NYMETH

The oldest Demons remember it. Or claim to. A time when the Presence filled every hollow space, when purpose flowed through them like blood, when they existed not as empty vessels but as extensions of something vast and loving. They do not speak of it often. The loss is too sharp, even after millennia.

Nymeth does not remember the Presence. She was born long after, into a world where the hollow was simply what Demons were. A cold spot in the chest that never warmed. A silence where music used to play. She grew up thinking this was normal, because for her generation, it was.

The elders called it the Absence. Theologians called it the Withdrawal. Common Demons called it the ache, or the cold, or simply the hunger. Different names for the same wound: the Presence had loved them, filled them, given them meaning. And then it left. No explanation. No farewell. Just a sudden emptiness where completion used to live.

What remained was need.

Demons learned to fill the hollow with external feeling. Emotion, absorbed through proximity and touch, could quiet the ache temporarily. Joy worked. Fear worked. Desire worked especially well. Any feeling strong enough to resonate could be taken in, held, used to simulate the fullness they'd lost.

But it never lasted. The hollow always returned, deeper than before, demanding more. Feed and starve and feed again. An eternal cycle with no end point, no satiation that persisted. Just the endless work of staying filled enough to function.

This was the inheritance Nymeth was born into. This was the shape of her existence from the first moment of awareness: empty, aching, reaching for something to make the cold stop.

She did not know, then, that she would spend centuries learning to live with it. She did not know that she would build an entire identity around managing the hunger rather than hoping to cure it. She did not know that efficiency would become her religion and detachment her only defense.

She only knew that she was hollow, and that the hollow hurt, and that she would do whatever was necessary to make it hurt less.

Every Demon learns this eventually. Nymeth simply learned it faster than most.

Nymeth's first lessons came from proximity. Stand near someone feeling strongly. Let the emotion wash over you. Notice how the hollow quiets, how the cold recedes, how for a brief moment you feel almost whole. This is sustenance. This is survival. This is what you are.

She was clumsy at first. All young Demons are. She stood too close, lingered too long, made her hunger obvious in ways that frightened the other races. A Beastkin merchant once caught her hovering at the edge of his family's grief-ritual, drinking in their sorrow like water, and the look on his face taught her something no elder had bothered to explain: feeding was necessary, but feeding visibly was dangerous.

So she learned subtlety.

She learned to position herself in crowds where emotion ran high. Marketplaces during heated bargaining. Temples during fervent prayer. Taverns during celebration or despair. She learned to take small sips rather than deep draughts, to move through spaces rather than camping in them, to be present without being noticed.

Touch came later. The first time she fed through direct contact, she understood why the elders called it dangerous.

A Demon boy, older than her by a decade, had offered his hand during a festival. A dance, a moment of connection, nothing more. But when their palms met, Nymeth felt his emotions pour into her like light through a window. Not the ambient wash of proximity-feeding, but a direct current. Intense. Immediate. Filling her hollow so completely that she gasped.

She held on too long. Took too much. When she finally released him, he was pale and shaking, and he looked at her the way she would be looked at many times in the centuries to come: like she was not safe.

She apologized. She meant it. But she also remembered how full she'd felt, how warm, how close to complete. And she understood, with the clarity of someone who has just discovered a fundamental truth about themselves, that she would do almost anything to feel that way again.

The hollow teaches you what you're capable of. It teaches you that need has no morality, that hunger will override principle if you let it, that the difference between a monster and a person is simply how well you control what you take.

Nymeth decided, young, that she would not be a monster. She would feed. She had no choice. But she would feed carefully, strategically. She would take what she needed and no more. She would never again see that look on someone's face.

It was a good resolution. She kept it for almost two hundred years before she broke it the first time.

But that discipline, that early commitment to controlled feeding, became the foundation of everything she built afterward. The diplomat who could stand in rooms full of emotional humans without losing herself. The professional who could feed just enough to function without becoming dependent on any single source. The mask she learned to wear: pleasant, competent, utterly safe.

All of it started here, with a young Demon who scared herself with her own hunger and decided she would rather starve than lose control again.

