Gilead stepped beyond the crescent the others stood in safely yards away. The only bold one now, the mage grabbed Damien beneath his jaw, and he couldn’t move out from under the man’s withered hand, smelling so like brimstone it burnt his throat. Gilead had stepped into the ring of blackness expanding at Damien’s feet, but the shadows barely licked at him.
“Come on, now,” said Gilead, a smirk on his dry, thin lips. “Feed It. It is your destiny.”
Noxscura wrapped around the fingers that dug into his throat, but Damien willed it back, sweat pouring down his neck and muscles shaking. If that was what they wanted, then it was the last thing he was willing to give them, but he was struck by the fact he’d expected to be run through, his blood spilt, to be cleansed from the plane. But they weren’t killing him—they were coaxing E’nloc into existence. Were they really that stupid?
“Do they know you’re doing this for the Grand Order of Dread?” Damien spat back, throat raw. He looked for shock onthe faces of the others, but nothing in their features changed.
“If I were to act in the Order’s favor, it would have already been done in The Temple of the Void. They expected containment in a vessel, before It could come to full power, so that they could destroy It.” He squeezed so tightly, Damien could not take another breath. “You should be thanking me, boy—that would have been your death.”
The Order was going todestroyE’nloc? Damien scowled through his suffocation—that meant they were going to destroyhimtoo. Gilead’s hand finally released him.
“And this isn’t meant to be my end?” he coughed, the growing pool of forever darkness lapping at his bound ankles. The magic was so intense, he no longer felt the nausea or the pain, only the ebbing of his own blood inside him, being drawn toward the dreaded inevitability below.
“Cooperation goes a long way,” Gilead whispered, decaying breath on Damien’s face, and then he backed toward the others. “Truly, what we do here today, the sacrifices we make for the holy light of Osurehm, is in service of the realm.”
Murmurs rose up in agreement from the rest, though the words seemed hollow and repetitious. They were…they werealldivine mages, weren’t they? Perhaps further removed from their dominion forebears than Damien, but with veins that ran thick with luxerna in their blood.
And there Damien stood, alone and given up togood.
Dawn’s crimson brightness that had been creeping over the stadium began to darken then. Over the edge of the arena’s high wall, a black orb hung in the sky above the sun’s ascent, slowly swallowing the light. As it rose, the sun would be blotted out when it passed behind the moons still hanging there, one before the other.
When the day is night…damn it.
The men stepped back, giving Damien space as if there wereanything he could do in his bound state. Even if he could have bled himself, casting was out of the question; E’nloc would absorb it all. Defenseless, he watched the four noble sons and Archibald drawing various, pointed weapons to be brought to their forearms while Gilead looked on.
Only by the spilling of the descendants’ blood may It rise…shit.
Blades cut into flesh. Bloodcraft done by divine mages. Hypocritical bastards. Bastards, all of them. Everyone, leaving him there to rot just like the corners of the world. Rot he had failed to stop—fuck, perhaps he had actually been feeding it, left to fester and grow, to follow him, find him, and consume him in the end just as he knew it would. However far he traveled, however much he changed, he couldn’t escape the prophecy, couldn’t escape who he knew he was meant to be. He’d not expected to become a sacrifice, of course, but then he had always been a tool of evil. Even his own mother knew it.
Blood splashed over the arena’s mud as darkness ascended overhead, the sun rising into its own obscurity behind the double moons. The blood lost its color in the growing crimson shadows. No one moved to stab Damien though, the men, even Archibald, simply watching the void open at his feet.
Curiously, Damien did not sink into the darkness, and no tendril reached out to wrap around him. His racing heart did slow, though, breath calming. There was pressure on every limb, on his chest, on his head. Something was happening, but he had no idea what, the sound of wind whipping down through the arena’s basin carried away into a hollow nothingness. An entire arena, and not a seat filled, only these six to watch as he could no longer hold back the noxscura, and they didn’t even look pleased by the heinousness they were inflicting upon him.
“Can’t you at least fucking enjoy this?” he gasped.
But no—they insisted on looking utterly terrified.
Only Gilead had the courtesy to grin as Damien succumbed to E’nloc, arcana flooding out of him so quickly that he only had a few seconds more before turning to a husk. The mage held up the pendent, the one his mother had used against him, the one Delphine had stolen, the one he had given to Amma for protection.
Amma. She’d done her best, really, if only he could say the same for himself.
The sun finally hid behind the moons completely and darkness fell over Eiren. Damien wasn’t a praying man, he wasn’t even aware of what most of the gods were called, but he knew Thea, goddess of death, mostly because her name was easy to remember. As her fingers crawled up Damien’s spine, the only thing he thought to lament was not telling Amma he loved her sooner. Because it had always been true, he had just been too stupid to realize and too afraid to say, and he mourned not having a moment longer with her.
Then there was nothing.
Well, no, there was an inky blackness. A bone-deep chill too. And the strange feeling of floating. If this was death, then perhaps it wasn’tthatterrible, but to experience thisforever?
It wasn’t death, of course, because Damien Maleficus Bloodthorne couldn’t die that easily, and death was quite different than just floating in chilly darkness forever, but those details would be sorted later.
A tingle, something like noxscura, ran over the back of Damien’s head—that was, if he had a head anymore. In the darkness, there was a flicker—half of an ugly, red stone that had a ridiculous name he probably should have paid a little more attention to. And then there was a voice.
“Finally,” It said. “Ours.”
The stone’s other half floated up to meet the first before him in the nothingness.
“Oh, no, no, no,” Damien groaned. “Just let me be dead.”
“Destruction soon,” It replied as the two halves of the rough-cut gem became one, no longer fragmented, “but first, existence.”
