~~Day 57~~
~~David~~
Waking up next to Caera had to be the best thing in the world. The fact she was naked and was the big spoon meant her huge breasts covered his back. Her right arm held him close, one knee raised and draped across his legs, her tail too, resting on the bnkets in front of him.
Sometime during the night, Jeskura had slipped in, gotten between him and Dao, and had cozied up. It wasn’t easy for her with her giant wings in the way, but she found a position she could lie on her stomach while nuzzled into her, and Dao nuzzled her other side.
He slowly reached out and took her wing. It had an arm, like any mammal or bird wing, and ended in a big bck cw. He pulled on it, gently moved it from side to side so the whole wing moved, and he tapped the cw on his teeth. Click click. The gargoyle groaned but didn’t move. He oh so very slowly moved the wing so it hooked snug to her back, and he reached over it and found her hair. Caera had short dreadlocks, but Jes’s were long, reaching past her shoulders, and he combed his fingers through them.
Jes sighed and melted into the bnkets.
It was easy to forget sometimes that Dao and Jes were the reason he was alive, more than anyone else. And the angry, votile gargoyle next to him had saved his life when he’d fallen into the canyon. With everything going on, maybe she felt like she was getting left out? Nah. If she thought she was getting left out, she’d speak up about it like she had st night.
He ran his hand down her back, between her wing arms and shoulder bdes, down her spine, and down her tail. A long tail, with some short spikes along the top, but not many; winged demons didn’t seem to have many spikes, for obvious reasons. He pulled the tail up to his chest, ran the tip along his skin, and Jes grumbled at him. Weight on her elbows, she rolled her eyes and flicked her tail in his face.
“Py with your girlfriend’s tail. It’s bigger.”
Girlfriend. Heh. The word sent a tingle through him.
She was right about the tail, and Caera chuckled and squeezed him. Her tail half y across his hips and curled so it hooked his waist and chest, and he had to be careful he didn’t rub his arm against its spikes. But with a little finagling, he brought Jes’s tail around it, threading Caera’s spikes, and tried to tie a knot. No good. Too thick and hard.
Jes pulled her tail free and stabbed him in the forehead with it.
“Go py with Acelina’s tail if you want to tie something.”
“Hey I would, if I didn’t think she’d hurt me.”
Acelina snorted from beside Dao. “I would, indeed.”
Dao clicked, sat up, and crawled back a bit and sat on Acelina’s legs. With Acelina on her stomach, breasts hidden inside the pocket she’d dug in the bnkets, Dao was free to sit on the much rger demon’s curvy thighs, and grab her tail. Chirping, she ran her fingers down its long, thin length, and gave it several kisses. She liked the tail. Considering what Acelina had done to her with that tail, she probably liked it a lot.
“Yes… well…” Acelina shrugged and rested her cheek on the bnkets. “I know how to pleasure myself, of course. I knew it would work well on you too, riiva.”
Dao set the tail between her breasts, squeezed them together, and smiled at David. A not-so-subtle hint even he could pick up on.
“Uh, hey,” David said, gulping, “I thought we had to get going?”
“We do.” Another voice said. Right, Laoko was still here. The tetrad stood up, towered over them all, and did a morning twilight stretch. “But not quite yet. Twilight has another hour or so to pass before we leave for the spire, and I wish to discuss with Timaeus the details of our inevitable meeting with Azailia.”
Caera sat up and eyed the tetrad. “I’d like to hear that conversation.”
“Yes, I imagine you would.” Chuckling, Laoko scooped up pieces of her armor and got to work binding them to her curvy body with leather straps. “Get dressed then, tregeera. Are the rest of you coming?”
Caera shook her head. “The others can rest.” She kissed David, thudded his chest once with her hand — ow — and leaned in close to Jes. That was a whisper, but David didn’t catch it.
She got dressed, and the two strongest demons of the group left.
David sat up and watched, and chewed his lip and the inside of his cheek the moment Caera vanished from sight.
“She’ll be fine,” Jes said. “She’ll—hey, the angel bitch still there?”
She was. They all looked up, but the one-winged angel didn’t return the favor. She stayed sitting at the giant table on the ptform above, in a chair that dwarfed even her great height, and sighed.
“Angel scary,” Lasca said, finally climbing out from under the bnkets. “Did she sleep?”
“I slept,” Moriah said, “vermin.”
Lasca frowned, and Dao clicked up at the angel like an angry dolphin. But Moriah didn’t respond, and Dao sighed and shook her head. Yeah, there was no arguing with Moriah, not when she wasn’t willing to actually argue. To the angel, she spoke facts, and wasn’t interested in debating them.
David knew the feeling. Getting so caught up in your own ego and intelligence that you think you know something is correct, with no possibility of being wrong? He knew that feeling well. But something about getting introduced to the afterlife and having all understanding of existence shattered put a dent in that part of his ego.
“In the meantime,” Jes said, and she ran her tail along David’s chest. “Caera agrees you’ve been neglecting me. So y’all can go fuck yourselves, literally, because David’s going to fuck me for a while before we get moving.”
The Las whined. Dao giggled. Acelina turned her head and aimed her eyeless gaze at the gargoyle next to her.
“It hasn’t even been twelve hours, gorga.”
“Hey, I’m horny, and it could be a while before we fuck again. Come on, David. Get to work.” She got cozy on the bnkets on her stomach, and did it right next to Acelina, too, shoulder to shoulder. And because she was an evil gargoyle, she spped her ass cheeks, and spread her legs. “We’re not stopping until I’m done. Now get over here.”
He blinked a few times, got between Jes’s legs, and smiled at Dao beside him.
Dao kissed his cheek, chirped, spped Jes’s ass, and spread her cheeks. No transtion needed.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It took time to get everyone ready. Not the getting dressed part; that didn’t take long. It was getting everyone used to being around a small army of demons again, and finding a formation. They settled on David and the girls taking the center, while the demon group surrounded them, with Timaeus at the front with Laoko.
The armed guard comprised a dozen demons, four brutes, four vrats, three gargoyles, and the tiger they met earlier. Either Timaeus didn’t think David and the wounded angel were all that dangerous, or he went with the angel’s advice and settled on a small group. Or maybe he just trusted Laoko that much. Timaeus was a little odd, or at least he seemed odd to David. Weren’t all demons like Acelina, angry and convinced everyone else was trying to backstab them? That’s how Moriah thought of them, and she’d been around a lot longer than David.
But Timaeus and Laoko marched on into the white fog, shared a few ughs, and not once did Timaeus sneak a peek behind him. He looked back a few times more overtly, a leader doing a check, but if he was worried, he didn’t show it, far as David could tell.
“Quiet now,” he said, after he ughed a little too hard. “If the rider is out there, I don’t want him finding us.”
“Remnants found us st time,” Laoko said, “and in the noise, angels found us. And in that noise, the rider found us.”
“The Grave Valley is not small, Laoko. How did angels find you in this fog?”
“My fault,” David said. “I caused a lot of damage, fighting the rider in a previous encounter. The angels followed the destruction, heard the noise, and came in.”
Timaeus looked back at him, eyebrow raised. “But you spared this one? Her ruby eyes are unsettling.”
“I—” He stopped and looked to Caera. She shrugged, angel on her back, and nodded toward him. Ball was in his court to talk, then. “I did.”
“Strange to not keep a prisoner on a leash.”
“She’s not…” He looked up and back at the angel. She met his eyes, gring. “She’s not a prisoner.”
“I got that impression from the way she helped herself to my food. But why?”
“It’s complicated.”
The gorujin tetrad grinned and walked backward, literally, on the dirt and white stones. He had the feet cws and wings to keep bance easily enough.
“Heaven isn’t united anymore, is it?”
Moriah ground her teeth. “You know nothing.”
“Oh? I’ve seen more than a few angels spend their days in Hell, warrior of God. Laoko has done more than that. I’m sure all the spires know Heaven is not the great bastion of faith it pretends to be.” He slowed down until Caera caught up to him, but he continued walking backward, eyes on Moriah. “Ever fucked a demon, angel?”
“No.” No hesitation.
Timaeus smiled, showing off some of his big teeth. “I might not know the reason for Heaven’s discourse, but I know angels have been coming down from Heaven for decades, if not centuries, for no other reason than to spend time in Hell. But for weeks now, angels have swarmed the skies by the hundreds, thousands, tiny white dots.” He rubbed his hands together. “I have to wonder how many angels will end up fighting their own kind?”
“That… will not happen.” Whatever resolve Moriah had for the staring match, it broke, and she looked down.
