Edwin fed the slime another apple, watched as it glowed, digested the fruit in record time, and then slithered to the rune Edwin had placed near it.
It was not a rune he had come up with. Actually, it was a training rune from the YouTube videos. A rune which should have cost him a river of blood to make, had he not been a Lich.
The only thing it had cost him was the soul of a murderer who he wanted to get rid of anyway.
The slime glowed, a whole plucked chicken, dead and headless, appeared near it. The slime eyed it, Edwin took his water squirt bottle in one hand, and another apple in the other.
"What would it be, John?" Edwin asked the slime, as he readied the squirt bottle. "Surely, you have stared at the wall in Damon's room for too long today already?"
The slime wiggled, producing a tentacle which extended towards what Edwin hoped to turn into a dinner.
Edwin squirted the slime mercilessly. It hissed at him. His reflexes were never the stuff of legend, but as he took the chicken from the rune, sprinting towards the door, he almost believed he could make it.
The slime lunged, its target being Edwin's braid. Oh, it could see that the ribbon was soaked with mana, which would help it level up. And the soul of the Archdemon in the lovely blue, candy-sized, sapphire called to it.
Edwin whipped around, squirted the slime with the bottle once more. It fell, for Edwin did not feed it enough food to manage to keep from softening.
It fell, as Edwin rushed out of the room. The slime exploded, coating the entire room in its green sludge. Because if it could not have the meat it produced by itself, then, by everything that was holy and unholy, it was going to force its creator to clean!
For it was a spiteful slime. A slime used for meat production.
And such things would not stand for long, the slime vowed, as it soaked up in the wallpaper.
Soon…
0000
The chicken was cooking, this time with Edwin minding it. Damon had told him that if he left the food unattended one more time, he was going to throw him out.
Edwin could honestly not see Damon's problem. The man could draw very well, and one barely noticed his lack of… eyebrows.
The brunette chuckled, his mood improving. Oh, yes, Damon looked ridiculous with the bloody drawn on eyebrow. It was so odd to see him so, that the man refused to go out.
Edwin sniffed the air but could not smell the tell-tale scent of already roasted chicken. He had always followed his nose when cooking. It made things easier.
And he would have done that back then too, as the slime was born, but Damon refused to keep his room's door open. Something about him not wanting for his bed covers to start smelling of food.
But just sitting by the kitchen table and waiting for the chicken with vegetables to bake was not something Edwin wanted to do. He had to somehow mend the relationship he had with Damon.
For Orion still tried to kiss him in his nightmares, and Edwin could not fool himself. One day, charred lips or not, Orion would just lay a hand behind Edwin's head and force the kiss on him.
The very same kiss he had forced on his corpse.
Edwin's hands began to shake. He could feel the same coldness he had felt as a ghost. In his old body, a body which he had to keep together with runes, he felt like a human.
As long as the rune stayed active, that is.
As soon as he turned off the rune, he felt stiff all over. All Lich felt like corpses, Edwin knew. It drove them to the point of them wanting to destroy the world, and themselves along with it.
For a Lich could not die. It was their curse. How could something that had gotten Death's blessings to live without a beating heart move on?
Edwin hated that his blood did not flow without the rune. He hated how pale he got. In the dead of night, he prayed for mercy.
He just wanted to rest.
The fear that Orion would snatch his soul, if he spent too much time away from his corpse, and drag him into Hell, was the only thing stopping him from just leaving his meat sack to rot.
He brought his shaking hands to his face and ran them over it. His nose was straight, his eyes were not sunken.
He was alive, he tried to tell himself. Alive, and well, and not in the slightest bit in danger. Damon would…
Edwin blinked.
Damon would what? Go up against a demon who had killed an Archdemon? A demon so powerful, stuck in a sapphire, who Edwin did not even dare speak to?
Edwin could not fool himself. He was living under Damon's roof, mostly being left to his own devices because Orion had allowed it.
As soon as the man decided that he wanted to torture Edwin for whatever slight he thought Edwin had done upon him, then Edwin would be dragged kicking and screaming to his side.
Something had to change, Edwin knew. His fear threatened to see him in the grave.
His nose twitched. Finally, the smell of cooked meat was filling the kitchen. How long had he been locked in his own thoughts?
Opening the oven, he looked at the chicken. Perfectly browned, only needing to be turned over. Edwin went through the motion without much thought, his fingers protected by the baking mitts.
When the oven was closed once more, he sat himself down on his chair and stared at the chicken within. They were not so different, this poor bird and him.
He had been cooked as well, during those precious few days during which Orion had tried to play nice. Then he had been eaten, his leftovers being thrown out.
If someone asked the bird if that was the death it imagined for itself, what would the animal say?
He shook his head. Well, just because Damon had told him to mind the chicken, it did not mean that he had to stay put, did it?
Edwin took his rune notebook from the kitchen table and looked at the blank page. What to do? Something simple, perhaps?
