~~Day 96~~
~~Mia~~
They stood in Dobasi’s throne room, rested and ready to rip his head off if they had to.
But the bastard had Anianus with him, and a bunch of brutes. And vrats. A couple of gargoyles were with him, and a tiger. Three bat girls hung from the ceiling, and a minotaur wearing an absurd amount of armor stood nearby. All had some nasty scars.
Minotaurs supposedly weren’t a threat. Big and slow, they built things, and that was it. But this minotaur, missing an eye, looked ready for battle.
But it wasn’t him that had everyone worried. Or Anianus. It was Dobasi, wearing a full suit of meera metal, but also a third tetrad, a woman, also wearing a full suit of meera metal.
A demon decked head to toe in black spiky metal armor was a scary thing. Two was especially scary.
“Who’s this?” Mia asked, gesturing to the bolstara tetrad. Hooves, no tail, but otherwise looked just like Julisa. No hair, four arms, four giant horns, and busty. And standing with some of that absurd confidence that got under Mia’s skin.
Mia’s whole gang was there, Azreal and Noah included, so she had confidence to match.
“This is Cillia, my lover,” Dobasi said.
Mia tilted her head and looked the woman up and down. Cillia returned the look with a steel gaze through the open face of her helmet. A cold and brutal woman, missing several fingers from two of her hands. She matched Dobasi’s energy perfectly.
“Looks more like a bodyguard,” Julisa said.
Cillia spat on the floor. Mia took a step back. In all her time in Hell, she’d never seen a demon do that.
“Where’s Cato?” Mia asked. Dobasi tilted his head. “I know you have another bailiff. Is she not coming?”
“Angel’s Spine is large,” the spire ruler said, voice deep and grumbly. “Anianus was lucky to find you and return as quickly as he did. Cato may take several weeks to return.”
“I hope she doesn’t run into the rider then.”
“She can defeat–“
Mia shook her head. “No. She can’t defeat the rider. Romakus, I thought this guy was supposed to be smart?”
Dobasi glared, flared his wings, and stepped toward her. But that was the game, a pissing contest assholes like this Dobasi engaged in. Mia didn’t have a dick for pissing, but she’d been dealing with chest-thumping assholes for months now. She stood her ground, and Vinicius stood directly behind her, glaring down at the spire ruler. And because the bastard was too head-up-his-ass arrogant, Dobasi wouldn’t dare look up.
But he was smart enough to take a step back.
“You give the rider much credit,” Dobasi said. “You ran from him, with Anianus and his forces at your side.”
“Yes,” Noah said. “We did.”
None of the angels had their weapons out, but they didn’t need them to look intimidating. And their white and gold armor stood out against the black and red of everything else.
The room was split down the middle, Mia’s versus Dobasi’s forces. An errant pin drop might stir a fight.
“He cannot be killed,” Vin said. “Only slowed.”
“And,” Julisa said with a crack of her tail, “the rider can defeat most demons single-handedly. He could even defeat Vinicius.”
Vin snarled down at Julisa, but she returned it with a devious smile.
“He’s after me,” Mia said. “If I stay here, he’ll attack eventually.”
Dobasi stared. “Attack a spire?”
“Yeah. Last time he attacked with a couple dozen demons in bits of aera armor, and riding a sercano.”
That was enough to break the tetrad’s composure.
“A sercano?”
“Giant lizard thing? Looks like a spiky komodo dragon?” She knew he didn’t know what a komodo dragon was, but it added to her whole ‘I’m a big deal’ image she was aiming for right now. “Yeah, he charged the Death’s Grip spire with it. He is called the rider, right? Likes to force hellbeasts to be his mount? It got away after, injured. The rider’s demons were all killed, but he pushed into the spire, slaughtered everyone in his way, and nearly got me.” No need to mention David. “He took down dozens of demons by himself and nearly got Kasimiro.” She gestured to the sarkarin at her side. “The rider has killed many tetrads, even tetrads surrounded by other demons. And he’s killed angels. We even tore his head off, and he just regrew it! So believe me when I say the rider is a threat, and we need to be leaving quickly before he pins us down here. That means you, Dobasi, need to show me what you want to show me, now, so we can be on our way.”
Dobasi and Cillia glared down at her like they wanted to incinerate her with their eyes. She was used to it.
Romakus and Julisa chuckled. No one else did. But that’s what you needed to be a member of the Damall: a bad sense of humor.
