So he walked for several days, taking his time, singing his songs and humming his tunes, at peace with the wasteland around him. He passed through stretches of ruined earth, decimated forests, blackened hills, and scorched grasslands, and he was pleased.
This was what he had worked so hard for, what all those who had shed their humanity had sought—a landscape devoid of living things, barren and blasted, empty of nature’s troublesome creatures. He could control this sort of world, and control was paramount to his reworked personality. Control was power, and power was sustenance. All the things he had once thought so important—things he could no longer even remember in the specific, but only in the general—had been left by the wayside in favor of the one absolute—power over life and death.
Had he stopped to think it through, he might have asked himself what his world would be like if he and those like him were the only creatures living in it. But such speculations seemed counterproductive to his purpose.
The words to a new tune came unbidden:
Ragpicker, ragpicker, walking through the land.
Make yourself a wish as quick as you can.
Ahead there’s a valley where the children play.
But your demon’s fire can sweep them away.
He frowned. It wasn’t very good, really. Children were of no interest to him. To other demons, yes, those whose lives were dedicated to making human children into a more interesting species. But those demons were gone, swept away in the apocalypse of five centuries earlier. So much had been lost in that time. Demons of all forms, their followers and armies, everything they had been on the verge of achieving. Still, it was never too late to start anew. That was what he told himself every day, and every day he found reason to believe it. Humans were still possessed of the same weaknesses that had brought about their destruction in the old days. Theirs was a race destined to be short-lived. They would find new ways to destroy themselves or to enable the demons and their servants to destroy them. It was inevitable. They just didn’t know it.
He wondered how many were living in the valley the girl had come from. He wondered how many more valleys hid similar enclaves. He hoped there were more than a few. He didn’t want to end this hunt until his appetite was sated. Surely, there were more bearers of the black staff. Surely there were other talismans and forms of magic to be found and claimed. It was a big world, and you couldn’t expect to find everything right away. Not even he could do that.
It took him three days to locate the nearest pass after climbing into the mountains, an undertaking at which he did not work overly hard, acknowledging the limitations of his human body, the ragpicker’s body of which he had grown quite fond. He still bore his bundle of rags on his back, a burden he was happy to carry. His trophies, the reminders of his conquests, still meant something to him. He liked to take them out at night when he was alone and look through them, matching each to his memory of its previous owner, remembering who that owner had been and how he or she had died. At my hands, the demon always added silently. Al of them, at my hands. Isn’t that marvelous?
Once, during his ascent, he encountered one of the agenahls, a huge tank of a beast lumbering along just above him in the rocks. It spied him quickly enough and swung toward him, sensing the possibility of a quick meal. But then it caught his scent, identified what he was, and backed away quickly. The demon let it go. He appreciated the fact that animals were often much smarter than humans, and he thought that one day they might fill in the gap that would be left when the last of the humans were gone.
He reached the pass leading into the valley shortly before sunset on the third day of searching, when night’s gloom was settling in and its shadows were lengthening. He saw the remains of Trolls scattered about outside the pass and then again in the pass itself, the latter mixed with the bodies of humans. The scavengers had gotten to some of them, but not all. Four-footed scavengers were wary of confined spaces like this one, and preferred to do their hunting elsewhere. Mostly, it was the predatory birds that had begun to pick the bodies apart, and these were already gone for the day when he arrived.