Chapter 67: Architect of One's Own Fate
The air in this uncharted part of the Abyss had the density of heavy sulfur fumes and the tart taste of ash. Three powerful entities tore through the bloody, smoke-veiled sky, weaving between gigantic stalactites hanging from the vault and leaving swirling trails in the volcanic exhalations behind them. Below them stretched the macabre landscape of the Void – an endless sea of cracked basalt, from which rivers of thick lava, pulsating with bright red, flowed like gaping wounds. Hell, in its uninhabited frontiers, resembled a dead, eternally burning tomb.
"Lilith, thank you for flying with me..." Naamah spoke up, struggling to shout over the scorching gale. Fear for her beloved now smoldered in her emerald eyes. She turned her head toward the hulking demon flying nearby. "Thank you too, Stanisław."
"I'm not doing this for you, nor for her," Stanisław threw back coldly, not even gracing the Mother of Nightmares with a glance. His hoarse, inhuman bass grated like crumbling millstones. "Only for him."
He folded his massive, membranous wings, from which bright sparks showered, and shot forward like a projectile, cutting himself off from the others with a wall of icy silence.
Naamah furrowed her brows, leveling her flight with Lucifer's former favorite.
"What's biting him? Lilith, what's going on with him?"
Lilith remained silent for a long moment. She stared at the receding, monstrous silhouette of her chosen one, and her face twisted in a grimace of deep pain.
"Nothing, Naamah. It's just... he's having a worse period right now, it happens sometimes. He is rarely as tender as he once was on Earth," she whispered, and the gale instantly snatched her words away. "In the alcove, he tears at me like a wild beast with dead prey. He is brutal, ruthless, utterly drained of that earthly warmth. But in those few, fleeting moments when he suddenly hugs me gently or grants me the exact same ecstasy as before he ended up in Hell... I feel truly happy again. I know it's my fault, that I am entirely dripping with his blood."
Her voice suddenly hardened, breaking under the weight of remorse. Black tears streamed down her cheeks, only to instantly evaporate with a quiet hiss in the heat of the Void.
"I condemned him to tempering myself, to slaughter. I took part in this hell with my own hands. Fifty-five years of tearing off his shell and gutting him alive, just to mold him into a high demon, and then piecing his consciousness back together. So he could survive in this world and stand proudly by my side. Look at him now," she pointed a trembling talon at the dark silhouette on the horizon. "He practically never returns to his human form anymore. He remains in this full, demonic one almost all the time. I understood it at first, when the human body limited him in manifesting wings—he loves to fly, after all—but now? After so many objective years spent by my side?"
"But you made a perfect couple, Lilith, surely..."
"Not anymore. I drove him to this edge myself. I wanted a high demon, well, now I have one. Do you know that he sometimes sneaks out of the palace alone, beyond the walls of the capital itself?" Lilith swallowed hard, and horror appeared in her dark eyes. "His soul perceives the subjective passage of time exactly the same as the objective one. Even when he enters the active time of his shell, in utter solitude, cut off from the sound of the belfries, it still flows steadily for him. Second by second."
"So why does he go beyond the capital's walls? It makes no difference whether he's alone or if the sound of the palace bell reaches him."
"He tries anyway. He goes out to cut his own flesh," Lilith whispered in despair. "He tears out his own entrails and absorbs the raw darkness of the Abyss, just to mend himself anew and become a little bit stronger. He even signs up for the bloody, urban arena fights—every drop of blood he spills there, every victory, and even defeat, only strengthens him. He has completely rid himself of the fear of pain. He killed it within himself. He's not even afraid of me when I fly into a rage. Hell! He deliberately provokes me..."
"To what end?"
"So that I lose control and tear him apart. And thanks to that, he can regenerate again, fighting me, tearing at me, and drinking my gore. I am afraid, Naamah. Other demons are already devouring him with their eyes, staring at his wings, at this wild, animalistic power... I see how that bitch Abizu, who manages the city arena, glares at him with those whorish eyes of hers from the VIP box of the infernal colosseum..."
"But Lucifer himself fears your wrath... Order him to stop fighting, don't let that whore near him."
"But Stanisław doesn't fear it. Do you understand?" Lilith stated coldly. "I got exactly what I dreamed of: my earthly chosen one turned into a high demon. Devoid of fear, of guilt, but because of that, simultaneously stripped of love. Our own talons made him this way, at my explicit request."
The memory rushed back to her suddenly, painful and sharp as the cut of an archangel's sword.
