Chapter 34

~~Mia~~

The current carried her deeper into the vibrating ocean. It enveloped her, pulled her under the surface, and her thoughts blurred above her as she sank lower into the flowing waves. Her fingers plucked the strings, stirring the vibration, and something responded. Something played with her. Whoever they were, whatever it was, each note she played, they mirrored. And who or whatever they or it was, they played so much louder, so loud it was all Mia could hear. An ocean tide that pulled her, guided her, and all she could do was hold on, while some part of her still above the surface yelled down at her. Her own voice could not reach herself.

Once, when Mia had been a child, she’d noticed how different and distant people sounded when she was under water. Now, that was her, her own voice unable to penetrate the surface. But the fingers inside her played their song, and the ocean waves responded with a million voices.

The barren ground, the burning sky, the thorny bloodgrip, the veins of lava, the burning bushes and metal monuments grown to reflect the past, she felt them all. They were connected to the ocean, a part of it, and they resonated with the unknowable song.

Yosepha, crucified on a cross, stared down at her, the only angel not wearing armor, and her dark eyes opened wide.

Mia looked around herself. More black horns had appeared from among the crevices between the rocks, and red eyes stared at her almost as much as the angels above. Unlike the ground and sky, she couldn’t feel the demons, couldn’t pull on their strings directly, but she knew they were in the ocean with her. Maybe they didn’t feel it like she did, but they were there, floating on its surface like driftwood. And she would need them if she was going to save Yosepha and Galon.

“Romakus, be ready to get Yosepha,” she said. “Julisa, Galon has fallen and lies on the mountainside. Be ready to get him.” How she was talking, she didn’t know. They were her words, and she told herself to say them, but they felt distant, words that had to punch through the silent choir in her mind. “Vinicius, guard me, and stop Livian when she comes. Do not fall to the aura.”

“Aura?” Romakus asked. “Livian? What?”

Mia held up her staff, pointed it at the angels, and prepared her song, her will. Over five hundred angels floated above, and unlike a sexual aura, an aura of Hell would not touch them. But it would touch the demons that permeated Death’s Grip, the mountains that surrounded them, the tunnels, the scurrying claws and thundering hooves. It would beckon them all.

And while Death’s Grip may have been an unorganized mess of demon tribes, Zelandariel knew what she’d been doing. She knew the power of her province, of the tens of thousands of demons within. To harness that power, she needed to use the spire to summon the horde.

Mia didn’t.

“Unmarked,” the rapholem above called, bits of Galon’s blood dripping down his chest. He hadn’t put the blood there. The other angel had, but this one had done nothing to stop her. He was just as much to blame. “Surrender.” He slowly descended toward her, shield at his side, spear at the ready, posture confident, and guiltless. Despicable.

The angel with the crooked wing stayed where she was, but her red eyes glared through her helmet down at Mia with familiarity, and fury. There was pain in those eyes, rage driven by something that had happened to her, by the death of someone named Shaul.

The angel was a fool. She did not know pain. She did not know fury. But she would.

Mia slammed her staff down and unleashed the song. Her fingers plucked the strings as hard as they could, and the unknown, non-existent, infinite ocean became a tsunami. It swirled around her, responding to her with excitement and desire. It wanted to play with her, to mirror her song, and to fill in the gaps and flesh out its tone. Hell wanted to dance for her.

Vinicius and the tetrads growled as the aura buried them, and they stepped out into the open, ready for war. Mia snapped her eyes back to them, and they froze as she cut into them with her glare. If the tetrads and ragarin were lost to the aura, this wouldn’t work. But her death stare yanked the demons back up from the brink of the horde call, and she nodded, satisfied, as she looked back to the angel now only thirty feet above her.

A part of her wanted to give the angel an ultimatum. Leave Yosepha and go. It would have been the nice thing, the empathetic thing, the forgiving thing to do. But those thoughts washed away in the ocean waves that churned until it was all crashing water rapids. What was left was her desire.

She wanted to hurt the angels. She wanted to hear them scream.

A thousand demons rose from the nooks and crannies of the nearby mountains of Death’s Grip, growling, snarling, and the angels above paused as they looked at the rising horde.

