Chapter Forty-One

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

SILAS HELD back Blood Lake's angst-ridden tide, arms spread against the surge of almighty resistance. The mace swung, shredding the boney onslaught, but more gathered at his back and climbed atop his shoulders; an invading horde seeking to spill over a mountain range. The water sought entry between his feet, trying to find a path through the shadows he cast.

It would find none.

He would allow nothing to steal sight of the culmination of all things.

His beautiful, terrifying view of what was always meant to pass.

The halo was remarkably plain, its hilt leather-bound, its blade dull. But there was nothing so insipid about the daemon who pulled it from its bedrock of bones.

A daemon incapable of ugliness, despite what he may believe.

Silas took in every inch of the Berserker Prince, every river of liquid flame that ran through an exterior as rough and jagged as a barren mountaintop, and black as night. Atop his head, a rough cut of basalt curved like a diadem, the great ember at its centre, an indescribable gem.

Pitch had chosen a delicate visage in his human form, and Silas understood now how the contrast must have pleased him, for his true form was all stony brawn and powerful dominance. Immovable solidity.

The daemon was not so large as Silas's Nephilim, but was far more formidable. The bones crumbled to ash beneath him. Samyaza's pyre reduced to grains of sand with the twist of an onyx heel.

Pitch…Vassago…stood triumphant and raised the halo high, a sight fit for the heavens. The lake surged, the currents buffeting Silas anew as the Watcher King's legacy saw its fate sealed.

He did not sway, nor shift, or stumble. He would not look away.

Even as the prince raised the halo.

Even as he drove it into himself in one swift strike.

Silas did not cower at the glare that came. Pitch vanished beneath the explosion of light, his silhouette like a ghostly imprint within the brightness. The clamour of the bones, their interminable weight, lessened. Silas drew himself up and threw off the weight of the lake's misery. Raised himself to full height, the bones raining off him.

The mace shivered in his grasp and returned to a simpler form; the two-toned metal ring, now tarnished and scored with fine cuts.

A singular note rose above all others. A call for Silas's ears alone.

Child of mine.

A last, desperate cry from an angel whose cause was well and truly lost. An attempt at final manipulation.

Samyaza's hail would go unanswered.

There, within the brilliance of Seraphiel's divine magick and Pitch's unyielding resolve, Silas glimpsed the Watcher King. His sire. The spectre whose refusal to hand himself over entirely to death had wrought so much misery upon those who had once thought his cause noble.

Perhaps, once, that cause had been so. Silas was far removed from the wars of the Angelics, further still from the court of Lord Enoch and its machinations.

But he cared little for past grievances; more concerned with those of the here and now.

Samyaza's desecration of this graveyard–his torturing of the souls it contained–negated any righteousness.

And those were not the worst of the Seraph's sins.

The Watcher King was taking Pitch away from him. That was unforgivable.

Silas shrugged off the whispering of his sire. The pleading.

‘I am no child. And you were no father.'

The easy denial infuriated the flimsy ghost of the once-potent angel.

A shockwave struck at Silas, and he spread his arms, letting it wash over him. His blood screamed in his veins as Samyaza's final deathnote rang out. Tolling its last.

Thinning to nothingness.

As Silas, too, thinned.

His tremendous weight took him to his knees. His greatness draining from him, as a form emerged from the brilliance where Pitch had last stood.

An inferno that rose skyward.

Dwarfing Silas where he knelt and bled away his past.

The fire held neither daemon nor simurgh, but an almighty convergence of the two.

The firebird rose, its wingspan stretching over great swathes of Blood Lake's crimson sky. A daemon prince at its heart.

Silas knew Pitch's flames as he knew his own truth. He spied his prince; there in the blazing expanse of tail and wing and claw.

His great love, hidden away, but never lost.

