“A real toughie,” droned Isldrah, picking at her nails.
Amma’s throat and lips couldn’t go dry, but the panic was still there, coursing all around her and winking in and out like the sparkling silver and gold of arcana in the air. She looked from the god of winter and wealth urging her on the decision he knew she would make, to the goddess of death tapping fingers across her pages anxiously. Beside her, the goddess of birds and health also tapped, but there was no trepidation there, onlyimpatience. The god of fortune and destiny who had given up nearly all of his powers to the oracle back in her plane only silently grinned at her as if he could wait forever and never tire of the present moment, glad to be in it always, and finally, there was the goddess of trees and oaths, the one by whom she had sworn.
“I’m going back.”
Tarwethen smiled. “Of course, dear, now let’s—” The god blinked. His fingers shifted to claws, teeth to fangs, limbs elongating, shadow growing. “How dare you, mor—”
“Stop that.” Sestoth slapped his shoulder, and Tarwethen lost the terror that had been overcoming every inch of his being. “She made her choice.”
“Yes, the disgustingly selfish one where she allows the entirety of existence to burn to ash just so she can, what,livea few seconds longer? Have you no, what is it called?Humanity?”
Amma swallowed, and this she really did as her throat was mending, and she shrugged shoulders that she would soon have again. “I don’t care,” she said, her own voice quieter in ears that were on another plane. “I would rather be with Damien for one moment longer than abandon him. I love him, and I made a promise that I would stay by his side. I can’t break my oath, and even if I could: I don’t want to.”
Heart beating, Amma’s vision clouded, and Sestoth’s warm voice was in her ear. “That’s my girl.”
CHAPTER 35
HOW THE TURNTABLES
All of the good things on this and every other plane paled in comparison to life blossoming in Amma’s eyes. The entirety of existence would be destroyed, but she had come back to him, and Damien would never allow her to be lost again for as long as he lived, which, admittedly, seemed to have a rather short forecast, but still.
There was a flash of fire, and the resurrection spell burnt itself out of the Lux Codex in Pippa’s hands. She slammed the book shut and quickly shrouded it away, one less source of agony in the chamber, but barely an impression on the excruciating pain aching inside Damien. But there was Amma, alive, and nothing else mattered.
Gathered up in his arms, Amma’s hand found its way to Damien’s chest. Her lips parted, all of the love he’d rashly enchanted out of her returning to her face. She gripped his tunic, drawing her shoulders in, and then in a show of surprising strength, yanked him downward.
Amma’s features shifted into malice, resentment, rage. The talisman was finally out of her, the enthrallment should have been broken, the last, horrible command he’d given her wiped clean, but she looked on him as if she would put an end to Damien’s entire existence.
“Don’t youevertry to make me stop loving you again,” she hissed, and then she was kissing him.
Damien scooped her up against his body. Still covered in her blood, they slid against one another, but her arms were strong as they wrapped around his neck. He squeezed her back,hands roving over where the wound had been, now gone, and shifted away from where Xander sat, recovering on the dais from utilizing so much arcana. The other blood mage might have just broken everything either of them had ever understood about arcana and performed a divine spell of resurrection alongside a priestess, but he’d also been the one to make Amma dead in the first place.
Kill. Them. All.
“Shut up,” Damien mumbled against her mouth.
Amma pulled back. “What?”
“Not you.” He swallowed hard, throat still raw from screaming and crying.
She pouted. “That’s still in there, huh?”
He went to nod, but there was a terrible crack that shook the entirety of the throne room. Pippa yelped, and even Xander started as Damien held Amma closer, pressing his back to the stairs. From the ruined opening into the vault, the bloody and terrified form of King Archibald Lumier came running. He fled past the others, a coarse scream echoing into the throne room as he stumbled down the stairs and fell to the carpeted floor below.
A dark and ominous cackle rose from the vault as a shadowy form stepped out of the swirling noxscura that flooded into the throne room. Birzuma the Blasphemed, Ninth Lord of the Accursed Wastes and Nefarious Harbinger of the Chthonic Tower, exhaled on the threshold of the vault of Eirengaard Keep, newly freed from her prison of over a decade, and obviously pissed. Skin blue like the depths of the night, her eyes shone with yellow light as they fell on the floundering form of the man who had just freed her. Horns curled back behind her ears, rigid and coming to points tipped with gold, growing out of a wild mane of black hair. She grinned, fangs glinting, and then struck out.
The demoness was standing beside them one moment and then hunching over Archibald in the next, faster than eyes couldkeep up with. A clawed hand came down on the back of his neck and lifted him from the ground, and the King of Eiren hung there in her grasp, sobbing in fear.
Birzuma inhaled deeply, and Damien knew that satisfaction, at least tangentially—there would be no stopping her. She growled and then took a long look out at the throne room filled with infernals that had crept out of the shadows to revel in her presence. A demon lord could not crawl out of a ripped veil between planes, she had to be summoned and with intensely powerful magic, yet she was there.
“Mother, dear!” Xander was back on his feet, gulping for air, a hand pressed to his chest, still drained from the resurrection yet beaming.
The demoness turned, features hard to read on skin dark as midnight, but her flickering, yellow eyes fell on the blood mage. “Xander.” Her voice rippled through the throne room, thick and austere.
“Yes, it’s me! I got you out,” he panted, taking the steps two at a time and straightening when he reached her.
The blood mage wasn’t short by any means, but Birzuma had at least a foot on him, her lithe form clad in layers of black clothing that moved ethereally around her like smoke. She held Archibald out of the way, his feat just scuffing the floor as he vainly attempted to flee. Birzuma brought a hand to her son’s face to tip it up, black claws curling over the entirety of his jaw. “My son,” she said, each word weighty and dreadful. “What took so long?”
Xander’s eyes widened, for once at a loss as he stuttered. “I, uh, well?” He tried to look over at the others as if they could help, but she tightened her hold on him, leaning closer, waiting. “Zagadoth has been locked away for more than a decade longer than you, and—”
