Amon had existed long enough that the concept of a beginning no longer applied to him. He did not remember being created—only that he had always been there. Always towering, always enduring, always untouched by the slow erosion that claimed lesser beings. Centuries had passed over him without consequence, sliding off his existence like water over stone. Time did not soften him. It only refined him into something colder, heavier, and more exact.

He was enormous, his height unnatural even among demons, his body shaped for dominance rather than grace. Dense muscle lay beneath scarred skin, every inch of him a testament to survival through violence. His presence alone warped the space around him, pressing down on the forest like a held breath. Creatures fled long before he arrived. Trees leaned away from his path. The land itself recognized ownership.

This forest was his.

Not through conquest, but through inevitability. It had grown around him, learned him, adapted to the weight of his existence. He wandered it without purpose, not out of restlessness but because motion was preferable to stillness. Stillness invited memory, and memory was useless.

Amon did not feel.

Whatever capacity he had once possessed for emotion had long since been stripped away by repetition—war after war, life after life, ending beneath his hands. Mercy had proven inefficient. Curiosity had become irrelevant. Humans, especially, had reduced themselves to patterns so predictable they barely registered anymore. They entered his domain afraid, hopeful, or desperate, and they left it changed or destroyed. None of them lingered in his mind long enough to matter.

They were brief. They were loud. They were breakable.

Nothing about them warranted attention.

The forest was quiet as Amon moved through it, his steps unhurried, inevitable. He sensed a human presence ahead—not unusual, not alarming. Young. Mortal. Insignificant. He made no effort to mask himself, no effort to adjust his path. The human would flee soon enough. They always did.

Then the trees thinned.

Light spilled into a small clearing, gentle and warm in a way that felt out of place within his domain. And there, seated among the grass, was the human.

Amon stopped.

The boy was small—astonishingly so. His body looked almost unreal against the wild growth around him, as if he did not quite belong to the same world. He sat calmly, legs folded, posture loose and unguarded. Curly light-blond hair caught the sunlight, soft and bright, framing a face untouched by hardship. His skin was smooth, his presence light, his existence so gentle it bordered on the sacred.

There was an ethereality to him that struck wrong.

Not fragile, not weak—pure. As though he had stepped out of some higher place by mistake. His large, pale green eyes were clear and luminous, holding no fear, no suspicion, no awareness of danger. A butterfly rested on his finger, perfectly still, as if the forest itself had deemed him harmless.

The boy smiled softly as he hummed, the sound barely more than a breath.

Amon did not move.

This was not how humans were meant to look.

This was not how they were meant to exist.

He told himself the boy would be like every other mortal—temporary, delicate, destined to fade. Beauty did not change outcomes. Innocence did not protect against endings.

Still, Amon remained at the edge of the clearing, vast and silent, his attention fixed on the small, luminous human who sat within his forest—unaware of the ancient demon who had just found him.