Demon Contract

There was no up or down, only black that felt like a weight on the skin.

Max hung in it, suspended between fire and absence. Ash drifted in slow spirals where a floor should have been, each fleck turning to a pinprick of light before it vanished. The ritual circle still burned around him without ground to sit on — lines of blood and memory hanging in the dark like wire. Cracked, but holding.

Aamon was whole.

The demon would not keep a single face. With one blink it was a crowned wolf, antlers spiralled like polished bone; with the next, a tapering serpent cut from living flame; then a robed figure without features at all, arms a fraction too long, blue fire weeping from the sockets where eyes should be. The smile never changed. It stretched too far across a mouth full of knives, as if skin had been taught to obey a joke it did not understand.

"Do you feel it?" Aamon's voice slipped through the heat — silk at first, then the edge of a blade. "The Contract is sealed. You gave yourself willingly. There is no retreat, and no undoing."

Filaments slid from his claws — not chains, not rope, but hair‑thin threads of blue light that shimmered like spider silk under a dying star. They didn't wrap Max; they passed through him. One needle through the sternum. Another through each temple. Others through the soft hollows where thoughts collected and hardened into meaning.

Pain followed, the wrong kind. Not flesh pain; a catch deeper than nerves, as if something inside him had wordless edges and those edges were being pulled loose. The threads pulsed. Heat climbed his spine.

A memory lifted.

April stood in their kitchen, morning light yellowing the tiles. Hair still wet. Liz on her hip, coffee in her other hand. Music playing low — an acoustic cover of Bowie — and April humming without hearing herself. Max could feel the warmth of the mug when he took it from her, the cheap ceramic grazed by a hairline crack at the rim.

It burned away in a clean, quiet line.

Another rose to the surface before he could reach it.

Liz at five, knuckles white on his jacket sleeve at the school gate, rain stippling the tarmac. He knelt, told her she was brave, told her he'd be there at the bell. Her hand was small. Too warm from holding fear.

Gone.

Then Victor, slumped against a training car with his brow split and gear smoking, live‑burn drills gone wrong. Melted plastic in Max's mouth. The hiss of steam. The realisation that he'd frozen — not in terror, but in the hollow space where the right action should have been.

Gone.

Ethan, drunk after April's funeral, grinning and crying with bloodied knuckles, hating himself so loudly that forgiveness felt like a bruise in Max's chest.

Gone.

The small things followed, their edges brittle with use: a missed birthday; an argument he sparked because he needed a target; the dog they promised and never got; the echo of his mother's voice at graduation; April's laugh echoing up a stairwell. Each cut loose. Each carried along the threads and fed to the blue.

Max tried to pull air. Nothing moved. The filaments weren't binding a body; they were peeling a person.

Aamon floated closer until he blotted the distant light. The heat pushed softly at Max's skin without burning it — the warmth of an oven door opening, a domestic temperature, pleasant enough that the mind lowered its guard. The smile showed more teeth.

"This is the truth," the demon murmured. "Contractors beg for power and receive hunger. I do not grant. I consume. You are a gate, Max Jaeger. A door with hinges pre‑cracked by grief."

The threads bit deeper. Colours dulled. The pattern that defined his name lost ink at the edges.

He forgot where he was. Then why he was here. The syllables of his own life slurred — firefighter, husband, father — until only noise remained.

A small sound cut through the noise inside him. Not from the void. From a room that had not existed for years.

Liz, days old, soft as fruit. Her hand curled around the first joint of his finger, grip weak and stubborn in turns, not quite understanding that the world could let go. The hospital room still smelled like antiseptic and warm plastic. April slept with her mouth slightly open, a dark crease where the oxygen tube had sat hours before. The window reflected a tired stranger who could not stop smiling. Somewhere down the hall a trolley rattled on a loose wheel.

The promise came with the memory, quiet as breath. He remembered saying it into that warm, plastic smell. I'll protect her. No matter what.

The threads struck that place and slid off. Sparks flicked into the dark like insects in rain.

Max took a breath that didn't involve lungs. The sound of it wasn't air — more like a rope tightening on a winch.

He understood Aamon's method in a single, cooled moment: not murder, but an unmaking of reasons. Take away the why and the who surrenders itself.

Something lit behind his skull. Not blue. Not red. Gold — faint as light under a closed door.

