Re:Demon - Reborn as a Demon Book 1

Interlude II

Library of Tellic, Year of record 3687

Sorting room 59b

More records had been lost in the sorting rooms of the great library then most countries ever possessed. It wasn't that they were being mistreated or that the Archivists were sloppy, it was the sheer volume of materials that came in daily. There were the reports from the Chroniclers, there were texts from every country that printed in mass, there were submissions from scholars, there were even boxes of recipes that filled an entire room.

There were hundreds of rooms of documents to go through, all of which came in without any organization. It was the job of the Archivists to go through them, read them, sort them and send them to be filed in their appropriate category. It was hard work that required being able to read dozens of languages and to be able to extrapolate where something went, which was the greatest challenge, after all, many of the documents could be filed in any number of categories. A simple journal from a merchant that loved flowers could find a home in travel, floral, business or any number of other categories, which was why it was so important that the Archivist write up a complete list of cross references for each document and file them properly, otherwise, no one would be able to find what they were looking for.

Room 59b was Prinna's domain, ever since she'd found herself in this world, she'd been surrounded by books, no doubt as a reward for being so patient in her last life. It was everything she could want, she got to read all day and then organize. She felt a greater sense of accomplishment every day here then she'd felt in her entire former life.

That wasn't to say she didn't miss things, the internet had been a great thing, even though it often had people thinking they were experts on something just because they'd looked it up, but here, here she could read all kinds of things, things that would've been impossible in her former life, at least outside of fiction.

Take the document she'd just finished, it was a copy of an ancient tale, one that had taken her days to translate from the old form of the language it was into modern, but it told of the fall of the last Demon Lord. How eight hundred plus years ago, a terrible demon had rampaged from the west, driving her armies far into the human lands through brute force. It was thought that her army was indestructible, since it was made up of the strongest warriors anyone had ever seen. Each one of them was said to be equal to a hundred men and together, they couldn't lose.

This wasn't the first time humanity had been threatened, there had been a string of Demon Lords over the years, but this was the worst in years, not because she was strong, though she was, but because she plowed forward, letting nothing stop her.

Prinna had to respect that kind of single-minded devotion, even if she couldn't understand why she'd want to take over. In truth, it seemed that the Demon Lord wasn't interested in that either, since she just kept moving.

Eventually the humans were getting pressed into a dire situation, not even the hero, who was born whenever the Demon Lord awoke, could stop them. Just when things seemed helpless a group of elves came to them and proposed a solution.

Their homelands had been along the Demon Lords path and their warriors had barely managed to hold long enough for the rest of their citizens to escape, so they wanted revenge.

They proposed luring the Demon Lord to a specific location, one that would dampen her power and heighten theirs, letting them cast a massive ritual to seal away the spirit of the Demon Lord.

The humans agreed, so they lured the Demon Lord to the chosen spot and while their armies threw everything they had at the Demon Lord's followers, the hero engaged in single combat with the Demon Lord herself.

The battle raged for hours, all the while the elves were casting their ritual. Eventually the spell took effect, pulling the Demon Lord's soul out of the cycle of reincarnation that it had been stuck in.

What the elves had neglected to mention, was that the hero, being tied to the Demon Lord, would get sucked in as well, killing him.

While the humans gladly paid the price of their hero, it was the elves that paid the greatest price. The power the spell needed was so great, that it cost everyone that was casting it their lives, wiping out the entire elven tribe that had known the spell.

Only a few were left to tell the humans the truth, that despite the power that had been sacrificed to cast it, the spell still wasn't strong enough to contain the souls and that every ten years, it would need to be refreshed with the blood and souls of innocents.

The surviving humans built a series of settlements around the seal, and would continue to reseal the spell in blood for the rest of time, lest the tragedy of the Demon Lord be reborn upon the world.

Prinna loved reading stories like that, stories of legends and myths, she loved how there was so much to learn here, so she eagerly grabbed the next one off the stack, one that had been of interest to her since she'd spotted it, but had held off on it till she got through the stack that had been built on top of it.

It was a weathered, old satchel, like the kind she'd seen the Chroniclers carrying as they came and went from the Library. Inside she found stacks of pages and journals, notes and scribbled sketches of everything the owner had come into contact with.

Spreading the documents out on her work table, she started going through them, when a page caught her attention and caused her to freeze, staring at it for a minute in shock.

As soon as the shock dissipated, she scrambled through the rest of the documents in a desperate search for the related notes and entries and quickly read them, twice.

What she found was the story of a Chronicler who had gone to a small town to investigate the strange suicide of a boy. He'd made notes of the writing the child had left behind in the hopes that someone would be able to translate it, and years later, someone had, because the writing that he hadn't been able to recognize wasn't one he could have, it wasn't a language of this world, but of Earth.

Prinna felt tears in her eyes as she read the note again.

I can't take it anymore.

The madness won't stop, I can't wake up from this nightmare. I don't understand what's going on. I miss my family. I want to see them again, and soon I shall. I hope this will wake me, and if not, I just hope that we all go to the same place, I hope that this world's afterlife is the same as Earth's.

It won't be long now, so don't worry about me, I'm about to be free.

Staring at the page, she willed her numb mind back into action and found the corresponding entry in the journal. Doing the math, she realized that the boy had been born around the same time she had, which meant that he was likely one of her classmates, which meant that the rest of them might be out there, and if they were, someone had to find them, to talk to them.

Since no one else knew that the others were there, there was only one person that could do this, which meant that as much as she loved her current life, for the time being Prinna would have to put her Archivist life on hold and transfer to being a Chronicler, a dangerous life that would take her out of the library and into the world.

She didn't want to, but she knew that she didn't have a choice, her friend's lives were at stake.