"He is the Demon Sovereign's child. You must not harm him."
Seraphina's brows twisted together, and she fixed me with a look of pure contempt.
"You wretched mortal. To save this bastard, you'd tell a lie that absurd?"
"The Demon Sovereign's power is beyond measure. A mortal body could never carry his offspring."
The other maidens chimed in.
"Exactly. The Demon Sovereign's power is so immense that anyone with weak spiritual energy would be destroyed just from the union alone."
"You're a mortal. You don't even have the constitution to be with him, let alone bear his child."
"This bastard is obviously the product of some affair with a low-ranking demon guard. And you have the audacity to pass it off as the Demon Sovereign's heir? The nerve."
They weren't entirely wrong. The gap between a mortal and a demon was vast beyond reckoning.
The Demon Sovereign, above all, was a being no mortal should have been able to touch, let alone conceive a child with.
That was why he had fed me his heart's blood, day after day.
It kept me ageless and undying, and it tempered my mortal body until the barrier between us slowly dissolved.
Even so, it had taken us hundreds of thousands of years to conceive this child.