The Ancestors of Demons - Book 2

The Ancestors of

Demons - Book 2

Tess Grebe

Austin Macauley Publishers

The Ancestors of Demons - Book 2

About the Author

Dedication

Copyright Information ©

About the Author

Tess Grebe lives in Paderborn, Germany. She has been a great fan of fantasy books ever since she was little and has been writing smaller and longer fantasy stories for just as long.

While Tess has lived in Germany all her life, she grew up speaking English as her stepfather was a soldier in the British army and she went to British school within the army camps. She has found her place in life working with animals as a vet’s assistant and writing the types of books she has always loved to read.

Dedication

To my granddad, Werner. You have been one of the greatest influences on my life, a true companion on my path through life and I am grateful for that. You have helped shaped the person that I am today, so I just wanted to say, Thank you.

Copyright Information ©

Tess Grebe 2024

The right of Tess Grebe to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035808335 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035808359 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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E14 5AA

It is story-time once again

The world Earth, just like we left it.

How many days, weeks, months, years or even decades has it been?

Too few to care about and too many to keep count of. (Just like the core opposites, just contradiction each other endlessly and becoming one within their contradiction. As is the nature of demons)

Now is the time to enter Earth again. Let’s find ourselves those humans—

Come on, gather around humans, you know the drill. What do you mean, you don’t know the drill, we are having a story-time again! Why are they looking so baffled? Wait, cursed deathworld! Those aren’t the same humans as last time! For demon’s sake, Maka, check what happened with the other once. Dead?

Oh, it has been a few hundred years, that explains it. It’ll be annoying to start all the way from the top again. Guess we got no choice, Eskh, be so kind and use a shadow-ball to place the memories from the last story-time of the other humans in these humans, so we can continue where we left off. Ah, nothing to worry about you guys, we are just altering your memories a little. Oh demon, they are running, guess that was to be expected. Twins, stop them from running. It’ll be over before you know it—

Now that that is settled, do all of you remember the previous story-time? Good, good and all of you seem to recognise us five. What? You forgot our names? But we just gave you those memories.

For demon’s sake, humans and their ability to forget. So once more, I’m Argiston, leader of this group. I formed my substance into the form of a dwarf. Maka is the giant one, his forms comes from the Arginate. The young twin boys are Hen and Maran. And the little girl, who was so kind to alter your memories, is Eskh.

Very good question, what are we gonna talk about. Well, we thought we will tell you about more worlds, just like we did last time, but this time, we are going to also talk about our own personal experiences in those worlds or the worlds we have already told you about. Let’s just say we want to be a little more personal this time around. We ain’t strangers no more and you do know our names by now, so why not tell you about some of our own personal adventures.

Where to start? There are just far too many things to talk about. Oh, that is an idea, let’s talk about how the twins like to confuse their masters and friends just a little bit.

The twins never do anything apart from each other, they always share every moment of their life, since the very first second. The two of them met where all of us met, in Begin, our birthplace and home. Amongst demons, making friends works similar to finding mates, our instincts can often already tell if we are going to be friends or not.

This doesn’t always work, only with very strong bonds or very negative ones. So if we are going to become extremely close friends our instincts will tell us beforehand, if we are going to absolutely hate each other’s guts for no apparent reasons our instincts will also tell us so beforehand.

With the twins, the moment they saw each other at Begin, both of them knew that they will have a bond so strong, they will never find anything like it. So, when it was time to pick our main-form the two of them picked the same main-form.

The main-form refers to the form a demon likes to take the most. For normal demons, this is just a name for their favourite form. For shadows, it is more than that.

Remember how we told you our substance is always black and white and we have to use the shadow-paintbrush to change its colour. Well, in case of our main-form, our substance naturally produces the colour combining light and darkness rather than using the shadow-paintbrush, but that only applies to our main-form.

This means if we change into our main-form, it will have colours beside white and black automatically, while if we change from our main-form into another it will lose the colours and will be black and white again. The main-form has to be chosen, but can be changed if wanted. We, however, by nature, like to keep even our main-form black and white themed, if possible.

As you can tell, as most of our cloths are either black or white or a colour similar to it and our hair always goes either toward black or white as well.

In addition to that, they each made the other their master, so if one of them dies, the other will two. They share their thoughts, their senses, their everything and when they pick one master or more (we can have an infinite amount of masters).

