Page 150 of The Death Wish

The firebird’s cavernous mouth opened, the inferno luminous at the back of their throat.

A tilt of the head. A topaz eye set on Silas.

A pinpoint of emerald at its centre, glowing. The firebird’s head twisted sharply, redirecting the flame, but the beast hadalready breathed her fire. A cry rushed forth; the first sound the creature had made.

‘It’s alright,’ Silas whispered.

The bloom of catastrophic flame descended.

His tears were vanquished by the heat, his lips cracked by its rush.

He was smothered. Pressed down into the sediment which took him readily. The wildfire raced over him. Leaving him untouched.

Go well, Silas. My thanks to you both, for this freedom.

The weight upon him did not belong to ash or bone. Silas tried to form her name upon his lips, but found them too ruined to speak.

The air cooled, and the weight slipped away. Silas lay, half buried in the ashen mud, blinking slowly at the petrified corpse by his side; a massive serpent he did not recognise. But her shape did not matter. Silas knew the touch of Satine against his mind.

The Lady of the Lake had burned in his place.

Silas breathed in slow rasping drags. With the striking heat gone, a chill seeped up through the mud. He heard his deathnote now, solitary, and lonely. He had no strength to raise his head, but his eyes lifted just enough to see the firebird circling above. Low and close, and spectacular, giving off only the mildest warmth. Barely enough to stop Silas from shivering.

Lower, closer.

Still, Silas was not scorched.

The firebird descended. Touched its claws of dying ember to the dampness and rid it of the last drops of Blood Lake. Turning the mud to warm sand.

Silas sighed into the softness and heat.

The great destroyer of Blood Lake settled near him.

A sob escaped him, drawn from his tired body by the sheer perfection of what he heard. He smiled through hopeless tears, copper upon his tongue as his lips split wider. Silas listened as the firebird’s remarkable flames flickered and dimmed.

Pitch’s song played itself out. Not just his death note, though that lay there too, but his whole medley, shattering the silence that had always surrounded him.

Daemon. Dominion. Saviour.

Silas inched his hand through the calming warmth of the sand. Finding the tip of a velvet wing, sighing at how it mimicked the familiar press of the daemon’s hand.

They shaped together perfectly.

‘You are here at the end.’

Pitch’s voice found a way through his sublime melody.

‘I promised you...’ Silas’s lips stung, but he still smiled.

‘You oaf.’

‘A fool for you alone.’

Verdant light shone through Silas’s fading vision. He blinked, barely daring to believe what he saw. But death need not always be cruel. She could be a rescuer, a granter of wishes.

Pitch lay amongst smouldering embers, the ruins of the simurgh spread beneath him like sunset fallen from the sky. He was caught between his two worlds; the exquisite, delicate human just visible within the great, smouldering fortress that was the daemon. Pitch lay within Vassago; and there was no telling where the seams that joined them had been sewn.

His eyes, those gems that shone duller now, never left Silas.