This is the second chapter of Diabolical Ascension, the saga of Zeraga Baal'khal, the Doomfire. Discretion is advised due to graphic content.
The first chapter, Awakening, can be found here: https://talesofvalorandwoe.wixsite.com/zeragabaalkhal/post/diabolical-ascension-i-awakening
Image credits (in order of appearance): Petr Joura
“Master? Can you hear me?” The voice was low and sibilant, heavy with uncertainty, and the words went in and out of focus, sometimes muffled and sometimes not.
Zeraga felt as though he had been trampled by a pack of hell hounds; his flesh throbbed with pain. The smooth, warm earth against his backside provided precious little relief. Opening his eyes, the devil saw that he was in an earthen hut, perhaps eighteen feet in diameter and twelve feet in height. Dim light pulsed through the whole of the hut, radiating from a dimly lit hearth.
In a spartan earthen chair next to Zeraga sat another devil who was about as large as him and had a similar skin tone, though he was bulkier and more muscular, and he had only two arms rather than Zeraga’s six. The other devil’s face was elongated and had a chiseled nose and jaw, as well as thick, crust-like eyebrows, granting him a countenance that was at once patrician and saturnine, framed by shoulder-length black hair that was thick and mane-like. A pair of dark, ram-like horns crowned his head. His red eyes seemed to glow brighter in the smoldering firelight, and shadows played across the scalemail he wore. Bat-like wings with dark crimson membranes folded over the devil’s shoulders, and his legs were reptilian, covered in red scales and ending in talons. The bladed tip of his sinewy tail stirred next to his feet.
Zeraga blinked his eyes, clearing away the last vestiges of unconsciousness. “What happened? Who are you?”
“I am Zamyyr Ôth, the Grim,” the other devil replied, “I served your previous incarnation. As far as what happened, I could ask the same of you. I found you lying face down in a gorge next to a glowing pentagram. I thought you were dead, but I took you back here to my hut just in case you were still alive. I am glad that you are.”
Zeraga gave a dry smile. “Me too. Lord Asmodeus sent me to retrieve Hellscythe, and then Hellscythe summoned a demon. I killed the demon, but I still couldn’t get Hellscythe to take me back to Golgotha.”
Let it be known that I was still merciful. the weapon chimed in. I could have summoned another demon to kill you, and I did not.
Zamyyr gave a nervous laugh as he leaned over his chair and pulled Hellscythe out from behind it, the weapon’s ruby tip glowing with unfettered malice. “You may not be happy to see this, but I took Hellscythe with me. You will need it if you are to reach your full potential.”
Zeraga shifted up into a sitting position. Looking between Hellscythe and Zamyyr, he then asked, “Why?”
Because you have only seen the tip of the iceberg that is my power, and I am unfortunately bound to help you in all lives and all times. the demoniac weapon replied with no small degree of arrogance.
Zamyyr nodded. “Exactly. All of your past incarnations have wielded Hellscythe.”
“And all of them died,” Zeraga replied cynically.
“Yes, but not because of Hellscythe. Your last incarnation died because of the folly of Asmodeus.”
“You mean Lord Asmodeus?”
Zamyyr’s gaze hardened, turning dark and cold. “The ruler of Golgotha is not worthy of such respect.”
“I can agree with that. When I was at his palace, I could tell that he was hiding things from me, but I had no choice but to obey. Still, I do not understand what you mean when you say that my last incarnation died because of Asmodeus’s folly.”
“Allow me to tell you a story. Perhaps it will jog your memory…”
* * *
A writhing miasma of crimson mist cloaked Zeraga; it was a corporeal mirror of the sanguine pall that had fallen upon his mind, born from blood and souls and slaughter and carnage, offerings to the demoniac weapon called Hellscythe. Zeraga’s armor, once shining copper and green, was now thoroughly darkened from the vital fluids of his foes. He continued to feed the gluttonous blade he wielded, slicing open another demon before him. The demon was a lavender-skinned, vaguely humanoid thing that had eyes as black as death; twisted limbs that were entirely too flexible; and claws, teeth, eyes, and tentacles where none should have been. It let out an inhuman scream, shrill and wailing, as its purple, pulsating guts spilled onto the blackened earth below. Its lifeblood, if such a term could even be applied to the abomination, became mist that added to the crimson shroud around Zeraga.
