Angels - they're known as the protectors of the worlds, fighting for people no matter the limitations. They'll do anything at any cost. Meanwhile, demons – are destructive monsters that will attack and kill anyone and anything they see on sight. They're monsters through and through. Lady Angelica Irene, the goddess of everything herself, possessed immense knowledge and strength. Angels and demons have been around for centuries, fighting. Ire knew demons were untrustworthy. But one day, when another fight happened, a demon pinned Irene down.
"Why won't you kill me?" Ire whispered, her voice barely audible.
"Because I love you," the demon king whispered, the air around them growing heavy.
Irene was skeptical. But when Daemon, the demon king, requested her hand in marriage, she couldn't refuse. Others criticized their marriage. However, their disapproval did not stop their affection for each other. Irene shrugged off their skepticism.
What would Daemon do? Ire's stronger than a demon like him, right?
The sky opened like a question.
Stars thinned into a silver hush over the high ridge where Irene landed, feathers whispering against the chill air. The moon was a pale coin, indifferent. Below, the valley smelled of cold blood and distant smoke; above, the constellations burned with a clarity she had never learned to take for granted.
For a goddess, for a protector of the worlds, Irene felt rather small, as if every breath might betray the secret lodged inside her chest.
Daemon's boots left prints in the frost as he caught up to her. He moved differently from the others—demon grace folded into human restraint—so that even when he smiled, the world held instantly its breath.
Crimson eyes softened, the ridged planes of his face relaxing. He smelled of iron and autumn rot, the scent of something dangerous domesticated into a warmth he kept for her alone.
"Are we meant to be?" Ire asked. Her wings fluttered, a physical manifestation of her inner turmoil. A crushing wave of uncertainty washed over her, a sensation she'd never felt before. At that moment, her heart felt as if it had shattered into a million pieces.
Daemon drew near until the hush of his breath brushed her ear. "We are," he said. "I love you."
She should have been afraid. The angels and the concessions made to peace across the bridges of treaty and treaty-breaker taught her fear by law. Yet on this ridge, with the stars leaning closer as if to listen, Irene felt the old certainties unhook like loose armor.
"You know what they will say," she whispered, her voice trembles with each word.
He knew, and yet he still held her closely. "Then let them say it..."
A roar broke from the woods—shouts, arguments, and the metallic clatter of armor. Their hiding had been poor from the start; the world did not so easily forget a goddess of everything and the demon king who had taken her hand. Figures spilled up the slope: pale wings catching the starlight, black cloaks glinting with sigils, voices braided into accusation.
"Lady Angelica Irene," called a magistrate, voice cracked with righteous shock. "You violate the covenant...?"
"King Daemon," another practically spitted, disgust as ever.
Irene watched them, the faces she had once trusted, and felt a slow, comet‑bright ache that was almost prophecy. When the first spear was raised, it was not the demon king they met but the old rules.
Old rules always found a way to bleed into new ones.
Daemon lowered his head, a small, private defiance. "Leave her be," he snapped. "She is mine."
They did not arrest them that night. Perhaps the elders feared the spectacle of capturing a goddess; perhaps Daemon's name still held weight in the courts of certain demons. Instead, the crowd dispersed under a rain of muttered prophecies and broken blessings. They returned to their altars and their gossip, leaving the ridge for the two who had dared to answer the same forbidden question.
They did not return home.
Irene had a kingdom that smelled of rosemary and old justice and the soft leather of treaties. Daemon had a citadel that smelled of blood-forged iron and spices no breezes ought to carry.
They went instead to a hollow at the river's bend where the lilies leaned like sleeping hands and the water moved like an edited history, carrying only what you allowed it to keep. There, with a blanket between them and the cold earth, they found a brittle domesticity: shared bread, a lullaby the demon king hummed in a tongue that never reached the market square, a hand pressed against joints that had once held war.
"Do you think," Irene asks when the constellations had burned through their last willingness to be beautiful, "that the others know something I do not? That when they hiss and insult us, it is warning and not whim?"
Daemon watched her. He had wanted to tell her everything once-political marriages, the ache of court ambition, the carved sigil at his wrist that would one day demand a sacrifice... He had wanted to tell her that love, in his world, was often a treaty written in blood. It was manipulated.
It was abused.
Instead, he traced a finger down the line of her cheek and let the silence be his answer.
No, she thought to the dark and to herself, because to think otherwise was to invite the shrapnel of doubt into the soft place where her loyalty grew. No. He would not throw me away.
Yet the question nested in the marrow: what was a demon's love if not a weapon sharpened by necessity? Irene had been forged by light and law; she knew how to measure wounds by the way they bled. Trust was an act of violence she'd only ever committed with her wings folded shut.
They married in defiance and in a chapel that smelled faintly of salt and scorched wood. Their vows were a scandal printed in every tongue across every planet and universe. Theirs was a union bound not by orthodox blessing, but by a hunger so quiet and irrepressible it resembled faith. For a while, the world seemed to forget to punish them, and a few had illicit love for themselves. For a while, the children grew...
Allisiario Dame Daemon came first, a shade of his father with too much of his mother's stubbornness and arrogance. Black hair cut like a blade that covered an eye, but eyes the color of bruised plums—purple that glowed when anger or curiosity engulfed him. He was small in the body but loud in the kind of way that unsettled angels and demons alike. Ellinaskariya Aangell Irene came second, a faultless mirror of Irene's whiteness, hair like unspooled light edged in gold, and eyes like polished coin. She moved as if air belonged to her by default; she loved the rules enough to use them as weapons.
