Quickly, I tucked my wings tight into my spine, and stilled my breath.
I didn’t move. Didn’t make a sound.
I did everything I could not to draw any attention to myself.
“Hallowed swine.”
A vicious, monstrous, voice spat from across the thick, smokey haze.
“We can see you.”
Then six, large silhouettes shot across the haze, their horns protruding from their heads, aiming for my exposed flesh. I registered the seven blood-red eyes. Pallor skin. Tattered skirts. Claws for hands and feet. Well, hèls. I’d been found by Spirit Harvesters.
I didn’t think. Imoved.
I snapped open my wings, and shot like lightning through the smoke.
“Get back here, Hallowed filth.”
I didn’t think so.
I flapped my wings with all my might, racing through this elephantine manor. Excruciating pain licked my bones but I pushed it to the recesses of my mind. After five hundred wingyears of beatings and torture, I’d grown immune, numb, to physical pain throughout my body.
I raced my way through the infernal darkness until I found myself in a cavernous space. I’d flown so far, so fast, I’d lost the Spirit Harvesters. I looked above, panting. My wings hummed with the exertion. My limbs burned. As I blinked through the darkness above, through the open ceiling, I found it. A towering doorway made of silenced souls, glimmering in onyx and lavender, with an open center that was filled with the swirling display of the cosmos beyond.
The Realm Portal.
I pressed my lips into a thin line, warring internally with my swelling emotions.
I was goinghome. Fresh tears prickled my eyes. I floated towards the portal.
Close.
I was soclose.
A cruel, dark chuckle slithered into the air, withering my hope.
“NowSlave. You weren’t planning to leave without saying goodbye. Were you?”
Blood pounded in my ears. I blinked through the darkness and saw what wasn’t there before. Grotesque bodies in all shapes and sizes floating like a nightmarish army.
Rot.
I was completely surrounded.
I said nothing as I looked at the wall of demons blinking hungry, inky-black eyes at me.
“Tassarion, you are many things.Deafisn’t one of them.”
I turned my head. And found High King Zemshazrayèl Beliah floating in my direct path to the Realm Portal. A knot formed in my throat. Taking on the king alone was one thing. Taking him on with this horde of demons, was something else entirely.
“Need I remind you what happens when I have to repeat myself?”
I flinched. The image of Dragontails—whips intricately made from the skin of dragons, woven with talons, glass, and skin-shredding shrapnel—sinking into my flesh and ripping it clean off my bones, made me shudder. I raced through any possibility of how in the rot I was going to escape, coming up short.
“No, you do not, Hèlslord Zemshazrayèl the Cruel.”
Time.