The halo was cracked. It wavered in and out like a heart monitor with dust in the leads. But it existed. It beat in time with him.

Aamon paused. A blink. The first stutter in a perfect appetite.

You can have the cost, Max thought, shaping the words without sound. You can have the guilt and the years and everything I broke by mistake.

Not her.

The halo steadied. The filaments tightened as if they had encountered new material — not bone, not thought, something with weight that could not be thinned by heat.

Aamon's face kept changing, each new shape showing more teeth than the last.

"Interesting," the demon said. "A hinge that bites back."

The void seemed to creak. It was a small sound, as if a house somewhere in the dark had shifted under a change in weather.

Max focused on the place the gold touched and held. He made himself smaller everywhere else so the threads had less to drag. April's laugh was gone. Victor's half‑smile was gone. Ethan's ruin was gone. But Liz remained — the newborn hand; the rain‑soaked sleeve; the weight of her on his shoulder after he'd carried her home asleep. When he looked at that weight, the halo brightened enough to stain the edges of Aamon's blue with a sickly green.

The demon's smile dropped by a tooth.

"Every fracture widens the door," Aamon said, less silk now, more heat. "How pleasant that you have so many."

"Enough," Max answered. The word came out rough and thinner than he intended, but it landed. The threads jerked.

He lifted his head. The dark pressed close. The circle hung in pieces around him. The ash spiralled. The halo held.

Something in the void shifted, a tide turning without water. The pulling did not stop, but it met shape for the first time — the sense of a frame rising where there had only been skin.

Aamon leaned in to smother it.

Max did not look away. He could not afford to. He gripped the promise like a rung on a ladder sunk into a well and felt the gold answer.

The first thread snapped.

It was not a sound so much as a change in pressure — the relief you feel when a tight band around the chest is cut. Blue sparks skittered across the dark, fizzled, died.

Aamon's eyes — when he had them — narrowed.

Max breathed again. The halo brightened by a fraction. The remaining threads dug deeper, their points seeking softer ground, but their light leaked where it touched the gold.

The demon's voice flattened. "You misunderstand your role."

"Maybe," Max said.

He was shaking. He could feel the tremor along thoughts he had left, as if the scaffolding he'd built in his head had been rushed and the wind had arrived early. It didn't matter. A single beam held. That was enough for now.

Aamon drew back to strike with something more than memory.

Max kept his eyes on the gold and braced for the next pull. The void tightened to a point.

The crack inside him widened — not a break this time, but a seam opening.

And he fell, not away from Aamon, but toward the place where the halo came from.

***

Something inside him gave way. Not a snap he could hear — a shift, deep and structural, like the loosening of a foundation stone.

Aamon's pull didn't stop. The threads still fed on him, still drank, but their rhythm faltered. Something had ignited within Max that would not dissolve.

He fell. Not in the way a body falls — no rush of air, no ground coming up. This was a drop through himself: past light, past memory, past the place where thought has shape.

When he opened his eyes, he was standing in the hallway of his old house.

It was the same narrow corridor he'd walked a thousand times, but wrong in ways that clawed at the edge of recognition.

Ash lay over everything like snowfall left too long to melt. It filled the seams between floorboards, dusted the picture frames, clung to the patterned wallpaper in soft drifts. The walls were scorched and bubbled, paint split into curls. The air had smoke in it, but the smoke didn't move — it hung in suspension, strands frozen mid-swirl, refusing to rise or fall.

Time wasn't moving here. It was holding its breath.

The fire hadn't come yet.

But it would.

Down the hall, the door stood ajar. Its edges were black and crumbling, the paint cooked until it split like dry earth. Light leaked underneath — the slow flicker of flame, too still for the real world. Shadows stretched across the floor in sharp lines, unmoving.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

There was no alarm. No voices. Only the silence of a house moments before it gives way.

Then he heard it.

"Daddy…?"

Muffled, high, carrying the weight of tears.

Liz.

She wasn't in the fire. She was beyond it. Somewhere past that door, crying.

He moved before the thought had finished forming. The boards didn't groan under his boots. His shadow didn't change shape. Heat breathed faintly against his face but didn't bite yet, as if it were waiting for permission.

As he walked, other sounds tried to force their way in — April's scream, the real one, tearing through smoke seven years ago; the crack of wood under his fists; the wet pop of blisters forming on his palms. The moment her voice cut off.

