Theo: The Blood Angel of Lescatie

Outside, amongst the whistles of the city guards, knocking over stalls and vendors, a bloody comet darted towards the city gate. Ignoring all shouts, he slammed towards the iron gate, melting right through and smashing it open to cries of surprise and horror.

The man's face was a mask of fury and determination. He could almost smell his next victim on the night wind.

His fury ignored the screams of anger, the wail of anguish from a child Naga who learned her mother's death.

**

Ever since he felt existing, he ran. Some babies remember their parents. Some their first smells. Some the first food or a fellow baby, mamono or man.

He remembered unbridled terror; lost in the Age of Dying Man when his mother hold him to run as ships disgorged strange beings with long ears and black skins, coupled with strange women and men with animal features to raid the fisherman towns. He remembered running until a strong pair of female hands grabbed him and started tying him up...

"Ara ara~ Where do you think you are going?"

He remembered trying to kick her, only to be slapped silly "Stay where you are, brat!"

He remembered being dragged amongst sobs and being prodded and pushed to the cargo hold of the ships, and their new life, seperated from many friends and kin, taught to work and obey or die. He remembered wails and cries, being taken, hands tied to each other in a long line to a dark port city.

Then he remembered one of the dark elf males (a declining type of mamono, males) , using blood to write strange patterns on a scroll and store it. Theo was scrubbing and wiping the furniture with an iron collar around his neck, never to read anything on pain of death.

Yet a child, and a cunning one grown up in servitude is anything but blindly obedient. He would sneak morsels of food back to his parents half-dead from fatigue, and ask them to be taught letters...To sneak copies of the letters back to his little stash under the slave bed.

"Ma. I want power like them. Power. Mother, please. teach me."

Then he remembered Father expiring from the mine dust, and Mother follow him from grief. He remembered Brig, or Brikha, a little girl who wore better and was treated better than the others, and remembered giving her a small flower he found, and of course, her getting dragged away by a grim looking dark elf woman, and a huge Naga with a bloody knife.

Then he understood why everyone cried and shivered and begged when the strange mystic dark elf womeneyed some slaves.

One fateful day, he kept a scrap of paper on his slave shorts.Looking at his jailors...much to their surprise when he opened the papers...

"Y-you....fucking...monsters..." He wept and started chanting as the guards stared at him in confusion, one disturbed at his insult and raising a stick to smack him on the face.

The Dark Elf woman who occasionally fed him better out of some strange sense of pity was staring in shock when her colleague, a Minotaur couple, one of last males and female, shudderedas blood dripping from their weapons formed strange garrote wires and ripped them apart.

The woman flailed and fell back in terror, only to be torn to pieces by slivers of blood which started to grow every time the boy read another scroll, evaporating it.

Another guard screamed in terror and started shouting, his handsome ebon features contorted in shock. Screaming, he ran upstairs to inform the overseers, Theo stepping behind him with a hateful, glowing face:

"UPRISING! UPRISING! FLOOD THE SLAVE BARRA-"

The guards that filled the room froze, jerking in a strange dance as piss and shit fouled their clothing; limbs twisted in impossible angles as the bodies convulsed and were strung apart as if pulled by an invisible hand.

The boy was no longer; he had snapped and turned into a monster.

He had become a monster covered in shimmering patterns of blood. His face was twisted in undescribable hatred and rage after losing everyone. From his mouth roared a scream of sheer, unadulterated hatred.

"DIE!"

When the doors burst open and the once-child stormed towards the chamber where the others were taken, he found the corpses, and on top of them, the open eyed stare of the corpse that wasthe girl who shown him love. The priestesses that cleaned the bodies and harvested their blood stared at him in horror.

The reason children were killed and forbidden to use blood magic was that a child's blood was far more powerful.

The head mystic, a red-robed dark elf stared at him in a mix of disdain and pity. Smiling, she drew a magic wand, only to have her face changed to a look of horror as well, when Theo threw a handful of blood in the air, and screamed a single syllable.

"DIE!"

Squeezing his fists, he squashed the screaming dark elf before him.

"DIE!" Opening his fists, he now spread his fingers, forming the liquefied, burning blood and flesh into a burning red star, he swung his child arms, crying from anguish and hatred, and slicing the temple walls into crumbling stones, using the blood-web he formed to fly, to be thrown away into a quieter place...

