Chapter 17

~~David~~

Apparently, in the few minutes since David had left Diogo and the shark demon upstairs to fight the rider, a lot had happened. Diogo no longer had his left arm. Any of it. The rider — must have been the rider’s axe, since the wound looked burned — had cut his arm off at the shoulder joint, so only a few inches of the limb remained. That didn’t matter to Diogo. He roared down at the fallen rider and marched toward him, like he wasn’t coming straight toward an ancient, deadly myth who’d disarmed him. Like he was going to win this fight.

No wonder Jeskura was terrified of this guy.

The rider stood back up, looked at Diogo, turned enough so he kept the brute at his side, and looked at Vinicius. The much, much bigger demon came closer, and entered the entrance hall of the dungeon, trapping the rider. Not really trapped, though, considering both demons were injured.

“Vinicius,” Diogo said. “Who released you?”

The dragon shrugged lightly and flicked his giant tail toward Mia at the other end of the dungeon.

Diogo snarled. “And where is Zelandariel?”

The four-armed monster said nothing.

“Where is Zel!? Did you kill her?”

The monster still said nothing. He didn’t have time to. The rider had to pick a target before he got surrounded, and went with the one-armed brute right in front of him.

Diogo wasn’t so easily taken down. Maybe he’d learned from getting his arm chopped off, because he sidestepped an oncoming downward axe damn fast, and again punched out with his only arm. The rider ducked under it, and his other axe came up. Diogo stepped back. Definitely a lesson learned.

The axe glowed red, and more fire flooded the hallway. The flames poured over Diogo, and the demon roared with rage and pain as ember waves buried him. He jumped back, and the arc of flame crashed into the ceiling of black metal before it exploded outward and poured down over the walls. Fire could not be aimed so easily. Fire went where it wanted, and that was everywhere.

“Vinicius!” Mia yelled. “Do—” She spun around.

Someone behind Mia, way behind her, opened a pair of black metal doors. With the fire blocking David’s view, and Diogo, and the rider, and now Vinicius as the monster got up, David couldn’t see who. Someone with a black face, tall, and spindly wings.

“Vinicius, get me to my brother!”

With an annoyed snarl, the four-armed giant turned around, and scooped up Mia hard and fast, zero attempt to be gentle. But with his bleeding arms, he hugged Mia to his chest, and covered most of her body with his. Demons could resist flames, but they weren’t impervious to them. Even Vinicius had to be careful of the hotter spots, particularly the rider’s axes.

And David could do nothing about it. As Diogo backed off from the rider, snarling and wiping flame from his skin, the rider turned back and faced Vinicius again. Vinicius’s arms were all busy, though. Why was he listening to Mia? Why was he risking his life for her? And who the fuck was that demon way in the back hallway Mia was desperate to get away from?

Stuck between a rock and a hard place. Diogo was half a demon, and already on the backpedal as a fresh wave of fire threatened to burn his skin off. Vinicius needed to get past the rider and couldn’t fight, but Mia somehow had the power to make him try anyway. The rider wasn’t going to just let him run past, though.

David tightened his grip on his tiny broken sword, and—

Lost the tiny broken sword. Someone behind him yanked it out of his grip hard enough to almost dislocate his good shoulder, and David spun around with the sudden yank. Falling on his ass, again, and bruising his tailbone, again, he looked up at the fresh addition to the chaos.

It was the half burned demon. The huge vrat threw himself past Diogo and straight onto the rider’s back, and wasted no time. His left hand grabbed the rider’s helmet and pulled his head to the side, and his right hand came down and stabbed at the rider’s neck. It hit something in there, something that wasn’t metal.

“Adron! Get out of here!” Mia screamed, her eyes peeking up over one of Vinicius’s hands. The heat haze wasn’t enough to block out her wide eyes streaming with tears. Afraid for the demon apparently named Adron, or because she was currently going through an inferno?

The rider fell to a knee, but before David could jump for joy, the armored man got back up, with a broken sword sticking out of the side of his neck, up between helmet and shoulder. Whatever Adron had stabbed under the helmet hadn’t done much, and the rider rotated an axe in hand, preparing to swing it backward at Adron.

