TSMFTDG 37

Episode 37

Sixteen years earlier, the world was turned upside down by an impossible birth: a new Demon Lord chosen by the gods. Up until then, the title of Demon Lord had always been won through slaughter and theft of power — never handed down by divine will. Except for the very first Demon Lord, nothing like this had happened.

What no one guessed was the new lord’s age. The freshly anointed Demon Lord was only ten.

Blinded by a furious blizzard, the child — Lehel — pressed on without stopping. She had just realized what she’d become: her hair had shifted from black to a foreign silver, and even the storm itself answered to her will. Directionless and alone, she wandered until the thin ice on a frozen lake cracked beneath her feet and she plunged into the cold.

She couldn’t swim. As she sank, numb resignation set in. Death, for someone who had already lost everything, didn’t seem unbearable.

Then a different light reached her. A presence that was at once animal and human, monstrous and gentle — Shaila — found the drifting child and carried her back to a warm home beneath the waves. Shaila took the lost girl in, wrapped her in protection, and grew to love her in a way she had never loved a human before.

Lehel, who had only ever believed monsters to be cruel, found this care bewildering. She asked, blunt and curious, “Are monsters normally this… clingy?”

Shaila laughed and, with a simple promise, became the child’s guardian: “I’m the one who protects you. Stay with me.” The promise came from genuine affection — Shaila had never interfered directly in human lives, but meeting Lehel changed that. She loved the child fiercely.

Under Shaila’s care Lehel grew into a true Demon Lord. Attacks came, wounds deepened, but every day she grew stronger. Sometimes, bored beneath the waves, Lehel slipped to the surface to fight. She returned bloodied, defiant — and Shaila scolded her as any parent would. But Lehel wanted power for herself. At fourteen she told Shaila plainly: “I want to be strong. Strong enough to need no one’s help.” Shaila, with a mother’s resignation, stopped trying to cage her.

A decade later, on Lehel’s twentieth birthday, she left without fanfare. She left only a short note — a brusque farewell — and vanished. Shaila kept the scrap tucked close, grieving quietly for what ten years had meant to her; for creatures who live so briefly, ten years is a lifetime worth of memory and love. Shaila had come to think of Lehel as family. She hoped, with all the sincerity of a guardian, that the child would stop suffering.

Back in the present, I woke with tears on my face. The hidden quest reward had shown me those memories — a burst of someone else’s past. Stupid, I thought; Shaila loved humans far too much. Seeing the memories explained why Shaila had been brusque with me when we first met. Ten years of memories gone could make anyone angry.

Wiping my face, I felt heavy. I had work to do. But then the system’s message popped up, crisp and impersonal: all quest rewards had been granted. Another line followed: congratulations on obtaining the “Mermaid’s Tear,” but beware — power that doesn’t suit your body takes a price. I asked the system aloud if I could choose the price. It replied: you cannot. The toll will come at the proper time.

Shaila had never taken life. Her power was pure and clear, and suddenly possessing it made my own strength surge — and bristled with the knowledge that this force would exact retribution. I wondered, not with much pain, whether it would have been better to have taken that power later. Still, the system’s warning comforted me; at least I could brace myself.

I left the bed, touched my silver hair — a reminder that I wasn’t who I’d once been — and went to wash. In the mirror I didn’t just see changed color; I saw a symbol of metamorphosis: no longer fully human.

Downstairs the castle hummed with an uncustomary clamor. At the courtyard two figures had already drawn swords: Rian and Terrio. Their clothes were rumpled from recent blows. I stood by the window, leaning my chin on my hand, and watched. Rian had never been to Terrio’s taste; the latter had resented the human’s closeness to Lehel from the beginning. I’d been warned not to meddle — Lehel wanted to handle her own circle — so I decided to see how she’d choose to solve it alone.

Terrio was a small thing by race and bearing — one of the unglamorous “eyeball” monsters, overlooked and unremarkable. He had lived as a servant, doing Lehel’s errands and managing the castle, and he’d always felt inadequate. He trained relentlessly, tried to prove himself every day, but, in his eyes, power and favor fell elsewhere. He couldn’t understand why a human like Rian would occupy the place in Lehel’s proximity that he had imagined for himself.

Seeing Lehel unconscious in Rian’s arms some time ago had broken him. The restraint he had kept for years evaporated. In a single fit of fury he grabbed Rian by the throat.

“You leave this place before Lehel wakes. Or I’ll kill you,” he snarled.

For the first time, Terrio broke the rules. He spoke with a rawness that matched the ache beneath: the knowledge that he had loved from a distance something he believed unworthy of his claim. The pain of being always one choice away from belonging finally snapped him into violence.

And so, beneath a roof that housed shared histories and stolen memories, choices and jealousies took their form. Shaila’s memory — tender and private — lingered like a counterpoint to the present’s sharp edges: a gentle, impossible affection that rippled outward, touching and complicating every life it had brushed.