An Angel’s Road to Hell

Cassandra Pendragon

I opened my mouth to spat a well deserved reply at her but before the first syllable could form in my throat, a strange, pulling sensation enveloped my forehead, as if I was being sucked in by a crown I didn’t yet carry. I swayed, the figures around me dimmed and a heartbeat later I felt the scene dissolve as I was thrown into a song of colours, a painting of sounds… except, it wasn’t my memory I was cast into, I wasn’t even sure if it truly was a memory.

A heartbeat later I was myself again, a tall, slender, ghostly kitsune hovering in the void and I wasn’t alone. At my side six pearly white tails with a tinge of crimson cleaved the aether, dancing in the reflection of four burning wings. Without a conscious thought I drifted closer, my fingers caressingly encircling hers. I leaned over and breathed in her scent, the memory of pine trees and flames as comforting in this dream as they were in reality.

“What are you doing here,” I whispered, entirely oblivious to the carnage below our feet.

“I’ve been with you ever since you turned yourself into a bonfire of transcendent forces. You simply didn’t see me.” She breathed a kiss against my cheek and added forlornly: “The better question is, where are we? This isn’t your memory, is it?” I shook my head, taking in the mind boggling scene for the first time.

The black void was trembling, the realm beyond reality shaken by forces that were too great to comprehend. Around us a battle raged, the likes of which I had never wanted to see again. At the cusp of existence, fully grown immortals fought tooth and nail, wings and crowns, two against one. Lilith and an angel I had never met but remembered all the more clearly tried to preserve their lives, tried to escape from a maelstrom of corrupted blue and golden magic. And they were struggling. Time dilated, seconds turned into years and decades passed in an instant as worlds were created and snuffed out, the imprint of their demise further fuel for the transcendent war. Between the past and the future Lilith and Odin fought for their existence, the corrupted noose around their necks ever growing tighter.

My wings manifested of their own accord but before I could move Ahri’s hand closed tightly around my arm. “Don’t,” she hissed. “Even if we really are here, we won’t be able to help. This is beyond us, Cassy. For now, at least. All we can do is watch and pray that we aren’t discovered.”

I trembled, my muscles taut, the unleashed power in my veins demanding for me to act, to do something, but I knew she was right. Even in the fraction of a second she had needed to speak, death and destruction had claimed another part of the realm as dreams made real crumbled and turned into dust. The powers of dying stars, of withering worlds, of annihilated matter were unleashed and even though they couldn’t touch us, I still had to close my eyes when the final ripples branded against our presence and nearly condemned us to oblivion.

Grudgingly I relaxed as my wings formed a scintillating cocoon around us, a barrier that would, hopefully, keep us safe in the eye of the storm. “Holy hell,” I mumbled when the darkness lit up with golden flames and the silence was torn asunder by a world ending growl. “They’re… are they losing?” Ahri only shook her head helplessly, her gaze never wavering from the confusing, surreal display. Was it happening now? Did we come here to bear witness to the end of immortality? What was even going on?

A strike, that would have pulverised Gaya and her sun as easily as I would crack open a nut, suddenly erupted from the cacophonous amalgamation of splendour and might. I felt lost as the fleeting concepts of reality vanished, the cosmos quivering under the onslaught of a fully grown immortal, but just when I thought this had to be the end, a circle of towering candles, each as large as a planet, appeared. The insurmountable force simply vanished and from the flaming glyph the maw of a beats appeared, sparkling gold and blue, large enough to devour a star system whole. Without hesitation it pounced, the glowing, upright shadows of Odin and Lilith fled but they weren’t fast enough. Teeth, as large as worlds, closed around them and my heart skipped a beat. There was no coming back, at least I thought so, until something changed.

A fourth presence had appeared, shrouded and cold, nothing more than a speck of dust in an endless sea, but when the death trap was about to devour the strange pair, it flared, it came to life with the echos of uncounted aeons, of true eternity, brought into the light. The behemoth froze and shattered, the motes of its existence further fuel for Amazeroth’s freezing flames. “Is he… is he protecting them,” Ahri stammered.

“I… I think so. He… he told me, remember? That’s his memory, I think. He told me he was fighting for my friends when I relived my birth. But why has he brought us here?”

“Maybe it wasn’t on purpose? Maybe he lost control?”

