Chapter 24 - Fallen's First

They negotiated terms ahead of time—no replenishing of strength from flames or restrictions on which forms they could or could not take. The winner would be declared when the other party conceded defeat. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Saer could not invoke his hierarchical power or Runeak’s true name to control her. She demanded a true test between them without safety nets.

They didn’t delay. Runeak was arguably the least patient of the Daemoenica, though Saer held no desire to wait.

Runeak left her armor in place, but didn’t don a helmet. She exited the tent, and Saer heard her low but commanding voice speaking the local language, presumably to spread the word of their impending clash and to ascertain her soldiers cleared the sparring field she had in mind.

While Runeak occupied herself, Saer pulled off his hooded cloak in preparation. Under, he wore a simple sleeveless top woven from hemp and similarly made trousers for his legs. After an internal moment of debate, he pulled the shirt up and over his head, leaving him only in loose fitting pants and leather-tied sandals.

Saer rolled his shoulders and his neck, then lifted the tent flap and stepped out into the afternoon sun.

Two guards waited to escort him. Their dark eyes lit up with excitement as he approached, though the pair schooled their faces to careful neutrality. The atmosphere beyond and around them buzzed with activity and excited voices. Groups of soldiers hurried towards the sparring grounds on the outskirts of the encampment. In the span of minutes, word had traveled of the upcoming entertainment.

One of the soldiers at the tent entrance reached out to grasp Saer’s elbow, but he pulled away. Jerking his chin instead in the direction the crowds headed, he spoke in their language to the best of his ability. “I follow. Show me.”

The guard shrugged and beckoned, taking the lead, though his partner remained at his back to flank.

Saer ignored any whispers, stares, and fingers pointed his way, preparing his mind for the fight at hand. He held no doubt Runeak learned more tactics through the centuries. Their first battle might as well have been a toddler’s flailing skirmish in comparison to what they each knew presently. Saer’s heart thudded light and quick in his chest, flutters of anticipation. He excelled at combat, though he didn’t tend to seek it for sport or relish in it—certainly not in the way Wrath did.

But Lucifer created him as the pinnacle of physical prowess. He would defeat the Fifth. Pride did not doubt.

Runeak came into view, at least three hundred feet away, directing the final steps of her makeshift arena. On the borders stood racks filled with both practice and true weapons, archery targets, and soldiers.

The oval sparring field carried a false impression of tranquility when Saer stepped to its edge. The muttering intensified, and Runeak glanced to confirm his presence, then raised her hands, calling for quiet.

The escorting guards shuffled away to join their comrades.

Walking to the center of the crushed grass meadow, Runeak addressed her people, somehow managing audibility without shouting. Though he couldn’t understand all the words she spoke, Saer paid close attention to the humans’ responses. Reverence shone in their eyes and body language, so different from the harvests he had taken in the recent past. An air of solidarity hung between Wrath and her soldiers, bereft of deceit. They saw her as their war leader, and they would follow her blindly into battle wherever she went.

This was how Wrath harvested alone.

A great cry rose from all around at the end of her address, strong enough to vibrate Saer’s ribcage. If anyone else evoked such a response, they might have smiled, but Runeak only stared, then turned her head to nod at Saer.

He stepped onto the field, weaponless.

Tense silence rolled through the audience.

Runeak prowled to one of the weapon racks. From his vantage point, Saer discerned her picking up a few different items and placing them on her person, though he couldn’t tell their shapes. She came away with one final armament in her hands, a metal sickle on a short wooden handle which she grasped with her right palm. The posterior of the blade attached to a long chain with a weight at its end, and these links Runeak coiled around her left hand and wrist. She stalked back onto the grassland until she stood ten paces from Saer.

She addressed Saer in low, guttural syllables, using the first language they’d ever known, “Your move, Eldest.”

Saer offered the barest nod of acknowledgement, then slid a foot back into a more rooted stance.

Susurrations percolated at the borders of the meadow.

The whispers shifted to gasps as Saer thrust a hand forward, balled it into a fist, and pulled back towards himself with inhuman speed. He wrapped a metaphysical tether on Runeak’s brilliant, Hellsfire core, then wrenched the heat towards himself, intent on weakening her from the start.

Runeak’s expression didn’t change. A picture of calm ire, her shoulders tugged forward, but her will rose to match Saer’s. An invisible rope of precious heat stretched between the dueling pair, and she gripped onto it with equal strength while, at the same time, she unfurled the long chain from her left arm with practiced ease.

Saer redoubled his efforts to pull on her innate fire while Runeak’s jaw tensed. The demoness swung the sickled end of her weapon in wider and wider arcs. Then the wicked blade hurled through the air—directly at Saer’s chest.