Here, those moments didn't have sound. They pressed on him instead, heavy as wet cloth, adding weight to every step.

He reached the doorframe. The brass knob was warm — the kind of heat that warned, not the kind that stopped.

His hand closed on it. He pushed.

The nursery was gone.

In its place stretched a chamber built from ruin.

The walls weren't solid. They were made of fragments, dozens of them, turning in the still air. Each shard was a memory cut loose from its place. Liz with cake mashed into her cheeks on her first birthday, eyes lit like she'd invented joy. His first fire rescue, helmet streaked with soot, the adrenaline still buzzing in his teeth. April in a bookstore, holding up a lurid romance novel with exaggerated scandal, laughing just for him.

Every image was cracked. Every edge was burned. The fire hadn't just taken his home — it had reached into him and left its mark on the foundations.

At the centre of the chamber stood a vault. Gold and bone, latticed and spiked, it rose like the crown of some buried thing forced to the surface. It was no shield. No barricade to keep danger out. Its shape told the truth: this was a lock.

Max stepped closer.

Suspended inside the vault was a single ember.

It was no bigger than a coin, its glow so faint it should have gone out. But it hadn't.

His soul.

It pulsed once. A soft golden beat. The chamber shuddered. Outside the door, the light of the flames dimmed, as if recognising it.

Aamon's threads didn't reach here. This was beyond him.

Max stared at the ember. He didn't reach out. He didn't call for help.

He remembered.

The nights sitting by Liz's hospital bed, watching the numbers change on the monitors. The weight of April's journals on his lap, their pages stained with smudged ink where his hands had lingered too long. The guilt that wouldn't let him sleep. The fear that stole his appetite. The rage that came and went like a fever.

And the thing that never left — the love.

"This," he said, voice raw and low, "is what I protect."

His fist clenched.

"This is what he can't have."

The ember flared — sudden and violent. Light burst from it, washing over the vault like dawn hitting ice.

Something moved in the glow.

Metal. Hooks. Chains.

They grew from the walls, from the light, from the marrow of him — links the colour of sunlight through smoke, shot with veins of something darker, locking tighter with every shift.

This wasn't a shield to hide behind. It was a cage to slam shut over whatever dared to enter.

Max's breath caught. The meaning of it wasn't clear in words, but he knew it all the same.

His soul wasn't offering him power. It was offering consequence.

And it was building the cage for one purpose.

Aamon.

***

Aamon paused.

Only for a fraction of a second — but here, in the void, a fraction was its own tide.

Something was wrong.

The threads anchored deep in Max's soul began to writhe. Their ends frayed, filaments splitting like cut wire. Sparks skittered into the dark. One recoiled altogether, curling back from him as if touched by acid.

The demon's brow folded in a way that had nothing to do with anger.

Then a thread snapped.

Aamon flinched. Not as if struck — but as if he recognised the sound.

"No…" The word was quiet, as if testing the shape of it for the first time. Then, sharper: "No."

Max's eyes opened. There was no body to open them with — no lungs, no skin — only the shape of him, sculpted from soul and fire. Moments ago that shape had been hollow, flickering, bleeding into the demon's web. Now it burned with a steady, swelling light.

A gold halo formed behind his head. Not flawless. Not divine. The edges were chipped, uneven, like a crown cast in haste. But it was alive.

Aamon drew back. The shape of him blurred, shifting faster than before.

"You… should not have—"

Max breathed, and the sound of it cut through the void like metal shearing.

The chains came next.

Not from his back. They tore free from his chest — six of them, each a length of twisted soulmetal and memory, glowing gold and scored with markings that shifted between languages. They swung wide, the arcs of a celestial cage, and sank their ends into the fire around him. The space buckled where they struck, pinning the void itself in place.

The demon's threads tangled in the links. The gold swallowed them whole.

Aamon's scream rolled through the dark. Not pain — fury.

"Insolent mortal!" His voice cracked between anger and something thinner. "Those chains were broken — burned to their root. No one should remember them!"

His shape convulsed. Horns flashed and vanished. Ribs turned inward like the closing of a trap.

"You were nothing. Just grief. Just meat."

Blood leaked from Max's mouth, thick and hot. His limbs shook, but the halo didn't dim.

