Death's Shadow (The Demonata 7)

When Theseus finally came to the Labyrinth and, through trickery, felled the mighty Minotaur, Beranabus wept. Vain, proud Theseus was severing the Minotaur’s head, to take as a trophy, when he heard the child’s sobs. Startled, he followed the sounds to their source and examined Beranabus by the light of a torch he had smuggled into the maze.

Beranabus didn’t look unnatural. Theseus thought the boy was six or seven years old and assumed he was one of Minos’s unfortunate victims. He tried to lead the child out of the Labyrinth. “Don’t cry,” he muttered awkwardly. “The beast is dead. You’re free now.”

Beranabus glared at Theseus and his eyes blazed with a yellow, fiery light. Theseus quickly backed away. He hadn’t been afraid of the Minotaur, arrogantly sure of his success. But this child unnerved him. The boy was an unexpected find and Theseus wasn’t sure what to make of him.

“Come with me now or I’ll leave you,” he snapped.

Beranabus only snarled in reply and crawled across to the dead Minotaur. Theseus watched with disbelief as the boy spread himself over the monster’s lifeless body and wept into the thick hairs of his bloodied, ruptured chest. He stood uncertainly by the pair for a while and thought about hacking at the Minotaur’s neck again, to claim his prize. But then he caught another glimpse of the boy’s yellow eyes. It was ridiculous, but

he had a notion the child might prove more of a threat than the Minotaur.

“Stay here then,” Theseus pouted, turning his back on the boy, deciding to leave the Minotaur’s head intact. If people questioned him afterwards, he would say the beast fought valiantly, so he’d decided to have him whole as a mark of respect.

Following a trail of thread to safety, Theseus wound his way out of the Labyrinth to take his place among the legendary heroes of that time, alongside the likes of Heracles, Jason and Achilles.

He left the orphaned boy alone in the darkness, weeping over the corpse of the slain, demonic beast. He assumed the child would die in the shadows of the maze, unnoticed by the world. Life was cheap and Theseus didn’t think the boy would be any great loss. The slayer of the Minotaur was a shallow, shortsighted man who cared only about his own reputation. He could never have guessed that Beranabus would outlive and outfight every legendary warrior of that golden age, and eventually prove himself to be the greatest hero of them all.

DEAD GIRLS TELL TALES

It’s strange being alive again. This world is huge, complicated, terrifying. So many people and machines. You can travel anywhere and communicate in ways I never even dreamt of when I first lived. How are you supposed to find a place for yourself in a world this convoluted and uncaring?

Life was much simpler sixteen hundred years ago. Most people never travelled more than a few kilometres from the spot where they were born. Men sometimes went off to fight in distant countries, and came back with tales of strangely dressed folk who spoke different languages and believed in frightful gods. But girls and women rarely saw such sights, unless they were kidnapped by rival warriors and carted off.

It was a peaceful time when I was born. No great wars. Food was plentiful. Laws were respected by most clans. We built huts, made our own clothes, farmed the land, herded tame animals, hunted the wild. We married young, bore lots of children, worshipped our gods and died happily if we lived to be forty.

Then demons invaded. They attacked without mercy and dug up the remains of our dead, creating new beasts out of the rotting flesh and bones, turning our own ancestors against us. We fought as best we could, but for each one we killed, five more appeared. They terrorised villages across the land. It was only a matter of time before we would all suffer horrible, painful deaths.

In our darkest hour, an unlikely saviour appeared. A gruff druid led a small band of our warriors on a mission to send the demons back to their foul universe. I went with them, and so did a simple boy known only as Bran.

We drove back the demons, but one of them—Lord Loss, a red-skinned demon master with eight arms and no heart—imprisoned me in a cave beneath the earth. I was shut off from the world of light. In the darkness, he sent his familiars to torture and kill me. The pain was unbearable and death, when it came, was a relief.

At least it should have been. But for some unknown reason, when my body perished, my soul remained trapped in the cave. There was to be no escape for me, even in death.

I was held captive for many long, depressing centuries. Mine was a world of darkness and absolute desolation. Lacking a body, I couldn’t even sleep. I was conscious for every minute of every long day and night.

I couldn’t see or learn anything of the human world, but I was at the focal point of what had once been a tunnel between the Demonata’s universe and ours. By focusing hard, I could trace the shattered strands of the tunnel back to their source, and from there magically peer into the demons’ den.

Not a lot happened in that part of the universe, but demons occasionally drifted by or stopped to test the tunnel in the hope that they might be able to rekindle it. I worried that one of them might succeed, so I kept a close watch.

After sixteen hundred years my worries proved well-founded. For the first time I sensed movement in the human world. A boy of great power had come to live in the area close to the cave. I could feel him being manipulated. He was led to the cave and tricked into trying to reopen the tunnel. I tried to warn the boy, to stop him. But he couldn’t understand me. The tunnel was reactivated and demons flooded through in their thousands.

That should have been the end, but the boy returned when all seemed lost. He came with another teenager and an elderly magician—Bran! My old friend had survived and grown more powerful than any of us could have imagined.

As strong as Bran and the boys were, it wasn’t enough. Hundreds of demons stood between them and the cave. They tried to break through, but failed. It looked like everything was finished.

Then something remarkable happened. A magical force connected me with the boys. It united the three of us and we became the Kah-Gash, an ancient weapon of incredible power. Without knowing what we were doing, we took the universes back through time, to the night when the tunnel was opened. Bran and the boys seized this fresh opportunity and put a stop to the onslaught, denying the demon hordes access to our world.

During the battle an innocent bystander—a boy called Bill-E Spleen—was killed. I felt myself drawn to the dead boy As my spirit seeped into his corpse, I found myself capable of restoring the body’s functions. I set the heart beating and it pumped blood through the veins and arteries. The brain sparked at my urging. Lungs rose and fell. Bill-E drew breath… and so did I. My first free breath after sixteen hundred years of imprisonment. No words can describe the deliciousness of that.

As Bran and the others stared at me, amazed and afraid, I set about altering the body I’d taken over, reshaping it, giving it my face, my build, my sex. Within hours it was a boy’s body no longer, but a girl’s, with breath, a heartbeat, bones, guts, flesh, blood, a face. I was alive!

That’s when my problems really began.

LONELY NEW WORLD

What amazes me most about this modern world is that people aren’t more amazed. I first lived in a time of magic, with priestesses and druids who could perform wondrous feats. But we had nothing like aeroplanes, computers, televisions, cars. We were servants of the natural world, ignorant of the ways of the universe and the origins of our planet. We didn’t even know the Earth was round!

Today’s people have mastered the land and seas, and even made inroads into the heavens—they can fly! There are things they can’t control, like earthquakes and floods, but for the most part they’ve torn down trees, carved the planet up with roads and made it theirs. They’ve hurt the Earth, and they don’t seem as happy as people in my time were, but they’ve achieved the incredible.