A human. A mate. A bond.
The floor cracked.
I didn't decide to break it. My wrathfire made the decision for me—erupting downward through my boots, through the ancient black glass, splitting the surface in a web of fractures thatradiated outward from where I stood like fault lines from an epicentre. Molten light bled through the fissures, gold and red, and the temperature in the Throne room climbed ten degrees in the space of a breath.
The sound that came out of me was not a word. It was older than words. It was the sound the Scourge's volcanoes made when pressure built past bearing—raw, tectonic, a roar that shook dust from a ceiling that hadn't seen dust in a millennium. I felt it rip through my chest and fill the chamber, and I felt my brothers flinch, and I did not care.
Then the words came.
"Thirty thousand years." My voice was gravel and heat, barely controlled, each consonant a struck flint. "Thirty thousand years I have forged myself into a weapon worthy of the Scourge. I have held my borders against Greed's incursions, crushed rebellions, bled for this realm in wars that half the demons in this room slept through." I did not look at Sloth. I did not need to. "I rule through strength. Through discipline. Through thepurityof what I am."
The cracks in the floor widened. Somewhere beneath us, something groaned.
"A bond that tempers me is not completion. It iscontamination." The word tasted like poison and I spat it at the Throne. "I do not want softness. I do not want compromise. I do not want some fragile, mortal creature planted in my citadel like a flower in a furnace, wilting while I pretend that her presence makes me more than what I already am."
I was burning. Not metaphorically—my skin had taken on the ember-glow that my soldiers knew to run from, molten veins of gold tracing the lines of my arms and throat, my horns radiating heat that warped the air above them. The three lesser demons near Lust had pressed themselves flat against the wall. Good. They should.
"I want to burn as I have always burned."
The silence after my voice died was the kind that fills a room when something has been broken that cannot be unbroken. The cracks in the floor still glowed. The ceiling still rained dust.
Pride spoke first. Of course he did.
"The Rite is beneath us." His voice cut through the heat of my rage like a blade through smoke—cold, precise, utterly controlled. He hadn't moved from his position near the Throne. Hadn't flinched. His silver horns caught the glow of my wrathfire and threw it back as something colder. "We are the Seven. We are not mortal men to be shackled by—what? Sentiment? The mating rituals of creatures who live eighty years and call it a lifetime?"
The arrogance of it should have been staggering, but this was Pride. He didn't believe the Rite was beneath him because he objected to the terms. He believed the Throne was already his. He was insulted that he was being asked to earn what he considered a birthright.
Greed said nothing. But his fingers stopped. They had been moving—over gemstones, over gold inlay, the constant restless calculation that was as involuntary for him as breathing was for humans—and they stopped. His eyes narrowed to slits of pale gold, and I watched the gears behind them begin to turn. He was already working out how to game this. How to acquire a mate the way he acquired everything: through leverage, through transaction, through finding the price of a thing that was supposed to be priceless.
Lust laughed. Low, bitter, barely a sound—more an exhalation shaped like amusement. "A genuine connection," he repeated, and the words dripped from his tongue like honey laced with something corrosive. "You're askingmeto form a genuine connection. Father, I am the lord of desire without fulfilment. Iam every want that consumes itself. You might as well ask fire to nourish."
Envy's reaction lasted half a second. I nearly missed it. A flash across his features—raw, nakedwant, so intense it distorted the air around him the way my heat distorted it around me. He wanted the Throne. He had always wanted the Throne. But more than that—and this was the thing I filed away, the thing I would turn over later in the privacy of my own domain—he wanted to bechosen. The look vanished behind a mask so smooth it might never have existed. But I had seen it.
Gluttony stopped eating.
He had been mid-bite—that obscene, dripping fruit halfway to his mouth—and his jaw hung open for a full breath before he closed it. The fruit lowered. His eyes, small and shrewd beneath the bulk of his brow, moved from the King to the cracked floor to me and back to the King. He said nothing. Gluttony rarely needed to speak; his silence was its own kind of consumption, swallowing reactions whole and digesting them at leisure.
Sloth did not react at all. His eyes remained closed. His breathing remained even. I could not tell if he was asleep, meditating, or simply so profoundly indifferent to the shape of the future that he could not be bothered to open his eyes for it.
The King absorbed it all.
The rage, the objections, the bitter laughter, the calculating silence, the flash of desperate wanting, the performative unconsciousness. He sat on the Obsidian Throne and let our reactions wash over him with the patience of a mountain enduring weather, and when the last echo of my roar had died and the dust had settled and the cracks in his floor had stopped spreading, he spoke one final time.
"The Rite is spoken." His voice—all seven sins, all at once, faded but absolute. "It is law. Even I cannot undo it now."
The room went still.
I understood. Not immediately—the understanding came in layers, each one landing heavier than the last, settling into me like sediment after a flood.
Even I cannot undo it now.
Notwill not. Cannot.
He had bound himself. Bound his own authority to the decree with the same irreversible finality he'd bound us. The Rite wasn't a tyrant's whim to be retracted when it became inconvenient. It wasn't a test that could be failed and forgiven. He had written it into Infernum's bones, and in doing so he had written himself out of the ability to unwrite it.
This was a dying king's final act.
The grief surged again—that thing I refused to name, pressing against the back of my teeth. I bit down on it until I tasted something that wasn't quite blood.