She did not know, then, that control was just another kind of cage. She would not learn that lesson for a very long time.

The Demon Domains had always required diplomats. Not warriors. The Domains had no shortage of those. They needed speakers. Listeners. Demons who could move through non-Demon spaces without causing incidents, who could read a room and navigate its politics, who could represent Maelketh's interests without making enemies of everyone they met.

Nymeth had spent her first two centuries learning to feed invisibly. She had not realized she was also learning to read people.

But she was. Every time she positioned herself near strong emotion, she was cataloging what caused it. Every time she adjusted her approach to avoid detection, she was learning to predict behavior. Every time she fed without being noticed, she was practicing the art of presence without intrusion.

Maelketh's recruiters found her working a border market, moving through the crowd like water, feeding on the ambient emotion of a hundred transactions without any single merchant noticing her existence. They watched her for three days before making contact.

"You're wasted here," the senior recruiter said. "Come to the Obsidian Throne. Learn to make your talents useful."

She went. She had no reason to refuse.

The diplomatic corps trained her in the formal skills: languages, protocols, the political structures of every major race. She learned the nine Beastkin clan-hierarchies and how to address each properly. She learned the Dwarven listening-customs and which silences were respectful versus which were insulting. She learned human communication patterns. Their reliance on facial expression. Their emotional transparency. Their desperate need to be understood.

But the real education was subtler. She learned to wear masks.

Not literal masks. Diplomatic masks. The attentive listener who made speakers feel heard. The sympathetic advisor who made the troubled feel validated. The charming companion who made the lonely feel less alone. Each mask served a function. Each mask was hollow underneath.

That was the secret the diplomatic corps taught her: connection could be performed. Intimacy could be manufactured. You did not need to feel anything to make others feel everything. You simply needed to know which responses to mirror, which words to echo, which touches to offer and when.

She was very, very good at it.

Over the next three centuries, she served the Obsidian Throne in seventeen different postings. Border communities where Demons and other races coexisted uneasily. Trading hubs where economic interests created political complexity. Human settlements where the population had never seen a Demon and needed careful introduction to the concept.

Each posting followed the same pattern. Arrive. Assess. Build relationships with key figures. Feed carefully, never enough to be noticed, never from anyone who might become a liability. File reports. Move on.

She never stayed anywhere long enough to form attachments. This was policy, but it was also preference. Attachments complicated things. Attachments made feeding personal instead of professional. Attachments meant caring about something other than her own survival and the Throne's interests.

Nymeth did not attach. She connected, performed intimacy, served her function, and left. The masks came off when she was alone, and underneath them was nothing but the hollow and the cold and the endless, manageable hunger.

Maelketh himself commended her once. "You are efficient," he said, and from him that was highest praise. "You do not let the work become personal."

She thanked him. She did not mention that she had no idea how to make anything personal, that the masks were all she had, that she sometimes wondered if there was anyone underneath them at all.

Efficient. That was what she was. That was all she was.

For three hundred years, it was enough.

It went like this: Demons were hollow. This was fact, not tragedy. Simply the nature of their existence. The hollow needed filling. Emotion filled it. Therefore, feeding was survival, and survival was the only moral imperative that mattered.

Everything else was complication.

Attachment complicated feeding. If you cared about your source, you hesitated to take what you needed. You held back. You starved yourself for sentiment. Nymeth had seen other Demons do this. Fall for a human or a Beastkin, become dependent on a single source, waste away when that source inevitably aged or died or simply left. Pathetic. Preventable. She would not make that mistake.

Desire complicated efficiency. Wanting something beyond sustenance meant admitting the hollow could ache for more than feeding. It couldn't. Or if it could, acknowledging that ache served no purpose. Better to want nothing, need only food, and acquire that food through professional competence rather than personal investment.

Hope complicated everything. Hope meant believing the hollow could be truly filled, that the cold could permanently warm, that somewhere out there was a source rich enough to end the hunger forever. This was a fantasy. The Presence was gone. Nothing would replace it. The sooner a Demon accepted this, the sooner they could stop wasting energy on impossible goals and focus on what actually worked: small meals, frequent feeding, no dependencies.