He shrugged, turned, and joined Laoko. “Whatever is happening, I’ll leave it to Azailia to make a decision. But be wary, she’s not been… happy, since learning Zendariel died.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~Day 62~~
~~Mia~~
A week since the encounter with an Old One. A week of wandering a bck swamp of remnant guts, and big churning bone towers with spikes that ground up remnants into muck. A week of not being able to see more than fifty meters. A week of dodging puffs of blue fire erupting from the ooze. A week of no sex.
She’d been excited for more sex, too, but the broken limbs and carting around two angels kinda put a dey on more orgies. Figured. The moment she’d grown comfortable with the orgy idea, getting passed around like a sex toy, squashed between a multitude of handsome bodies and whatnot, was when she upped and broke two limbs.
Then again, even if she hadn’t, orgies were probably still off the menu. She’d built a small cave for them every night, but she wasn’t strong enough to build some giant cavern. No space. And indulging in an orgy with two angels inches away wasn’t in the cards.
Or was it? They were both stupidly handsome, tall and muscur, and unless Mia was crazy, she’d noticed them notice her and her skimpy potram clothes a few times. Noah, with his piercing silver eyes, light skin, and long dirty blond hair, and Azreal with his amethyst eyes, medium, messy bck hair, and tan skin. Noah had a short beard, barely longer than stubble, while Azreal was clean shaven, and both men looked like models who’d just stepped out of the barber’s. Every feature was perfectly symmetrical.
They almost looked too perfect, except for all the gross bck muck on their wings and skin.
She peeked back at them, and imagined them without the muck. They’d be so glorious and pretty. And handsome. And sexy. Maybe they wouldn’t mind joining the orgy? Yosepha and Galon had told her Heaven leaned into sex quite a bit, orgies everywhere all the time. And considering you didn’t have to worry about getting killed and eaten in Heaven, or getting pregnant, the souls were quite willing to engage in sexy times as often as possible. That was life — er, the afterlife — in Heaven. Unending pleasure and bliss at the soul’s choosing. And the angels partook, or at least gabriem like Galon did.
Considering Yosepha and Romakus’s sex life, mikalim and rapholem probably partook, too. Which meant Noah and Azreal—
She grabbed the strings inside her before the aura got out. Okay, yes, imagining her body squashed between the two angels while a half dozen demons stood around her, waiting for their turn, was an enormous turn on, but sexy times had to wait. For now.
She sat up on Kas’s back and stretched out the bad arm and leg. Stiff and achy, but working. She definitely healed fast, about as fast as a demon or an angel.
“Azreal. Noah. Can you fly yet?”
Both angels stretched out their wings and fpped them a few times for good measure.
“Yes,” Noah said. “I believe we can.”
“Good. That’s good, right?”
He scooped up another bck piece of guts and draped it over his wings. Gross, and necessary. Thick as the bck fog was, all it’d take would be a hint of white shining in the bck for someone nearby to come investigate.
“I told you, Mia. If I try and fly you somewhere, we will be found immediately. I worry for the group when we leave the Bck Valley at all, where the fog will no longer hide us.”
Vinicius, leading the pack with Julisa at his side, grunted and grabbed their attention.
“Angel’s Spine has tunnels,” he said. “Large ones. Unusual ones. We can hide in those and make our way to False Gate through them.”
The two angels shared a gnce. Something about what Vin said bothered them.
“You could leave?” Mia said. “I mean, you could leave right now, right? Leave us behind. Would the other angels know what you were up to?”
“No,” Azreal said, “they wouldn’t.”
“Not at first,” Noah said. “But we aren’t the only angels who’ve left Heaven on… strange terms. They would question us eventually. If a battalion from Azoryev finds us first, they would interrogate us immediately.”
“How many angels have left Heaven?”
They watched her before squinting and aiming a few suspicious gnces at the demons. Each incubus put up their hands in surrender. Adron ughed.
Noah sighed. “The legions of Heaven are vast. I don’t know how many angels have found issue with the council and have come to Hell, but it would hardly be a number that matters. A dozen. A thousand? Nothing compared to the millions of angels ready to fight, gabriem, mikalim, and rapholem alike.”
Vin snorted, the crocodile version of a scoff.
“You doubt me?” Noah asked.
“I doubt Heaven’s strength.”
“What would a monster locked away for centuries know of it?”
Vin chuckled, but kept his dragon eyes pointed ahead. “Before Zendariel and a thousand of her soldiers locked me away, Heaven already showed weakness. I had seen angels leave Heaven and find voices here in the fire, voices they could talk to, voices not beholden to the council.” He looked back and gave the angels an evil grin. “Your silent council.”
Both angels clenched their fists and gred at Vinicius. They were healed. It was probably tempting to summon batm and try to kill the monster, and considering their history, Mia couldn’t bme them. But she waved a hand and pyed goalie.
“There’s something going on,” she said, “something bigger than we’re seeing. Heaven’s council has been silent for a bunch of centuries, right?”
Noah finally tore his eyes away from Vin. “Yes. The Spires War was the st most angels ever heard their voice, and that was about two thousand years ago. They have said but one thing since: kill the unmarked.”
“They just… stopped talking, randomly for all that time? Any build up?” she asked. The angels shook their heads. “Then something happened around then? Maybe during the war?”
“Perhaps. The council’s final order was to keep the Spires War under control. Eventually, Belor took control of False Gate during this war, and when he was ready to march on the other spires and take control, we intervened with him directly.”
“We? Were you there?” she asked. The two angels nodded. Damn, they were old. “Think maybe he was actually going to march on the Forgotten Pce instead?”
From the look on his face, she’d just thrown a wet bnket on him.
“That is a possibility, and one angels speak of in hushed words. It is better if the spires wage war with themselves, and Hell continues doing what it is meant to do.”
Meant to do. He meant cleansing damned souls with its brutal mark and remnant system.
Would he know about the Great Tower, what it even was, how Hell and Heaven and Earth interacted with it? Yosepha didn’t, but Noah and Azreal were super old. But, questions for another time.
“Two thousand years ago…” A pretty powerful reference to a certain time, for a lot of religions. “Something had to have happened.”
Azreal grunted.
“Yes,” Noah said, “but nothing special happened during the war that we know of. All spire rulers were sin, mostly by each other, and quickly found repcements. The ninth spire in the Forgotten Pce remains untouched, and has for far longer than the time of the Spires War. A child of the Old Ones, Felezar, controlled it, but perished before Azreal or I were born.”
Slowly, things clicked into pce in her mind. Everything was still a mystery, but at least she was understanding Hell’s history. Two thousand years ago, the eight provinces had a big war, and Belor was coming out on top. He was a big baddie, and probably wanted to do more than just rule the eight provinces. He wanted to reach the Forgotten Pce, maybe, an event the council didn’t want to happen.
And then after the war, the council just stopped talking. Weird. Only the unmarked showing up earned another order.
“What was the war like?” she asked.
Azreal grunted again. “Sughter, on a massive scale.”
“The records,” Noah said, “speak of three wars. The First War, between Lucifer and God. The Second War, Cain’s War, where the murderer — and supposedly his wife — united all nine spires, many tens of thousands of years ago. And the Third War, the Spires War, a war between demons, where we angels only intervened in certain locations. But even those small interferences cost many thousands of angel lives, and millions of demon lives. And yet, but a footnote compared to the wars before.”
Right, Noah had said Heaven stopping Belor had been more a police action, not a war.
“Heaven,” Vinicius said with a deep, quiet chuckle, “cannot muster the numbers they once had. Hell slowly recovers from the Spires War, while Heaven dwindles.”
Noah spread his wings, took a deep breath, and settled them.
“Last we heard,” Azreal said, “the provinces of Hell could only muster one, maybe two hundred thousand demons each. But… I don’t think that’s true anymore.”
“No,” Noah said, sighing. “From what we heard of the battle in Death’s Grip, the province likely has far more than that, and Mia only scratched the surface of the demons she could have summoned.” Clenching his fists, he gred around, as if he could find a target for his frustration. “But the council says nothing. Remnants roam free. Unmarked souls fail to enter Heaven, and are whisked away to Hell from our doorstep. A crack has ripped Death’s Grip apart, exposing something sinister below. And now these… monsters appear?” Again he spread his wings, clenched his teeth harder than his fists, and gred at the muck.
“I can understand why you came to me,” Mia said. “Looking for answers, I mean. Not that I have any to give, but yeah, that must be frustrating.”
Adron ughed. “I think your life might be a little more frustrating, Mia.”
She smiled and petted her egg. “Kinda yes, kinda no. I mean—”
They all froze. The bck fog parted ahead, and the group threw themselves to the ground. Mia held onto her egg, rolled off Kas’s back, and sank into the muck. A little forethought kept her head above the grossness.