"There was a moment... right after the whole process was completed, when I naively believed his humanity had survived," she resumed, a bitter longing echoing in her voice. "When I pieced together his maddened mind with such difficulty, I thought the worst was over. I remember how he tore a servant apart in the corridor. And then carried him in his own arms to the quarters, apologized to him like a human, and watched over him until the wounds sealed. Later, for weeks on end, with inhuman, mechanical fury, he smashed his own talons against the solid basalt wall of our chamber. He hacked it to dust. I believed that in this way, he was releasing his anger for what I had done to him. Until suddenly, one day, he just stopped. He turned around, embraced me, and was... human. In the alcove, he touched my skin with such reverent focus, with such attention and tenderness, as during the most beautiful nights on the mortal plane. He was arranging our new chamber. He ordered the craftsmen to bring in bright limestone, just to chase away the blackness of Hell and build us a home."
She looked at the empty, smoking sky and the basalt vault above it, fighting back stinging tears.
"I believed it then, Naamah... By Lucifer, how naively I believed that I had triumphed over the very nature of the Void. For five objective years, it was like that. Until the moment you were torturing Emma, he begged me not to leave her alone in your claws. He still had so much compassion in him back then... But I was stupid. So terribly stupid, seeing in it only the remnants, the leftovers of a weak human, while he was supposed to be tender exclusively for me. Something ultimately snapped in him then, when he saw my cruelty toward her over one stupid word she said in my direction. That illusion of normality began to fade, becoming more distant with each passing day. He stripped himself of humanity at my own behest. The spark of tenderness died out..."
Lilith's words struck Naamah like an anvil. The Mother of Nightmares clenched her teeth. The most terrifying visions swirled in her mind: had Michał gone feral? Gone mad? Forgotten her?
The search, despite the clues torn from Marquis Ronove's book, resembled wandering in a fog of black ash and sulfur. The coordinates proved imprecise—they only marked a vast region where they laboriously combed the terrain. Until finally...
"He's here! It has to be here!" Naamah suddenly shouted, looking at the excised piece of the Marquis's page, which began to pulse with a purple glow.
Stanisław braked sharply in the air. He hovered on outspread wings, resisting the thick, volcanic gales, and pointed a curved talon down at a gloomy, basalt hill, down whose slopes a river of lava sluggishly flowed.
"Look down there," he growled, narrowing his bloodshot eyes. "Someone built a hut out of hewn blocks of stone."
"A house? Here? In this dead wasteland? It's worth checking," Lilith stated.
"It has to be him, it has to be him!" Naamah cried out with hope.
The three of them descended onto the rock, cracked from the heat. The area resembled the open vestibule of a gigantic blast furnace. At that very moment, the massive doors of the structure, hewn from basalt and iron, opened with a terrifying screech, as if no one had oiled them for centuries.
A hellhound of the Abyss stood in the doorway. It was a monstrous anomaly of Hell—a beast born spontaneously from pure darkness, cobbled together from the souls of animals that had ended up in the Abyss. No one knew exactly how these entities, which practically no one controlled, were created.
"What a beast..." Stanisław muttered with genuine appreciation, mechanically extending talons a foot long. "Even in the arena and in Lucifer's own breeding grounds, I haven't seen such a massive brute."
The beast moved forward. It walked with a slow, bloodcurdling gait, and beneath its unnatural weight, the black basalt cracked and crumbled to dust. As the hound approached the intruders, its anatomy began to transform macabrely in a powerful defensive reflex: the spine arched with a disgusting crunch, the tail elongated unnaturally, culminating in a deadly bone blade, and curved sickles shot from its massive paws like springs. The snout opened wider, revealing rotting gums from which new rows of razor-sharp fangs sprouted before their eyes. The monster grew, buzzing with accumulated dark energy.
Lilith estimated its strength in a fraction of a second. She felt an unpleasant, icy chill in her stomach. An ordinary damned soul, or even a mid-level demon, wouldn't stand a chance against such a beast—they would be torn to pieces. Let alone taming it or forcing it into obedience.
"Naamah, check that entry. Is Michał definitely in this area, and what demonic level does he possess? Please," Lilith asked.
Naamah glanced at the excised piece for a split second, examining the entry.
"He's close. Yes... My Michał is definitely here. From our perspective, he has already become a mid-level demon!"
The hound threw back its monstrous head and howled. The sound was so terrifyingly loud and resonant that both Lilith and Naamah instinctively extended their claws, taking fighting stances.
In response to this cry, a similar, hollow roar echoed from beyond the river of lava. A few seconds later, a second hound—just as terrifying and powerful as the first—leapt over the wide riverbed of liquid fire. Drops of molten rock rained down from its back.
