Night of a Dimming Moon

Date: Unknown
Location: Campsight
 
The fire was low tonight. Not dead—just simmering, like me.
 
Ka’rozzel sat across from me, back straight, chains slack around his limbs like they were resting too. He doesn’t need the fire. He doesn’t feel cold. I think he just likes the way it flickers in my eyes.
 
I asked him why he followed me. He didn’t speak for a long while. Just watched the flames. Sometimes I wonder if he still sees things in them—memories, regrets, torment. He’s not what people think devils are. Not all laughter and contracts. He is silence. Chains. Pressure.
 
And then he said, “You carry what I was. Before the breaking.”
 
I asked if he meant the pain, and he tilted his head. “No. The rage without shape. The hunger to be more than a wound.”
 
We talked quietly after that. About what it means to be forged in suffering. About how vengeance is not a path—it’s a forge. You go into it burning, and you either come out tempered… or nothing at all.
 
He told me something I didn’t expect: that sometimes he envies me.
 
Not for my power. Not even for my freedom.
 
But because I still remember my father’s voice.
 
He doesn't remember the voice that begged Azhi-Kael to end it. Or the hands that reached for help and never got it. He remembers chains. Pain. And the relief of surrendering to something worse just so it would stop.
 
I didn’t say anything for a while after that. Just listened to the wind over the stone.
 
Then I said something I hadn’t told anyone, maybe not even myself.
 
I said, “Sometimes I still wake up and think he’s nearby. Like I can hear my father stoking the fire in the hearth.”
 
Ka’rozzel didn’t mock me. He didn’t call it weakness. He just nodded.
 
“That is what they could not burn out of you,” he said. “That is what makes you dangerous.”
 
So I sat there in the quiet with a devil, and for a moment, I wasn’t a weapon. I wasn’t a monster. I wasn’t even a warlock.
 
I was just a girl by a fire, holding onto a memory that refuses to die.
 
And for once… that was enough.
 
—V