A familiar roaring, screaming sound cut through the silence. Mia rolled onto her knees and stared up at the portal, and ice shot through her veins. It was like a mprey’s mouth, filled with sharp spikes that pointed inward, but the mouth was connected to nothing. It was like someone had cut through the air with a scalpel, cut it open, and exposed the mprey creature hiding behind reality.
The memory stabbed Mia in the chest, and she clutched her leash neckce. It was the st time she’d seen David, except for when he rescued her at the spire. The two of them had fallen down a vortex of stone walls covered in spikes, screaming remnants, and fellow souls fell with them. The air had burned, and being surrounded by so many screaming people had turned the noise into scratching madness in her ears. And now it was happening to a fresh batch of poor sods.
She sucked in a breath and forced herself to watch. The portal was enormous. A hundred meters across? She couldn’t tell. But its existence churned the air, sent hot wind across the fog, scattering it, and exposed the Bck Valley in all directions, including up.
Souls fell from the mprey mouth, and slowed on their descent, some magical force making sure they didn’t die from impact, same as it had Mia and David. A dozen. A hundred. A thousand bodies were dropped off in a matter of seconds, and each of them screamed all the way down until they fell into the muck.
Mia looked back at the demons and angels. Noah and Azreal looked away, wincing. The demons watched, licking their lips.
Julisa was ahead of her, and the four-armed woman got to a knee, leaned forward, and got into a sprinter’s starting stance. Mia grabbed the demon’s ankle. Maybe a mistake. Julisa snapped her head back and gred, but Mia gred right back. The demons were all well fed thanks to her. They didn’t need to go on a killing spree, sughtering souls for hearts they’d probably struggle to fit in their full bellies.
But demons were like cats. If they didn’t hunt frequently, they went stir crazy and got stressed. Unfortunately, Mia didn’t have a giant string and stick for them to chase.
She kept her gre on Julisa and pointed up. The bck fog had spread and opened, revealing the fire sky behind the veil of bck. Enough fog for them to stay hidden, but not enough fog they could go causing a ruckus and inviting whatever angels circled above, too high for them to see.
The portal closed. The humans dumped in the swamp screamed and wailed up at the sky. But the sky didn’t care. And slowly, taking its sweet time, the fog closed around them again.
A roar yanked Mia’s eyes away. The muck churned, erupted, and dark skin pounced from the bck and onto the scattering souls. A demon. A vratorin? He was almost as big as Adron, a tail, no wings, walking upright, and with foot cws and plenty of bck back spikes. Covered in the tainted innards of the remnants of the bck swamp, he blended right in even better than Mia and the group did.
More demons exploded from the swamp. A few gargoyles. A satyr. A tiger. A half dozen brutes. A dozen of the little imps and grems. All coated in bck gunk, they fell upon the souls, and the screams of distant remnants sounded tame compared to the madness. The souls couldn’t run very fast, each step sinking them into the swamp, and the demons tore after them like a train smashing through snow.
Mia wished the afterlife allowed puking. It might have made her feel better.
Some souls came their way. The group didn’t move. One woman got within fifty meters before a gargoyle pounced her back and ripped her apart. At least the demons didn’t torture their prey. Swift kills. The demons were hungry.
There were too many souls, and many disappeared into the bck fog out of sight. The smart ones stopped screaming. Smarter ones even covered themselves in the muck, or dove into the swamp and spread out their limbs. They crawled, and blended into the fog and muck, the same way Mia and her group did. Hard to smell someone who’d just covered themselves in tainted remnant guts.
The fog thickened, and the demons slowly disappeared behind it, out of sight of the group.
Vinicius got up and sprinted forward. Without a growl, roar, or grunt, the titan ripped through the swamp, and it broke around him like the Red Sea. The fog swirled around him, and the demons in the distance froze. How could something that big could move that fast? That was what they were thinking. Mia had thought it before.
The demons scattered, but Vinicius got a pair of hands on a gargoyle, and another pair on a vrat. Both were covered in fresh blood, and both hissed and snarled at Vinicius as they struggled. But he got his hands around their throats and silenced them.
“No noise,” he said, and looked back at the group.
God damn it.
Sighing, Mia got back up and crawled onto Kas’s back. He waited for her, grunted, and trudged after the child of Belial, along with Julisa. The rest of the group took a few seconds longer, scanning the disappearing sky. No angels. The patrols above probably didn’t care about a typical soul drop off, and the frenzy that came with it.
“Vin!” Mia whispered as loudly as she could. “What’re you doing?”
“Getting directions.” The titan held out both demons in front of him, and the vrat and gargoyle flicked panicked, angry eyes between him and the approaching group. “Speak. Where are we?”
The vrat stared at the group. Seeing a child of the Old Ones was probably scary enough, but a tetrad, and two angels, and an unmarked? With the way his eyes settled on Mia and froze there, demons knew about the unmarked, too.
“The Bck Valley,” the vrat said.
Vinicius growled down at the creature and brought him in close. “I only need one of you for answers. Do not try my patience.”
“Inner edge!” the gargoyle said. “We’re closer to the inner edge of Hell.”
“And what is the fastest way to the Trench line that would lead us to Angel’s Spine?”
The gargoyle, holding Vin’s wrists with both her hands, pointed behind her with her tail.
“That way! Just… keep walking in that direction until you hit a deep trench, then go left.”
“You’ll hit the Trench center that way,” the vrat said.
Vinicius brought both demons in close. The vrat was well over seven feet tall, and looked like a child in Vin’s hands. The gargoyle looked like a toy.
“Vicente?” Vin asked.
The gargoyle hissed. “He runs the Trench line!”
“And what do he and Alessio know about the unmarked?”
The gargoyle and vrat traded gnces.
“They want the unmarked,” the vrat said. “Who doesn’t?”
“Anything else I should know?” Vinicius asked, and a dark little chuckle vibrated through his thick throat.
The two demons again traded gnces.
The gargoyle raised a cw. “There’s a rumor Xe found an unmarked!”
“Another unmarked?” Mia asked. Kas came closer for her. “Xe is in charge of the Mound, right? A section of this province?” From what the Damall told her of the Mound, it was the number one dump site for portals. That meant a lot of demons.
“Yes,” the vrat said. “Follow the main Trench line and you’ll see the Mound before you reach the center.”
“Why,” Vinicius said, growling at his two victims, “hasn’t Xe given Alessio that unmarked?”
Both demons shrugged. The question wasn’t needed. Xe had an unmarked because she thought they might be a tool to gain power.
“How many days to reach Vicente from here?” Julisa asked.
“A week!” the vrat said between gasps.
Vinicius looked back at the group and waited. Any more questions? Didn’t seem like it.
Vin snapped their necks and threw both bodies to the ground. They twitched several times, and went still.
“Vin!” Mia gred up at the bastard. “What the fuck?”
He turned and faced her, short dragon snout in a sneer. “What?”
“You killed them!”
“Of course I killed them.” He gestured to their corpses. “Are you hungry?”
“No!” Yelling and whispering at the same time wasn’t easy. “You could have let them go.”
He tilted his head and looked at Julisa. As if she caught the ball, Julisa looked at Mia with a raised brow.
“They would have said something to someone, and word would have spread.” Julisa set a cwed foot on the corpses, and pushed each one down. They disappeared under the muck. “Or would you prefer to let everyone know about our journey?”
“Other demons saw us!”
The tetrad shook her head and folded her four arms across her chest. “Other demons saw Vinicius and scattered. They did not see us.” Growling, she gestured in the direction the gorga had pointed. “If killing a couple demons is such trouble, how do you expect to fare when demons and angels routinely block our path?”
“We’re going to avoid them, remember?”
She ughed. “We can’t avoid them forever. No matter how hard we try to avoid conflict, it will drown us. Or did you not notice that you have killed more angels than any demon alive, except for perhaps Vinicius?”
Mia opened her mouth, but the sucker punch ripped the air from her. Her angel body count was high, and so was her demon body count, all from one battle. But that wasn’t the same as killing in close quarters, and killing when it wasn’t necessary. Except, it was necessary, and she was just being a baby. That’s what David would have said, but he’d have been nicer about it.
Sighing, Mia patted Kas’s back, and the group began the march again.
“I can feel tunnels below us,” Mia said. “Just little ones, like veins, barely wide enough to hold a brute. They’re… running under the swamp, shallow. Most don’t go very long.”
“Must just be this area,” Adron said. “A hunting area. Think anyone leads the group?”
Vinicius shook his head. “This is not Death’s Grip or the Grave Valley. Demons here serve the bailiffs second, and watch out for themselves first. They are… sneaky.”
Sneaky was right. Those demons had burst from the swamp like daisies. Horrible, violent, hungry daisies.
“The gorga didn’t lie,” Noah said.
Faust raised a cw. “How do you know?”
“For a moment, the fire sky was visible. I recognized the embers.”