Vinicius had other plans. He crashed into the rider hard, and knocked him and Adron over like a football lineman hitting a toddler. Adron went flying, and soon Diogo did too as Vinicius continued forward, each step vibrating the whole spire with the sudden momentum as he tackled everyone in front of him. The only thing that kept David from getting run over was his small size and pressing his body tight against the wall.

“Get Adron and my brother and close the door!” Mia’s voice, puncturing the roars of battle and fire, turned Vinicius around at the exit. He listened. For some reason, he listened, and grabbed Adron and David.

One hand for the sweating, panting Mia, one hand for David doing the same, one hand for the broken, exhausted vratorin, and one hand for the hole in his gut. Now that David was floating in the air in Vinicius’s grip, the hole in the giant monster’s stomach was visible, and blood trickled from it down over the demon’s leg. Holy shit, just one of his legs was as big as all of David, thicker and wider, too.

Once out on the inner balcony, Vinicius used his tail and slammed the two doors closed. And in one of the most iconic, perfect displays of sheer ridiculousness David had ever seen, the twelve-foot four-armed monster sat in front of the doors.

“This will not hold the rider for long,” he said. “He will summon his strength and open it eventually.”

“Hopefully after he’s finished Diogo off,” David said. “Can—”

Vinicius put the three of them down. Adron collapsed immediately, and Mia ran to his side.

“Adron! Oh god, are you okay? Oh god oh god. Vinicius, you fucking asshole! You almost killed him! I didn’t tell you to—David! Oh god, David!” Mia threw herself at him and hugged him. “You’re alive! I didn’t know if you were alive, and—”

They both froze, and the world flashed white. Images hit David hard, and his head reeled back as symbols crashed into him. They flared in his brain, redlike fire, amber like the veins of Hell, gold like the rays of Heaven, and they demanded he notice them. Somewhere in the dark matter of his brain, a piece of his brain told him he recognized the symbols, and once it did, his subconsciousness jumped on board and filled in the blanks.

Runes. Those were runes, like the ancient language he’d read for Caera. The same, but different. Runes his brain struggled to understand, struggled to pronounce even inside his own imagination. Life, death, creation, destruction, Heaven and its nine islands, Hell and its nine provinces, so many more. Three stuck out, loud and bright in his thoughts: potram, royam, and batlam.

He forced his eyes open and met Mia’s. If his eyes were as wide as hers, he was probably scaring the shit out of her, too.

“I’m alive,” he said. “I uh, came here to rescue you, but—”

She threw up her hands. “But we don’t have time!” Her eyes screamed at him more than her voice. Whatever had happened when they’d touched each other, she’d seen it, too.

“I know! But we can’t go back up and out, not with hundreds of demons coming down.”

“Shit, I didn’t think—”

He threw up his hands. “What the hell were those symbols!? We touched and suddenly I’m swimming in a new fucking language of shit I don’t understand!”

“I know! I don’t understand them either. But—”

He didn’t get to interrupt her. Something big and heavy crashed into the doors with enough force to make the T-Rex sitting back against them shift a few inches across the floor.

“Holy shit,” David said. “The rider is ... is...”

Vinicius looked down at him, which he did even while sitting, and grumbled in his chest. David didn’t speak alligator, but that was probably an annoyed grumble.

Mia grabbed his shoulders. “What do we do!? Think of a plan! Think!”

“I’m thinking!”

“You’re panicking!”

“So are you!”

“I—Adron!” She got on her knees beside the demon and shook him by his unburned shoulder. “Oh god Adron I’m sorry! I told Vinicius to stop the rider, and he did that! And Hannah, and ... and...”

“Hannah?” David asked. Mia snapped him a glare, and the one-eyed demon, barely conscious, aimed his one eye at David with enough malice to kill. Well, shit, don’t mention Hannah.

“I warned you about him,” Adron said, and he sat forward. Or tried, anyway. Mia pushed him back against the wall beside the closed doors.

“I know. I know and I’ll make sure he doesn’t do anything like that anymore. But let’s get out of here. We need a way out! We need to find Kas, and get out.”

“Kas?” David asked, and braced for some more eye knives. No eye knives this time, thank god.

