Asher remained tall and strong, not a sign of pain or fatigue on his face. I could still feel him through our bond, but he was blocking me as best he could, hiding the worst from me.
My eyes darted between the god standoff and the lava below, and I found my fortitude. I found the strength to remove my arm. Because I didn’t need two arms if I had no Asher. I didn't need them if there was no world.
Gritting my teeth, I dived back down toward the lava, and when I neared the surface, threw my left hand out and plunged it straight into the boiling river of fire. My intention had been to keep my pain to myself, grit my teeth and get through it, but it was so much more than I’d imagined.
My skin melted away, reduced to nothing more than bone in seconds. My skin was diamond, but even diamond had a melting point. My bones, though, must have been something stronger than diamond because they did not succumb to the heat. Once I’d screamed through the pain of losing my skin and muscles and organs, there was nothing but a cold chill against the parts of my body still in the flames.
Where are you?I called to the Hellbringers. But there was no reply. Swirling my mutilated arm in the fire, I started to wonder if this had been enough. Did they require me to go fully into the flames? Did I have to sacrifice everything except my bones to control them?
Before any of those questions could be answered, something heavy and solid grabbed my bone-arm and yanked me under.
Chapter 32
Asher’s voice was the last thing in my mind before everything went black and pain like no other destroyed me.
I burned.
Every part of me burned. There was no escape. My screams allowed the lava to seep through my throat, melting me from the inside, and within a minute of the worst kind of torture I’d ever felt in my life, there was nothing left of me, nothing but a fractured mind and a skeleton built of fragmented memories and original power.
As I floated in the lava, it felt cool against my bones, and I wondered what it really was. What was this substance, filled with an energy I had not felt before?
Come to me.
This time I was in control, fears stripped away. I could never experience the sort of pain like that again. Softness had been burned from my body, and I was now the perfect machine to house the Hellbringers.
I was the perfect god killing machine.
Our special one.
The energy surrounded me, a swirl of darkness and ultimate power.
The three of you would have controlled us. It’s better this way.
I had a flickering thought of two others, their faces shrouded. Better this way for sure. This was what I was made to do. What I was made to be.
Why am I special?It was time to know, even if knowing changed nothing.
You and the other two contain a tiny essence of the Mother of All. Her energy lived within you when she died to save the worlds. She spilled her blood and power. We are the original energy she used to build it all, and now you will have it. No other could harness the energy of the universe in the same way you do.
This information was new to me. I’d never expected that the Mother of All’s energy would reside inside of me, but it explained why I was here now, controlling this power.
I was the Mother of All … the second.
Bony fingers appeared in front of my face, held together with my power alone, since any connective tissue was long gone. The dark power wrapped around my hand and my energy welcomed them. They sank into me like the missing pieces of my essence. Light pierced through the darkness of this world below and I wanted to smile, only there were no lips left for me to do so. I settled for embracing the contented feeling of completeness.
Complete power.
Time to do what we were born to do.
The Hellbringers had not been born, but they were one with me now, and had embraced my thoughts and memories. They’d lain here in this elemental ooze since the fall of the last Mother. They had been waiting.
With ease I lifted myself in the air, moving through the fire like it was water. Something caught my eye when I was about to break through, and I wondered for a moment why there was a bronze trident in the lava with us.
Why had it not burned?
You don’t need it.
The voice pushed away my curiosity and I dismissed the trident then as nothing more than a trivial Atlantean thing. Akin to caring about an ant. Or the slimy trail of a slug.
