"He's beautiful, Myranna," Krozath whispered, his deep voice unusually gentle as he cradled his newborn son. The demon warrior's crimson skin contrasted with the bundle of dark fabric that held the infant. "Look at his markings—I've never seen anything like them."

  Myranna, still exhausted from her bor, smiled weakly from the birthing stone in the Rebirth Cavern. Her azure skin glistened with sweat, and her curved horns had small cracks from the strain of childbirth—battle scars she would wear proudly.

  "The midwife said they're unusual," she murmured, reaching for the child. "A seven-pointed star on his palm. It's a powerful omen."

  Krozath carefully transferred their son to his mother's arms. The baby's skin was a striking violet—neither his father's crimson nor his mother's azure, but something unique. Tiny nubs on his forehead promised impressive horns one day, and his eyes, when they occasionally flickered open, revealed irises of molten gold.

  "What shall we name him?" Krozath asked, sitting beside his mate on the edge of the stone.

  Myranna studied her child's face. For a moment, she saw something strange in those golden eyes—something old, something knowing. Then the baby blinked, and he was just a newborn again.

  "Azreth," she decided. "It means 'one who returns' in the old tongue."

  "Azreth," Krozath repeated, testing the name. "Strong. Worthy. It suits him."

  The midwife, an ancient demoness with gray skin and knowing eyes, approached cautiously. "The birth-smoke is ready," she announced. "It will help the child's demon essence align properly."

  She carried a small brazier filled with glowing embers. Carefully, she added crushed herbs and powdered crystals, creating a sweet-smelling purple smoke that she wafted over the infant.

  As the smoke touched his skin, baby Azreth's eyes flew open. Instead of crying as most infants did during the ritual, he stared directly at the midwife with an unsettling focus. For a heartbeat, the old demoness faltered, nearly dropping the brazier.

  "What is it?" Myranna asked anxiously.

  The midwife recovered quickly. "Nothing," she lied. "The child is strong. His essence is... unique."

  What she didn't say was that in her centuries of attending births, she had never felt a newborn resist the alignment smoke. For the briefest moment, something inside the infant had pushed back against the demonic energies—not violently, but with the quiet stubbornness of a rock in a river.

  "Take him home and love him well," she advised, completing the ritual with haste. "Some children are born special."

  "Special how?" Krozath demanded, his warrior's instincts detecting her unease.

  The midwife chose her words carefully. "Some souls carry old wisdom. Watch him closely as he grows."

  With that cryptic statement, she left the new parents to marvel over their child, who had already fallen into a peaceful sleep, oblivious to the destiny that awaited him.

  Time passed differently in the demon realm. Seasons blurred together under the perpetual twilight sky. In the small settlement on the edge of the Shadow Forest, Azreth grew quickly, as demon children did.

  By his second year, he was walking and talking. By his fourth, he could summon small fmes to his fingertips—a proud moment for his father, whose own fire magic had made him a respected warrior in their cn.

  "Again, Azreth!" Krozath encouraged, watching his son practice in the clearing behind their home. "Feel the heat in your blood and direct it outward."

  Azreth, small but determined, furrowed his brow in concentration. Fmes danced across his violet fingers, but instead of lobbing the fire at the target his father had set up—a crude wooden mannequin painted with the symbol of the human Church—he extinguished the fmes.

  "What's wrong?" Krozath asked, kneeling beside his son.

  "Why do we burn the dummy?" Azreth asked, his golden eyes troubled.

  "Because they are our enemies," Krozath expined patiently. "The humans would destroy us all if they could. Especially their Church, with their Padins and their Saintess." He spat the st word as if it tasted foul.

  "Have you ever met a human?" Azreth asked.

  Krozath's expression darkened. "Yes. I've fought many on the borders. Killed some too."

  "What were they like?"

  The question caught the warrior off guard. "Like? They were... fragile. Weak individually, but dangerous in numbers. Treacherous. They speak of light and goodness while committing atrocities."

  Azreth nodded solemnly, but something deep within him—something he couldn't name or understand—whispered that this wasn't the complete truth.

  "Try again," his father urged, ruffling his hair between his growing horns.

  This time, Azreth summoned the fmes and threw them at the target. The fireball struck the mannequin's chest, precisely where a human heart would be. Krozath cheered, but Azreth felt a strange pang of remorse that he couldn't expin.

  "He doesn't py like the others," Myranna confided to her mate that night, after Azreth had gone to sleep. "Tezra tried to include him in their hunting game today. The children were pretending to capture and devour humans."

  "A common enough game," Krozath noted, sharpening his war bde. "What happened?"

  "He suggested they pretend to make peace with the humans instead." Myranna's voice was low with concern. "The other children ughed at him."

  Krozath's hands stilled on the whetstone. "He's young. He doesn't understand the world yet."

  "It's more than that," she insisted. "When the market trader's son pushed little Grex into the mud, most children ughed. Azreth helped him up and cleaned him off."

  "Compassion isn't weakness," Krozath reminded her. "You forget, I've seen you heal wounded warriors on the battlefield, even enemy demons when the fighting was done."