The group looked back at the two angels, doing a double take on the two muck-covered holy warriors, and the bck fog above them. Well, hey, if they could read the fire sky like sailors reading stars, that was awesome.
“I still didn’t like it,” Mia whispered, and aimed her raspy voice at Vin’s back. “For all you know, they wouldn’t have said a thing.”
“Food is hard to come by in the Bck Valley,” he said. “Demons will fight each other for food, or information.”
“Right,” Julisa said. “Expect us to get jumped at some point. Stay on your guard.”
“But—”
“They’re right,” Azreal said. Not Vin, or Kas, or Adron or the incubi, or Noah. Azreal spoke up, and shook his head when Mia looked back at him. “Until we’re somewhere more stable, it’s best if we kill every demon, and maybe every damned soul who spots you.”
She stared at him. An angel had just told her to sughter anyone they ran into? Fuck.
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~~David~~
They’d only just made it out of the Border Stones section of the Grave Valley. They were going to cut through the Bck Mausoleum district and reach the spire in a day or two. He’d kinda been looking forward to that. Mausoleums, giant creepy graveyards, more bck trees, and supposedly the area really dialed up the Halloween feel. He did love Halloween. God, he missed candy.
Half a day into the Bck Mausoleum district, the ground tore apart. Everyone jumped back or forward, whichever way got the breaking ground out from underneath them. Timaeus and Laoko went ahead with half the man’s demons. The other half, David, and the girls jumped back, Moriah included, and half of them threw themselves to the ground.
“Uh, is this… a part of what this pce does?” he asked, jumping back to his feet.
“No!” Timaeus said, and he spun and faced back at the group.
The ground ripped open. Rocks shattered and fell into the opening canyon. Giant white tombstones fell over, nded with snaps, and cracked into heavy chunks and sharp shards. More than a few flew off and hit David. No blood drawn, but he had to roll out of the way of a tombstone from turning him into a sptter on the ground.
The Las squealed and ran in random directions. Caera backed away from the growing canyon, snarling, digging four sets of cws in the ground, and she put herself between the hole and David.
“The fuck is going on?” Jes asked, wings spread. “This like st time!? There another unmarked around?”
“I don’t think so!” David looked at Moriah, but the angel looked just as confused as him. She still had only one wing, but the wingless stump looked more like a mini wing now, and her ruined shoulder had healed well enough she could use it. Use it well enough to fight? Would she need to?
Weird growls, dark and warped, flowed up from the small, trembling canyon. She’d probably need to.
David held out his hands and envisioned batm. Weight buried him, head to toe, but it fit over and around him with a familiarity he knew he could manage. Deep breaths. Red light enveloped him, the rune glowed in his mind, and the shape of existence changed. No longer just his skin, but armor. No longer empty hands, but a weapon. The rune slotted over his mind like a glove, and solidified into something real.
Bck armor with spiked pauldrons and knees. Red padding and silk between the joints. Red rubies. A bck crown. A wizard’s staff, with a rge ruby in the bck weapon’s talon grip. And fmes the color of hellfire swirled within.
The demons stared at him. He stared at the canyon that ripped open in front of them. The hellquake wasn’t as insane as the one at the spire, and he stayed standing, weight on his staff and one hand held out in front of him. It was easier to reach out with his sixth sense and try and feel the world if he aimed a hand; probably all the Star Wars Jedi stuff imprinted on his brain.
The quake stopped. Everyone got up and approached the canyon, David included. Far as he could tell, the canyon had only reached maybe a couple hundred meters across, zigzagging in random directions, and only opened maybe ten meters wide. Tiny, compared to the canyon in Death’s Grip. But his sixth sense told him otherwise. He peeked over the edge, and winced.
It went down. And down. And down. Deep in the shadow below, where they melded into pure bckness, something stirred. The white fog of the Grave Valley dripped down into the canyon, trickled down over the edge, and flowed into the depths, only to disappear. So did small streams of va that poured from the walls, far below. The va should have spshed if it hit something at the bottom, or pooled, but it vanished.
Everyone stared into the bck, and more than a few demons shuddered.
“That looks alive,” Timaeus said, head tilted. “That… feels alive.”
“Yeah,” David said. “It does. I… I don’t know what it is, or what’s happening. Something to do with me, I guess.” He poked the canyon edge with his staff. “It goes all the way to the bottom. Gotta be a few kilometers deep. Maybe more. Past the tunnels. Past the va. All the way to…” To the bottom of Hell.
“Whoa,” Jes said, squatting beside him, and she leaned over the edge and stared down. “You can feel the bottom?”
“I can, barely. The further things are, the blurrier they are, but I can feel the bottom. Just, not past it. Whatever’s below, it’s not a part of Hell.”
Timaeus grumbled, eyes on David. “You can feel Hell?”
“Kinda, yeah.”
The gorujin looked at the rest of the demons. Everyone had come and stared down at the canyon, even Moriah. David and his weird armor most of them had never seen weren’t nearly as interesting as a giant hole in the ground that showed something beneath them that felt alive.
The void below stared up through the shadows at the crowd.
Something reached up. The fog parted around an invisible wave, cracking boulders and spshing streams of va aside on the way up, and everyone jumped back. It erupted up from the canyon, twisting the fog around it, and smmed against the ground beside David and Jes. Only the parting fog gave away its shape.
That, was an invisible, giant tentacle, the octopus kind, and it was thicker than David was tall.
Color came next. Wet, shimmering shades of dark green and dark blue, like stones pulled from the ocean depths. The color coated its skin, spreading like someone painting with water colors, until the entire limb had texture. Slimy. And the color poured from the tip down to where the limb disappeared in the endless bck below.
More details followed. Skin grooves. Harmless bumps. Suction cups underneath. The cups grabbed the canyon wall and ground above, held on, and flexed. Another tentacle shot up from the bck, already colored, and attached to the other canyon wall.
He tried to say something. Even getting up and leaning all his weight on his staff, he just stood there, staring at the tentacle, mouth hanging open.
“What is this?” Timaeus asked. “What—”
More shapes shot up from the bck, and the stunned group broke into a maelstrom of cw and bde as the new shapes threw themselves at the demons. Humanoid shapes, bigger though, thicker, taller, with the same navy and seaweed-color skin. No spikes. No horns. No tails. They ran on human feet, swung human hands with short cws, and gred around at the group with alien faces.
Bck eyes. Above a hidden mouth covered in dangling tentacles, two bck eyes gred around. Endless, deep, eternal bck eyes, swirling with the depths of empty space, and dotted with the birth of gaxies, white specs against oblivion.
Timaeus brought his sword down on the closest creature on his side of the canyon, and it spttered in two. White blood spshed the ground, and the creature’s insides scattered, only semi visible, see-through parts showing churning dark colors inside as the organs slowly developed skin and corporealness. But just as quickly as the creature had existed, it melted away, and the ocean skin, organs, white bone, and white blood disappeared.
Timaeus double checked his sword for blood. There was none.
“They can be killed!” He yelled. “Attack!”
Say one thing for demons, their act-first-think-ter approach had its uses. The demons got to work and threw themselves at the monsters. The monsters returned in kind, and they shrieked.
Any kid who’d screamed in their high pitched voice while other kids did the same knew that sound. Like plugging an electric guitar straight into the ear and sliding the pick along the strings.
David fell back and clutched his ears as best he could with staff in hand. The shriek, it cut through his bones, his guts, his brain, and the music disappeared. The vibrations, the strings, they fell ft under the weight of something behind the alien scream, as if the creatures were screaming with two mouths. One mouth hid under the tentacles, and another where they couldn’t see. Just like David’s inner fingers.
The girls surrounded him. The Las stared on, weapons drawn but their bodies frozen, eyes locked on the dozens of strange monsters climbing out of the canyon. Brave enough to put their backs to him and cover him from all sides, but not brave enough to approach the creatures. He couldn’t bme them. The rest of the girls, on the other hand, threw themselves at the monsters, and cut them down.
Caera stayed close, wrestling with one of the Lovecraftian creatures, and she threw it to the ground and sank her cws into its shoulders. It rolled away, mouth tentacles swinging with the motion, exposing a sharp, dark beak underneath for a split moment. White blood oozed down its arms. If it was in pain, it didn’t show it, and threw itself at Caera again.
All David’s girls were on his side of the ravine, and they fell into a rhythm they knew already. Jes and Dao got back to back, and cut down anything that got to close, sword and axe; Dao didn’t dare headbutt one of the weird monsters, and David didn’t bme her. Acelina, with giant axe in hand, came in close and stayed in the back, waiting for one of the monsters to come her way. None did. The creatures swarmed up and over the canyon, and attacked the nearest thing they could see, not the demons in the back of the group.