“A sarkarin demon,” Mia said. “Big like that Diogo brute you just saw, but eyeless, two big horns on the sides of his head. Big tail.”

“Looks like a big shark dinosaur?”

“Y-Yeah. Did you—”

“Diogo and ... and a sarkarin, were fighting the rider. The shark knew who you were and told me where to find you.”

Mia’s eyes shot upward. “He ... He can’t be...”

“We don’t have time for this,” Adron said. This time he managed to get up, and pushed Mia away when she tried to stop him. “Once people realize Zel’s dead, they’ll start fighting for control of the spire. That means coming down here.” He gestured to the hole in the center of the balconies. “Even if they don’t find out yet, I can hear that fight above, same as you.” Despite one hand back against the wall to keep from falling, Adron found enough energy to half yell his words, half beg. “We’re going to get caught in the middle, and—”

“We have time for Kas!” Mia jammed a finger up at Adron. “He’s your friend! And Hannah...”

Adron shook his head. “We can’t—”

“Hold the door,” Vinicius said. “I will take my spire back, take its power, and you will be safe.”

“Okay, I just met you,” David said, gesturing to the giant monster, “but I trust you as far as I can throw you.”

“Same,” Mia said, clutching her strange necklace.

David continued. “There’s no way we’re just giving you control of the spire. Who knows what you’d use the horde call for.”

“And it’d probably free you of the leash,” Mia said. “And you burned Adron! You tried to kill him!”

David almost asked, but let it go. If a leash was how Mia was controlling the biggest, scariest demon David had ever seen, details could wait.

Vinicius shook his head. “The rider...” After a heavy rumble, he lowered his head. Exhausted, maybe, or not willing to explain. Stoic asshole behavior. “I must take control of the spire. It is mine.”

Mia marched up to the giant and stared up at him with eyes David had never seen. The fuck had happened to her in the week it’d been since he last saw her?

“You will not! We’re going upstairs to find Kas, and—”

David took her hand. Again, touching her skin was like an electric shock, and strange symbols shot through his mind, same as before. Mia was the source of them, but from the look in her eyes, she was seeing things come from him, too, or was getting stuck in some sort of feedback loop.

He let go, gasping.

“The fuck ... is ... that?”

“You tell me!” She grabbed him by his half breastplate and avoided skin contact as she shook it. “What have you been up to all this time? I thought you were dead, and—we’re getting distracted! We need a plan!” That was her panic voice. It sounded dangerously close to her ‘do what I tell you to’ voice, a voice only he ever usually got to hear. The joys of being a brother. “You always have a plan, David. What’s the plan!?”

“I uh ... didn’t have a plan.”

“What!?”

“I saw the rider and his army attack the spire, and I just ran in! I left my girls behind, and—”

“Your girls!?”

“A few demons that have been helping me, but—”

He didn’t get to finish the sentence. Hell broke loose.

~~Mia~~

Everything was going from bad, to worse, to worser to worst.

Hannah was dead. Adron was burned, badly, by her new slave. Vinicius, already wounded by Zel, was bleeding from new wounds in his arms, burned gashes from the rider’s weird axes, but not burned enough to stop the blood from dripping. Diogo and Acelina were trapped in the dungeon with the rider, which was actually a good thing, but short-lived if the heavy crashing against the double doors behind Vinicius really was the rider.

David was alive! David found her! David looked like shit, favoring his left shoulder and bleeding from a really nasty-looking nose. And he’d said he’d run into Kas fighting the rider. The rider was terrifying, the aura he emitted was terrifying, and he was chasing her, and David, like some Hell version of Jason or Michael Myers who could run instead of just walk everywhere. The chance Kas was alive was small.

But not none. He could still be alive, and she needed to know. There was no chance she was leaving Kas behind if he was alive, unless he didn’t want to come.

Vinicius wanted control of the spire, but it was obvious he was a giant asshole. No way she’d let him have it. But how else could they get control of the situation? It was all chaos, and now they were stuck with no options.

David usually had a plan. Him not having a plan was enough to have her ready to panic, but she would not panic. The fact touching him seemed to summon the runes from the spire’s book back to her mind was a new level of insanity she couldn’t think about right now. Right now, what mattered was escaping.

Hell had different plans.

