Incitata, Demon Fan - Part 1

As a child, Incitata was fascinated by stories of ghosts and demons. Every night they would visit her in her dreams. She was just a farm girl from a rural village. Other kids and her family found her interest strange and terrifying. She didn’t have many friends growing up. Her family didn’t let her sleep in the house because sometimes she would scream in her sleep or speak in strange voices.

Her only friend was a baby boar with crimson fur that she met in the woods one day. Its mother had recently been killed by hunters from the village. She liked its horns. And for some reason, it didn’t try to run or maul her. She began feeding it and it followed her everywhere. She named it Diablo. The name just came to her, she didn’t know if it meant anything.

As Incitata grew, so did her fascination. She began to obsess over the different kinds of ghouls and devils and dreamed of meeting a real one to befriend and communicate with. She had never had a friend who could talk back to her in words. One day a strange man came to her village looking for supplies. She heard the other villagers calling him a “diabolist”. They were terrified of him and formed a militia to run him out of town, but Incitata knew that she had to follow him.

Incitata was a teenager now. She had grown very good at hiding and sneaking in the woods because the other kids liked to hunt her and throw mud at her for being weird, or sometimes even beat her up. She gathered up all the food that she had and followed the man for days, with Diablo at her side. He would perform strange rituals at night and often shouted words that made no sense.

Incitata was curious, but she wasn’t dumb. She could tell that this man had been driven mad. Also, it’s not a good idea for teenage girls to approach strange men in the woods, because, duh. So Incitata kept following him in secret. It wasn’t hard, he always seemed distracted by things that weren’t there. When she slept at night her dreams told her that she was getting closer to what she wanted.

Soon after, the man reached an old crypt. He conducted an elaborate ritual and gathered all his equipment to venture inside. A day passed at the man did not emerge. Incitata wondered if she should follow him inside, but she was just a girl. She didn’t know how to fight or even have a torch to light the way inside.

At last, the man emerged. His clothes were torn and he was covered in blood, but he was dragging a large chest. As soon as he got a safe distance away from the crypt, he collapsed, exhausted.

Incitata was pretty sure that he wasn’t much of a threat anymore, so she decided to get closer and scope him out. The man himself didn’t have much on him, but she noticed that the lock on the chest had been broken.

She slowly opened the lid. Inside the chest was a thick book full of stories and a steel helmet which gave off an ominous vibe. Incitata loved it. She immediately placed the helmet on her head and it pulsed with demonic energy.

“Sooo cool,” she thought and pumped a fist. It was a bit big for her skull, but she had a wild mop of hair, so it fit well enough.

She looked at the strange man. He lay unconscious and helpless. Incitata needed a better bag to carry her new dress and book, so she stole his and slung it across Diablo’s back with her new loot inside.

“Kill him” rang a voice in her head.

Incitata was a bit taken aback. She looked at the man sprawled on the ground. She totally could kill him, just use the helmet to bash his skull. But, she didn’t see the point of that. She was into demons and stuff, but she didn’t want to hurt people for no reason. So, she just left him there, took all the food and water from his camp that she and Diablo could carry and decided to get far away.

The next time she stopped for a rest, she opened the book. Its cover was leather bound and covered in all kinds of strange symbols and imagery. Its pages were full of even more, but Incitata had never learned how to read. It was beautiful. She knew that she had to decipher the stories and mysteries of the book.

“Guess I gotta learn to read,” she thought, and decided to find the closest town to start. As she walked through the wilderness towards signs of civilization thought about a plan. She knew people usually learned to read from teachers. So, she had to find one of those. But she also knew that teachers cost money, and she didn’t have any of that. She didn’t get paid for any of the work her family made her do on the farm.

Finally, Incitata found a road and decided to follow it. It wasn’t long before she encountered some other people - a trio of three nasty-looking men. They eyed the young girl with her oversized helmet and sack of items. Diablo snorted at them. It was clear that these guys had ill intentions.

They surrounded Incitata and Diablo, brandishing crude weapons.

“Hand it over kid and we might let you go untouched,” one of them sneered.

Incitata wasn’t much afraid, her life didn’t mean much to her in a sense. But, her assortment of cursed goods was her life now. She wouldn’t hand it over. She put up her fists. The men cackled. Incitata felt anger boil inside of her and then erupt.

