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Scott opens his eyes to a darkened room, a breeze curling around his eyelashes, and his skin crawling with the unmistakable feeling of being watched.
The window on the other side of the room is open, mid-winter frozen chill drifting in and twirling in the gauzy curtains of his bed. He shivers as he sits up, loathe to let his bare feet touch the cold floor but even more hesitant to let the window open. He’d surely have closed it before bed — right? How had…
As his eyes adjust to the dim light, he makes out a shape crouched in the dark beneath the window. His heart dips.
There’s someone in his room.
Scott stumbles back into the bed instantly, undignified yelp and hissed expletive, heart hammering against his ribs. He’s got nothing here, no sword, guards too far to answer his call sooner than the intruder would reach him — he’s on his own, and he tries not to feel defenseless.
“Who–” His voice falters, weak with sleep and fear, and he tries again. “Who are you? What business have you here?”
The intruder hasn’t moved. They’re sitting under the window, shadowy overhang, knees crooked ahead of them and an elbow on them so their head tips forward, gaze fixed directly on him. It’s dark; it’s the middle of the night. The only light filtering into the room is from the moon and half-clouded stars, and it catches their outline, silvery rim halo over their shoulders, arms, head and…
And horns.
“You look different,” the demon says.
In his lungs, his breath freezes. Something sharp pricks at the inside of his chest. “What are you doing here, Xornoth?”
The demon flinches. It’s slight, barely noticeable save the ripple in silvery liquid light around its shoulders. When it speaks, the voice carries the same harsh grating cacophony Scott is familiar with, as if three voices speak at once, but now there’s a quieter depth to it. As if two voices have faltered, leaving the third alone. It says, “Waiting.”
A chill runs through him. “For what?”
Xornoth doesn’t answer. It raises one shoulder, lowers it again. “I was hoping you’d give some clarity on that.”
“You think I know what you want?” And when it doesn’t answer immediately, Scott scoffs. He folds his arms, trapping as much heat against his chest as he can. Cold still rolls in from the window. “I think you want destruction. I think–no, I know you want my friends suffering or dead. You want your corruption spread across the land, you want chaos sowed with it, and you especially want to make sure I know it’s half my fault.”
“Sounds like you do know what I want, then,” it says, and there’s–there’s something in the way it says that. Sets Scott bristling on edge, not with fear but with annoyance . The condescension. The demon sounds sarcastic. It’s making fun of him.
“Don’t–Oh, am I wrong?” Scott demands, matching its sarcasm in spades. “Tell me, then, your master plan, o Lord of Darkness.”
A huff. It tilts its head, horns framing the moon through the open window, waxing crescent. Sets its chin on one hand atop its knee. “You’ve summed it up, I think.”
It’s at this moment that Scott isn’t sure how to continue. He could shout for his guards — but the demon is making no move to attack, still sat crouched beneath the window. Relaxed, almost. Casual. Scott’s never felt more confused, cognitive dissonance biting into him like an arm he’s leaned on for too long. He thinks he should be more afraid than he feels now that the immediate adrenaline has begun to fade.
“Why are you in my room?” Scott settles on, finally.
“Wanted out of the cold,” it says.
“Surely Joey’s bed is warm enough for you.”
Xornoth breathes out that same huff again. “Oh, brother, the scandal. You’d accuse me of such a thing before marriage?”
Brother. Is Scott bickering with the demon? Is this what’s happening? “Forgive me, but you’ve been terrorizing every emperor for months. I cannot believe that is where you’d draw the line.”
The demon tsks. “Have ye but small faith.”
“In you? Yes.”
“Hmm.”
The silence lapses into something just this side of comfortable. The cognitive dissonance is settling into something that prickles less like the needles of a pinched limb, and more like the ache of a day-old bruise. Scott, if he squints, could almost picture the demon curled up under his window as something nonthreatening. As someone he could sit beside, someday, maybe.
Well, maybe he won’t get too ahead of himself. It is still the demon wreaking havoc all across the lands. Scott won’t let one calm moment confuse him.
