“You watered it with hope, didn’t you?” said a voice behind him.
His sister, Robin, already had her satchel full. She was halfway through harvesting mockingpods and grudge-corn, her horns tied back with a ribbon of practical twine. Her smirk never faded, not even when the brambles bit.
“It’s three parts liquefied schadenfreude, one part ennui,” she said matter-of-factly. “In a silver pail. You know that.”
“Hope’s not a fertilizer. It’s a weed.”
He scowled. “Why do we even grow something called Taste of Victory if it feeds on failure?”
“Because that’s what victory tastes like,” she said, plucking a pride-beet from the dirt. “Someone else loses. You win. That’s the flavor.” He hurled the rotten fruit against the shed. It splattered with a puff of lemony bitterness and a sound like an apologetic sigh.
Their family’s plot wasn’t an infernal palace. Just rows of twitching vines, whispering weeds, and potatoes, just regular potatoes (everyone likes potatoes), tended by their father Purk and mother Grelza, farm demons through and through.
They grew what the underrealms needed:
- Shriekfruit, which wailed louder the closer it got to ripeness.
- Spiteberries, which turned sour when picked by someone in a good mood.
- Graphewrath—their version of grapefruit—so acidic it could melt a mortal’s throat before the peel even hit the ground.
- Ego corn, which grew taller if you complimented it regularly.
- And, of course, Mockingpods, which repeated your insecurities at double volume when stepped on.
They were proud of it. The Brimsting name had tilled cursed soil since before the Great Sealing.
Tucker hated every inch.
While his parents fretted over black mold blight and how best to prune the shrieking thornberries, he was dreaming bigger. Lies. That was his gift. Not fire. Not strength. Not shadowcraft. Lies. The good kind, the kind you don’t realize are lies until you’ve told them yourself. The kind that reproduce, infect, take root in a culture, a system, a kingdom.
Even in his tiny demon schoolhouse, built from manifested charred regrets and asbestos snakes, he was the best liar in class. He could convince you that you wanted to fail, that failing was fashionable, and that he'd be happy to accept your test score on your behalf.
By the time he was barely half a fang tall, he’d made his choice. He wasn’t going to rot in some burning field, waiting for his turn to inherit Shriekfruit Acreage. No. He was going to be important.
He dreamed of a lava-lakefront villa. Of walking into the Ashborn Dominion and owning it. And why not? Its previous ruler had abandoned it anyway; rumor said he’d left to run a demon-themed café in the mortal realm. Fine. Good. Tucker would take everything he’d left behind.
There was just one small problem: No one cared about Tucker. He was first-level. Low. A peon. Not worthy of a summons. Not powerful enough to break through.
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That night at the dinner slab, Tucker pushed a chunk of despairberry-glazed hellboar around his plate with a spoon, ignoring the steamed sorrowgrass and roasted thorn tubers beside it. The meat was tough, gamey, and just a little smug. Hellboar always was. Its grin hadn’t quite cooked off. “We’re thinking of letting you manage the south field this season,” Purk said proudly. “It’s an honor, son. You’ve got your mother’s soil instincts.”
“And Robin’s already offered to take over the storage enchantments,” Grelza added. “You two work together, this farm could thrive for centuries.” Robin said nothing. She chewed her meal slowly, calmly, like someone at peace with her place. Tucker finally spoke.
“I don’t want to dig holes. I want to give speeches.” Silence. Even the stew stopped bubbling.
“That’s not a job,” Purk said. “That’s a phase.”
“You want to impress people?” Robin said gently. “Try impressing yourself first. Maybe plant something on time.”
He stood. His claws clenched.
“You’re all content being small. That’s not my curse. That’s yours.”
Purk sighed. “So what then, son? You want to go to one of the big cities? Work for a soul repo firm or a grimare printer? Oh gods, not a telemarketer!?”
“No. You’re thinking too small.”
“I want to go to the mortal realm. I want to gain power. Influence. I want to be the demon who breaks the lock to the Second Circle!”
He declared it with such passion and pride he expected awe. What he got was laughter.
“Oh sure,” Robin wheezed, pounding the table, “You’ll be the next Foxmonger! Demon of lies!”
“I could!” Tucker snapped. “I got the highest lying scores in school history!”
“Geisty…” Grelza said with soft sympathy, “It’s just… it’s a small school. Only a few dozen students a year.”
“Lying’s a dumb subject,” Purk added. “Should’ve been removed centuries ago. But nooo, demons and our slow-to-change traditions…” He rolled his eyes. “Why go to the mortal realm anyway? There’s nothing there you can’t get here. And it could take centuries to buy a ticket.”
“I want to rule,” Tucker said. “To conquer. The way demons did in the old days.”
Purk threw his face into his hands. “So you want the days when we subjugated humans, treated them so badly they called the gods down and locked us out of their realm? Really?”
“It’s romantic, Dad.”
“It’s horrible, son. No. Stick to farming. It’s good honest work.” The word honest stuck in Tucker’s craw like a fishhook made of shame.
That night, under a sky of fidgeting stars and oddly combustable bats, Tucker lay on the roof and practiced what would one day become his craft. He wasn’t lying. Not exactly.
“It’s not a lie,” he whispered to the wind. “It’s what they want to believe. That’s not evil. That’s… considerate.”
The thing was, Tucker was brilliant, not in brute strength or fire-casting, but in navigating the murky, unsupervised waters between misinformation and disinformation.
Disinformation was just lying, everyone did that, from demons and humans to gods and goblins. Misinformation? That was honest ignorance. That’s why people still thought you only use ten percent of your brain, or that garlic repelled cursed accountants.
But the sweet spot, the true art, was this:
When you knew your source wasn’t reliable... but it told you what you wanted to hear so you repeated it anyway. Because it felt good. Because it made you feel right. So the questions was, if I don’t KNOW it’s a lie, per say, but I have no reason to believe it, or reason to doubt it and I don’t bother to look into it, am I at fault? Many would say no. And that’s where it began, the rot. Not with a grand curse or a smoking crater. But with a choice to not check. To look the other way. To share a phrase without asking if it was ever true. And in that pinprick, so small you could forget it, a soul began to spoil.
He smiled. And the wind didn’t answer. So he told his story. Then he told it again. And again. And slowly, he started believing it himself.
The years passed. His dad was right about one thing. it would take a very long time to earn enough coin to get to the mortal realm. In the meantime, he made plans. Backup plans. Contingency plans. Plans within lies within contingencies.
And when the day finally came, when a mistake randomly cracked open a door, he stepped through it, and he knew exactly what to do.