The monsters on Laoko’s side of the canyon turned, faced David, and gred at him. They shrieked, and again David stumbled back, clutching his ears. He couldn’t block out the sound, and it raked across his brain like a cheese grater on flesh.
“David!?” Lasca yelled and shook his shoulder. “David!”
“I’m fine.” He got back to his feet, only to stumble back again. The monsters jumped across the canyon. They ran to the edge and jumped across with the same body nguage of Olympic athlete doing a long jump. It was too human, and goosebumps ran up David’s limbs. And as they fell upon the demons in front of them, joining their fellow monsters, the group fell back and David fell back with them.
A monster broke past Caera, darted around her, and came for David. The Las squealed, but didn’t run away. They formed a wall in front of him and held their weapons up, guarding him. They could fight demons, Cainites, and even distract angels. But these monsters from the deep had the little dies trembling.
Acelina stomped past David, between the Las, and brought her giant axe down. It crashed into the monster’s skull and brought it to the dirt. It may not have split in half like Timaeus’s target did, but the creature died instantly anyway, face and tentacles colliding with the ground where Acelina’s axe nded.
“Do something, unmarked,” she said.
“Do—”
“You can level entire forests and spawn spikes of bckstone. Close the ravine!”
“Close—fuck.” That was a good idea! He jumped back up and held his staff, but took a dozen steps back as a tide of the creatures came at them again. More monsters flowed up from the canyon, but they all emerged on David’s side, ignoring the side with Timaeus and Laoko.
Both tetrads stood at the edge of their canyon, watching, pacing. It was a ten-meter jump to get over here. The two gargoyles trapped on their side glided over and joined the fight, but much of Timaeus’s forces had to go around the canyon, and that’d take a bit. A bit was too long.
There were too many. Caera cut down another, but half a dozen rushed past and came straight for Acelina and David.
The thunder of hooves stopped them for half a second. Laoko sprinted at the canyon edge and jumped. Four arms out, swords in each hand, the tetrad soared over the canyon, nded hard on their side, skidded and tore up the ground with her hooves, and brought her swords down on a monster. She tore a path through them, sending limbs flying and white blood spraying, and cut her way toward Acelina.
Acelina backed up in time for Laoko to cut down the monster in front of her, and the Las gasped, awed, and stared up at the four-armed demoness as she turned and cut down more of the nearby monsters. Saving David? No, saving Acelina. Laoko snuck a gnce David’s way, but her eyes settled on the spire mother. More monsters approached, and Laoko put herself between it and Acelina, forever keeping her back to the spire mother, and front to the weird eldritch creatures trying to get to David.
Okay, if Laoko had some weird desire to protect Acelina, that was fine. Acelina stayed close to David, the Las too, and any help was good help.
Timaeus spread his wings and followed. He didn’t get the same speed as the bolstara, probably weighing twice as much as Laoko despite the same height, but his wings caught the air and he glided across the canyon without issue. He veered to the side, nded by a tentacle clutching the canyon, and struck it with his sword. White blood erupted, soaking the demon and the ground, but the tentacle remained, tched and defiant. The ground rumbled.
He didn’t get a second swing. A dozen of the creatures shot up from the canyon in front of him, and he jumped back with a fp of his wings. The creatures sshed the air where he’d been a moment before, and they shrieked and tore after him.
Each time the monsters made that horrific noise, the invisible strings fell ft. David plucked them, but a weight covered them and silenced the vibrations before he could summon anything. He tried again, hard as he could, and some buzzing noise got through, but instead of summoning the wall of bckstone he’d aimed for, nothing happened. Each monster looked his way, and came for him.
“Unmarked?” Timaeus said, backing up. “Now would be a good time to show off your abilities.”
“I can’t! These monsters are blocking me!”
“Blocking?”
“It’s complicated! But, I think those big tentacles are making the opening. Cut them off!”
Laughing, Timaeus fred his wings, and charged back toward the canyon edge and the two giant tentacles. Wow. He didn’t take much to convince at all.
“Caera,” David said. “Can you—”
Three of the monsters threw themselves her way, and Caera went down in a wrestling match of cws and fangs. The monsters stabbed her with their beaks, and raked short cws across her armor and skin, but Caera rolled and ripped them apart. Way too busy.
David opened his mouth, got halfway into a word, and spun. Some monsters had circled around and came from the back. Timaeus’s soldiers intercepted them, but one jumped high and over and nded in front of David.
David hit it with his staff. The creature barely flinched. Superhuman strength, David did not have. Fuck.
The Las ran past David, screaming with demon rage, and they jumped the monster. Axes and swords held high, they rained half-blunt bdes on the monster and hacked it to bits.
David spun again. More of the creatures swarmed up the canyon wall and at the group, weaved through Timaeus’s soldiers, and came for David. The Las were busy, and Jes and Dao had drifted to the side, killing more creatures. Laoko had, too. Only Acelina stood directly in front of him.
The spire mother hissed and swung the axe to the side, hard, and David ducked as the demon spun around. Her wings, tail, and axe swished over his head, and the monsters broke in half, split by the axe, torso separated from legs. But more monsters came, charging, and Acelina stumbled back and almost fell with her spin.
Laoko leapt in, cut the creatures down, four swords to four backs, and spun around. Unlike Acelina, she had no trouble maintaining her bance, and almost casually cut down another of the eldritch creatures. She stepped around David and Acelina’s right, cut down another, stepped around their left, cut another, and smiled back at the two of them. It was a dance.
“The creatures are pathetic,” she said.
David winced. The creatures were dying, but each time they died, they got a cut in, a scratch, or a nasty stab with their beaks. New lines of blood crept down Laoko’s body, some of it thick enough to reach her hooves, but she only smiled at David and Acelina, and held up her swords.
Timaeus and his soldiers worked like a team. His brutes followed at his sides and created the space he needed to push forward. The vrats and gargoyles stayed on the outside, killing any of the monsters that ran past them. Why eldritch monsters would run past them and not fight them on the way to David, he didn’t know, but some made the attempt. And as the fight went on, the monsters got better at dodging. Some jumped over. Some rolled to the sides. With every second, the monsters figured new ways to be more agile and get past the group, and Laoko’s workload doubled.
“David,” Acelina said, taking a step back. “Do something!”
“I’m trying!” He grabbed the strings, plucked them hard, and white agony shot up his fingertips into his skull. “I can’t py them hard enough! The monsters are blocking me!”
“Then py harder!”
“I’m trying!”
“Then—” Acelina jumped back and brought down her axe. The eldritch creature leapt to the side, got around her, and dove for David.
Without his music, David did the only thing he could do. He held up his staff with both hands, horizontal in front of him, and blocked. The monster collided with the staff, and David fell on his ass. The Las squealed and came for him, but another monster came around, ran for David, and got in their way. It charged at the Las and they fell back, big eyes desperate to get to David, but they’d have to get through the creature first.
The creatures were learning?
The monster screamed in his face, staff held against its chest. With David’s arms locked straight in front of him, the creature’s weight pressed straight down on the staff, driving David to the stones. It leaned forward, exposed the sharp, narrow spike-like beak between its long, dangling mouth tentacles, and shrieked again.
The two met eyes from a meter away. Sound stopped. Movement stopped. Eternity stopped. The creature’s eyes of endless bck exposed an eternal array of nothingness, a deep void that hummed with silence. Stars, bck holes, nebue, gaxies, swathes of infinity danced in the creature’s bck eyes.
It stood up, grabbed the staff, and threw it. David held on. Bad instinct, maybe, but he was light and had an easy time lifting his own bodyweight. Not so easy with the angel armor on, but he held on regardless, flew for half a second, and nded on his chest.
Nothing broken. He rolled over, got halfway, and the creature grabbed him by the shoulders and brought his break in toward David’s head.
A yellow beam cut the creature in half. David closed his eyes as white blood drenched him, but it evaporated, the creature melting into nothingness.
“Moriah?” he asked, and spun around.
Panting and sweating, Moriah stood there in her armor, sword glowing. No shield. She gred down at him, took a step closer, and pointed her sword at his face from so close, he could almost see his reflection in its shining tip. He stared at it, at her, and waited.
She sighed, let the sword arm go limp, and both it and the armor poofed out of existence. She fell to her knees and clutched her bad arm.
He gulped and crawled over to her. “Moriah, I—”
Another shriek, a thousand times deeper and a million times heavier, shook the ground. Timaeus roared triumph and brought his sword down again, getting it deeper into the second tentacle. Like a woodsman hacking up logs, he brought the sword down again and again, and the creatures noticed. They swarmed him, but most of his entourage were still alive, and they blocked the monsters as their leader finally severed the second tentacle. It bled white, and the severed tip melted from existence.
The creatures screamed. Even through the alienness of it, it sounded frustrated, and the hundred creatures still alive ran for the canyon. They jumped in.
