Fiendish Blood

	Is that… a horn?

	You stared at it wide-eyed and bemused in the mirror. It crowned your head like a terrible blister or a jagged and ugly scar, even though its glassy exterior shined almost colorfully in the candlelight. It was dark, and not readily apparent against the black of your hair, thankfully. You drifted a finger across it, almost afraid to touch it, as though the surely dark energies it represents would lash out and burn your finger; it felt cold, and hollow.

	The next day, having deftly tucked it beneath your hair as you deliberated about your predicament, you briefly ran your tongue across your teeth and almost yelped in pain in front of your father. You excused yourself as blood began to trickle into your mouth, and hurried to the mirror; again, you found another fiendish trait, and you felt the noose begin to tighten around your neck. You balked at the state of your teeth; particularly those in the front had begun to sharpen, their edges having overnight grown sharp enough to rend flesh with a mere touch.

	As you prodded at them, you noticed something else—a darkness creeping over your fingers, in small and irregular ashen splotches that proceed all the way up your arm.

	The decision making process next was a blur. You found yourself more lucid as the teeth of the hacksaw began to dig into your horn, although they had dealt no serious damage yet; your hands quivered and you hesitated. Perhaps the little black obelisk that juts from your skull represented all that evil that is corrupting you, and by cutting it away, you would free yourself of further transformation… although it seemed more likely, as you halted, that you would simply be mutilating yourself.

	You spent the night pacing in your room, thinking, worrying. You swore you could feel the same darkness that stained your skin sinking into your heart, and you worried; what could this evil drive you to do? Would you become a snarling little monster of intractable rage? Would you hurt your parents because you felt ostracized or because you were angry or simply because that undefinable and intrinsic desire for evil that all fiends shared told you to?

	Would they hurt you?

	…

	The next day, you were gone. In the dead of the night, under light mist, you packed as much as you could away, whatever food you could scavenge without being caught, and you vanished. Neither a witness account nor a set of tracks left behind, even as your eyes began to shine bright and unnatural green in the dark, you darted between buildings and escaped detection with an urgent secrecy. It was a wild and dangerous decision, and the forests of this world promised only doom to a lone and inexperienced teenager, but so too did the horn that crowned your head, and so too did the judgmental gazes and hateful sneers of townfolk that you once loved.

	The path was a rainy, damp blur; you didn’t know when you could stop running, so you didn’t until your legs stopped working. The veneer of adrenaline-driven instinct was punctured only by brief and horrible moments of lucidity, ones that you desperately tried to shrug off and yet got longer and longer as you grew more tired.

	The longest of them came when you felt jaws dig into your leg, and you were suddenly face-down in the mud. Forced to remain still, your mind came around to a blinding pain as rusted metal clenched around your ankle. Deluded with the belief that someone might hear you this far out, you did your best to withhold the screams that welled up in your throat as your hands desperately scrabbled at the errant trap. At first, it was impotent flapping; you barely managed to gather the presence of mind to recall your experience with this particular make of trap, your shaky hands fiddling with the springs and slowly managing to open it, even as… disgusting, glowing green blood poured over its taut jaws.

	You reached up to start tearing at your clothes in the hope of making a makeshift bandage, but you felt something strange rolling through your hand. A sort of power had begun to gather at your fingers, subconsciously, and you drew them trembling and glowing across the wounded ankle. Beneath your touch, trailing behind the slow arc of your fingers, the deep cuts began to seal and the horrible fiendish blood stopped flowing.

	You tried to catch your breath, and you found it surprisingly easy even as the pain still wracked your ankle. You cradled your face in your hands, your breathing dipping and steadying to your whim, as you slowly dragged yourself to your feet, still a bit shaky on that foot. Scooping up your pack and slinging it over your shoulder again, you considered picking up the pace again, but were too exhausted and mentally too busied with bewildered musings about the nature of what just occurred.

	Maybe if you had healing powers, you could… still help people. The power that ran through your blood was not that of a wicked sorcerer or a scheming necromancer, but of something that could heal, repair, mend. That could be a good sign… right?

	You hoped.