With thanks to everyone who’s made donations and sent encouraging messages to help me get through Covid and Charlie’s illness.
(This document is a fair and correct copy of the ancient text held in the First Temple Of Transformation, being the first and most precious of its holy writings.)
An Account Of Andry And His Demon
So there I was, about to be sacrificed to a demon.
I’d already made two escape attempts. Neither worked. A virgin with unused magical potential and the right bloodlines isn’t easy to find, apparently. They’d gone all out with the security.
The ritual was well under way. It was too late to escape from inside the circle. I theoretically had no way out. I’d never learned magic. I’d always been small and skinny, nowhere near strong enough to pull off some last minute bond-breaking. If anyone was going to come to my rescue, they would have by then.
Theoretically, I was out of options.
But I’m a small, skinny guy who’s not strong enough to win a fight, who didn’t know magic was an option, so I’d had to learn other skills.
I’d never learned magic, but everyone’s heard the stories. Everyone knows what a binding circle is. Everyone knows that it matters what side of the circle the runes are written on, and if I turned my head until my neck almost broke I could see the runes they’d written. They were on the outside of the circle. And it was a triple circle, too, and the stories say that’s the strongest kind.
The cultists might have said that this demon was their god, and maybe the drones chanting down there below the showy sacrificial stage actually believed it. They couldn’t see the circle from there. But this demon wasn’t showing up voluntarily, I was almost sure. The cult leaders were compelling it to appear.
I’d heard stories like this, too. They usually ended with a lot of dead cultists and one - or a few - leaders with far too much demonic power.
I listened to the speech the leader gave before they started. Shorn of ranting, it basically boiled down to ‘after this night, our bond with our demon god will be cemented in blood, praise him, our path to immortality will begin, and so on’. So… the demon wasn’t bound to them already. This was an important sacrifice. Possibly their first human sacrifice, or the strongest, or the one that sealed the deal.
When the demon appeared inside the circle with me, I forced down the panic with the weight of more panic. If I froze up, or screamed, or fainted, I was a dead man. The next few seconds were all-important.
