The oppressive, sulfur-choked atmosphere of the Demon Realm didn't just feel hot; it felt like walking through the throat of a dying god.
Rivers of liquid fire snaked across the blackened bedrock underfoot, casting an unstable, flickering orange glow over the landscape. Every few seconds, a localized pocket of methane would burst through the crust, sending a violent, hissing spray of crimson plasma toward the bleeding, ash-choked sky. The heat indices were high enough to blister mortal flesh, distorting the horizon into a shimmering, hallucinatory mirage.
"Dan, I know this is a terrible time to bring this up," Lilly said, her voice strained as she forced the hot, toxic air into her lungs. She reached out, her fingers tightening around Dan's calloused hand as he effortlessly anchored her, pulling her across a jagged, two-meter fissure where a bubbling vein of magma spit sparks against her leather boots.
Once her feet cleared the gap, she didn't let go of his hand. Instead, she squeezed it, the ambient heat making her golden hair stick to her damp forehead. "But I'm certain this is the only window I'll get to ask. You're wearing a face that isn't yours, hiding your very name from the rest of the party... and it's driving me crazy."
Dan didn't answer. He didn't tighten his grip, nor did he pull away. He simply kept his rhythmic, unbothered stride through the volcanic ash, his posture completely detached from the environmental violence around them.
Frustrated by the brick wall of his silence, Lilly quickened her pace. Her boots crunched loudly against the obsidian gravel as she lunged ahead, pivoting sharply on her heel to physically cut off his path. Her brilliant, molten-gold eyes locked instantly onto his. Biologically, she was four years his senior, but in that moment, standing with her hands on her hips and her jaw set in a stubborn pout, she radiated the frantic, emotional energy of a teenager—a trait common among half-elves whose extended lifespans often stretched out their youth.
"Dan, look at me and tell me in your own words," Lilly demanded, the hot updrafts whipping her golden hair into a chaotic halo. "The rumors flying around my domain are completely insane. They're saying you're a monster, an international fugitive. Just... what exactly happened back in Ha'val? Why is there a continental bounty on your head? And why is Areia wanted alongside you? I know I'm invading your privacy, I know it, but I need to know how my friend is actually faring in this nightmare."
Dan ground to a halt, standing perfectly still in the center of the ash path.
Under the heavy veil of his magical disguise, his eyes didn't look human—they burned with a deep, predatory crimson that seemed to absorb the ambient light of the lava lakes. His stark, snow-white hair stood out like a beacon of absolute cold against the oppressive, bleeding crimson of the demonic sky.
He stared through her, his expression entirely unreadable for a long, torturous moment. Then, he let out a soft, heavy sigh that carried the weight of someone carrying a universe on his shoulders. He didn't answer her. Instead, he slowly turned his head toward the jagged volcanic peaks in the far distance, where a massive, swirling black vortex of winged, chittering fiends was beginning to swarm like a plague of locusts.
"Croc is crying," he murmured.
Lilly blinked, her golden eyes widening as her aggressive stance instantly collapsed into pure bewilderment. "What? Dan, that was completely random." She let out a nervous, awkward laugh, looking around the desolate, roaring landscape as if searching for the punchline. "Please tell me you're not using some bizarre metaphor to dodge my question. And besides... why would someone like Croc cry? She's literally a walking fortress. She's too strong to cry."
"Lilly," Dan said softly.
He didn't raise his voice, but the sudden, grounding authority in his tone completely sliced through the ambient rumbling of the volcanic valley, freezing her words in her throat.
"If I try to explain the absolute tapestry of madness surrounding my life and Areia's... I'll only end up breaking both of our brains," he said, his crimson eyes shifting back to lock onto hers with a terrifying, raw honesty. "The truth is, even I don't fully comprehend the parameters of what is happening to me. I'm sorry."
He paused, the distant glow of the lava reflecting off his pale skin. "All I can give you is a single fact: I am not normal. I am a variable this world wasn't prepared for. So... please. Drop the questions for now."
Lilly searched his gaze, looking for a lie, a deflection, or a hint of exaggeration. She found nothing but a vast, hollow vacuum of truth. Defeated, she let her shoulders drop, stepping off the obsidian path to let him pass.
They resumed their quiet, calculated trek through the burning wasteland, the silence between them heavy with things left unsaid.
But Lilly's mind couldn't rest. Her thoughts kept drifting back to his sudden, jarring statement about the beastkin warrior currently stationed sections away.
