“Then the White Snowfield, the Demon Realms… What are they, exactly?” Ketal asked the Holy Sword.0

“The places you call the Demon Realms, the region you name the White Snowfield… The creatures there were born in a remote past, first to appear in a universe of chaos and the first to rule it. They are older than the gods and older than the demons. The Demon Realms are prisons where they were confined after losing the war.”1

“Hmm...” Ketal stroked his chin. Outwardly, he showed little change, yet the words struck deep. He pictured a time when there were no planets, no seas, no light, only a black age without structure. To think that life had arisen in that darkness, and that he had lived in the same place as such beings, was an idea that even he had not fully grasped.0

So that is why the rat kept calling me a child, he thought. To something that had endured since those days, he would indeed be little more than an infant.0

“Did they feel very alien to you when you looked at them? I imagine they did not obey the ordinary rules of living things,” the sword asked him.0

“They did not,” he said. “Take the rat as the simplest example. A body that rotten should not be able to function at all. Decay is death. Yet it moved as if nothing were wrong, and the stench...0