effort, but that movement sent a shattering crack skittering through my wards. I felt it like a blow to my own body, and the next breath I took fogged in front of me.
That stopped me.
I stood, feeling the leaf litter freeze under my feet. This was wrong.
It was midsummer. Something was very, very wrong.
A seed of panic rooted under my sternum. I looked up and watched the cold air currents dance through the shivering treetops. It reminded me of… home.
The kind of cold that couldn’t be shaken, couldn’t be abided. It was the kind of cold that chilled one’s soul, an unnatural calm, a sucking submissiveness. That was what I had run from, as a young thing. I couldn’t imagine a life with that kind of yoke around my neck. I had run, far away, hoping to never feel that kind of annihilation to my own spirit.
This was not the monster hunter.
This was something so much worse.
I thought of my wards, destroyed by the blithering idiot. He was strong, but he was not this.
The seed of panic spouted tendrils that snaked up my ribs and through the tendons in my joints. My mind screamed to turn back to my house, but I feared that the creeping cold would be there, too.
I know I should have recognized that thought for the lie that it was. I should have noticed how my mind had already begun to spiral into that sucking, freezing terror. But the overwhelming threat in the darkness, somewhere, made introspection impossible.
The only way was forward. Turning back would not save me.
Truth be told, I wasn’t sure if going forward would save me, either. But I would die trying.
I began to run away, toward the lesser of the two evils. I tried to ignore the numbness on the bottom of my feet, as I raced over the ice. If I was numb, I would not feel the pain. It had been a long time since I had felt frostbite, and it had taken much time and food to heal. And here I was, already half-starved.
The spiraling fear wrapped itself around my shoulders.
Forward. That one word repeated like a mantra through my mind.
I ran.
Samael
I watched the two of them converge onto the frozen glen where I waited. The man had unsheathed a hunting knife, and the metal frosted in the air.
My firefly raced through the trees. She kept her hunger around her like another skin, her need allowing her to press through the blanket of icy dread that permeated the forest.
Neither of them stood a chance.
Their eyes met, and each launched at the other as they screamed their own battlecries.
Each was cut short as I cast two spike-tipped chains that wrapped unerringly around each of their ankles, pulling them apart and bringing them crashing back down to the ground. There was a sickening crunch of bone against the ice, followed by two hissing groans of pain.
I watched their eyes widen as I wrapped the two chains around my forearms, each link scraping against my long, purple-tipped claws. I emerged from the darkness above them, dragging them toward me.
Their fear was delicious, palpable on the freezing air currents around us.
I towered over their prone forms. “You both hunt each other, but I am the true stalking terror here.” I flashed a fang-tipped smile as I watched their panic blossom as they each tried to process my chain-covered form. I addressed the human. “The succubus will be mine.”
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