Hell was not what humans on the surface imagined.
There was no fire burning endlessly, no tortured screams echoing from every corner.
What existed was a city, a real one, with dark stone streets polished smooth over thousands of years, tall buildings carved from obsidian, and a sky that stayed a permanent deep red, like dusk, as if the sun there were always in the process of setting but never quite finished.
At the heart of that city stood the Hall of Gluttony, the palace ruled by Beelzebub, one of the Seven Demon Kings who governed Hell.
Beelzebub himself did not fit the common image of a demon king.
He wasn’t frightening in any crude sense.
His build was large but composed, his face closer to that of a wise old noble than a bloodthirsty monster.
He rarely raised his voice.
He preferred listening to speaking, and when he did speak, every sentence sounded as though it had already been thought through carefully before ever leaving his mouth.
That night — though in Hell the word “night” was only a matter of habit, since the sky there never truly changed — Beelzebub sat in his study reading reports from his territory when one of his oldest attendants rushed in without knocking.
“Your Grace.” The attendant’s voice, an old demon named Orrin who had served for three centuries, didn’t sound like itself.
It trembled.
“The Archive Chamber. You need to come now.”
Beelzebub looked up from the papers in his hands.
“What is it?”
“The tablet,” Orrin said, barely able to steady his breath.
“The one sealed since the First War. It’s… glowing.”
For a moment, Beelzebub’s face showed no reaction at all.
But anyone who had known him long enough would understand that such stillness was exactly the sign that he was thinking very fast beneath it.
He rose from his chair without hurry, yet the moment he stepped out of the room, his pace was far quicker than usual.
The Archive Chamber sat deep beneath the palace, carved directly into the bedrock of Hell, where the oldest records were kept — some written in a language even modern demons no longer recognized.
At the center of the chamber, surrounded by stone shelves three stories tall, stood a small altar with a stone tablet resting on top.
The tablet glowed a faint red, pulsing slowly like a heartbeat.
Beelzebub stood before it for a long while, hands clasped behind his back, eyes tracing the symbols slowly assembling themselves across the stone’s surface, one by one, as though the tablet itself were “remembering” what it needed to write.
“How long has it been since the last time this happened?” Beelzebub asked, without turning.
Orrin, standing a few steps behind him, answered in a voice still unsteady.
“According to the records, this tablet was last active sixty-six million, six hundred sixty-six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six years ago, Your Grace. When it was first sealed.”
“And now it’s active again.” Beelzebub repeated the words slowly, more to himself than to Orrin.
“Right at the end of the same cycle.”
He stepped closer, extending a hand, but did not touch the tablet’s surface.
He simply let his fingers hover a few inches above it, feeling the faint heat radiating from it, like an ember only just lit.
The symbols arranged across the surface were simple, yet their weight was far heavier than a mere string of words.
At the end of the sixty-six million, six hundred sixty-six thousandth, six hundred and sixty-sixth cycle, a King shall rise.
Nothing else.
The sentence simply stopped there, as if the rest had been deliberately hidden, or wasn’t ready to be read yet.
“Is that all?” Beelzebub asked.
“That’s all we can read, Your Grace,” Orrin answered.
“The rest is still dark. It may surface over time. It may never surface at all.”
Beelzebub stayed silent for a long moment, staring at the tablet as if weighing something far larger than the simple words in front of him could convey.
As one of the Seven Demon Kings, he had lived long enough to know that the world rarely gave warnings without reason.
Something written, sealed, then awakened again after tens of millions of years was no coincidence.
And a King shall rise was not a sentence anyone currently holding the title of king could afford to dismiss.
Six days later, Beelzebub called an emergency meeting with the other six Demon Kings.
The meeting chamber was circular, seven great chairs surrounding a black stone table at its center, each chair facing inward.
Beelzebub sat in his seat, calm as always, waiting for the others to arrive one by one.
Astaroth arrived first, as usual.
Tall and gaunt, wrapped in a long robe covered in symbols that kept shifting position as if alive on their own.
His eyes, as always, regarded everything with a quiet suspicion, even his fellow Demon Kings.
