Orion kept on bandaging his arm, as the demon near him looked at the giant volcano at the center of Hell with something almost akin to fear.
The ice demon could not understand his new underling. He did not even know why he shared Edwin's home cooking with the man.
He only knew that the man had asked, politely, at that, if he may have a pancake.
The rest was history.
"I don't understand," Len said, as he kept on staring at the bloody volcano. His deep red eyes were a rich bloody color. If what Orion had been reading in Edwin's thoughts held water, then this demon must have a big body count to his name.
Not that he did anything to hint at the fact. Orion needed a door unlocked, Len found a way to the other side, where the demons who were standing between Orion and Edwin's wedding ring were cowering.
"Nothing new, Len. Nothing new, I'm afraid," Orion said, noting that the bandage was coloring crimson once more. Did the last demon have poison in his saliva?
It would make sense, but the demon had not gotten the chance to bite him or sting him with his scorpion's tail. So, what could it possibly be?
"No, what I can't understand is why the bosses are gone, Orion. Have you ever even seen the Devil? Or even so much as felt God's punishing hand?" Len asked, as he scratched himself behind the head. Orion snorted. Oh, not another one. Not another one trying to find himself. Those were worse than bricks.
"Why don't you find a tree to sit under? I promise I won't bring you any food," Orion said, his growl making it into his voice, even though he did not want to drive Len away.
Not really.
He had his uses, and while he was talkative now, the opposite was normally the case.
"No, really now, Orion. Who created us?"
Orion groaned, not bothering to restrain himself. Not this crap again! Why did anyone even need to ask such a silly question?
It was just like the whole shit with the chicken and the egg. Well, Orion had tried to tell people that it had been the T. rex, then the egg, and then the chicken.
A prank he had played, way back when, had his kicks from a T. rex being followed by an adorable yellow chick.
It had not been so amusing, he had to admit, as he had watched the chick tear from the flesh of a dinosaur 1000 times its size.
Cute things should not be bloodthirsty. But then again, Orion had picked a particularly nasty specimen for the mother.
The father, on the other hand, had been mellow. Mellow enough to stick around pass the point when the hormones of the female had run their course, which ended up with him getting eaten.
Wait… was that the first tragic love story on this planet? Did he actually create something that could have been a cautionary tale for dinosaurs?
He shook his head.
The T. rex mother was long dead, the chicken had lived to an old age and died not leaving so much as a bone behind.
Now if only he could find out who had copied him, and that more times than Orion could count, he could finally find out to whom the world had to thank for chicken soup.
"Think about it," but it seemed that Len was not giving up. "What if they killed one another, and the administration doesn't want to tell us about it because then they would be pointless? Or, what if they went on a vacation together?"
Orion looked at the skies, which were actually the topmost layer in the deepest bowels of the Earth, and snorted.
"You, dear Len," he said, patting his companion on the head as if the demon were some child. "Have been a Muse for far too long. Let me guess, a BL author?"
Len nodded. Orion did not admit he felt sorry for people often, but Len was a special case. The man probably had to think up more than one sex scene.
Which, for a demon, would be no problem, but the thing was, Len had told him he was straight.
Orion could not even begin to imagine the psychological damage done to his new friend.
"She used to wake up at two in the morning," Len began, his eyes seeing something Orion did not even want to imagine. "Ate tons of chocolate, drank an entire kettle of mint tea, and that in the mornings alone. If one can call the timespan between 2 and 4 a.m. morning. I should sign myself to some drug support group. There are nights when I wake up at two in the bloody morning, and without even thinking much about it, make an entire kettle of mint tea. It is just… I don't even like mint tea. Heck, I don't even like tea."
Orion had to bite his tongue, in order not to laugh out loud. Oh, the Muse demons who were squeezed like lemons for too long normally either killed the humans who had signed off their souls without even realizing it or developed Stockholm syndrome.
The only cure, the only way for a Muse to move on after the death of their jailer, was for them to air their grievances.
Orion did not believe he was the right shoulder to cry on, but Len had opened the door to the Archdemon who had ended up as a sapphire. A wonderful engagement gift, which he knew for a fact that Edwin touched now and again.
It was almost worth it to get his lips burned.
Almost.
"But that is not the worst part," Len said, as he buried his face in his hands. "She learned German. Was horrible at it. I had to learn German while she was forcing me to write about anime characters. Do you have any idea what sort of nonsense I was forced to recite?"
Orion could not hold it anymore. His sides started to hurt from the laughter. Len looking at the volcano all the while, not paying him any attention, and probably wishing that he could kill his former appointed writer a second time, for closure this time. Orion made peace with the fact that some people had it worse than him.
And if the bosses, as Len had called them, had ever existed, then he would thank them personally.
After which he would carve out their eyes and park his behind on their thrones.
Then, he was sure that Edwin would be forced to notice him.
