Epilogue

WEN

A second could have passed. Or a year.

It would feel like that to anyone else. For me, time doesn’t even register in the void. Every other sensory perception is as nonexistent.

Then why do I feel—pain? It’s pervasive, shrieking down every tortured nerve. Then it’s not, and I pinpoint the focus of agony to my back. Where a hard surface with jagged protrusions is digging.

I’m injured, but I don’t know how bad. I can smell blood, and there’s—heat. There’s also pitch darkness, but maybe only because my eyes are closed.

I don’t want to open them. I don’t want to get confirmation of what my mind already knows.

That this isn’t the void.

It could have been another year before dread forces my lids apart.

I was right. I’m not surrounded by bottomless nothingness and all-encompassing malevolence. I’m somewhere dark and corporeal, that reeks of ancient evil and endless suffering.

I don’t care where I am. Only that I’m alone.

Godric isn’t here.

It’s even worse than when he disappeared and I could no longer feel him. For this time, I can. Just a wisp of his being, but it’s enough to batter me with the knowledge.

He’sin the void.

The void I tossed him into, and that I can now barely sense.

Fathomless laughter echoes all around me.

Every hair on my body stands on end as the realization hits me like steel knuckles to the head. What this place is.

As if to punctuate my horror, the darkness gives way gradually to the burnt illumination of flames. And in the distance, on top of his macabre pedestal of remains, he stands. Hands raised to the Heaven he forsook, wings spread like a shroud of doom and swathed in his eternal flames.

Lucifer.

Heart bursting with every beat, I gape at his gigantic, blazing form as he descends from his pyre of burning bones.

Like the first time I’d seen him in the Imperium Realm, he shrinks down from skyscraper-sized to mere giant as he approaches. Once he’s a few dozen feet away, he starts clapping, lazy, teasing cracks that shake the cavern, each one feeling like a bullet of despair tearing through me, body and psyche.

“Amazing, Uri. Beyond expectations or belief. As always.”

I wince at the terrible depths and sweetness of his voice. “You… You …”

In response to my tremulous stutter, his laughter rises again, until I feel my bones will turn to dust within my flesh.

Deductions become a hurricane, tearing my mind apart. But it’s his amusement that burns me with a fury that blasts away my pain. My hand closes around something sharp hard enough to split my palm, then I’m on my feet and hurling it at him.

The rock disintegrates within the field of flames surrounding him. It makes me even madder, and it all explodes out of me, in shrieks that cracks through my mind’s walls and the cavern’s.

“It wasn’t me. It was you. You’re the one behind all this, you ex-Heavenly bastard!”

His laughter rises to a crescendo, almost driving me to my knees. But rage keeps me on my feet, and spewing my hatred and deductions at him. “You’re the one who drove everyone insane by unleashing their darkness! It was all to weaponize Godric, to force me to do something drastic to stop him, and to open a rift in the realms so you can return from your exile!”

He booms another laugh before he sobers and shakes his gargantuan head. “Ah, Uri, what a convoluted and utterly—dare I say it, diabolical plan. It amazes me how you came up with it on the fly. Now I wish I could take credit for it, but alas, you know I cannot lie. I only took advantage of this delicious turn of events.”

This cuts all the strings holding me up, and I crash to the ground, finding no air to breathe anymore. “You m-mean it was me …”

His tsk explodes in my nerves, making me wish I could just lose consciousness, and wake up to find this whole night has been an endless nightmare.

“I don’t believe it was you either. Not that it matters now. You achieved the most important part. I don’t know where you sent your Deathspawn, but you managed to rid me of one of my most insurmountable obstacles.”

Every word is a harder blow, dragging me deeper into a maelstrom of confusion and despair.

But like he said, it doesn’t matter who or how. What does, is finding a way to send him back, and a way out of this nightmare.

From what I recall of the hazy maze of that encounter, he likes to talk, likes me to engage him. I’ve got to keep him distracted, keep him talking. Maybe I can get him to give me the info I need, or strike some bargain with him, like I did in the Imperium Realm. Even if I don’t remember the specifics of this bargain.

Feeling a breath away from collapsing, I put every last bit of my ebbing stamina into steadying my stance and voice as I smirk up at him. “Don’t celebrate yet, Luci. It will only make your disappointment worse when I get him back.”

“Ah, Uri, you always were so rebellious. Yes, I realize how ironic this sounds, coming from me. But it’s one of the reasons why we fit so beautifully together. Yet do consider this—wherever you sent him, you did so because his mind was already past the point of no return—like a bomb that had already gone off. You might have thrown it into stasis and frozen the chain reaction, but if you ever try to retrieve it, the explosion would only resume, and blow everything apart. Including him.”

I stare at him, this literal devil who always tells the truth, and everything inside me implodes.

Within his flames, I see a glimpse of an exquisite smile as he croons, “Whatever you did, wherever you sent him, you doomed him to an exile that he can never return from. You will never get him back.”

***