Why wasn’t I surprised he’d picked a hideous body? There were boils on his skin, warts, and sores festering. He’d always been off in his tastes about who to torture.
“We’re here to escort you to your father,” he said. “He wants to make sure you arrive…alive. You’ve been above for so long, we thought you might’ve gone soft.” He hissed the last word, finding enjoyment in the insult.
This whole show was an insult, this thinking I wouldn’t be able to travel through the Underworld to my father.
I was already moving.
A scythe appeared before me, and I grabbed it, acting before either of them could react.
A slice to the left, a step forward, and another slice to the right. Since they had corporealized, their heads slid off, falling with a thud to the ground.
Their eyes rolled toward me, their mouths still in smirks.
They weren’t dead. The rules were different in the Underworld, but it’d be a bitch for them to reattach when I was done, and they needed to reattach before moving back to their non-corporeal forms.
I raised the scythe and went to work. “You got it all wrong,” I told them. “I’ve been resting. Now I’m all charged up.”
I didn’t leave them in pieces when I’d finished.
They were in slivers.
BLOODY KELLAN
They weren’t the last.
More demons met me on the path.
The scythe appeared each time.
It wasn’t mine. The scythe appeared for me. If I weren’t supposed to, it wouldn’t have shown itself. When they appeared, it was considered an honor in the Underworld.
As a result, when I got to my father’s residence, I was covered in blood. It dripped down my arms and fingers. My legs were soaked in it. I left bloody footprints behind me, all the blood of others.
It was glorious, and the demon in me writhed in pleasure.
On his front steps was a large podium, a hundred stairs leading up into the sky, up to where he looked down upon me.
That’s when I knew he loved this.
He loved what I had done.
I had fed my demon, and he knew it.
His nostrils flared, smelling the blood on me. I could sense his pride. “You are still my son.”
His words drifted down to me, on a breeze he had created for them.
I didn’t respond because I couldn’t deny it.
I was who he had borne.
No other guards came out to meet me. They were there, but they were hiding or holding back on my father’s orders. Either way, I ignored them and turned into my non-corporeal self. I moved up, floating to the podium my father stood on.
He didn’t non-corporealize. He waited, studying me, sensing into me. He was probably picking up things I didn’t want him to know, things I didn’t know myself, so I tried to resist him. He was my Master, and I was his son, so a thread of resistance was built into me when I was born. It was the natural order for a son to defy his father.
I had been using that muscle the entire time I was gone, building it up, making it stronger. It was now my spinal cord, and it throbbed under my father’s perusal.
He took the form of an old man, his skin wrinkled, his hair white. He had a slight hunch to his back, but it was all a guise. He could take any form he wanted—human, animal, alien. He could even show his wings, though I’d only glimpsed them once in my life.