This place was as much Kobal as the Fires of Creation were.
***
Kobal
My gaze went to the far dais, my fangs throbbed with the urge to tear something to shreds.Mythrone was gone, and I knew exactly who had it, but why had Lucifer bothered to come here and take it when the weight of it would only slow him down? I had a feeling I would find out the answer to that soon enough.
Beyond where my throne once sat, I saw that River’s was also gone.
When she squirmed in my arms, I set her down. She walked away from me to rest her fingers against the wall. Her head bowed and her black hair fell forward to shield her features.
Pulling her hand away, she flexed it as she stepped back. Pink color tinged her cheeks and the black circles under her eyes had lessened. Realizing this room gave her strength, I seized her hand and placed it on the wall again. She tried to tug it from me, but I refused to release her.
“You saw what happened below! What I did!” She jerked at her hand again.
“Those were extraordinary events. You are weakened, Lucifer is still alive, and Hell is coming apart. Take what you need from this place, while you can,” I replied, unwilling to relent.
Her fingers unfurled in my hand to rest against the wall. We stared at each other for a moment before I released her. The ground shuddered again. A jagged crack raced out from beneath my feet and toward the dais. Through the crack, the flames beneath us flickered and jumped. The demons stumbled away from it and the hounds backed slowly away.
“Opening that gateway sometime soon would be lovely,” Magnus said to me.
“For once, I must agree with him,” Lopan said from his perch on Calah’s shoulders.
“Step back,” I commanded.
River turned and flattened her back against the wall while the demons crept closer to her. Many of them eyed her warily, and only Corson and Bale were brave enough to stand beside her, but beneath the demons’ apprehension of her, I also saw admiration. What she’d done to the seals made them nervous, but they respected power, and she had displayed alotof it.
I rubbed my palms together before closing my eyes and focusing on the flow of the symbols marking me. It had been years since I’d opened a gateway, and I’d never done it as often as my ancestors had in the days before Lucifer entered Hell, but the ability to do so came flooding back to me.
The ground heaved again, and gasps filled the air as the temperature in the throne room ratcheted up. Energy crackled over my skin. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know the fissure had grown enough to reveal the oracle below.
Opening my eyes, I turned my hands so the backs of them pressed against each other. My markings shifted and flooded down to my fingertips when I pulled my hands apart. The rending of the air caused my skin to ripple as I opened a hole before me. I may not do it often, but the opening of the gateways was a part of me and it brought forth an overwhelming sensation of rightness with it.
River’s eyes met mine over the black hole in front of me. At three feet wide and five feet high, the hole had been opened through the fabric of time itself. The ground heaved upward, knocking most of the demons into the wall as chunks of the ceiling broke free to smash into the ground. The force of them dented the ground, and one larger piece crushed a demon beneath it. I didn’t have time to open the gateway as wide as I wanted to, or to have it open on the other end where I wanted it to.
This would have to be enough.
“Hurry!” I commanded and held one of my hands out to River. Until I closed it, the gateway would remain open without me now. Taking my hand, she stepped away from the wall. “It won’t take you all the way out of Hell,” I told her. “I didn’t have enough time for that, but it will get you most of the way there.”
“I’m not going without you,” she stated.
“I will follow you,afterthe others go through.”
She glanced at everyone else. “They’ll go first, but I’m staying with you.”
“No, you’re not.” Looking beyond her, I focused on the demons. “Start evacuating, now!”
“Your majesty, you should go first,” one of them protested, and the others nodded their agreement.
“The Fires will not kill me, but they will kill you. Go.”
I didn’t have to order them through again as they rushed into the gateway. Many had to duck to enter it, and some could only go through one at a time. The tree nymphs were small enough to fit two or three at a time. The darkness swirled up like fog to block most of their bodies before they were more than three feet in. Within five feet, they disappeared.
“You have to go,” I said to River.
“You are their king, and I am their queen,” she said. “I will wait until our followers are safe too.”
“Iwill survive if this whole place falls, you will not. You’re going.”
