A figure stepped through the shadow.

His black hair drank in the moonlight rather than reflecting it, and his eyes, dark and steady, caught the ambient glow of the city around him in a way that made them stand out even within the deep shadow he had emerged from.

He paused at the threshold between the shadow and the open street, taking in what lay before him with unhurried attention.

"The continent has long stabilised, but the scent of war remains," Alex murmured, feeling all too familiar, scent invisible to all but a few.

He stepped out from the shadow and let his senses expand across the city, stretching around him in every direction.

The place was vast. Its architecture was grand and ancient, filled with towering domes and spires and wide stone bridges that connected elevated districts across open air, layered palaces rising in tiers that looked simultaneously royal and beautiful.

Every surface had been carved with intricate detail, the craftsmanship visible even at a distance, the stonework glowing faintly with silver and gold highlights that caught the light and held it against the backdrop of a dark, dusty gray sky that pressed down over everything like a permanent dusk.

The city felt impossibly large, built around a wide river that moved through its center with the easy authority of something that had been there before the first stone was laid and expected to be there long after the last one crumbled.

The river’s surface caught the city’s light and broke it into shifting fragments, and along its banks the streets were alive with movement, with noise.

At the city’s center stood the palace.

Carved entirely from black obsidian, its surface catching and swallowing the available light in equal measure, the palace rose behind a collar of domed structures whose curves softened the severity of the obsidian without diminishing it.

Intricate sky bridges connected the palace’s vast and impossible structure to the domed buildings surrounding it. The whole of it dominated the skyline the way a mountain dominates the landscape around it.

’This bastard certainly knows how to sell an illusion,’ Alex thought, grinding his teeth as his senses continued their quiet inventory of the city’s details.

He left the shadow of the building behind him and stepped onto the murky red-stoned street.

The city was alive around him. The streets were full of individuals, some towering over Alex by a significant margin, others barely reaching his chest, their proportions and dimensions as varied as their features.

Their faces were unlike anything that belonged to the most races, beastmen, humans, elves, carrying the specific qualities of their own kind.

Scaled skin caught the lamplight on some. Others had fur covering their necks and chests. Multi-segmented arms moved with a fluid, natural grace.

Facial structures varied wildly from one individual to the next, but the one thing that was common, without a single exception, was the horns.

Every individual on the street bore them, in shapes and sizes and configurations as varied as everything else about them, but present on each and every one without exception.

They were demons.

Alex watched them move through their city, living their lives with the unhurried ease of people who felt safe where they were, and reminded himself of what he knew and what the world outside tended to forget.

Demons were not inherently malicious. They were not the monsters that the stories painted them as, not in their daily existence, not in the texture of how they moved through the world they inhabited.

They were a race, the same as humans or beastmen or any of the others, shaped by their circumstances and their history into what they had become.

They were more inclined toward conflict than most, perhaps, but that inclination came from genuine strength and the culture that strength had produced over generations, not from some fundamental corruption of nature.

And which race could honestly claim to be truly peaceful? Not the elves, whose independence and power had been purchased and maintained through strength and war, not the humans, whose history was as much war as anything else.

Alex dropped his head and began to move, more out of habit than necessity. To the people moving around him, he simply did not exist.

’If I didn’t know the truth of that rotten monster,’ Alex let his thoughts wander, his eyes settling on the distant palace as his steps began to carry him toward it, ’I would bring plague and death to this continent for what their king is doing to the world outside.’

He gave himself the time to walk and observe, moving through the streets without urgency, letting the city show him what it was.

The stories he had heard about the demon continent, the accounts that had circulated through the human continent and beyond for decades, described a lawless wasteland of perpetual war and hunger, a place where strength was the only law and nothing endured.

He had known better than to accept those accounts uncritically long before he had any means of verifying them, and what the city around him confirmed was what he had suspected.

The demon continent was prosperous. Genuinely, visibly, structurally prosperous, and it was made possible by one man, who built a continent drowning in hunger and war into a utopia.

Ahrimon.

The name carried its weight even in thought. A vile and irredeemable horror, whose selfishness was matched only by his endless hunger, who had built a prison around his entire continent to serve his own need.

A being whose true nature and plans sat so far outside the boundaries of what any reasonable mind could be expected to accept that Alex himself had spent time questioning his own sanity in the period after learning them.

And yet to his people, he was a benevolent king. A ruler who had given them peace and prosperity and a life worth living, who worked genuinely in their interest in every way that was visible to them.

The barrier that imprisoned the demon continent was his doing, placed there for reasons that had nothing to do with protection and everything to do with his own survival.

But his people did not know that, and even if they had known, many would have chosen him anyway, because the life he had given them was real even if the motives behind it were not.

Alex collected his thoughts and confirmed why the city was so alive. He had expected to find a celebration, but not on this scale.

The city was decorated for a grand celebration. Homes and gathering places glowed with warm light, bars and hotels spilled sound and movement onto the streets, and the energy in the air carried the particular quality of people who had been given a reason to enjoy themselves and were doing so without reservation.

The cause, as Alex had confirmed, was not the fall of the Human Continent, though perhaps some were celebrating that as well. The true occasion was simpler and more human, in the oldest sense of the word.

Ahrimon’s youngest son was getting married.

The news made Alex smile, because it only made everything more enjoyable to him.

Today was the day of return. The day the year ended, and those who had entered the Ancestral Realm and survived long enough came back to the world they had left behind.

Alex had returned today as well, the same as all the others, but unlike them, he had done so by choice and for specific reasons.

Two of them.

The first was to get the true second half of the Ancient Red Gem, the Archaic Ring, currently in the possession of demon prince Rongradin, whose wedding was filling the city around Alex with celebration and decoration.

The second was the conversation he had been carrying in the back of his mind for longer than he cared to calculate precisely, the one he had known was coming years in advance.

The conversation with Ahrimon.

The Demon King.

And this time, it would happen on Alex’s terms.