Demon Angel AU: Prologue
I do not know linear timelines forgive me. This is a sad heavy one, but I will call it the prologue for the Demon angel AU.
CW// hypothermia, child abandonment, child death (revives), implied human trafficking and noncon, parental death, awful parents and childbirth. Ask for summary if you need it!
The night he was born, snow fell silently as a silver string coming from the window of an old barn illuminated the sweaty forhead of a woman. The woman, who he should have called mother, was the second lover of a man who gave her no love, but gave her the mercy to hold her bastardous son once. The man had walked inside to find a healthy boy. The man untangled the cloth wrapped around him as careful hands held his head, feeling a fuzz of white that should´ve grown to be silver, just like his mother’s.
A rarity the man´s uncle got from a market in a faraway land and brought to his nephew as gift.
White like the snow, with petal lips pouty and slighty open. He would’ve been a quiet boy, the man could tell. So silent and behaved while laid on his mother’s chest. The man who was his father, held the woman with silver hair on his arms as she passed away, her baby boy on her arms hearing her hum a lullaby that ever so slowly melted with the quietness of the world outside, slowly covering the world with a white blanket.
His wife couldn’t find the fruit of his crimes.
So the baby boy, barely hours old, was wrapped in blankets, put on a basket in his sleep and taken outside by his father. Held tightly on one hand as the bulky man entered the woods.
The man walked and walked, trying to not panic each time he felt he couldn’t make out the road back home and sighing relieved when he saw the familiar trees with the carved sigils marking the way. As he walked, every so often he looked down to see the baby on his basket. He would remember later the color of his eyes were like a wild fire, getting lost in them and having to shake his thoughts away and focus on the road ahead.
As the snow crunched under his feet, the man halted to a stop when he found the circle of trees, marking the center of the forest where no one would hear his cries, and put down the basket on the ground.
The man then left and went back to bury the woman with silver skin, praying he wouldn’t be cursed as he laid with his wife.
The cruelty of humans never stopped amusing the creature who roamed her lands that they naively called theirs. Her long hairs and the bottles around her waist swinged at every step, as she walked back to her home deeper inside the woods when a lonely soul cried in the middle of her circle. Her face was peeled off to the bone. Only leaving the horned skull with blue flames as eyes.
She was not a deity nor a demon. In the humans narrow vision of the world, she was life and death and nature encarnated. One of many that no longer existed. An Ancient who recalled how the woods had only been a careless seed planted on the ground by mere accident and now extended for miles and miles over the hill and into the mountain separating her realm to the human’s.
Much like the offering placed accidentally on her circle.
The moon bathed the body of a boy who was giving his last cries. Too cold, too young to hold out on his own, but even then, had stubborn red eyes that glared back at her, wishing to live with burning passion.
The ancient cackled and her chest of thick black fur heaved with laughter that came as wind.
Only a few humans would spit on death’s door, and this young, barely even a night old, human was ready to fight it.
The ancient passed a hand over the boy’s cheek, so cold already, and then dipped into his fortune as she sang her questions to the stars above. She sang giving him warmth with her human hands, elongated and too thin, but so warm the boy leaned on to them before she looked down to find the same fire still burning on his eyes.
“Misfortune has smiled upon you since the day you were born, boy. It will continue to do so for as long as you live. But you will fight it with the same fire I saw on your eyes tonight. Fearing threats worse than death and finding the warmth you couldn’t find in your human peers, but you will not do so alone. Fate has prepared you to find whoever will accompany you at the hardest times, when you will need them, and they will need you, the most” the Ancient whispered “However, for new beginnings there’s an end, my boy” she said as the boy’s cries lost power, became whispers, as his eyelids, with thick white eyelashes, slipped closed and silence reigned on her lands once more. “Your mother spoke her last wish to me, to let you know your name” the Ancient said as she plucked out a splinter from each the tree that made her circle and placed them eight of them on the boy’s hands and chest, right above the heart. “You’re not the first to be brought to my woods, but even if misfortune smiled upon you, her sister, fortune, granted you the rare gift not many are graced with. You will live to hear your name” she said as she let the moon bathe his skin.
The splinters merged with his body in seconds, and the heart beat that had been gone, the unmoving boy inside the basket cried again when the Ancient cradled him on her arms, covering him with her own warm cloak, feeling the little bump on his spine under the blankets and how his ears curved and pointed outwards. His fangs and horns wouldn´t grow yet, but the stripes on his cheeks marked him as inhuman already.
A certain type of demon would be born of such a ritual, not too strong like the demons the Elder of the demons made, but simple demons who carried the desires of their past lives and transformed the frustrations of such into their power. Essentially granting them what they wished for if they abandoned their humanity. The albino was too young to know the price he paid, but he wouldn’t ever had it otherwise.
“Tonight I took a voice from the lost souls singing their pleas and wishes inside my woods” the Ancient told the baby boy lifting his tiny hand to touch the skull face. Her amused hum made him smile, it would take years to hear him say thank you, “And tonight you were given a name you shall protect from granting the wicked to call you by. You will learn, my sweet boy, that a name holds power over the one who bares it. So cherish and protect what was given to you, Albus”
The ancient felt five tiny fingers clenching around her finger, a laughter she would hear for the next 18 years of her life making company to the humming of far older songs than herself as she walked through her woods. Always having the little white demon trailing behind her, hurrying up to hold his Anshe’s hand.
