Aziris was one twentieth the size of Petrah and centuries behind in technological advancement. The forest realm's isolation had squeezed the resources that they had access to. Unlike Petrah, Aziris didn’t have access to the lower strata.

  The forest was a stable piece of surface land that Balor had isolated from itself. The realm didn’t extend below it towards the ocean. The Aziris only had access to whatever was on the surface. They were in a similar growth cycle to Balor’s first failed experiment of Veilthorn on a non-stratified planet.

  Petrah was the anomaly, emerging fast from the choices that he made. Aziris needed similar drastic intervention if he ever wanted them to catch up to the rest of the world while remaining isolated from it.

  He realized this as he walked the street in a more assimilated form in the body of a citizen that he created for information gathering.

  He had collected everything he could about the Deathbringers of the Star Family that he wanted to see. They were isolated on a desolate tower on a mountain at the edge of the kingdom. The Azurians, rulers of the land, gathered criminals and rule breakers in dungeons for three-month intervals.

  Those sentenced to death were taken around the kingdom in chains and then sent on their death march up the mountain to the tower. The Deathbringers executed them and dropped their bodies off a cliff.

  This system had been in place even without the Deathbringers. The cliff was a taboo site where thousands of individuals had met their end. The old method of execution was pushing the prisoner off the edge, or beheading in case of public punishment.

  The first Deathbringer, a Star Family child who killed his mother, father, and six servants by the age of four, had been sent there to be dealt with by the executioners.

  The mountain and the tower had been closed when no executioners returned. It was a local legend that the child survived through cannibalism.

  Azurians used prisoners to test the harrowed mountain, but none had ever returned alive. Over the years, it had become tradition to send death marches up the mountain and leave them to their fate.

  Over the years, sightings detailed the boy growing up to be a man, and perhaps procreating with a female prisoner to birth an offspring of their own.

  The details were locked behind Star Family archives that no one but family members had access to. A created individual wasn’t going to get past the security measures. Balor didn’t want to assimilate into a Star Family member.

  Balor almost joined a death march as his direct strategy to see the Deathbringers. On second thought, it didn’t seem that wise an idea. If their powers were exactly as dangerous as they were rumored, he had no idea what they might do to him. It was almost like bloodstone contact—an unpredictable, unknown.

  He used a creature disguise for the first time, creating a scavenger bird of prey that was common to the death cliff area.

  He followed the most recent death march up the mountain, flying close to the tree tops as he gathered every bit of information that he could from the prisoner’s experience.

  The death march brought them halfway up the mountain to a stone bridge that connected with the other half of the mountain, separated by a deep chasm.

  There were twenty-three prisoners tied to each other with chains. The guards that oversaw their march abandoned them on the stone bridge, urging them to move to the other side or be shot with arrows.

  Some of the prisoners almost leapt off the stone bridge, carrying everyone else down with them. More level-headed prisoners beat them unconscious and carried their limp bodies to the other side, where more annoyed ones killed them, breaking their wrists and ankles to slide them out of the chain.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The group set out in search of water and a place where they could break their chains to survive in their separate ways.

  A few of them managed to break their chains with rocks that first night by a small stream of water.

  By the third day, the prisoners only had chains and water. Some perished trying to eat various plants to quell their hunger. The Death Mountain was devoid of creatures and nutrition in general.

  Only thirteen prisoners remained at the end of the ordeal, and they had no choice but to climb towards the tower if they needed a semblance of a normal life again.

  Balor perched on a nearby tree to watch the last thirteen organizing themselves to rush the tower and kill their executioners for the supplies.

  Four prisoners died in various traps along the way. The rest of them made it to the forest clearing where the decrepit tower was. An old man came out of it to greet them, but the prisoners rushed to kill him with sharpened sticks and stones.

  They collapsed before ever reaching the old man, only a thrown rock bouncing off his forehead that left a bleeding gash. A small girl rushed out of the tower, yelling at him.

  Balor watched them go back into the tower, leaving the immobilized prisoners behind.

  They weren’t dead.

  The tower’s windows glowed yellow when the sun dipped below the horizon. Some of the prisoners had gained enough strength to crawl back, but they were still in the garden of the Deathbringer’s dwelling.

  Tower’s door flung open after dusk, and the small girl emerged with a lantern in her hand. She moved from prisoner to prisoner, touching them briefly as she went. Most of them keeled over dead before they even noticed what she was doing. The last three screamed and struggled, but she silenced them all the same.

  Placing the lantern on the ground, she began dragging the corpses by the legs towards one corner in the courtyard. She couldn’t have been older than ten. She was struggling with the second one.

  Balor, meanwhile, analyzed what Source mechanism gave them this dangerous power. He had noticed surges of Source energy each time she touched someone, but it wasn’t enough power to kill by itself. In the outside world, that amount of Source energy would have to be used in a very specific way to be deadly. None of those methods would simply decouple consciousness from the body in a split second.

  Even with his Dragon powers, he didn’t have enough information to process the exact mechanism behind this power. It was also supposed to work through line of sight in some cases, although he had only seen the old man use it to immobilize the prisoners.

  Balor waited for the girl to exhaust herself with the corpses. After dragging the fifth one, she tossed her robes and lay down on the grass, sweat pouring from every pore.

  He wanted to talk with her, but he didn’t want to appear as a human. He flew low over the ground and brushed by her as the bird and warped himself into a shape that matched Azirian's depiction of death.

  “Greetings, small one,” he spoke as the girl crawled backwards, panicking on top of her panting. Breaths hitched at her throat, and no voice came out when she opened her small mouth.

  She coughed, clutching her chest. “D-demon! demon!” she said, trembling where she was.

  “I am death, your master, small one,” he recited in a slightly formal accent of the Azirian language. “We meet at long last.”

  “Master? My master?!” the girl asked, holding both her stomach and chest. “Why are you here!”

  “Rude. Introduce yourself,” he said sternly. He had a certain role to play. In Azirian culture, death was personified as the ‘last teacher.’

  “My name is Reizha, master,” she said, bowing awkwardly. “D-do you want to meet my father?”

  “No, I wanted to meet you,” Balor said. The child jolted as if she had never considered the possibility.

  “F-father hates when I talk with strangers, master. He’ll punish me.”

  “I am no stranger, Reizha,” Balor lied. He didn’t want to meet a father that he’d have to put significantly more effort to fool than a small girl. “I am death. You’ve been serving me since you were born.”

  “Yes, master,” the girl said, gulping hard. “What should I do? I killed these people. Did you take them?”

  “Oh yes, they’re on their way to hell. Most impressive work, small one.”

  “H-hell! Father says we’ll go there because we kill…”

  “Answer me, does the snake go to hell because they ate a mouse?” he asked.

  Reizha kept panting while her eyes darted everywhere, thinking about a question she’d probably never been asked.

  “No?” she asked.

  “Precisely. Deathbringers don’t go to hell because they bring death, small one.”

  “It’s all good then!” she asked, smiling for the first time.

  “You’ve nothing to fear in hell, even if you go there,” Balor lied a bit further to set her mind at ease. “It is my home, and I treat those who served me in life with special care.”

  “Oh!” Reizha bowed eagerly. “I’ll tell father this!”

  Balor realized he’d taken a step too far just to appease a child. “Perhaps this should be a secret…”