"Dan... I know you've mentioned it before in passing," Lilly asked quietly, her voice barely carrying over the crackle of bursting lava bubbles, "but how old is Croc, really? And what did you mean back there... how can you possibly know she's crying right now?"
Dan didn't look back at her. He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, his hand resting casually near his waist as he calculated their next move through the hostile territory.
"I usually tell the guild and the authorities that she's twenty-three to keep them from asking questions," Dan said, his voice dropping into a somber, devastatingly quiet register. "But the biological reality is... Croc is only fourteen."
The dream she was in began with the warmth of her early days, memories of a life she had forgotten. Not the searing, violent heat of the world she currently slept in, but a soft, golden radiance that felt like a mother's touch.
Isis sat cradled between the colossal roots of the Mother Tree—a structure so incomprehensibly massive its trunk rose like an eternal mountain, splitting the upper atmosphere and breaching the very clouds themselves. Down below, the world was a pristine, untouched cradle of life. The sun hung high and brilliant, casting a cool, glittering light across the earth, while the wind danced through the valley, happy and refreshing as it carried the sweet scent of morning dew.
Isis closed her eyes, a soft, involuntary smile parting her lips. She was at absolute peace.
As far as her eyes could see, the land was wrapped in a vast, undulating ocean of emerald grass and vibrant wildflowers that swayed in perfect rhythm with the breeze. Dozens of brightly colored birds—creatures that knew absolutely nothing of fear or hunters—perched lazily on her shoulders and arms. With gentle, fluid movements, Isis held out her palms, feeding them tiny seeds and sweet, crushed fruits, laughing softly as their tiny beaks tickled her skin.
In the dream, she had no concept of time, nor any idea how she had suddenly come to be. But her mind was too full of wonder to care about origins.
She remembered her very first days of life, wandering down to the edge of a crystalline, mirror-like lake. Leaning over the water, she had stared intensely at her own reflection, trying to make sense of the strange creature looking back. Up until that point, she hadn't seen a single living being that walked upright; there were only the towering trees, the rushing rivers, and the wild animals that occasionally kept her company. In her innocent mind, she simply assumed her appearance was the standard for existence—or, at the very least, that she was a solitary creation, the only one of her kind meant to walk this beautiful earth.
Her reflection was a marvel of nature. Her irises were a deep, vibrant green, holding pupils that burned like small, brilliant rubies. The sclera housing it all wasn't white, but a deep, pitch-black void that made her eyes look like twin stars caught in a night sky.
And then there was her hair. A cascading, living waterfall of forest-green vines that moved with a gentle consciousness of their own, swaying lazily in the wind and diligently tending to her every need, brushing away stray leaves and braiding themselves into intricate crowns.
Stepping back from the edge of the lake, she had looked around the endless horizon. The world was so pretty, so overflowing with quiet majesty. As she moved, her incredibly long, vine-like hair draped downward, wrapping around her frame like a protective, modesty-shielding gown. Her skin held a faint, ethereal greenish tint, but it was so subtle, so flawlessly blended with her porcelain undertones, that it wasn't something anyone would notice at a casual glance.
She had raised her hands back then, lightly touching her throat, feeling the steady vibration of her breath. Her fingers traced her lips, her smooth face, and the sharp line of her teeth. To suddenly exist—to be entirely, undeniably alive—felt incredibly strange, yet it filled her with a blissful, boundless happiness.
She spent a fundamentally long time near the great tree. A thousand years washed over the world like a quiet afternoon, and not once in all those centuries did she ever see another creature walking on two legs like herself. But not knowing that anyone else existed, she never felt the sting of loneliness. She simply kept living, a happy, curious girl dancing through her own private paradise, blissfully unaware of the eons of tragedy that waited for her in the waking world.
The timeless serenity of her paradise didn't shatter all at once; it bled out, slowly and irreversibly, on the day the grass turned red.
He was a man, but he was nothing like the graceful, unblemished animals she spent her days tending to. He was a creature of raw agony, his body brutally pierced by jagged, rusted shards of iron and splintered wood from every conceivable angle. He was utterly defeated, a dying monument of flesh and broken pride, trailing a thick, dark smear of crimson across the pristine emerald grass. Isis had absolutely no conceptual framework for malice or war; she had no idea where this strange being had come from, or what horrific cataclysm could have possibly reduced a living soul to such a ruined, mangled state.
Yet, even as the last embers of his lifeforce flickered violently in his chest, the man kept crawling. His fingernails dug into the dirt, his body dragging forward with an agonizing, singular obsession: he was heading toward her Mother Tree.
