Monsters will never surrender unless they are overwhelmingly outmatched. If they’re evenly matched, they’d rather die fighting than kneel. I was no different. I had been a monster, driven by the same instincts – and because of that, I died. It was as simple as that. No more, no less.

In the end, he split my head open and ripped out my brain and my eyes. That’s where my memory ends – the moment he ripped out my brain, I drifted into unconsciousness. A rather pitiful way to die, perhaps. One thing I do remember, though, is that its wings tasted pretty good.

Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I think, Am I missing the underworld? After being reborn as a human, I’ve been able to live much more comfortably than in my previous life. I don’t have to fight for food or territory. A stable life is guaranteed. I can sleep peacefully, and wake up without tension. And yet, sometimes I find myself thinking of the damp, muddy ground of the underworld. Is this what humans call nostalgia? Could it be that, despite everything, that abandoned place still feels like home?

“What are you thinking about?”

Zetak’s voice snapped me out of my thoughts. For some reason, he looked rather angry.

“What were you thinking about, to be so… distracted?”

So distracted? I wondered what he meant by that. As I looked at him, he clicked his tongue in irritation. I expected him to say more, to explain himself, but instead, he turned away in silence. What was he going to say, and why had he stopped?

***

After the incident in the temple, nothing of significance happened. My father instructed the high priests to keep my abilities secret, forbidding them to mention them to anyone. It was obvious that he wanted to prevent any rumors that might lead the Senate to propose me for the role of ambassador. In his mind, I was already the son he needed to keep hidden – the impotent one.

Ironically, this worked to my advantage, freeing me from the burdensome responsibilities that would have come with the position.

The nobles had been watching me closely ever since the Templars stormed the Academy. No doubt they were hoping for some sort of show – perhaps Zetak’s execution, or for me to cause a public disturbance. But when I returned unscathed and without incident, their interest faded just as quickly. In a few days, they would probably lose interest in Zetak as well.

“Your hand has stopped.”

I looked down at my right hand – specifically at the coins scattered across the table in front of me. I slowly pushed each coin upwards, one by one. The first coin with my thumb, the second with my index finger – one coin, one finger.

I repeated the motion of moving the coins up and down, a simple task that my fingers struggled to perform without trembling. It was part of the rehabilitation routine the healers had instructed me to follow whenever I had the time.

“And you haven’t turned a page yourself for a long time.”

Across from me, Zetak sat at his desk, surrounded by a towering pile of books. He had followed my orders and borrowed every book on the Underworld. It had been two days now and he had been reading non-stop, but I noticed that the pages of the book in his hands hadn’t moved for some time.

“Are you just dozing off with an open book? You’ve been on the same page for thirty minutes.”

“You’re mistaken. I was reading about the Gates.”

“Ah, the Gates.”

Dimensional rifts. Holes to the Underworld. Gates. They were known by many names, but the concept was the same – unpredictable portals that appeared and vanished at random, opening pathways to the underworld. Some were barely big enough for a person to pass through, while others were huge enough to swallow whole villages. The size and nature of the gates were as varied as the chaos they created.

If a gate appeared in an empty sky, you’d be lucky. But if it opened in the middle of a village, dozens, if not hundreds, of people could be swallowed up and thrown into the Underworld.

“Crossing over to the underworld from here will be easy, if you ever decide to go, it won’t be difficult. It’s getting back that’s almost impossible.”

Gates opened scattered across the world, allowing anyone who wished to enter the underworld to do so. But returning was another story – almost impossible. The chances of finding a Gate back were slim, and even if one did appear, the creatures of the Underworld would likely devour you long before you could reach it. The number of gates leading from the underworld to the human world was extremely small.

When they did open, they tended to appear in places that few could reach – at the bottom of a crater, beneath a swamp, or deep within the Thorn Forest. If the gates were easier to reach, the human world would have been overrun by monsters from the underworld long ago.

