Demon Contract

Day 1743.

It did not think.

It did not speak.

The Wretch only crawled.

The world clung to it like damp cloth — the air thick with iron, rot, and something sweet, like fruit left too long in the sun. Each breath filled its throat with a wet rattle, each exhale spilling the stink of its own decay. The ground rasped under its body, shards of glass crunching into tendon, the sound sharp enough to echo in its skull. There was no silence here, only the constant susurrus of meat shifting beneath the land, like the earth itself was breathing in time with its crawl.

What had once been Liz Jaeger had rotted into something half-human, half-refuse, a creature the forest had worn down like a stone left in a river of teeth. The Wretch dragged itself forward on elbows stripped to tendon, each movement leaving wet smears of blood across the cracked concrete. Its knees were wrapped in ribbons of torn skin that stuck and peeled away from the ground as it crawled, leaving pieces of itself behind.

Its hands were not hands anymore. The nails had split and torn off one by one, some swallowed, some spat out. The fingers bent wrong, crooked stumps swollen with pus, trembling every time they scrabbled for purchase. Once it had painted those nails pink before prom night. Now they were nothing but blood-black claws.

The body it wore was obscene. Flesh hung in tatters, flaking from sores that never closed. Open cracks split along the spine, each breath forcing pale worms of pus to weep out before drying into crust. The ribcage showed through parchment skin, lifting and falling as if the skeleton itself were trying to crawl free. Her back was slick with black lesions. One hip had hollowed so far inward it looked gnawed.

Its smell was worse than sight. The rot clung to it in layers — copper, pus, mildew, the stink of wet soil pressed into open wounds. Flies sometimes gathered at the edges of its spine, crawling in and out of the cracks like they already knew the body was theirs. When it moved too fast, its skin split further, sloughing off in strips that clung to the dirt like abandoned bandages.

One eye was sealed with tar-thick blood. The other gaped too wide, never blinking, the lid fused stiff. Its gaze was inward now, like the body was watching itself rot from the inside.

Its mouth sagged open, jaw swollen and unhinged, teeth cracked down to the root. The tongue was grotesquely swollen, too large for the cavity that held it, spotted with black ulcers that bled when it rasped a breath. The air whistled through its throat like wind in broken glass.

And still it crawled.

Because movement meant it had not yet ended.

When it faltered, the crawling things came. They lived under the skin, waiting. Some soft, long as shoelaces, writhing in the meat of her calves. Some hard and jointed, their legs scraping bone as they nested in her shoulders. One night it had opened its mouth and felt something coil between its teeth, squirming as if it meant to replace them. That was the night it stopped sleeping.

Now its legs were riddled with small round holes. Scabbed rings around emptiness. It never checked them anymore. If they were empty today, they wouldn't be tomorrow.

Its world was no longer silent, only carcass-quiet. The ground sighed when she wasn't looking, the air whispered with teeth. Buildings lay in ruin—an upturned bedframe, rusted springs hooked through the dirt like claws; a chalkboard with I'm sorry scrawled hundreds of times in hands that looked like its own; a church bell split open with its old name carved upside down into the bronze.

Sometimes it saw people. Faces in the corners. Jack smiling, Chloe sketching, Alyssa rolling her eyes. They watched the Wretch. They whispered. They mocked. They waited. But when it turned, they were gone, leaving only dust.

It did not cry. The ducts had dried years ago.

It did not scream. The voice had died before the name.

It crawled on, because that was all it knew.

It scraped the water away with one ruined hand. Then crawled on.

Always toward the door.
The door.
The scratching.
The name.

The Wretch didn't remember who it was. But the door remembered. And that was enough.

Every movement angled toward it — ribs grinding, tendons fraying, skin peeling. It was less a person than a compass now, its body nothing but a broken needle pulled by the gravity of that slab of steel at the world's edge. The Wretch didn't crawl to live. It crawled because the door was there, and as long as it dragged itself toward it, it wasn't gone completely.

***

The Wretch dragged itself higher, ribs scraping the slope until the shattered horizon came into view.

And there it stood.

The Devourer. The Titan. The thing inside It, now vast enough to touch the edges of the sky.

It did not exist outside of the Wretch. It was the parasite and the host together, the rot made flesh. What It saw on the horizon was only a reflection—an external face for the cancer gnawing at its soul.

The Devourer Titan was colossal, its body stitched from memory and mutilation. Limbs grew from bundled torsos, stacked spine upon spine until the arms dragged across the earth like siege towers. Its fingers were lattices of jawbones interlocked, each tooth grinding against another in a ceaseless chitter. At its back, a cathedral of tongues rose and fell, each veined and dripping, whispering names in a thousand overlapping pitches: Mum, Dad, Dan, Jack. Over and over. Until the words lost meaning, becoming only vibration.