But his strength failed him. A long distance away from the towering roots, the man's arms collapsed beneath his weight. He rolled onto his back, his breathing turning into a wet, shallow rattle, his lungs preparing to take their final, desperate breath.
Isis had already sensed him long before he fell. To her, the entire forest was a living, breathing tapestry of interconnected heartbeats, and this man's fading pulse had sent a sharp, agonizing ripple through her own soul.
Slowly, carefully, she stepped out from the shadow of the canopy.
Her bare feet pressed silently into the blood-stained grass. She approached the broken figure with a profound, wide-eyed curiosity that overrode any sense of fear. A creature on two legs, she thought, her mind racing as she hovered over him. A man... just like me?
She stood over his broken form like a beautiful, tragic deity of the wilderness. Her vibrant, forest-green hair cascaded down around her body, the living vines waving gently in the wind, stretching outward to lightly brush against the cold iron handles protruding from the man's chest, as if trying to soothe the metal itself.
The man let out a ragged, tortured groan, his eyelids fluttering open with immense effort. Through a haze of blood and impending darkness, he looked up.
He didn't see a monster. He didn't see the strange, pitch-black sclera or the ruby-red pupils staring down at him. As his gaze locked onto her vibrant green irises, his eyes widened with a sudden, overwhelming surge of pure, ecstatic longing. The agony lines on his face smoothed away, replaced by a profound, breathtaking peace.
A small, genuine smile played on his bloody lips.
"So..." the man muttered, his voice barely a raspy whisper that floated into the warm breeze. "God has finally come... to take me away at long, long last. I knew... I always knew you existed."
With that final, breathy confession of faith, his eyes rolled back, his head loped to the side, and his chest fell still. He collapsed entirely into the earth, his spark extinguishing right beneath her gaze.
Isis stood perfectly frozen in the quiet afternoon light. She tilted her head, her ruby pupils dilating in the dark voids of her eyes as she stared at the unmoving face. The birds on her shoulders stopped singing, sensing the sudden, heavy shift in their mistress. For the first time in a thousand years, a chilling, unidentifiable sensation began to bloom in the center of her chest—a dark, suffocating weight that the beautiful world had never taught her how to carry.
Isis stared down at the unmoving man for a long, quiet interval.
He had spoken to her, producing strange, rhythmic vocalizations from his throat—words that her mind couldn't quite translate, yet carried an undeniable, crushing weight of emotion. She was no stranger to the concept of cessation. She had seen animals hunted, wounded, and killed within her forest before. Nature, beneath its breathtaking majesty, could be quite brutal, operating on an unyielding cycle of predator and prey.
But as her vibrant purple-green gaze traced the jagged, metallic shards protruding from this creature's flesh, something inside her recoiled. Nothing about these injuries screamed nature. This wasn't the clean tear of a claw or the predictable strike of a viper. This was artificial. It was calculating, jagged, and cruel.
Suddenly, the ambient light of the clearing shifted.
Isis turned her head sharply as a brilliant, incandescent streak of ethereal light erupted directly from the center of the man's chest. It rose into the air, a pulsing, fluid core of pure energy. But instead of floating upward into the vast blue sky, the light abruptly changed its trajectory, pointing downward as it began to dive frantically toward the earth, eager to bury itself in the soil.
Zap!
Before the light could touch the grass, a thick cluster of Isis's forest-green hair shot out like a nest of living vines, wrapping securely around the glowing anomaly. The soul wriggled frantically within the foliage, twisting and turning with a desperate, wild momentum as it tried to break free from the absolute grip she held over it. But it was entirely futile.
Isis pulled the vine back closer, staring at the trapped light with intense, wide-eyed fascination. She had witnessed this phenomenon multiple times over the centuries whenever an apex predator claimed a life in her woods; she knew this glowing essence was the absolute core of a living being.
Yet, every single animal soul she had ever seen had gracefully ascended into the clouds above, melting into the sky. This was the exact first time she had ever witnessed a soul trying to burrow deep under the earth instead of climbing toward the sun.
To her innocent mind, this could only mean one thing: a mistake had been made.
She assumed the light had simply lost its orientation, a broken compass steering it in the wrong direction. Gently, she tried to manually pivot the trajectory of her vine-hair, aiming the glowing core upward to show it the proper path to ascend—but the moment she loosened her grip even a fraction, the soul violently yanked itself back toward the dirt, desperate to sink into the dark below.