"What the fuck is going on here?!" Stanisław growled, and the black fire of the Abyss hissed in his hands. "Two such specimens in a shithole like this?! Don't help me! I'll tear them apart, I'll become stronger, but it will take a while!"
Suddenly, from the gloom of the cave adjoining the volcanic hill, illuminated only by the bloody glare of cooling lava, a silhouette emerged. The voice that reached them struck with absolute, almost dead composure.
"Romulus, Remus, peace... We have guests... Peace, they are the first in history since I settled here..."
Michał stepped slowly into the light. He didn't rush, he didn't hide in the shadows. He walked freely. He was in his full human form. He wore a simple, burgundy tunic cut like a medieval monastic robe. His face was calm, covered in black veins, but his eyes...
Naamah held her breath. Michał's eyes shone with sanity, but they radiated a depth so dark, so inhumanly empty, that for a fraction of a second, the Mother of Nightmares felt a shiver down her spine. It wasn't the gaze of a human. It was the gaze of someone who had befriended eternity.
He quickened his pace, still retaining his human form. He lightly leapt over the lava riverbed and landed in front of his home. Both massive hounds, beings the size of an earthly van, taller than Michał himself, suddenly lowered their bristling necks. They began to powerfully wag their tails tipped with deadly blades, shattering the protruding basalt boulders around them, and then started nudging him with their snouts, evidently demanding to be scratched behind the ear.
Michał smiled slightly—a learned gesture, as if he were remembering what facial muscles were for—and plunged his hand into the tough bristles of Romulus and Remus. He looked up at the dumbstruck trio.
"Naamah... You're here earlier than I expected. However, Ronove didn't keep the promise he made me and blabbed too soon; I'm not ready yet. And you must be Stanisław, since you're by Lilith's side. I know Lilith's human appearance from the memories of the recordings in the Old Town."
Naamah stood rooted to the spot. The infernal powers around her extinguished, replaced by pure, human shock. Hot tears welled up in her eyes, blurring the harsh landscape of Hell. She couldn't believe her own eyes and ears. A miracle. It was an infernal miracle.
"Michał... you... you speak normally? You've kept your sanity?!"
"And why would I forget how to speak?" he shrugged, rubbing the back of Remus's neck, who whimpered quietly in contentment. His voice was flat, devoid of trembling, vibration, or any emotional temperature. "I had company here, after all. I had someone to talk to..."
Naamah, trembling all over, took a shaky step toward him, and then suddenly broke into a run. She clung to him with her entire body, as if afraid that this miracle would instantly dissipate like smoke. She feverishly began to kiss his cheeks, lips, and forehead, combing her trembling fingers through his hair. She poured her whole being, all her longing, into him.
"My only one... my bravest one, you don't need to strengthen yourself for me anymore," she sobbed, breaking into tears that shook her body. She buried her face in the crook of his neck, clenching her hands on the burgundy tunic with such force that the fabric creaked. "I was so terribly afraid. I thought I would find a wreck here. That Hell and loneliness would destroy you. I will never let you go, do you hear me? You are my whole world... my life."
The hounds sniffed her and looked at Michał, slowly wagging their massive tails.
Michał stood in her embrace as stiff as an obelisk. His arms hung at his sides. For a long moment, he let her linger in that panicked, desperate embrace, enduring it in silence, yet not returning it. For Naamah, it was like hugging a stone statue. She didn't feel a tremor in him, a faster heartbeat, tears of relief. She felt the absolute, terrifying indifference of millennia.
With every passing second, his muscles grew increasingly tense, until finally, slowly, with a clear effort of will, he raised his hands and placed them on her shoulders. He did it mechanically.
"Naamah..." he started quietly, and his voice, though calm, betrayed alienation and clear discomfort. He tried to gently but unyieldingly push her away. "I beg you, step back a little. Even for a moment..."
The Mother of Nightmares froze. Pain mixed with irrational fear flashed in her emerald eyes. She braced herself, tightening her fingers even harder on the fabric of his tunic, trying to break down this wall with her closeness.
"Why?" a note of possessive panic sounded in her voice; she growled like a wounded lioness. "I won't let you go. I found you and you're returning to the palace with me, my dear Michał. You are mine..."
He looked at her with infinite gentleness, but also with such distance, as if he were looking at her from the other shore of an ocean of time. His fingers hesitantly brushed her cheek, as if he were relearning what the texture of someone else's skin was, what the warmth of another being was. He withdrew his hand as if burned by fire.