...only to land and come face to face with a terrified group of dark elf overseers trying to fend off the hateful slave mob. His nearest adversary had a brown and yellow stream down his white trousers when he stared into his eyes.

"DIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE!"

The mystics he hated were already liquefied in a boiling torrent of blood. These wretches, slave keepers Theo tormented longer, flaying their skin slowly with a shimmering sliver of blood, savoring her screams. His mind completely unhinged from the trauma of losing her family, he screamed more arcane words now coming on their accord from his mouth, exploding into an uncontrollable spell that started shaking the walls of the entire mine complex.

Around him, other slaves screamed and started an escape not unlike a stampede. Theo had triggerred an arcane earthquake just when a human army was had arrived.

The rest was like a dream; the memories were an endless scream of "No!" decorated with flying torrents of blood and pain until it all blacked out with a splash of cool, sacred water on his face. He woke up, facing a circle of armored human men and women, clean and shining. They had shot him with glass arrows full of water.

"Holy water paralyzed him! Now!" They descended on him with batons.

Then blackness, mercifully, again.

++

"What the hell am I doing here?" Was Theo's thoughts when he shared a cup of wine with the man before him in a cave.

"That's one hell of a story, friend. Here. One on me, for the lost islands and people in it."

The wine went like juice, cold, refreshing and smelling of pine. The man was from his own nation, a human that ended up on the mainland from Hellas Islands when the country was independent. Now it was a ruin, surviving refugees in Lescatie, the rest, in slavery under monstergirl Empire.

"Easy fella, retsina doesn't stay inside you like it stays in the bottle. But you look like you need it." He spoke in their sing-song language of the islands few besides Centauride and Satyros could understand.

Theo just shrugged and kept smoking the pipe. "Epharisto"

He downed the last retsina.

"Sorry, my wife usually drinks all the stuff. That's all I could spare." The man shrugged apologetically.

"It's alright. She is Satyros, right?" Theo replied. The man nodded.

"Any day now. That's why we shacked up here, she gets upset when she cant drink wine for the kid, and them Satyros kids need wine go grow up. Healthy living and all." Theo smiled at the reply. "Ironic, I know."

"To your child then." They both raised their cups, clinking quietly.

Their toast was joined by a cup of juice as the man raised his eyebrows. His wife had woken up, a beautiful Satyros female dressed in green, practical forest outfit, beautiful horns curled behind her and a pan-flute on her lap. Her pregnancy must have been quite advanced, as her belly could almost be seen moving.

"Sorry, Silena...we had to toast and celebrate."

The Satyros woman nodded, smiling. Her mournful eyes were locked on Theo, her face showed plenty of her own suffering.

"Heard your tale. So, you are him. The Boogeyman."

It was another nickname attached to the horror that stalked mamono lands, of "Slave 4859" transformed into a horror that was rumored to snatch mamono children at night to drink their blood. It was the horror that turned the Slaver Guild into a much more whitewashed dominatrix club of "Guild S". It was the fear that made the mamono leaders treat humanity's subjugation as a necessary evil, looking behind their shoulders every time a human slave was hurt more than necessary.

He had rampaged across many monster settlements he deemed "too dark", a fury unbridled when he broke free from his human jailors, this time trained in war. The New Monster Empress and Demon Lord Agrat even deleted all records of his rampage to avoid disillusionment amongst her subjects.

His existence was the reason Thorn clan of Dark Elves were nearly extinct, or mines full of ill-fed human slaves were abandoned, the humans curiously nowhere to be seen, portions of Reik's map were erased.

His crowning achievement was an ancient Vampire sorceress, who fed on child blood and enacted strange "art" exhibitions called "spirit cooking", was impaled on her own mansion's spire, magically preserved to feel the horror of sunlight as a strange mechanical cage around her was tied to a clockwork, opening and closing its shutters rapidly to burn her slowly, but not kill her for days.

The (now permanently) dead vampire girl's mouth, locked in a dying scream from the inside, and sewn shut with Arachne threads on the outside, flesh painfully stretched, held the key to the Empress' bedchamber. The message was simple.

You are next.

Next week, Mamono Empress hastily enacted "Slave Laws" to ensure wellbeing of her human slave population and protect them from abuse. The Reik had taken the message quietly, and Theo disappeared into obscurity, content for the time being.

**

Theo laughed quietly. "I am a monster, if you count defending the meek monstrous. You yourself know without violence it don't happen in Dunia."