“What is this?” the rapholem asked.

Mia said nothing. A death glare was all the angel deserved.

She raised her staff and called to the burning sky. The sky answered. The clouds of flame moved, slowly at first, a crescent of shifting amber that gradually drew the attention of the shocked angels upward.

The wind grew. The fire above pulled in on itself, and reached down, splitting the air apart as it turned faster and faster. The mountains howled, and the ground shook. A thousand demons roared up at the unfurling maelstrom, and all the angels turned to face the madness as it descended upon them.

“Stop her!” the killer angel screamed, blood still dripping from her sword. “This is her doing! You must stop her!”

The angel’s words cut through the frozen awe of the angels, and the nearby single rapholem dove for Mia. Vinicius stopped him. With a roar that rose above the growing thunder, Vinicius dove around Mia, and smashed the rapholem to the side. Angel reflexes saved him from taking a set of claws to the body, but Vin’s weight and strength were more than enough to send the angel flying back, barrel rolling through the air and almost landing.

The angels had their cue. Nearly a thousand sets of angel wings descended upon them, but before they could reach the demons below, the gabriem had their moment. A couple hundred shining arrows shot into the sky, and like shooting stars, they fell upon the land. But they didn’t go where the angels aimed them. Mia pulled the burning sky down and down, and the twisting vortex of flame tore the air open. Twisting gale winds grabbed the glowing arrows and scattered them.

They decorated the mountainside, each glowing arrow sharp enough to sink into the rock, but none landed near Vinicius or the tetrads. Distant demons screamed, some falling to the deadly volley, but the second volley fared no better, hitting random demons that climbed out from their tunnels, but none fell upon Mia or her guardians.

The rapholem came first, giant shields in front, spears pointed forward along their sides. The mikalim followed, smaller shields ahead, swords in front, as if their bodies were weapons themselves thrown toward the battlefield. All of them came for Mia, ignoring the waves of demons that exposed themselves, called by the horde.

They were Mia’s horde, and she used them. She did not have the reach of a spire, but for several miles in all directions, her music permeated the ground and the sky, until every demon felt its pull. And like shrieking banshees, they ran to Mia and the inevitable battle with the speed of predators.

Using her open left hand, she pointed a finger at the angels, and the demons attacked. They swarmed, wings, horns, and claws all pouring toward Mia and the oncoming angel battalion. Vinicius, Romakus, and Julisa moved toward the mass, but Mia slammed the base of her staff into the rock beneath her, and they stopped, ripped free of the hypnotizing, silent song.

She needed them awake and aware. But the demons she did not know, the strangers pulled up from the depths of the rock and stone, would be fodder for the machine of war.

Livian and the Damall ran up the tunnel, summoned by the horde call, but Vinicius turned and blocked them. How he stopped them, Mia could not see; her attention was elsewhere.

The tornado above continued to rage and soon it touched down, splitting the approaching angel tide, but even with all the power of its burning madness and screaming wind, the angels did not get swept in its wake. Even if angels truly were weak compared to their betters of the past, they were still a host of deadly powerful entities, and wouldn’t be so easily dissuaded. And, in the sky, they abused their God-given privilege, and flew above the demon army. But at least the oncoming tide of the demon horde had given them pause.

Mia swung her staff upward and called upon the mountain. The mountain listened, and erupted. Rock shot upward in front of her, a colossal spike of black and red stone, a small mountain in its own right, and it cut through the air as it blocked the incoming servants of Heaven. Hell tore open, rock breaking rock, and the rising layer of new ground sent hellquakes for miles in all directions.

She needed time for her army to arrive.

She swung her staff to the side, the ground erupted with a mighty crack that threatened to pop her ears, and lava shot up from the cracks into the sky between her and the approaching angels. The geysers died quickly, but the angels at the front of the charging mass stopped, lest they drown in the molten rock. She played the song harder, and again, shots of lava attacked the sky, turning the angel army into a mess of panicked birds dodging what would have been death, even to a servant of the other half of the Great Tower.

Was Galon still alive? Did her song hurt him? She couldn’t see him anymore. Yosepha? The angels continued to carry her, high above and in the back of the army, but for some reason, they did not retreat. She could still save her.

