Night in the Wasteland is the time when silence gains weight. But for demons, it isn’t a time for sleep.

  I watched Riza. She woke up after only three hours. That surprised me: apparently demons — or at least her kind — need very little time to recover. Three hours of deep, almost dead oblivion, and she was back on her feet, ready to walk. A biological weapon made for war shouldn’t waste time on dreams.

  It was dark inside the shelter; only my eyes and her timid gaze gave any weak footing in the half-gloom. There was no point moving now — cliffs lay ahead, and it would be better to cross them in daylight.

  I picked up a charred stick and started drawing letters on the dusty floor. Riza immediately scooted closer, watching my hand with intense focus. Her wings brushed the stone walls with a soft rustle.

  “Look,” I said in demonic, pointing at the first symbol. “This is ‘A.’”

  “A,” she repeated. Thin voice, but clear.

  I drew letter after letter. To my surprise, she didn’t need anything repeated twice. She absorbed knowledge the way dry ground drinks water. “B,” “V,” “G”… The whole alphabet I still remembered from my human life spread across the shelter’s dusty floor. She repeated everything without a single mistake.

  She’s too smart for a normal child, flashed through my mind. Six years old, and she’s catching the structure of language on the fly. What are you raising, Zenhald — an ally, or your most dangerous enemy?

  I wiped the alphabet away with my palm and began writing a whole word. The letters came out angular, but readable.

  “Now look here. This is ‘H,’ this is ‘L,’ this is ‘E,’ this is ‘B.’ It reads: ‘khleb.’”

  She frowned, staring hard at the symbols. For her it wasn’t just food she had never tasted — it was the symbol of the world the old boar had spoken about.

  “Khleep?” she said roughly, stumbling on the vowel.

  “No.” I repeated slowly, sharpening the sound. “Khle-b.”

  “Khleb,” she said again — this time cleanly, though a harsh demonic accent still clung to her voice.

  “Khleb,” she repeated once more, quieter now, as if tasting the word. “Zenhald… what is it like?”

  I froze.

  How do you explain the taste of bread to someone who has lived on raw moss and larvae?

  “It’s warm,” I said, staring at the shelter wall. “And it smells like morning after rain. If you eat enough of it, something inside you becomes calm. You don’t want to bite anyone or hide anymore.”

  Riza touched the drawn letter “H” with her finger.

  “I want to taste bread. Someday.”

  I looked at her small shape in the half-dark. Six years old. Smart, capable, and endlessly alone.

  The voice inside me spoke again — but this time it didn’t laugh. It just stated a fact:

  You won’t be able to leave her in a village anymore, Zenhald. She’s learned the taste of apples and the sound of words. Now she’s part of your path — whether you want it or not.

  “Go sleep, if you can,” I said, setting the stick aside. “Tomorrow we have a lot of ground to cover.”

  She didn’t lie down.

  She sat beside me, her wing almost touching my shoulder, and began tracing the word khleb in the dust herself, letter by letter, until her fingers were smeared gray.

  I watched her and understood:

  my plan to “hand her off to the first village” had just failed completely.

  I fished another apple out of the bag. Red, juicy — it looked alien against the gray stones. I set it in front of me and wrote a new word in the sand with the stick.

  “Apple,” I said, pointing at the letters. “This is called ‘apple.’”

  Riza leaned in, her wing nearly brushing my hand. Her eyes devoured the symbols.

  “Appla?” she repeated, warping the vowels.

  “No.” I shook my head. “Listen carefully: ap-ple.”

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  She bit her lip, squinting as if fighting her own tongue.

  “Ap-ple,” she said again — much cleaner this time. Almost without an accent.

  I felt a strange satisfaction. This girl was like a blank sheet of highest-grade parchment — the slightest stroke landed perfectly.

  Next to it I wrote a short, three-letter word.

  “And now this. ‘Give.’”

  She stared at me, confused. I translated the meaning into demonic.

  “This will probably be your most-used word,” I added with a hint of irony. “‘Give’ means you ask someone else for something.”

  Riza went silent. Her gaze flicked from the word in the sand to the apple in my hand, and then to me. Gears in her small head spun at insane speed. She tried the new sounds, linking them into a chain.

  “Apple… give?” she said uncertainly. “Give apple?”

  I froze.

  She hadn’t just copied sounds — she understood structure. She built her first request in the human tongue.

  “Here,” I said, handing her the fruit.

  She took it, but she didn’t bite immediately like she usually did. She looked at the apple, then at the smeared letters in the sand, as if realizing that words carried power no weaker than the lightning in my hands.

  With words, she got what she wanted without fear and without pain.

  Look at her, the voice in the depths of my soul woke again. A couple hours of teaching and she’s already manipulating you in your own language. The girl is dangerous, Zenhald. She absorbs everything — your magic, your words, your weakness. Are you sure you want to keep this circus going?

