Page 77 of Fallen: Darkness Ascending, Vol.1

NHIALII

I wait for his pleas, but none come. Only the wheeze of his breath and the stench of his fear fill the room.

“No words? I question, voice deadly, serrated with malice.

I cross the final space between us in a breath. He tries to run, spinning toward the door in desperation, except I’m quicker now. Faster than fear. My hand clamps onto the back of his neck, slamming him face-first into the wall, plaster cracking from the impact.

He gags, sputtering with a mouthful of debris. “ Stupid bitch.”

“You thought I was fragile,” I growl into his ear. “You mistook softness for weakness. You thought silence meant surrender.”

I hurl him across the room. His body crashes into the headboard with a satisfying crack, limbs folding like a marionette before he crumples to the floor.

The air leaves his lungs in a pitiful wheeze.

He coughs, peppering the floor with fresh blood and broken teeth.

The predator reduced to a squirming stain.

I stalk forward, unhurried, closing the gap.

“You wanted to unmake me?” My voice roars with cold ferocity. “Then witness what you’ve made instead.”

He tries to scream, but my hand finds his throat.

I lift him from the floor, one-handed. His feet kick helplessly in the air.

Sewage-stained eyes meet mine, no longer pleading, only understanding.

The recognition of what's to come next breaks him.

The foul stench of urine stings my nose as it coats the front of his trousers.

I want him to see me. I desire the last thing he ever sees to be reckoning incarnate, born from pain.

I slam him down, the floor splitting from the force.

Bones shatter under my wrath. His mouth stretches open, a soundless cry clawing for mercy, but finding none.

My hands clamp over his neck, and I channel the power coursing through me, the exact suffocating grip he forced on me in my last moments. My own perverse inversion.

His thrashes grow frantic, and his face contorts in panic, as helpless gasps gurgle for clemency. He claws at my hands, scrabbling uselessly. Each desperate flail weaker than the last. Veins in his forehead bulge, eyes rolling as blood vessels burst red.

I lean in close, whispering like death. “I’m the noose now.”

The floor beneath us trembles, an otherworldly vibration thrumming up through my boots and into my bones.

Cracks spiderweb the filthy linoleum. From the rupture, a dim crimson light seeps upward, sick and pulsating.

Its hellish beam, alive and ancient below our feet. It breathes from a waking slumber.

The glow intensifies, spreading in all directions until the center of the room ruptures open, revealing a circle of decayed earth.

The air vibrates with agonized screams echoing up from the fissure—raw, savage, eternal, as if the souls of the damned themselves are reaching upward to claim what’s owed.

We are bombarded with its mephitis next.

Brimstone floods the air, thick and sulfuric, choking out the mildew and rot of the motel’s former filth.

The room becomes a furnace, lit in blinding red, as the portal stretches wider with each heartbeat.

From deep below, a cacophony of screams rises, layered, inhuman, and tortured.

They claw against the air with a volume that defies distance.

“Eddie,” Soriel’s voice divides the chaos, steady and commanding. He steps forward, wings unfurling in radiant fury. His eyes blaze with holy fire as he raises a hand toward the rift. The cracks widen, ripping apart the room, dragging us all toward the abyss.

I tighten my hold just as the portal engulfs Eddie’s feet first, ripping sinew from bone.

Blood and severed muscle splatter in the air, quickly disappearing into the void.

Bloated intestines and abdominal organs rip free next, coating the monsters below in bile.

The pit is ravenous. It favors this particular taste of evil.

Eddie’s shredded body combined with the pull from the damned threaten the festering edges of the rift.

His final screams, high-pitched and piercing, are swallowed up by the infernal maw.

Soriel catches my arm, grounding me away from the fiery chasm. “This is where his reign ends,” he says reassuringly, “and where your new awakening begins.”

I release my grip, watching the last of Eddie’s desperate wails consumed by darkness. The portal shudders once, then seals, snapping shut as a cauterized wound. The fissures close, sealing away the otherworldly tomb and leaving no trace behind .

The room quiets, heavy with the weight of justice delivered.

Outside, the storm rages on, but inside me, something colder, sharper has taken root.