The nightmare always began with the witchlight.Caelum knew, in the dreaming, that he was dreaming. This was the cruelest part—the awareness that his infant body lay safe in the nursery while his mind returned again and again to the throne room, to the moment of his death, to the cold.He stood in obsidian glass. He wore his own face, his true face, gold eyes and horns and the weight of eight centuries of rule. The Abyss answered his call. Power flowed through him like breath, like blood, like life—Then the dagger.Malphas emerged from shadow, but it was not the Malphas he remembered. This one wore white, cardinal's robes, the silver sun of the reformed Abyssal Understanding Authority on his breast. His smile was the same. The dagger was the same."You built a cage," Malphas said, "and called it a kingdom."The blade entered. The power fled. Caelum fell to his knees on glass that was no longer obsidian but marble, white and cold and carved with Seraphina's name."Check the grave," she whispered from somewhere above him. "He is not dead. He is—"Caelum woke screaming.The nursery was dark. His throat was raw, his small body drenched in sweat, and his hands—he looked at them in the moonlight—were clenched so tightly that his nails had drawn blood from his palms.Four years old, he reminded himself, forcing his fingers to open. I am four years old. I am Caelum Valorian. I am not there. I am here.But the here was becoming as terrible as the there.The nightmares were growing worse. Not more frequent—he had dreamed of the throne room since his rebirth—but deeper. More detailed. He was beginning to remember things he had not thought of in centuries, things the seal should have taken: the taste of Abyssal wine, the sound of his generals' war councils, the specific weight of the crown he had forged from demonsteel and his own condensed power.Memories or hauntings? He did not know. He only knew that he woke each morning exhausted, carrying the weight of two lives in a body that could barely climb stairs."Caelum?" The night nurse, Mathilde, appeared in the doorway with a candle. Her face was kind, worried, tired. He had woken her three times this week. "The dream again?"He nodded, not trusting his voice. The performance of childhood—needing comfort, accepting comfort—had become automatic, but tonight he could not manage it. Tonight he was still Asmodeus, still falling, still feeling the seal close around his people like a fist.Mathilde lifted him. She was young, perhaps twenty, with a burn scar on her wrist that she hid with long sleeves. Caelum had noticed it months ago, had filed it away with all the other information he gathered: the cook's gambling debts, the footman's illiterate sweetheart, the way the head gardener stole cuttings to sell at market.Information was power. Even without magic, even without strength, information was power."There, little lord," Mathilde murmured, rocking him. "There. It's only a dream. The Demon King can't hurt you. He's dead and gone, sealed away forever."Caelum closed his eyes. Let her believe he was comforted. Inside, he was counting—eight hundred years I ruled, two hundred I was dead, four I have been reborn—and calculating how long Malphas had been wearing his saint's mask.One thousand years total. Give or take. And I remember all of it."Mathilde," he whispered, when his voice was steady. "Why do people have nightmares?"She paused. The rocking stopped, then resumed. "The priests say it's the soul processing sin. The physicians say it's bad humors in the blood." A small laugh. "My mother said it's just the mind cleaning house, sweeping out what we don't need."I need everything, Caelum thought. Every memory, every warning, every fragment of who I was. I cannot afford to sweep anything out.But he said, "Your mother sounds wise.""She was a fool," Mathilde said, without bitterness. "But she was kind. That's something, isn't it?""Yes," Caelum agreed. "That's something."He did not sleep again that night. He lay in Mathilde's arms, practicing the breathing exercises he had invented—slow inhale, slower exhale, counting heartbeats until the panic subsided. When she finally returned him to his cradle, he waited until her footsteps faded, then rose.It was forbidden. He was forbidden from walking alone at night, forbidden from leaving the nursery, forbidden from being awake when the household slept. But Caelum had learned that rules were maps of other people's fears, and he was learning to read those maps.He needed to move.The nightmares left him with energy that his small body could not contain—a vibration in his muscles, a urgency in his blood that demanded action. In his previous life, he would have sparred, or flown, or summoned fire until the excess burned away. Here, he had only himself.So he trained.It had begun accidentally, months ago. He had been trying to reach a book on a high shelf—Histories of the Abyssal War, illustrated, for children—and his body had failed him. Too short, too weak, arms trembling after seconds of effort. He had raged then, silently, tears of frustration hot on his face.Then he had thought: This is fixable. Not with magic. Not with power. But with work.He started with push-ups.Not real push-ups, not at first. He could barely hold his own weight on hands and knees. But he held it. Counted to ten. Collapsed. Tried again the next night, and the next, until he could do five, then ten, then twenty.He added squats. He added planks, holding his body rigid until his small