A brute approached, heavy feet hitting the metal, axe at his side. From the look on his face, he had words to say to Mia, angry ones, fisty ones. Maybe he approached just a little too fast for Vin’s liking, but the moment he got close, Vin slammed his colossal tail into the juggernaut’s chest, and sent the demon onto his ass.
Vin didn’t have to do that. He did it anyway. Either he just wanted some violence, or he was taking the initiative in protecting Mia again. And she had no idea how to feel about that.
Every demon drew their weapons, but Mia held up a hand.
“Thank you, Vin,” she said, smiling back and up at her titan. He snorted. “Don’t get me wrong, Dobasi. Anianus didn’t capture us. We came of our own accord. This is a temporary visit, because I think we can help each other. So let’s get this done. Show me what you wanted to show me.”
Cillia stomped a hoof. “You think you can simply leave when you–“
Mia pointed a finger at the tetrad, and shook the world. Or at least that’s what it’d feel like to the asshole woman. It took effort, but no precision, a simple chord that told the ground to vibrate and bring the bloody floor and walls of the throne room to ripple like it was Jurassic Park. They didn’t know Mia couldn’t affect the tower directly, and she planned to keep it that way. Vibrating the ground outside the tower did the job.
Cillia took a step back, but Anianus laughed.
“She is a devilish little thing,” he said. “Isn’t she?”
Mia smiled at the bailiff, looked back to Dobasi, and waited.
It took a minute, but Dobasi gave in eventually, nodding and gesturing to the exit. Mia and her crew went first, Dobasi followed, and they stood on the inner balcony, looking down the hole. High as they were, falling down the hole meant many seconds of freefall, and either hitting another balcony on the way down, or going straight to the bottom. Gravity would have a few things to say to whoever reached the bottom that way.
“I’ve seen the ritual room in Death’s Grip,” Mia said. “Bottom floor?”
Dobasi nodded. “Bottom floor. Though here in Angel’s Spine, it will look different.”
Mia nodded and held out her arms. “Azreal?”
With a grunt, the man in an absurd amount of armor slipped his hands under Mia’s arms, and took her down. Easier this way than riding a demon’s back and hopping down each floor. Cerberus rumbled and jumped down after her.
It was a long way down. She looked up constantly, checking to make sure no one attacked her crew. Noah had his armor on, but she spotted a few strange movements from him, hinting at his injury, but otherwise he kept right beside Azreal, while the demons hopped from floor to floor. Down, and down, deep into the bowels of the tower, where the tip of the bottom penetrated the ground.
In the spire, light came in a couple of varieties. Dangling metal skulls with fire burning inside behind the eyes, almost like burning bushes. And amber veins that snaked their way across the spire itself as if they didn’t belong, burning spire flesh or cutting across the metal in strange places, like weeds pushing up through sidewalks.
Both almost disappeared when they hit the bottom, and the spire greeted them with the unending chorus of thousands of remnants coating the walls.
Dobasi landed softly, bending his knee and letting his wings catch his weight enough he didn’t break his legs. Vinicius had no wings to help his landing, and the ground rumbled lightly with the impact. Superhero landing.
“Sarrius,” Dobasi said, and gestured to the walls.
One brute joined them in the dark pit and got to work. He and his brethren drew their weapons and cut down remnants in swaths, silencing them with all the finesse of a lawnmower to grass.
A voice cut through the screams. “Mia!”
Mia spun. A brute cut a dozen remnants down, silencing whatever remnant had formed a name above the cries for mercy, freedom, and death. No one said her name again.
“Mia?” Kas asked.
“Nothing,” she said. Maybe the others hadn’t noticed, the voice blending in with all the others. But like being in the center of a crowd, hearing someone’s name punched through the noise, a ping in the dark, and had grabbed her attention. Now it was gone.
Mia clenched her eyes shut and took a deep breath. Focus. Deal with this for now.
Dobasi walked forward, body blending into the dark, and his amber horn provided the only light. The angels summoned their weapons and a gold glow with them, and stayed with Mia as she followed Dobasi. Cerberus stayed on her heels, closer than usual.
It was just like the Death’s Grip basement. Bone, everywhere.
Dobasi grunted, his horn glowed a fraction brighter for a second, and an enormous door opened up.
“Come,” he said.
Everyone followed.
The same tunnel. Bone floor. Bone walls. Thousands of thousands of bones. Thousands and thousands of remnants Dobasi, Cillia, and the brutes cut down like jungle vines.
They came to another door. Last time, Zel insisted only Mia follow her through this door, leaving Adron and Kas behind. Dobasi held up his hand and turned, likely to say the same thing.
“This is sacred ground,” he said. “Do not touch anything.”