The tug of war snapped. Saer’s concentration shattered as he ducked and rolled forward to avoid being skewered by Runeak’s weapon.

The audience cheered.

Runeak attacked a second time, aiming the weapon at Saer’s leg. He dove once more, scrambling further away. He couldn’t see her, but his heat sense told him that she closed the distance.

Great Hells, she was fast.

Wrath swung the sickle a third time at his shoulder just as he pulled himself to a stand. Saer snarled and snapped his left hand up, catching the weapon’s handle. He jerked back, using his weight to rip the chain away. The tether loosened in his grasp. Runeak had let go.

She gave no chance to celebrate.

Wrath pivoted and thrust with movements as smooth as slicked oil.

A burst of agony erupted from Pride’s upper left abdomen. He roared, stumbled, and looked…

The handle of a dagger protruded from his stomach.

Burning Hellsfire ichor spilled around it, draining him. Runeak reached for yet another weapon at her hip as she closed the distance. She had drawn first blood.

The crowd shouted its appreciation.

Her blade felt cold in his hand when Saer grasped it. He pulled the knife free while dodging and shoving a burst of fiery energy into the steel. Scarlet fluid sizzled, smoked, and crisped as he cauterized the wound, biting down on his scream of pain. The humans gasped.

It took less than a second. Runeak advanced, swinging a long, elegant sword. The sickle Saer took shot up as he deflected Runeak’s downward strike. He flipped the blood stained long knife in his right hand.

The two faced one another, Runeak with a two-handed sword and Saer with a chained sickle in his left grasp, a knife in his right.

They circled.

“I wanted a fight, not a slaughter.” Runeak punctuated the bitter statement with a thrust of her blade. Saer parried.

“Human weapons aren’t my preference.” Saer countered another attack, then sliced forward with the knife he’d taken. It caught her arm, shaving mostly through armor but taking a bite of flesh with it.

For the first time since reuniting with his sister, a faint smile touched her face, visible more in her eyes than her mouth. “No one has drawn blood from me, in single combat, in years,” she purred.

Another strike. Another counter. The crowd grew restless.

Saer remained in his circling crouch, ignoring his throbbing abdomen. “You sound far too happy about it.”

The hint of a smile faded, swallowed by Runeak’s usual haunting stoicism. “Learn to embrace pain, Saer.” The sword flashed downward, and Saer thrust his weapons above to clang against the blade before it cut through his skull.

Saer’s snarling face spanned inches from Runeak’s, her obsidian eyes locked to his. “You don’t command me,” he growled.

“It will make you a better fighter.” Runeak shoved Saer away. He dropped the sickle, using the split seconds it fell to slam his palm into Runeak’s elbow while also slashing at her same wrist with his knife. Wrath grunted, dropping her sword as blood spilled fresh from her forearm. Their audience shouted and gasped.

Saer couldn’t help smirking when the Fifth backed up to recenter. “I seem to be doing fine,” he gloated.

Runeak growled and reached across her body to unsheathe her final weapon, a long-bladed knife matching one which Saer now wielded. She flipped the weapon to solidify her grip and lunged forward.

A flurry of slashes and slices punctuated by grunts and the clanging of metal rang out. Sharp cries and hisses of pain left one or the other as the blades laid wounds on their opponents’ skin, none deep. Back and forth, pivoting and dodging with inhuman grace—a dance without music.

Runeak twisted her arm and dug her knife’s blade under Saers’ hilt, wrenching the weapon from his grip. He dove for the knife, but the demoness stopped him with the point of her blade under his chin, forcing him to swallow through heaving breaths and back up as she pushed forward. A new well of blood dripped from Saer’s throat. His torso and arms were littered with various cuts.

“Do you yield, Eldest?”

His single-worded response came as a grated whisper. “No.”

Runeak’s arm tensed to drive the knife into Saer’s throat. The point sank in as he took the precious heartbeat of time to lift the heel of his hand and slam it into Runeak’s nose, stunning her enough to fall back. Her grip loosed on her knife and, with a gargled cough, Saer wrested the weapon and threw it aside.

Scarlet liquid pooled in his throat. Saer focused more of his precious heat into the wound at his neck to cauterize and close it. The process weakened him, but blood loss would have been worse.

Saer fought to regain his footing. Blood dripped from Runeak’s broken nose. Rather than exhausted or afflicted, Wrath appeared...exhilarated.

How?

Runeak’s stance shifted, shoulders hunching as she stalked. “Embrace the pain, Saer.” Her pleased voice would have been sultry if it weren’t for the murderous intent dripping from it.

Saer spat on the ground and wiped at his ruby-stained lower lip, never taking his eyes off her. “Why would you want me to be a better fighter?”

“I want to beat you at your best.”

