Neria never treated me quite the same after Makka's death. She didn't know that I was the one who actually killed her, though she might have had her suspicions after seeing that Makka's body had no fatal wounds on it. She, despite not knowing that I was the one responsible for her daughter's death, blamed me for Makka being in the village in the first place.

Like a typical blind human mother, she could not accept that her daughter might want to kill her, and was sure that Makka had been in the village because of me. Thus, when Makka was killed by accident, it was not her fault for being in the village, but mine, because I must have been the reason she was there. I didn't particularly care, but it annoyed me, since I had been ordered by Father to stay with Neria until I was at least thirteen or fifteen. I would be in trouble with him, and he was the only person I was afraid of at that time, if I left her.

So a few yeas passed and the war continued, neither side gaining much of an advantage. They were still pretty much at a stalemate when I turned thirteen and finally left Neria's house. I was still a small boy then, and still quite feminine looking, to my great chagrin. I also wasn't far enough past twelve to notice that I had stopped growing. I might have just been late to mature, since that was something that actually happened every now and then among demons.

Despite my lack of size, I was still a more mature thirteen year old than any human I'd ever met. I was tired of living with Neria, who treated me a less than human since Makka's death. The only saving grace of Neria's attitude shift had been that she had stopped treating me as a child. Still, it annoyed me, and I felt it was time for a change of location.

I moved to the kingdom of Nanti, which even then was known mostly for the city of Burnlord. I had heard tales about Burnlord though, and I decided not to go there. I moved to the capital city of the kingdom instead, a fairly small city, but much larger than the village I was used to living in.

As I expected it would, the war between Derekan and my former homeland ended as soon as the news spread that I had left. Derekan didn't care enough to keep killing off their faithful once I was no longer there to exterminate. Oddly enough, they didn't shift their attentions toward Nanti at that point. That was most likely since they would have to conquer another two or three kingdoms to get at Nanti, neither of which were major supporters of demons.

My reputation did precede me to Nanti though. There were enough demon friendly humans there that the realized who the blonde kid with the attitude was as soon as I arrived, and they warned the others. My greeting wasn't exactly a warm one, in that more than a few of the humans in the city tried to intimidate me into leaving. I ignored them, putting a few out of commission for a while when they got too annoying.

The humans of the city finally settled into an agreement with me though. I just wanted to be left alone, but I still wanted to be able to eat. They would feed me and leave me alone. In exchange, I would protect the city from whatever might attack. Usually the attackers were the less sociable weak demons, the ones who thought they could prey on humans even though they were weaker than some humans. They were the kind who sickened me, so I protected the city from them easily.

In seven years of living there I never once failed to protect the city. The agreement continued, and the humans left me alone except to provide me with food. I spent most of my time either in the woods, killing off more animals, or in the cities' libraries, studying demon history. I wasn't exactly happy, but it was better than living with Neria.

It was also over those seven years that I started realizing that my not being human was having an effect on my growth. At thirteen I hadn't realized that I had stopped growing at twelve, but when I reached fifteen, then sixteen, and then seventeen and still looked like a little twelve-year-old, I knew something was weird. That was part of the reason that I spent so much time in the libraries, to try and find out what it was about my being a demon that made me look like a child.

I did eventually discover the reason. Demons of the same level as Father and I, being a step removed in power from the ultimate evil, had some sort of characteristic that marked them as definitely not human. Supposedly the ultimate evil looked just like a human, the same way the gods did, but we demons couldn't be the same. The non-human characteristic was different for every demon, and the farther demons got from the ultimate evil, the less human they were.

Father's non-human characteristic was his horns and claws. Mine was less obvious, unless you knew my actual age. After all, if you thought I was actually twelve, or younger, then I looked just like a normal, very pretty human. The problem was, humans who didn't know me tended to assume that, and thus I still didn't get treated like the adult I was. It infuriated me, and that was when my tendency to lose my temper at the merest mention of my being younger than I was started to develop.

I suppose the main reason that my non-human characteristic was at the same more and less human than Father's is because of my human mother. I may be fully demon, but I do have that bit of humanity that throws it off without diluting my blood. Father doesn't have a human parent, at least, I don't think he does. I have absolutely no idea who Father's parents are, but I feel more or less completely confident in saying that neither one is human. Because of that human blood of mine, I can pass as a human to anyone without enough magic to get past my shields. I just have to let them assume that I'm only twelve years old to do it, something that I will refuse to do almost all of the time. But, at the same time, to anyone who already knows how old I am, it's obvious that I'm not human.