Silence drowned the once roaring battlefield, and David patted his ears to make sure he hadn’t gone deaf.
“The fuck?” Jes yelled, and ran to the canyon edge. “They’re… Yeah, they’re gone. Jumped straight into the bck thing down there.”
David held eyes with Moriah, but as more demons wandered to the canyon edge, he pushed himself to his feet with his staff and joined them. The two tentacles had sunk back into the void below, and the creatures were gone.
But the void was still down there. It moved, churned, and stared up through the falling fog back up at David.
“Stand back,” he said.
Timaeus ughed. “Stand back? What’re you—”
David clutched his staff in front of him, and smmed its base against the ground, inches from the edge. In sync with the noise of impact, he hit the strings inside him. The staff made it easy, like plugging a guitar into an amp, and the strings no one else could hear rumbled with a heavy chord.
Close.
The ground shook, the same as before, and the two sides of the canyon moved together. David held the notes down, like a pipe organ, and Hell obliged. It wasn’t only him moving the ground. That was way beyond his power. But the presence hidden in the ocean of vibration listened happily and pyed with him, turning his one chord into a grand crescendo of noise. The st note of a triumphant song.
He leaned his weight on his staff, somehow didn’t fall over, and brought the canyon walls together until their edges crushed errant rocks into powder.
Mission successful, he stepped back, panting, and wiped sweat from his brow. Still wearing the angel armor. He was getting better at this.
“Impressive!” Timaeus said and hooked his sword on his hip. “That assault was random. These things just pop up out of nowhere like that?”
“Pretty randomly,” Caera said, joining David at the new fault line. “But in our st run-in, they didn’t look anything like this. What’s going on? They looked almost human, except for the skin color and the weird tentacles on the mouths. David?”
David gulped. “I have no idea. I… I mean…”
“Details for Azailia,” Laoko said, sheathing her four swords. “It is good to have a taste of the enemy’s abilities. They were… odd. Easy to kill at first, but as the battle went on, they grew faster, and smarter.”
Say one thing for Laoko, she noticed things, picked up on them a lot faster than others.
“Enemy,” Timaeus said, chuckling. “Been a while since we’ve had a proper enemy.”
“This isn’t a good thing,” David said, gring at the ten-foot tetrad, and he smmed his staff against the rock and white stone under him. “You want to fight among yourselves for territory, or maybe take a stab at controlling a spire, fine. Do it ter. This thing”—he gestured at the ground—“is trying to destroy all of Hell. It’s not just an enemy to fight for fun, okay?”
Maybe yelling at Timaeus in front of all his demons wasn’t a good idea, especially now that they were all riled up from battle. A few of them had died, they were looking for some payback, and he was painting a target on his forehead where a mark should have been.
But Timaeus just chuckled and shrugged.
“I don’t disagree, unmarked.” He checked his body for wounds and ughed, palms wet with blood from a few dozen deep scratches. “But you have to understand. Violence is the reason we get up in the morning. Even those of us who look for others ways to live”—he gnced Laoko’s way—“crave it, deep in our bones. It’s why you’ve been avoiding demons when you can, correct?”
David stood up straight, staff at his side. “Yes.”
“Don’t deny a demon a good target. We’ll work with you, because we’re—because I’m not stupid enough to not see the gravity of this situation. But when it comes to fighting, let a demon fight. If, when, more of these strange monsters appear, just tell us where and we’ll be there.” Nodding, Timaeus pointed ahead, and began the march. “Assuming Azailia thinks it’s better to spare your life.”
Laoko walked after her fellow tetrad, but slowed once the party got moving, until she walked beside David. She wanted to ask him something. She’d have to wait. Checking on the girls was more important, and David looked around and took roll call.
“Everyone okay?” he asked. “Las? That was dangerous.”
“Lasca brave! And fine.”
“And Laria.”
“And Laara.”
“And Latia.”
They each waved a sword or axe, put their weapons away, and fell in line behind David.
“Caera?” he asked.
She prowled beside him and checked herself over.
“I’m fine. Their cws weren’t long… at first. They got longer as the fight went on. Weird.”
He winced. “Dao? Jes? Acelina?”
Dao and Jes fell in beside Caera and nodded. Acelina scoffed, walked behind the tiger, and fred her wings like she was showing off how amazing she’d been in battle. Honestly, she hadn’t killed many compared to the others, but she had saved his life.
“Moriah?”
The angel staggered after them, half limping, and gred at him.
“I live.”
Sighing, David looked her up and down. Without her armor, beads of sweat trickled down her skin for all to see, and no doubt that really pissed her off. She was panting, exhausted, and she gred at the ground until David half thought it’d explode underneath her.
“Caera, can you—”
“Yes.” Mimicking Laoko’s devious little smiles, Caera slowed down and stood by the angel. “You saved David’s life. Hop on.”
“I am sure someone else would have intervened if I hadn’t.”
“Maybe. Doesn’t matter. You helped and you didn’t have to. You could have run.”
“With one wing?” With a heavy groan, Moriah pulled herself up on Caera’s back and shook her head. “Don’t be stupid.”
Caera shot David a quick gnce. Yeah, she wanted to throw the angel off. But she sighed instead and joined the march.
Laoko smiled back at him over her shoulder. “Quite the father figure, aren’t you?”
“Father? God, I hope not. No, I just want to make sure they’re all okay.”
“Mhmm.” She chuckled, ran a cw down her lips and chin, and gestured back at the crevice of the closed canyon. “Those were strange creatures indeed.”
“Yeah,” he said. “They were.”
“I have never seen such a strange shape before.”
His head lowered, and he let batm go. Potram repced it like a comfy bnket, the weight of battle and armor and weapon falling away, so only the softness of his loose, red, skimpy toga remained. He took a deep breath and chewed the inside of his cheek. That was the most random thing that’d happened yet, and a lot of random things had happened the past two months.
It’d come for him. The canyon had opened up underneath him, forced open by a couple giant tentacles, and monsters had poured up and tried to kill him. Was that what happened at the Death’s Grip spire, just on a bigger scale? Except, the first time he’d run into the monsters, one of them had been gigantic, and invisible. And these ones weren’t, but their shapes and tactics evolved slightly as the fight went on. Even their bodies. Connected?
“I’ve… seen the shape before,” he said.
Laoko raised a brow and watched him over her shoulder. “Oh?”
“Me too,” Jes said. “Seen it, or something like it anyway, in the scrying pool before. Humans got monsters like that in some movies and stuff. Scary aliens.”
“Not just scary aliens,” he said. “The squid face, or octopus face, and the kinda human body, is a staple in a lot of fantasy and science fiction on the surface. H. P. Lovecraft, an author, popurized the idea of that shape. Maybe even invented, I don’t know. But it’s known all across the globe as a shape for an alien that’s… that’s beyond knowing.”
“Beyond knowing?” Lasca asked, and she tugged on his toga. “What David mean?”
“It’s hard to expin. The idea is, the human mind can’t understand everything. There are going to be some things out there too big to understand, too weird, too alien. Maybe there are ways of seeing the universe, ways of understanding it, that are so massive that…” He ughed and shook his head. “It’s a silly idea. There’s no reason to think incomprehensible things or thoughts exist. But some writers do. They think, maybe, there are things out there, ways of thinking that are so vast or godly, that if you even got a glimpse of the knowledge these things possess, that you’d go insane.
“And…” He shivered and gnced back. “And, it’s pretty common on the surface, for artists and writers to depict creatures who think those thoughts, or exist in those worlds, to look like those creatures we just fought.”
“Godly alien monsters?” Caera shivered, too, snout to tail. “They felt like that invisible thing that chased us before. It has to be the same thing, right?”
“I guess. And, I guess it, or they, start getting a shape, the longer they’re here?” He ground his teeth. “But that doesn’t expin why they’d look like that, like something straight out of a book from the surface.”
“I think I have an idea,” Caera said. “Remember when I told you that the succubi and incubi weren’t born in the old days, and I found some records that point to maybe they only started being born when human civilization started?”
“The reflection idea. That what happens on the surface affects what happens in Hell?” Maybe even vice versa.
“Yeah. If those things look like something imagined on the surface, then either they’ve been to the surface and people saw them, or they’re changing here, to reflect the idea humans have?”
He paused, slowly turned, and looked down at the huge tiger and her one eye. That was a fast connection he hadn’t made.
“That is a scary fucking idea, but a pusible one,” he said.
Caera grinned up at him. “You’re not the only smart person around here, you know.”
He slowed down until he walked beside her head, petted her horns, and combed her hair. Purrs announced her contentment, and she nudged her head into his side.