Runeak closed the distance between them, forcing Saer back as she assaulted him with a barrage of punches and kicks, not allowing a single opening to strike back. The demoness’s knuckles slammed into his chin, a glancing blow while her heel collided with his shin an instant later. Saer snarled and stumbled, eyes blazing as he knelt. She could have finished the attack and brought him to the ground, yet she pulled back.

“Embrace the pain, Saer!” Wrath screamed, and though they couldn’t possibly understand the words, the surrounding crowd shouted in appreciation.

Embrace the pain.

Pride’s lips pulled back, teeth bared, breaths heaving and fluid-filled from the knife’s strike he’d taken earlier. The rest of his cuts and bruises seared and throbbed. It hurt.

Embrace the pain...

Saer’s vision sharpened as understanding settled in. She absorbed the blows and wounds landed upon her as though they fueled a fire, rather than quenched it. She reveled in it. Was elevated by it.

Craved it.

Saer lunged at Runeak at the same time he pulled from within, forcing his body to undergo a violent shift from human to Daemoenic. Sable wings ripped through Saer’s back with a sickening, flesh-rending sound. Silver horns thickened and solidified, claws lengthened, and hooves encased his feet, all in the span of one heartbeat to the next.

The soldiers cried out when he crashed into their leader, slamming her onto her back. Saer’s endless maw opened and dove at the connection between his sister’s neck and shoulder, crunching the armor and flesh in his powerful jaw. He drove rows of razor canines in until he tasted blood.

Wrath screamed.

The scream shifted to a howl.

The howl turned into maniacal laughter.

Embrace the pain.

Saer shook his head while clenched on Runeak’s flesh, her body pinned. Any human would have passed out as their tissue ripped open. Runeak stilled her laughter, then shifted into a foreboding growl.

Pride shoved his metallic claws into her torso, wrenching in opposite directions. Her collar bone snapped under the strength of it and her high-pitched gasp stabbed his ears. Saer loosed his muzzle and bellowed down at her, teeth dripping with blood. “Do you yield, Runeakael?”

The shine in Wrath’s eyes was beautiful and horrifying.

She lifted a shaking hand, slick with blood, and wrapped her fingers around the end of Saer’s right horn, staining it crimson. She jerked to bring his maw closer with unfeasible vitality, something between a snarl and a grin curling her lips. “No.”

Saer opened his jaw to bite her skull.

She shifted.

Wrath’s thick, razor-tipped left horn speared into Saer’s wide maw at an angle, perforating the flesh of his cheek, like a deranged fish hook. He roared and shoved, pulling himself off the skewering appendage. Vermillion fluid splashed. Witnesses screamed and cheered.

Saer’s claw lifted to touch the hewn damage at the side of his jaw while keeping an eye on Runeak. She crouched on all four limbs—the huntress once more. Wrath lost little of her terrible grace when she moved, despite broken bones. Baring her unholy teeth in a barking growl, she charged.

It went on with tireless brutality.

The sun dipped below the horizon, the evening air colder as night closed in.

From one crucial heartbeat to the next, he misread Wrath’s next move. Whether from fatigue, being outwitted, or outmatched, Saer attempted to dodge a biting attack. She swiveled against her feint and slammed the end of a cruel winged talon into the center of her brother’s chest. At the same time, she jerked her head to the side and found purchase with her open jaws on Saer’s lower abdomen and hip. Runeak thrust him onto his back and a hollow, gasping cry left him. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think through the abrupt suffocation of his punctured lung.

Runeak’s razored teeth found his intestines and began ripping them out of his body.

Her mandible crushed into the tender, bloody entrails. Saer attempted another intake of breath when she reinforced the strength behind her wing talon. With ribbons of dripping, meaty flesh hanging from her jaws, Wrath growled and pulled back just enough to bark against Saer’s skin, “Do you yield, Eldest?”

Saer could only nod.

Runeak used her wing’s leverage to pull herself higher on Saer’s body. Blood flowed at an alarming rate across his chest and pooled under his torso. Thrusting her clawed hand into his torn, abdominal cavity, Wrath screamed into his tortured face, “Say the words!”

His mind howled even if his throat wouldn’t work. Saer tensed his jaw, forcing all his concentration into speaking that which Pride hated. “Y..ess...I—” he gasped, coughed blood through a mangled jaw, then finished with a gurgling exhale, “yield.”

An unholy grin spread on Wrath’s muzzle. She threw her head back and roared with such volume, the ground shook.

Around them, the army joined in a raucous cry.

Runeak pulled her trembling wing back. The talon left Saer’s chest cavity with a wet, sickening sound. One of her legs jutted at an awkward angle. Wrath slunk away on her clawed hands and one good hoof.

Pride had lost.