Silena smiled. "I thought as much. My Husband, Alex, saved me from Guild S when they wanted a debt collection, namely us both as slaves to some Duchess' mansion. We ran away but then, a Lescatian patrol wanted us executed. I don't understand you humans' empire either!"

"Then let me tell you why I don't like Lescatie..." Theo took a drag from his pipe.

**

He was wrapped in a strange arcane textile and drugged into sleep, only to wake up in an army camp, wrists wrapped in strange clothes. He was fed, washed, and shoved into a trail of ragged, starving children. His terse question of whether these people were slaves was met with mild annoyance, derision and a dry loaf of bread tossed at him.

"Eat, boy. The Inquisition will decide what to do with you." It was a burly knight wearing a full plate armor. An armored woman who had a mace and incense ball on her tip started arguing with him whether it was worth feeding a "witch." Theo didn't care. He was dead inside.

The Academy was a lesser evil compared to his past. Regular meals and better treatment, yet slavery nonetheless.

His wrists were locked in runed cuffs to prevent blood magic. There were regular sermons and chastising just to prevent any "vice" or "heresy"

And confessions. Magically enforced if resisted. He had to tell how he used up the blood of all remaining slaves to rip his captors apart in front of the academy. Children avoided him. Nuns beat him. He was reviled all the same.

"Kinslayer" "Heretic" "Demon-blooded"

"Witch"

He kept the sobriquets as badges of honor. And their worth was well recognized when the Theocracy removed his blockers one day. But until then...He suffered years of "Thou shalt not"s, beatings and chastisements. And being a hateful rebel, he resisted without breaking. Only some unseen favors, as well as interested individuals up above, he thought, spared him.

"FASTER!" The drill instructor screamed, the boys drilled, some with crossbows, some with swords. He took every lesson to heart, and even got sympathized to be let into the library sans blood magic. He devoured every book, every tactics manual and engineering book.

The nuns were surprised that he read without magical aid, which helped his position and security. Even the Headmistress Agatha started to respect him, which he never returned.

"I was brought here in chains, like an animal. Why? Answer me, and I am Lescatie's most loyal soldier."

No one answered.

"WHY?"

No one felt like explaining anything to him in his life whenever something hurtful was done. So be it. Theo hardened his heart, following orders, but with a great deal of malice and cruelty attached.

His suspicions were assured that his treatment for the following weeks improved considerably when he heard a great battle was imminent. Already church bells rang, militiamen embraced their families and horses were raised for war.

He was dragged, again, by armored men to a giant throne room of marble.

"You are sent to a unit of witches like you. Deal as much damage as you can to the enemy, so that Allfather will absolve you upon your death, child." The elderly man announced.

Even so, Theo wanted to speak. His objections to be collared before being led outside were about to be silenced by a slap, he managed to let out one terrific shout, completely overriding his sense of self preservation.

"I'M NOT AN ANIMAL!"

That made everyone pause for just one moment for the elderly man to step forward, approaching him slowly, swatting aside any interference: "But my lord Theocrat, he is-"

The old man who heard the shout walked ever so slowly to the young man who grew up in a crucible of pain. His steps were slow, painful, aided by a long, gnarled stick. His old face, full of wrinkles, wiry white hair under his elaborate, silken cap, almost looked fatherly.

Almost.

"He is a child, as much as I detest sending children to war, he is also a blood mage." He tried to smile at Theo, who at this moment looked at him with disdain and anger.

"What has this to do with me?" He kept his chin high, hands cuffed with antimagic linen he grew to hate all these years. The old man sensed his anger: a simmering fire that bubbled like lava.

"Suppose you will be compensated." The old man spoke kindly.

"Hello? "Deal as much damage as you can to the enemy, so that Allfather will absolve you upon your death, child."" he mimicked with an angry voice. "I'm to be sent to die chained AND you-" He only reluctantly stopped talking when he smiled, and gently raised a hand. Somehow he was charismatic with his every move and display. Once, Theo listened:

"Theophilos, son of Fisherman Thomas, correct?" The old man's face was still kind and patient. Theo nodded hesitantly, wondering how he knew. The old man sighed and leaned on his staff with a look that showed genuine care.

"The monsters that took you and your people to slavery and death...especially the dark elven raiders are Maou's bodyguard now." He raised his eyebrows as if pointing out a good thing. "You can avenge what happened to your family. Is that not what you want?"

Old cunning bastard read his mind.

