Until This World Ends

Ch3: Meeting and Parting

In the 4th year, Valentine met his first Rider. His ghosts were pacing by his side, out in the open. They still didn't share a room with him when he settled in for the night. But it was the three of them standing there, staring at their mortal enemy.

She... He had to assume it was a she, as it was a vastly different demon from the Gibbey Riders he slaughtered. Topless as the males were, he was surprised she dressed the same way. There was nothing exposed. He was close enough to notice that her third eye was tattooed over her scales. They had 2 eyes, just like he did, this whole time. After all the times he had killed these creatures...

Part of him wanted to weep over the lack of knowledge he still held.

Her nakedness mattered very little, as there was nothing to expose. She didn't have human anatomy. But, like that should matter, he chastised himself, not daring to speak.

Human mothers nursed children at work, in homes, fields, and markets. The knight had a life of celibacy that would be a harsh vow to break for this inevitably dead creature. For both of them. Seeking comfort was a human feeling, but who knew how this graying creature looked at other beings?

There wasn't intimacy in her clothes. There wasn't enough intimacy in Valentine to care what she looked like, aside from the shock of meeting her.

What bothered him was that after 4 years of being alone, it was still some of the first things to cross his mind. Loneliness, desire—nothing left to give? Here's this dying woman who it would be a mercy to kill. He's reminding himself that sex would be the worst thing for either of them? How could man and his twisted ways be favored by the Goddess?

By hatred of himself or sheer compassion for the living, he picked her up and carried her into the knight's barracks. He gave her wine, cheese, and a wheat porridge filled with honey and bog butter. His care took 2 months before she sat up on her own and struggled to communicate with her captor.

After a day of gestures, she frantically tried to get him to understand that she couldn't stay in his jail.

The thought repulsed the knight. He had never held anyone captive in his life, and he wasn't starting this late in life. When he let her go, gave her a modest travel pack full of goods and drinks, and wished her well.

Valentine spent most of the day brushing tears out of his eyes while he found make-work. Repairing his clothes. Replacing fallen slate tiles on the building he slept in. Hauling wood from stores to his rooms as the nights would be growing cold soon.

Wishing he could pet the heads of his silent dogs.

But even then, the loneliness crept in, deeper against his spine. It sent prickles of existential dread—which he ignored—where his finite mortality warred against the greater world.

For almost 2 months, he had not noticed his headaches or blurred vision. He had someone to hold onto his sanity for. But now, his eyes hurt, his mind was too pained to think, and he drank himself into a stupor for the first time in years.

The alien woman returned a fortnight later. He couldn't see her as a demon any longer. This ephemeral creature was a lifeline that he had let go of, come back to anchor him.

She held out her arms to him, and he found himself laughing and crying, but he hugged her.

Valentine thought she meant to ask for affection. No, she bit his shoulder with that too-wide mouth, through the wool of his shirt. This was a maw that could swallow his whole head, and she bit deep into the meat of his shoulder.

It hurt. Teeth punctured flesh from the force of the grip. It was not from sharpness, so it bruised and then tore into the edge of muscles. Their bite was fairly infectious. He knew this before he found himself yelping in pain, pulling her away from him to look her over more than himself. She seemed feverish.

Two weeks since she left, and she was spiraling out of control already, biting him.

He put her back to bed and started his devotions over again while caring for his own wound. Her bite blistered, and he caught a fever. By the time he had her well, the knight was the one who needed care.

Valentine came out of that fever having lost what little ability he had to reach his winged state. He finally lost his trust in the Goddess, whose powers he wielded against the alien woman. It was his 40th birthday.

He didn't think he liked her company. He missed Gareth. But she was not horrible to learn from.

~~~

By year 6, the big creatures no longer breached the hole in the world. He eased up, in his hiding, as the smaller creatures were still within his weakening power to fend off.

Th'thee was a demoness, as he suspected. The oddness of her name, which was so hard on Valentine's tongue, meant songbird, so he often called her Lark. It was difficult to tell what she thought of him, as she wouldn't speak about relationships. She wouldn't even say what they were to each other, strangers or friends.

She did drag him into her bed—not to do anything but sleep back to back. Valentine, by that point, just let her lead him where she wanted him. Any deviation brought out the damned question of him being her jailer. He didn't understand. He probably would never understand. It felt like keeping the only person he knew required having nothing of himself to offer.

As they slept, spines touching, he often wished for a human emotion, something he could relate to.

But he knew she wouldn't last forever, not at the rate at which these creatures died. It was phenomenal that he had years with her. His mind wasn't nearly as shattered because he had someone to annoy him in every waking moment with bizarre demands.

Still, he had dreams where Th'thee was so viscerally herself yet human that he could fall in love with the dream. It was painful to wake up to this cold, barren mind that wanted nothing to do with affection.

About 7 months into dreams of lost lust, Th'thee started to complain about pains. They rapidly grew to look everything like childbirth to Valentine.

In a panic, he tried to coax and encourage her through her contractions. The knight had helped deliver three children in the course of the war. If it was childbirth, he knew what to do.

On a human.

Not on a demon.

Lark stood up and started undressing. Valentine's imagination had been lacking. The anatomy was not how or where he thought it should be. He had no idea how to help her with what he was seeing.

Again, it didn't matter with her, for it wasn't the time or place, much like his first vision of his friend. She grabbed his forearm and squatted, using his strength and balance to push out an egg the size of a toddler.

That.

That leathery thing on the ground was why she looked so healthy and whole when she should be dead. Th'thee's mind turned towards the egg, wrapping her still-naked form around it. Lark slowly forgot the language she taught Valentine and left the world one day at a time.

In his bewildered grief, he watched a woman die for her biological urges, one that he was certain he never fulfilled.

The last thing Valentine ever did for the sake of another was bury her in the catacombs. Th'thee would lay wrapped tightly around her egg until the world ended.

This was the only demon to ever receive respect in all the days of man, and thus Valentine declared her holy.

The Goddess never objected, so she could go live in a brothel.