“Maybe…” Was it possible? Was a single corrupted immortal able to make the Lord of Mirrors, aided by an angel and a demon, falter? Usually I’d have said no, but this…

A scream, filled with more rage than I had ever felt in my lives, tore through the void and blew Ahri and me away like leaves in a raging river. The only reason we survived were my wings, which dispersed the inherent power of the voice, but the sheer force still made me tremble as I fell, head over tails, through the darkness, my fingers desperately wrapped around Ahri’s hand. If I let her go, she’d disappear, this much I knew.

“You won’t,” I grunted and flooded my veins with light. “Never again.” A single moment was drawn into a lifetime as I struggled on the brink, my body quivering as it demanded to transform into something that could withstand the pressure. I almost gave in, the fear of losing her much too prevalent to worry about consequences, but when I felt the infinite tide from my core expand and envelop me like a searing blanket of heat, I hesitated. As ludicrous as the incomprehensible display seemed, I still had a gnawing suspicion that it was very much real and as I had learned before, where transcendent forces were concerned, the lines between dreams, memories and reality weren’t as reliable as I wanted them to be. If I was to change, my own power would anchor me, my… gravity enough to make an illusion become something more. They would see me, they would feel me and I dreaded what would happen then.

When Ahri’s fingers slipped through my grasp, it didn’t matter, though. To hell with the consequence, to hell with my worries, this had become a fight I couldn’t afford to lose but before I could do something utterly stupid, the pressure vanished. I blinked and immediately pulled her closer, my tails circling around her as I felt her raspy breath against my cheek.

An unimaginable surge of cold, frozen purpose had taken hold of the void and wherever I looked my surroundings had turned into fractured mirrors. Ghostly, terrifying shadows moved in their depths, pieces of the past and the future, rallied when their master called them to battle. “Close your eyes,” I hissed, my own gaze glued to the shattered reflections as they clawed their way through the veil and manifested. Echos of pain and torment, of victory and defeat flooded through the cracks and drowned out the flickering light around the immortals. Darkness and silence descended upon the battlefield, a frozen moment when everything held its breath, the calm before the storm. And then, the fragile illusion shattered and chaos incarnate claimed us all.

A twisted, corrupted shadow, wreathed in golden and blue flames, expanded, pitting its power against the flood of what it had been, what it could have become. It wavered, its strength barely enough to contend with the onslaught. For the fraction of a moment or an eternity it hovered on the brink, cloaked in possibilities that would never come to pass, drowned by mistakes it couldn’t even remember. Still, it… or rather she, Hecate, the Lady of the Mists, didn’t go quietly into that sweet, silent night.

She couldn’t win, Amazeroth had turned her past and her future into her doom. Whichever way she turned she was hounded by the spectres of her own actions, the atrocities she had committed in the name of something she hadn’t understood, the empty victories she was to gain for a cause that wasn’t hers an insurmountable wall that slowly cut her off from everything she was. In the end she withered, the golden motes of her essence entirely consumed by flames of blue and I… I panicked.

Without restraint, without the mould of an immortal to contain it the Corruption would spread, it would grow, and not even the Lord of Mirrors would have a prayer to subdue it, for there was no reflection left to mirror its weakness, no fleeting phantom to get a hold of. Corruption was empty and it was eternal, a force that couldn’t be cowed or turned against itself for it spanned everything that ever had been, from the very moment we had opened our eyes to the last, torturous breath we all would take. It was infinite and it was broken, free of a sense of self, devoid of any weakness.

But Amazeroth wasn’t alone. At the precise moment when Hecate’s essence vanished, consumed by an all encompassing, ravenous hunger, something insignificant, something small changed. A creature, a living, breathing being, a mortal thing, almost entirely eroded by the sheer magnitude of what it had been forced to witness, pounced. With another eerie, defiant growl a giant, shadowy wolf, larger than life, threw itself into the centre of the maelstrom. It vanished immediately, its soul, its life, no more than a drop in an ocean that was carried away, that was assimilated by the infinite whole. Still, for the merest fraction of a moment, for a minuscule, frozen second, there was purpose, there was life and the Lord of Fate didn’t hesitate.

