Chapter 202: An End, of Sorts

For a moment, I saw Abigail’s eyes reflected in Seyari. Mouth open to shout a warning as the blade came down. Envy’s dark eyes weren’t even on my wife; they were looking directly at me. Full of malice and delight.

For all the power racing through me like it wanted to burst out, I was too far—too slow. Fire erupting behind, I shot forward anyway, a scream tearing itself loose from my mouth.

The blade came down.

A cannon shot cracked the air.

And an orange blur knocked my wife aside.

Lorelei: ally, backstabber, and demon of wrath. Her four eyes locked with mine for just an instant, burning bright and clear and blue in seas of darkness.

In them, I didn’t see Abigail. Not quite the same.

She’d made her choice, and I latched onto the wisping strings of her righteous fury like a drowning woman, accepting all I could.

Her binding collar glowed, Envy’s blade struck with a sparking clang, and the world went white.

When I hit the cavern wall, I didn’t hear it. Miraculously, my spine didn’t snap, and I shoved off with my tail. The flames all around were blinding, and their magic nature threatened to burn despite my immunity.

“SEY!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, pushing all the power I could—wind and fire both—into taming the flames.

The moment I did, a familiar feeling hit me. A soul, demonic.

Lorelei.

Another force struck at it like a cleaver, and my gem lit up green in response. With instinctual magic, I pulled, then yanked, then threw my all into keeping my friend’s soul from a second terrible fate.

With a feeling like a frayed rope snapping, Lorelei’s soul slammed into mine.

I’m sorry.

Lorelei would never get another life, like Abigail, but I knew she’d known that. She’d made the choice and that had to be enough. Grief would have to wait in the face of relief.

With Lorelei’s soul, the presence of Envy’s aura I had felt dissipated, gone back up the tunnel. I didn’t even consider chasing them.

“Sey!” I shouted again into the thinning smoke.

The air writhed in the heat, walls running like too-hot frosting as stalactites dripped into the solidifying floor.

Down amongst softened stone, I spied movement and shouted again. The furious coughing I received in reply could have been the world’s greatest aria for how it made my heart swell.

When I landed, Seyari was glowing with holy magic, scorched flesh regrowing as blackened feathers regained their lovely crimson shrine. Agonizingly, I held off wrapping her in a hug… until she had most of her skin back.

Moving now felt so… light, and I swept her into a hug so fast I heard the air escaping her lungs.

“...na!” She took a breath. “Renna! Air!”

I loosened my lower arms just a little.

“Looser!”

I pouted, but obliged.

Seyari looked up at me with glowing golden eyes and a radiant smile. “We made it—for now. What did you do?”

I blinked at her. Hadn’t she seen… wait. She was slower now, if only by a little. If I focused, I could ignore it, and for my sanity’s sake I did. “That was Lorelei.”

“Oh.” Seyari furrowed her brow, but also she brought her arms and wings into the embrace.

“Mhm.” I rested my chin on her head. “I caught her eyes—she was free, in the end.”

“...I’m glad.”

“I know you never liked her.”

“I never got along with her. There’s… a difference. I really am glad.”

“Mhm. We should still stop Mordwell.”

She made no move to end the embrace, instead sliding her head out from under mine and pulling my chin down into a quick kiss. “Yeah, I know.”

Barely resisting… baser urges, I loosened the embrace. “We really should go if you’re healed enough to fly. Hell portal and all that.”

“Mhm,” she hummed. “I know, don’t care.”

“The portal’s incredibly dangerous.”

“I suppose.” She finally pulled away with a sigh, then looked up at me. “Did you get taller?”

“I…” I frowned. “I hope I didn’t. Doors are one thing, but short ceilings I can live without.”

“Sky’s better anyway.” She tugged at one of my lower arms. “Let’s go.”

With a smile, I followed her into the air. I’d already forgotten which tunnel out of the room was the way I’d come in, but she turned me around and together we flew deeper into the cave. The place, including an obvious campsite in a small chamber, was deserted.

“Envy wanted to kill me in front of you,” Seyari said as we flew, voice carried on the wind. “They could’ve done it sooner, but they waited.”

“Sick bastard,” I threw back. “Why’d they want that?”

“Well, what would you do if they’d succeeded?”

Just the thought made my blood boil and flames snake out through the joints in my armor. A thought was enough to quell my wrath, but it was there, waiting. And it gave us both the answer. “Things I’d probably regret.”

“I assume it wouldn’t be a rampage?”

“Not through mortal territories.”

“What if it were a far-away land and Envy’s ilk were hiding amongst mortals?”

“I…” More than one fist clenched and my mind missed a beat. It should have made my blood run cold, but I felt nothing. And that, once again, scared me. “I’m not sure.”

I thought back to my conversation with Sonia. Drift of the self was a real danger to someone like me—precisely because it was a game of centimeters.

We turned a corner, and ahead could see an unnaturally-crimson glow flickering eerily along the tunnel walls.

Sey angled her head back at me, wings still for silent gliding on air currents she created. “We’ll talk more later.”