0000
Edwin looked at the vegetables in front of him. Eggs and vegetables. Only eggs and vegetables. Sure, he was used to eating chips with ketchup this past year, and he should really start to be grateful about the fact that he remembered how to make the food forest rune, but… come on!
"Are you trying to get us in heaven, kitten?" Damon looked about as excited to eat his leafy greens as Edwin, which was not saying much about Edwin's cooking prowlers.
The ten gold coins were spent, he had put their last egg inside this boiled thing.
It was cheap, but God darn it all, he would have killed for some salt. Why the heck did Damon not agree to at least buy some salt? What was Edwin supposed to do, find a deposit and mine it himself?
"Because," Damon's voice was normally something Edwin could have described as silk and honey. But now, he just wanted to punch the man's teeth out. "If that were the case, you could have spared us the unborn chicken. Putting babies in a bed of vegetables, which is a sin on its own because it is proven that they are sentient as well, is…"
"The eggs are the chicken's period, as long as the hen did not come in contact with a rooster," Edwin enjoyed as Damon's fork dropped, and the man pressed a napkin to his mouth.
Some things were worth more than gold.
"You have been feeding me chicken period for ten days?" Damon picked up his plate, aimed without so much as blinking.
"If that shit gets in my hair, you will clean the entire house!"
But Edwin was at his wit's end.
He did not know why, but he had to cook up industrial portions of food. Damon claimed he snacked on them during the night, but Edwin had never seen him do it.
What he did know, however, was that while Damon had money for food boxes, he did not have money for food.
"I was aiming at your face!" Damon stood up, made a couple of threatening steps towards Edwin. "But if you want to see if this blob is a good shampoo, then I will gladly help! It is the right consistency!"
Edwin picked up his plate, which was about as highly piled as Damon's untouched one. He hated the idea of throwing away food, but while the vegetables and egg were boiling, he had gone to Damon's room to watch some rune lessons.
By the time he had gone back to the stove, having made just tiny progress in the rune he was making, the thing in the pot looked like a slime monster.
Edwin did not want to be credited for the restoration of that particular species, so he had let the water evaporate.
The result, as he later found out, as he tried to empty the plate over Damon's head, while the vampire did his best to return the favor, was something akin to cement.
"Just you wait until I get a fork!" Damon yelled, made a couple of steps towards the sink, only to blink.
Ah, he remembered with mounting dissatisfaction. The dishwasher had broken down after Edwin had made the stones which were trying to pass for baked potatoes, and Damon had not bothered to dump them in the bin first.
And Damon, just like any self-respecting vampire, had attempted to dump the washing to Edwin.
By not going anywhere near the sink, and letting the stench do its job. Edwin, though, as Damon had realized when they sat down to try and eat their…dinner, was a tough nut to crack.
And what was worse, a lazy one.
How Orion was going to deal with such a housewife was beyond Damon. Yet, he had promised his friend he would smooth out the rough diamond and give Orion the shiny and awe-inspiring product of his hard labor.
But as he willed himself to pick a dirty fork, got his fingers dirty, and then proceeded to attempt to scrape the sludge out of his plate, he knew that things had to change.
For Edwin did not fear him. Damon was pretty sure that he had been reduced to something like a roommate in the eyes of the Lich.
"If you don't start to pull your own weight, I will…" Damon began, the green in his hazel eyes coming to the surface.
The fork snapped in half, Damon looked down at the sludge, which now had eyes.
"Huh?" Was the only thing he could say, before the thing scrapped itself free of the plate, and latched itself at his face.
Edwin, for his part, did not want his bodyguard/boss to be eaten by their dinner. It had not been his intention to create such an abomination. Just to make something warm for the two of them, before the two could go back to doing their own thing:
Damon reading his smut romances, and Edwin watching rune crafting videos on YouTube.
"No, bad, bad!"
Edwin looked around, saw a glass which had a little bit of a clean spot on it. He filled it up with the still brown water, for Damon had not gotten around to fixing that up, and then dumped the water over Damon's head.
The slime grew, gave out a roar similar to a turtle's mating call.
And so, without knowing it, the vampire/Lich duo became a part of history.
As the two idiots who not only restored the slimes to Forestia, but also managed to turn a slime into a dungeon core.
Which was problematic, for the house was the slime dungeon.
Not that the two even suspected such things. Oh, they were destined to remain ignorant for a very long time. Living in the dungeon, drinking dungeon water. Changing.
Their most pressing concern back then, on that August evening, was how to save Damon's eyebrows from being peeled off his face.
They failed.
Damon, even though he hated to do such things, had to draw his eyebrows back on, later, in the seclusion of his own room, as Edwin was yelling from the other side of the door about how sorry he was.
The problem with that was that he was a vampire. Limbs he could regrow. Eyebrows, not so much.