“Did you finish reading about the monsters?”

Zetak didn’t answer immediately. His gaze fell on my right arm, and for a long moment, he seemed lost in thought. Finally, he closed the book.

“You mentioned cutting off your arm and replacing it with a monster’s limb. Is that even possible?”

So that’s what was on his mind. He was still thinking about my comment earlier. I looked down at my trembling right hand. Theoretically, it was possible.

“Yes, It is possible. But there are risks involved.”

“If you use the body of a monster that’s no more than ten years old, it should be possible. Depending on the monster, you might not even have to cut off the arm.”

His eyes narrowed slightly at my words. I pointed at his body with my fingers.

“The monster you’ve merged with probably has considerable strength. But it must have been less than ten years old. If it were older, you would have been the one consumed – your consciousness devoured, your body taken over.”

He looked at me, silently demanding more explanation. I pushed the coins aside and continued. This was something he needed to understand, something that would no doubt come in handy one day.

“The younger the monster, the easier it is to merge with human flesh. But the older they are, the more their instincts, their nature, dominate. If you were dealing with a monster beyond its years, you wouldn’t be sitting here – you’d be nothing more than a shell for it to use.

“Monsters are born with only their instincts. It takes them about ten years to develop a sense of self. If you had merged with a monster that already had a developed consciousness, it would have been the one controlling you, not the other way around. It’s a trick that monsters sometimes play on humans who fall into the Underworld – they merge, but it’s the human who ends up losing themselves completely.

Some monsters will attempt to merge with humans to gain a human body and take control. The result, of course, is a gamble. Some succeed, gaining both the strength of a monster and the durability of a human body, while others fail – the human traits remain too dominant, weakening the monster’s power until it finally dies.

“How do you know all this? None of the books I’ve read mention such details.”

I could see the doubt creeping in. But I had no intention of revealing the truth. To tell him that I was once a monster would be pointless – no one would believe it. And even if they did, there would always be doubt.

“There are restricted books, reserved only for the royal family, I found it in one of them.”

It was a convincing enough excuse, and Zetak seemed to accept it without pressing further.

“They say that even if a monster develops a sense of self, it doesn’t experience human emotions. However, I’ve heard that after about a hundred years, some begin to awaken to emotions… but I can’t say for sure. It’s just something I’ve heard.”

[You’ve lived quite a while… I suppose in another twenty years or so you’ll start to learn about emotions too. How about it? Would you like to serve under me? I could teach you many things.]

As I spoke, the memory of those radiant butterfly wings came back to me. I remembered how it had wrapped its tendrils around his waist, its gaze filled with an almost disturbing curiosity. It was a monster, yet it had taken the form of a human – probably one who had fallen to the underworld and whose body it had stolen. This butterfly had been playing with humans long before it took their form.

As these memories of my past life began to resurface, it was almost as if I was drifting into nostalgia. Although most of my memories were of territorial fights and feeding, the strongest was that of the man with the butterfly wings. Perhaps because he was my last meal before I died, he stood out the most, etched vividly in my mind.

“The priests said your arm ended up like that because of my claws. Does the forbidden book say anything about that?”

“It’s something you’d find in ordinary books. I guess you haven’t come across it yet. A monster’s claws carry poison, and they can hide it at will. You, however, are still in the process of becoming a monster, so your claws will always carry the poison. As you become more comfortable with your body, you’ll be able to hide it as well.

At my words, his expression hardened as he lowered his gaze to his hands. He stared at his fingers, where snake-like scales had begun to appear in patches. Then he looked back at me, searching my calm demeanor for an answer.

“Even with that risk, you slept next to me? What if I accidentally scratched you in your sleep?”

“It’s not a poison strong enough to kill by mere contact, it only works if it penetrates deep into the muscle. But if you’re fighting other monsters, don’t rely too much on your poison. Many of them have thick armor – too hard for the poison to penetrate beneath the surface.”