61. GODRIC

Before being nuked, and especially after, blocking out external stimuli, no matter how overwhelming, had long become second-nature. Engaging my senses to the exact level I chose had been infallible.

Then she said, “Are you my birthday surprise?”

Ever since she gasped those five preposterous words, my senses have rebelled against my dominion, have been eager slaves to her every nuance, rioting out of my control at her mere existence.

Now her clucking, the most ridiculous sound to have ever been produced in this miserable world, or in any other, echoes inside my every cell, driving me to one conclusion.

One day, I will make her cluck her throat bloody as I fuck her into oblivion.

That day is drawing nearer with every breath, now that my very air is filled with her. Then we’ll both find out what I’ll become when she finally breaks me. The mere idea of losing control is at once unspeakable, and irresistible.

Arousal thunders through me, and my perpetually-engorged cock uncoils violently enough to hurt. The image of it bursting through my pants, jerking like a firehose under brutal pressure, and dragging me in search of her, makes a rumble of bitter humor escape me.

Not even I hear it. But my frustration is forceful enough, it alerts the crowd to my presence. Everyone parts for me as usual, clearing my path to the bar.

I don’t know why I’m heading there. It isn’t as if I can dull my turmoil over that quicksand of a being.

That’s one of the realizations that have been pillaging my ordered existence since I dragged her puking and snarking arse into my life. The latest one was a week ago, in the cavern.

I’d stared at her across the wreckage, and it was as if I were looking into the future. Clairvoyance had never been one of my abilities, but at that moment, I knew.

One day, one way or another, she will drive me to destroy everything.

And to think she once called me a rogue asteroid.

Though she wasn’t wrong either. I am a destroyer.

What else could I be, when I was born of endings, and forged from annihilation?

Not that I am what I am by virtue of my nature alone. The methods they used to make sure I turned out this way had been—inventive. And they succeeded, and failed, spectacularly. For I am the monster they wanted to create. But I’m not their monster—as I let them believe.

I’ve long been preparing for my own war, laying its foundations in patient, painstaking increments. I had all the time in the world, after all. Or so I thought.

Until she happened.

She once told me it would have been better, for both of us, if I hadn’t caught her. I didn’t contest her verdict, even when I suspected it was wholly inaccurate. That it would have been better for everyone, for everything.

But there was no way in Heaven or Hell I could have given up my obsession with finding her. Even knowing everything I know now, I would do it again.

I would always do anything to find her, to keep her.

Apart from that knowledge, there’s that of my steady deterioration. During the past weeks, I tried telling myself it was due to the interrupted Purge. When I couldn’t fool myself anymore, since in reality it plays only a minor role, I tried relegating it to the fact that I haven’t possessed her yet. But as I once told her, if it had been that simple, I would have bent her over every surface in the cavern and arena, and fucked her within a whimper of her bloody mortality until I was cured.

I now suspect that ravishing her, in every way that does and doesn’t yet exist, would only exacerbate the madness.

No. The cause for my decline is far more insidious and unresolvable. Because it is all of her. And all of me.

Together we weave a cocoon of obsession whose threads are ever entangling. And within it, I’m metamorphosing into something I don’t recognize. Something that craves, obsesses, and commits ever more unhinged acts.

Even now, I have no idea how I terminated the Purge prematurely. I only know why. Because she screamed my name. I still don’t understand how I sought the Concordia with Azazel. I only know I did it to protect her. I can’t fathom that I tried to throw away all of my Energy across the realms, risking untold consequences, to myself, to Existence.

Yet, as I told her, I’d do it again.

Ever since that day I first felt her, everything had been about her, because of her. For her.

Her.

Both Astaroth and Asmodeus had made that diagnosis. But the first assumed I can ration my involvement, and the latter thought it a possibility I can one day end it.

They were both wrong. This affliction is as permanent as I am.

Now I am balancing on the edge, and there’s nowhere to go but over it.

When I do, I’ll give her what she’s been gagging for since that first time I strangled her. I will destroy her in an abyss of subjugation, and reforge her in an inferno of ecstasy. It’s then that her power over me will be absolute.

Even without taking that plunge into no return, it bloody near is. The way I felt this morning was indication enough.

I stood there as Astaroth delivered his damage control speech, and contemplated slaughtering every single cadet in the Academy.

I practically saw them trampling each other in terror to escape me, and heard their shrieks of agony as I picked them off one by one. I almost smelled their burning blood, and felt their charred bones crunching beneath my boots as I left the massacre scene behind, as I had left many before.

But those had been strategic necessities in all-out war, carried out with pragmatic intent, and without a flicker of enjoyment. That would have been an act of wanton vengeance, committed in the most searing of tempers, and with the grimmest of satisfaction.

All that because they dared to believe her existence should end. Even worse, for looking at her in such revulsion, and causing that look of despondency on her face.

It was irrational, not to mention hypocritical. When my own plans would lead to injuring far more than her feelings, when realizing them might hinge on ending her.

Now I’m reduced to contemplating sacrificing it all for her. Everything I worked for, everything I must do, everything that I am. Everything, period.

The probability that I would destroy everything, starting with my own plans, has been increasing with every second she’s in my life, infiltrating my every thought, invading my every sense. But it was in the decimated cavern—our decimated cavern—that it became a certainty.

The day I destroy everything will be the day I lose her.

And I will. She’ll one day be no more, while I go on and on. And on.

I always knew that, but when she said it that day, it became my new reality.

It now pollutes my every thought, poisons my every breath, and has been dismantling my sanity, one spark at a time.

All this because I didn’t obey reason for the first time in my life, and didn’t kill her as soon as I found her.

For a while, I thought I’d missed the perfect opportunity when I choked her at the gates of the Celestial Court. It was something I’d never resorted to before. Being who I am has always been enough to enforce subjugation.

It was already unthinkable that a human would force me to employ such a tactic. But in lieu of submission, she gave me not one, but two middle fingers.

As I stared at her bruised, calloused digits, with their dirty, jagged-to-the-quick nails, I was engulfed in a premonition. Like the omen that had overwhelmed me all these years ago. The certainty that something terrible was happening. That I am no longer the master of my destiny.

Then I raised my gaze to hers, and it felt as if I’d plummeted into an unknown reality. One where control was not only unattainable, but nonexistent. One where I would unleash myself, and take what I wanted—when I never knew what it meant to want. Up until that moment, desire hadn’t existed for me. I lived only to fulfill my purpose.

In those moments, as time fell away, and my insides lay bare for her, for me, to see for the first time, it became all-encompassing.

The desire for this insignificant, inconceivable being.

I used to think I should have fucked her to death then.

But I’d long since realized it was always too late for that. That there was already no way out, for either of us.

Now, no matter what I do, like I keep telling her, it will end in disaster. All I can do is not precipitate the chain reaction before …

“The Final Apocalypse is here!”