The wizard whispered a strange, ancient spell spoken once so very long, long ago. The red flames of the demon-king’s eyes dimmed, and the wild curses spewing from his parsed lips died away into silence. He clutched at his throat, chocking, it seemed, and slowly descended from the height he’d been levitating at.
Other differences too, began. His horns fell off. The thin skin, which had been stretched tight around his skull, swelled. His boney hands seemed to be inflating.
Gagging, he cried, “What…what have you done to me?”
“A curse,” said the wizard, “and a gift.”
“What’s happening?” he moaned. “I feel…I feel…”
“Pain,” the wizard explained. “That’s called pain.”
The transformation was near complete: crouched there moaning upon the floor was not the dreadful, undying monster from the mountain, but a young, cowering man, shivering, feeling the cold for the first time in the long, uncounted eons since disharmony had awakened him.
His eyes, once literal fire, looked up at the wizard, a dark and lovely blue.
“I’m blind,” said the new man.
“Only as blind as a man. This is all they can see.”
“They see nothing. You were a white hot flame. Now, you’re but a withered, old man.”
The wizard smiled.
“Look,” he commanded. “Look there in the valley.”
The once demon-king turned his head. Below, the lazy, winding river glistened like gold under a falling sun, and the distant villages along its coasts glowed softly against the coming night.
“What…?”
“It’s called beauty,” explained the wizard softly. He saw that the man’s teeth were chattering. “Here,” he said, and taking off his cloak laid it over the shoulders of the quivering flesh below whose eyes were locked upon the many colors of the dying sun.
The wizard went on: “There’s cold, but there’s also warmth. We knew neither. There’s pain, but here’s comfort. That grumbling coming from inside you is called hunger, but you’ll find there’s also food.”
“Food…” he’d remembered the word, vaguely. He had kept prisoners in his mountain once. They kept begging for it. Then they died.
“I’ll die,” he gasped at the realization.
“Yes,” said the wizard. “We’ll die. But now, you might also live.”
Tale Told 