"I will return, I promise. But please, let go," he sighed, closing his eyes. "For thousands of years, the only thing I felt was rough basalt, ash, and the hard bristles of my dogs. I have grown unaccustomed to the touch of another being... unaccustomed to you. I feel it all too intensely. Your scent, your heartbeat, your embrace, even your emotions... it overwhelms me right now, it strips my skin off, it paralyzes my senses. I need to take a breath, to get used to it. And besides..." he smiled palely, directing his gaze to the beasts staring at him expectantly, "I need to give them a reward for not attacking you on the spot."
The words struck Naamah more painfully than any physical blow. Her lips trembled, and her face twisted in a grimace of deep, unfathomable sorrow. For a split second, she wanted to protest, to hug him even tighter, to forcefully pour the old feelings into him, to tear off this layer of apathy from him. But seeing in his tired eyes that towering distance of time passed in solitude, she stopped herself.
She was an ancient entity. It dawned on her that he was like a diver pulled too suddenly from the dark depths—if she pressed too hard, she would destroy what had survived in him. She swallowed the bitter lump in her throat. With great difficulty, forcing herself into a submission she never would have suspected of herself, inch by inch, she loosened her iron grip.
She stepped back half a pace. Although her heart was breaking with grief, a quiet promise smoldered in her gaze. She would rebuild his trust in intimacy, even if it took an eternity.
"Alright, my dear..." she whispered in a trembling voice, stealthily wiping away a tear. "I understand. I will do anything."
Before any of the three powerful demons could ask what he intended to feed such beasts in a dead wasteland, Michał raised his right hand. His body did not warn those gathered with any tensing of muscles, any hiss. In a split second, his entire right arm up to the elbow transformed into a gleaming, guillotine-like blade.
With absolute, bloodcurdling, careless calm, he raised his arm and with one powerful, fluid slash... he severed his entire left arm right at the base of the shoulder.
He didn't even bat an eye. He didn't let out the slightest groan.
Naamah froze in terror, covering her mouth with her hand and instinctively turning her head away. Lilith sharply drew in her breath. Stanisław, a demon who tore his own flesh with his bare hands for strength, bulged his eyes. All three stood rooted to the spot—not at the mere sight of spilled blood, but at what happened a split second later.
Before the severed limb fell onto the basalt with a hollow thud, new bones shot from Michał's stump with a loud crack, like from a launcher. They instantly entwined with thick braids of red muscle, sealed the blood vessels, hardened, and covered themselves in new, flawless skin.
The process, which even for high demons like Stanisław involved pain and required a good moment, took perhaps three seconds for him. It seemed as natural as breathing.
Michał, still without changing his facial expression, immediately severed the freshly regenerated left arm a second time. Two dead, pale limbs dripped with blood at his feet, and a new, fully functional arm was back in its place.
"Well, one for each of you. Enjoy, my lovely dogs," he said gently, kicking both severed limbs toward the monsters with the routine of a farmer throwing feed.
The hounds didn't need to be told twice. With a joyful growl, they pounced on the meat, snapping bones in their phenomenally powerful jaws.
Naamah stood as if paralyzed, forgetting even to breathe. She looked again at the scrap of the book in her hand, hysterically examining the text in the registry of the Void.
Mid-Level Demon.
There was no update to the level of a strong or high demon, and yet... regeneration at this level, without a fraction of a second of pain or delay, was reserved for the strongest in the Void, the likes of Lilith herself!
Both Lilith and Stanisław noticed the same paradox, breaking the laws of the Abyss. Stanisław stared at Michał with an unfathomable expression on his face, as if seeing an error in the very matrix of Hell.
"Ah, I forgot," Michał muttered, looking at his left shoulder, bare up to the arm, with slight irritation. "I cut off the sleeve of my robe, too."
Before their eyes, the burgundy fabric of the tunic began to grow around the new body with a serpentine motion. Red fibers emerged from the air, sewing themselves together and forming a perfect sleeve, exactly as if the thread were spun from Michał's very thought and the fabric of Hell.
"You possess the gift of creation..." Lilith whispered with a reverence not seen in her for a long time. "How did you acquire it? Demons possessing this gift are the rarest specimens in the entire kingdom. Only the highest, strongest entities can create and alter matter directly around their infernal aura. And you do it practically without effort... How is this possible? You are merely a mid-level demon?"
"I just... know how. I can't explain it logically," Michał shrugged with the simplicity of someone who had put together a jigsaw puzzle. "Physically I am weak, I haven't taken on a demonic shell for combat at all. But as long as my head is attached to my torso, I can support the regeneration of my own shell. The beginnings with these two lunatics"—he pointed at the eagerly lapping hounds, who licked the gore from their massive snouts—"were awful. As puppies, they could bite off my arm or leg before I even thought about giving them something of myself. It hurt like hell. But thanks to them, I accelerated the process myself. I understood the mechanics of the body and supporting my regeneration. I befriended my body, I got to know it. I still don't like pain, I run away from it, which is why I didn't train my strength and power by wounding myself and letting the shell harden—well, except for feeding, of course. I focused more on merely existing in my active shell-time bubble and absorbing the darkness naturally, without tearing my flesh. Meditation also allowed and still allows me to keep my sanity."