Mia, David, and Adron all fell hard as an earthquake ripped through the tower.

“What the fuck!?” David yelled and followed it with a yelp as he landed on his bad shoulder.

“David!” She tried to get to him, but the earthquake didn’t so much as let her crawl on her hands and knees. Vibration ripped through her, heavy and chunky, and pulsed through the floor.

Adron. Poor Adron. He must have been in so much pain, from the burns and from aching to take out his anger on the rider and Vinicius, and able to do neither. And now the vibrations pouring through the tower had him grinding his teeth, biting back more pain from his ruined skin.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “Did someone take over the spire?” Her voice barely made it over the rumbling.

“No,” Vinicius said. “The ritual takes time, and drowns the spire in light.”

Killing Zel had been unusually anticlimactic for multiple reasons, one of which was how the spire barely noticed except for opening the teeth doors and some other stuff. No giant explosion, earthquakes, or big light beams. And if the earthquake now had nothing to do with that, then what the fuck?

The world of Hell ripped itself apart. The parts of the spire’s walls that were metal fought against the vibrations, but the parts of the tower that were flesh and bone couldn’t resist. Giant white rib bones that connected balcony to balcony snapped in half. Layers of muscle and tendon stretched and ripped apart. Blood poured from the walls, and the remnants cried out as the surfaces they grew from or were trapped within split open.

“W-What...” Mia dragged her butt across the balcony and sat beside Adron, and she grabbed his unburned hand. Both of them, backs to the wall, watched a new Hell open on them.

Blood rained over the balconies. Deep in the spire as Mia and the rest were, many of the floors above unleashed their death and agony over the metal as they ripped apart, and poured blood and guts down the center hole of the spire. More than just blood, but bodies, too, remnants and their soft flesh succumbing to the earthquake. A few remnants nearby were torn free from their walls by sheer vibration, and others were squashed by the walls of muscle shifting and flexing like real muscles trying to keep the spire together.

The muscles failed. Mia screamed and clutched Adron’s arm. The heavy thudding behind Vinicius stopped. The small fires and amber lights in the spire trembled, and drowned in new beams of light that cut through the shredding walls.

David fell. Already on his hands and knees, falling meant landing on his hip and bouncing around like a rubber ball on a subwoofer speaker. He drifted her way, and without thinking about it, she grabbed his hand.

Again, the strange sensation flooded her. Just like playing the weird instrument inside her, reading the ancient language, and thinking about those strange runes the tower’s book had put inside her, something in her brain, or maybe her soul, recognized the sensation. Communication? Exchanging information, or something else? The fingers inside her did more than pluck strings. They drew symbols in the dark matter in her skull, and sent them across the aether into David along the strings.

There was something there, inside her and her brother, or maybe beneath them, something they walked on or swam in. She had it, or could interact with it, and David could, too. And like one of them was negatively and the other positively charged, electricity flowed from her to him. Not as strong as the first time, but still, enough that she recognized the symbols their touch summoned to her mind each time.

“Mia,” he said, pulling his hand away, “maybe—”

The earthquake doubled. Mia tried to scream, but nothing came out. All she could do was hold on to Adron’s arm to keep from bouncing around, the much heavier demon her anchor. Vinicius would have been better, but he was ten feet away and she couldn’t even move two feet without getting tossed.

The new beams of light doubled in size as the walls continued to rip apart. Bone and flesh peeled away from metal and slowly revealed thick metal beams covered in enormous spikes hidden behind them. The metal skeleton of the spire.

Hell crumbled, and a third of the tower’s flesh ripped away from its side like someone peeling a fingernail off the finger. The balconies remained, firmly attached to the skeleton of black metal beams and their serrated, enormous spikes, but the flesh and bone walls could not remain. The fire sky came in and bathed the spire’s depths in light, and the bodies of demons rained on the growing canyon. Canyon?

The earthquake, or hellquake, only grew worse. Adron, Mia, David, and even Vinicius bounced and slid across the balcony as each new vibration that hit the spire felt like a bomb. She tried to hold on, but Adron’s arm grew more slippery with every passing moment, until gravity and a hard thud into the metal balcony sent them flying apart.

“David! Adron!” Mia screamed. This didn’t make any sense! Why was she sliding across the balcony like it was tipped over!?