…He won’t pass it up, either.
Because it’s still just sitting there, looking up at him like it really is waiting for him to do something, and Scott doesn’t know what that something is. Doesn’t know what the demon wants from him this time.
“If I were to trust you,” Scott begins, slowly, “If you could have any of my faith, you could, you know.”
Purple eyes flick up to study him, but its expression doesn’t change. “Really?”
“You would have to change, of course.” The part of Scott that always wants this solution rears up; the part that thinks maybe everyone will just change their minds, maybe if he just waits it’ll all sort itself out, maybe the demon will un-corrupt itself if he says the right combination of words. “Try out some kindness. Some friendship. I would give you small faith, if you quit all the–the tentacle and possession and blood stuff.”
And this time, the demon laughs. Low. There’s barely any echo. “We both know that’s not how this works.”
And Scott does know.
He knows the prophecy, he knows his god, he knows the antlers he wears and the sword he carries. He knows the weight of his life. He knows the demon’s, too.
“Do you feel it?” it asks, as near a whisper as Scott’s ever heard. “Your–your connection, your god. I’ve been meaning to ask. Is it cold for you too?”
Aeor is like frostbite, he thinks. Like a blue flame. Like something so cold it burns, and so hot it freezes you to the touch. Aeor is a crystalline fractal of winter across a pool, and he feels those crystals sharp in his blood these days. He feels the scorch of divine ice with every move.
What he says is, “Yes. So is Exor?”
Xornoth says, “Like emptiness. Like the end. I am the void, I am nothing –”
And Scott knows this is his enemy thrice, sworn, prophesied, and reborn, but there’s a kinship about it he can’t stop from creeping into him like an unwanted chill. In his lowest moments, Scott is small in a vast puppeteer’s hand that will exist long after he’s dead, every step made on the decree of something that has been and will always be.
The demon, sitting on the floor across from him, is the same.
Scott steps forward from the bed, then, and settles on his knees on the floor. And the cold seeps upwards into him but he only half-feels it. There’s a new center of balance he’s had to learn, from the wings that pull him back and the antlers that tip his head forward, and he settles into that center. Hands in his lap. On level with the demon’s eyes, which follow his every move with a lazy, catlike sort of wary interest. There’s a line of tension in its shoulders. Coiled like a spring.
Scott tries to imagine this thing as his brother. Tries to picture them standing side by side at a coronation, or posing together for a portrait, or a smile on the demon’s face as it jabs an elbow and a friendly, sarcastic dart in his direction. They look nothing alike, but maybe a long time ago – maybe before wings and horns and purple and gold. Before a prophecy, before god, maybe it could’ve been just the two of them.
He can’t see it, but he feels it ache somewhere in him that he’s long lost the memory to.
“Xornoth,” Scott starts, and he’s not sure what he’s going to say next, but he never says it. The demon rolls forward on the sound of its name, spring and release, and Scott remembers in an instant how tall it is. Rearing up, making the high ceilings and arches of Rivendell’s architecture a joke, and it’s only years of royal training that keep Scott’s shoulders straight and his posture uncowed.
Xornoth leans over him, ten feet of leathery ebony and dripping purple and a mouth full of sharp teeth bared, and it hisses, voice cacophonous and overwhelming, “Don’t call me that.”
“It is your name,” Scott says, and it says, “Then don’t call my name.”
Scott refuses to look away. A staring contest between gold eyes and purple ones — one beat, two —
And just like that, the demon is gone.
It blinks from existence in the way Scott is well-used to. No splash of potion particles, no telltale warp of enderpearl teleportation. It is simply there, and then it isn’t, and the bedroom is still and empty. Cold wind shifts the curtains and the canopies around him, but Scott can barely feel it anymore. The crawl of his skin is gone too, no more itch of being watched, even though he casts a glance around the room. Just to be sure.
It’s him, and him alone. No demon. No brother.
He closes the window.