Oblivion

All There in the (Monster) Manual are stories based on creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Over 2022 I released a different story fitting the theme every single week and I've now expanded to Dungeons & Dragons' Monsters of the Multiverse and even the Pathfinder Bestiary. Could be fantasy, science fiction, horror, or something else entirely!

This Week's Inspiration: Demons

==============

Gods, he was tired.

How could his limbs feel like lead and still move like lightning? Tochtli's speed surprised even him as he launched himself into the fray. His body had been hewn into a weapon by four years of endless battle. He was built for this, he was never more perfectly within his element, but all he wanted to do was to go back to his tent and try to get a few more hours of sleep.

A macuahuitl sword flashed in Tochtli's hand, the wooden club ringed with razor shards of obsidian. It carved through the face of a Little Eater, trailing ribbons of dark, bloodless flesh as it tore free. Pain did little to deter the hunger-demon. Tochtli reversed the swing and split the demon's head. He did so while still moving, not waiting to watch it fall.

Dozens of corpses already decorated the battlefield. Surrounded by jungle and swamp, they steamed under the bright morning sun. Most were Little Eaters who, as always, supported the demons' forces in their hundreds. Diminutive creatures but ferocious, the hunger-demons were only the size of children but wizened as ancient men with limbs like broomsticks and heads half the size of their bodies. Their mouths gaped like buckets, ringed with teeth made from obsidian shards. It was how most of the warriors refreshed the blades on their swords, by plucking them from the heads of Little Eaters. Behind them were the pain-demons, less numerous but more dangerous individually. The size and shape of men grown but warped, twisted, slower because their every movement was a torture. Quills of invisibly sharp obsidian sprouted at random from their flesh.

Most of the demon corpses had been downed by arrows and spears. It was the job of Tochtli and the warriors he led to hold back the horde while the spear throwers and bowmen, and the youngest warriors who carried nothing but slingshots and jagged stones, did their work. At sixteen, Tochtli was older by two years than most of the warriors he led. He'd stopped caring to learn their names, few lasted long enough for him to have cause to use them. As he separated two Little Eaters' oversized heads from their shrivelled bodies, he watched another tackle one of the warriors beside him. He ran to help the boy but the Little Eater had already torn a great hunk of flesh off the boy's shoulder with its obsidian teeth. A second Little Eater got under the boy's armour and ripped a gaping hole in his stomach. Haemorrhaging from two wounds, the boy gawped like a fish. Tochtli's macuahuitl sword ended both hunger-demons before they could savour their meal, and then he showed the boy a merciful end as well. He had died in battle, it still counted. His soul would ascend to Heaven instead of disintegrating into nothingness before Lord Death's throne.

Behind the first wave came a twin-demon, towering above the Little Eaters and pain-demons. Tochtli's face showed no emotion, because there was nothing to show. He had fought twin-demons before. He had fought endless hordes of hunger-demons and pain-demons. He had fought rage-demons and spider-demons and fish-demons and Laughing Ones and Centipede Men and Screamers and pride-demons and bird-demons and tree-demons and child-demons, and many more. A vast network of scars covered his body like markings on a tablet no living eyes could read. For four years he had fought in the Tlatoani's endless war to carve out a little more territory from the demons that surrounded their empire on all sides. To find other cities of humans that they might connect with and defeat and subjugate. He never, in those four years, ever questioned the divine will of the Tlatoani to guide them as he did, and never gave anything less than his all to the fight. But he was still so very, very tired.