Silas reduced, whilst Seraphiel's Cultivation distended to engulf all the tragedy and perdition that festered here. His eyes stung, his throat thickened as his humanity rushed in to fill the void left by the drying of his Nephilim blood; he had been birthed a child of Samyaza, but would not die one.

The firebird's shadow rippled over the still waters as it soared higher. Silas had thought himself behemoth when he'd opened his Nephilim heart. He had thought the Lady's Leviathan a great and daunting creature, but they were, all of them, mere specks beneath the firebird's shadow.

The creature born of primordial fire and daemon flame was vast as the heavens themselves.

And surely far more beautiful.

Silas craned his neck, watched the epic sweep of infernal wings, felt the furious blast of their movement upon his cheeks, and cursed his tears for how they blurred his vision. He did not wish to miss a moment of Pitch's last spectacular display.

Silas prayed the prince knew himself wondrous. Let Seraphiel have given him that, at least; a chance to realise the magnificence Silas had always known.

The firebird opened its mouth, a beak curled like a massive ocean wave, and sent forth a holocaust of flame. The touchdown against the lake was the eruption of a volcano, the brilliance making Silas wince. He raised his arm, shielding himself from the heat. He was far from where the firebird struck, a half mile at least, and yet his hair singed.

Again and again, a devastation of fire worked at evaporating Blood Lake. The firebird made no sound, save for the rasp of wings and hiss of the torrents as they jettisoned.

And Silas had much else to listen to, as the lake was turned to ash.

The exhale of breaths long held.

The shackles of the Watcher King's regrets and furies coming loose, falling away.

Those who had languished here, drowning in their own laments, now pierced the surface and opened themselves to the cleansing fire.

The water grew lower and lower around him.

Silas watched, his neck aching with the weight of his own bones. His spine fractured as he refused to look away, his fingers snapping when pressed to the thick ash to bolster him. Silas crumbled along with all the bones.

‘Not yet, please, I beg of you,' he implored his goddess. ‘Let me be the one to bring him to you. Let us go together.'

But if she listened, he heard no reply. The scythe did not whisper, nor tighten in assurance. Perhaps he was voiceless; now that his ride was done.

Ash floated from the fiery sky; thousands of years of turmoil now insubstantial as dust.

Silas bent to the whim of time, naked and breaking, finally kneeling at mortality's feet.

The firebird circled around, the shifting light betraying the movement. Silas felt his bones grind as he forced his head to raise. The pyre was gone, but the mound of bones Silas had created still stood tall. Those he had cast off whilst he was giant, now overshadowed him. The last collection the firebird needed to decimate.

Silas sought to rise to his feet, but death had her gentle hands upon him now, coaxing him to lie down his head a final time.

But not here, not this way.

He did not know if Pitch watched on from behind the firebird's eyes, and understood the blissful havoc they wreaked. But Silas would take no chance with his love's last moments.

Prince Vassago had been haunted by the strike that had downed Seraphiel. The guilt and remorse had eaten at him. He had not loved that angel, and yet he suffered. How much greater the suffering if Pitch struck down the oaf he had finally, so wonderfully, found cause to love?

Silas ground his teeth and fought death once more. Not with the scythe, as he'd done with Sybilla, but with all the resistance his purebred blood could muster. Humanity held an innate desire to fight against the goddess. For time immemorial, they had sought to elude and outrun Death. He knew that better than anyone alive.

Their evasion was pointless, but there was something to be said for their tenacious belief in its possibility.

He joined their ranks, and clung to wistful hope. He dug his fingers into the shifting ground, seeking to drag himself clear of the last bastion of bones. The water was a thin film that had turned the ash to grey mud; adding further duress upon his feeble body. But he tried. An inch here, another there. Trying to outpace death on two fronts.

The air brightened, and his skin burned with the proximity of the firebird. He was barely a foot away from the pile. Hope was one thing, but stupidity was another. It was ludicrous to imagine himself far enough away to escape the oncoming blast, and plain insanity not to notice his broken wrists and splintered knee bones. He was done for.