“We’re all coming in?” Mia asked. “Zel wasn’t so kind.”
“You made your point. And this is Angel’s Spine, not Death’s Grip.” He gave his wings a small shake, rattling the skulls hanging from them, turned, and opened the door.
It was a sight Mia knew, but from the look on the others’ faces, Mia’s crew did not. Dobasi’s demons had seen it before, but even they looked in awe at the scope of a vast castle made entirely of small human bones, charred black, all inside an even bigger cave.
The colossal cavern wasn’t in the spire, not really, only connected to it by the tunnel. Did it regrow when the archangels had fallen on the spire and sunk it deeper into Hell?
Mia could feel this room far more than she could a few months ago in Death’s Grip, before she’d started learning her powers. She could sense it. This strange room was a connection point between the spire and Hell herself.
Vinicius growled at the sight. Maybe he’d seen it before, but that didn’t stop him from staring at the massive bone walls and their windows, along with the hanging braziers full of flame.
Yosepha finally took an audible gasp. “I have never seen the unholy room of a spire.”
“As you should never,” Dobasi said. “This room is for demons only. But these are interesting times.” He marched forward, the bone floor quietly fighting not to break under his hooves. And like the bone castle in the cave deserved reverence, he spread his wings wide, like he was paying respects.
His horn glowed, and he pushed the two doors open, exposing the many pillars inside.
Things were different. In Death’s Grip, the inside had been like the inside of a cathedral made of bone, complete with a pulpit. The pulpit was there, pillars too, but the center of the room was empty, save for the giant blood pool within. That was new.
“Holy shit,” Romakus said, staring down at the deep red. “How deep is that?”
“No one knows,” Dobasi said. “And several volunteers have entered, never to return.”
Well, at least he said volunteers.
Nodding, Dobasi stepped behind the pulpit too big for even him, fetched the book, and stood over the blood pool. The pool rippled.
Wasting no time, Dobasi flared his wings again, and held out the book in front of him, still closed.
“Michael. Raphael. Gabriel.”
The blood rippled again, and Mia gulped. The liquid wasn’t natural. If she looked hard, she could see her reflection, distorted by the waves. The pool was responding. This was a far cry from the written communication she’d had with Raphael, but it was still something. Except, how was this communication?
“I bring one of the unmarked,” Dobasi said.
The blood changed. Like a scrying pool, the strange liquid swirled, and an image faded in, hiding the crimson beneath a veil of illusion.
“That’s me,” Mia whispered, staring down at the pool. Her, standing in the room of eyes with the giant bone wall where she’d talked with Raphael. Everything was a blurry mess, with movement bleeding colors like horrible compression artifacts in a video. Except her. She was crystal clear in the dead archangel’s memory.
“Deciphering the noise,” Dobasi said, gesturing down at the pool, “took hundreds of years. The archangels do not speak clearly. What echoes are left of their minds, I struggle to understand. But whatever is left of them, is aware.” He snapped his head toward Mia. “Or it was. The noise has grown quieter since your conversation with them. What did you do?”
“I spoke with Raphael.” She gestured down at the blood. “And I didn’t need a crazy blood pool to do it.” Poking the bear. Lots of bear-poking.
Dobasi gave his wings a small rustle and held out the book to Mia. Lucifer’s book.
Taking a deep breath, Mia took the book, and opened it. She knew what would happen, and she knew the others didn’t. Runes exploded out from the book, lit up the pillars, lit up the walls, lit up the ceiling with them. Floating, glowing amber runes, not written in amber but a visual illusion. The alphabet and thousands of words, powerful words that danced in Mia’s mind in some web of connections she’d never be able to decipher.
Potram. Batlam. Royam, too, but she hadn’t activated that last one yet. The rune for suppressing spire auras was there, nine versions of it. And the rune for traveling between realms, a rune Mia had never expected to awaken. But it was there on a wall, and in her mind. The connecting wires were live, like electricity, but even without trying, Mia could tell the rune was beyond her. Too heavy, too large, too grand. For now.
Dobasi and the others stared out at the runes, and Mia couldn’t help but wear a small grin.
“You deciphered these?” she asked. “I can read them, but how did you manage to learn?”
“I can read only a few,” he said, gesturing to the book. “I have never summoned these runes, but I deciphered a few from the book, using what little the blood pool can show me.” Dobasi leaned over the pool again. “Heaven’s Tears.”
