The growing conflict on Isla Isabela did not go unnoticed.
While humans debated policy...
While vampires enforced blood inspections...
While the Seakh continued crossing the boundaries between worlds...
Another civilization watched in silence.
One far older than humanity itself.
The Devils.
Unlike the races that inhabited the material world, the Devils did not concern themselves with human governments, kingdoms, or civilizations. They neither desired worship nor recognition. Humanity occupied no meaningful place within their thoughts.
To them, mankind was not magnificent.
Nor was it evil.
It was simply... disappointing.
Short-lived creatures driven by greed, fear, vanity, and endless contradiction. A race capable of creating beauty only to destroy it moments later. A species convinced of its own importance despite existing for the briefest instant in cosmic history.
For this reason, Devils almost never interacted with humanity.
They preferred distance.
Silence.
Indifference.
The affairs of mortals were beneath them.
Yet Isla Isabela presented a problem unlike any they had ignored before.
Because the Seakh were not strangers.
They were family.
Not direct descendants.
Not servants.
But a distant branch of the same ancient spiritual lineage.
Different enough to become their own race.
Close enough to remain kin.
Watching them slaughter one another with vampires was no longer merely a political concern.
It had become a matter of blood.
The Devils' anger, however, extended far beyond the deaths of the Seakh.
To understand their hatred, one must first understand the oldest truth deliberately erased from nearly every civilization.
There was a time when the world belonged to spirits.
Before humans.
Before vampires.
Before werewolves.
Before every race now considered dominant.
The Earth was inhabited by beings that modern religions would eventually divide into countless names.
Devils.
Jinn.
Angels.
And many other spiritual species now forgotten by history.
But they were not spirits then.
They possessed bodies.
They walked upon the earth as tangible beings.
They lived beneath the same sky.
They fought.
They loved.
They built civilizations.
They experienced life as any physical race would.
Death existed.
But so did peace.
For countless ages, those civilizations flourished.
Conflict certainly existed, but never enough to satisfy the Creator.
According to the oldest Devil traditions, God eventually grew dissatisfied with that world.
Perfection had become predictable.
Peace had become stagnant.
Existence itself no longer evolved.
Without chaos...
Nothing truly changed.
And so, creation began anew.
New races were introduced into the material universe.
Humans.
Vampires.
Werewolves.
And countless other physical species.
To make room for them, the original inhabitants of Earth were removed.
The Devils...
The Jinn...
The Angels...
Every ancient spiritual civilization was displaced from the physical world and relocated into separate dimensions beyond human perception.
They retained their existence.
But they lost their home.
The Earth they had once called theirs now belonged to others.
Not because they had failed.
Not because they had sinned.
Simply because creation had moved on.
For many, this was not merely exile.
It was betrayal.
The Angels accepted God's judgment.
The Devils did not.
Neither did many of the ancient spiritual races.
What followed cannot accurately be described as rebellion.
It was war.
Not a symbolic conflict.
Not a theological disagreement.
An actual war fought across dimensions beyond human comprehension.
It lasted nearly five thousand years by Earth's measure.
Entire civilizations disappeared.
Stars became battlefields.
Worlds were consumed before they could even be named by mortal languages.
The Milky Way itself became one of countless fronts in a conflict that reshaped existence.
The Angels remained loyal to God.
The Devils refused to surrender.
The Seakh, along with many spiritual races, found themselves caught between ancient loyalties and the desire simply to survive.
When the war finally ended...
The impossible had happened.
The Angels lost.
Driven from their dominion, they retreated from the territories they had defended since the beginning of creation.
The Devils emerged victorious.
Not over humanity.
Not over the material world.
But over the spiritual domain that had once answered directly to God.
From that moment onward, the spiritual realm surrounding the Milky Way no longer belonged to Heaven.
It belonged to the Devils.
God remained the Creator.
But creation was no longer under His direct rule.
The universe had not become godless.
It had become divided.
And that division would echo through every generation that followed.
Including the one now struggling to survive on a small island called Isla Isabela.
For the conflict unfolding there was never merely about vampires and Seakh.
It was the latest chapter...
In a war that had begun long before humanity ever learned to write its own history.