Morning in Yeun smelled of wet earth and woodsmoke.
Beelzebub woke before the others, as he usually did, and sat for a while at the edge of their camp watching the sky lighten over the hills.
He hadn’t slept much.
It wasn’t unusual for him; centuries of ruling a territory as large as Gluttony’s had trained him out of needing much rest at all.
But this particular sleeplessness had a different texture to it, a quiet restlessness he hadn’t felt in longer than he cared to count.
By the time Korr and Ilyen stirred, Ravel was already up, going over the plan for the day in a low voice more for his own benefit than anyone else’s.
“We go in as travelers passing through,” Ravel said.
“Buy some bread, maybe trade a little, ask harmless questions if the chance comes up naturally. Nothing that draws attention.”
“You’ve said that three times already,” Ilyen murmured, tying her hair back.
“I’ll say it a fourth time if it keeps you all from doing anything clever.”
Beelzebub said nothing through the exchange, only rose, brushed the dirt from his coat, and started down the hill toward the village without waiting for the rest to finish arguing.
They caught up quickly enough.
Yeun in daylight looked smaller than it had from the hilltop the evening before.
A single dirt road ran through its center, lined with modest houses, a small square near a well where a few villagers were already gathered, trading gossip along with their morning chores.
Chickens wandered freely between houses.
Somewhere nearby, a dog barked twice and fell silent.
Their arrival drew a few curious glances, the kind any small village gives strangers, but nothing more.
Ravel struck up a conversation with an old man selling bread near the well, asking about the road south, the state of the harvest, nothing that would seem out of place.
Ilyen wandered toward a stall of dyed wool, feigning interest while her eyes moved carefully over the village, cataloguing details out of old habit.
Beelzebub walked slower than the rest, letting his eyes drift over the village at his own pace.
It was Korr who noticed first, a small tilt of his head toward the fields at the village’s edge, where a group of figures worked among the rows of early crops.
Beelzebub followed his gaze and stopped walking entirely.
There, kneeling in the dirt beside a broad-shouldered man clearing stones from a furrow, was a small boy in a patched tunic, sleeves rolled up despite being far too big for him, carefully placing seeds into the ground one at a time with a focus that looked almost out of place on a face that young.
Beelzebub didn’t need Ilyen’s charms or Fenwick’s trained senses to know.
Something in him, something older than his title, older than the seven chairs around that black stone table, simply knew, the way a compass needle knows which way is north without needing to be told.
“Your Grace,” Ravel said quietly, appearing at his side, having noticed the direction of his stare.
“That’s him. Has to be.”
“I know,” Beelzebub said.
He didn’t move toward the field immediately.
He stood at the edge of the road for a long moment, watching the boy work, watching the easy, unremarkable rhythm of a farmer’s son doing farmer’s work, and felt something twist quietly inside his chest that he couldn’t quite name.
Not fear.
Not even the reverence he’d half expected to feel, if the prophecy proved true.
Something closer to disbelief, standing right up against certainty, refusing to fully resolve into either one.
“We should keep our distance until we know more,” Ravel said carefully.
“You said it yourself. No approaching yet.”
“I said Fenwick shouldn’t approach again,” Beelzebub corrected, quiet but firm.
“I never said the same of myself.”
Before Ravel could protest, Beelzebub was already walking toward the field.
Bram noticed the stranger first, straightening from his work with the particular wariness a farmer reserves for anyone he doesn’t recognize walking straight toward his land without an obvious reason.
“Morning,” Bram said, not unfriendly, but watchful.
“Help you with something?”
“Passing through,” Beelzebub said, his voice carrying an easy warmth that felt entirely natural despite everything underneath it.
“Your fields are well kept. Not many travelers stop to notice things like that, I imagine, but I spent a good part of my life around farmland once. Hard not to appreciate good soil work when I see it.”
Bram relaxed slightly, the compliment landing exactly as intended.
“Not much else to do out here but keep it kept.”
Beelzebub’s eyes moved, almost incidentally, toward the boy still kneeling in the dirt a few feet away, who had stopped his work and was now looking directly up at the stranger with an attention far too steady for a child his age.
“Your son?” Beelzebub asked.
“That’s him,” Bram said, a note of quiet pride slipping into his voice despite himself.
“Lucifer. Helps me out here most mornings. Doesn’t much care for sitting idle.”
Beelzebub crouched down, slowly, deliberately, bringing himself to something closer to the boy’s eye level, the way one might approach an animal that startled easily, though nothing about the child in front of him looked remotely startled.
“Lucifer,” Beelzebub repeated softly, testing the shape of the name in his mouth as though hearing it spoken aloud for the first time carried its own kind of weight.
“That’s an unusual name for a place like this.”
“My mother chose it,” Lucifer said.
His voice was calm, unhurried, the same flat evenness Fenwick had described in his report, though hearing it directly did something to Beelzebub that no written account could have prepared him for.
“Did she say why?”
Lucifer considered the question for a moment, the way he seemed to consider most things, weighing it with a care that belonged to someone far older than three years.
“She said it felt like it had been waiting,” he finally said.
For a long moment, Beelzebub said nothing at all.
Behind him, he was distantly aware of Bram shifting his weight, of Ravel and the others keeping careful distance near the road, of the ordinary sounds of a farming village continuing around them entirely unaware of what was happening in its own fields.
None of it fully reached him.
His attention had narrowed entirely down to the small, steady eyes looking back at him, eyes that held no fear, no confusion, nothing but a quiet, patient awareness that felt, impossibly, older than the boy wearing them.
“It has,” Beelzebub finally said, so quietly it was almost lost beneath the wind moving through the wheat around them.
“Waited a very long time.”
Lucifer tilted his head slightly, the closest thing to genuine curiosity Beelzebub had seen cross his face since they’d started speaking.
“You talk like you know something,” Lucifer said.
Beelzebub allowed himself, for just a moment, something close to a smile.
“I might,” he said.
“But not yet. Not here.”
He rose slowly, brushing dirt from his knee, and looked once more at Bram, who had watched the exchange with the mild confusion of a man who suspected he’d missed something important but couldn’t have said what.
“Thank you for your time,” Beelzebub said to him, warm and easy again, the crouching stranger from a moment ago folded neatly back beneath the traveler’s mask.
“Good soil, good family. Not a bad life, from where I’m standing.”
He turned and walked back toward the road without waiting for a reply, his pace unhurried, though the moment he was out of earshot of the field, the calm he’d worn like a coat dropped away entirely.
“Well?” Ravel asked, falling into step beside him, voice low.
Beelzebub didn’t answer right away.
He kept walking, eyes fixed somewhere ahead of him that had nothing to do with the road.
“Send word back to Hell,” he finally said.
“Tonight. Tell them we’ve found what we were looking for.”
Ravel’s steps faltered slightly.
“You’re certain.”
“I’ve ruled Gluttony for over four thousand years,” Beelzebub said, his voice quiet, almost distant.
“I have looked into the eyes of demons who could level cities without blinking. I have never, in all that time, felt what I just felt looking into the eyes of a three-year-old boy kneeling in a vegetable patch.”
Behind them, back in the field, Lucifer had returned to his seeds, pressing each one carefully into the soil, though his eyes kept drifting, again and again, toward the road where the stranger had disappeared.
He didn’t understand everything the man had said.
But one thing had settled into him with total clarity, the same quiet certainty that had carried him through every strange night since his birth.
Whatever was coming, it had just introduced itself.
And it would not be the last time they spoke.