Nymeth's philosophy was bleak, but it functioned. She fed enough to stay operational. She served the Throne competently. She wore her masks, moved through her postings, filed her reports, and felt nothing that the hollow couldn't explain.

The grey world she lived in was stable, if colorless.

Other Demons pitied her sometimes. She could see it in the way they looked at her. This efficient machine who had apparently forgotten how to want anything. They whispered that she was cold, that she had lost something essential, that no one could live like that forever without breaking.

She ignored them. They were projecting their own weaknesses onto her. They couldn't imagine functioning without attachment because they lacked the discipline to try. She had tried. She had succeeded. Their pity was misplaced.

And if sometimes, late at night, in the quiet moments between postings, she felt something that might have been loneliness?

Well. Loneliness was just hunger in a different costume. Feed more, feel less. The solution was always the same.

She was not unhappy. Happiness required wanting something and getting it, and she had long since stopped wanting. She was simply functional. Efficient. Present.

A Demon who had solved the problem of existence by refusing to engage with it.

She could have continued like this forever. Three hundred years had proven the model worked. Three thousand more would prove it again. She would serve, feed, file reports, and eventually cease to exist, and no one would remember her as anything other than competent.

This was acceptable. This was safe. This was the grey world she had built for herself, and she had no reason to believe it would ever change.

She was wrong, of course. But she did not know that yet.

No one ever knows, before the door opens and the color walks in.

Border Communities. Six months to two years. Establish relationships with the human population. Identify willing feeding partners for future Demon visitors. Assess local attitudes toward expanded Demon presence. Report quarterly.

Nymeth read the briefing, packed her things, and departed within the week. She had done postings like this before. The Border Communities were standard assignments for mid-level diplomats, challenging enough to require competence but not significant enough to warrant senior attention.

The territory sat at the edge of the Demon Domains, where the obsidian gave way to contested forest and the political landscape grew complicated. Beastkin clans passed through regularly. Dwarven traders maintained a permanent market presence. And humans, rare humans, the richest feeding source in Khevari, had established small settlements in the gaps between greater powers.

Humans. Nymeth had fed on them before, of course. Every Demon had. They were intense. Emotionally transparent in ways other races weren't, their feelings written across their faces and radiating outward like heat from a fire. A single human in a crowd could feed a Demon for days if approached correctly.

But they were also fragile. Short-lived. Easily frightened by Demon nature. The diplomatic protocols for human contact were extensive: move slowly, explain feeding before it happened, obtain consent, never take more than they could spare. Humans who felt violated rarely cooperated again, and the supply was too limited to waste on carelessness.

Nymeth followed the protocols. She always followed the protocols.

She arrived at the largest Border Community on a market day, when the streets were crowded and the emotional ambient was thick enough to feed on without direct contact. Standard approach: find lodging, identify key figures, begin building the network that would justify her presence.

The tavern she chose was busy. Beastkin merchants argued prices at corner tables. A cluster of Dwarves kept to themselves near the fire, their emotions muted and deep the way Dwarven feelings always were. Sustaining but not rich. Humans scattered throughout the room, bright notes in a muted chord.

Nymeth ordered a drink she didn't need, positioned herself where she could observe without being noticed, and began cataloging the room. The merchant who controlled the textile trade. The Beastkin elder whose word carried weight among the visiting clans. The human woman who seemed to know everyone's name.

Standard assessment. Standard evening. She would introduce herself to the key figures tomorrow, begin the slow work of building trust, establish herself as a useful presence rather than a threatening one.

The hollow ached, as it always did, but the ambient emotion in the room kept it quiet enough to ignore. She could function here. She could serve her posting, file her reports, and move on when the assignment ended. Another two years. Another entry in her record. Another stretch of grey competence in a grey existence.

She lifted her drink. Watched the room. Let the evening settle around her like a familiar coat.

The door opened.

And everything she thought she knew about hunger became irrelevant.