Balor had convinced a child to be his friend for the first time in any experiment.

  It was absurd how readily Reizha accepted that Death itself was her friend now. He was impressed with the imagination that let her mind bend in such a way.

  She guided him through the process of Deathbringer’s service to the Aziris, the processing of corpses with specialized magics. Reizha’s father had created a separate hall where this process was handled by stone mechanisms.

  She only had to drag the corpses there after plundering them for valuables and reusable materials. There wasn’t much to take from prisoners, but she showed him a proud collection of trinkets that she’d collected from particularly special ones. Her own pair of earrings had come from a noblewoman sentenced to death.

  The corpses were then rolled and crushed between stone, drained of fluid, and packaged into wooden cylinders. With the reduced weight after the drying process, it was easier to carry them to the edge of the cliff to toss them down as per Aziris tradition.

  Balor followed the hard-working child through the process as she struggled with three corpses for hours. He didn’t offer help because death was a ghost with no physical form.

  “Father’s head is bleeding because he wanted to talk with these people!” she said, stuffing one man into a stone crevice.

  “Should he have killed them before they came near your home?”

  “That’s what we’re supposed to do, master. He thinks he can make people want to die by talking. Doesn’t work!” she said, clearly frustrated with her father.

  “Have you tried talking with anyone?”

  “I did, when I was five! That man almost strangled me!”

  “He must’ve died when you touched him?”

  “Yes, and I was stuck under him for hours!”

  The child was clearly measuring all the prisoners with the bad experiences. She was right, because he couldn’t imagine anyone not taking the chance to save themselves from certain death.

  “I see Deathbringing is hard work, Reizha. Do you know where you received this power from?”

  “From you, master!” she said, swiping her hand over her forehead. “We worship you every day. Three times in the morning, three times in the night.”

  “I wish to see how,” Balor said, looking at her curiously.

  “Did you not see me today, master? Were you not watching?” Reizha asked a clever question, catching him off guard.

  “Oh, I did,” Balor said, nodding. “Your worship could use some improvement.”

  Reizha let out a gasp and bowed. “I’m sorry, master! I’ll do it the way my father says! I was lazy!”

  “Show me,” Balor insisted.

  Reizha stopped what she was doing with the corpses and headed towards a small hut next to the tower made of stone bricks. It had a thick wooden door that the child had to push with all her weight to open.

  Inside it was a bizarre monument made of bones. Skulls stripped of flesh had been meshed together purposefully with some amount of bilateral symmetry, although it was strangely chaotic at the same time.

  This bone artwork filled the entire wall, in a mess of eye sockets and mouths. Each shape was arranged with sharp corners aligned to form a spiraling flow. Some light leaked through from below.

  The light was red.

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  Balor almost jumped back out of the hut and disappeared at the sight of the color.

  “It’s dark in here, wait,” Reizha said, crawling under the table of offerings to mess with something on the ground. The red glow intensified with a burning smell.

  It wasn’t the Anti-Source from a bloostone. It was colored flames dancing behind the bone shapes.

  “Impressive red flames, compliments to your father,” he said, looking at them apprehensively.

  “You don’t look like Wall, master. Maybe we should change it?” she asked, pointing at the sunken skulls.

  “I can look like that sometimes,” he said. “In bad days,” he added.

  “So, this is how I worship!” Reizha said, crawling back out. She didn’t stand up. She stayed on her knees. Gathering them close, she placed her elbows on the ground and bowed her head three times.

  She chanted a phrase from a language that Balor recognized. It was from the proto-civilization that came before Aziris. The one he influenced with the bloodline system of his own.

  The chanting was begging ‘the ender’ for salvation.

  She stood up, dusting her knees and elbows. “Sometimes I don’t get down on my elbows, master. I finish bowing on my knees,” she said, guiltily averting her eyes.

  “Do you understand the meaning of the chant, Reizha?” he asked curiously.

  “God of the sky, deliver us from evil?” she recited in modern Azirian.

  The child had been raised on a false translation. He knew something was wrong the moment he heard that old language, which should’ve been dead or warped beyond recognition by this point.

  “Some call me the Ender. What do you know about my name?”

  “Father calls you something different, master. I don’t think it’s ender. It’s Eater. He says death eats all life with many mouths, death watches all our sins with many eyes. He says death is always watching, so I should behave.”

  Balor only knew of one ‘Eater’ with many eyes and many mouths. This reeked of corruption. His own realm.

  Looking at Reizha, he thought about wiping the slate clean in his beloved forest realm. He had no idea how the Seedmaker corrupted this isolated population with no access to lower strata.

  “Does your father have red stones that give him power?” he asked Reizha, expecting the worst. “I was blessed with them long ago.” He lied.

  “Red stones, master? no. Stones don’t give power. Air does,” Reizha said. “That vapor is white, not red. I see it sometimes when I end people…”

  This wasn’t bloodstone corruption. There was no Anti Source involved. This was a new type of corruption. The Seedmaker had found a way to communicate with minds directly.

  This couldn’t have started with two individuals on a mountain. They had a shrine depicting their God. They were oblivious to the dangerous, imposing appearance of their God.

  He had burned the corruption to ashes while the Seedmaker had moved onto a completely different method. Balor knew it had to have started this at the same time. This was a much slower method, in exchange for superior stealth.

  “I am curious how your father learned to worship me so effectively,” he said casually.

  “Father said he could hear you, master. He said I’d be able to hear you, too. Wait till I tell him I can talk with you better than he can!” Reizha said enthusiastically.

  “That should remain a secret,” Balor said sternly. Reizha jolted and nodded eagerly.

  “Of course, master.”

  The girl closed the shrine behind them and started heading back towards the pile of corpses.

  “Behave yourself, I’ll be watching,” Balor told her as he dispersed into the darkness.

  Reizha stared at him open-mouthed for a while, shook her head, worshipped a random direction with the proper posture, and went back to dragging corpses.

  Balor hovered high above Aziris, trying to dissect what he just learned. He had completely missed this new attack vector of the Seedmaker.

  If it were two individuals in his realm, there had to be much more in the wider Veilthorn across strata. The Seedmaker was replacing their Gods with himself.

  Death-bringing itself was a power that had to have come from the ‘Eater.’ Someone from the Star family’s ancestors was responsible for the way Reizha and her father turned out.

  In a way, he wouldn’t have shrunk down to the ground to talk with a hominid if it wasn’t for their rumored suspicious powers. The problem of belief was largely unsolvable in an overbearing way.

  Even as a Dragon, he had limits to the amount of attention that he could pay to any individual. One solution would’ve been omnipresence. He was capable of stretching himself far and wide after he became a Dragon.

  It was still quite dangerous. Stretching all of his soul mattered; that thin made him a separate being that was not Balor. It also increased the risk of being confronted by the Seedmaker at a moment of weakness.

  The amount of time it took to gather all his soul matter back was plenty enough for the Seedmaker to consume and assimilate him as it did to other serpents.

  Much like countering corruption by blessing those who fight corruption, he needed to implement a belief to battle existing beliefs.

  Reizha was worshipping the God of Veilthorn, not the Eater. The Seedmaker had made sure to manipulate her father into manipulating her. His malignant belief system was already in motion, transcending generations.

  Balor had returned to the forest realm to implement his own race, but it seemed crafting the beliefs of their current ancestors was far more important.

  Hovering above Aziris, Balor juggled ideas for a belief system that could fight against corrupted belief systems. The fastest way to spread it was already clear.

  Children like Reizha.