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"So, what you are saying is to forget about the Nayphyllym and this part of the styx? To take the nobles home to Elysian and… what? Wait for the Nayphyllym to attack?"
"We don't have to hang around and wait for that," Azazel suggested.
"Take theAsphodeland go somewhere where we are neither Nayphyllym nor Daemons, where we can start over," Marduk nodded.
Silence enveloped the meeting room. Azazel took my hand. "I'm happy wherever you are."
Seth rose from his seat and walked around the round table, hands folded behind his back, his face set into a mask of concentration.
"We don't owe anybody anything," Lilith said, making Seth stop his pacing. "We were never given a choice in this. We were born into roles we were forced to play, and we did. And now we are free."
"Free to do what we want and free to go wherever we want," Azazel added.
"Do you feel any responsibility toward Elysian?" Grigori spoke up. He was a quiet man, and when he spoke, we usually listened.
"I don't," Seth confessed. "I do feel some moral obligation to warn them though."
"That's what we do then," Azazel agreed. "We go to Elysian, drop everybody off who wants to leave and… what do you call it, karamia?"
"Ride off into the sunset," I supplied with a grin.
"Ride off into the sunset," Seth mused. "I like that."
"The Daemons had thousands of years to prepare for another war with the Nayphyllym. Whatever happens is on them," Marduk agreed.
Agreeing murmurs moved through our ranks, and I felt a weight lifting from my chest. I had worried Seth, as the new King of Darkness, would want to join ranks with the Daemons of Elysian. So far, all the decisions we made were through joint meetings and in a democratic way, but he was our ruler, no matter if it went against my still very human nature or not.
Had he done so, I feared Azazel's and my options would have been fairly limited. From everything we knew, the Daemons weren't in possession of a large fleet, so it wasn't like we could just buy a ship and fly off on our own once we reached Elysian.
And the idea of throwing ourselves at the mercy of the Nayphyllym didn't sit well with me, even though I was a member of their race. Honestly, I didn't know where I belonged other than to Azazel.
That the others in our small group felt the same was a deep relief. And I liked the idea ofriding off into the sunset. Starting something new at a different place. Far from the Daemons and Nayphyllym.
EPILOGUE
Elysianwasfinallybehindus.
Just as we had feared, the Daemons were more concerned with living their immortal lives to excess than with building defenses for their planet. After all, that was what Behlial had secured for them.
To say they were unhappy with us taking theAsphodeland leaving Behlial behind with them was an understatement. The new ruler of Elysian tried everything from bribery to threats to entice us to continue Behlial's styx, even after we revealed all Behlial's treachery. They didn't care, as long as the styx would keep the Nayphyllym off their backs.
Most of the nobles, guards, and servants left theAsphodel. Only a few asked to remain, and we actually took on a few more from Elysian, who were more farsighted than their brethren and were willing to risk an unknown future rather than possible enslavement by the Nayphyllym.
The universe was dauntingly large, but it was its vastness that would allow us to vanish. We flew for several hundred years, gliding through space. One might think life aboard a spaceship would become boring after all this time, but Behlial's bibliotheca turned out to be a well of information. Even I, who had never harbored any great aspirations about learning history, found myself fascinated with thebooksstored there, which weren't like any books I had ever seen.
Most were discs that when entered into a tablet, brought real historical events to life. We watched the Nayphyllym and Daemon wars, watched things that had happened on Earth. It was eerie and fascinating at the same time to witness events I had only ever read about play out as if in a movie.
Of course not everything was accessible. Behlial's betrayal, for example, wasn't on any of the discs, but the brothers enjoyed watching Ishtar come aboard. It was an alien version of family movie night.
Besides that, we frequently stopped and marked inhabitable planets to replenish our stores and to explore. As soon as we discovered intelligent life, no matter how primitive, we took off again. By an unspoken agreement, we would not subject another planet to what Earth had gone through and corrupt the natural development.
Honestly, we didn't care how long our journey—we stopped calling it styx—took, because every year took us further away from the Daemons and Nayphyllym.
Until one day, we discovered a true paradise.
It looked like a tropical dream. Hundreds of islands dotted the planet. Alien palm trees with orange leaves glistened in the sun and deep violet stems reached up into the sky, baring edible, delicious fruits.
Animals were in abundance in the sea as well as on the islands, but we didn't find a trace of intelligent life and called this planet our home. Naming it Paradiso.
