The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 398: Eyes Open

Chapter 398: Eyes Open

In their many and their few the most powerful demons of three worlds - now two - made their way around the rim of the Eye of Hell.

The landscape of Hell was far darker than it had been, even with the underglow of the Eye barely piercing the shroud above. Even the Eye itself was much changed. Wider and cooler as it leaked the heart blood of Hell’s core in its final eruptions.

Had the demons been aware enough, thoughtful enough, and looked long enough, they would have seen what the woman waiting for them knew.

Hell was dying.

Not the intermittent death of places, driven by terrible storms of ash.

But the death of the whole, driven by darkness and fire.

An imbalance too long uncorrected, which could only be cured here.

And now.

On a cliff overlooking the Eye from its highest remaining point, the summoner waited. Compared to the approaching demons, some of whom rose to four measures in height, she was diminutive. Shrouded in black robes, with her sole exposed arm covered in the scars of a dozen spell circles.

Under the shadows of her cowl, she smiled.

She only needed thirty to be lured, but instead, she had acquired more than fifty.

She could count them by their mana, the demons.

Generals, vectigals, lieutenants, arbiters...

Those powerful enough to seize entire fields of mana.

Those openly attuned enough to be summoned.

Those who would be the avatars of their masters’ wills.

And one would-be master...

One would-be Duke.

By the simple act of showing off his mana, Zevuv Beelzebub - third claimant to the Dukedom of Gluttony this year alone - pushed ahead to the front of the line as demons from every nation of Hell gathered.

A true demon of gluttony, his three mouths gnashed and chewed even the ashes from the air as he shifted his ponderous gut towards the one who had summoned them all here with a word.

The mouth that occupied the space where a belly-button would have been opened wide as it tasted the mana around the summoner.

"What is this?" Gluttony bellowed. "We expected a Demon Lord, not some peon."

Their hostess raised her hand for silence as the demons behind Gluttony began to loudly agree. The most recent arrivals - those of the Duke of Pride - shoved their way forward as a group to stand beside Gluttony as a collective.

"I am come to announce the death of Heaven... and of Hell," the woman spoke. "The Duke Maledict has taken the mantle of Luciferos. He has sundered Heaven, and soon the land you stand upon shall become the foundation of a new Paradise, for all demon-kind."

A few polite cheers sounded, but those gathered did not acquire their positions or their strength by being gullible. More than a few hands tightened around their weapons.

"Where is he then? Where is Maledict?" Gluttony raised his six arms - two each aside each mouth - in mocking benediction. "Are we to pray for his arrival? Why summon us here only to disrespect us with this... nothing?" he gestured at her.

Eyes flickered about the summoner. Some noted the circles on her arm. Others the way she had not moved from her spot the entire time.

But it was Gluttony who’d realized what the others had not.

That the woman before them seemed to have no aura of mana... at all.

"What even are you?" he asked, when no one else spoke up.

Alone amongst the gathered demons, one with many eyes began to back away, several of his orbs fixed on the distant horizon.

On the distant edge of mana whose blackest tinge blended with the darkness of a shrouded Hell.

As their hostess spoke, only Zazel guessed the true nature of their opponent. And in that moment, he despaired.

But their summoner was already speaking.

"I am the catalyst of the final Heavenswar," she announced, her voice smiling as she lifted her hood to reveal a mask of pure, reflective metal. "The salvation of demon and angel-kind."

A wing unfurled itself as her cloak fell away.

A crimson wing, its edge garlanded with inscribed cloth in thin strips.

"I am the Endmother."

At the sight of the angelic wing, dozens of hands readied themselves for battle.

But it was already too late.

From beneath them all, a field of metal thorns erupted from the black silt. The thorns pierced feet and hooves and claws alike, growing upward. Impaling and impaling. Seeking the heart stones in those that bore them, breaking the organs of those that did not.

The Endmother revealed her hidden hand, and Zazel alone knew the weapon she held. For it was the weapon of Kainur Satanos, and by right of the strong it belonged now to his successor.

But Duke Kir was not here.

Zazel had betrayed him. He’d felt it only right and reciprocal, for what Duke would have his people do nothing at the end of the world? What Duke would seek his own power, keeping close council with weaklings and fools while shirking the might of those in the nation he claimed rulership of?

At worst, he would find yet another fool, and his return to Kir would carry reports on every layer of the treason of Zazel’s peers. But at best... Oh, how he’d longed to see a new Demon Lord before he died.

One by one, the demons gathered began to die, Zazel watched.

The gelatinous mass of Gluttony, the hubris of Hazzarn, and the many forms and sins of rivals and acquaintances all melted and burst, their mana subsumed into the black mass of the power surrounding them...

A power that fed most of what it took into the ground.

And all around the Eye of Hell, a shimmering green-grey glittering began.

Along pulses of mana, the glow deepened and brightened. The very sand seemed to shift towards the Eye. Towards the summoner...

The Endmother.

"You are my witness, Zazel of Pride," the mysterious angel said as she began to take the remaining mana of her fallen victims into herself.

All along her arm, the sigils and circles began their glow.

And only then did Zazel realize what she was doing.

An angel had carved the spell of demonification into her own flesh.

As the Endmother lurched, her body snapping and contorting, Zazel was paralyzed by fear and fascination. He had witnessed the power of a single metatron, but Kir Satanos had resorted to tricks and diversions when he could have done so much more.

A shriek shattered Zazel’s reverie as the Endmother’s back erupted with wings. And in the end, she hovered over him, three angelic wings on her right, and three demonic ones on her left.

She was terrifying.

She was glorious.

She was...

"Beautiful..." Zazel spoke in fascination, barely aware of his voice.

His eyes held him prisoner.

Even when she approached.

Even when she passed her hand along the ridges of his sockets.

"Zazel of Pride. Once you stood by the blackness of Stygia, and there you saw the truth of Heaven and Hell... For this reason alone, I will spare you. But before I take your eyes, I will give you a message..."

The metatron - for what else could she be? - bent and whispered. One by one, her hands - clawed and unclawed - burned through his sockets with mana glowing at their tips.

He did not resist. He could not resist.

She filled his mind with his final purpose even as she whispered in his ear, forcing her inexorable vision into his thoughts as she showed him everything. Every possibility he had left...

And in the end he knew...

He would go.

He would await.

His eyes would never again heal, and he would live off mana alone.

And when the time came, he would deliver her words. And then, with the certainty of destiny, he would die.

When she pushed him backward through a hole in time and space, into a place that was cold and hard, he fell without sound or complaint.

*

As soon as she was alone, the Endmother turned to the glittering cliffs of the Eye, and with a snap of her fingers, collapsed them all into the caldera, hovering in place as the stone and its harvest of corpses fell into the lava.

And then, as would never happen again, Hell erupted.

A plume shot forth beyond the ability of gravity to hold it.

The cascading shock of the eruption flowed around the moon, rebounding on itself and shattering every surface structure left standing.

Every outpost of angels from which they had thought to hold eternal vigilance.

Every bastion of demons, from which they had thought to outlast the Heavenswar.

All on the moon of Hell died that day.

All but one.

And from the moon spread a bridge of ash and death, reaching downward to Ayther with smothering promise, but also reaching out. To the shards whose gravity still held sway even though they had been three days separated.

Slowly, the clouds reached.

In the vacuum of space, reacting with the sun, the tiniest of life forms that suffused the ashes of Hell performed the role for which they had been designed.

They folded the fabric of space, tearing open rifts wherever the conditions were right.

All became ash and chaos.

All became Perdition.