They all looked back at the pool. Images flowed along it, showing scenes within the mountain, giant eyeballs crying gold tears, enormous bones the size of city blocks, the blood rivers, strange hellbeasts with too many heads — Mia glanced at Cerb — and of the landscape itself. How the archangels got a view from outside their bodies, she didn’t know, but it panned across the mountainscape of Angel’s Spine from up high, showing colossal white blankets covering the mountains.
Not blankets. Archangel bodies. Great white feathers, thousands of them, each the size of huge buildings. And closed eyes with flesh-white skin. Thousands of them, too, of different shapes and sizes, some leaking gold tears along the seams in their skin and creating flowing gold rivers.
“That’s interesting,” Mia said. “Raphael told me he couldn’t see anything other than me or other unmarked.”
“That is true,” Dobasi said. “Much of what these ancient, dead things show me is nothing but memory. But sometimes, they can glimpse the current if it happens within their bodies or nearby.”
Mia shivered. Awareness of what was happening in her own body sounded gross. Being able to see her innards digest food? Bleh.
“How does this help me?” she asked. “If you’ve managed some rudimentary communication with the archangel corpses, what do you know?”
Cillia snarled down at her, but Cerberus returned it, staying forever at Mia’s side. Good, because every other demon in the place was distracted by the glowing lights and the blood pool, even Vin.
Dobasi slowly plucked the book from Mia, glaring at her with every inch he pulled from her loose grip.
“Archangels,” he said. “Show me Beelzebub.”
Mia froze. Ice shot through her veins, and her badass girlboss image shattered around her.
The image changed. Darkness swirled. Piles of skulls followed, each surrounded by emaciated souls, each with 666 etched on their foreheads. Amber veins lined the rocks below, but few and rare, showing only hints of something alive deep in a pit of stone and black. Something moved, growling with slow, lumbering motions, and its voice stirred the cave to vibrate. Skulls rolled down the skull piles, and the slave betrayers did their duty, piling the skulls yet again.
“I’ve faced an Old One before,” Mia said, staring. “It… was a tough fight.”
Dobasi and Cillia traded glances, but Anianus spoke up.
“You have?” he asked.
“Yeah. Asmodeus is buried under the Black Valley, injured and trapped. He — it — almost got out, but I don’t think it could have stayed out. It was really injured, and not by me. I just knocked it back into its cage.”
Dobasi nodded and gestured at the blood pool, the image slowly panning over a great chasm and some creature mostly hidden in the shadow. What little of it was visible stretched long, and with the betrayer slaves for size context, Mia got a guess at how big it was. As big as Asmodeus, and that meant bigger than fucking Godzilla.
Just an ant compared to a single archangel, but that ant was big enough to topple cities.
“Beelzebub stirs,” Dobasi said. “Something has drawn its attention. It sends betrayers up to fight me in numbers greater than ever before.”
“It has betrayers in fighting condition?”
“Yes. Humans rain from on high, fall into the crevices of the archangels’ flesh, and many find their way down into its lair. Hordes of them, surviving on demon hearts, what essence they can find from hellbeast hearts, and archangel flesh.”
Mia stepped back. “They eat archangel flesh?”
“Yes. They, and the hellbeasts. Both swarm the deepest tunnels of my land, bodies warping and growing into strange things. For many years now, they have grown more aggressive. Ninety-six days ago, Beelzebub itself fought to escape its unknowable prison.”
Ninety-six days. She didn’t look to her crew, but they knew. She’d died ninety-six days ago.
“It senses an opportunity,” Anianus said. “An opportunity for what?”
“That is obvious,” Cillia said. “The archangels have explained, as much as they can explain, that the Old One is trapped. It seeks escape, just as the unmarked said of Asmodeus. And it will try to use an unmarked to do so.”
“Wait,” Mia said. “When did you learn about the Old One in your basement? Alessio didn’t know about Asmodeus.”
Dobasi shook his head. “Many centuries ago, but the creature lay dormant.”
“I’m still confused,” she said. “You wanted me so badly, you sent your bailiffs out to get me, and you used your spire aura to try and capture me, too. Only reason that didn’t work is because I know what I’m doing.” No need to tell him the details of what happened with Raphael and her new ability to block spire auras. “What exactly is it you want me to do? If you’ve been talking with the archangels, or the echoes of what they were, you know I’m on a quest to save the whole damn Great Tower. What am I supposed to do for you?”
Dobasi and Cillia traded a couple of glances, the subtle gesture showing a lot more vulnerability than those two were probably comfortable showing.
“We know Beelzebub rises,” Dobasi said. “And the archangels have shown me it will both try to take the spire, and try to consume an unmarked.”