  "This is different." Myranna twisted her hands together. "It's as if... as if he doesn't think like a demon at all."

  The words hung in the air between them, giving shape to fears they had both harbored but never voiced.

  By his seventh year, Azreth's differences had become impossible to ignore. While other demon children delighted in their growing powers—testing their strength, competing in dispys of cruelty or cunning—Azreth used his abilities with restraint.

  His fire magic had developed not into weapons, as his father had hoped, but into controlled fmes that he used to help his mother heat her healing potions or to light the mps in their home when darkness fell.

  "Why do you resist your nature?" demanded Tezra, now a nky demon adolescent with sharp fangs and a sharper tongue. She and several other young demons had cornered Azreth behind the vilge's blood fountain.

  "I'm not resisting anything," Azreth replied calmly. "I just don't see why hurting the crawler was necessary." He referred to the many-legged creature Tezra had tormented earlier for the amusement of her friends.

  "Because it's fun," she sneered, her ruby eyes fshing. "Because we're demons, and that's what we do. We take what we want. We hurt what we can. We grow stronger through others' pain."

  "That doesn't make sense," Azreth argued. "If everyone just takes and hurts, then eventually there's nothing left for anyone."

  Tezra's friends exchanged gnces. One of them, a muscur youth named Vrath, stepped forward. "You sound like a human," he accused. "My father says humans are always talking about 'fairness' and 'mercy' like they actually matter."

  "Maybe they do matter," Azreth suggested.

  The words had barely left his mouth when Vrath shoved him hard against the wall. "My brother died fighting humans at the Scar st season," he snarled. "While you were pying with your little controlled fmes, real demons were dying."

  Azreth felt a surge of anger—hot and unfamiliar. With it came a strange sense of déjà vu, as if he'd faced bullies before, long ago. Something ancient stirred within him, and for a moment, combat instincts he shouldn't possess flowed through his body.

  Without thinking, he sidestepped Vrath's next attack with a fluid grace that left the rger youth stumbling. When another demon tried to grab him from behind, Azreth twisted in a move no seven-year-old should know, breaking the hold with practiced ease.

  The young demons froze, suddenly uncertain. This wasn't the Azreth they knew—the quiet, strange child who avoided conflict.

  "How did you do that?" Tezra asked, her hostility giving way to curiosity.

  Azreth blinked, the moment of muscle memory fading as quickly as it had come. "I... I don't know."

  The confession was honest. He had no idea where those movements had come from. They'd felt natural, like breathing, yet he'd never trained in such techniques.

  The confrontation dissolved as the other young demons backed away, whispering among themselves. Soon, word spread through the vilge about Azreth's unexpined fighting skills.

  That night, Azreth dreamed for the first time of a world bathed in sunlight. He walked through golden fields that stretched to the horizon, felt a warm breeze on his skin that carried the scent of growing things. In the dream, he looked down at his hands and saw pale, five-fingered appendages instead of his violet, slightly cwed ones.

  He woke gasping, tears streaming down his face without knowing why. A profound sense of loss engulfed him—homesickness for a pce he'd never been.

  "Azreth?" His mother's voice came from the doorway, concerned. Her night vision easily detected his distress in the darkness. "What's wrong?"

  "I had a strange dream," he said, wiping his tears. "About a pce with a yellow sky."

  "That's not a sky, little one," Myranna said, sitting on the edge of his sleeping mat. "You dreamed of the human realm. Their sky is blue, but they have a burning star that crosses it each day, making it appear golden."

  "It was beautiful," Azreth whispered.

  Myranna stroked his hair, her touch gentle despite the sharp cws. "Many things in the human realm are beautiful," she admitted. "That makes them all the more dangerous."

  "Have you been there?"

  She nodded. "Once, when I was young. A raid across the Scar. I saw their fields and vilges before the fighting started."

  "What were the humans like?" Azreth asked, echoing the question he'd asked his father years before.

  Myranna considered her answer carefully. "Different," she finally said. "Not as strong as us individually, but they build things together that st. They fear what they don't understand, and they don't understand us at all."

  "Why do we fight them?"

  "Because they fight us," she said simply. "It's been that way for as long as anyone remembers. They hate us for what we are. We hate them for what they've done."

  Azreth frowned. "That sounds like a cycle that never ends."

  Something in his words made Myranna shiver, though she couldn't say why. "Sleep now," she urged, pulling his bnket up. "Tomorrow is the Harvest Moon festival. You'll need your strength for the celebrations."

  After she left, Azreth y awake, staring at the rough ceiling of their home. The dream lingered in his mind—not just images, but feelings. Walking through those golden fields, he had felt a sense of rightness, of belonging, that he'd never experienced in the demon realm.

  "Who am I?" he whispered to the darkness, touching the seven-pointed star birthmark on his palm. It seemed to tingle under his fingers, as if responding to his question.

  But no answer came, only the distant howls of shadow wolves in the forest and the quiet certainty that he was somehow different—a demon child with a perspective that didn't match his reality.

  Deep within him, buried memories stirred like seeds beneath winter soil—dormant but alive, waiting for the right moment to emerge into the light.