Demon Lords Apostle

Chapter 1 — The Wrong Light It started like any other dull afternoon. Fluorescent lights hummed. The teacher worked a century that did not care if anyone was awake. Warm air. Still air. Someone’s phone buzzed against a backpack and died of shame. I watched the clock because the clock was the only honest thing in the room. Then the air split. A thin line of light cracked the linoleum between my sneakers and widened until the floor forgot how to be a floor. Desks went. Voices went. History went. White took the classroom the way floodwater takes a basement: no argument, no pause. A voice that had never had to raise itself said, from a long way off, that we were chosen ones of another world. Summoned. Needed. The usual holy sales pitch. I hung in that gold with the rest of my class. Faces around me were stuck between fear and the kind of awe that makes people stupid. The light held. Then it did not. Warmth went out of it. The gold turned red. The others rose, pulled toward whatever sanctuary the goddess had prepared for her complete set. I fell. Their voices vanished upward into the glow that had wanted them. Mine stayed in my throat and came down with me. I woke on black marble. The ceiling had given up being a ceiling and become only shadow. The air was thick and wrong, like a room that had been holding its breath for a long time and had just remembered I was in it. Torches came on one by one and made a hall out of the dark. A red carpet ran to an obsidian throne. On it sat a man who did not need the throne to be tall. Seven feet. Hair like hammered gold, long enough to remember every year it had been allowed to grow. Two yellow horns. Eyes the color of cooling amber. No beard. No crown.