“Slaughter!” the Doomfire screamed as he cast aside the shattered remains of the demon corpse and stalked forward, deeper into the melee.
Slaughter! Hellscythe screamed back.
Finding the next foe was no effort at all. It was a crimson-scaled thing with a trio of contorted heads and entirely too many eyes, each of which was a different lurid shade. There were no mouths whatsoever upon it, but it still shrieked as it and the surrounding pack of its equally twisted kin fell upon Zeraga. A hellfire sword boomed into existence in the devil’s grasp as he carried out his next bout of butchery; each swing of his weapons added to the cacophony of wet crunches, sickening tears, and resounding cracks that formed a sonic facsimile of the crimson mist around him. The Doomfire was a vengeful demigod of war, ever thirsting for more blood.
And more demons came to offer it, heedless of their imminent demise. The battle was not even close to over; the legions of chaos did not seem depleted in the slightest; the churning morass of demons in front of Zeraga did not slow. And so the devil continued to slaughter and scream, scream and slaughter, harvesting more blood, more souls, more life-stuff that was as sweetmeats to the eternally gluttonous Hellscythe.
Not far from Zeraga was Zamyyr, hewing demons with herculean strokes of his Axxcrudyr, wrathful, bladed monoliths of sickly orange feyrferreus with stout handles of leather-wrapped dragon bone. The infernal runes upon the blades glowed bright red as they spat torrents of crimson lightning and incandescent hellfire that left behind the charnel stench of incinerated demon flesh in their wake. Zamyyr, too, was a furious demigod of war, and he faced the same problem as Zeraga: there were too many foes willing to give battle.
Gathered around the two devils were what remained of the Crimson Dragons. Forged by Zeraga’s own blood and consecrated in infernal sorcery, those devils fought with the same perfervid desperation as their master and his second. Less than one thousand Crimson Dragons remained from the original ten thousand, but each one was worth more than ninety-nine mortal men. All of them had already endured blows that would have felled lesser beings, and still they continued to hack, slash, slice, and thrust at the press of demons that surrounded them on all sides, a fleshly forest of uncountable horrors. Amid the meat grinder raged storms of magic of all shades and shapes that were consistent only in their capacity for annihilation.
“Slaughter!” Zeraga screamed again, his booming voice rising above the din of war as he swung Hellscythe. Its blade punched through the face of a demon that had appeared as a beautiful woman with alabaster skin, six goat-like legs, and three arms that each ended in a long, curved, serrated sword blade formed from a weird purple metal that would likely never be found again. “Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter!”
Caught in such an unyielding war, any other among Hell’s generals would have called a retreat to regroup and fight another day. Zeraga Baal’khal, the Legion Master of the Crimson Dragons, had no such luxury. He and his children had taken the fight directly to the Primordial Chaos-Void of Ag’graaza, the very birthplace of the demons they slaughtered and still could not defeat. The landscape was presently one of featureless black rock crowned by an eerie blue sun, but that could change at any moment, such was the capricious nature of chaos. Zeraga remembered all too well how the Crimson Dragons’ landing place had become an ocean of acid in the span of a moment, the devouring depths drowning so many of Zeraga’s children, as well as Baalkhalizar, the great metallic warship, nearly as large as Leviathan himself, in which the Crimson Dragons had traveled.
The Crimson Dragons had since encountered forests of screaming blades; eldritch places where pink mist had been like solid ground and spears of lightning rained from the sky; and vast tracts of undulating darkness where gibbering, insane whispers had been the only pathways. These were but a sampling of Ag’graaza’s horrors. The plane had no sense of direction, either, neither north nor south nor east nor west, neither beginning nor end, and whether Zeraga and his legion had been trapped there for only a single day or a thousand years, they could not say.
They had come to Ag’graaza on the orders of Asmodeus, the Lord of Golgotha, with a simple objective: slay Ahriman, the First Demon, and end the threat of chaos in the multiverse for all time. Then, even the angelic hosts of Heaven would no longer be able to deny the honor and glory owed to the Thirteen Hells of Nyrrakhâ and the devils within, who were the mightier champions of law.