Mia’s new mountain was less a mountain, and more a half bridge that reached high into the air, with a sheer cliff face opposite of Mia, and a ramp on her side of it. And her demon horde used it. The angels compensated quickly, diving around the new mass toward Mia as the lava died, but the flood of new demons used the raised ground to meet them in the air.

Gargoyles; gorgalas. Vrats; vratorins. Brutes; devorjins. Tigers; tregeeras. Bats; dilojas. Satyrs; riivas. Minotaurs; borjins. Succubi and incubi, volaras and volarins. Even some impas, impins, gremlas, and gremlins, usually resistant to the horde call, merged into the horde. They all emerged from whatever hunt they were pursuing, left whatever prey they chased, abandoned whatever political games they played with each other, and joined Mia’s horde. They swarmed up the ramp, the new bridge that cut into the howling sky several hundred feet, and all demons with wings dove upon the scattered angels.

The angels roared with defiance, but the demons did not care. Those with wings used the deadly wind and caught the air long enough to catch some angels, and latch onto them. For all an angel’s strength, even they could do not fight against gravity when a dozen imps or grems, or a half dozen gorgalas, dangled from their limbs and feathers. Endless wings, a canopy of white and gold, and black and red, that swirled in the hectic path of the deadly hurricane of flame.

The wind grew stronger, and what had once been a maelstrom of bending fire twisted upon itself into a tornado. It touched upon the crest of Mia’s new mountain, and grew, ripping the wind apart, twisting pockets of distant air into their own whirlpools of fire. The song beckoned, and the fire sky danced to its tune, reaching down with a dozen more fingers of flame that ebbed and flowed.

Twelve new bending tubes of amber cloud fell from the sky until they touched the ground and unleashed havoc. Tornadoes of scorching flame flowed around the ramp, and the cut through the swaths of angels as much as the demons. And from the roars that rose to join the battle, the demons lost to the call of the horde were happy to be lost to the madness.

Angels fell. They either fell to the fire tornadoes that danced with unpredictable beauty, or to the hundreds of demons that used the ramp to take to the sky. Demons could not fly, but the absurd winds grabbed their wings and launched them into the air, sending them into the chaotic flow of a dozen vortexes of fire fighting each other. Like kites guided by madness, they drifted in the air, roared with hunger and bloodlust, and many found angel wings to sink their claws into.

It was not long before many angels had fallen to the ground, and were engulfed by the demons that could not glide. And the angels in the far back, carrying Yosepha’s cross, slowly fell toward the ground, unable to resist the shrieking, burning wind as Mia pulled the roaring sky down upon them.

Mia stood, solid, unmoving as the wind tossed her hair. With staff firm against the rock beneath her, she looked behind her. Julisa stood there, eyes wide. Romakus did the same, eyes locked on the chaos before him, the mountainside-turned-battlefield, and the rain of destruction above. Vinicius stood close to Mia, face scanning for any angels that might approach; the one he’d tossed aside was now locked in battle with several other demons.

“Go,” someone said. Mia said? “Julisa, get Galon. Romakus, get Yosepha.”

“How the fuck am I going to do that?” they said in unison.

Mia didn’t respond. She set her eyes back upon the death and madness she had wrought, and reached for the song her fingers played within. The ground was her. The sky was her. The song was her. And the demons that swam in her vibrating currents were guests within and upon her.

And this woman, this young girl with red hair, pale skin, and freckles. She was ... Mia was...

Thoughts were lost to the flowing vibrations. Someone’s voice tried to reach her, but could not, muffled above the surface of the ocean song. Her voice? Her thoughts?

Julisa ran out across the mountainside along the edge of the battle, around the chaos and screams of death, and around angels that swooped in and about the dozens of nearby demons. Romakus did not go around, but through. He dashed down the mountainside toward the ramp, using his colossal wings to keep from breaking his limbs against the jagged rocks. And upon reaching the new ramp, now soaked in blood and covered in the corpses of demons, he sprinted up.

