June 16, XXXX

I wonder what would have happened if I had never accepted the deal. Would I have been happy if I hadn’t taken the chance to fix the wrongs that had been done to me and mine?

Though, I have to wonder, what exactly is happiness? Being the oldest, it was my duty to provide, nurture, and protect from a young age, especially when my younger siblings were born. There was never any room for “happiness,” even with the second chance.

Perhaps I won’t ever know the answer to that question, but at least my family is safe — the emperor himself has ensured that no matter what happens to me (to us), my family will be protected as innocents of this whole shitshow.

Perhaps it’s better that my family has been kept in the dark about my actions so far, I know my father wouldn’t have approved. He was always against killing for any reason and for me to be the cause of multiple families’ destruction — for good reason, not that it will matter in court — that fact alone will destroy what is left of our tenuous relationship.

I know my mother would have been saddened to hear of my actions. She hated that I had become a soldier at a young age, and an unofficial knight around the same age. For me to be the villain of this city — well, I just hope she takes care of herself.

My siblings would be confused — too young to yet understand the significance of death and how terrible my actions truly are — as it should be. I wonder how they’ll react when they finally realize everything I’ve done?

It’s useless to wonder at this point.

I wonder if anyone will believe me if I said that I genuinely didn’t want it for this to happen? Probably not. Why should I feel guilty now, after decades of destroying these noble families and the handful of investigators?

I wouldn’t blame the survivors their anger if I said that so I won’t. Perhaps it’s best if I go down as disinterested as possible, I know it will be easier to accept my sentence that way.

Tomorrow I will enter court against the families I destroyed so utterly over the past decade or three (my how time flies by, it feels like just yesterday that I met Alrekr). I know that I will lose, since I cannot say the true reason for my revengeful actions. Who would believe me?

Not even Alrekr (god-blessed man that he is) would believe me, though it saddens me to say it.

Tomorrow I lose, tomorrow I die by my husband’s hands.

— Last Entry of Elegast Kabiri van Abraxas

Note: this was an incomplete story written four years ago that I just found again. I may continue it again.

Aydean Durrett, a human with little magical powers, was an employee of her dad’s shop “the Durrett shop”, a simple family-owned clothing store that her father had started on credit until Credit Dues (the company her father had borrowed from) comes to collect their dues.

Thonok, a Gatekeeper of Death, prefers to spend his time as close to mortality as possible, gets captured by an employee of Credit Dues who wants to create symbiosis between demons and humans.

All Aydean wants to do is pay off her father’s debt while living beside demons and people who call themselves ‘wizards.’ Through the twists and turns of living in the magical office, she becomes fast friends with Thonok. Can she survive long enough to reach her goal or will she be doomed to suffer for eternity?

There had been few occasions in which he had been so certain he was about to die.

The first was when he fell off of monkey bars as a kid. He hit the ground hard and it was the worst pain he had felt up until that point. He had been six.

The second was when he had been learning how to drive at sixteen and he had ran off the road. It hadn’t been his fault per se, somebody more experienced yet under the influence had been trying to pass him but didn’t quite get over far enough.

He ran into a tree head-on. He remembers now how it felt to feel his heart pounding in his head, to feel the scrapes and cuts along his arms and torso from the branches and glass.

How he was so afraid that his father sitting next to him was dead.

They both made a full recovery, but it had been so terrifying at the time.

And now, at a mere 20 years old, he was terrified that his father would beat him to death.

After the accident Oliver’s father relapsed into his alcohol addiction, becoming more and more violent as the years dragged on.

The smallest things were like a hairpin trigger, setting off a violent reaction that could be fatal.

His mother was lying on the floor, unresponsive and he knew that he would be next.

So he fired.

How does it feel to leave something you love behind? It feels like a tear in my soul, an empty hole that I made through my own actions.

It is nobody’s fault but my own that this hole is slowly consuming me. This desire, this burning flame that seems to consume everything I am, yet I cannot allow it to consume me.

If I do, everything I have done up until now will be all for naught, everything that I have worked towards will be undone in a instant.

And it’s better this way.

I’m not the greatest of people, I’ll be the first to admit that. I can be hard to handle, much less understand.

And I felt understood for once, they made me feel like I was easy to understand and that every one else was the problem.

But that was the problem in and of itself.

My ego expanded and I stopped thinking about if something was wrong or right, letting myself get manipulated into doing anything and everything they wanted me to do.

I like to think that they were innocent of everything, that they didn’t mean for it to go so far. They didn’t mean to hurt me like they did.

But living in denial is worse than accepting reality.

It was their plan to destroy me the moment they laid their eyes on me. My stupidity gave them an opening, an opening they took without hesitation.

Perhaps by me leaving everything will truly be destroyed. My work in shambles either way.

But at least I keep my divinity, my honor, intact leaving this way.

Perhaps I love them, but I love my job more.

My people’s creativity stretches as far as I can see the horizon, if not farther. The muses themselves called my people to create and prosper in the first place for my people did not start off creative.

But isn’t this just propaganda created for my people to keep them quiet, to keep them defying their oppressors?

But who are the oppressors? The people who came and “conquered” us or ourselves?

It can be so hard to see what truly is the issue: the people who conquer or the people who ignore the conquering.

But perhaps the conquering itself was never an issue to begin with, since it birthed a new era in my people. It birthed music, art, and dance and am I not the patron of those very things?

Should I not be happy that my people have started to use the very things I’ve longed for them to enjoy?

Perhaps the muses did indeed call my people to create, only my brother would know, though, since he is in charge of them. It’s funny, I’m the patron of the muses but my brother, the patron of war and famine, got the muses.

Perhaps I too was conquered. Perhaps that conquering too led me to create.

Perhaps I will never know for sure.

But one thing I do know is that my people are starting to wake up. They are starting to understand the injustices done to them — unable as they are to adhere to my brother’s patronage.

Unable as they are to put up arms, to fight honorably.

How many have died unhonorably? How many have died to those tyrants since they made their home among my people?

They look so like my people only because they are. My people conquered their own, to keep them ‘safe’, to keep them out of harm.

But they themselves are harming them. How ironic.

I wonder when will my children will wake up fully? I wonder when will my children fight back?

Perhaps never. Should I be okay with that? Should I allow my people to live in ignorance forever? Should I allow them to continue to slumber?

Wouldn’t that just serve to harm them further?

The other patrons, even the one of wisdom, have no advice for me, for their people don’t suffer like mine do. Their people are the conquerors and their issues lie in becoming the people they oppress.

Why must my people be different? Why must my people not behave like the others?

But perhaps, just perhaps, me people’s uniqueness is good, will be good. For, even though they repressed themselves, I doubt others could oppress them easily.

Perhaps I should walk among them sometime, get to know them and inspire a few. All I’m good for are the arts, but perhaps (just perhaps) it could the seed my people need to awaken.

But for now, I must watch and wait awhile more.