Its chest was a cavern torn open, ribs splayed outward into gnashing teeth. Inside, organs dangled like windchimes, pulsing with stolen light, dripping trails of memory. Each one throbbed in a familiar voice.

Please…
I want her back…
I didn't mean to…
I'm sorry.

The voices were its own. Not echoes. Confessions devoured and played back as hymns to Its captor.

Faces bulged across its form like obscene blossoms. April's head leaned from the shoulder, lips split ear to ear, whispering lullabies in a wet gargle. Jack's face twisted from the hipbone, empty eyes streaming insects that hissed as they burrowed back into the flesh. From the Devourer Titan's navel, a child's face screamed endlessly—the Wretch's own, clean and unbroken, mouth stretched too wide to ever close.

The Wretch trembled at the sight. Not with fear. With recognition. Because it knew—this was not something out there. This was what the demon had made of it.

The Titan did not chase. It didn't need to. The Wretch understood now. It was not a monster on the horizon. It was inside. The Devourer was the shape the demon had carved from Liz Jaeger's soul, every lie she told herself given bone, every memory of love stretched into a scream. Looking at it was like looking into a mirror where the reflection had been skinned and rebuilt into godhood. The more It fed, the more of her it became, until even her hatred of it felt like a prayer.

Every scrap of guilt whispered into the dirt, every confession mouthed into the steel of the door, every memory It forced away in desperation—the Titan caught them. Consumed them. Grew stronger from them.

It was no longer simply horrific. It was becoming beautiful. A symmetry of despair, a god sculpted from rot. And the more it devoured, the more divine it appeared.

The Wretch's gut twisted. Its chest convulsed. It vomited black ink, a rope of tar that hit the soil and writhed, twitching upward as if eager to crawl back down its throat. The sight of it sent a jolt of panic through its ruined body, a reminder that even what it expelled still belonged to the demon.

It smashed the bile into the ash with a ruined hand, smearing until the movement stilled. Then it pressed onward, crawling harder, faster, dragging itself through broken glass and bone.

The Devourer Titan did not move. It didn't have to.

It lived inside.

And it would feast until nothing human remained.

Still, the Wretch crawled. Always toward the door. Always toward the scratching. Always toward the name.

***

The Wretch did not remember beginnings.

Not a first cry, not a first word, not a mother's voice. Those were lies now, burned away and swallowed by the thing inside.

It remembered only the cycle. The ritual. The door.

It crawled across the dust, dragging what remained of its body like a carcass animated by stubbornness alone. Its trail shimmered black with blood and flakes of dead flesh, glistening like the slime of a slug across ash. Every joint clicked when it bent, as if each angle had been broken and rehealed wrong.

Stolen novel; please report.

The cycle always began the same way.

Scratch.

The Wretch slumped at the base of the door, forehead pressed against cold steel. Its fingers—little more than scar tissue and splintered bone—rose in jerks, moving on instinct rather than will. It gouged the surface with whatever tools still clung to it: a shard of jawbone clenched between stumps, a splinter of glass bound in a knot of its own hair, the ridges of its teeth gnashing until they cracked. Sometimes when all else failed, it scraped with its forehead, pressing until blood smeared the steel like paint.

Scratch.
Scratch.
Scratch.

The pain did not matter. Pain had been stripped of meaning months ago. What mattered was the sound—the rasp of bone against steel, the ugly hymn of persistence.

Sometimes the sound carried. It echoed down the plain, bounced against the cliff, and came back doubled. The Wretch never knew if the echoes were real or if the Devourer was mocking it, replaying the noise from its cathedral of tongues. Each scrape was answered by a faint chorus of whispers: scratch, scratch, scratch. Until it felt like the world itself was copying the motion, a thousand unseen hands clawing with it.

After scratching came feeding.

The Wretch did not eat out of hunger. Hunger was for people, and It was no longer people. It fed because stillness meant death, and death meant surrender. So it devoured whatever the world offered: pulp sucked from tree roots that bled like veins, moss that wept red when torn free, worms that hissed Its name before writhing silent. When nothing remained, It peeled Its own scabs in strips and chewed until the taste of iron thickened Its tongue.

Then came silence.

The Wretch would fold itself at the door's base, knees crooked, arms slack, one eye blind, the other staring without blink. Its chest rose only when forced. This was when the pressures came—when the Devourer pressed from within, sliding unseen fingers through Its skull, speaking without words.

"You failed."
"You burned her."
"You were nothing before, and less than nothing now."
"You called me, and I answered."

Its mouth moved in answer, though no voice emerged. Vapor hissed between Its lips, soundless, dry. Still, the mouth kept moving. Because the cycle demanded it.

Then came the confessions.

The Wretch dragged itself to the circle. The bone spiral. Proof of time. Proof it still existed. It collapsed within the ring and muttered, words rasping into nonsense.

