A Demon's Tale

Chapter Four - Part II

- The Ritual -

I woke up with a snatch and gasped for air to catch my breath. I was soaking wet.

"Colin..." I whispered to myself, but just as I did, forgot why.

That name, it sounded so familliar, but yet I could not recall. It felt as if I had just seen something, or dreamt something, but the second I had woken up, forgotten all about it, and instead, all I was left with was a feeling; a feeling of something familliar and important.

I was lying on the ground in the pool of the strange liquid, beneath where the orb had been hovering. I regained my sense of awareness and to my distress remembered where I was. I exhaled out my disconsolate breath. I put my head back down on the ground and felt the liquid nib the tip of my ears. I half-closed my heavy eyes and stared with an unfocused and turbid vision up into the dark ceiling or branches above. But then, something long and black, like hair, dangled over my face. And within the long black hair, I saw... a face.

I then realized a strange figure was hanging over me.

"Aaah!" I screamed as I rolled over and pushed myself away from whatever creature was standing over me.

I pushed and crawled away in the small pool of water trying to get as far away as possible as quickly as possible.

"Hihihe!" I heard, like child's laughter.

I then stopped and quickly turned around still sitting on the ground. And then I saw something very unexpected...

A little girl, with long black hair covering most of her face, just around ten years old, wearing nothing but gray and dirty rugs, was standing there staring at me. She giggled as she watched me trying to get a grip of myself and make sense of what I was seeing, frightened by her, a little girl.

"Hihih" She giggled again. I was so confused.

"How are you feeling?" She asked.

I sat with my mouth open staring at her.

"Wuah, what, huh, who are you?" I mumbled.

She turned her head and giggled again.

"Come, Eric, we have much to do". She said.

I was sitting frozen still. My mind, trying to work out just what in this world was going on, had completely stopped as if not a single neuron knew where to fire. A human? A little girl? What was I seeing? How did she get here? Why was she not terrified? How did she know my name? I had to have gone insane, although, there now no longer seemed to be any limitations for what this world could produce and had yet to offer. I could not wrap my head around what was going on.

The girl walked around in the room which now seemed more like a dark enclosure inside the forest. The whole place was brighter, and I could see different types of trees all around. I was laying in the middle of it all still in the pool. I realized my vision was clearer, and the colors were brighter. I looked down at my demonic arm. It was burning with some kind of blue flame...

Like a blue blaze inside my torn-up demonic arm, it waved around casting out small flames and sparks from the hole in my palm and from the gaps. The before, hollow and empty space inside was now occupied with this extraordinary blue substance. It was very bright, so bright that it lit up my surroundings. The substance seemed to become more concentrated towards the center as if it had turned into a solid blue crystal in the shape of my skeleton. As if I could see every bone inside my hand and the bones of my forearm from between the fractures leading to my elbow.

The substance also seemed to move around like a liquid, and then into a gas leaving the gaps of my arm, swirling around it like a spiraling stream of wind, to then return back inside. It was moving as if pulsing, as if following a rhythm, like the beating of a heart, or as if breathing.