> "The shadows only exist to run from the light—that's what they always said. But in truth... it's always the darkness that consumes the light, swallowing it whole, until the world becomes a pond of endless despair."
> — Leornars
>
The Mayor's private office had once been a sanctuary of polished mahogany, leather-bound ledgers, and gold leaf. Now, it was a macabre canvas painted in the frantic, erratic brushstrokes of arterial spray. Leornars stood over the mangled form of the town's leader, his jagged silhouette flickering wildly against the dying, ash-choked embers of the fireplace.
"You can't do this and expect people to accept you!" the Mayor shrieked. His voice, once booming with political authority, cracked like dry glass beneath a heavy boot. "You're a monster! A stain on this world!"
Leornars didn't flinch. The insult didn't even register in his fractured mind; he had been called far worse by significantly better men. He knelt slowly, his movements entirely devoid of haste, and placed a steady, blood-slicked palm over the Mayor's trembling face. For a single, twisted heartbeat, the gentleness of the touch almost looked like a gesture of comfort.
Then, he slammed the man's head against the solid stone wall behind him.
*THUD.*
The sound was heavy, wet, and final. The Mayor's eyes instantly rolled back, the whites showing through a grotesque crimson mask of his own shattered features.
"This world rejected me. You treated my very existence like a curse," Leornars muttered, his voice dropping into a dark, melodic register that vibrated through the enclosed space. "I only ever wanted a normal life... with my mother. But you and your dogs took everything from me."
His voice cracked—not with the fragile innocence of a child, but with the catastrophic, tectonic shift of a soul giving way to pure, unadulterated wrath. He wrapped his fingers into a handful of the Mayor's graying, sweaty hair, yanked him upward, and hurled him violently across the room.
The man crashed into his own ornate executive desk, the heavy mahogany splintering with a sickening crunch as his spine twisted under the impact.
"I promised I'd send you to the depths of hell," Leornars said, his fingers closing tightly around a jagged shard of glass he had retrieved from a broken windowpane. "I always keep my word."
The next few hours inside that locked room became a horrific study in anatomical cruelty. Leornars worked with the absolute, agonizing precision of a master sculptor. He began with the face—carving thin, shallow lines that peeled back the Mayor's dignity until his aristocratic features were reduced to a raw, unrecognizable map of agony.
The screams were deafening at first, tearing through the office until the man's vocal cords frayed, reducing the noise to wet, desperate gurgles. With brutal, unyielding patience, Leornars moved down to the legs. He used the serrated edge of the glass shard to saw methodically through muscle, fiber, and tendon, working until the Mayor's feet were completely separated from his shattered ankles.
"Don't worry. It's just you and me," Leornars whispered directly into the man's ear, his breath smelling heavily of copper and smoke. "All your precious town guards... they aren't coming to save you. They're already resting somewhere far more peaceful than this."
Outside the heavy doors, the distant torches of the remaining town watch flickered through the courtyard. Shadowy figures moved past the frosted, blood-splattered windows. Leornars frowned, glancing toward the locked entryway.
"Tch. I can't even catch a break... filthy dogs."
Deciding to end his "test," he discarded his ruined, blood-soaked coat. He seized the blunt, notched iron sword he had stolen from a guard, lined it up, and drove it straight through the Mayor's chest, pinning his writhing torso directly to the floorboards.
With a sick, wide-eyed grin stretching across his pale face, Leornars reached directly into the open wound. His bare, scarred hands pried the ribs apart one by one, the bone snapping beneath his grip like dry kindling in a bonfire.
The Mayor's final scream was no longer human; it was the high-pitched, guttural screech of a dying animal.
Leornars found another sharp fragment of glass on the floor. He ruthlessly pried the man's shattered mouth open, caught his frantic tongue, and sliced it out with a single, clean motion.
"Finally," Leornars exhaled, tossing the flesh aside. "Some peace and quiet."
He spent the next hour in a silent, hyper-focused trance of gore, arranging the Mayor's internal organs in a macabre, circular ritualistic pattern around the pinned body. Finally, he turned back to the barely-conscious, twitching husk. He gripped the hilt of the sword and drove the steel down through both of the man's eyes, burying the tip into the floor.
"...That's for my mother."
He sat in the heavy silence for a long time, staring blankly into the dark void of the room. Then, with a sudden, jerky motion, he reached down, carved out the Mayor's still-quivering heart, and tossed it into the far corner of the office like a worthless piece of refuse.
The night air outside was freezing, but Leornars didn't feel it. He walked through the dirt paths of the village, a red wraith cutting through the shadows. He stepped silently into a small, warmly lit cottage—the local bakery.
Inside, the baker—the very man who had stood by and watched silently as the knights dragged Emalian to the execution block—froze mid-step, a loaf of bread slipping from his hands.
Leornars didn't waste a single syllable on words. He lunged across the counter, driving a glass shard deep into the man's left eye socket. As the baker stumbled backward, screaming and clutching his face, Leornars snatched a heavy silver dinner fork from the dining table and buried it entirely into the man's exposed throat.
The baker collapsed against his own hearth, choking violently on his own lifeblood. Leornars finished the deed by grabbing a nearby kitchen knife, burying the blade deep into the center of the man's heart until the thrashing stopped.
A sharp, terrified gasp shattered the sudden quiet.
A young boy stood in the back doorway, his trembling mother clutching his shoulders from behind. The child's face twisted from absolute shock into a mask of grief-stricken, impotent rage. Seeing his father dead on the floor, the boy grabbed a small skinning knife from the counter and charged blindly at the intruder.
Leornars sidestepped the clumsy attack with effortless, ghostly grace. He disarmed the boy with a swift flick of his wrist, sending the knife clattering away, and delivered a sharp, calculated kick to his jaw. The force sent the child flying backward, crashing hard into his mother's arms.
"Stay out of this," Leornars warned, his voice a flat, terrifying monotone that carried no human emotion. "Or I'll cut you down too."
"You killed my father!" the boy screamed through his tears, clutching his bruised, bleeding face. "You expect me to just let you go?!"
Leornars didn't even look back as he stepped over the threshold toward the exit. "Then grow stronger. Stronger than your pathetic dog of a father. And come find me."
He vanished into the thick treeline of the forest just as the angry village mob arrived at the bakery doors.
The villagers chased him through the brush with burning torches and rusty pitchforks, howling like beasts for the "demon child's" head. But as Leornars reached the absolute heart of the ancient forest, the sky above didn't just open—it shattered.
A massive pillar of blinding, celestial light descended from the clouds, instantaneously incinerating the surrounding canopy and swallowing Leornars whole. In the blink of an eye, the column of light retracted back into the atmosphere, leaving behind nothing but scorched, blackened earth and a deafening, echoing silence.
The pursuing villagers skidded to a halt at the edge of the smoking crater, their torches dropping into the dirt.
"...What just happened?" one of them whispered, his knees trembling violently.
"The gods..." another gasped, falling to his knees and pressing his face to the dirt. "The gods themselves descended... and killed the demon child. He's finally been purged from our world."
They turned back toward the village, sighing in profound relief, completely unaware that the "demon" hadn't been destroyed at all—he had simply been invited to plague another world.