Inside his chest, behind the cage, something began to move.

A wheel of light. A forge without flame. A prison wrought from soulsteel and sacrifice — built from everything he'd lost, and everything he would not hand over.

It was not a weapon. It was a furnace.

Not to channel power — to break it down. To make it his.

Aamon's claws lit with blue Hellfire, arcs running jagged from fingertip to wrist. He hurled it before Max could take another breath. The heat hit the chains first, raced along them, then slammed into Max.

He screamed.

The Hellfire wasn't mere heat — it was want, violence, the pure taste of ruin. It seared like a brand pressed to bone. It ripped through veins that didn't exist, dug into the spine of him, scraped every thought raw.

The cage drank it. The forge burned it.

Max twisted under the force, every line of him wracked — but he did not break.

Aamon staggered. His hands flexed once, then again, as if deciding on something worse.

This time he threw more than fire.

Talons of shadow. Soul-wires knotted with ancient hunger. Barbs steeped in voices that should have stayed buried — April's scream as the smoke took her, the flatline blip of Liz's monitor, the ragged wheeze of Victor's breath slowing under flame. Every one sharpened into a blade and driven at his core.

Max didn't move aside. He let them hit.

They sank into him — and then turned. The barbs bent inward, their voices warping. The wires folded in on themselves. Shadows tore like cloth.

The chains pulled tighter.
The forge spun faster.

Max gritted his teeth, every tendon shivering from the strain, but he kept his footing.

"You gave me fire," he said, his voice unsteady but clear. "You fed it with my grief."

He lifted his hand. Blue fire bloomed there — no longer Aamon's fire, but something remade, gold laced through the heat until it burned a different colour.

"But you forgot something."

The growl in his throat rose with the heat.

"Fire eats."

He pulled.

***

The motel room was gone.

Its shape had collapsed inward, pulled into a whirl of Hellfire and soul-light. The space folded over itself until it resembled a cathedral made from ash and ruin. Ceiling tiles floated in slow arcs above his head, their edges glowing as if they'd been dipped in ember. The floor was no longer a surface but a spiral of burning sigils that turned lazily, bleeding their light into the dark. Smoke hung midair, caught between seconds, refusing to move.

Time and space here had been pressed thin, stretched to paper.

The veil between Hell and Earth trembled — and through the trembling came Aamon's scream.

His body was splitting apart. Not tearing in one clean break, but cracking along lines that had been there for longer than Max had lived. The chains anchored in Max's chest hauled on him without any sense of effort — not force, inevitability.

The forge inside Max was no longer quiet. It roared now, a low, constant thunder rolling from marrow to skull, each note vibrating in his teeth. It was not calling for help. It was calling to feed.

Aamon lashed at the air. His claws were hooked with void and sulphur, his strikes leaving gashes in the space between them. The air rippled like water. The black behind it split.

He tried to run. Not by stepping back — by tearing open another way out. His voice shook the air in a language that was never meant for breath.

"RI'VAKTOTH— I call you— Belial— Agrath—"

No one came.

Only the echo of his own fear.

Max stepped forward. His bones shrieked. The chains burned down to their roots inside him, but his weight carried through the pain.

He wasn't reaching for aid. He was pulling Aamon in.

The demon's wings unfurled. His jaw distended, teeth flashing, mouth opening into something far too wide to be human. He tried to rise on the heat.

Too late.

Max's hand came up. Not in a blow — in a grip.

His fingers closed around Aamon's lower jaw. They sank through smoke, through flame, through the painted skin of godhood until they locked onto what was beneath.

He pulled.

It wasn't bone that came loose. Not flesh.

Essence.

The skin around Aamon's mouth tore like wet parchment. Flame peeled in ribbons. Shadows streamed off him in black smoke.

A core.

It spiralled in on itself, a knot of will, hunger, and ancient agony — a star that had been refused its death. The colours were wrong for light: blue knotted with black, streaked with violent violet, too bright to look at and too loud to exist. It pulsed like a heart under siege, each beat sending a shiver through its own glow, as though staying whole was more than it could manage.

Aamon's cry was high and furious.

"No—" The word tore out of him. "No, this is not how—"

Max opened his mouth. Not for sound. For breath.

The inhale didn't move air. It moved meaning.

The void-breath pulled the core in, dragging light with it.