The twins wore necklaces Ire gave, one of pure white and gold, the other, shadowed by their father's sinister thoughts. One holds the power of life, while the other holds death and destruction. One holds the chain, the other, the key.
They were a family stitched together from contradictions. Where one child took after the mother—measured, considerate, quick to forgive—one held to the father's ferocity, to a propensity for mischief that left feathers and scorch marks in equal measure.
The valley where they lived was a polite thing, a place where politics retired to breed grudges. Children ran beneath stone arches, and sometimes the markets sizzled with demon spices or angelic incense.
But where the twins walked, stares hardened like ice and laughter fell into careful practice. Rumors were creatures more dangerous than any armies combined.
On a humid afternoon that smelled faintly of tar and hot metal, Irene called to Allis from the courtyard of their estate. He stood with one hand on the katana at his hip, his expression practiced into bored disdain like always.
"Allis," Irene called, voice a bell that never lost its authority even when private grief threatened her. "Tell your sister to come home now."
"Yeah, yeah, mother. Don't suffocate too soon," he muttered, the coldness in his voice echoes through the yard. He then left as if the entire world was a performance he'd seen too many times.
"Where is she?" he turned back to ask.
"Ellina's with the other angels." Ire answered with a smile, ushering her son out of the training fields. She wants her son to have a life too, not in hiding from rumors, but with pride for the family.
Allis mutters under his breath, already done with life. He walks through the hills and valleys, acknowledging the other angels and demons. The wars have stopped for now, but the conflict and pain still lingers. The two species still hate each other's guts, but a few now had illicit love, like Daemon and Ire.
"Ellina!" he called, because siblings that bicker do so to prove the world knows where to place blame. "Time to go home now."
Ellina smiled in a way that sharpened into mayhem. "Took you long enough... twin," she said. Her tone was gentle and thorned; a weapon disguised as a sweet lullaby.
"Anyway, what took you so long?" Ellina asks sarcastically, a hint of mischief in her eyes.
Allis waves dismissively, rolling his eyes as he answers, "Mother again… Got a problem?"
Ellina's smile widens, clearly fake, her expression darkening will malice.
"Yeah, I've got a problem… It's you."
They squared off like two storms that had chosen the same sky. Feather caught leather. Katana gleamed. The clouds over the mountains darkened, not from thunder but from the weight of ancestral disappointment.
"Is that a demon?" someone breathed.
"No way… he's Ellina's brother?" another angel said, delighted and terrified to be in the presence of scandal.
"Woah, what a dynamic," an older youth said, and the word dynamic was a knife gilded in pink envy.
"You really think you can beat me?" Ellina taunted, and Allis drew his blade in a way that made the air around them sing.
The twins stare at each other, the tension rising each second. Fascinated, Ellina's friends backed away, whispering about the dynamics because an angel and demon were related, and that's not something you see every day.
"How are they even twins? They're complete opposites!" a younger angel shouts, his curiosity getting the batter of him.
"I've never seen anything like this…" Another angel – a kid breathed, her mother quickly taking her by the hand, sensing the tension.
"He's kind of... hot." A teenaged angel says, her cheeks burned a deep pink.
Allis crosses his arms; Ellina mimics him. The clouds darken, as if responding to the twins' emotions. The twins have been known to squabble, they never got along.
And they never will...
"Why did you come here?" Ellina growls, her voice dangerously low.
"I didn't want to. Not like you have anything kind to say…" Allis answers, holding his ground firm.
Ellina's wings unfold, her feathers sharpening, her eyes showing murderous intent. Allis shows no fear, only rolling his eyes again at his sister's attempt.
"You really think you can beat me?" she asks again.
"Try me." Allis barks back.
Allis's eyes narrow as he draws his katana again, meanwhile, Ellina sharpens her feathers further.
The sound of their fight was a private thing until their father appeared, his silhouette enormous and enraged. Daemon's eyes were coals; his presence was literal hell, but it held restrained. He advanced without the ceremonial pageantry demons used for war. He advanced as a father.
Ellina smirks, crossing her arms as she adds, "Plus, I know I'm-"
"What did I say? No fighting!" Daemon roared, and where his voice carried, feathers stilled, and laughter fled immediately.
They froze. The yard held its breath. Even the market hawkers paused mid-argue, because Daemon's temper was a thing you respected with the immediate compliance of survival.
Allis pointed at Ellina. Ellina pointed at Allis. The old trope of twins or siblings—the blame game.
"You're going believe her?! She-" Allis started.
"Stop," Daemon said with controlled calmness, raising his hand as a gesture. He stepped between them, palms soft yet strong. The air around him shimmered, the heat of his blood making the frost along the garden path steam. "You two are in serious trouble when we get home."
The twins grumbled, but obeyed a man who had once commanded troops and courted entire empires into bending the knee. There was a terror in obedience that looked a lot like respect.
Inside, the house hummed with the banalities of dinner and the clink of dishes and the children's small rebellions. They ate, they bickered, they told lies small enough to pass as family legend. Outside, the valley whispered and plotted. Inside, the family held together like a seam stitched in haste.