“WHATS SO FUCKING FUNNY YOU PATHETIC DIRT DICKS?” boomed a monstrous voice. It was coming from the helmet.

The men all backed up in shock and fear. One of them fell over. Another turned and began to scramble away, but ran straight into his companion’s blade which lodged itself in his gut. The man holding the blade let go and ran off into the wilderness with his companion close behind.

Incitata stood by, unsure of what just happened, while Diablo began slurping the wounded brigand’s blood off the ground.

“I crave terror. Help me cause it, and I will help you. Now please, place me on that man’s head so I can relish in his dying moments,” the helmet telepathed to Incitata.

Incitata did as the helmet asked, after all, it had just saved her. As she placed the helmet on the man's head he began shrieking in agony. Diablo became more animated and started digging into the man’s organs until the screaming stopped.

At the end of it all, Incitata picked the area and the man’s corpse clean of anything valuable - two daggers, a few coins, a pair of boots, and a belt. It wasn’t much, but maybe enough for a reading lesson. She put her helmet back on and strode off for the nearest town.

When she reached town, Incitata was able to sell her items to another unsavory character who didn’t ask why it was all covered in blood. She inquired about reading lessons. There were no teachers in this backwater town, but she did learn about something called a library where they had a lot of books like hers. Maybe she could learn to read there. So she strode off for the closest town with a library.

Along the way, she passed a merchant’s wagon carrying an assortment of goods. The man driving the wagon waved at her and she waved back, but then the helmet erupted in all kinds of unholy blasphemy and frequencies from untold dimensions which whipped the man’s horses into a panic. He tried to calm them, but they were mad beyond reason and in his attempt, he fell from the wagon and became trampled to death.

Incitata felt bad about this. That man had seemed nice. The helmet sensed her unease. “You’ll need to sell more things to buy reading lessons,” it told her.

“Yeah, but I won’t get to do any reading if they lock me in a dungeon or hang me as a witch. Just scare them. Don’t kill anybody or I’ll throw you in a lake”

“But, I crave death.”

“Once a year I’ll let you kill someone if you just agree to tone it down. I only want to kill people who deserve it. Anyway, we don’t want to attract too much attention or the townspeople will destroy us both.”

The demonic helmet found this agreeable and with that in mind Incitata figured she might as well make the best of the situation so she loaded the merchant into the back of his wagon and turned it around towards the nearest town. When she arrived there she told the people in the market that she had found the merchant already dead and he must have fallen during his journey.

The other merchants thought it sounded strange, but Incitata was just a small girl without any weapons, so they believed in her innocence and gave her a good price for recovering all of the goods. It was enough to begin her studies.

Incitata found the library and a reading teacher, its librarian. She paid upfront for reading lessons and arranged to sleep in the library’s attic in exchange for cleaning and keeping it tidy after her lessons. She was a quick study and soon words began to make sense to her. But, the librarian was an unenthusiastic teacher and was often hungover. He was only in for the money.

And the book from the crypt was different somehow, she still couldn’t make sense of it. One day she decided to bring it to her lesson and ask her teacher to help her read it. The librarian thumbed through a few pages, then abruptly went pale as a ghost, closed the book, and told Incitata she needed to leave, forever, and that her lessons were finished.

Incitata was upset, she still had months more of lessons that were agreed upon. But, the librarian was unrepentant. He began shouting at her.

“SILENCE YOU PISS FUCKER,” interjected the helmet in a voice from the depths of the seventh realm.

The librarian was an old man. He became even paler and clutched at his chest before staggering about the library as if drunk. At last he crashed into a book shelf and lay there motionless.

“What the hell!” Shouted Incitata.

“Oops, sorry, not my fault he’s an old sack of shit. But honestly, I didn’t mean to kill him, my bad. Hey look on the bright side, now you can take back what you paid him for lessons and find somewhere else to study where they’re a little more open minded!”

Incitata sighed. The librarian had a gambling and drinking problem so there wasn’t much left of her study fees, but Incitata did load up on rare books she could keep practicing her reading with and sell when she didn’t need them anymore.

She packed up her bags, waited until dark, and for good measure, decided to set the library on fire to cover her tracks. Maybe the people there would think it was all some big accident and she died too. And with that, she set off to find someone who could help her read her book.

Entered by: 0xecfe…D269