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The creature who now called himself Szeethe gazed down at the drained body of his father. What a pathetic weakling, it was a pity he had not been allowed to commit this act of murder earlier! Yet, his master Mahizor, the high priest of the Cult of the Grey God, had held him back for years, forcing him to bide his time. Only when the time was right would the death of Miruthlak be allowed. So he patiently waited, doing the bidding of his secrete master while at the same time, running the useless errands of his impotent father.

A cold hiss escaped the half-demon's lips and he spat in his father's lifeless face once more before drawing a small brass whistle and blowing three clear notes through it. Almost immediately he was joined by a dozen small, skittering were-rats, his elder brothers. They rushed over to the body and lifted it, stuffing it irreverently into a canvass sack.

Szeethe took the tallest of the were-rats by the shoulder. "Take him to the pressing room, Grozol my brother," he said, "This one is to be squeezed for all he is worth."

The were-rat nodded and, chattering to his kindred in their own special language, guided the group and their prize into an adjacent building in the tannery complex. There, the demon's body would be drained of every last ounce of blood before his crushed body would be fed to the creature in the black pool on the other side of the city. Szeethe watched as they left, satisfied he had such a large pool of relatives from which to draw simple minions. It was so easy to keep things like this in the family.

Szeethe was the product of a most unholy union, that of a demonic father and a were-rat mother. As such he was truly one of a kind, for nowhere in the history of Crown was it recorded such a union before. Szeethe was a dark creation bred for a single purpose: bring about a second Demon Scourge. For years he had been reared in dark passageways among the demonic brethren who survived the squashing of the original scourge, trained wicked arts, infused with some of the most base of powers. Added to that, his mind was altered and enhanced, removing the simple intellect of his were-rat mother.

When he was old enough, he was sent to be trained in the ways of the Shadow Walkers, a secret society of wizards who had brought about, quite by accident, the Demon Scourge only a few years earlier. Most of the Walkers had been killed during the scourge and the purges that followed. Many of them died at the hands of the ethereans who led the victory against the demons, many more had been killed by the vengeful Crown Watch, which had suffered many losses against the demonic hordes early in the war.

Officially they were dead, and indeed most were. Those few left continued their dark search for the arcane knowledge that had led them to conjure up the first balor. They continued their work in secrecy these days, unable to move about in society anymore, relying on clandestine meetings to further their goals. Yet their plans were all for naught.

Szeethe knew, with some satisfaction, that a birth like his would never happen again. For one reason, his mother had died in the process, leaving behind quite a brood of young were-rats who were left on the streets to die. For another reason, Jurchan, the Saruulan Shadow Walker who alone in Crown possessed the arcane knowledge of cross-breeding the demon to the were-rat, was Szeethe's first victim, his blood being the first sacrifice offered to the Cult of the Grey God. To that blood would now be added the sanguine essence of Wythlin the sailor and Miruthlak, father of Szeethe. In time, there would be much, much more...

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