Chapter 1
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Love is stronger than death. But waiting is worse than hell.
Chapter 1. Agarès. The Fall
He rode Kharr like a shadow cast across the bruised, bleeding sky of the Lower Realm.
The beast was a nightmare forged in flesh and scale—a monstrous hybrid of drake and bat, armored in overlapping plates of calcified bone that clicked and clattered with the heavy, rhythmic beat of his leathery wings. The winds of the Lower Realm always reeked of sulfur and scorched meat, a pungent stench that clung to clothes and skin like a second layer of grime. But today, a new scent tainted the air, sharp and metallic beneath the familiar rot.
Betrayal.
“Something is wrong, Agarès,” Kharr rumbled, the sound vibrating through the saddle of living leather and straight into Agarès’s spine. “I can taste it on the tip of my tail. We are flying into a snare.”
Agarès tightened his grip on the reins. He had ridden Kharr for three centuries. The beast had never been wrong about danger. Not once.
“The Soulless Clan has been too restless,” Agarès murmured, his demon eyes scanning the jagged, obsidian peaks below. “Their movements too coordinated, their whispers too bold. The Emperor is uneasy, and when Kernunn is uneasy, blood flows like cheap wine.”
“They smell blood,” Kharr snorted, a plume of sulfurous smoke escaping his jaws. “Yours, apparently.”
“Who is making the move?”
“I don’t know. It feels like everyone.” Agarès was mentally dissecting the fragile web of alliances, the deals struck in smoke-choked chambers, the shadows of past wars that never truly ended.
He was just piecing together the puzzle when Kharr suddenly let out a wet, choking gasp.
The beast lurched violently mid-air, its massive frame convulsing. Its eyes rolled back, instantly clouding over with a milky, necrotic film.
Poison.
Agarès’s heart didn’t skip in fear; it hammered with pure, incandescent rage. Someone had poisoned his mount. Someone had dared.
He threw himself from the saddle, muscles coiling for the impact, but he knew the trap had already sprung.
From the shadows of the jagged cliffs, they struck.
Mor’s Blades—black daggers forged in the deepest, lightless pits, edges honed to swallow the very concept of light—flew in a storm of silent death. Dozens of them, aiming straight for his throat.
Agarès twisted in the freefall, thrusting his hands forward. Clumps of solidified shadow, thick and viscous as tar, erupted from his palms, slamming into the blades. The deflection tore through the air with a deafening screech of steel against dark magic, a sound like nails dragged across bone.
Then, something whip-like wrapped around his ankles, yanking him downward. From the right, the Thorns of Sorrow rained down—poisoned darts trailing a sickening, necrotic purple haze. Each one carried a curse that would liquefy his organs from the inside out.
“Surrounded. Bastards,” he snarled, hitting the black rock in a crouch, his claws gouging deep trenches into the stone.
They stopped hiding. Figures clad in armor forged from polished black bone stepped from the gloom, tightening the noose. Dozens of them. Perhaps a hundred.
Agarès’s demon eyes darted across the crests etched into their breastplates, and his blood ran cold.
Damn it. Kernunn was wrong.
The banners of nearly half the Lower Realm’s clans were present. The Serpent’s Eye. The Broken Crown. The Hollow Hand. This wasn’t a skirmish. It wasn’t a political maneuver.
This was a full-blown, apocalyptic rebellion.
And he had walked right into the slaughterhouse. Alone.
“Well, well,” Agarès purred, his voice carrying effortlessly across the battlefield, dripping with dark amusement. He bared his fangs, the ivory gleaming wickedly in the gloom. “You’re all here? What a delightful gift. Saves me the tedious trouble of hunting you down one by one.”
He cracked his neck, feeling the familiar, intoxicating rush of adrenaline, the dark, primal hunger that only absolute violence could sate.
“Let’s end this.”
With a vicious, ear-splitting roar, he launched himself into the fray.
It was not a battle. It was an execution.
He didn’t fence; he obliterated. His claws shredded bone armor like wet parchment, tearing through ribs and severing spines. His wings became bludgeons of mass and muscle, battering demons to the ground with bone-shattering force. His tail, thick and lined with obsidian spikes, snapped necks like dry twigs.
Black demon blood sprayed across his face, hot and acidic. His own crimson ichor mingled with it, pouring from a dozen shallow wounds. But he didn’t feel the pain. Not yet.
One demon lunged. Agarès caught the descending blade bare-handed, twisted his wrist with a sickening crunch, and ripped the creature’s throat out with his teeth.
Another came from his blind spot. He didn’t even turn. His wing snapped back like a whip of solid muscle, crushing the attacker’s skull into a pulp of bone and brain.
He was a tempest of death, and they were the fools who had summoned the storm.
But there were simply too many.
More than half of his attackers lay in twitching, dismembered heaps, but the rest kept coming, fueled by a desperation darker than fear.
Realizing they were losing the physical battle, the surviving conspirators didn’t run. They dropped their weapons and raised their hands in unison, chanting in a guttural, ancient tongue that predated the Lower Realm itself.
The air tore open. A portal yawned wide right beneath Agarès’s feet—a violet abyss, hungry and endless.
He plummeted, gravity seizing him. At the very edge of the spatial tear, a spear woven from pure, compressed vacuum shot upward. It pierced him clean through, shredding his left wing in a catastrophic explosion of flesh, bone, and black blood.
Agarès roared, a sound of pure agony, forcing his remaining wing open, fighting the gravitational pull, clawing at the thin air to drag himself back to his world.
Then came the second spear. A brutal, concussive impact to the chest.
The portal collapsed with the sickening, implosive pop of a bursting eardrum.
His shattered wing wouldn’t hold him. The fall resumed, faster now, terminal and absolute.
The freezing, dead winds of the Void tore at his flesh, stripping away the familiar, comforting heat of the Lower Realm. His demon blood, usually boiling with dark, chaotic power, turned sluggish and ice-cold in his veins. The darkness wasn’t just around him; it was seeping into his marrow, claiming him for a realm he did not belong to.
His consciousness began to fray, slipping into the dark, cold embrace of oblivion.
His last thought wasn’t of vengeance. It wasn’t of Kernunn, the Emperor, or the treacherous clans that had just signed their death warrants.
It was simpler. More human, in a twisted, tragic way.
How the hell did I screw up this badly...