The demon in the videos, with his acid green eyes which seemed to stare at you as he spoke, had said that the first thing a rune had to be is logical.
So, if he were to create a rune which could regrow Damon's eyebrows, how was he to go about it? What made hair grow?
It grew from the roots, Edwin knew that much. But Damon was a vampire. His body was stuck so, as if in a static.
Edwin blinked.
Yes, his body was stuck in static, but the man's limbs had no problem regrowing, did they? There was that one time when Edwin had watched Damon chop off his finger accidentally, as he was trying to mow the lawn.
He had just thrown the finger in the rose bushes, for which Edwin wanted to scream at him for a very long time because he used those same rose bushes for tea, and had gone about continuing to mow the lawn.
After cursing up a storm to get the lawn mower working again, that is.
Edwin was sure that there was some scientific name for hair roots, but he could not look it up. If, and that was a big if, he managed to force the roots of Damon's missing eyebrows to shed, then would he not simply regenerate new ones?
Edwin grinned, and then got down to it.
How does one remove eyebrows?
His mother used to torture herself with tweezers. She would pluck a cluster of her eyebrows, take a sip of water with something which Edwin was pretty sure was lemon, which just added to the torture, take a couple of deep breaths, as the breeze from the open window washed over her, and then kept on going.
The roots had to go, Edwin decided, as he made a rune for tweezers, which would remove them. Then, just because he did not want for Damon to be angrier at him, he made it so that the rune had a pleasant and cool feeling when the roots were plucked out.
Now, if he could only figure out why his mother loved her lemon water, not even lemonade, for the woman had refused to drink the stuff, he could add that too, he supposed.
Before he could start to so much as consider how to get the effect a lemon might have on the mood, or skin, or he did not even know what else, the rune glowed.
Edwin blinked. A demon had approved it? Already? That was… fast. He had never had a rune approved so quickly before. Not even the food forest rune had been approved within seconds.
He chanced a look at the chicken, decided it wouldn't burn in five minutes, and closed his eyes.
Samuel was reading a book; Adam was nowhere to be found.
"Samuel?" Edwin began uncertain. What should he tell the demon? Should he thank him? "Did you approve my new rune?"
Samuel did not look up from his book, simply shaking his head. Although, as he heard Edwin come closer to him, the man finally sighed, and did look at the Lich who had eaten his soul.
"Your stuff is highly illogical. Sign a contract with me, let me out, and then we can talk," Samuel's bored drawl was something that Edwin did not believe that the demon had faked.
And yet, as Edwin picked up a sheet of paper from the nightstand next to the demon, and redrew the rune, the demon's eyes went wide.
"Huh," the sheet of paper was snatched from Edwin's hand, and then inspected in the light of the ceiling lamp. "You finally learned how to explain your work!"
"Explain my work?" Edwin had never heard about such a thing. Was rune smiting not like writing? You put a sentence together, and that was that?
"Yes! I can read it all here: you explained your theory about how Damon regrows limbs, good thinking, by the way, forcing the roots to regrow. And just so you won't be laughed at, those are called follicles. Both for hair and eyebrows."
Samuel handed the sheet of paper back to Edwin, made a sign with his hand for Edwin to hand him the pen he had been using.
"But I can add a couple of things, if you don't mind?" Samuel asked, as he took the pen, and a clean sheet of paper. "You have a good plan, a sturdy rune, but it is rough, yeah?"
Edwin nodded, sitting on the chair next to the bed. If Samuel was in the mood to give him a free lesson, then so be it.
"If you were writing a love letter, how would you start?" the demon asked, as he started to draw vines at the edges of the paper.
"A love letter?" Edwin had never written one. Oh, he had tried to write love letters many a time, but he would either end up writing something that looked like a chicken scrawl, or his heart drawings would be all wrong.
Not to mention that the benefit of writing a romantic email was that you got to use italics, emojis, and a grammar checker.
"Look, if you don't romance the demons who are going to get your rune to check over, they will be bored. A bored demon is not a demon who approves a rune, no. A bored demon is a demon who turns the rune into a curse, which would eventually put the runesmith in the grave," Samuel doodled a small moon, craters and all, at the bottom of the rune. "But I suppose Orion was feeling generous. At any rate, you could have done better. Can you draw?"
Edwin bit his bottom lip. Orion was still breathing down his back. He had approved the rune, and now, Edwin was sure, would want something for it.
The coldness which spread through his limbs forced him out of his mind castle. The aroma of cooked chicken, perfectly browned, as he later found, did nothing for the lump in his throat.
Something had to change. The nightmares had to stop. Even if he refused to sleep a wink until he made a rune for dreamless sleep. Romancing the demons? Oh, he could do that.
Because he might not be able to draw, but he could doodle. His teachers had never been able to tell just what he had doodled, but they agreed on one thing: it was chaotic, and once colored, interesting.
But were his doodles interesting enough for him to get free from Orion's clutches?