In fact, that is how one stupid Shadow lost their life during the first couple of days after birth. (Yes, there are even stupid Shadows and we aren’t afraid to admit it.) Said Shadow decided to make all the living beings in the First World, except for Shadows, his master, unfortunately not even a Shadow can protect so many beings from death, so he died after a few minutes. The twins would always share said masters.

However, they wouldn’t always reveal to their masters or friends that there were in fact two of them. With some masters or friends, the two of them kept on switching out, who stayed with their masters and the other one would follow unseen, while still showing slight differences in personality.

And then, without any warning, both of them would simultaneously appear, at times acting, like they were the same Shadow just being in two places at once and in the next moment acting as two different people.

Why did they do it? Because they could and it was fun. But, they usually at some point would reveal themselves as two. Some cunning masters even got behind it, without a reveal being required, especially since they would sometimes even correct their masters and friends, when they use the wrong name. They liked those masters the most.

Talking about multiple masters, I myself did something quite unusual picking my master. There was one time in my life when I just couldn’t decide which destiny of two particular humans I found most intriguing. I wanted to be with both at the same time, but the problem was, they were in two completely different worlds. Instead of picking one over the other, I gave into my desire and made both my masters.

(Things like that are a little dangerous. Having more than one master always brings a higher risk of one dying unexpectedly, leading to the Shadows death. We can be in ten places at once, but, while it might sound like a lot, depending on the destiny, we might find ourself using all of those places up, just protecting one master, without being capable of protecting the others. That is especially true for worlds, where we join in a war or worlds, where our masters have tasked us with something (which we would never refuse)).

Multiple masters in one world is still easier though, than multiple in different worlds, as the chance, that you are close by, if help is needed, is just much higher in the same world. Even more so in small worlds and considering, those with strong destinies, tend to be linked to each other, makes chances of being near all our masters even higher.

In different worlds, you always have to stay on alert for everything happening in both worlds and have to pay close attention to how many places you are at once.

My little adventure with two different masters in two different worlds was much more easy though. I decided to take this risk, because I realised that the times in those two worlds were perfectly reversed. When it was night in one of the two, it was daytime in the other. So most of the time, my other master was asleep, when important things happened with the other, as there was hardly any important destinies during night time.

Well, there were times I was needed at nighttime, but not many and I felt safe enough to do it, with success, as you might guess, by the fact, that I am stood before you right now.

What? How we became friends? Well, guess we have talked about how the twins became friends, so it isn’t surprising that you would also want to know how all of us became friends.

Unlike the twins, the rest of us hadn’t had their instincts telling us we could be friends. Eskh and I made friends, before we met Maka and the twins. I met Eskh in one of the forest outside Begin, when the First World was still in uncivilated age.

She was racing through the forest with Wind, the demon responsible for weather. They were playing tag, though to demons standards, meaning they ran faster than most cars and jumped whole trees while doing so and often even changed gravity to escape one another, falling in and out of the sky over and over. Even things like unmaterialising, when about to be caught and tearing parts of their substance off, where they were touched is considered normal, when demons play tag.

For the game, Wind changed his form, usually his substance covers a whole world, is completely see-through and at all times unmaterialised. While he did still all that with his substance, he simultaneously shaped his substance into a humanoid form, though still partially see-through and with no facial features. He moved the more see-through and less see-through parts of his substance circularly around himself, making it look like a tornado condensed into a person.

I was intrigued by Eskh playing with Wind. I had never seen any other demon interacting with Wind before, so I approached the two of them. It turned out Eskh had instinctually felt she would become good friends with Wind and had approached him because of it. As their instincts had foretold, the two of them became friends and with that, had been Eskh only demon-friendship, since birth, apart from the herd-ship, she felt towards all Shadows.

Over time, I found myself more often interacting with the both of them, until I felt the core of all demon bonds, the desire to make them smile or rather, the wish of making them enjoy life, so fulfilling the purpose of life. (The term smile is the simpler term demons used to refer to enjoying once life.) This desire is what is necessary for a demon to form a bond of any type.

Even when Wind wasn’t around, Eskh and I spend a lot of time together in our demon-herd as well, this was when we met the twins. Their identical main-form caught both of our interest, as we