“Blood! Blood!” chanted the choir.Adnihilo’s heart was beating steadily as the drums. His feet had finally gone numb, his fingers cramped gripping gaps in the weather worn mortar. Only a bit further. He could hear the lapping of the ocean, felt the cool air rush over his skin as he placed a hand on mouth of the well. Then the brick he held crumbled, and Adnihilo could only watch as it tumbled into the blood below. That’s when he noticed, saw his legs and the damage done. They were nothing but bones and dangling ligaments. Suddenly, it was just one hand bearing his weight while pain raged through his lower extremities. And still the flood was coming.
With the last of his will, he reached again for the mouth of the well but found flesh instead of brick—an outstretched hand, the hand of a friend, yet cold. It was Adam’s. The Messah’s body had been slung over the edge of the well so that his arm hung down, Adnihilo’s only rope. “Raise it up,” said the dead Messah, and the half-blood grabbed on—to the wrist at first, then the elbow, and after that he grasped a fistful of hair, pulled himself over the edge and in the process dragged the pastor’s son into the boiling blood.
“I’m sorry,” Adnihilo gasped trying to catch his breath, safe at last outside the mouth of Hell. But this was not the world he saw from inside the well. It was no world at all—nothing but black sky from horizon to horizon, the ground a shallow pool of cool, viscous water. “I’m sorry,” he said again, fading in and out of consciousness. It was the pain, the exhaustion, the crackling of corpses he’d crawled over only to save himself. The shame made him nauseous.
“They deserved it,” uttered a strange voice in the dark, uncannily familiar. “Don’t be a coward. Look for yourself at what you’ve done. Look,” it said, but Adnihilo didn’t believe he could bear to see. He hugged his knees, lay grieved and motionless on the face of the waters. This world was not what was promised in his depths of suffering. It was nothing, and Adnihilo could not brave another step, another sacrifice spent on being nothing. He’d rather be dead with the rest of them. “So be it,” the voice answered, and at once light flickered in the distance. The horizon ignited, a ring of fire, burning quickly inward over the surface of the water. Good. Adnihilo thought he’d let himself be consumed by the flames, but as the fire drew closer and the pain came again, he realized how mistaken were his childish notions of death. “There is no escape from suffering,” the voice said. “There is only submission…or defiance.”
The half-blood got up onto his hands and knees, hoisted himself onto the mouth of the well, the last safe place from the sweltering flames. “Yes,” he could hear that the voice was pleased, “now see them for what they are, for what you refuse to be.”
He looked into the well like one would stare into the sun: squinting at the beginning, forcing himself until his eyes began to adjust to the ache, allowed the image to burn permanent in his vision—a flotsam corpse, grim and gaunt with dark bronze skin, its head a mess of deep brown curls, its eyes the soft rounds of unmottled irises. He saw himself, every aspect bled of the red fire of rage. “And now you see what you’ve sacrificed truly,” spoke the new Adnihilo squatting at the mouth of the well. His body was whole now that he’d consumed the flame, his flesh bright as copper, the rest of him dark as sanguine.
†††
“Raise it up!” chanted the demons’ procession as each plucked a golden chalice from the black of the surrounding deep. “Blood!” each called, filling his cup with the abyssal water as he rounded the isle, Ba’al at the lead. “Hail the Xanthos King!” they cried, passing under his high seat and reversing their direction. They rounded again, coiling ever more inward to where Lilum lay writhing on the ground. Adam stood beside her, watching the pangs of infernal childbirth, resisting the urge to look Asmodeus in the face, wondering is anything the Charred Angel said was true—and if it was, what it meant for souls to be conjoined, to be embedded. How much of them would be left to serve the original purpose of Light Bringer, Dark Seeker, and mysterious Deep Sea?
“Now,” the King started, and the procession halted in a perfect circle, the priestess at the center, crying in pain. They held their chalices high. “Light,” the King said, and the contents of the cups burst into white flames. “Be reborn, Heritor of Fire, in that truest light that births the dark. Bring us vengeance against our maker. Bring us ashes and cinders of Heaven and Earth. Let there remain nothing apart from Pandemonium. For this purpose, be reborn.”
Astaroth poured his burning chalice, and Lilum’s body burst into flames. Then Naberius followed, then Focalor and Murmur, Andras, and Kimaris, Aamon and Beelzebub. Last was the bishop of Cathedral Nox.
“Be reborn…Armilus!” the King dubbed their champion, and the lords became a chorus, chanting, “Armilus! Armilus!”
A shadow formed inside the white flame, stepped forth, proud and changed down to his core. This was not Adnihilo, Adam told himself; nevertheless, he found his breathing quickened, his palms slick, and his heart pained. The Messah’s only solace was that the armour the demons dressed Adnihilo in covered his face. It would be easier to pretend this was not his friend, easier to accept the unwinding of fate.
The white flame burned out. To Adam’s surprise, Lilum remained, sodden and shivering, but otherwise unscathed—and likewise, unnoticed. Adnihilo paid her no attention, nor did the demons or the bishop. Only the King commented, “Armilus, we pass to you the torch which burns the world. Like Lucifer and Dagon and Veles before you, be blessed with the gifts
