He backed her toward the wall, his larger body eclipsing the lamp, plunging her into his shadow. “Was it the fish seller? The one with the arms? Or was it someone new?”
“Ramon, please,” she begged, her back hitting the cool plaster of the wall. There was nowhere left to retreat. “You’re imagining things.”
Her honesty had always been a shield, but now deception coated her tongue like honey. Perhaps he tasted it in the air between them. Her pulse quickened - not just with terror, but with something darker, something that bared its teeth behind her eyes and watched him with newfound hunger.
“Am I?” he snarled, his face inches from hers, his breath a hot, foul wave of the beer he’d been secretly drinking in the kitchen. “Tell me what you’ve been doing while I was away. Tell me who you let into my house. Into my bed.”
His hand shot out and clamped around her throat. The impact drove her head back against the wall with a sickening thud. Stars exploded behind her eyes. His grip was a vise, his thumb digging into the hollow of her throat, cutting off her air. She clawed at his wrist, her nails scraping uselessly against his thick, calloused skin. Black spots danced in her vision.
“Tell me!” he roared, shaking her. Her head lolled, a dead weight on her neck. A choked, gurgling sound was the only answer she could give.
In the vortex of pain and terror, as her lungs screamed for air they could not have, a new sensation erupted. The talisman against her chest, which had been a steady warmth, ignited. It was not a pulse; it was an inferno. A searing, agonizing heat flared against her skin, scorching her flesh through the thin cotton of her dress. The pain was excruciating, a brand being pressed into her sternum, but it was also a signal. A beacon. A scream into the void that was not her own.
At the exact moment of the talisman’s ignition, the room changed. The air, already strained, became a physical weight, a foul, sulfurous pressure that pushed in from all sides. The shadows in the corners of the room stopped being shadows; they deepened, churned, and began to coalesce into something solid, something with a dreadful, ancient hunger. The lamp flickered wildly, the bulb buzzing as if it were about to explode. A profound, unearthly cold leeched the humidity from the air, and Ramon’s hot, stale breath plumed in front of Lina’s face as a white cloud of vapor. The condition had been met, had been exceeded. The judgment had begun.
From the deepest heart of the churning shadows behind Ramon, a form detached itself from the gloom. It did not step or stride; it simply… was. One moment, there was only darkness, the next, there was him. Maruz unfurled to his full, impossible height, his magnificent frame seeming to warp the very architecture of the room, his shoulders so broad they threatened to brush both walls of the narrow space. His skin, the color of bronze forged in a dying star, radiated a visible heat that distorted the air around him. The sigils carved into his flesh were no longer faint, but blazed with a fierce, amber light. His eyes were not just fiery; they were twin furnaces of ancient, nihilistic rage. The air thickened with the scent of brimstone, a smell so potent it burned the back of Lina’s throat.
“She has been under my protection.”
The voice came from everywhere at once - from Maruz’s perfect, severe lips, from the vibrating walls, from the deepest chambers of Ramon’s own terrified soul. It was a chord of immense power, a multilayered resonance that stripped the strength from bone and marrow.
Ramon’s hand flew from Lina’s throat as if he’d been electrocuted. He stumbled back, turning, his face a slack-jawed mask of disbelief that curdled into raw, primal terror. The bully, the tyrant of this small, sad kingdom, was face to face with a god of a darker, older world. All the color drained from his face, leaving behind a pasty, sweat-slicked canvas of fear.
Lina collapsed, sliding down the wall to the floor, her body a boneless sack. Air flooded her lungs in ragged, desperate gulps, each breath a searing pain in her bruised throat. She lay there, on the cool wood, looking up at the impossible scene unfolding before her.
Maruz regarded the terrified man with an expression of pure, divine contempt. He took a slow, deliberate step forward, his bare feet making no sound. Ramon scrambled backward, tripping over the woven rug and falling heavily.
“What… what are you?” Ramon stammered, crab-walking away, his eyes wide with a madness that was not his own, but had been inflicted upon him.
Maruz smiled. It was not a gesture of warmth or humor. It was the baring of teeth, a promise of exquisite violence. “I am the consequence,” he rumbled. He tilted his head, a gesture of almost scientific curiosity. “You seem surprised. You should not be. You humans are so careless with your lives, and the lives of others. Do you know how many people simply vanish in this country? Every fifteen minutes, another one gone. A worker who never made it home from the docks. A man who simply walked out of his life and was never seen again. A crewman lost at sea in a sudden squall.” Maruz’s smile widened. “So easy. A few memories altered here, a story planted there. No one saw you come here. Not really. No one will remember you leaving. Not at all. Your existence is a whisper, and I am the storm that will erase it.”
