Chapter 83: Severed Wings and a Fallen Deity

Azriel

"I know what I am doing," I muttered for the umpteenth time, shooting a sharp glare at Taizel and Uriel, who were still stubbornly trying to talk me out of transferring the curse energy.

​"You do know that by doing this, Azriel, your suppressed demon blood might react!" Uriel warned, his tone grave as his mind drifted back through centuries of blood-soaked history.

​He went down memory lane, recalling how Elysium had violently sealed the realm of demons after winning the Great War against Draca—the King of Demons, and my uncle. My mother’s brother.

​Unlike my brothers, who were born of mostly humans and low-born mothers, mine was no low-born demon. She was the absolute Princess of the Demon Realm.

That union alone had driven Elysium into a fanatical frenzy because deities and demons had shared an ancient, deep-seated hatred since the dawn of time.

​When the heavens discovered her existence, my mother was mercilessly slaughtered. I was ripped from her cold arms, sparking a catastrophic, centuries-long war between Elysium and the demon realm.

It raged on until Draca was finally suppressed and locked away in the abyss.

Sealing the Demon King had effectively sealed the fate of every remaining demon in that realm, severing them from the world entirely.

​And now, I was about to unleash that dormant, dangerous bloodline within myself—all to save Seraphel.

​"You would go to such extreme lengths, yet you dare claim you don’t love the human?" Mirevale’s rasping voice broke through the silence, followed by a mocking, breathless laugh. "No one... no one in all of creation commits such self-sacrifice unless they are deeply, hopelessly in love. I see what you have become, Azriel," she gasped, her head tilting with a sinister glint in her eyes. "You have become the very thing you feared. A Sin of Lust falling in love. How utterly strange. How unheard of."

​"Shut up!" all three of us snapped in unison.

​"I need her gone!" I yelled angrily, turning aggressively toward Uriel. "I don’t care if my demon side comes back again, I will find a way to suppress it like I usually do! Just transfer the curse! Seraphel is my bonded mate, my omega, and I am doing this for him only because he is carrying my child."

​Lies. ​I could feel them resting heavy on the tip of my tongue, and I hated the bitter, foul taste of it.

Everyone kept throwing that word around—love—but I didn’t even understand what it was. I had never been in love. I had no idea how it happens or the way it works, because all I think about every time is the next hole that I was fucking.

​"Alright," Uriel agreed with a heavy sigh.

​He raised his hands, revealing a glowing orb of pure white light. With a flick of his wrist, he pushed it toward Mirevale, forcing the sphere to siphon the parasitic curse directly from her fading essence.

The moment the hex entered the orb, the light violently inverted, turning pitch-black as it absorbed the corruption.

​Uriel turned back toward me, holding the dark orb. "I hope that you know what you are doing."

​I nodded firmly. This is for Seraphel. I was going to let him know how I had saved his life and how he was going to be owing me forever. That was all there was to this.

​The orb moved away from Mirevale and floated toward me, and slowly, it began to transfer the dark energy directly into my chest.

I braced myself, gritting my teeth for agonizing pain, but nothing happened. Even after all the dark light from the orb finished transferring and the sphere shattered into a thousand useless pieces, there was no pain at all.

​"How do you feel?" Taizel asked, watching me closely.

​I looked at him and shrugged my shoulders. "I feel alright. I don’t think there is any problem with it."

​Mirevale let out a wet, hysterical cackle from the ground. "Oh, you foolish devil spawn, the curse will not take full effect now! It will fester... it will feel like you are being eaten from the inside, and you will face so many crazy, torturous moments once I am gone! You will regret killing a deity!"

​"Shut up!" I yelled, closing the distance in a fraction of a second.

​I grabbed her by the throat, hoisting her up into the air. "No matter what happens, it will be my cross to bear, Mirevale—not yours. Because you are already rotting away," I smirked at her, pointing a clawed finger to her fading, glowing hands. "The Goddess of Death is about to die. Ironic, isn’t it?"

​Mirevale glared at me, her void-like eyes burning with raw hatred as she started screaming into my face. "I might die now, but Elysium will send more people! There will be others who crave the powers of the Child of Prophecy who will go after the baby! Your child will never be safe!" She laughed wildly. "And even if I die, another Goddess of Death will be reborn to finish the job!"

​"Not quite," I whispered coldly.

​I shut her up when I gripped her shoulder blades, forcing her divine wings to violently manifest from her back. For a deity who ruled over both Life and Death, her wings were a grotesque contradiction—the left side a blinding, feathery white, and the right a pitch-black, shadow-draped wing.

​"W-What... what the hell are you trying to do?" she demanded, finally showing how afraid she was.

​I chuckled darkly and looked toward Taizel. "Give me your blades," I ordered.

​"Gladly," Taizel responded, dropping his razor-sharp blade onto my open palm.

​As soon as I felt the heavy steel in my hand, a cruel grin formed on my face, knowing how I had wanted to remove the wings of the deities for centuries—and Mirevale was going to be my first victim.

​"They say the wings of a deity will always appear at the Deity Hall of Remembrance after their death," I declared, raising the blade above her back. "But Mirevale, that is not the case for you after all. It seems that you will not only cease to exist, but you will never be remembered!"

​Mirevale’s eyes widened in pure, unadulterated horror. "What the hell are you trying to do!" she screamed, thrashing wildly. "No! No! No!"

​I chuckled right into her hysterical face as I chopped off her wings. ’’You went after what’s mine, I won’t let you die an easy death.’’

​I slammed the blade down, slicing through flesh, bone, and divine cartilage with brutal precision. Golden celestial blood spattered across the cold stone as I hacked through the joint of her left wing, tearing it free while she let out a blood-curdling shriek. Without missing a beat, I drove the blade down again, severing her dark right wing with a sickening crunch as corrupted black fluid hissed against the ground.

​"This is your nightmare, Mirevale. Goodbye," I said slowly. ’’For you will never be remembered ever!’’

​I stretched forth my free hand toward the severed wings on the ground and lit them on fire with hellfire.

​"No! No!" Mirevale screamed as she faded into nothingness alongside her wings, which burned into ash almost immediately as she vanished.

​I heaved a deep sigh, wiping the golden blood from the blade before looking at Uriel and Taizel. "I believe that we are closer to getting back at Elysium."

​Taizel placed a heavy hand around my shoulder, grinning. "Yes we are, and I am glad that we are fighting side by side now as brothers again."

​"Yes, but I have exhausted so much of my powers and we have to leave now," Uriel said, yawning as he stretched his hand forward and summoned a swirling portal.

​I nodded in agreement and then looked back at Odomos. "What happens to Odomos now that its owner is dead?"

​Taizel let out a loud laugh. "It belongs to me. This is now my new domain."

​"What a gluttony," Uriel muttered as he entered the portal.

​"Think of it as a souvenir from defeating one of the deities of Elysium," Taizel muttered as he entered the portal after him. "How will they deal with the death of one of their own?"

​I said nothing as I joined them into the rift, because I didn’t care.

Elysium started it first—and now it was our turn.

An eye for an eye.