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Signed with a Rose’s Thorn
by Donna J. W. Munro

Nora bent over the contract, eyes passing over each line with the keen eye of a legal maestro. She ought to be after so many thousands of years in the employ of the Prince of Darkness.

“Flawless,” she said, having just found the last of the ensorcelled conditions that wrapped around the lettering of the obvious rewards and costs of the whole world.

Human eyes are nearly as weak as Human hearts.

Why did this pissant demon duke think she needed to be a part of this next wave of hell unleashed? By now, humans practically lined up to sell their souls in the name of flashy men selling hate and the machines they made to enforce their will.

“Am I free to duplicate it?”

Nora nodded and flicked her fingers, an assent as much as a dismissal. The demon scribes would bleed themselves dry making enough soul contracts for this current madman and his retinue.

It never mattered that it had happened before or how it had turned out.

It never mattered that people suffered, unless it was suffering close to their own skin. Friends. Family.

And it always came down to that didn’t it? Enough suffering for the whole world when the demons opened their veins and poured out promises of greatness, of being better than, “them,” of owning the other in the modern parlance.

She watched the duke demon gathering the drying contracts and assigning them to groups of demon bureaucrats who would create the cascading chain of domination. This group for the wealthy shady figures funding the coup. This pile to the religious figures more interested in influence than piety. This pile to the faithful of one ideology serving in government. And then came the followers. Masses of them. Too many even for the dukes and bureaucrats to distribute, but when the master took human form in a skin they’d love, when he shouted out the words of hate and promises of in group vengeance, the humans would cheerfully flock to stand at his side. There would be no need for individual distribution. The foolish living would line up to sign on the dotted line for their beloved leader.

It had happened so many times before.

Nora sighed and pulled out the prickly chair behind her burning desk, sinking into the comfort her own punishment. She’s hurt so many in her own life serving beings of power and wealth. She’d hidden the crimes of others in pretty words, falsified numbers, and legal jargon. As her skin boiled off, she knew she deserved every second of pain her office furniture meted out.

There’s always a loophole for eyes that know how to see it.

She’d used loopholes so many times in her life to get the monsters of the world out of trouble, to keep them in power, to bend justice to her master’s will.

Her ability for find such an out was a gift that the powerful paid buckets of gold for.

Gold had done her little good when she’d shivered naked before the Master’s soulless, black gaze. She’d paid for her cleverness, gladly, because she’d spotted the loophole right away.

The Other, not Master, worked against what the dukes and the other demons did. Blind to the nasty bindings and sub-clauses of each demonic coup, the Others sent courageous fighters, inspired souls to suffer, and weapons as fragile as the breath of butterflies that puffed out through the gaps in burnt flesh and shattered bone. Fragile but as strong as the insistent wind that pushes a ship from port to port.

She found her loophole in the introduction of the breath between the iron clad words the Master made her write in each contract. A salvation clause hidden in the promise of eternal torture for temporary power. A way for the other to loosen a soul here and there from the grip of the perverters.

She’d take the thorns she’d plucked from the backs of victims of the last incursion, the roses that crested from each pore of the architects of the crematoriums that ripped through the stripped back muscles of the propagandists and the Commandants, that pressed into the eye orbs of the New Order followers and the profiteers who served as a guards to the monster they’d followed, powerful voice ragged from screaming in his eternal burning, bleeding, tearing punishment.

The thorns that grew held a drop of justice in them. A tear from the Creator over the beauty and cruelty wrapped up in the world they’d made now perverted by the Master’s exploitation of human greed and hatred.

Once stolen, Nora presses the thorns into her burning skin, rupturing her veins to write a screed for the Other. In the indents of horror, she outlines with hope. The weakness of the one who comes written in each of the contracts. The direction to blow the wind of salvation to catch those raising their sails.

Hope is the rose that tops the ripping thorns.

She bleeds out each day, making two-sided contracts. She sends them off knowing the loophole expands. It burns inside with a cooling flame. It soothes as her blood refills and her muscles reform only to burn again and again. Hope is a loophole and someday, hope will be big enough to blow her away from her Master along with all the others she’d saved.

More from author Donna J. W. Munro:

Revelation: Poppet Cycle Book One

In a dark future, people with money live in doomed cities and use the recently deceased as
repurposed servants and workers called poppets. Ellie DesLoge is the teen heiress of the
company that makes and distributes poppets–your basic reprogrammed flesh robot complete
with training chips and kill switches. If Ellie does everything her Aunt Cordelia says, she’ll have a
life of wealth and power. If she chooses to be what is planned for her, life will be perfect.
Everything she ever dreamed. But something about her sweet poppet Thom goes against what
Aunt Cordelia and tradition have taught her. Will she choose to believe what everyone knows is
true or will she follow what her heart tells her about Thom? Her choice will change the world.

Available on Amazon!