The sun bit without mercy. Every ray was a sentence, a blade sanctified by the mirrors that formed the cursed circle. In their midst, the demon lay. He did not sleep, did not breathe in the true sense of the word — he lived a form of suspended agony, an existence torn between reflections that did not belong to him. The mirrors did not merely reflect his body. They multiplied him, deconstructed him, forced him to live through every facet of shame and self-hatred at the same time. In one, he was the helpless child. In another, the executioner with hollow eyes. In another, the beautiful man Elena had cursed with light. In yet another — no one. Just a shadow of what he once was.
He had been bound here for an eternity. Years on end. Merciless years, full of forgetting. He could not say how many had passed because time warps grotesquely when you suffer. Everything hurt.
Daylight lashed him with sanctity. It drained his senses and yet would not let him die. His flesh smoked where the rays crossed, as if the earth itself tried to reject him. His fingers bled without skin, and his eyes were cracked — not from tears, but from pure light. He had lost his voice countless times, yet every morning he screamed again. Not to be heard. Not to be saved. Only to remember who he was.
"Sol maledictus... Ardeam. Ardeo. Ardebo in aeternum." (Cursed sun… I burned. I burn. I shall burn forever.)
Each day was an execution. And every execution, a ritual of helplessness.
On his knees, forehead pressed to the barren earth, the demon no longer struggled. Not because he had accepted it. But because hatred does not require movement. True hatred is born in the silence of the condemned. The mirrors reflected him, but they could not touch his thoughts. And there, in the core of his mind, the demon boiled.
He did not plot. He did not conspire. He waited.
"Per lumen, damnatus sum. Per tenebras, renascar." (By light, I was condemned. By darkness, I shall be reborn.)
Time was a joke. A filthy trick played on the backs of those who still believe in beginnings and endings. For him, there was no more "now." Only "still." Still alive. Still broken. Still here. But not forever. Nothing is forever. Only darkness.
And he was darkness.
And yet, even hatred grows weary. When the day became too sharp and the silence too vast, she came. Not in body. In memory. Not his memory. Elena's.
He felt her the way rust feels in the marrow of wood — slow, corrosive, final. Elena's thoughts, though lost across distance, sometimes left echoes in him: fragments of longing, slivers of voice, shadows of dream. And with them appeared the image of the soul once promised to him. Not by word. By blood. Amara. What was meant to be his. The price. The balance. The bond. But she was never given to him. She was born and hidden. Raised in light, in freedom, far from the fire that had once claimed her.
He felt her slipping through his vertebrae like a broken promise. And the worst part wasn't that she had been denied to him. It was that she lived. Joyful. Unaware. Laughing.
And that laughter pierced him deeper than any ray of light.
He didn't hear it directly. He felt it in his mother's memory. A joy that had no right to exist. A laugh that drove the knife into the place where his heart had first been burned. How could she laugh? How could happiness exist while he was pinned down, bare, torn, starving for shadow?
"You laugh... and I am the ash of your life."
He did not curse her. Never. The hatred he carried for her was too precious to be uttered aloud. He kept it in him like a cold flame, like a memory he would one day drive into her soul with the tip of a kiss.
"Amara..." he spoke, and the mirrors trembled.
Her name carried weight. Not because he felt it — but because he knew it. She was the payment that never came. The pact broken. The ultimate offense. She was proof that he had been betrayed not once, but twice. Once through the blood given. A second time, through the blood withheld.
"Filia pacti... Spes fracta... Liberatio mea."
(Daughter of the pact... Broken hope... My deliverance.)
Elena had denied her to him. Elena, who had sworn a covenant, who had summoned him with blood and salt, then cast him into the light, into a sacred circle, like a cursed dog. Elena, who had given him a promise, then stopped her heart just before fulfilling it.
"Traditrix... Mendax... Matrem damnavi in aeternum."
(Traitor... Liar... I have cursed the mother for eternity.)
The mirrors twitched. One cracked at the edge. Not from force. From intent. In that corner, for the span of a moment, he saw his true face. Not torn. Not multiplied. Just his. The way it had been before the fall.
Beautiful. Calm. Human.
And still, he felt no shame, no regret. Only a single drop of blood rolling down his cheek — red tear, heavy, inevitable.
"Lux... mea damnatio est..." he whispered. (The light is my damnation.)
Sometimes, when the light was so white the world seemed to disappear, the demon wished to forget. To forget who he had been, why he was there, how he had arrived. But memory would not yield. The circle would not allow it. The mirrors would not release him — not even from himself.
"Libera me... vel interfic me..." (Free me... or kill me...)
No one answered. Only the mirrors moaned, weaker and weaker. Not because they wished to offer escape. But because they knew what was coming. They had already seen what was within him. What was being born in his darkness.
There, in the belly of pain, the demon clung to a single thought: revenge is not the moment you raise the sword. It is the moment you name it. And he had a name. Just one. Amara.
"I will rise from the light," he thought. "And when I do... I will shatter every dream you hold. I will caress your temple only to whisper how close salvation had been. I will kiss your eyelids before closing your eyes forever. I will remind you who I am in every night sleep betrays you, in every breath that no longer belongs to you. I will not take you with hatred. I will take you with the right of the wronged. And every touch will be restitution. Amara... you will be mine. Not through love. Through right."
The light screamed. His flesh peeled in layers. And he, at the center of the circle, smiled.
"Lux tua erit mors mea... Et mors mea erit renascentia." (Your light will be my death... And my death will be rebirth.)