"EILA!"
The wooden door slammed open. Imara sprinted into the freezing night, dropping to her knees in the frost beside him. She desperately wrapped her arms around his trembling, convulsing shoulders, pressing her warm hand flat against his spine. A frantic surge of soothing, blue mana flooded his back, desperately trying to stabilize his violently shivering body.
________
The violent convulsions finally stopped.
Eila lay in the freezing frost, his chest heaving as a thick stream of dark blood spilled from his lips. The sharp, acrid stench of scorched ozone hung in the air from the failed spark.
Imara didn't speak. She dropped to the frozen grass, hooking her arms under his armpits. She was exhausted; her own mana circuits scraped entirely hollow, but pure adrenaline fueled her muscles. She hauled his dead weight backward, her boots slipping in the mud as she dragged him through the doorway and into the dark hall of the safehouse.
She dropped him onto the narrow cot.
Eila groaned, his right arm violently twitching from the backlash. He planted his good hand against the mattress, desperately trying to push himself up, trying to maintain some pathetic semblance of control.
"I-Imara..." Eila choked out, the copper taste of his own blood thick on his tongue. "Listen to-"
Imara shoved him.
Her hands slammed flat against his chest, forcefully throwing his weakened body back down against the pillows.
"Don't," Imara breathed. Her voice was a low hiss, trembling violently, that shook the very air in the room. "Do not say a single word."
Eila froze. He looked up, the apology dying in his throat instantly.
Imara stood over him in the dim light. She was trembling so violently that her knees were visibly shaking. Dark, bruised bags hung heavily under her bloodshot eyes. Tears were streaming down her face, cutting tracks through the ash and dirt on her cheeks.
"I burned my own life force to pull you back," Imara rasped, her voice cracking as she pointed a trembling finger directly at his face. "I poured every single drop of mana I had into your shattered veins just to keep your heart beating while Orlon brewed that draught. My circuits are bleeding, Eila. Every breath I take feels like breathing crushed glass."
She took a step closer, her shadow falling completely over him.
"I haven't slept for days, continuously crushing mana-stones in my mouth to heal you over and over, trying to close the wounds, trying desperately to wake you up."
She tried to stop the flow of tears, rubbing her eyes. It didn't stop.
"And the very second I close my eyes..." Her voice broke into a raw sob. "The very second I let myself sleep, you crawl out into the frost and try to kill yourself!"
"I wasn't trying to kill myself," Eila whispered, his eyes wide, completely paralyzed by the sheer weight of her fury. "I just needed to know if I could still spark-"
"YOU ARE NOT THE SHIELD ANYMORE!"
The scream finally tore from her throat, raw and agonizing.
Imara's hands clenched into tight fists at her sides. A jagged spark of hyper-compressed blue healing mana misfired from her fingertips, snapping through the air and scorching a smoking black hole directly into the wooden floorboards.
Eila flinched at the crack of the magic. He stared at the smoking wood, the horrific realization of how deeply he had pushed her finally setting in.
"You don't have the right," Imara wept, her shoulders collapsing as the anger suddenly gave way to a profound, suffocating despair. "You don't get to be the martyr anymore, Eila. You don't get to throw away the life I just sacrificed my own soul to save."
She stared down at him, her blue eyes hollow and broken.
"If you truly want to die... then next time, don't let me heal you."
The heavy wooden door slammed shut, the crack echoing like a gunshot in the cramped room.
Eila didn't flinch. He just lay frozen in the dark.
Through the thin walls, he could hear the muffled, ragged sound of Imara weeping. A moment later, Riko's hushed, sleepy voice drifted out, desperately trying to calm her down. Every sob from the other room felt like a physical knife twisting in Eila's ribs. He had faced demon hordes and the King of Aethelgard without blinking, but the sound of her breaking was a weight he couldn't lift.
His eyelids grew impossibly heavy, the blood loss from the magical backlash finally dragging him under. Sleep conquered him before he could figure out how to look her in the eye again.
When Eila woke, the freezing morning light had already shifted to the pale grey of noon.
His head was throbbing with an agonizing rhythm. He dragged a heavy hand across his mouth. The dried blood from yesterday was gone. Someone had carefully wiped his face clean while he slept. On the small wooden side table, a warm bowl of broth was already waiting for him.
Even after he had shattered her heart, she still made sure he didn't starve. The suffocating guilt clamped down on his throat.