Because it was tipped over. She screamed louder and pressed her fingertips against the balcony metal floor, but all they found was blood. Remnants screamed as they fell, and their soft bodies tumbled and fell apart as they rolled down the balcony toward her.

She was falling. The spire was tilted. Some part of her refused to accept that a spire as absurdly tall and as ridiculously deep as Death’s Grip’s spire could just ... fall over. She turned her head and looked down at the oncoming outer edge of the tower. The wall wasn’t there anymore, and if she kept sliding, she was going to fall between the metal columns of the spire’s skeleton, and into the growing canyon.

A canyon. That’s what her eyes told her it was. The wall of flesh that’d once been on the side of the tower was not only gone, it’d been pulled away, attached to the canyon wall that slowly pulled further and further away from the tower every moment. Strands of muscle still connected to the spire ripped apart as the canyon wall moved further, taking with it the fleshy spire wall and leaving behind the naked, spiky metal pillars and columns of one side of the spire’s Hellish construction.

She slid closer and closer, and turned over onto her ass and dug her heels into the balcony, but they found no groove or friction to latch onto.

“Mia!”

Mia looked up. Adron had fallen toward the hole between the circular balconies, and held onto one of the chains dangling from the balcony above with his good arm. Vinicius did his best to keep his back against the double doors of the dungeon, but the with the spire tilting on its side almost perpendicular to the doors, his weight eventually slipped out from under him. The lower of the two doors to the dungeon flung open, and two of Vinicius’s hands reached up and grabbed it to keep from sliding down the balcony toward Mia. But neither of them had said her name.

Her brother had. David, wearing nothing but a silly, weird skirt thing, and a piece of black demon armor across half his chest that probably weighed a lot, slid down toward her. He made no effort to slow down, and half stood up on the slanted, bloody surface, borderline surfing down it.

“Mia!”

“David, what’re you—” She sucked in a breath as the edge of the tower came up to her. Her hands flailed out to the sides, but the metal beams to her left and right were too far to reach. The spire’s inner balcony floor came to an end, and gravity, apparently out to kill her, pulled her down into oblivion.

David’s hand grabbed hers. David grabbed the metal beam just outside Mia’s reach.

The scream of pain from her brother ripped her eyes away from the abyss waiting below. His right hand held hers, and she dangled over the newly opened canyon. His left hand held the side of the metal beam between some of its bloody spikes. David’s left shoulder did not look good, and a new coating of blood came out of his nostrils as every muscle in his arms and chest flexed.

He was going to break. She had to grab something, anything, and get her weight off him before he couldn’t hold on anymore, but something grabbed her eyes and demanded she look around.

Hell had been ripped open directly under the spire, a canyon that cut across as far as her eyes could see, in both directions, toward the center of Hell and toward its outer edge. A giant ravine that’d spread at least a few hundred feet across, and was only growing wider.

The spire, a colossal structure as deep as it was tall, black metal framework that held red flesh and white bone, was half falling half bending into the canyon that’d ripped open underneath it. The only reason it hadn’t fallen into the abyss was the metal framework and the way it latched into one side of the ravine and hooked into the stone wall. The canyon wall that’d ripped away oozed and bled, and a few thick strands of sinew still connected the distant ravine wall to the spire, but they snapped as the ravine grew wider again. There were tunnels in the canyon walls, too, ones that’d once connected to the spire’s depths, and sex demons and souls stood in them and stared down. Not across the canyon to the spire, but down.

Mia looked down.

Hell bled into the darkness. The spire, bending under its weight with half its body exposed, oozed blood and lava that spilled and ran down the canyon wall. Veins of lava in the opposite canyon wall poured down the stones as well. The crimson and glowing amber fluids fell into blackness.

The depths weren’t black or dark because of shadow. The fire sky burned above, and lit the canyon walls all the way down, to where they eventually stopped. Hell had a bottom? Unless her eyes were lying to her, the canyon wall opposite of her didn’t go down infinitely, but stopped, and exposed the blackness below. True, unending, real blackness. The amber, glowing lava poured upon the obsidian eternity beneath her, beneath Hell herself, and broke apart upon nothingness. The crimson liquid of the spire did the same, its fleshy growths and torn muscles bleeding onto the blackness below, only for the blood to hit something, break apart, and vanish.