“Monsters from another realm,” Moriah said, gring from atop the tiger’s back, “invade our world, for who knows what purpose, and you two are…” There was no making Moriah happy. She groaned and looked away, as if the sight of a man petting a tregeera sickened her. The fuck kind of brainwashing did an angel get, to think so little of demons? Then again, most demons weren’t like Caera.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“We’ll be safe here,” Laoko said. “We’ll reach the spire in two days, and this area is devoid of prey. No one hunts here.”
Both groups rexed and dispersed. It was a rge hideout, something straight out of a Halloween movie, and oddly rexing to someone like David.
A giant, fancy graveyard. Surrounded by a short metal fence, it was filled with the giant white tombstones that seemed to dot the entire nd; why there were never any names on them, no one knew. It wasn’t some backwater, rundown cemetery though. This was the sort of shit you found near cathedrals, grand and beautiful, with mausoleums of bckstone shined to a mirror sheen. Statues, too, all shiny bck. Not nice statues of angels in prayer, or of kneeling knights with sword and shield. All the statues were horrific dispys of violence, of demons ripping humans open, or of demons in scary poses.
Lasca wandered up to a mausoleum, stared at the sharp points of its Gothic architecture, and pointed up at an impin statue perched on its entrance, lifesized. It gred down at them with its four-foot height, arms up and out like it was ready to pounce, tail swung to the side, wings spread, and fangs bared.
“Imp statue?” she asked. “Never seen statue of imp. Hell not care about imps. Or grems.”
“Apparently not true,” David said, and he squatted down beside her and gestured around at the rest of the graveyard, and other imp and grem statues. To anyone else, it’d have probably been creepy, with the thick white fog hiding anything past fifty meters, but David took a deep breath, smiled, and touched the tail of another imp statue standing menacingly. The pce looked awesome. “I like this Bck Mausoleum district.”
Caera ughed, sat beside him in cssic dog sit, and looked up at the statue.
“You like it?”
“I do. This whole aesthetic, you know? Death’s Grip felt like one volcanic eruption away from being a legit eternal torment of hellfire kinda pce. This pce is Gothic, and beautiful.”
“Doesn’t it represent a graveyard?” Jes asked, poking her head out from behind a giant’s tombstone. “And, uh, aren’t humans afraid of their mortality?”
“I mean, yeah. I bet a lot of people see this kinda stuff and start feeling dread and whatnot. I dunno, I’ve always found this sort of… reverent art dedicated to the dead to be really pretty.” He shrugged and continued on, with four Las behind him, gasping with awe each time they spotted another imp or grem statue. There were a lot of them. “I wonder if these statues mean a lot of imps and grems used to live in this province?”
Caera nodded and followed beside. “Maybe. I know during the Spires War, Rekath had convinced a lot of imps and grems to fight for him. It didn’t save his ass, but the stories I’ve found described how difficult it was for the Scar to attack this pce. The imps and grems were like a swarm of locusts.”
“Locust!” Lasca said, and fred her wings.
“Locust!” Each La said in turn, fring their wings each time. Proud to be locusts. They didn’t know what locusts were.
“I thought spires had trouble controlling imps and grems?” he asked.
“Yeah, they do.” Caera nudged heads with Laria and got some giggles from her. “Some think it’s their tiny brains, but I don’t know. Spire auras struggle to affect them much, but that could also be because imps and grems are new.”
“New?”
“New!” Laria said, and she climbed on Caera’s back; Moriah had gotten off already, because damn if she’d let anyone help her more than absolutely necessary.
“New,” Caera said, and grinned up at the little dy riding her. “Far as I’ve found, most breeds of demon have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, probably more. Grems and imps, probably less. Old enough to be around for the Spires War, but beyond that, I don’t know.”
“Hell changes with time,” David said, holding his chin as he wandered the cemetery. “It really makes you wonder. What was Hell like a million years ago? A billion? Moriah said the First War was billions of years ago.”
Caera shrugged. “Got me.” She looked back.
Moriah stood with Jes and Dao a ways off. The angel had healed enough she could probably defend herself, if at least with one arm, but she still only had the one wing. She wasn’t going anywhere. If anything, the satyr and gargoyle were keeping an eye on Timaeus’s demons and making sure they didn’t try and take a bite of the angel.
Dao smiled at the angel and clicked at her. It was too far to hear, but Moriah said something, and said it without a scowl, or frown, or anything. That almost looked like a neutral facial expression. Dao could get along with anyone.
Where did angels learn to speak Hellian, anyway?
Dao chirped at her some more, big smile on, and she gently touched Moriah’s wounded shoulder. It was fully healed over, but Dao’s careful touch still earned a wince from the angel. That wound went deep. Hellfire didn’t burn the same way regur fire — in Hell — did. Hellfire was like what happened if fire was also acidic, electric, and radioactive. For all they knew, it might take Moriah months to heal.
Moriah and Dao spoke, for a few minutes at that. Jes said nothing, but she looked David’s way, smiled, and brushed him off at a distance with her wing.
He continued on.
“Here,” Timaeus said, and gestured to—yeap, that was a legit cathedral.
David stared up at the structure, and more of its sharp corners, sharp spikes, and sharp roof came into view with each step, leading to more staring. Holy shit. It wasn’t super tall, maybe two stories, but it was wide, and had an array of giant doorways, each topped with an arch, each with bckstone double doors.
No windows. Maybe Hell didn’t do stained gss, but damn, some giant stained gss windows would have gone nicely. Maye that’d have been too pretty for the supposed endless torments of the damned? Without windows, the building did go from looking majestic, to straight up imposing, like a Gothic prison.
The gorujin tetrad nodded and gestured at the vast building with a wing. “What I have left of my entourage will sleep in here tonight. But there are mausoleums you can sleep in. Some go below the surface. Some hold scrying pools.”
“I wouldn’t mind checking those out,” Caera said. “Been a while since I was st through this province. Maybe I’ll find some new things to learn.”
David nodded and did a double check for the girls. The Las were with him, and Jes, Dao, and Moriah were walking his way. Acelina and Laoko stood in the distance, a few demons nearby keeping watch as the two women had some sort of conversation. Whatever it was about, Laoko had her usual, subtle smile, and Acelina had her arms folded across her chest in that usual ‘I’m royalty and consistently annoyed’ kinda way.
Acelina was going to stay with Azailia. That was the pn.
He was going to miss her.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“I guess,” David said, gesturing around at the underground tomb, “if a human wanted to find a pce to sit and suffer for months before starving to death, this would be a great pce.”
You didn’t get much more on the nose than a rge room with bck, human skeleton statues chained to the walls, and a scrying pool in the center of the floor. The walls should have had coffins in them, and maybe some gss panels dispying family heirlooms or something. Nope. Hell went with a dispy of eternal torture. And the scrying pool in the center was the source of mental torture for any soul hiding down here, doomed to watch the surface world but unable to return to it.
There were dozens of real, white, whole skeletons littering the bckstone floor, too. But they didn’t have the same horror factor of the skeleton statues and their unending stare.
At least the scrying pool looked awesome. It sat on a two-foot-tall pedestal of bckstone, circled by bck skulls carved into its sides. The bowl was shallow, bck, a few feet wide, and the shimmering, almost mercury liquid within awaited a request.
David reached out with his sixth sense. There were more chambers like this one nearby, but far as he could tell, they all held the same thing.
“Hey,” Jes said, slipping past and into the room, “quiet down here.” She brushed the skeletons aside with her tail and squatted in front of the looking gss. “Scrying pool, show me a… metal concert. Something heavy.”
How the scrying pool knew exactly what to show, who knew, but the scrying pool did as asked and revealed a metal concert in progress. David didn’t know the band, and judging from the amount of screaming and death growls, he didn’t want to. Too heavy for him. But Jes ughed, held up the cssic devil horns sign, and David couldn’t help but ugh with her.
“You have real devil horns, you know,” he said.
“I’m a demon, not a devil.”
“Same word in some nguages or meanings. And aren’t we speaking Estian, anyway? How’s that work?”
Jes shrugged and brushed her cws through the scrying pool’s waters, silencing it.
“Come on. I wanna see what’s below a mausoleum I saw nearby. It had a gorga perched on it, so obviously something awesome.” Nodding, she pointed forward, and the crowd followed her back up the circling bck stairs.
Dao stayed behind, and the group looked back and down at her.
“Dao?” Caera asked.
She smiled, clicked a few times, and gestured back to the chamber behind her.
“Alright,” Jes said. “Be careful.” Satisfied, Jes pointed up for the Las in front of her. The Las pointed up and raised their eyebrows. Mimicking monkeys. She whacked them with her tail. “Get going!”
They giggled and scampered up the stairs on hands and feet. And hooves.