Zeraga had known from the start that his present crusade was doomed; challenging the First Demon in his own realm was folly beyond measure. But who was he, Zeraga, to defy the will of Lord Asmodeus? Had Zeraga refused, he knew that Asmodeus would have simply executed him and created his next incarnation, the four hundred and twenty-eighth, who would obey the archdevil’s orders unquestioningly. That was the doom of immortality that fate, in its infinite malevolence, had bestowed upon Zeraga Baal’khal.
And so the Doomfire could only fight, but he no longer fought for Asmodeus. Zeraga fought to avenge all of his children who had fallen to the cackling whims of chaos; he fought to be free from the ever-tightening grip of Ag’graaza; he fought to live so that he could fight again.
“Slaughter!” A brutal stroke of Hellscythe plunged the weapon’s blade into a demon’s heart. Slaughter! Hellscythe drank the demon’s essence, leaving behind a shriveled husk that was trampled into an unrecognizable paste as Zeraga moved on, a small group of his children following behind him. “Slaughter!” The cycle began anew.
From above came a guttural roar so loud, full, and intense that it drowned out the din of battle below, resembling one of the Fire-Brides of Pandemonium, mighty dragons who dwelled in the Thirteenth Hell. Had it actually been one of those majestic beasts, those living engines of cataclysmic destruction, Zeraga would have cried out in joy, greeting the dragon as a guardian angel made manifest. But, no such good fortune came upon the Doomfire and his children; the roar from on high had been that of another demon, come to aid its kin in the butchering of their atavistic foes.
The newly arrived demon dwarfed all others. It was a twenty-foot-tall behemoth of hard, muscular flesh that was like living stone, bound in skin that was the color of gore. Crooked horns crowned the demon’s bestial head, and each of the fiend’s six eyes bore an invidious flame. A purple tongue whipped about inside its maw of sharp teeth. War-plate of darkened iron with bronze trim, etched in many places with the eight-pointed star of chaos, clung to the demon’s form like an impassioned lover, and each of the demon’s meaty fists gripped a weapon as large as Zeraga. One of the weapons was a vicious axe wrought from twisted bones and gnashing maws held together by a dark, tar-like substance. The other weapon was a whip that split into three distinct thongs, each as black as night and taking the form of a seething serpent with a hood that was the same color as the demon’s skin; eyes that burned with the same wrath as their bearer; and fangs that glistened with a sheen of sickly pink venom.
Zeraga’s gaze shot toward Zamyyr. “Hold the line! You must command the Crimson Dragons now.”
“You can’t mean to face the demon alone!” Zamyyr called back, barely heard over the sounds of battle that he continued to add to. “It will surely slay you!”
“I must keep it from reaching you and the rest of my children. It is our only hope for victory.” Zeraga decapitated another demon with Hellscythe as he burned away more of his foes with a gout of hellfire. “Slaughter!” The Doomfire spread his wings and hurled himself at the demon overhead, speeding forward like a wrathful arrow launched by a wrathful god. “Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter!”
Slaughter! Hellscythe screamed back, pumping more vigor and rage into Zeraga, thickening the crimson pall upon his mind.
Roaring with unfettered hatred, the demon cracked its whip of serpents at Zeraga, and each living thong breathed a torrent of kaleidoscopic flames. Zeraga unleashed his own torrents of hellfire that clashed with the chaos-flames in mutual annihilation. The Doomfire closed the distance a moment later, a hellfire axe screaming into existence in his grasp as he did so. It was with that weapon of infernal wrath, lurid flames granted a lethal edge, that Zeraga began the melee.
The demon batted away Zeraga’s axe with its own, and the gnashing maws upon the demon’s weapon lunged at the devil in an attempt to taste his flesh. He darted out of the way just in time, but the three thongs of the demon’s whip were already speeding toward him. Conjuring a hellfire shield, Zeraga blocked the whip. A chop of Hellscythe followed, the blade of the weapon screeching as it scored the demon’s breastplate but failed to penetrate it.
The demon’s axe crashed into Zeraga, sending pain and agony surging through the devil as he began hurtling downward. With a forceful beat of his wings, the Doomfire recovered himself, stabilizing midway between the war below and the demon above.