She stared down into the endless eternity. It stared back up at her.

Demon roars tried to pull her vision away, but failed. As she looked into the black hole, shapes fell past her in her peripheral vision, dark red bodies wearing black armor, and a couple wearing gold. Their screams and roars of rage and frustration echoed through the canyon, and ended instantly when they reached the bottom. No, before they reached the blackness. At the edge of the canyon’s floor, above the shifting, living darkness, the falling demons hit something else. They shattered like glass, and vanished, before reaching the void.

New vibrations flowed up through the canyon wall. The earlier hellquake had been from the canyon ripping Hell open, but had thankfully stopped for the moment. The new vibration didn’t move her, shake her or the tower, or do anything she could feel. But she felt it nonetheless.

Something in the darkness below roared. No sound, but it was roaring. Something in the darkness moved, something she could not see.

Endlessness.

Nothingness.

She forced her eyes back up to David. Like her, he stared down into the emptiness that wanted to devour them.

“David!”

His eyes snapped back to her with a jolt.

“Jesus,” he said. “Je—holy fuck my arm!” He looked back up to his fucked up shoulder, back to her, and ground his teeth hard enough she almost heard his jaw click. “You got fat!”

“Oh fuck off and hold on!” She swung her other arm up and grabbed onto his wrist. He groaned and cursed, but nothing he hadn’t told her a thousand times before, and she summoned a grin for him as she helped him pull her up. They were both small and light, and that meant they’d forever be weaker than people bigger than them. But they were damn good at climbing.

The strange, electric flow continued to run between them, but didn’t blind her with a flood of sensation and information anymore. Whatever it was, it’d settled down to something ignorable.

She scaled up her brother’s arm, waist, good shoulder, and got her hands onto the metal beam that connected her balcony floor to the floor above. It was covered in huge jagged spikes, and the spikes were covered in torn bits of flesh where they’d once been covered in the spire’s muscle and bone wall. She got her hands around the curves of some spikes for a better grip, dangled from both hands, and looked down again.

The blackness looked at her.

There were stories about the things people saw in the ocean. It was one of the deepest, oldest fears humans had, right up there with the fear of spiders, snakes, and heights. Staring into the darkness of night was one thing. Staring into the endless depths of the ocean, straight down into blackness that defied understanding, while things in the dark stared back up, hidden enormous things, was the stuff legends were written about. Legends and horror stories.

There was something in the darkness below her, something that swam in shades of onyx and almost shining edges of obsidian. Whatever it was, its movement stirred the black waves, and countless, invisible eyes surrounding an eye the size of the universe stared up at her and her brother.

“The fuck is going on?” David asked.

It was David’s voice that ripped her eyes away from the void, this time. He was closer to the balcony, and with the whole spire bending and tilting almost forty-five degrees, he got his feet up and pressed to the balcony behind him. The tilt didn’t look so bad on the floors below them. It looked worse on the floors above, but at least the half of the spire that grew above ground had kept its walls. Only the lower half had lost its walls, all on one side, ripped away by the opposite ravine cliff face. The metal beams were literally bending.

If the spire lost its grip on the canyon wall they were on, it’d fall into the dark.

“I don’t know what’s going on!” she said. “Did the rider do something?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I killed Zel, that might have—”

“You killed Zel!?”

She glared at him, and slowly swung toward him and the balcony along the metal beam. If she thought of them as monkey bars, and not the bones of a flesh spire, or the only things keeping her from falling to her death, it wasn’t so bad.

“She was going to torture me! And I don’t think her death has anything to do with ... with this!” She waved one of her feet below her at the pit. Best gesture she could manage with both hands busy. “Now help me get up!”

“The fuck are we going to do if we even can get back into the spire!? The—”

“David stop thinking and just go!”

“Go where!? We can’t climb back up this slope!”

“I ... I...”

Shit. He was right. Her brother pressed his feet up against the balcony slope, and tried to push himself up back onto it, but without an edge to get his feet on, he couldn’t get up. He did manage to get a foot up long enough to pull himself up and straddle the metal beam, though.