After five years of living in Nanti, the kingdom of Dereken finally decided that they had had it with my presence in the world again. This time, they didn't seem to care that they would have to conquer a few other kingdoms to get at me. They had more faithful to sacrifice in a war than ever, because of massive recruiting efforts since they called off the last war, and they still hated Father with a passion.

Also, they apparently had another one of Father's children to lead them. Nobody who I asked could tell me anything about this half-demon leader of theirs, but I was already more or less certain I knew who it was. After all, Makka had taken her younger brother, Yuutho, when she led them. He would be eleven by then, and still rather new to his magic, if it had manifested at all by then. Still, eleven was almost old enough for most boys to fight for Dereken, so it was probably old enough for a boy to lead them as well. I was certain that Yuutho would be leading the army against me, whenever they reached Nanti.

I kept track of the Derekian army as it made its way through the two full kingdoms and a small offshoot of another that stood between Dereken and Nanti. I laughed at the destruction that was happened all because of me, and human stupidity. I wasn't afraid, and I wasn't particularly concerned about the kingdoms that were getting crushed either. The army wouldn't be able to kill me. I was powerful, much more so than I had been when Makka led her army against me. In addition, I was too smart to let them catch me. I would let them crush the kingdoms between them and me, and waste huge chunks of their army before they even reached my home.

Then, when they reached Nanti, I would let them fight there. I was more or less in the center of the kingdom, so they would have quite a bit of fighting before they got to me. After all, I protected the city I lived in, so the humans who lived there didn't hate me. They didn't like me either, but they weren't going to just give me over, not that they could if they tried. If I could resist being given to the Derekian army when I was ten, I could certainly resist it when I was twenty.

They would eventually reach my city anyway. It was inevitable, because the people of Nanti just were not big into fighting. They wouldn't stand a chance against religious fanatics in the end. But that was no problem for me, because when they reached my city, I just wouldn't be there. I would move. I wasn't that attached to the city, and I could find another city, in a different kingdom, with equally impressive libraries to continue my research on demonkind. I would even be nice enough to let the Derekian army know where I moved, so they could go and kill off more of their followers fighting to that place.

I liked my plan, and I would have been overjoyed if I could have set it in motion. Unfortunately, I never got to do it. The Derekian army did get to the borders of Nanti a little under two years after they started, which was almost impressive. They even had over half of the people that they started with when they got there. But they never actually started trying to go in to Nanti. They just sat at the border and demanded that Nanti hand me over.

The king of Nanti just replied that he couldn't order me to do anything I didn't want to do. He would ask me, but he was fairly certain that I wouldn't agree to go to them. He was right, of course, and he politely informed the Derekian army and its boy leader that they would have to convince me themselves. By then I had confirmed that they were being led by Yuutho, who had grown into a much different person than his older sister. From what I heard, he was almost some sort of saint to them, powerful, beautiful, intelligent, popular, and most of all, kind. He apparently didn't want to kill me, but the head priest, who I suspected was the same one from before, had convinced him that it was necessary.

For two months, the Derekian army sat on the borders of Nanti and demanded my surrender every few days. After that time, it had been two years since they started this second war against me. At that point, on what I would later realize was just three days before Yuutho's thirteenth birthday, they sent a small group of people into the kingdom to meet with me. They were allowed in under the condition that they wouldn't attack anyone, not even me, and that if they were forced into fighting with me they would make up for any damage that occurred, which would probably be mostly from me, not them.

I waited patiently for them in my city. I didn't change my day to day lifestyle just because there would be a potentially hostile force coming to meet with me any day. As they made their way across the countryside, which took them three days, I got more information about them. Specifically, I found out that there were only five people in the group, three fanatic soldiers, Yuutho, and his high priest. As they got closer to the city and entered the limits of my subconscious magic detection, I could feel two of them, Yuutho and the priest. Both were only half human, which made me actually a little eager to meet this priest. I had heard before that he was another of Father's half human children, which made him my half-brother, though he was somewhere around sixty years old at that time.

Yuutho, the priest, and their soldiers arrived at my secluded house during mid-morning on the day of Yuutho's thirteenth birthday. I was asleep when they arrived, and I did not appreciate it when the soldiers started shouting in the direction of the window that Yuutho told them was my bedroom, after finding that knocking just didn't work to wake me up. At first I was tempted to just put up a shield of magic that would keep the noise out and go back to sleep until my normal rising time of around noon. After all, it was rude of them to expect me to be conscious at such an obscenely early time. It wasn't until Yuutho called, quite politely, up to the window and asked me to please wake up and talk to them, since they were tired and just wanted to rest a little. He hadn't said it very loudly, but instead he reinforced his cry with a neat strand of magic. It was his skill with his power that made me decide to see them then.