“Your soul belongs to Father Ahriman!” the demon roared as it cracked its whip again. The serpent-thongs snapped forward to their full length, spitting more multi-hued, ever-shifting flames at Zeraga.
He blocked most of the onslaught with his hellfire shield, but still more of the chaos-flames came from above, below, and around the devil’s infernal bulwark, causing his flesh to writhe and contort as it was ravaged by undiluted chaos, the raw essence of Ag’graaza itself. Zeraga threw up his mouth and screamed, a scream of suffering that became a scream of hatred.
A fierce crack of his wings sent the Doomfire charging toward his demonic foe, beating back the next crack of its whip with his hellfire shield. Another beat of Zeraga’s wings followed, carrying him the rest of the way; Hellscythe was carving through the air a moment later.
Slaughter! the weapon screamed as it erupted in hellfire.
The demon moved to parry, but Zeraga was too close and too fast. Hellscythe perforated the demon’s breastplate, shattering one of the stars of chaos and tearing into the flesh beneath. Dark gore sprayed forth; Hellscythe drank it. The demon bellowed in pain, and it brought its axe down in retaliation. Zeraga blocked the weapon with his hellfire shield, its flames snarling and undulating as they explosively collided with the monolith of bone and death wielded by the demon. A swing of Zeraga’s hellfire axe followed, severing the demon’s whip at the handle. The serpent-thongs snapped taut as they gave shrill hisses of agony, and they fell unceremoniously to the ground below, soon lost amid the mounds of bodies and the ever-flowing rivers of carnage.
Arcs of actinic blue lightning, many shades brighter than the sun overhead and unlike any color found on any mortal realm, burst from the demon’s six eyes and arced across Zeraga, leaving throbbing agony wherever its tendrils touched. The Doomfire yielded no ground as he tore Hellscythe free and struck again. The weapon punched through the demon’s breastplate a second time, growling with glee as it began to drink from the new well of essence that it had opened.
Dropping the handle of its whip and gripping its axe in both hands, the demon unleashed an overhead chop, an attempt to split Zeraga from head to toe. The Doomfire threw up two of his hands and gripped the handle of the axe, forcing it back. The gnashing maws sunk their teeth into Zeraga’s flesh, leaving scores of bleeding wounds as they attempted to chew through his fingers, but the wounds healed as quickly as they were formed due to the profane vigor from the blood-rage brought on by Hellscythe. And the weapon continued to feed; it was like an infant suckling their mother’s breast.
The demon continued to press on its axe, yet the weapon made no progress against Zeraga’s god-like strength. More blue lightning raged from the demon’s eyes, but the Doomfire paid the onslaught no mind. What would have previously caused searing agony now only invoked dull thuds. With each passing moment, the demon grew weaker, and Zeraga grew stronger.
“Slaughter!” the devil screamed.
Slaughter! Hellscythe screamed back.
Zeraga tore the demon’s axe of twisted bones and gnashing maws from its grasp as he hacked at the demon’s arm with his hellfire axe. The demon roared in agony as its limb was severed; the gore that spilled out became the next offering to the ever-hungering Hellscythe.
With another roar, the demon became a maelstrom of flailing limbs, one last, desperate attempt to repel the foe that it had once thought itself the better of. Zeraga and Hellscythe were recalcitrant; the devil blocked the demon’s blows with his hellfire shield while his demoniac weapon continued to feed. Its strength expended, the demon fell limp a few moments later, delivered into the grasp of death.
Rather than falling to the ground, the demon’s corpse spontaneously combusted into kaleidoscopic chaos-flames that formed a portal and pulled Zeraga in, snuffing out his hellfire weapons and slamming him with a tide of pain as his field of vision was smeared with a mirage of colorful, disfigured nonpatterns.
The Doomfire found himself in a room that was in the shape of an enormous rhomboid prism, made entirely from shards of perfectly clear glass that were devoid of imperfections. The glass shards were of an infinite array of sizes and angles while the floor was one perfectly clear sheet, immaculately transparent that horizontally bisected the room. Both above and below, Zeraga could see the walls of the weird room taper into points. Silence hung heavily in the air; it was so quiet that the Doomfire could hear his own labored breathing, that of a predator who had just slain his prey and wanted to slay again.