I nodded and fell into her wake. This is her moment.

We rounded the bend in the cave to a scene I wish I hadn’t seen twice before: bodies, some human, most demon, and a pulsing miasma of ritual magic. Threads of visible magic pierced up and down into the rock suspending it like a castle-sized cocoon of terrible fury and power. The ritual’s color was crimson, like mine. As much as I’d want to call it sickly, or wrong, or twisted, the only difference was in the shine of the flames.

Used for horrible purposes, magic was magic. Demonic or no.

The chamber was like a grand cathedral of ancient stone, more “hollow magma chamber” than the natural caves we’d been in; it’d be pretty in another context. As it was now, with bodies and blood, the undulations of folded rock just served to twist shadows frighteningly in the flickering red light.

Sey flew forward, around the magic, and I followed behind, wary. Despite all the assurances, I still worried she’d do something rash—I would in her place. Aura sight was blinding unless I kept to the walls, but I didn’t sense Envy or anything else.

How quiet it all was was the worst part. I expected chanting, a rushing, roaring of air and rock and power. All that could be heard were Sey’s rapid wingbeats and the soft sound of distant flames, their roaring muffled to a whisper.

To my mind, it felt wrong. To my body, my instincts, it felt like an awaiting challenge. Like an opportunity. Gross.

At the highest point of the cave, on an outcropping of rock too bulbous and indistinct to hold such a grand confrontation, stood the source of two once-ruined lives. More than that, in fact.

My soul was different than most of my kind, but I could feel echoes of others’ pain straining. For the first time in a long time, my heart clenched with anxiety and worry of its own volition. And my body ached with half remembered phantom pains.

Mordwell would have been an intimidating man, once. Short-cropped hair had gone thin and gray with age, his face spotted and sagging, mouth set in a grim, focused line. His eyes, such an unassuming brown, burned with passion. I expected wrath to suffuse him, to hit me like a wave even over that of Seyari’s righteous fury.

It didn’t.

His eyes were not those of a madman; and that scared me more than anything else.

Around him, a bubble of whipping, glowing wind held back the heat of the chamber. If I wasn’t already sure that “holy” magic had nothing to do with holiness, this scene would erase all doubt. I wished I could carve it into stone and throw it through the tallest window of the Church’s headquarters.

Sey paused for just a moment, magic blowing to keep herself aloft in place. She looked like an angel with wings dipped in blood, here to finish a vengeance she’d long pursued.

An angel of wrath.

Lances of blinding light started to take shape in her hands. Mordwell noticed us, somehow, his head lifting up and eyes flicking away from sustaining the spell.

He opened his mouth—and the first lance impacted the shield before any of us could hear what he’d tried to say. Any follow-up was drowned out by Seyari. No words, just a scream—raw and painful.

The second lance flew, and the old, frail human had no hope of dodging. His own magic must have been close to exhausted, as the shield spun apart without resistance as the lance took him through the chest.

A clean shot through the heart, and Mordwell was dead before he hit the ground.

Decades of pain and suffering and knives in the dark and it was all over in just a few seconds, leaving a hollow feeling Seyari must have felt so much more keenly than I could ever—

“Fucking finally!” My angel of wrath shouted, head tipped up and voice raw but exuberant. She clenched her fists and spun a pirouette in the air. “Thirty-four fucking years, and I don’t even fucking remember how many days! Renna, help me pull this ritual apart—it’s gonna go out of control in a second here.”

I blinked.

I blinked again.

Then I smiled, showing all my teeth. “Sure thing, Sey.”

She grabbed my hand—top right—and showed me how to take apart a world-threatening ritual portal to the demonic plane. Pull magic from here, push it there. Keep it stable and draw it out like draining an abscess. All the while, Seyari was smiling like I’d only ever seen once, on our wedding day.

I almost asked about planning the reception, we’d not yet had the chance after all. But it’d have to wait. Envy was still out there. Apparently they’d abandoned Mordwell, or perhaps this was their plan all along.

Except the part where Seyari lived.

That was a victory we owed to Lorelei, and I’d be making a gravestone for her in Astrye when we got back. Mordwell was dead, but it all felt more like the start of something new than the end. An idyllic cottage was a far fantasy, farther now than ever before. The last anticlimax was how the ritual dissipated with the sound of a candle blowing out.

Not one second later Seyari pulled me into a hug so quickly I could feel the air between us resisting.

“If we didn’t have to race back home just in case Envy’s going there next, I’d fuck you so hard right now there’d be a second damn eruption.”

“I…” I could feel more heat than just the blush arriving with the force of a bursting dam.

She looked into my eyes for just a moment, then decided I must not have had anything to say and shut me up with a deep kiss. Tongues twined and competed and flames twisted around us as we spun in the air. When I came up for breath, Sey was smiling viciously. All around me, I felt my armor falling away into cinders.

She traced a claw down from my bottom lip to my chin, drawing a thin line of blood she licked off slowly. “Maybe we have enough time for something quick.”

“Sey, no,” I protested, but my heart wasn’t in it.

“Sey, yes.” She licked her lips and pounced.