I crawled out of bed, blinking several times to actually get my eyes working properly, and then walked to the window. I stuck my head out, tangled mess of hair and all, and called down to them. "Fine, I'll talk to you now! Just give me some time to wake up and stuff like that! You can come inside, but don't even think about trying to go anywhere but the first room you come into. I don't want you snooping around my house, and I will catch you if you try it."

Then I pulled my head back in the window and shut it. I laughed at the feelings of shock that I felt coming from all five of them, particularly Yuutho and the priest. They didn't know about my non-human characteristic, about my having stopped ageing when I was twelve. They had been expecting someone who looked like a twenty-year-old to stick his head out the window and yell at them. They hadn't been expecting a little kid. But Yuutho had recognized me, even though he hadn't seen me since he was two and I was nine.

I washed up, got dressed, and set to working out the mess of tangles that formed in my hair every night. About a half hour later I finally felt decent enough to go downstairs and talk with them. I wasn't in the best of moods, having been woken up way too early, but I wasn't feeling ready to kill either. I figured that was as good a mood as they could possibly expect from me. Besides, more than likely I would just end up getting more annoyed and/or angry with them, rather than less, if I waited longer.

I got even more shock from them when I walked into the room. A quick peek into a soldier's mind revealed the fact that they had decided that their eyes had just been playing tricks on them when they thought I looked like a little boy before. They all were still expecting me to look my age, and when I looked younger than Yuutho, it confused the soldier I was peeking on more than a little. I felt similar confusion from everyone else, including Yuutho and the priest, who should have been shielded better than that.

I ignored their shock and treated the situation like everything was completely normal. I just walked into the room and took a seat in my second favorite chair, a huge overstuffed monstrosity that I had paid dearly to get my hands on. My favorite chair was in a different room; no one but me got to even see that one.

"Well, you're the ones who wanted to talk," I said as I settled myself against one arm of the chair with my legs over the other one. "So let's talk. Unless you've changed your minds and would rather take this in a violent direction, that is... I would love that. I haven't gotten a chance to kill someone in a while." I smiled at them, trying to look frightening, though it didn't really work that way. I got cute instead, which didn't help my intimidation factor.

The room stayed silent for another few moments after I finished speaking. The soldiers obviously didn't want to get involved. They were scared shitless of me, even though they all thought they could take me if they really had to. After all, I was just a little boy. They were huge compared to me. The priest was apparently trying to put up a silent advisor front, to hide the fact that he was way out of his depth after seeing and feeling me. That left Yuutho on his own, and he didn't look happy there.

Finally, he spoke up. "Saka?" he squeaked, sounding like he wasn't quite sure of the answer even though he recognized me. After all, I hadn't changed all that much since the last time he saw me before then.

"Of course," I said. "Do you see any other full demons in the room?"

"But you're..." he started. I could feel the rest of the protest in his head. "You're supposed to be twenty!" Before he could get it out, I glared at him.

"Don't finish that sentence if you value your life," I said, letting just a hint of coldness creep into my voice. "I am who I am and what I am, no matter what I look like. If you have a problem with that, you can just leave my house. Unless you'd rather die. And no, I'm not going to explain." He swallowed the question he was about to ask, which was very smart of him.

"I..." he started, but he trailed off after a pointed glance from the priest. "We are here to ask you to give yourself up to us."

"And if I do? What happens then? Do I just get locked up for all eternity, or however long I live? Or do you kill me then?"

"If you give yourself up peacefully we will see that we save as much of your soul as we can," the priest said. "I doubt we can redeem you fully, because of your many sins, but we can at least try to save you."

"You want to save my soul?" I asked incredulously. I couldn't believe what he was saying. The most amusing part of it was that he actually believed what he was saying. He thought that if he prayed for me, and if I gave myself up nicely and let them kill me, probably in some sort of ritual sacrifice, that he might be able to "save my soul." I am still not sure if I even have a soul, and if I do, I'm sure it's just as a black as the worst human's. After all, I am a demon.

I then burst out laughing. This earned me several injured, and almost offended, looks from the other people in the room. They all believed that they could save my soul, provided I was willing, and they thought my disbelief was offensive to not only them, but their god. I just found it hilarious, and it only made me laugh harder.

"You don't want us to save you?" Yuutho asked in a hurt tone of voice. He was pouting, and he sounded and looked even younger than I knew he was at that moment. Most of all, he sounded like he couldn't possibly believe that I didn't want to be saved, like everyone should want to be saved.

