The first letter reached Yeun three weeks after Lucifer’s departure, carried by a large black bird that landed right on the kitchen windowsill, startling Maera so badly she dropped the pot she’d been holding.
Bram, who’d been repairing a hoe handle at the table, shot to his feet, his hand reaching instinctively for the nearest object before he realized the bird was simply waiting calmly, a small scroll tied to its leg.
“That’s no ordinary bird,” Bram murmured, approaching slowly.
“I don’t think it is either,” Maera answered, already steadier, reaching out to untie the scroll.
The bird let her, watching them both with eyes far too intelligent for an ordinary bird, before finally taking off back into the sky without waiting for a reply.
Maera unrolled the scroll with trembling hands, Bram leaning in beside her, both of them reading the small handwriting that was unmistakably their son’s, though the letters were far neater than anything they’d seen from him before.
Mom, Dad,
I arrived safely.
This academy is enormous, bigger than I could have imagined from Beelzebub’s books.
I chose the Ancient Studies track.
I met a boy named Theo from Dravorn, he’s nice, if a bit loud.
My placement exam didn’t work properly, but the Headmaster said it wasn’t a big problem.
I was offered a spot in a special class, but I chose to wait for now.
I miss your sayur asem, Mom.
I miss Dad grumbling about the goat pen fence.
Tell Sela I haven’t gotten stuck up, though she probably won’t believe it until she sees for herself.
I’m alright.
Don’t worry too much.
Lucifer
Maera read the letter three times before finally letting her tears fall, part relief, part a longing that hadn’t shrunk even slightly since the day he’d left.
“Sayur asem,” Bram murmured, his voice rough, trying to smile even as his own eyes glistened.
“Out of everything in the world he could miss, he writes about sayur asem.”
Word of the letter spread quickly through the village, though Bram and Maera hadn’t meant to tell anyone besides Sela, who came running to their house the moment she heard from a neighbor who happened to spot the black bird flying over the village.
“He actually wrote?” Sela asked, barely believing it, standing in the doorway still catching her breath from running.
Maera smiled, handing her the letter.
“Read it yourself.”
Sela read it carefully, her eyes widening slightly when she reached the part about herself, and for a moment, her expression softened into something far gentler than usual before she quickly hid it behind a put-on huff of annoyance.
“Hasn’t gotten stuck up, he says,” Sela muttered, folding the letter back up carefully, far more carefully than she usually handled anything.
“Fine, I’ll forgive him for not writing more. Just this once.”
“You can write back, if you want,” Maera said gently.
“The bird said it’ll return next month for the next letter.”
Sela was quiet for a moment, staring at the letter in her hands, before finally giving a slow nod, much quieter than her usual tone.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I want to.”
That night, after Sela had gone home and the village had settled back into quiet, Bram sat alone on the porch, staring at the darkening sky, thinking about his son, who was now who knew how far from here, in a place he couldn’t even picture clearly.
He didn’t notice the figure standing silently at the edge of the fence, beneath the shadow of a tree dark enough to hide it from ordinary eyes.
Isra, still stationed near the village per her arrangement with Beelzebub, was making her usual nightly round, checking the village’s boundaries as she’d done every night since Lucifer left, when she felt something that made her stop dead.
An aura, faint but unmistakable, moving along the edge of the forest west of the village, not a wild animal, not a lost villager, but something far more controlled, far more deliberate, like someone observing without intending to come any closer.
Isra sharpened her senses, trying to trace its source, but the aura vanished as quickly as it had appeared, as if its owner realized they’d been detected and chose to withdraw rather than risk confrontation.
She stood still at the fence’s edge for a long while, staring toward the now-quiet forest, deciding not to disturb Bram’s peace that night with a worry that might turn out to mean nothing at all.
But she sent a brief report to Beelzebub before returning to her post, her words short but clear enough.
Something is watching the village.
Not one of us.
Unclear which side yet.
Far from Yeun, in a dark space that belonged fully to neither Hell nor the human world, the same figure who had once stood in the Aldren family’s yard, testing Lucifer with a single simple question, now stood at the edge of that same forest, staring toward the quiet village in the distance.
Satan didn’t approach any closer that night.
He simply stood, arms crossed, his eyes fixed on the lamplight still glowing in the Aldren family’s window, thinking about the answer a five-year-old boy had given him, one that, for some reason, still echoed in his mind years later.
They shouldn’t kneel, the boy had once said.
Not if it’s only out of fear.
Satan wasn’t certain whether he’d come tonight searching for one more reason to keep doubting, or searching for the reason he’d already, quietly, begun to fear he’d find sooner or later.
He turned and vanished back into the forest’s shadow before dawn arrived, carrying the same question that had walked with him since that day in the field, still unanswered, still not ready to be answered.