The demon raised a hand, his long, elegant fingers spread. He spoke a single, guttural word of power, a syllable that cracked the air like a whip. In response, the walls of the apartment erupted in light. Shimmering, intricate sigils blazed to life across the plaster, on the door, over the windows - a cage of infernal crimson energy that pulsed with a low, menacing hum. The weak yellow light of the lamp was devoured by the bloody glow, plunging the room into the heart of a hellish forge. Every object cast long, dancing shadows that looked like grasping claws.
Ramon screamed, a high, thin sound that was utterly pathetic. He was trapped. He was judged. He was meat.
“Your judgment has come, Ramon Delos Santos,” Maruz declared, his voice a final, damning verdict. He began to advance, his movements the fluid, inescapable grace of a panther closing on its cornered prey.
Lina lay against the wall, her breath still coming in ragged sobs, the searing burn on her chest a constant, fiery reminder of her choice. But the terror that had owned her for eight years was gone, incinerated in the crimson light. It was replaced by something else, something vastand dark and thrilling. Awe. She watched Maruz, this magnificent, terrible being she had called forth, and she felt a connection so profound it was like a second soul being born inside her. His power was her power. His rage was her rage. The crimson light of the sigils was reflected in her wide, dark eyes, and in their depths, two tiny infernos burned. She was no longer watching a rescue. She was witnessing her own terrible, beautiful ascension.
Judgment Rendered
The crimson sigils pulsing on the walls were not just light; they were a solvent, dissolving the cheap plaster and peeling paint of Lina’s world. The cramped apartment groaned, the geometry of the room bending and stretching into an impossible space. The ceiling receded into a cathedral of shadow, and the walls fell away into a twilight vista of black sand and a churning, starless sea that existed only in sound and scent. The roar of phantom waves crashed against an unseen shore, and the air tasted of salt and oblivion.Lina remained on the floor, a castaway on the familiar island of her living room rug, while the world she knew was unmade around her.
Maruz stood at the heart of the transformation, the architect of this new, terrible reality. He raised a hand, palm open, toward the whimpering shape that was her husband. “You built your kingdom on the geography of her pain,” the demon rumbled, his voice a complex harmony of grinding stone, ancient whispers, and the sibilant hiss of a dying star. “Now, you will live in it.”
From the demon’s palm, a darkness deeper than the starless sea bled into the air. It was not a shadow, but an absence. A patch of perfect, light-devouring void that tore a hole in the world. It spread, silent and hungry, encircling Ramon, who stood frozen in its path. He tried to scramble away, but the edge of the void was not a line he could cross; it was a state of being into which he was already sinking. The crimson sigils cast no light into its depths. It was a prison of absolute nothing.
Trapped within this supernatural cage, Ramon’s terror became something tangible. It was a scent, sharp and sour, that cut through the salt air. And then, another scent joined it, one Lina knew with a soul-deep familiarity. The clean, sharp, chemical bite of bleach. It billowed from the void, an invisible cloud, and Ramon gagged, his hands flying to his nose.
“What is this?” he choked, his eyes streaming.
Lina knew. She remembered scrubbing the grout in the bathroom on her hands and knees, the fumes making her dizzy as she worked to erase the splatter of blood from a split lip before a neighbor could see. She remembered the burn of it on her own skin.
“The scent of erasure,” Maruz’s voice echoed, seeming to come from within the void itself. Ramon began to scrub at his hands, his face, as if trying to wash away an invisible stain, his movements a frantic parody of her own.
Then came the sounds. A woman’s scream, high and sharp, ripped through the chamber. It was her voice, but younger, a sound she had not made in years, from a night he had pinned her to the bed and she had thought he would finally kill her. The scream echoed, layering on top of itself, becoming a chorus of her past agonies. Ramon clapped his hands over his ears, his body convulsing. But the sound was not in the air; it was inside his head.
The shriek was replaced by the percussive crash of a dinner plate shattering against a wall, followed by the wet, ugly slap of a hand striking flesh. Each impact was accompanied by a violent flinch from Ramon, as if he were the one being struck. Lina watched, her breath caught in her throat. She remembered each of these moments. They were scars on her memory, and now they were his.