"Of course I don't," I said. "You're just going to pray over me, comment on how much of a miracle it is that the nasty demon was willing to give himself to the true servants of God, and then kill me. I don't have any desire to die, so I'm not going to give myself up to you."

"But!" he protested. Despite his fairly good mental shields, I could see that he had actually believed I would give myself up when they told me they could save me. His faith in his god had blinded him so much that he thought just believing could make me bend to his will. It should have been annoying, especially considering who he expected to dance to his tune, but instead I found it rather amusing just how far human faith could take a person.

I laughed again, and this time it earned me a glare from the priest, as well as the same injured looks from the soldiers and a confused stare from Yuutho. The priest looked very disappointed, and I could get just far enough in his head when I looked to see that he wasn't going to take no for an answer, even if Yuutho had promised that they would be peaceful while they were in Nanti unless forced into violence. I could have told him right then and there that he wouldn't even be able to scratch me, but I didn't. It was more amusing to watch him try.

"That leaves us no choice," the priest said, his voice heavy in an obvious attempt to sound ominous and powerful, though he was just a puny little half human who didn't even have enough power to keep me from peeking in his mind.

"And what are you gonna do about it, old man?" I asked him. He glared at me some more, and then Yuutho shot a pleading look at him, silently begging him not to cause any trouble.

"We will have to take you by force," he said, smiling. He was feeling proud of himself, and confident that between himself and Yuutho there would be no problems in bringing me back to Dereken. That showed me just how much of an idiot he was, since I could tell without even trying that the two of them were nowhere near as strong as I was. Of course, he was already an idiot, since when I looked a little deeper into his mind I saw that he thought I was as weak as I looked.

That pissed me off more than his blind confidence did. He actually thought I was magically weak just because I looked, and was more or less, physically weak. And he thought of me as a cute kid. I think it was because of that final insult to my adulthood that I decided to play with him a little before I took him out.

Because of that decision of mine, that day became the first day I ever pretended to be as young as I looked to trick someone. It was also more or less the first day I ever acted the age I have looked since I was twelve, and that includes when I actually was twelve. He thought I was a cute kid, so I decided to give him cute kid, right up until I had him where I wanted him so I could kill him the same way I had killed Makka.

Back then I wasn't quite as good at acting like a cute kid as I later became. It took me almost a century of practice before I became truly convincing to people who knew me more than the average stranger on the street. But, that day in my house, against Yuutho, the priest, and their three fanatics, only Yuutho realized that I was acting. I turned on the charm and smiled at them, trying to look as sugary and adorable as I could possibly be without gagging myself, and the four of them ate it up without a second thought. They were so convinced that I was finally showing my true colors, coming out from behind the scary, flippant mask that they thought I had been showing until then, that they wouldn't even listen when Yuutho tried to warn them that my current behavior was the mask.

I killed three humans that day. After about three or four minutes of me acting like a little child, the priest ordered his fanatics to grab me so they could take me back to Dereken with them, despite Yuutho yelling almost nonstop at him about how I wasn't the weak little kid I was acting like. The men rushed forward on his command and tried to drag me out of the room. I continued to act like a child, even though the idiot on my right had my arm in a death grip, so that I was sure I would find a huge bruise there in the morning. It pissed me off, but I carefully stored the rage to fuel my destruction when I finally stopped playing.

I burst into fake tears when the soldiers actually started walking toward the door. "I don't wanna die!" I yelled at the top of my lungs, which actually caused the priest to cover his ears in pain. I reinforced it with a tiny flow of power, trying to push the soldiers away from me. I carefully kept the flow weak enough so that the men holding me would be able to resist it. That way they would think even less of my powers, without forgetting that I really was the person they wanted.

"We're doing this for the good of all humankind," the monk said with a hint of false kindness in his voice. Looking in his mind showed me that he was attempting to act like he felt sorry for me, but that he truly did despise me for being what I was. And, at the same time, he despised himself for being my brother, even if he was far older than I.

I let the fanatics drag me all the way to the front door of the house. The priest followed behind, with Yuutho hiding behind him and still trying to convince our older brother that I was just acting. He realized that I was dangerous, but the priest was too busy hating me and all that I stood for to actually listen to him. Besides, to the priest Yuutho was just another filthy half demon anyway. I put up some amount of struggle, just to keep up the act.

Then, just as the men were about to drag me across the threshold, I set up an invisible wall of magical force right in front of them. They slammed into it as one, hard enough to hurt and stun them, but not hard enough that I was carried forward to impact with it as well. The priest and Yuutho saw this and froze in their tracks. I saw a look of terror cross Yuutho's face when he realized that I was ready to stop playing.

