Random stories

# Soulmage

**"Prepare to meet your end, foul demon!"** The slim, wobbly-kneed teenager tried to swing her blade at me. Unimpressed, I simply took a single, surefooted step back, navigating the corpse-strewn, muddy battlefield with ease. Nobody had taken the time to teach the poor girl the importance of a good pair of boots, and her pitiful slog through the mud would take ages to catch up with me.

"I have a name, you know," I said mildly.

"The only name you deserve is *barbarian*, you monster!" The girl shrieked as she charged at me. One of my soldiers appeared, brandishing a ball of fire, but I shook my head. This was the fourth would-be hero the Silent Parliament had thrown at me, and I'd given all of the first three a nice pat on the back, a reassuring pep talk, and in one case taken in a runaway who had no stomach for the churn of endless violence that made up an active battlefront.

I may have been a demon, but I was a Demon of Empathy. On occasion, I let others into my heart—which was more than I could say for my enemies.

"I recommend you stop following me," I said, taking another calm step back.

"Never!" The girl snapped. "They said you would try to sway me from my path with your wicked words of deceit!"

"Actually, I'm just trying to point out that you've been following me into enemy lines for the past two minutes." The girl froze as she looked around and realized that the black-and-white emblem of the Silent Parliament was nowhere to be found. "On the plus side," I mused, "it's not exactly as if you can get any *more* surrounded than you already are."

"Then I shall go down in a blaze of glory!" The girl leapt at me, blade crackling with heat, and I raised an eyebrow. This one knew some magic, evidently. Nevertheless, it was fruitless; she'd misjudged her leap and landed in a sprawl on the floor.

I sighed, walking towards her—ostensibly to give her a hand, but this was the fourth time I'd played out this pattern, and my enemies would be predicting me. I kept my eyes on the sky, watching for the telltale flash of—

*There.*

Quick as a flash, I slashed one hand through the air, tearing open a rift between here and the Plane of Elemental Darkness. A fraction of a heartbeat later, an eerily silent column of holy light struck the ground around us, crisping the mud into brick and setting the corpses aflame—but beneath the shelter of the rift of darkness, the girl and I were kept safe.

"That was an artillery strike," I gently explained, "ordered by your army's commanding officer on *your* position, in the hopes of taking me out while I gave a fallen child a hand. Scorn me all you like, but do yourself a favor."

The girl's eyes were wide and shellshocked as they met mine.

"As long as you continue working for the Silent Parliament? Don't think of yourself as the hero."

I stood, leaving the shocked girl staring at the destruction her own commander had wrought—the destruction that I had protected her from—and went to exit the battlefield.

But before I could return to my warcamp, the girl croaked, "Wait."

I stopped, then turned, raising an eyebrow. "What is it?"

"I..." The girl swallowed. "This can't be right. They wouldn't just... they wouldn't just throw me away..."

"But they have." My gaze was not unkind as I knelt by her side. "Would you like to see how?"

The girl got to her feet, sword abandoned in the mud, and mutely nodded.

Then I closed my eyes—trusting her not to strike me—and reached into my soulspace, delicately carving away a portion of my memories. The memories of the first three heroes who had come to stop me, who I had spared, and who had been quietly vanished by their superiors without a trace.

The first one, of course, didn't believe me. Neither did the second, even when I presented him with the memories of his predecessors. The third simply broke down when I showed him the names and faces of the previous "heroes" who had challenged me.

But the fourth?

The fourth grew *angry*.

"This... this isn't right." The girl clenched her fists. "The Silent Parliament—they can't get away with this."

"They have so far," I gently said. "And they will, if nobody stops them."

The girl trembled with fury. "You told me that I could not call myself a hero, so long as I worked for the Silent Parliament."

Slowly, I nodded.

"Then *let me call myself a hero.*" She held on to the fragment of my soul that I had gifted her. "Let me show everyone what happened here, so that another child like me is never tricked onto this battlefield again."

A quiet, fierce grin spread across my face, and I squeezed the girl's arm.

"I will remember you," I said. "My name is Odin, and I am the greatest Demon of Empathy to walk this world."

"My name is Haionn," she said, "and I am a *hero.*"

Then Haionn strode to her own side of the battlefield, wielding memory and truth where once she held a blade.

A.N.

Soulmage will be episodically updated. Want to know what happens next? Check out [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/bubblewriters/comments/uxmwe4/soulmage_masterpost/) to be notified whenever a new part comes out! There's already thirty other chapters before this one, so there's plenty to catch up on.

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Submitted by meowcats734 on Thu, Jun 09, 2022 to /r/WritingPrompts/

The prompt

You're the villain that the Chosen One is meant to defeat. Once they arrive, you notice they're just a teenager who barely knows how to swing a sword. Angered by your opponents sending children to do all their dirty work, you decide to help the teen get revenge.