The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 400: Volume 6 - Epilogue

Chapter 400: Volume 6 - Epilogue

Beneath the sundering of Heaven, a second sky appeared over the shadowed desert lands of Armedon - grey against the black of an ashfall that turned the sun into a red disc, despite the midday hour. A second sky that began to stretch across the world, snaking to the grand and invisible winds of mana over every continent, every ocean.

At first, the phenomenon was regarded as merely a Perdition writ large. Unusual, but many had already seen the natural portals between the Triune Worlds during this Heavenswar.

Then the lights began to fall.

A drifting haze of sparkles - like those that accompanied the opening and closing of Perditions - only everywhere. A blue-green haze like sparks that moved unnaturally in the wind and even through buildings as they seemed to seek the ground. As if not entirely real... and yet their effects certainly were.

Across the continent, devices wrought with magic began to spark. The weakest of them simply flickered and failed, before returning to function as the motes passed through them. The strongest failed spectacularly.

In Aaru, the massive outdoor teleportation circle on the northern edge of the oasis exploded, taking the oldest of Ayther’s adventuring guilds with it as the Tower Lord watched from the safety of his shielded home.

Though Aaru was an ancient city, not lacking for protective magics, no planner had ever thought to the scale of what was to come.

Other explosions occurred throughout the city, and were it not for the small mages, the fires might have spread uncontrollably along the wooden rooftops. These fires came almost exclusively from mages. Those who had been in the process of reifying themselves when the wavefront of mana passed invisibly from the void to Ayther. Those who had been handling artifacts of immense complexity.

And those who were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when swarms of floating lights passed through them.

Then the wind came.

A massive, concussive gust rocked even the mighty heights of the Tower from the west, before a second, weaker gale forced its way back east, filling in the void caused by the first. Yet the damage was done.

The weakest structures were flattened. Every layer not of the firmest construction crumbled, trapping tens of thousands in their homes. The streets filled with rubble, and the oasis waters became a contaminated murk into which many dove for safety. In places where the city had been built up on the ruins of itself, the ground rumbled and split as the new crumbled into the old.

In an instant, the ancient Colosseum above the Duat and the tower of Aaru became the only recognizable features of what had become a dying city.

It was in the midst of this misery that Araqlun descended upon Aaru, coming from the west.

It slid down from the Perdition - a towering mountain of silver and gold atop a disc of shorn pillars, ringed in world tree bark. Like scabs, the slabs of wood fell from Araqlun as the city approached, leaving nothing natural upon its metal visible from below.

Those who looked up from their terror knew not what they saw as the air began to still for the sheer mass of the angelic city pressing down on the air above them.

With inexorable weight, Araqlun came to rest above the Colosseum.

An hour after Araqlun stopped moving, an angel with six radiant wings descended upon the tower. When the first angel appeared, many dared hope. Then more angels descended, spreading word of calamity.

Araqlun and Aaru had always been the twin pillars of the world. Surely the sponsor of their prosperous millenniums would not abandon them now.

It must have been the demons that sundered the sky.

The angels were here to save them.

To save them from a Tower Lord who dared let so many demonic spawn infiltrate their city. Who had been pushed into the Duat as fodder for the Mother Dungeon. The demonkin who had been chained together to work those fields. To craft the baubles that Heaven loved. To make the toys they gave their children...

It took mere hours for the logic to wind its way to its barbaric conclusion...

The demonkin they should have killed instead of exploiting.

The demonkin Heaven might kill them over.

By then, the roiling mass of a hundred thousand survivors was gathering, flooding towards the Tower. Some begging aid, others demanding blood.

Blood there was.

Amidst the ruins, any person with demonic features - even beastkin whose only guilt was to be born with horns - were killed. Beaten, stoned, or eviscerated with magic and metal alike.

The only pause to the chaos came when the Coliseum crumbled from below, a tower of iridescent matter flowing upward, crystalizing as it went until it touched the base of Araqlun, and there grew still, flowing until it supported the angelic city like the trunk of an unnatural tree.

Tower Lord Anruelu kowtowed as best he could, given his girth, as the Son of Heaven paced about the pitiful excuse for luxury that was the Tower Lord’s throneroom.

How can these mortals live like this? Vinam sneered as he touched a hand onto the throne, shoving his magic through it as he tried to pull on the strings of the past. The imprinted memories from the cow of an elf he’d put on hands and knees.

By the time his latest adjutant, Cassiel Eros, reported the situation in the city to him, he had a pretty firm grasp of what had been going on since the start of the Heavenswar, even if it had cost him quite a lot of mana to learn it.

He "discovered" Aaru’s exploitation of demonkin and even full demons in the floors of the Duat.

He’d always known, but appearances were important.

Cassiel, when she spoke, was greatly shaken. "High Seraph... half the people down there are calling for blood. The rest are killing-"

"They are culling, Dame Eros. One does not ’kill’ rabid monsters," Vinam glared.

"A-as you say, Lord Victoriam," Cassiel responded. "They are... culling... demonkin. And blaming the Tower Lord for letting them into the city..."

"Well then, I think the solution is simple," Vinam said, pointing at the Tower Lord. "Kill him."

The Tower Lord coughed and blubbered, "High Seraph, please, I am loyal! I have always been loyal-"

"Not another word you sniveling creature, or I will have you die for months instead of in a moment," Vinam hissed, looking to Cassiel. "Do it now. Make it public. Make it memorable."

Cassiel shuddered but summoned aigaion into being, grabbing the poor elf and bearing him out into the sky as he went stiff from shock.

"Follow her and make sure everyone sees," Vinam snapped at two Elevated, one of whom was Ozzy. They obeyed, and Ozzy produced a pillar of light that shone down from above Cassiel, letting all who had gathered at the Tower’s main entrance see the execution that was about to occur.

*

With Araqlun eclipsing the sun, and the quietude of height, she could not help but stare out at the dark horizon. The still-drifting falls of life-wrought mana.

It was a blackness that, beyond the fires below and the sickly glinting lights of Heaven, had existed only conceptually for her. A darkness where tiny motes now drifted in far fewer numbers than when the great Perdition had opened.

Like a concept of Hell, painted in black and fire. She had never seen Hell. The Executioners were not to have been part of that invasion or this Heavenswar, but she imagined it was like this...

Stars alone knew what the rest of the world was going through at this very moment.

A high, almost giddy note of terror drew her from her reverie. And instead of feeling sympathy for the elf she was about to execute, she felt disgusted. And then she felt disgusted at herself for knowing that she had failed to stay kind.

She paused her flight, and her escorts paused with her.

They were above the nearest and grandest plaza, and below, people were avoiding the circle of light that marked where her victim would fall.

"It’s like the ocean..." the Tower Lord babbled, speaking to a nightmare born of prophecy as the crowd roared below. "So dark, you don’t know which way is up..."

Cassiel closed her eyes. Although her concept of the ocean had more to do with the sky, she indulged in a moment of earthliness.

The darkness filled her eyes like blue waters at night, with only glints of light to hint that there was more.

She could imagine the roaring of the crowd like the tides near Diurnus. An ocean made of people... And underneath them a sea of blood. One that would be added to once the purification of the Duat began on the morrow.

She imagined distant mountains like the cresting of waves, fed by gravity and motion and now the pull of but a single moon.

The sharp, slightly cold feeling of motes passed through her. Like drops of rain.

Falling like Rain...

"I wish I knew," Cassiel answered.

She let him fall.

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