Releasing my light, I let it spill from my chest, bleeding outward in a low, steady glow. Gold. Not the sterile white of Heaven’s halls, but something warmer. Older.
The walls are not cleanly split, but wrenched apart—forced open to reveal the Earth’s buried layers. Not just soil and stone, bands of compacted earth, each an indication of time itself, veins of different minerals glint as light touches them. I pass fossils, roots, and rock that have long ago fused with stone—fragments of life long since ended, and locked away beneath the world that replaced it.
All of it now twisted and warped by the immense heat, strain, and pollution it was never meant to endure.
Below, a molten pit churns, radiating heat and pulsing with its own unnatural light, lacing the air with hellfire—humid, dense, and stifling.
It licks at leather and armor, which warms but remains resistant to the intense temperature.
In the darkness below, two pairs of eyes stare up at me—easy to spot as their pale and hairless bodies stand out against the dark stone. Soulless creatures, both of them. Different species.
As I near the first who has climbed higher than the other, it turns, hissing—fangs bared, orb-white eyes burning with feral malice. I do not grant it the mercy of a slow death. I slice its head cleanly from its shoulders. In the same motion, I drive my other sword deep into the rock beside it, anchoring myself just long enough to watch the body tumble backward—vanishing into the inferno below.
The head soon follows.
I release the blade, forcing a burst of air against the cliff face to propel myself across the divide. My hand catches an outcropping. I hang for a fraction of a second before dropping—twenty feet—gripping another ledge.
The second creature lunges.
I dispatch it before it can make contact. Its body strikes the rock wall once—twice—before plunging into the gate, where the flames consume it in an instant.
If anything watches from the other side, the message should be clear.
This gate is closed.
I sheath my blades and throw out a hand, redirecting the heat as I descend, stopping just short of the gate itself.
Nearly nine feet across.
Wide enough to allow far worse through.
The heat intensifies near its center—yellow, then white—where the fire burns hottest. Around its edges lie the remains of those who failed. Blackened bones. Twisted forms. Some fused into the rock itself, as though the stone had begun to swallow them mid-passage.
Either something waited for them on the other side…or they failed to recover from the damage they suffered. Which means those who survived either regenerated or found a way to briefly negate the fire. A shield. A barrier. Something to stop the gate here from burning them whole.
I center and focus before calling more power to me.
Using my wings to hold myself aloft—I adjust as the rock beside me begins to shift.
I draw from everything around me—the dying threads of nature, buried metals, mineral deposits within the earth. Stone answers. Iron yields. Even the bedrock bends beneath the force of my will.
Stone folds in on itself. The heat slowly dissipates. The light inside the crevice dims as the hellfire is smothered out. A natural barrier of scorched stone covers and seals the gate.
I land.
For a moment, I do nothing except breathe and release nature back to itself.
Then I kneel and place my hand on the stone, binding it to this place with enough power that it’ll take more than another earthquake to reopen.
When it’s finished, I stand and, with a steady beat of my wings, head back toward the surface. As I rise, I pull the earth together behind me, forcing the fractured walls inward until the hole is filled and fused shut.
Back on solid ground, I retrieve my cloak and let my immortality recede. The weight of the world settles back into place as I call Mardoch to me and prepare to hunt down the demons who escaped on foot—along with any other lesser underworlders.
Once the demon reached civilization, its path became easy to follow.
Burned timbers. Shattered doors. A blood trail miles wide and the remains of lives ended too quickly.
For the past hour, tracking the destruction has become unnecessary. The screams—and the scent of smoke, sulfur, and death—have guided our course.
