They say demons don't beg. But the one impaled on her tail was doing just that.

His voice was shrill, soaked with desperation, stripped of dignity as his blackened claws scraped against the obsidian barbed spine piercing his gut. Serath stood motionless in front of him, her boots rooted in the scorched earth, her hand resting lightly against the haft of her blade, which remained undrawn. Not necessary. The pleading continued, a jumble of twisted syllables about loyalty, duty, and deception. Words decayed into noise.

Serath only tilted her head slightly, as if trying to make sense of a language already too corrupted to matter. With a flick of her tail, she flung the demon against a stone pillar—the crash of its collapse was louder than his death.

The forest held its breath. No birds. No insects. Only the faint metallic scent of cauterised flesh, already cooling.

Beneath her, a second figure twitched—a human this time. Scarred and branded with infernal runes, his eyes were clouded with smoke and shock. He had attempted to interfere, to protect the demon with some pitiful invocation of divine order. Serath stepped over him without sparing a glance.

She was done here.

---

The sound that made her pause was not a scream.

It was softer. Wet. Fragile. A note so small that the air nearly swallowed it before it reached her ears. She followed it past the ruined altar, through the hollow where the heat hadn't yet faded, and found an infant in a half-collapsed basket of vines and rags. Alone. Alive. Still wrinkled and red, the umbilical cord was freshly cut, though no midwife remained.

It did not cry louder when she approached. It did not cry at all when her claws slipped beneath its back.

Serath lifted the baby into her arms without comment, as one might retrieve a book from ruins. Its warmth seeped through the thin cloth wrapped around it. She stared at it for a long moment, as if waiting to feel... something.

Then she turned and left the clearing, her tail curling back around her waist like a closing lock.

---

The woods had changed by the time they arrived.

Sunlight still filtered through the canopy above, but it had lost its warmth, dimmed perhaps by the smoke lingering in the distance to the west. The trees grew denser here, their moss hanging like silent witnesses, while small animals peered from the underbrush with uncanny stillness. Something had passed through here, something not entirely natural, yet not wholly demonic either.

Then there she was.

Serath stood in a shallow glade where the fog refused to settle. A newborn rested calmly in the crook of her arm, its tiny fist curled around the edge of her coat. A fawn stood only a few feet away, sniffing cautiously at her boots. A raven sat on her shoulder like a sentinel, unafraid. The creatures of the wild had not fled from her; they had gathered.

She did not speak.

But when her head turned—slowly, deliberately—and her gaze met theirs, the air seemed to narrow. Not cold. Not threatening. Just... dense. Like gravity had shifted slightly in their direction.

One of her claws absently brushed the baby's back—not with tenderness, but with practised precision. Her tail, half-loosened, twitched once in reflex. She made no move to hide the blood drying on her boots.

The silence between them held. Heavy. Waiting.

A thousand choices filled their lungs—

She did not push. But she would not step aside either.