A Fate Worse Than Death

Chapter 1: Vanilla

I take a deep breath and finish the incantation, shaking with nervousness.

No way this is actually going to work.
What am I thinking?
Demons? Come on, what bullshit.

"...qui vocat vos."
The room is silent for several moments until I start to hear a soft ringing, a wave of dizziness overwhelms me, and the room starts to have a faint tint of vanilla. I hold my head in my hands and squeeze my eyes shut, trying to rid my head of the dizziness.

The vanilla smell gets a little stronger as the dizziness goes away slowly. I open my eyes and lower my hands. A petite girl with long silver hair, wearing a black skirt and a white blouse with a red tie is standing in my room. She's holding a clipboard and is looking at me. I soon notice her eyes are an abnormally vibrant mix of blue and purple, almost glowing.

"A-are you a demon?" I ask hesitantly.

"Technically? No. I'm a Consilium." She smiles warmly at me. "My name is Allura Alfor."

I start to speak, confused, "Consilium? What-I tried to summon a demon?"

Allura laughs softly, "Don't worry Lance McClain. My job is to assign demons to humans."

"How do you know my name-" my mind is reeling with questions.

"Shush." Allura glances at her delicate looking watch then back at me. "So why do you want a demon contract Lance?"

"I-I need help. I'm...getting beat up at school..and I can't keep lying to my mom about it. And-" I say, bitterly.

She cuts me off, "That's all I need, Lance."

I glance at her clipboard and there are several pages on it, the one I can see has many names on it with a line next to each one. I notice my name is the 6th one down. The names above mine have other names written on the line next to them. As I watched, a name appeared on the line below mine, sparkling on the page.

I look up and realize Allura was watching me. I blush, embarrassed.

"Sorry.." I say.

"No it's quite alright. Would you like me to explain everything?" She sounds a little lonely. I nod and she smiles happily. "So we, Consiliums, receive pages of human names. These particular humans are and will be summoning demons. We visit them, find out their reason for summoning a demon, evaluate them, and write the name of the demon who can help them best next to their name. When we write a name, it shows up on everyone's papers so that no one visits a human twice."

"Woah, I didn't think...I didn't even think demons were real much less had a whole system for making contracts or anything." I say, in shock about all of this still.

Allura smiles, then pauses before speaking. "I think I know who can help you. I would warn you about him but he's pretty much who you signed up for when you tried to summon a demon so.." Allura takes a black, shimmering feather quill out of nowhere and scribbles in small, neat writing a pretty name.

Keith Kogane

As soon as the quill leaves the paper, I hear ringing, definitely louder than before and I groan.

"Aw man seriously? Again?" I say and the wave of dizziness crashes over me again, now accompanied with nausea. Another smell flows into the room, crisp cherries, and it adds to the subtle scent of vanilla, almost making me sigh in happiness but I'm about to throw up so I don't and instead groan. The dizziness gets way more than I can take and I black out, falling to the floor in a heap.

///author's note///

So I don't have an editor or anything so please excuse my mistakes if you find any! I hope this turns out to be good lmao. See ya!