“I hear the old tablet lit up again,” Astaroth said, sitting down without waiting to be invited.
“If you called us here just because an old rock blinked, Beelzebub, I’ll be very disappointed.”
“That rock slept for over sixty-six million years, Astaroth,” Beelzebub answered calmly.
“I think that’s worth a little attention.”
One by one, the others followed.
Asmodeus entered with a faint smile, as if he already knew something no one else had said aloud yet.
Leviathan arrived with a cold aura that seemed to drop the temperature of the room by a few degrees.
Mammon came late, as usual, still tallying something on a small tablet of his own.
Belphegor came last, moving slowly, eyes half-closed as if just roused from sleep — though everyone present knew better than to mistake that slowness for weakness.
Satan didn’t sit.
He stood leaning against the wall, arms crossed, his face flat but his stare sharp, fixed on Beelzebub.
“So,” Satan finally said, his voice heavy, filling the room without needing to be raised.
“You called us all here to discuss an old fairy tale.”
“Not a fairy tale,” Beelzebub answered.
He raised a hand, and a shadowy projection of the tablet’s symbols appeared above the stone table, drifting slowly in the air.
“This prophecy speaks of something that has never happened in all our time ruling Hell. A King. Not a new Demon King. A King.”
Astaroth frowned, studying the floating symbols with a sharp eye, as if trying to dissect every letter.
“What kind of king does this mean? A king over Hell? Or something else entirely?”
“I don’t know,” Beelzebub answered honestly.
“Not yet. But I’ve already ordered Orrin and his team to dig deeper, and I wanted all of you to know before word spreads out of control.”
Leviathan let out a short snort.
“If this is really about some new King, why should it be our problem to go find him? If he’s truly as powerful as this claims, he’ll reveal himself sooner or later.”
“Or,” Asmodeus cut in, his voice soft but sharp, “someone else will find him first. Humans. Elves. Perhaps even one of us, wanting to use this prophecy for their own ends.”
The room fell silent for a moment, Asmodeus’s words settling into the air like a slow-acting poison.
Satan finally moved from the wall, stepping toward the table, his eyes still locked on Beelzebub.
“Tell us the truth, Beelzebub. You didn’t call us here just to share news. You already have a plan.”
Beelzebub met his gaze, not the least bit shaken by the pressure radiating off Satan.
“I’m sending search parties across the continent. Quietly. Not to attack anyone. Only to look.”
“Look for what, exactly?” Mammon asked, finally lifting his face from his tablet.
“A sign,” Beelzebub answered.
“Something out of the ordinary. Someone who shouldn’t exist.”
Satan let out a short laugh, one that carried no humor at all.
“And if you find it? If there really is a King rising somewhere, in whatever form that takes, what’s your plan then?”
Beelzebub paused, staring at the projection of symbols still hovering above the table, the same sentence, repeating, like a heartbeat that refused to stop.
“I will kneel,” he finally answered, calm, without a trace of hesitation.
“And I suggest the rest of you do the same, if this prophecy proves true.”
The room fell silent again, deeper this time, heavier.
Six pairs of eyes stared at Beelzebub, each with a different reaction — Astaroth with deepening suspicion, Asmodeus with a faint, spreading smile, Leviathan with a forced indifference, Mammon with calculations already spinning in his head, Belphegor still silent but with eyes now open a little wider than before.
And Satan, who only stared for a long moment, before finally turning toward the door.
“Search for him if you want,” he said, not looking back.
“But don’t expect me to kneel to anyone just because an old rock decided to talk.”
The door closed behind him, leaving a silence sharper than before.
Beelzebub watched the door for a long while, then turned back to the projection of symbols above the table.
He knew this search would take time — the continent was vast, and the sign they were looking for could take any form, anywhere.
But deep within him, something he found hard to explain — something like an ancient instinct that was rarely wrong — told him this search would not take nearly as long as he expected.
He did not know that far away, in a small valley called Yeun, in a village that appeared on no kingdom’s map at all, a dog had just stopped howling, and a small child stood at his window, staring into a darkness that, somehow, felt like it was staring back.