“He’s here!”

She heard the voice inside her head again as she raced toward the palace, nearly running over several guards on her way up the steps. The horse tripped and sent her flying face first into the stone but she recovered and raced inside followed closely by the guards.

“You can’t go in there---!” one of them yelled after her but she rounded a corner before he could say anything else.

There was something here, she could feel it. A presence in the air that was both cold and stifling but she couldn’t relent. The closer she got to where she thought the center of this presence was, the more fervent she became to recover her father.

“FATHER!!” she screamed as loud as she could when she finally slid into view of the main gathering area for the Pharoah’s court. The floor was covered in blood and Khafre was suspended above his throne, body limp and eyes watering. He was still alive but for the other poor souls in that room. Laini barely had words to describe the carnage.

As for what could cause such devastation?

It stood just in front of the Pharoah’s seat and looked as if it was about to lower him in its mouth when it noticed something behind it. When it came more into view, Laini understood.

It was the same demon who had terrorized her mother’s village.

And there was so much more to it.

Green flames from its mouth, dripping with what looked like rocks onto the floor that seared and burned little holes with each impact into the stone. The horns of the thing were massive and it turned to reveal a small, green orb in the middle of its chest. It lifted what Laini assumed was a nose and sniffed at the air before chuckling, Khafre tumbling to the ground haphazardly behind his throne.

“You…” it rasped through each chuckle. “You are familiar...the one who escaped.”

It tilted its head, and a wrapping that moved like cloth away from a small beady black marble; an eye that grinned with childlike delight.

“No…” it took a small step forward and it gasped for air with each movement as if it were struggling to breathe. “But you do smell like her…”

“What are you!?” she demanded, her fear waning with every second she stood against this beast.

“I am a devourer…” it whispered through painful inhales. “And you...are coming with me…”

Just as it took a large inhale, several guards came bursting into the room and without thinking began to throw spears and attack its legs but it was as nothing. The creature roared and a green flame erupted from its mouth and consumed everything in front of it. Laini darted behind and pillar before the flames could reach her and then another to get more cover away from screams from the guards.

The sound was cutting her right down to her soul and she tried to cover her ears but it was no good.

A coughing sound among the other screams caught her attention and saw a man’s hand from under a nearby chair. She ran to him and, to her horror, it was her father.

“Father--!!” she slid next to him and dragged him from under it but he cried out in pain. She gasped when she saw his torso: it had been mangled and parts of his innards were dragging on the floor. She couldn’t control her voice and couldn’t care if the demon found them. Laini’s voice was stolen at first from the initial shock but then she cried out. Cried harder than she ever has in her whole life.

“Do not be troubled…” he reached up to her and held her face. “I love you all...and whatever strength I have left...I give...to…”

His voice drifted with each word and she shook him.

She was too late and she was so distracted by the death of her father in her arms that she failed to notice the demon had picked up and slammed the chair far away from her.

Laini couldn’t hear it cackling above her when it reached a hand above Pawah’s body but she certainly saw the light.

A light that she could only assume was his soul.

She watched it hover for a moment before drifting down the length of his body and towards the now outstretched hand of this demon who called itself a devourer. She watched the light of her father’s soul enter the sneering mouth of a demon that not only deprived her of her mother’s family but also killed her father...but then ate his soul.

Time itself felt as if it had stopped.