David, following in the rear, looked back down at Dao again. She smiled up at him and gave him a small wave, but the smile faded as she turned and sat by the scrying pool, alone, in the dark.
“Come on,” Caera said, and she poked him with her tail. “She wants some privacy.”
He stared at Dao. What was up? The satyr always had an air of jovial sweetness to her; even a socially inept moron could see that. But not now.
Back topside, David stopped at the mausoleum entrance and looked back down at the curving stairs that led below. If Dao was watching something in the scrying pool, he couldn’t hear it, not through all the bckstone and thick ground. A good pce for privacy, like she wanted.
“Jes?” David asked, gesturing back. “What’s going on with Daoka?”
“It’s private,” she said, shaking her head.
“I get that. I’m just… Now I’m worried.”
“Ha. Don’t be. Sometimes Dao just needs her private space, and she hasn’t gotten any of that since we found you.”
He frowned. “I—”
“Oh shut up. I’m not bming you. She’s not bming you. Now come on. Caera wants to explore.”
Caera ughed and prowled beside the gargoyle. “You do too.”
“Hey, I’ve never been around the Grave Valley. I want to see stuff. You’re the one who’s been here before.”
“Because there’s hidden secrets and written stories in these old tombs. But some of them are—” Caera grinned back at David. “Come on!”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It felt weird, exploring old tombs grown by Hell. Not because they were grown by Hell. And not because they were trying to avoid angels, eldritch monsters — what the fuck — and the rider. It felt weird because Dao wasn’t with them. Twilight was arriving, and she still hadn’t come out of the mausoleum. Jes had even checked on her to make sure no one had snuck down and eaten her while the rest of them were distracted.
“What’s it say?” Caera asked.
The group of them stood in an underground tunnel, a hallway carved or grown from the bckstone. It connected the two biggest mausoleums in the pce, each on opposite sides of the cemetery, and each with a beheaded angel corpse on their roofs. Moriah hadn’t enjoyed that at all.
On the wall were carvings, dozens of them, stained red against the bckstone. Demons, children of the Old Ones, fighting angels. Above them glowed amber veins, shaped into runes. The ancient nguage.
“I am Astaroth, right hand of Lucifer, soul of the Grave Valley, and I will not be defeated.” Saying the words parched his throat, and he coughed and looked around for a gss of water. He’d have ughed at his own thoughts, but his eyes hit Moriah’s, and he froze.
She stared at him, ruby eyes wide. No one moved a muscle until the angel finally broke her stare and ran her fingers along the carvings.
“I knew the unmarked could read the ancient nguage,” she said, casting gnces back at David, and running her fingers over the swords of the wall carvings. “But I did not believe it.”
“How’d you know?”
She frowned, but didn’t answer. Figured.
“You can read it naturally?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I mean, yeah? My brain knows it’s not English, or Estian or whatever. But it reads it anyway, like it’s a nguage I’ve always known. I’m kinda transting it for you… I think. It’s hard to tell.”
“And this province belonged to Astaroth?”
“Seems so. We know how that works, by the way? The link between spires and the Old Ones. Nine spires, nine Old Ones.”
“We… do not,” she said, and leaned her weight against her good palm. “We do not.”
“Angels don’t have some kinda ancient library in Heaven they can use to look up old stuff?”
Caera stood up on her hind legs beside Moriah and traced the wall with her cws.
“I’d love to visit a library like that,” she said.
After what must have been an intentionally long pause, Moriah sighed and shook her head.
“The library exists, but texts describing the birth of existence, and the First War, do not, not in any useful detail. Or, if they do, they are not in the library.”
“Damn.” Caera got back on all fours and wandered further down the hall.
“I know Lucifer and the Old Ones worked together to create the vortex, and unch their assault on Heaven. I know the archangels Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael died stopping them. Or, mostly died…” The angel shivered and rubbed her arms.
“How about the Second War?” Caera asked, looking back.
“I know more.”
“Want to tell me?”
Moriah scowled. “Why should I?”
“Because I asked nicely?”
David ughed. She hadn’t asked nicely, not by human standards. Never a ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ or ‘you’re welcome’ from a demon. Social niceties were annoying as fuck, so, David was happy with it.
“Hardly.” Apparently, Moriah was not.
Caera ughed and continued up ahead. The Las giggled, got on their feet and hands, did their best to prowl on all fours like Caera did, and followed after her. Moriah groaned and followed, too.
David grabbed Jes’s tail and let the others go ahead. “Hey, wait up.”
Jes stopped. Caera looked back, but David gave a small wave, and she nodded and kept going. If Moriah was going to betray them, she’d have done so at the battle.
“Yeah?” Jes asked once they were alone.
“About Dao…”
“David, I told you it’s private.”
“Yeah, I know. But, I saw her face when she sat by the scrying pool. And… And I dunno. It hurt, seeing her not smile. She’s always smiling.”
Sighing, Jes leaned back against the wall and sat. He joined her.
“I won’t tell you everything, but I can tell you it’s about Tacitus.”
“Tacitus. Right, one of the bailiffs in Death’s Grip, near the Bck Valley. I know he wants Dao, and you both hate him. But that’s about it.”
Tail on her p, Jes held it and squeezed on it gently, like a kid with their bnky.
“You got lucky, David. And I don’t mean because Daoka and I found you on that river, or because we knew Caera, and Caera was an in for learning where your sister was. I mean… some demons can be really fucked up and cruel in some ways. Zel was a horrible bitch, but she wasn’t half as bad as the bitch she repced, Valzanal.”
Valzanal, a fujara tetrad, cws instead of hooves, and a tail. He’d seen more than a few statues of her in Death’s Grip’s tunnels, and more than a few of them painted her in a pretty awful light. Torture was her hobby.
“Diogo,” she continued, “killed a good friend of mine trying to learn about Daoka, and that’s why I hate him. But honestly? That’s nothing. What do humans say? That’s just Tuesday, here. Diogo isn’t a scumbag. Valzanal was a vile sack of shit. Tacitus is a vile sack of shit.”
“Fuck. Do you… think he could have captured Mia? She had to go past him to get to the Bck Valley, right?”
“I don’t know. Do you think Timaeus could stop you, if you used your powers and hit him and his troops hard?”
David frowned and looked down. “I don’t know.”
“Moriah says your sister created the firestorm, right? I bet she’s fine.” Jes shook a wing. “My point is… Tacitus abused Dao. I don’t want to go into details about it, but Tacitus abused her in more than a physical way, and now Dao is… like she is.”
“Sweet?”
Another wing shake.
“I think she’s always been sweet. Maybe she saw some interesting movies in the scrying pool when she hatched, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure she’s always been unusually… nice. No, it’s not that.” Jes touched her throat. “Dao can talk. But she won’t. She was like that when I met her, and I… I shouldn’t say anything else. It’s her secret to share.”
They both sighed. David set his hand on her tail betweem them and gave it a squeeze.
“Alright, I won’t pry. I mean, from you. Can I ask her about it myself?”
“You can,” Jes said, getting up, “but she’ll probably just shake her head, give you a kiss, and send you on your way.”
David followed her, and the two walked after the group.
“That does sound like her.”
“Besides, she’s my girlfriend, asshole. Go bond with your girlfriend. You two nerds get along well.”
“Girlfriend. Is Caera my girlfriend?”
Jes ughed. “I dunno. You tell me?”
“I… don’t know. I’ve never had a girlfriend before. I wouldn’t even know where to start on how to… confirm that.”
She stopped and grabbed his wrist with her tail. “That does make me want to warn you about something, though.”
“Warn?”
“You two like each other. You get along easily. But you’re human, David, and young. She’s a warrior who’s killed thousands of demons, and thousands of souls. And she’s been forced into a war against her will before. She still has the scar of Zel’s horde seal. I’ve seen enough TV in the scrying pools to see a problem.”
“That’s fiction. And I don’t see what the problem—”
She shrugged and patted his shoulder. “I’m just saying, it’s… You know, I’m not sure what I’m saying. I don’t fucking know. All I know is, you don’t really know what it’s like to be as old as Caera, to have seen as much death as her, or to be a demon and think the way she does.”
“I… I—”
“Fuck me, I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m just trying to give you a heads up. Demons aren’t humans. So, just, be aware of that, okay?”
They walked in silence until they caught up with the group, and Caera smiled back at him with her one eye. The memory of their conversations, the times Caera had been upset about needing to kill Cainites, and David speaking to her alone, drifted up in his mind. Even Caera had tried to warn him, then, that she was a demon and this was what demons did.
Jes had given him the most vague ‘humans and demons aren’t compatible’ warning possible, but she’d been honest. It was something to think about. But, just seeing the big tiger smile at him settled his nerves.
Yeah, she was a demon, with thousands of kills to her name and a long, horrible, ugly past behind her. So what?