"Didn't mean to call it."
"Didn't know it would answer."
"Didn't know what I was giving."
"Didn't know what I was losing."

The phrases came and went like coughs. Sometimes the wrong ones, sometimes ones stolen from memory, sometimes nothing but noise. Sometimes the Wretch forgot it had ever been a person at all, and called itself "it."

And then, always, it returned to the door.

Its head tilted forward until bone met steel. Its fingers twitched once more. And it scratched.

Scratch until blood seeped. Scratch until nerves failed. Scratch until silence swallowed it whole.

This was the cycle. And the demon fed from every step.

***

The Wretch woke to absence.

Not silence. Silence had weight here, filled with groans in the soil, whispers stitched into bark, the steady drone of the Titan feeding. This was worse. This was nothing.

It lifted Its ruined head and found the world smoothed flat. The cliff still rose, the door still waited, but the spiral—Its bones, Its clock, Its proof—was gone.

Not scattered. Not broken.
Erased.

The ground where they had circled the door was bare, clean as if fire had scoured it smooth. Not even dust remembered.

Its one good eye rolled wildly, searching for the femur, the jaw, the finger with its rag of cloth. Nothing. The proof was gone. Time erased.

It turned to the door.

For a heartbeat, relief. The steel still stood. But its edges shimmered, trembling like paper left in the rain. Its surface no longer threw back the Wretch's reflection. It swallowed it.

The Wretch reached out, hand trembling, and pressed a fingertip to the steel. It sank in. Not far. Just the tip. But enough. The door had been real. Now it was smoke.

Its stomach convulsed. It retched into the ash, dry and hollow.

Something was unravelling.

Not the maze. Not the door.
Itself.

The Wretch clawed at the dirt. The name, it thought. The name will hold. It bit its tongue until blood pooled, smeared the copper wetness across the soil, and tried to write.

L—

The letter slipped. Blood blurred. Its fingers cramped.

LI—

It scrawled again, frantic. The strokes tangled. The word slipped in Its skull.

LIZ. LICE. LACK.

It scratched them all out, a keening breath breaking in its throat.

Its hand went still. Its one wide eye stared at the red smears, not knowing what they meant. Its name was gone. A hole. A theft.

From the horizon came the shudder.
The Titan. The Devourer.

It moved without moving. Each time the Wretch blinked, it was closer. Not because it stepped. But because thought slowed. Memory drained.

And the voice came.
Not a whisper this time.
A laugh.

"Did you think scratches on steel could save you?" it purred through a thousand mouths. April's lips moved. Jack's teeth chattered. A child's face—its own, young and clean—wailed from the Titan's gut.

The Wretch clawed at the soil, frantic, until its ruined nails snapped.

"You were never Liz," the voices hissed. "You were always mine."

Its throat clicked, no sound escaping.

"You do not need the door," the Titan murmured, each syllable vibrating in Its ribs. "You are the door. You open each time you bleed. You feed me with every memory you throw away."

The Wretch tried to scream. Nothing. It collapsed forward, twitching in the ash.

But beneath the dust, a coal stirred. Not Its word. His.

Max.

The Wretch dragged Its hand across the ground, blood smearing crooked lines.

M.
A.
X.

The Titan stilled. One head turned, stitched lips curling back in hunger.

"You remember him?" it crooned, April's throat split wide in delight. "Even that is mine."

The Wretch pressed Its nails harder into the soil until bone showed through its fingertips. The letters gouged deep, ragged, ugly, real.

M. A. X.

Not Its name.
His.
The last word it could still hold.

And for one breath, the Titan did not laugh. It only watched, looming, waiting.

***

The Wretch lay still.

Not asleep. Not dead. Something in between, the thin smear of being that lingers when even pain has abandoned the body.

The world around It was ash, endless and flat, trembling with the Titan's slow advance. Its breath rattled weakly through a chest that no longer rose evenly; ribs had cracked open in jagged spirals, each movement dragging raw air through a ruined cage.

The word carved in blood — MAX — had already begun to fade. Wind lifted it grain by grain until the letters blurred, until it was nothing but dust smeared on grey dirt.

The Wretch's eye drifted shut. The lid stuck half-closed, too dry to complete the motion. Its lips parted, cracked down to the gums. A hollow sound rasped from Its throat — not speech, not even whimper. Just air leaking from a body too tired to hold it.

It was ending.

The Devourer Titan towered on the horizon, vast enough to blot out thought itself. Its mouths sang in harmony, a cathedral of hunger. April's voice, Jack's sobs, Its own laughter twisted into mockery. All of them echoed through Its skull until the very idea of being Liz Jaeger felt like an insult, a story someone else had told.

"You are mine," it crooned, a thousand throats vibrating as one. "The last breath you take will be to feed me. The last thought you think will be my name."