Theo's cynical smirk split into a barely visible smile.

"No collar. I am not a beast to be led. Nor for my friends, those you labeled "witches". I'll die than wearing another one." Theo exhaled with hate.

Ulrich the Theocrat nodded. "No collar. You have heart and dignity. Commander..." he looked at the man towering over Theo. "They will be treated with dignity."

He was given a sharp dagger and bottles of animal blood, surrounded by fearful men in armor and pikes to prod him, and similar wretches walking along as a Death Brigade, a unit of blood mages culled from witch hunts, since Maou himself was seen marching in his titanic form.

"Dignity..." Theo laughed to himself, completely overridden with black comedy.

So the slave-turned-heretic-turned-witch marched to death again.

He still remembered the Megiddo hill, where monster and men clashed in a huge battle, where squadrons of knights, male and female, singing to Allfather, tore into swarms of multi-limbed Naga, last male orcs, Dark Elven warriors and many other monstrous horrors. He remembered the rusty taste of blood as he repeated his old magic, his animal blood reserve springing to life and burning thousands. When blood ran out... He harvested from the corpses around him.

He found each one, each of his past prey amongst flying arrows, beautiful creatures of the past, ignoring a lowly human approaching them amongst the chaos of screaming monsters, cavalry, and beautiful monstergirls trying to kill or rape men. Each slaver he killed, whispering his family's name in their ears amongst the din of war.

One by one he unleashed horrible spells used by tons of blood, so intense that the hill no longer grew life on it, and animals around it gave stillbirths and mutated dead fetuses for years. Infusing himself with stolen lifeblood from each slaver, he launched himself at Maou's throat amongst the screams. The whole battlefield paused momentarily to watch him like a tick, like a piranha, tear at the huge Demon Lord, who roared and feebly batted at the crazed human on his neck.

When the Monster Lord disintegrated, the Human army found him in a hill full of corpses, their blood dancing around him in a macabre shield.

When the knights tried to arrest him, he lashed out, mowing down everyone on his path, screaming hate and blood magic. This time he was faster and avoided holy water barrages.

Neither army followed him as he took the form of a beast and rampaged towards safety.

++

"Sorry, I shouldn't have told what happened next." Theo took his pipe to his lips, sensing the satyr woman's unease.

"It's alright. You did what you had to do." Silena smiled, her gravid pregnancy making her wince. Alex nodded.

"So, what is your plan then?" Alex asked.

Theo sighed. "There are two remaining. Many more, actually but if the two die, the rest will understand."

"Understand what?" Silena blinked.

Theo's young face was haggard with a three-day stubble. His eyes spoke decades of pain, and his voice sounded much older.

"I'm no academy fop. I'm no philosopher. I'm no saint. But I know one thing. Without a...heavy argument, or...enforcing, things dont change. You dont plead and ask for change. You make the person quiver in fear if it is evil. You make a sound. You dont make a rap on door. You make a thunderclap."

"Don't you think you adopted this view...because of...?" The Satyros woman asked carefully not to poke. "Maybe there is a better way."

"Maybe. Later I will consider. Now, two remain. Shindalla. Azaneal."

The mention of the names made Silena the Satyros shudder.

"Them?"

"Them."

"The rest? Tomoko the Black Hearted? The Twenty Hellsnakes?"

"Turned into bloody salsa, roast SNEK and void-ash."

Silena could no longer meet his gaze.

"Sorry." Theo bowed his head.

The Satyros woman gazed at him in newfound respect. "Yet it also affected you."

Theo nodded. "I am infertile. Yes. I learned that Blood Magic also drains one's future, literally. I will have no sons or daughters. But it doesn't matter. I became a weapon when kids my age played pat-a-cake." Looking at the beautiful goat-horned woman, he emphasized:

"Others' hate turned me into this. And I want to confess something. Since you are good people...My rampages killed humans too. I even murdered human collaborators or slave overseers you know..."

Both looked at him in shock as he confessed his deepest guilt.

"I...snapped and killed someone saying "I should get over it.", a year ago. In an extremely torturous way. Another day, I had taken refuge in a barn." He took a sip of his flask before continuing. "A young man, not older than me, was getting browbeaten by his mother, even slapped and his hair pulled." He wistfully sighed and looked up. "Poor fucker was raised like an idiot. Shoulda seen the tirade she screeched about "conforming" and "being everyone else"." He chuckled.