  I ignored it, watching Riza eat carefully. She no longer looked like the wild little creature I’d pulled from that hidden room.

  We spent the rest of the night in silence. I traced constellation names in the sand, and she repeated them, nodding off mid-word but stubbornly refusing to close her eyes.

  We left the shelter at dawn. All the way, I continued our lesson — words fell from my lips, and Riza repeated them, trying to mimic my intonation. She was surprisingly focused. Every new sound seemed to be another centimeter of armor she was building around her fragile soul.

  But the idyll didn’t last.

  I stopped when the air ahead suddenly turned thick and sticky. A couple kilometers away, something was moving with impossible speed, cutting through space.

  “Riza, behind me. Don’t step away even once,” I ordered, and my voice instantly lost its teacher’s softness.

  The next second, the sky was scored by a black streak.

  A long, coal-black spear flew straight at my chest.

  My first instinct was to catch it in midair, but at the last moment the Demon King’s ancient instinct screamed danger. This wasn’t just a weapon. In that piece of black metal pulsed something foreign — powerful, endlessly evil.

  I simply shifted my body to the side.

  The spear hissed past, barely missing my shoulder, and slammed into the rock behind us with a dull impact, crumbling stone.

  And then he appeared.

  A tall, unnaturally gaunt creature wrapped in blackness. His body looked stretched, as if he’d been tortured on a rack for centuries. A plain white mask was frozen on his face — with no eye slits — and long bony fingers extended from beneath his black cloak.

  He landed without a sound, yanked his spear from the rock, and turned the mask toward us. First he studied me — then Riza. I felt his aura swell, filling the space. He pressed his power down on us, trying to make us choke on fear.

  “You… you… hide strength?” His speech was ragged, hoarse, as if he’d forgotten how to stitch sounds into words. “Human… whelp… Kneel… then I spare you.”

  I looked at him.

  Inside me, the voice burst into laughter.

  Look, Zen — another nobody pretending to be a god. Play along.

  I slowly dropped to one knee and lowered my head.

  The Spearman froze.

  For a full minute he stood motionless, savoring his triumph. I felt the ground beneath his feet begin to tremble — no, not the ground: him. He was vibrating with anticipation.

  He swung the spear.

  A lightning-fast thrust aimed straight for my heart. The speed was such that an ordinary person would have seen only a flash.

  But this time, I didn’t dodge.

  I snapped my hand up and clamped my fist down on the black shaft.

  The impact kicked dust up in a fountain, but I didn’t shift even a millimeter. The Spearman locked in place, unable to rip the weapon free.

  I felt the spear resisting me. It vibrated, trying to burn my skin with dark mana. The power in this weapon clearly surpassed the power of its owner.

  The owner was only a pathetic puppet.

  “Impossible…” the thing rasped behind the mask. “No one… no one can touch my spear!”

  “Yours?” I lifted my head, my eyes flaring with icy blue fire. “You’re just a worm that found a stick it can’t chew.”

  I yanked the spear toward me, throwing him off balance. Lightning danced across my palms, building crushing tension. With my other hand I formed a spear of pure white flame.

  The creature’s mask cracked under the pressure of my aura. He stood there, paralyzed by terror, unable even to scream.

  I hurled the flaming spear.

  It punched straight through him, leaving a massive hole in his chest — the edges instantly turning to ash.

  The Spearman began to crumble. The wind caught the black flakes of his body and carried them away into emptiness.

  “And that’s it?” I said aloud, staring at the ash. “I heard so much about you… and you turned out to be an ordinary weakling. Your weapon was the only thing worth noticing.”

  I looked down at the black spear now lying alone on the ground. It still radiated true evil, pulsing in time with some invisible heart.

  Where did it come from?

  Who could have forged such a cursed weapon in these lands?

  The dead don’t talk, so there were no answers to wait for.

  Riza timidly stepped out from behind a boulder. Her face was pale.

  “The enemy was… terrifying,” she whispered, staring at where the Spearman had stood. “And you weren’t even scared.”

  “I was just afraid of getting dirty in his ash,” I replied, trying to keep my voice calm.

  Riza stared at the black spear, mesmerized, and took a step toward it, reaching out—

  “No!” I snapped.

  She jumped back, frightened, looking at me.

  “Don’t touch it, Riza. That spear is an infection. It turned its owner into a skinny monster in a mask. He was probably once a normal demon — until that thing drank his soul and replaced it with its own malice.”

  I looked east.

  If a simple overseer had a weapon like that… what was waiting for us дальше?

  “Move,” I said, circling the black steel in a wide arc. “We can’t stay here.”

  But in my head, the voice sounded again — quiet this time, serious.

  You saw it, Zenhald. That spear… it smells familiar. Someone in these lands has started playing games even you never dreamed of.