Page 148 of The Death Wish

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 todeath 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.