"No, no... you're not supposed to go down there," Isis muttered, her melodic voice carrying a soft, childlike confusion. She tilted her head, her ruby-red pupils dilating within the pitch-black voids of her eyes. "What is wrong with you?"
She looked away from the thrashing light, her gaze dropping back onto the pale, bloody face of the fallen man. A sudden, unprecedented spark of an idea popped into her head.
Slowly, deliberately, her living hair lowered the brilliant core of light back down toward the center of the clearing. She pressed the glowing anomaly directly against the man's mangled, blood-soaked chest—and with a gentle, firm nudge of her vines, she pushed the light straight back into his body.
Of course, simply putting the essence back into a shattered vessel wasn't enough to magically revive a deceased creature. The wounds were still open; the blood had already left his veins.
But Isis had absolutely no conceptual understanding of the terrifying, godlike power she held dormant within her green-skinned form.
The moment her living, vine-like hair brushed directly against the man's cold skin, the latent energy of the Mother Tree surged through her. It was an instantaneous, silent explosion of absolute vitality. Right before her eyes, the jagged metal shards and splintered wood dissolved into microscopic ash, floating away on the happy wind. The deep, gaping lacerations on his chest closed up in a seamless blur, his flesh knitting back together so perfectly it was as if they had never been there in the first place.
Even the heavy lines of trauma, exhaustion, and age began to recede. His rough, weathered skin smoothed out, his graying hair darkening as his biological clock was forcibly reeled backward, growing visibly younger under the radiant, revitalizing touch of her grace.
It took precisely a full cycle of the sun for the man's soul to fully anchor itself back into his restored flesh.
The moment Isis detected the rhythmic, steady thumping of his heart echoing through the roots, she knew he was breathing normally again. With a gentle flick of her mind, her living, forest-green hair wrapped around his rejuvenated body, lifting him effortlessly from the blood-stained grass. She brought him deep into the hollow sanctuary of the Mother Tree, setting him down upon a bed of thick, velvet-soft moss that grew within the trunk.
For the next twenty-four hours, she simply watched.
Her vine-like hair drooped down from her scalp, prodding over him with an intense, childlike curiosity. The vines meticulously examined his arms and legs, lifting his limbs one by one to measure them against her own. He was so fundamentally different from her. He possessed dense, heavy musculature, with arms and legs that were considerably larger and thicker than her slender, graceful proportions. Moreover, as her vines lightly shifted the strange, fibrous material covering his lower half, she discovered a distinct anatomical organ underneath his pants that she simply did not possess.
Through centuries of observing the wilderness, Isis was well-acquainted with the biological concepts of male and female—after all, there were always stags and does, lions and lionesses, birds of opposite feathers. But she was completely, blissfully unfamiliar with the societal concepts of clothes and nakedness.
Curious, her hair lifted his heavy frame into the air, turning him completely upside down to examine the rough, woven stuff attached to his torso. She naively assumed it was some peculiar variation of his own skin, or perhaps a rough kind of protective fur unique to his species. She was just about to unravel a loose thread when the man suddenly let out a deep, gravelly groan.
Startled, Isis hastily lowered him back onto the soft moss, her hair snapping backward like a frightened snake.
She stood at a distance, her ruby-red pupils dilating within her pitch-black sclera as she nervously watched his eyelids flutter. She was acutely aware of her own lethal nature. Memory flashed back to a time centuries ago, when she had been bitten by a rogue apex jaguar because she had tried to lift the creature up to admire its spots. She hadn't fully understood what happened to the feline back then, but the incident had taught her a terrifying, absolute truth: her blood meant instantaneous death to any other living creature.
The jaguar's teeth had barely grazed her slightly green skin, drawing a single, glowing drop of her vibrant emerald blood. The moment that liquid divinity touched the predator's fangs, its lifespan hadn't just ended—it had deteriorated at a visible, horrific speed. Right there in her gentle grasp, the massive beast had been violently drained of its vitality, its fur graying, its flesh withering into ash, until it turned completely to dust and scattered into the happy wind.
She stared at her own flawless hands, then back at the younger, sleeping man. For the first time in a thousand years, a heavy, nervous knot tightened in her stomach. She desperately wanted to know this creature who walked on two legs just like her... but she knew that a single mistake, a single drop of her blood, would reduce him to nothingness.
The man's eyelids quivered open. For a long, disoriented interval, he simply stared absentmindedly up at the massive, swirling architecture of the wooden roots above him, his mind struggling to process the sheer scale of the ceiling.
