Twisted [Lady Lesso x OC] {S L O W B U R N}

Chapter 23

"You look pale. Are you sure you want to know more?" Lady Lesso asked in a surprisingly soft voice.

"Uh," I hesitated. "Yeah, yeah, I think I do."

"You think you do?" She raised an eyebrow and I nodded.

"I wanna know everything."

"That's a whole lot of everything," the woman scoffed.

"You promised."

"Fine. The Healers believed they'd found the true way, which in their tiny, little brains was the only way for things to work properly. Depending on where certain clans resided," the Dean went on to name various places, from tiny islands scattered across seas and forests to the far north, which she described as an unbelievably cold place where white bears hunted people and demons moved around freely through the snow. "-they had various customs which resulted in them seeing the world differently. There were certain laws they had to obey in order not to anger the spirits they believed in but they were different depending on where they lived. So, if you lived in a forest, hunting for hunters was strictly forbidden but for those who lived in the north, everything was prey. It didn't matter what you killed. What mattered was that you had something to eat. No food meant death."

I closed my eyes as she spoke and, to my utter surprise, I could easily imagine what the world used to be like back then.

"And that's exactly what infuriated the Healers. They believed the only way to please the spirits was to have everyone follow the same rules. That's why they joined their forces and unleashed hell on earth, to put it lightly. They're believed to have discovered the true nature of the dark arts."

"So, like, they invented dark magic?" I asked. I didn't think we were talking, like, thousands of years ago. More like, I don't know, more recent times.

"No, they didn't invent it. It had been created alongside the world as we know it. Both dark magic and the world are just as ancient, just like Good and Evil," she explained.

"Yeah, that makes sense."

"Once everyone knew of their existence, they became who we now know as the Soul Eaters," she paused and I sucked one sharp breath in. "You really do look pale, Reader."

"Oh, no, it's nothing. I just think I know that name. It rings a bell, kinda," I admitted and the woman gave me a surprised look. I shifted under her intense gaze and looked down to the ground. "So, uh, what do the Soul Eaters have to do with that kid, or demon, or whatever it was?"

"They are the ones that created it," she said simply.

"They created it? But you've just said they lived a long time ago-"

"The original ones, yes," she stated. "They were destroyed one by one, but their beliefs never died. There were people who carried their legacy throughout the years and passed them on through generations."

"So it's like a cult?"

"Well, yes. You could say that-"

"How does someone create a little devil like the one I saw?"

Lady Lesso ran her fingers through her red hair with yet another sigh. "To create such creature, you need two things. A demon. And a human child. A child so young it's unable to speak yet. It's generally believed that the younger the child is, the better," I felt a cold shiver run down my entire body as she spoke. "First, you get yourself a kid. Whether you kidnap it, or it's one of your own, it doesn't matter. You keep it locked up someplace dark with no human interaction-"

"Oh, so it's kinda like what you did to me," I laughed bitterly.

"It is not funny. I did what I had to do to keep you safe," she growled at me coldly. "As I've said, you keep it locked up long enough for it to forget what humans essentially are. Once you rid it of all emotions and manage to keep it alive in the process, you get a creature that is nothing but a shell. Like a box that's ready to contain something. Then you summon a demon and put it in the body of that child... and voila."