core muscles screamed. He climbed the nursery furniture when the nurses slept, building finger strength, learning balance. He hung from the window latch until his grip failed, then tried again.No one noticed. Or if they noticed, they attributed it to restlessness, to "the strange one" being strange. Caelum cultivated this—let them see him as odd, as sickly, as harmless—while he built himself in secret.Tonight, after the nightmare, he went further than before.The nursery connected to a servants' stair through a door that stuck in humid weather. Caelum had observed this, had tested the latch during daylight when no one watched. Now, in darkness, he worked it open with fingers that were stronger than they should have been, stronger than any four-year-old's had a right to be.The stairs were narrow, steep, designed for people who knew them. Caelum descended carefully, one hand on the wall, counting steps. Twelve to the landing, turn, twelve more to the kitchen level. He had mapped this in daylight walks with Mathilde, pretending to be tired, asking to be carried so he could see the layout from her arms.Information is power.The kitchen was empty at this hour, the fires banked, the great copper pots hanging like sleeping bats. Caelum moved through it without sound, practicing the stealth that had never been natural to him—the Demon King had not hidden, had not needed to hide—and found what he was looking for.The meat cellar.It was cold, colder than the nursery, and the smell of blood and preservation made his stomach clench. But the floor was stone, and the space was private, and there was a beam overhead that he had measured with his eyes during a daytime tour with the cook.Caelum reached up. His fingers closed on the beam. He pulled.His body lifted—inch, then two, then three. He held, trembling, until his arms shook and his grip failed. He dropped to the stone, landing in a crouch that he had practiced a hundred times in the nursery, and he breathed.Again.He did it seven times that night. Seven pulls, seven failures, seven landings that grew softer as he learned to absorb impact with his legs rather than his spine. When he finally climbed back to the nursery, his hands were blistered and his muscles were liquid fire, and he slept without dreaming.It became ritual. Nightmare, then training, then sleep. The pattern anchored him, gave him purpose beyond survival. He was not just waiting to grow—he was building, stone by stone, the foundation of whatever he would become.He was five years old when he first beat Gideon in a race.It was not a formal competition. The middle brother, now six and already receiving sword instruction, had challenged him on the garden path—last one to the oak tree is a demon's servant—expecting to win easily. Caelum was smaller, weaker, strange.But Caelum had been running in the dark for a year. Running up stairs, down corridors, through the kitchen gardens where no one watched. He knew how to breathe, how to pace, how to push past the first burning in his lungs.He won by three lengths.Gideon stared at him, chest heaving, something complicated moving across his face. Not anger. Not exactly. Recognition, perhaps. The acknowledgment that the world contained variables he had not accounted for."Again," Gideon said.They raced seven more times. Caelum won four. When they finally collapsed in the grass beneath the oak, Gideon asked the question Caelum had been waiting for."How?"Caelum considered his answer. The truth—I was a king who ruled through strength, and I cannot bear to be weak—was impossible. But there were other truths, smaller ones, that could serve."I practice," he said. "When I can't sleep. I run.""Why?"Because I wake screaming. Because my body remembers power it no longer has. Because if I cannot be strong, I will at least be fast."Because I want to keep up with you," he said instead. "You're my brother. I don't want to be left behind."Gideon was six. He had been trained to compete, to win, to view siblings as rivals for their father's attention. He had not been trained for this—vulnerability offered as gift."You're weird," Gideon said finally. But he was smiling, slightly, and when they walked back to the house, he matched his pace to Caelum's shorter stride.First alliance, Caelum thought. Built not on power, but on need.It was a lesson. He filed it away with the others.The nightmares continued to evolve.At five, Caelum began to interact with them. To speak in the dream, to try to change the outcome, to warn Seraphina before the blade fell. It never worked—the dream played out as memory, immutable, inevitable—but the trying taught him something.I am not helpless here. Even in failure, I am not helpless.He began to wake with more than fear. He woke with plans. Strategies sketched in the dark, tactics refined from eight centuries of war. If he could not change the dream, he could use it—study Malphas's movements, his words, the specific wrongness of the shadow that wore his skin.What are you? Caelum asked the dream, night after night. What did you become?The dream never answered. But in waking, Caelum began to research.He could not read the restricted texts—those were in his father's study, locked behind doors he could not yet open. But the nursery had books, and the library had gaps where he could hide among the shelves, and the servants talked when they thought he was not listening.He learned:The Abyssal Understanding Authority had been founded after the war, not before. Malphas's