I smiled at my younger brother as sweetly as I could bring myself to. Then I turned that same smile on my older brother, the idiot priest who thought I was actually as weak as I looked. He still didn't understand at that point, something I could tell by the fact that he somehow thought that his guards had stopped on their own. Luckily for him, he changed his mind about me slightly after I spoke.

"Did you really think I was going to let you take me like that?" I asked him as I dropped all of my pretense and reverted back to the true me. "That you could just have these idiots drag me out of here like the little boy I look? You didn't even consider the possibility that I might be more powerful than you are simply because I am a full demon?"

"You're just a boy," he said, both mind and voice vehemently denying the possibility that I might be more than I looked.

Something snapped inside of me, and I felt all of my carefully stored and controlled rage start breaking loose inside of me. It felt the same as it had the night I killed Makka, hot and powerful enough that the magic inside of me started breaking loose as well. I felt, rather than saw, my hair start to float around me, and with less than I thought I pushed the three idiots holding me away hard enough that they crumpled.

"I..." I growled low in my throat as I used another flow of magic to carry me forward. "Am..." Yuutho's face turned almost transparent with fear as he ran from his hiding spot behind the priest to somewhere safer, the rather intelligent choice of behind a large vase standing nearby. I was far less likely to destroy the vase than I was to destroy my half human brother. "Not..." I continued forward, and the first of the three guards, the one who had been holding my left arm, started to wake. I felt his fear, and reveled in it.

"A child!" I screamed as I came to a stop in front of the priest. By then he had finally turned just as white as Yuutho. He was actually frightened, and he had realized that I really was as dangerous as people said I was. Even better, he had wet himself, a delightful little human reaction to fear that I loved only because it meant that I had succeeded in frightening a human that much. The smell disgusted me, but I put up with it just to feel that terror emanation from the human mind in front of me.

"Do you understand that?" I asked, looking right into his eyes. I let down my personal shields, the ones that kept me safe from the world around me and, more often, kept them safe from me, and showed him just what was behind him. I showed him a glimpse of my mind, something he would never have gotten a chance to see any other way, and I felt it finally hit home inside him. I was scary. I was dangerous. And, most importantly, I was quite pissed off and not in the mood to leave survivors. He fainted.

Then I turned to the three guards. The other two had woken by then, and all three had gathered together to huddle there on the ground, as if the three of them would stand a better chance against me than they would separately. One of them, the one who had given me a bruise to look forward to the next day, stammered out something about being merciful and letting them live. He mentioned them having learned their lesson, and that they would never come near me again.

I laughed. "I'm a demon, you idiot," I said as I flew over to the three trembling me. "Do you honestly think I would have mercy on you?" He nodded, a hopeful look on his face, and I bared my teeth at him. It wasn't even remotely a smile, though I felt like smiling as I saw the hopeful look vanish from his face in an instant.

"You annoy me," I said flatly.

Then I pushed a tiny tendril of power into each man's brain. I turned back to Yuutho, who was still cowering behind my vase, and called to him. "Watch carefully. This is how I killed your fool sister. Maybe if you learn the trick yourself you can use it on me someday. Though I doubt it. You'll never have enough power to challenge me, boy."

Without turning back to the three men, I pushed large amounts of magical power into the tendrils I had forced into the men's minds. This opened three channels directly into their unprotected, human, brains, so I could send that same magical power flowing through the paths of their minds, thus completely destroying them. All three let out one, giant scream, loud enough to make my teeth rattle, but still one of the sweetest sounds I'd ever heard.

The look on Yuutho's face was even better than the scream. He had just enough skill to follow what I had done and see exactly how I had done it. He also realized the effect it had on the human minds, how they were seemingly experiencing an eternity of pain, even though the actual act took me mere seconds. And, he had enough imagination to conjure up an idea of what it must feel like for them. He stared at me with a look of pure hatred, looking much older than he had when he came marching up to my house to take me to my death.

I just laughed, again. "I see you understand," I said. "Those idiots were no match for me, and neither are you. It will take more than a half-human baby, a fool priest, and three human lackeys to make me do your bidding."

"I will kill you some day." His voice was cold, as his hatred burned with a chilling, focused flame. For a moment, I thought I saw his dark eyes glow a sullen red, with carefully and skillfully controlled power that he shouldn't have had, but the sight disappeared as quickly as it had come.

"Go ahead and try," I said. "For now, though, get the hell out of here, and take our brother with you."

My last sight of him, until some years later, was of him using a tight band of power to lift the much larger body of the priest and carry him away from my house. He didn't look back, and I didn't bother to watch as he marched away. I just slammed the door and headed up to my bedroom to fling myself onto my bed and fall into a deep sleep.