The Wretch's body spasmed once. Blood bubbled from its lips, black with ash. It did not fight anymore.

It only waited for the final swallow.

Far away, in the waking world, Max sat beside Liz's hospital bed in Singapore.

Her body was barely a body now — skin paper-thin over bone, tubes winding from her arms, machines breathing when she no longer could. Her pulse was a whisper on the monitors.

Max leaned forward, elbows on his knees, staring at her face. God, she looked so small. So far from the girl who used to tease him, who used to cling to him after nightmares.

"I don't know if you can hear me," he whispered, voice raw. "But I promised I'd come. And I don't break promises."

The Hellfire inside him hadn't cooled since the motel. It gnawed at him every waking moment. But now, here, the rage had no target. Only Liz.

He reached out, slid his hand into hers, and squeezed. Her skin was cold. Fragile.

"Whatever I've got left," he murmured, "it's yours."

And the fire obeyed. It left him in a rush — not the blue-white blaze of rage, but something warmer, deeper.

Red.

A line of power bleeding into her veins, running through her bones, threading into the dark where she had been lost.

The ground shook in the mindscape.

Not from the Titan's step. Not from the forest's breath. A different rhythm, low and resonant, like a war drum sounding from beneath the world.

The Wretch twitched. Its fingers, curled inward, jerked once. A faint heat moved under the skin — a thread, a line, something not of this place.

The Titan paused. Its heads tilted, faces twitching. The laughter faltered.

From beneath the Wretch's breastbone, a pulse. Dull at first, then sharper. Not golden. Not white. Not holy.

Red.

The ash froze midair. The laughter cut off in a single, ragged silence.

The pulse came again, stronger. It burned through Its ribs, curled down Its arms, gathered in Its palms until the broken fingers flexed against the dirt.

A line of red light bled out of the Wretch's chest, thin as a thread at first, then thickening, weaving into Its ruined flesh-like veins being re-knit.

It gasped. A sound, real and alive, tore through Its throat.

The Titan's heads reeled back, mouths open in sudden fury.

"No," it thundered, voices collapsing into one. "That is not yours."

But the red line did not obey.

It sank deeper, filling the hollows the maze had carved, sparking across nerves long dead, stitching through wounds left to fester. It hurt — God, it hurt — but the hurt was clean, sharp, real.

The Wretch's lips cracked wider, blood seeping from the splits. And for the first time in years, a word tried to break free.

"…"

Max didn't hear her whisper— not yet. He only felt the jolt run up his arm as her fingers twitched in his hand, weak but real.

The monitors screamed. Her back arched. The glow rose under her skin, red light pulsing through her veins.

Max pulled her close, pressed his forehead against hers. "Take it," he whispered. "Take everything. Just don't stop fighting."

The Devourer roared, the sky tearing with it. Shadows convulsed. The forest shrieked. The ash stormed into whirlwinds of rage.

But Liz no longer lay still.

Her eye blazed faint red, mirroring the glow that now beat inside her chest. Her broken hand clawed forward, not in despair but in defiance, tracing the letters into the dirt again.

M A X.

The letters glowed faintly, red bleeding into the grooves like fire filling cracks in stone. The dirt hissed, scorched by the heat of a name too stubborn to die. For a heartbeat the Titan recoiled, its thousand mouths slamming shut in unison, because the word was not for it. The word belonged to her.

The Titan bellowed. The maze howled. But the red line held.

The ember had been lit.

The Wretch trembled, body convulsing as the red line burned through its veins. Each pulse stitched ruined nerves back together with fire, searing where rot had lived for years. The pain was unbearable. But it was real. Not illusion. Not mockery.

Its jaw locked, teeth grinding against one another until splinters cracked loose. Its throat spasmed, raw air ripping through it like broken glass. Still, it forced the sound out, dragging it from somewhere deeper than flesh.

"I—"

The word broke, shredded into a hiss of blood.

It tried again. Lips split. Tongue swelled against teeth. Every syllable was a war.

"I… am—"

The Titan shrieked. The maze pressed in tighter, voices screaming, trying to drown the word before it lived.

But the ember surged again. The red line roared through bone and marrow, not gentle, not forgiving — demanding.

The Wretch raised its head, one eye glowing faintly, and spoke with all the will left inside a body made of scars and ruin.

"I am Liz."

The words rattled out of broken teeth, warped and blood-soaked, but they were hers. Every syllable clawed its way free like bone breaking through skin. For the first time in 1,743 days, the voice was not the demon's, not the Devourer's — it was Liz Jaeger's. And in that instant, the forest recoiled, the Titan faltered, and the world remembered her name.

The Titan reeled as if struck, its thousand mouths slamming shut in unison. For the first time since the forest claimed her, it looked uncertain.

And Liz Jaeger, once so terribly lost, started to remember herself.