An angel got in his way, but Romakus did not waste time. He swung out his sword hard, the mikalim blocked, and the harsh ping of impact announced the strength of the tetrad’s might. The attack launched the angel back, and the tetrad continued past. A half dozen demons followed Romakus and dove at the angel, but she escaped with a flap of her glowing wings. Another angel swooped down, enormous shield at the front, but Romakus bulldozed into them, a full tackle that knocked the angel off the side of the small cliff.

Higher and higher he rose, not fighting the angels despite their attempts to kill him; he was the only tetrad in the fight, after all, and the biggest target. But it was obvious he’d earned his position as leader of this division of the Damall as even Heaven’s warriors could not stop him, and once he reached the height of the ramp, he dove off. Past Mia’s cliff, she could no longer see the tetrad, and could only hope he could reach Yosepha’s captors.

The tide of battle had yet to reach Mia, the song pulling the demons toward the fight along and down the mountainside just below her, and the ramp of rock she’d created. But battle was chaos, and the fighting drifted closer, shifting up along the mountain and closer to Mia every minute.

An angel dove at Mia, sword up. Again, Vinicius knocked them back. He wanted to catch and kill them, and he roared up at them as the warrior took to the sky again, but the angels were smart enough to not commit to a fight with a child of the Old Ones. Unfortunately for the angels, they were not used to the very winds themselves dancing with the unbridled lunacy of flame, and a random gust ripped the angel from their flight path and tossed them into the whirlpool of circling fire tornadoes.

Mia could not tell if they died or not. All was roars, screams, and insanity. A little piece of her, somewhere above the surface of the ocean, knew that she should feel horrible, and would feel horrible. But those thoughts couldn’t penetrate the vibrations that enveloped her. For now, there was only the song, and the battle.

Julisa returned, angel on her shoulder. Mia did not look. She aimed her staff out at the battle ahead, and plucked the strings inside her harder, until the depths of the ocean responded in kind, mirroring her song and amplifying it into the world around her. The winds crashed upon them all, and Mia slammed her staff down in front of her to keep from falling over. She ripped a dozen angels from the sky and sent them down into the awaiting claws, swords, and axes of the horde below.

“Romakus?” Julisa asked, spinning around after setting Galon’s body by the tunnel entrance near Livian.

“Not back yet,” Livian said.

The rest of the Damall again tried to join the battle. Livian and Vinicius stopped them. Only the child of the Old Ones and the powerful tetrads were strong enough to resist Mia’s song.

The battlefield raged, Hell raged, and death flowed. Essence and resonance both fell into the dirt, staining it red, and Hell drank it down. Mia could feel it, the two energies pouring into the depths of Hell, but she could not touch them. Something else was absorbing them. Someone else.

For all the madness Mia had summoned, the angels would not be so easily defeated. Weakened by time, burdened by millennia, they still ripped through the swaths of demons like paper, and almost all the blood that drowned the land was demon. The gabriem tended to their fellow angels, healing wounds as the rapholem defended them with grand walls of holy light, gold barriers no demon could break. Adapting to the gale winds, many of the mikalim took to the sky, and unleashed their beams of holy energy down onto the horde.

Some angels died. Demons died by the hundreds.

The angel with the crooked wing rose above the battle, aimed her sword at Mia, and screamed with pure fury as she poured her grace into the weapon. It glowed brightly, almost blinding against the swirling amber flames. And when she unleashed the beam, the battle disappeared under the deafening roar.

Mia brought up her staff, and summoned blackstone. A wall of onyx shot up from the ground in front of her, fifty feet tall and wide, and ten feet thick. The woman’s attack crashed against it, and a new roar of destruction buried the battlefield as her attack shook the mountain. But this was not the first time Mia had seen one of these attacks, and she built the wall thick. It stood strong.

The attack didn’t last forever, ten seconds of holy death that chipped away at Mia’s wall like a colossal drill, but could not penetrate it before the angel above desisted. But for all the angel’s crazed fury that made her stand out from the rest of Heaven’s warriors, other angels joined her, took different angles, and again unleashed beams of holy light. Mia aimed her staff to the ground, raised it, and summoned new walls on her left and right, each spread and arcing overhead until a half-complete dome covered her, Vinicius, Julisa, Livian, and the entrance to the cave the Damall stood within.

The battle continued outside, but more angels joined the assault on Mia, burying her and her demons in the roaring sound of their holy light. She was pinned.