He took what had been offered and his grip was unrelenting, unbreakable. With an inhuman scream he tore through the growing cloud of eternal blue and forced it into a living form, a form he could manipulate, he could mould, for it had a past and a future. With callous disregard he compressed her… them into a single speck of light and entombed them in a relict of the past. Grey, indestructible matter rose around them, forming a cocoon I knew all too well, for I had seen it, I had touched it and I had absorbed its essence. The ring on my finger burned and I couldn’t suppress a tortured scream. My vision dimmed and the last thing I felt before I fell through time and space was Ahri’s caressing touch as she took on a part of my burden to allow us both to live.

When I woke up again, I wasn’t anywhere I’d have expected. It was a small, homely room, filled with a cupboard of rosewood, a table with a few chairs and a bouquet of roses, a rather large, soft bed and a few blood spatters on the floor. The moon was just dipping below the horizon behind a large, open window while the faintest hint of crimson and gold already peeked over white clouds. The quiet whispers of the cold wind carried the scent of winter orchids, oaks and pines into the chamber and in the bed beside me, Ahri was just struggling from her dreams. She was pale and sweating, her tails wrapped around herself as if to protect her from the chill she normally would never have felt.

I wanted to touch her, to kiss her, the questions, fluttering through my mind, about as consequential as the proverbial bag of rice in China but when I extended my hand to brush her sparkling tresses away, my hand simply passed through her like a dream. I wasn’t really there, I was still asleep somewhere far to the south but after the ordeal we had been through my desire to be close to her had been strong enough to allow me a few precious minutes between sleep and wakefulness when I could feel her again. Contently I waited, busying myself with taking in her changing expressions while she slowly rose from the dark depths of the immortal battle we had just been subjugated to. I knew she’d be alright, but as much as I still felt the looming dread so did she and it’d take a while for the both of us to process what we had seen.

“Rise and shine,” I whispered huskily. “The shadows are gone, the dawn has come.” A small smile tugged on the corners of her mouth and her eyes opened, deep, multicoloured ponds of warmth and desire that drew me in like a moth was drawn to the flame.

“What are you doing here,” she mumbled sleepily. “You can’t have arrived, yet.” Instinctively she reached out for me but just as I hadn’t been able to touch her, her tails couldn’t caress me. “That’s a shame,” she pouted, her brow furrowing cutely.

I laughed softly in response and snuggled up to her as closely as I could without brushing against her pristine skin. “It truly is, but I’m still grateful. I think I need something… precious, something that makes me happy to deal with what we’ve been through.”

“A dream to chase away the nightmare,” she breathed against my lips, the warmth in her voice more than enough to compensate for the lack of sensation.

“Something like that,” I replied through a smile. “I still can’t wait to hold you again, though.”

“You’ll have to hurry up, then. If you hadn’t dawdle for too long in the first place, I wouldn’t even have been here. Not without you, at least.”

“I know, no need to rub it in. There are a few things I have to take care of come sunrise and then I’m off. Shouldn’t take more than two days… I hope.”

“Are you going to bring her along?”

“Her… Kana, you mean? How do you even know about her?”

“Told you, I’ve been with you ever since you dragged her soul from the past, even when you couldn’t see or hear me. Which reminds me, your form…” My ears perked up.

“Have you seen it,” I immediately asked. I wasn’t entirely sure myself how I looked when I transformed and I was curious as hell. Who wouldn’t be?

“Not directly, only a few glimpses here and there. It’s hard to make out any details when your obscured by your power. It’s not as large as I first thought and decidedly feline. A winged fox, maybe?” With soft scales instead of fur, if memory served.

“Oh well, I’m sure we’ll figure it out soon enough. Thanks, by the way.”

“What for?”

“Stopping me. I don’t think we’d have escaped if I had transformed.” Her expression darkened.

“Right. Do you want to talk about what happened?”

“Not really. In a few days, maybe. When I’m not feeling nauseated anymore by the thought of having absorbed the essence of my sister, corrupted or not.” She jerked, as if to grab my shoulder but thought better of it at the last moment.

“That wasn’t you,” she whispered urgently. “It was the ring.” I shook my head slowly.

“Ahri… it really wasn’t. I… why do you think I’m the only one who can wear it? I… we have hid behind our youth for long enough, don’t you think? After everything we’ve just witnessed they still needed us to finish what they’ve started, didn’t they? We put an end to Hecate’s existence and considering what Reia has seen in that ill begotten memory she probably won’t be reborn, at least not the way she was. I don’t think there’s any need to keep on pretending. For you and me. We are a curse on our race,” I mumbled, echoing choked words I hadn’t heard yet, but somehow felt.