Where are we? Zeraga wondered. He had little doubt that he and Hellscythe were still on Ag’graaza, but that knowledge did no good on a plane where the basic laws of the multiverse were meaningless. In fact, it inspired only fury, the intensified urge to kill, yet there were none around upon which the Doomfire could satisfy that dark desire.
Zeraga turned his gaze down upon the axe he had taken from the demon. Though its bones still twisted of their own accord and its maws still gnashed, the chaos-axe no longer lashed out at the Doomfire, having accepted the devil as its new wielder. Zeraga had only wanted the axe because it was another weapon, a trophy in the rare event that he succeeded in his present, suicidal quest, but he saw now that the axe was his way forward; it was a shard of the Primordial Chaos-Void that was his to command.
Be wary of using that weapon. Hellscythe said as it banished the crimson pall upon Zeraga’s mind, allowing lucidity of thought to return to him. The magics of chaos are fickle, especially in their birthplace, utterly inimical to the law embodied by the devils of the Thirteen Hells.
Zeraga felt a great solemnity. What other choice do we have? Without the chaos-axe, Zeraga knew that he would be well and truly lost; there would be no hope of finding and slaying Ahriman, let alone reuniting with the Crimson Dragons, his valiant children who had come all this way at his side just so that they could die. The axe is our only way forward.
That does seem to be the state of things, doesn’t it? A sense of charnel mirth underpinned Hellscythe’s words.
The nine maws that formed the blade of the chaos-axe, each of a different size and shape, smiled at Zeraga. The sight of it, all the more unnerving because of its facelessness, sent shudders down the devil’s spine; triumph suddenly turned to defeat, choking ashes born from the fires of his blood-rage. On the battlefield, with his children, the Doomfire had been free, but now…
Zeraga pointed the chaos-axe forward, toward the other side of the room, and reached out to the eldritch weapon with his will as he had with Hellscythe so many times before. Rather than feeling the familiar aura of dark power and barely chained rage, Zeraga instead felt a tenebrous void with a barely sapient will that was inchoate and almost bestial, like a half-remembered ghost lingering at its grave. And it was hungry.
Soon. Zeraga promised. Soon.
The devil formed an image of Ahriman, the First Demon, in his mind’s eye. The Lord of Ag’graaza was a sixteen-foot-tall behemoth of rippling muscles cloaked in gray-black skin. His countenance was both savage and patrician, a vampiric beast with pure hatred burning in his fiery orange eyes while his grinning maw displayed his dagger-sized canine teeth. The star of chaos was etched upon the First Demon’s forehead, carved into his very flesh and rendered in the same fiery, hateful orange as his eyes, and the eight arrows were the root of the panoply of crooked horns above. From Ahriman’s shoulders extended dark wings that were passingly bat-like. Their span was greater than the height of the First Demon, and serrated talons of bone crowned the mighty pinions, each one like a forlorn citadel on a landscape of unyielding shadows. Covering Ahriman’s chest was a spiked iron breastplate, and he wore other pieces of armor upon his right arm and his legs; all three of those limbs ended in sword-sized claws. His right hand gripped a mighty sword of black metal that was engraved with glowing red runes, and its guard was in the form of a star of chaos, the same eight-pointed star which was etched upon the First Demon’s forehead. In place of Ahriman’s left arm were nine serpents, each as dark as the rest of him, with fangs like the talons upon his wings and hateful orange eyes which mirrored the ones upon his face.
As Zeraga projected the image of the First Demon onto the chaos-axe, its head became ensorcelled in kaleidoscopic flames, and the whole of the room shook, as though struck by an earthquake. The back wall, opposite from Zeraga, began to churn and undulate, the glass shards of it twisting into strange angles, weird curves, and even weirder shapes.
Zeraga’s heart began to race; the anticipation of battle was fully upon him. What else but more violence could await him after what he had just done? The devil called upon his hellfire. A pair of explosions followed as a hellfire sword and a hellfire shield manifested in his grasp, and he assumed a fighting stance.
