Demonchild wanders through the marsh, seeking the familiar beating of hearts beneath the heavy mediocrity of buzzing insects and dismayed fog, the stagnant stench of the brooding world which presses against his narrow shoulders and clings petulantly to dense locks of silver hair. He is growing, the brooding spawn of sunlight and smog, his mind and body twisting and bulging as it blooms into maturity, a dark labyrinth filled with shadows and flickering light.

He thinks the marsh might be beautiful, as beautiful as things are and can be. It stinks of death and glitters with decay, and as the demon walks he pushes suffocated rodents into the water, pausing until the slight plop of their bodies hitting the water recedes into the mist. What isn't there to worship in this catacomb? The fall of life, the work of nature and the gods to demolish all that had been and envelope it in the mist of shattered dreams and decrepit thoughts? This is pure, he thinks, a pure and simple sort of thing. This must be beautiful, therefore; and he stops to inhale it, closing his eyes, remembering, as he does, the salty and sweet scent of his mother, the only truly beautiful thing he knows.

He does not open his eyes as the sound of footsteps drifts to his ears, a firm and rhythmic bump, bump beneath the chirping of insects and the bubbling of restless sludge. It excites him, the recognition; it makes him tremor, and he returns to the world of vision, acute heterochromatic eyes peering into the condensed fog. The flicker of a shadow creeps through the corner of his gaze; like a snake he snaps his young head around, seeking it, condensation clinging to his mane greedily as he pursues the others who surround him. His throat catches the breath that tries to leave it, a sudden shock starting within his chest. He moves, and he is solid, a blight on this young earth beneath the bejeweled sky, heavy cloven hooves pacing the ground behind her. Could it be?

It is not, he finds, as they bloom into pictures before his eyes, not even close. She is too tall, she is too fat, she is too loud and crass. Her words are bitter daggers from an unpracticed throat, young whispers of an attempt at subtlety that crashed into vacant lots and burned in pathetic pits. A moment ago she had been beautiful, but now she was not, just a phony and a fraud indelicately careening through life on fumbling step, a bland and uninteresting fake who tried to replicate greater beings and failed. Besides, she wears the banner of a half-blood, the contemptible and false strands of equine blood dripping in a cascade from her corpulent rump. A final lie, a dark spot on a right fore, is the stone that seals her away forever from his regard. "I thought you were beautiful," he murmurs into the silence that follows her words. His youthful voice is plagued by remorse and wonder, betrayal that something so good could become something horrendous. "But you are only a lie."

The other, he does not speak to. He remembers him and knows him, this child of hell and harbinger of death, God's fallen angel and Satan's dearest spawn. The demonchild gazes at the ashen behemoth, and the liar in her malevolent cloak is forgotten and abandoned to rot beneath the weight of her own disaster. She is not important, the lie, but the corrupted scion is, and the lesser demon longs for his acknowledgement, even if it is only condescension and denial.

He wonders if his monstrous compatriot will kill the mare. He thinks he should like to see the liar die. It would be beautiful.