Then, reality slammed back into him. He sat upright with a sharp gasp, his hands flying to his head. "I'm... I'm alive?" he muttered, his voice echoing hollowly inside the hollow trunk. He stared down at his palms, turning them over frantically before tearing at his clothes to examine his torso. The gaping, lethal lacerations, the shattered bones, the rusted iron shards that had been anchored in his chest—all of it was completely gone. Not even a scar remained.
A sudden, sharp thought struck his mind. His head snapped up and he began to scan the cavernous room frantically, his eyes darting across the moss-covered walls until they stopped squarely on a dense wooden growth a few yards away.
Isis had tried to retreat behind the trunk to give him space, but she was far too tall to hide behind the narrow bark, and her vibrant green, vine-like hair was shifting and swaying lazily, completely giving away her location.
The man swung his legs over the bed of moss and stepped down onto the smooth wooden floor. The moment his feet touched the ground, his eyes widened; his body felt remarkably lighter, filled with a surging, youthful vigor he hadn't possessed in years. He immediately dug his hands into his pockets, searching for his daggers or any scrap of steel, but he found absolutely nothing.
God, he thought, his eyes locking back onto the shifting green vines. Is she really a deity?
He began to walk slowly toward her hiding spot, his mind turning with dark, calculating precision. But seeing as I am completely healed and breathing, she must possess some sort of miraculous, some sort of power. Then there's the fact that she looks like a wild Dryad... an untapped spirit of the forest. A cruel, ambitious smirk tugged at the corner of his lips. With a tool like her by my side, I could easily return and utterly destroy the bastards who harmed me. Can I capture her, though? For some reason, she feels incredibly powerful... but she looks naive.
His boots made barely a sound against the moss as he crept toward the wooden growth where Isis stood, her hands covering her face in a mix of nervousness and curiosity. The man reached out a hand, his fingers stretching to grab her shoulder.
VROOM.
Instantly, the happy atmosphere vanished. Before his hand could even come within an inch of her skin, Isis's forest-green hair shot upward like a nest of awakened leviathans. The living vines slammed into him with terrifying, blinding speed, wrapping violently around his arms, his legs, his neck, and his torso in a vice-like grip.
The man grunted, his muscles bulging as he tried to fight back, but it was entirely laughable—it was like trying to use a wooden toothpick in a contest of raw strength against a colossal industrial excavator. Her hair hoisted his heavy frame into the air as if he were nothing but a withered autumn leaf, the vines tightening with a lethal, crushing momentum that threatened to literally rip his limbs from his socket. He let out a strangled groan, the air violently compressed out of his lungs as the immense pressure steadily increased.
"No! Stop it!" Isis suddenly yelled, her eyes flying open in sheer panic. "Don't kill him! Let him go right now!"
The moment the command left her lips, her hair obeyed. The vines uncoiled instantly, dropping the man from the air. He fell with a heavy, ungraceful thud onto the hard wooden ground, gasping for breath. The green vines retreated back to Isis's head, but they remained rigid, hissing and swaying defensively like an array of vipers, completely blocking the path between her and the man. It was as if her hair possessed its own primal consciousness, harboring a deep, personal grudge against him—a dark instinct of self-defense that Isis herself was completely ignoring.
"Are you okay?!" she asked immediately, stepping forward with an expression of pure, heartbreaking worry.
But she didn't realize the gravity of what she was. The moment she spoke, it didn't sound like a normal voice; it was as if a titanic, apocalyptic soundwave erupted directly from her being. The sheer, latent magical density of her vocal cords warped the air pressure inside the tree.
POP.
The man's head snapped back as a sudden, agonizing pressure slammed into his skull. Both of his ears instantly ruptured, dark crimson blood bursting from his ear canals and streaming down his neck at her words.
Seeing him violently bleeding, Isis completely panicked. She stepped closer, tears gathering in her ruby pupils as she spoke again, desperate to fix it. "I-I am so sorry! My hair must have hurt you so badly!" she apologized frantically, her long vines sweeping the floor as she bowed deeply toward him.
PFFT!
A thick spray of dark blood trickled down the man's mouth as he violently coughed, collapsing onto his hands and knees. The weight of her gentle, apologetic words carried such an immense, crushing magical pressure that the vibrations alone threatened to violently rip his internal organs apart faster than her hair ever could.
Isis stood there, trembling and bowing, completely unaware of the horror she was causing. She had spent a thousand years talking only to herself or the silent trees; she had absolutely no idea that her voice carried the weight of a god. She was completely, blissfully ignorant of the devastating power she held over the fragile creatures of the earth.