“Julisa,” she said, “help Romakus. We must rescue Yosepha.”

Julisa snarled. “I—”

She snapped her eyes back at the tetrad, and the four-armed demoness grew silent. They stared at each other, Julisa looking for some weakness in Mia’s stance, but Mia stood her ground. Explaining her position would have been the logical thing, about how Livian was needed to keep the rest of the Damall from succumbing to the horde call, and how Vinicius was needed to keep Mia safe in case an angel came close. But demons didn’t respond well to logical explanations. They responded well to dominance.

Snarling, Julisa dashed out from between the walls of blackstone, and disappeared into the madness of the battlefield.

“Is Galon alive?” Mia asked.

Livian crouched over the body of the unmoving angel and checked his wounds.

“Barely.”

Mia would have snarled, screamed, ground her teeth, something. But all of that was lost to the song, caught in its waves. All that existed was the flowing strings she played, and her connection to them and the other thing in the song, mirroring her, amplifying her. Mind buried and flowing in the rapids, it took effort to summon anything other than the most basic thoughts.

Rescue Yosepha. Save Galon. Stop the angels. Escape. Escape? How were they going to escape? More demons joined her horde, but the song wasn’t strong enough to reach far, or summon the strongest demons nearby. And demons, running as fast as they could to join the fight, couldn’t join her as quickly as she needed. She needed an option, and she needed it now.

A voice in the song spoke to her.

Hellfire.

Mia stared at the blackstone that surrounded her, only barely aware of her own voice, screaming at her from above the surface. Don’t. You’ll kill hundreds. There has to be a better way.

Mia looked down at her staff, at the hellfire that swirled in the ruby upon its tip. Fire. She needed true fire.

She played the song, and the thing in the ocean, the thing that pulled her along through the currents, the thing that listened to her, spoke to her, it mirrored her. The song carried a thousand emotions, feelings that moved through Mia and drowned her in them, feelings beyond words. Rage, frustration, anger, but also mourning, moroseness, aching, longing, and a million other sister emotions. Whatever it was that listened to Mia’s song, its emotions were too large and complex for her to understand, but slowly they coalesced from emotion into a single action: destroy.

And fire was how she, how ... Hell, destroyed. Hellfire.

Mia’s mind and thoughts, lost to the ocean and its currents, paused on a memory. A single memory from her childhood, from the movie The Prince of Egypt, and a particular scene with a tornado of fire. Even as a child, that scene had mesmerized her. It’d been ... glorious.

“Vinicius,” she said. “Defend me.”

A growl confirmed he would.

The holy beams came to a stop, and Mia took her chance. She shattered the barriers she’d summoned, each splitting apart with a mighty crack that thundered through the mountains. Raising her staff high, she summoned fire, and this time, it would not come from the sky.

The mountain trembled. The ground quaked. Hell screamed.

The distant tornadoes of fire paled compared to the terrible roar of the flame that erupted from the ground. It came quickly, a spiraling array of embers that cut through the rock and stone of Hell, and threw hellfire into the sky, amber mixing with specs of lava, and carried upward by the shrieking flame. It was wide, far wider than the walls she’d summoned, and she drew it up directly in front of her close enough the flames came within a dozen feet of her.

The other tornadoes ebbed and flowed with the chaos of the wind. But this new tornado that burst through the rock was grounded, controllable, and with a wave of her staff, she guided it forward. Its top, a giant funnel that dwarfed its sister tornadoes, ripped the wind out from under the angels, and their wings betrayed them, dozens of the warriors yanked into the sky and into the flames.

Their screams joined the chorus of destruction.

More than angels were lost to the tornado of hellfire. Demons on the battlefield, lost to their own bloodlust, only avoided the fire as much as needed to continue pursuing battle with the angels. They did not expect the spire of hellfire to tear across the field, ripping up through the ground as it carved a path, and to dance between clusters of combat. They roared into the madness, even as the hellfire reduced them to ash.