The soft whoosh of sweeping wings grew louder. Silas sank into the sludge. His heart slowed. His end song rose, while the Seraph's magick descended.

He dragged his gaze upwards. Taking a breath that must number amongst his last.

The firebird's cavernous mouth opened, the inferno luminous at the back of their throat.

A tilt of the head. A topaz eye set on Silas.

A pinpoint of emerald at its centre, glowing. The firebird's head twisted sharply, redirecting the flame, but the beast had already breathed her fire. A cry rushed forth; the first sound the creature had made.

‘It's alright,' Silas whispered.

The bloom of catastrophic flame descended.

His tears were vanquished by the heat, his lips cracked by its rush.

He was smothered. Pressed down into the sediment which took him readily. The wildfire raced over him. Leaving him untouched.

Go well, Silas. My thanks to you both, for this freedom.

The weight upon him did not belong to ash or bone. Silas tried to form her name upon his lips, but found them too ruined to speak.

The air cooled, and the weight slipped away. Silas lay, half buried in the ashen mud, blinking slowly at the petrified corpse by his side; a massive serpent he did not recognise. But her shape did not matter. Silas knew the touch of Satine against his mind.

The Lady of the Lake had burned in his place.

Silas breathed in slow rasping drags. With the striking heat gone, a chill seeped up through the mud. He heard his deathnote now, solitary, and lonely. He had no strength to raise his head, but his eyes lifted just enough to see the firebird circling above. Low and close, and spectacular, giving off only the mildest warmth. Barely enough to stop Silas from shivering.

Lower, closer.

Still, Silas was not scorched.

The firebird descended. Touched its claws of dying ember to the dampness and rid it of the last drops of Blood Lake. Turning the mud to warm sand.

Silas sighed into the softness and heat.

The great destroyer of Blood Lake settled near him.

A sob escaped him, drawn from his tired body by the sheer perfection of what he heard. He smiled through hopeless tears, copper upon his tongue as his lips split wider. Silas listened as the firebird's remarkable flames flickered and dimmed.

Pitch's song played itself out. Not just his death note, though that lay there too, but his whole medley, shattering the silence that had always surrounded him.

Daemon. Dominion. Saviour.

Silas inched his hand through the calming warmth of the sand. Finding the tip of a velvet wing, sighing at how it mimicked the familiar press of the daemon's hand.

They shaped together perfectly.

‘You are here at the end.'

Pitch's voice found a way through his sublime melody.

‘I promised you...' Silas's lips stung, but he still smiled.

‘You oaf.'

‘A fool for you alone.'

Verdant light shone through Silas's fading vision. He blinked, barely daring to believe what he saw. But death need not always be cruel. She could be a rescuer, a granter of wishes.

Pitch lay amongst smouldering embers, the ruins of the simurgh spread beneath him like sunset fallen from the sky. He was caught between his two worlds; the exquisite, delicate human just visible within the great, smouldering fortress that was the daemon. Pitch lay within Vassago; and there was no telling where the seams that joined them had been sewn.

His eyes, those gems that shone duller now, never left Silas.

Their melodies played them ever closer to the goddess.

Her tempo was relentless, but Silas was eternally grateful for her mercy. She had stayed her hand until all things were said, all things were done, and his soul mate found. Few had such blessings.

The notes quietened. Silas's heavy heart slowed its beat.

Pitch smiled at him. He'd never seemed so unafraid.

The gleam in his eyes vanished. His hold on Silas's hand slackened.

He exhaled.

His melody died.

The silence was endless.

Silas would breathe no air without him. He let go, setting himself adrift. There was nothing to tie him here anymore.

One shallow breath later, he followed his daemon.

The humans had been right, after all.

There was a light that still shone when life extinguished; a bright beacon to guide Death's children home.

Izanami waited there in the glow, arms outstretched; a slender figure with eyes of viridian by her side.