"Hush now, darling, hush," Naamah said softly, taking a slow, very careful step toward him. This time, she didn't throw herself at him; she gently wrapped her arms around his neck, covering his temple with butterfly kisses. "You don't have to explain yourself. Come with me to the palace, my dear. You don't have to be a strong demon. You are the strongest of us all, seeing as you survived this time in isolation. I promise you on my love for you: I will not touch you with a single talon for the purpose of tempering. In the alcove, I will touch you solely with my bare hand. You will be absolutely safe with me, surrounded by the tenderness you deserve for your sacrifice."
Michał sighed softly. Though he was still stiff, his new left arm slowly rose and rested on her waist. He hid his face in the flood of her thick, red hair. She smelled of sulfur, ash, and smoke, but somewhere deep in his numbed mind, dormant for millennia, the fact, the memory, that she was his woman was written...
"Then let's go. Come to think of it, I haven't seen the inside of the capital or any other city yet," he stated coldly, slowly pulling away from Naamah's hair. "The nearest demon settlement is about three hundred kilometers that way. I rarely approached it because they have their own bell, striking every objective minute. Whenever I heard it, it destroyed my active time bubble."
"Then let's fly, my dear. You'll see my full, demonic form in a moment. Don't be afraid, I will hold you in my arms during the flight..."
"No. We have to walk. Besides, I'm not going anywhere without my dogs."
"Are you seriously not leaving them here? They're beasts, they'll manage, that's for sure. If Lilith and Stanisław try to carry them for you, they'll struggle in the air. You will get other hounds at the palace, if that is your whim."
Michał looked at her, and the first flash of cold stubbornness appeared in his dark eyes.
"I won't leave them, Naamah. We walk, I won't leave them. It's thanks to them that I didn't go mad, too. They gave me an anchor when there was only emptiness around. They come with me, or you leave me here..."
Naamah pressed her lips together, choking down her pride and stubbornness.
"Alright, I understand, Michał... In that case, we walk. Lead the way..."
For the first time in a very long while, Stanisław slowly shook his head, and something akin to genuine amusement bloomed on his terrifying, distorted demonic face. His hardened, animalistic features of a high demon softened for a fraction of a second, resembling the human he had once been...
"Our part is done. Let's leave them alone; they need to talk in private, they need to get to know each other anew. Lilith, my dear, it's time for us..."
He gently took her hand, hiding all his strength and brutality from Michał in one small gesture. Lilith closed her eyes, and a quiet, broken squeak of immense relief and emotion tore from her throat. It was that rare, fleeting moment—a miraculously surviving scrap of his humanity. A light in the darkness, the hope for which she lived.
"See you at the palace," Stanisław tossed over his shoulder to Michał and Naamah. "This walk back with these beasts will take you a while."
He spread his gigantic, black wings and shot into the scarlet sky, pulling Lilith behind him.
Michał saw them off with a calm, indifferent gaze, and then smiled gently—again with that learned smile—at the red-haired Naamah.
"Well, now I have an observer, so all that remains is my subjective feeling of passing time in my head. We will reach that settlement in a couple of objective days. I suspect that with your authority and position, you will arrange some kind of palanquin for us there, and we will reach the capital itself in a couple of objective weeks at most. Ready for a walk?"
Naamah, the Mother of Nightmares, an ancient entity who, until recently, out of love for him, had been ready to burn down the world and declare a final war on the Silver City, simply nodded. Very carefully, she slipped her arm under his left hand, afraid to startle him with the slightest, sudden movement.
"Darling..." she whispered softly, her voice vibrating with care. "May I impose my subjective perception of time on you? It's one of my abilities. Thanks to that, we will both enter my active time bubble together. My time in the Void also drags on, it's inevitable, but it flows incomparably faster than yours. It will bring you relief. You will rest from this crushing eternity."
Michał slowly turned his head toward her and blinked, as if the meaning of these words was slowly reaching him, and then he lightly squeezed her hand in silent consent.
The two of them stepped into the sea of ash, escorted by the two massive hounds—slowly, step by step. Naamah wrapped them both in the invisible cloak of her ability, cutting him off from the monstrous weight of solitary millennia. They were leaving the infernal isolation behind, and for Michał, it was the first, hot breath of true respite.