The enormous ramp of rock Mia had summoned ripped apart as the geyser tornado moved through it, splitting the ground and leaving a trail of lava in its wake. Blackstone, stained stone, meera metal on demon corpses, all of it was sucked up into the hellfire, doomed to swirl around the edges of the tornado before eventually getting pulled into the deadly flame. Soon, the small mountain, the ramp Mia had summoned to let the demons reach the angels above, shattered entirely, collapsing under its weight as more and more of the stones of its base were ripped away by the hellfire destroying the ground wherever it moved. The myriad of rocks tore upward, broke apart in a mess of collisions that echoed through the battle, and melted as they joined the hellfire.

Mia stared out onto the field, staff aimed ahead, her focus to guide the hellfire. Romakus. Yosepha. Julisa. The names echoed in her mind, and she held onto them, anchors that stopped her from flowing away with the ocean. Save Yosepha. Do not kill Romakus and Julisa.

Black and red wings moved in the distance. Romakus, surrounded by death and angel wings, pushed through the battle, past the fire tornadoes summoned from the sky, past the falling rocks of the destroyed ramp, and around the geyser of hellfire Mia guided. Julisa followed beside him, her four small swords out and slashing at any of the angelic warriors that came too close. She could not defeat an angel, not like this, but it was enough to stop them from blocking Romakus.

Yosepha was in his arms.

Why the angels had brought Yosepha, Mia could not understand. But then, why had they played music and sung as a choir? What madness had driven them to make such a grandiose and pointless display? Maybe they’d thought to prove to Galon the weight of their intentions? Maybe they’d thought a show of strength would convince Mia to simply surrender? Or maybe the angels were simply archaic, and could only operate in methods as ridiculous as a choir announcing their approach, while literally carting around a display of their faith to their god.

Wherever God had gone to, they weren’t here. No one saved the angels as more of them were swept up in the hellfire. No one cared about the demons incinerated by the flames.

Mia cared, but the song could not be denied. The silent music drowned her, and her emotions, her desires, were but tiny fish in the waves.

The angels were quick to adapt. They risked the gale wings and flew higher and higher until their wings brushed the flames of the burning sky. Yosepha had told Mia they could withstand those flames, but not easily. Maybe they were retreating?

No, they weren’t. Gabriem took to the skies and trumpeted their horns, but other angels continued to navigate the maze of fire and death. Rapholem defended each other from the horde, and giant walls of gold fought against the winds and the shards of molten rock they carried. Mikalim dashed about, agile, and unleashed gold beams of light upon the masses, even as several came for Mia yet again.

She prepared to summon another wall. If she did, she would not be able to see Romakus and Julisa, and would not be able to guide the geyser of hellfire. But the angels did not know that, and they came down to her, swords pointed forward as if they themselves had been thrown at her like spears. Melee combat it was.

Vinicius stepped in front of her and slashed with his claws. The first angel went down, and while the child of Belial did not penetrate his armor, the angel hit the ground hard enough something inside the shell of silver and gold broke. They took to the sky again, one arm bending the wrong way at the elbow.

Three other mikalim changed targets from Mia to Vin, and all three set their swords alight with a golden glow. Mia could not watch, eyes locked on the field of flame and the two tetrads running to her, lest she kill them and Yosepha by accident. But the sound of battle raged beside her, and roars of pure bloodlust resonated in her skull as her bodyguard unleashed his new, healed body on the three angels.

“More!” Livian’s voice. Shadows and feathers announced the arrival of more angels, but Mia dared not risk looking. Not much longer. Romakus and Julisa were maybe thirty seconds away.

More battle erupted behind her as Livian joined the fight, as well as the rest of the Damall. Maybe the angels hadn’t expected a couple dozen demons to be hiding in the tunnel, but Livian and the others threw themselves into the fray, and the angels that came for Mia’s back found themselves in a new battle. Even lost to the call of the horde, the weaker demons knew to attack the angels and not her.

Another angel descended on them, a flicker of movement above Mia she couldn’t risk looking to. Another ten seconds. Just another ten seconds.

Ten seconds too long. The angel reached her, sword glowing, and swung it down.

The angel missed. Her sword unleashed a golden arc, an extension of her sword that shot forward, and it crashed against the ground beside Mia. Something ... Someone collided with the angel midair, and again Mia could not dare risking a glance as she whipped the hellfire geyser around the field below. The newcomer roared.