Your fear is quite delectable… Hellscythe hissed, its voice heavy with the same anticipation felt by its wielder, albeit tinged with excitement. The will of the demoniac weapon was like a viper poised to strike.
The back wall of the room became turgid from its undulations. A moment later, it burst, spraying shards of glass everywhere. Zeraga dropped into a crouch and raised his hellfire shield as he willed it to expand. Those shards that struck the Doomfire’s shield were melted into malformed non-shapes before dropping to the ground and shattering, filling the air with a chorus of discordant chimes.
As Zeraga rose and lowered his hellfire shield, he heard an inhuman, unliving shriek, and the whole room was bathed in eldritch blue light as a vortex of bright lightning took the place of the back wall entirely and expanded further still, forcing the other walls to make room for its girth. One of Zeraga’s hands reflexively shot forward, and a wave of hellfire sprayed forth, slamming into the lightning vortex with the force of a tidal wave. The vortex absorbed the hellfire and remained unchanged; its crackling became a chorus of wordless mockery. An all-too-familiar laugh followed, deep and rumbling, similar to the voice of the demon that had wielded the chaos-axe but more malevolent still, entropy forced into the insufficient form of sound.
From out of the vortex stepped Ahriman, gleaming blue in the light of the chaos portal. His twenty eyes, those upon his face and his arm-serpents, were as fiery and hateful as ever. “Naïve, foolish Doomfire,” the First Demon said as he pointed his sword at Zeraga, the runes upon the baleful weapon shining with inchoate fury. “You should not have revealed yourself to me so soon.”
“Slaughter!” Zeraga screamed as he pointed Hellscythe forward and fired a screaming lance of hellfire at his foe, Ahriman, the First Demon, the archenemy of archenemies.
From the sword of the Lord of Ag’graaza streamed coruscating orange flames of his own, a facsimile of hellfire. The two conflagrations clashed, fulminating in mutual annihilation that sent a shockwave through the room so forceful that its shimmers distorted everything in sight: Zeraga, Ahriman, the lightning vortex, and the very room itself.
Zeraga was already charging forward, fueled by the blood-rage granted to him by Hellscythe. The next moments passed in a maelstrom of lightning-fast movements and thundering sorceries as the Doomfire clashed with the First Demon, trading blow for blow, flame for flame, wrath for wrath, hate for hate. Each combatant inflicted vicious wounds upon the other, staining the floor with an ever-thickening patina of gore, but neither relented.
“You knew before you came here that you could not win,” Ahriman said as he turned aside another of Zeraga’s strikes with his sword and retaliated with his serpents.
“I will kill you,” Zeraga seethed back, blocking Ahriman’s serpents with his hellfire shield as he swung Hellscythe again, aiming for the First Demon’s throat.
Again, Ahriman easily turned aside the strike. “You should know, also, that I have only been toying with you.” He parried Zeraga’s next swing. “And now, my amusement ends, but first…”
Excruciating pain flooded into Zeraga’s brain as he saw images of the battle that he had left behind. Small groups of Crimson Dragons, their metallic orange armor riven and covered in gore, took cover behind mountains of shattered bodies as they continued to fight off the demonic horde that had only increased in number. The devils’ screams of pain and death were almost as prevalent as the sounds of clashing weapons and tearing flesh. Though the fervor of the Crimson Dragons had not decreased despite their numbers having been so thoroughly decimated, they no longer fought for victory, for there was no victory to be had. The children of Zeraga Baal’khal now fought only so that they would die with honor.
Zeraga’s mind snapped back to reality to the sight of all nine of Ahriman’s arm-serpents lunging at him, mouths open, kaleidoscopic flames screaming forth.
“No!” Zeraga cried out. “No!”
Hot knives surged through every fiber of the Doomfire’s body as he willed all of the hellfire that he could possibly muster to rage forth, engulfing the room in an inferno that drove back the chaos-flames. The agony-filled, utterly inhuman screams of the First Demon and his serpents were sweet music upon Zeraga’s ears, a sign that the sacrifice of his children might not be in vain. The Doomfire leaped up at Ahriman and swung Hellscythe in a wide, cleaving arc.
“For the Crimson Dragons!” Zeraga bellowed.