The door creaked open. Eila painfully turned his neck.
"Imara, I am truly sorr—" he rasped, his voice raw and hollow.
It wasn't Imara.
Kaito stood in the doorway, his twin blades strapped tightly to his hips. He closed the heavy door behind him and leaned back against the rough timber, his arms crossed over his chest. He stared at the man in the bed.
"Fallen Hero," Kaito muttered. The explosive rage that clung to him was absent. Instead, his voice was dripping with a cold, unadulterated disgust. He was, even if Eila had saved him, still a survivor of Oakhaven.
He pushed off the wall and stepped up to the edge of the mattress, glaring down at Eila.
"I don't know how to give speeches, and I still hate your guts," Kaito said, his jaw tight. "But I am going to say this once. You are a pathetic coward, and a scum."
Eila held the boy's gaze, but he didn't argue. He had no defense.
"You have Imara," Kaito continued, his voice rising, the anger finally bleeding through. "The one person in this entire diseased world who is actually willing to burn her own life away to save you. And you decide the best course of action is to spit on her sacrifice and die in the dirt."
Kaito leaned in closer, his hands gripping the wooden footboard of the cot.
"Personally? I wanted you dead for what happened to Oakhaven. But the way you took that Orbash blast for us... it proved you still have a spine. So start using it. Because if you make her cry like that again, I won't wait for Kaelen to finish you off. I'll do it myself."
Kaito turned around and walked out, leaving Eila alone with his thoughts.
________
The heavy crunch of Lwastik's boots echoed across the dead courtyard.
Instead of the Demonic Castle, he found an abattoir.
The towering obsidian gates of the Demon Castle hadn't been smashed or battered at all. They had been sheared cleanly in half, the cut so impossibly smooth it reflected the grey sky like dark glass. The rotting top halves of his eight fellow Demonic Generals lay scattered in the ash, their flesh and bone parted by the exact flawless cut.
Dozens of lower-tier demons groveled in the dirt, pressing their horned heads into the cold ash as the towering right-handman to the Queen walked among the corpses.
"A mere human," Lwastik rumbled, his deep voice vibrating through the chest cavities of the cowering remnants.
He stopped beside the severed head of the lead General, it was rotting. Lwastik traced a clawed finger along the flawlessly smooth cut of the bone.
"My Lord..." a lesser demon whimpered, its entire body trembling against the dirt. "They were many... but their leader... he did not even draw a blade. He merely raised two fingers. He cleaved the gates, the soldiers, and the Generals in a single breath. He took Her Majesty, Queen Malakor, in a cage of light."
Lwastik stared at the severed head.
He didn't rage. Instead, a low, booming chuckle began deep in his chest. The sadistic laugh grew louder, echoing off the sliced obsidian until it sent the cowering demons into a state of sheer panic.
"A single breath," Lwastik sneered, wiping a smear of dried demon blood from his thumb. "Aldous never possessed a weapon that could cut reality. This was no human king. This was another being entirely."
He stepped over the decayed corpses, his heavy strides carrying him straight into the ruined throne room. The Vanguard soldiers had defaced the walls, but Lwastik's glowing orange eyes bypassed the vandalism. He looked only at the throne of bone at the center of the dais.
It was empty.
Queen Malakor, the ancient monarch who had kept the demons on a leash of calculated borders and treaties, was gone.
Lwastik climbed the steps. He ran a hand over the cold, pale bone of the seat. He thought of Lord Elmoire in Oakhaven, the fragile human who had dared to sever his arm. He thought of the pathetic weakness of a species that needed walls to survive.
Lwastik turned around and sat down on the throne.
The oppressive weight of his demonic aura flared, washing over the ruins of the castle like a suffocating wave of heat. The lesser demons at the base of the steps wept in terror.
"The Queen played a game of borders and treaties," Lwastik announced, his voice carrying the terrifying weight of a new era. "She allowed humanity to believe they owned the sun. But the duty is ours to save her, the laws must be molded."
He leaned forward, resting his chin on his massive fist, his orange eyes burning through the gloom.
"Rouse the remnants. Awaken every dormant brood on the continent. We are going to remind humanity why the demon kind has survived longer than they have even existed!"
He leaned back on the throne, a grin stretching across his face.
"Her Majesty is waiting for her kin to save her."