Spring came earlier than usual that year, and with it came a merchant never before seen in Yeun.
He arrived with an old cart pulled by an old horse, loaded with cloth, spices, and small goods rarely found in a village that small.
His name, he said, was Fenwick, and he claimed to come from the southern towns, peddling wares from village to village before harvest season arrived and everyone grew too busy to trade.
The people of Yeun greeted him with the ordinary enthusiasm of a village that rarely saw visitors.
Children crowded around his cart, staring at brightly colored fabrics they’d never seen before.
Adults haggled over spice prices with the same energy they’d use bargaining over a neighbor’s harvest.
For that one day, Yeun felt a little livelier than usual.
No one knew that Fenwick was no ordinary merchant.
Beneath the human form he wore like a cloak was something far older and far more patient than a traveling trader.
He was one of dozens of seekers Beelzebub had sent across the continent, scattered quietly under different disguises, searching for a single sign whose shape even they didn’t fully understand.
Fenwick had already visited thirteen villages before Yeun and found nothing but the ordinary lives of ordinary people.
He didn’t expect much from this fourteenth village either.
But old habits kept him thorough, watching every corner of the village with eyes trained to notice anything out of place, however small.
Lucifer saw the cart from a distance, standing at the edge of the field beside Bram, who was inspecting the irrigation channels for the next planting season.
“Want to go see?” Bram asked, noticing his son staring quietly at the small crowd gathering in the middle of the village.
Lucifer shook his head slowly.
“Later.”
Bram didn’t push.
He was used to the way his son held his curiosity in check, as if everything had to be weighed first before it could be acted on, even something as simple as watching a traveling merchant.
But that afternoon, once the fieldwork was done, it was Maera who finally brought Lucifer into the village center, holding his small hand while carrying a few eggs to trade for salt.
Fenwick was serving an elderly woman when Lucifer and Maera approached.
He smiled warmly, a smile practiced hundreds of times until it felt almost naturally perfect, and greeted Maera politely before offering a few goods.
But his eyes, for a fraction of a second, fell on the small child standing beside her.
Something was different.
Fenwick couldn’t place it right away.
There was no explosive aura, the kind that usually marked great power.
No striking physical sign.
The child looked like an ordinary farmer’s son, skin tanned from the sun, hair black as pitch, eyes staring back with a calm but wary attention, as if evaluating Fenwick the same way Fenwick was evaluating him.
What unsettled Fenwick was, in fact, the absence.
An absence hard to put into words.
Like standing at the edge of a very deep well, and realizing you can’t hear any echo at all when you drop a stone into it.
“A quiet one,” Fenwick said, trying to sound casual as he arranged a few spice bottles on his cart.
“How old is he?”
“Three,” Maera answered, smiling with the same pride most mothers carry.
“He’s been like that since he was born. Never much for fuss.”
“Interesting,” Fenwick murmured, keeping his smile in place.
“Rare to find a child that calm.”
He offered a small candy, sugar shaped like a flower, to Lucifer, a simple gesture he used to draw reactions out of children in any village.
Ordinary children would reach for it eagerly, or glance at their mother first, eyes bright, asking permission.
Lucifer only looked at the candy for a moment, then looked up at Fenwick’s face.
“Thank you,” he said, taking it with a polite but unenthusiastic motion, like someone accepting a gift because he understood it was the right thing to do, not because he truly wanted it.
Fenwick let out a small laugh, covering the strange feeling beginning to spread through his chest.
“You really are a different one, aren’t you.”
“Everyone is different,” Lucifer answered.
The simple sentence shouldn’t have meant anything.
But the way the child said it, in a tone far too flat for a three-year-old, made something inside Fenwick, something trained for centuries to recognize danger, pulse faintly, like an alarm just beginning to sound somewhere far away.
That night, once his cart was parked at the edge of the village and the villagers had all returned to their homes, Fenwick sat alone by a small campfire, watching the embers glow in the dark.
He pulled a small mirror from inside his cart, its surface a deep, solid black, reflecting nothing but his own shadow.
He touched the surface with a finger, murmured a few words in a language no human in Yeun had ever heard, and the mirror’s surface slowly shifted, revealing another face behind it.
That face belonged to one of Beelzebub’s junior officers, a young demon named Ravel, tasked with gathering reports from the seekers.
“Fenwick,” Ravel said, his voice sounding faintly surprised.
“You rarely report back this quickly. What is it?”
Fenwick paused, gathering the right words to explain something even he didn’t fully understand yet.
“I’m not sure it’s anything,” he finally said.
“But there’s a child in this village. Three years old. An ordinary farmer’s son.”
“And?”
“And I can’t read anything off him,” Fenwick continued, his voice quieter than usual.
“Normally, no matter how small someone’s power is, I can sense something. A trace of mana, an aura, anything. This child… is empty. Not weak. Empty. Like something should be there, but it’s hidden so completely that even the absence itself feels unnatural.”
On the other side of the mirror, Ravel went quiet for a long moment.
“Are you certain?” he finally asked.
“No,” Fenwick admitted.
“But I’ve visited thirteen villages before this one, and none of them made me feel the need to report this quickly.”
Ravel fell silent again, longer this time, as if weighing whether this news was worth passing straight to Beelzebub, or just an ordinary report that could wait.
“Send me the village’s location,” he finally said.
“I’ll pass it along. But Fenwick—”
“Yes?”
“Don’t do anything until you receive further instructions. If this really is something, we don’t want to make a mistake that can’t be undone.”
Fenwick nodded, though he knew Ravel couldn’t see him clearly through a mirror that small.
“Understood.”
The connection cut off, leaving Fenwick alone again beside a fire now burning low.
He stared toward the village, dark and quiet now, toward the small house at its edge where he knew the child was sleeping.
He didn’t know that inside that house, Lucifer had woken again, like so many nights before, staring at the ceiling of his room in the dark.
But this time, the feeling pulling at him felt closer than before.
No longer something far behind the mountains.
More like something already standing at the edge of their village, waiting for the right moment to knock.