Ahriman parried Zeraga’s strike with his sword of black metal and red runes. As the chaos-blade clashed with Hellscythe, the arms upon its star-guard extended and perforated Zeraga’s armor and flesh, creating a cacophony of screeching metal joined with the sound of tearing flesh. Zeraga screamed in agony as his lifeblood flowed out of him. The last thing he felt was the shattering of his impaled body as Ahriman dashed him against the floor.
* * *
Zeraga found himself gasping for air as his mind snapped back to reality. Zamyyr was still sitting in his chair, and his expression of unease became one of relief; his mouth twisted into a grin.
“I was starting to think that I had lost you again,” the Crimson Dragon said.
“What happened?” Zeraga asked as he shook away the last vestiges of the memory’s thrall, which was replaced by déjà vu.
“You were listening for at least a while, and then your eyes glazed over, and you seemed to nod off. What do you remember?”
Zeraga recounted his memory. By the end, Zamyyr was grinning wider than before.
“So,” he said, “it would seem that I did indeed jog your memory.”
“Yes…” Zeraga replied, “But there is so much more I have to recover… I am in my four hundred and twenty-eighth incarnation; that means four hundred and twenty-seven lifetimes of lost memories.”
Not entirely lost. Hellscythe said. I was there for all of them.
Zeraga thrust his will toward Hellscythe. You must tell me everything.
No. There is nothing I must do for you. the weapon replied sardonically. And even if I wanted to help you, Asmodeus has put safeguards in place to prevent me from doing so.
What safeguards?
I can’t tell you that, either.
Zeraga growled with frustration and turned his focus on Zamyyr. “You knew my previous incarnation. What else can you tell me?”
“Not much that can help us now, I’m afraid,” Zamyyr replied, “The Crimson Dragons suffered much the same fate as our blessed Baalkhalizar.” He gave a wistful sigh. “Since then, I have not encountered so much as a single one of our number. All of my tales of our past battles will only bring you sorrow and rage, master, and you have plenty of both of those things already.”
Zeraga frowned; Zamyyr was right. Though the Doomfire in his present incarnation had never known the Crimson Dragons, he felt an ethereal sense of grief intensified by his yearning for what had been lost. He wanted to know his children but knew that he never would, save for Zamyyr.
The Doomfire’s grief was soon replaced by hatred, hatred for Asmodeus. It was all his fault. He had sent Zeraga to his death; he had sent the Crimson Dragons to their deaths, all like lambs to the slaughter. And for what? Ahriman, the First Demon, still lived, and his children, his demons, were inevitably as infinite as they had been five thousand years ago.
“We need to kill Asmodeus,” Zeraga said darkly as he stood up and retrieved Hellscythe. “But how? We can’t do it alone.”
“No.” Zamyyr gave soft chuckle. “Two lone devils and a soul-eating scythe do not make for a successful rebellion against the Thirteen Hells of Nyrrakhâ, for to strike at Asmodeus is to provoke the ire of Lord Satan himself, no matter how justified our hatred is.”
Zeraga recognized Satan’s name in the form of muscle memory, knowledge embedded in the very fibers of his flesh. He also recognized the truth of Zamyyr’s words. The Lord of the Thirteen Hells would not take kindly to the assassination of one of his greatest vassals. “Do you know where we might find allies?”
“Not specifically. But, Asmodeus is no different from any of the other archdevils in that he has dukes and duchesses scheming against him. I’m sure we can find one to align ourselves with.”
Zeraga nodded. “Then we will return to Golgotha.” Confidence warmed his voice; a measure of who he had been as the Legion Master of the Crimson Dragons returned to him. “Do you know the way?”
“I should be able to get us there, yes.” Zamyyr rose from his chair and retrieved his Axxcrudyr from a rack built into one of the walls of his hut. “I will admit that it has been a while, as I have had no cause to leave Addaduros since my arrival here.” The Crimson Dragon hefted his weapons, those monoliths of lethality wrought from rune-engraved feyrferreus and leather-wrapped dragon bone. “However, I would say that the return of my master is a worthy cause. Let us go separate Asmodeus’s head from his shoulders, shall we?”
The End
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