reformation.The Abyss was sealed "permanently," but expeditions were still sent to the borderlands. None returned. This was called "maintenance."Demons were extinct. This was doctrine. But there were rumors—whispers among soldiers, stories in taverns—of things in the deep forests, in the abandoned mines, that did not match any known creature.And Seraphina. His grandmother, his enemy, his unexpected mourner. She had died young, yes, but not in battle. She had wasted away, slowly, speaking to shadows that no one else could see. The official record said "holy exhaustion." The unofficial said "madness."She knew, Caelum thought, touching her statue in the garden. She knew something was wrong. She tried to tell them, and they called it madness.He was six when he first wrote to her.Not a real letter—he had no one to send it to, no address for the dead. But he found a journal, blank, discarded in the library's donation pile, and he began to fill it with questions he could not ask aloud.Did you see him? In the throne room, did you see what he was becoming?Did you know I was already dying?Why did you weep for an enemy?Why do I weep for you?The writing was difficult. His small hands cramped, formed letters slowly. But the practice helped—organized his thoughts, gave shape to the chaos of two lives overlapping. He wrote about the nightmares, the training, the careful construction of Caelum Valorian from the ruins of Asmodeus the Demon King.He wrote about his siblings. Elara, distant and perfect, who studied magic theory with tutors and spoke to him only when required. Gideon, fierce and hungry, who had become something like a friend through shared exhaustion on the running paths.He wrote about his mother, Lyra, whose tinctures had grown stronger, whose smiles had grown more fragile, who sometimes looked at him with an expression he could not read.She knows, he wrote once, then crossed it out. She suspects. She sees something in me that reminds her of the statue, of the stories, of the grandmother she never met.He was wrong, he told himself. Paranoia, inherited from a life of court intrigue. But he watched her more carefully after that, noted the way she flinched when he spoke with too much precision, the way she stared when he solved puzzles meant for older children.I must be more careful, he wrote. I must be smaller. I must be harmless.But in the meat cellar, in the dark, he pulled himself up on the beam until his arms failed, and he dreamed of being dangerous again.The breakthrough came at night, in the space between nightmare and waking.Caelum was seven. He had just dreamed the throne room again—Malphas's smile, Seraphina's tears, the seal closing like a mouth—and he was lying in his cradle, counting breaths, when he felt it.Something else in the dark.Not a nurse. Not a sibling sleepwalking. Something old, something that pressed against his senses like a hand against a membrane, and he realized with a shock that stopped his heart:It was looking for him.He lay perfectly still. He had not felt power since his rebirth—had tried to reach for it, failed, accepted that the seal had stripped him completely. But this was not his power. This was something external, something searching, and it felt like—Like the shadow in Malphas's skin. Like the thing that wore my friend's face.The pressure increased. Caelum felt his bladder release, infant helplessness overwhelming discipline, and he hated himself for it but he did not move. He thought small thoughts—I am a child, I am nothing, I am not here—and he breathed, and he waited.The pressure withdrew.It took hours to stop shaking. When morning came, Caelum went to the garden, to Seraphina's statue, and he pressed his forehead to the cold marble where her sword met the demon's neck."He's looking for me," he whispered. "He knows I'm not gone. He doesn't know where, or what, but he's looking."The statue did not answer. But Caelum felt something—not power, not magic, just resonance—in the stone beneath his hands. A memory, perhaps. An echo of the woman who had wept for her enemy.Check the grave, she had said, in the dream. He is not dead."I know," Caelum told her. "I know. And I am not dead either. Not yet."He was seven years old. He had no magic, no allies who knew his truth, no plan beyond survival and information and the desperate, daily work of becoming strong enough to matter.But he had something he had not had as Demon King.Time.Malphas had waited two hundred years. Caelum could wait too. He would grow, and learn, and build himself into something new—not a king, not a conqueror, but something that could challenge a saint on human terms.I am Caelum Valorian, he told the statue, told himself, told the shadow that might still be listening. I am small. I am weak. I am learning.And I am not alone.It was a lie. He was alone, profoundly, terrifyingly alone, carrying secrets that would destroy him if spoken. But lies could become truths, with enough repetition. And in the silence of the garden, with the Hero's marble sword above him and the demon's stone face below, Caelum chose to believe it.He went inside to breakfast. He smiled at his mother, traded insults with Gideon, accepted Elara's distant nod. He performed childhood with the skill of an actor who had forgotten his own face.And that night, in the meat cellar, he pulled himself up on the beam not seven times, but ten.Not alone, he thought, muscles screaming, spirit singing. Not powerless. Not gone.
Not yet.
End of Chapter 3