The chains tightened their grip. They drew Aamon's essence through Max's chest, straight into the furnace. The forge shrieked as it turned, spokes spinning, devouring every part of the demon — his rage, his cunning, his cruelty, centuries of sharpened power boiled into one cursed flame.

Aamon's halo fractured. Cracks raced through it like lightning, then split it into shards.

In the fading shimmer of his form, the demon's jaw flexed one last time. "You'll choke on me, mortal," he snarled, voice guttural and fraying. "Everything I've burned will burn you."

His name — AAMON — seared itself out of the ritual circle in a pillar of smoke. The letters blackened. Then they were gone.

Max dropped to his knees.

He was breathing, but wrong. Every inhale scraped like molten glass through his chest. His skin was half-alight, veins glowing faintly blue. Smoke streamed from his shoulders, from his fingertips, from the corners of his eyes. His hands steamed, not with heat but with the slow burn of soul-fire.

Then the pain landed.

All of it.

Max's scream tore loose — no words, no thought, just sound. His hands clamped against his chest, but the forge inside him was beyond touch. It burned too hot, too full. The heat blistered his skin in patches. His jaw locked. The chains shuddered in the air, then snapped inward, sealing themselves against his ribs.

Fire ran its fingers along his bones, down his throat, across his spine. This wasn't Aamon striking back. This was the cost.

The price of taking.

The remains of the room — whatever could still be called that — rattled under the force of his scream. The light shook in the air as if ready to tear itself apart.

And Max kept burning.

***

Reality did not shatter with a sound. It buckled with pressure.

A low hum rolled out, deeper than thunder, a vibration that seemed to come from the bones of the world. The veil between the human city and the pit Max had torn open sagged, stretched — then tore apart like old wallpaper left too long in the rain.

Light warped. Shadows ran like spilled ink. The physical shell of the world — the motel, the block around it — felt the breach and turned its attention inward.

The room groaned. Then the walls began to bleed.

Blue Hellfire trickled from every seam. Thin rivulets slipped from the corners of the ceiling, from the sockets where lights once hung, from the jagged hole where the TV mount had torn free. The walls flexed and released like a living thing, pulsing as if they were lungs about to vomit light.

The ritual circle flared — once.

A sound moved through the stone beneath it. Not a scream. A name.

Aamon.

The syllables rasped like breath on glass, then went silent. Erased.

The sigils erupted.

A pulse slammed outward from Max's chest — too fast to track, too wide to outrun. Blue fire burst in every direction. It was not warm. It was not cold. It was both holy and profane, the wrongness of it settling into the marrow.

Somewhere under the roar in his skull, he thought he heard it — the faintest echo of Liz's laugh, the real one, before the coma. It vanished as quickly as it came, leaving only the fire.

The first wave turned the floor to ash. The second wave vapourised the corpses that had littered the walls. The third wave devoured the entire motel.

Furniture vanished to dust. Foundations sagged and liquefied. The air inverted, folding outward as if the world had decided to exhale everything it contained.

Then came the pillar.

A column of spiralling blue flame punched upward, ripping through what was left of the roof, the upper floor, the skyline beyond. It rose like judgement, streaked with threads of soul-light, scattering embers into the black clouds above. For one second, the sky over the street turned a burning white-blue bright enough to cut through closed eyes.

People would swear later they saw it from five miles away. Some would call it a gas explosion. Others would say something got out.

The fire did not keep climbing. It folded in on itself.

The pillar collapsed, imploding inward with the slow inevitability of water down a drain. Everything — light, walls, roof, heat — pulled back to the point where Max knelt.

Then silence.

The smoke thinned.

Where the motel had stood, there was only a crater, perfectly round, the ground fused to glass by the heat. At its centre lay a man.

Naked.

Breathing, but barely.

His skin was blackened and raw, hair scorched to the roots, and under the char faint blue traced his veins like molten wire. His fingers twitched once, and a thread of flame puffed from under his thumbnail, small as a dying match.

Around him, carved into the glass by fire itself, ran a ring of runes — foreign, sacred, cursed. The script of contracts and their consequences.

Max's eyes opened. Blue fire glimmered in them for the span of a heartbeat.

His next breath came ragged and shallow. He had survived, but the heat in his chest did not fade. It was still burning, still hungry.

He had agreed to carry the cost.

And now the cost was unending agony.