An Angel’s Road to Hell

Cassandra Pendragon

I wasn’t dreaming, well not exactly. I swam in an ocean filled with memories. Each drop represented a scene from my past, a brief glimpse of what had been. Parts of the endless sea were calm and full of light, others were dark and dangerous, unknown depth that would swallow me up without a chance of return, but I didn’t feel threatened. I didn’t have to go there.

If there had been some kind of time in that place, days or even weeks would have passed while I glided from one spot to the next, searching, always searching. I didn’t know what I was looking for but I knew I had to find it, more than just my life hung in the balance. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t take a stroll down memory lane, not now. There was something… calling for me.

I passed scenes I thought I recognised, moments I had already lived through, and others that were alien but felt like I was connected to them, as if I had returned home after being away for years. I was itching to explore, to make them mine again but I knew that I couldn’t. If I allowed a single memory to claim me now, I would lose them all, of that I was certain.

I went further and further, making my way through slices of frozen moments until I finally found what I had been looking for. It was nothing special, just another drop among hundreds, thousands of others. Small and inconspicuous it hovered before me, Mephisto’s face staring at me. He repeated two sentences, over and over: “you can’t yet use your magic outside of your body… your core will always heal you…” Light flashed before my eyes and I remembered clearly what he had told me before I had tried to heal my body and why it mattered so much right now. By the Great Fox, I had been poisoned and betrayed!

Suddenly I knew exactly how I had gotten here and with the realisation, the walls, or rather the world around me flickered. Light exploded from each frozen memory until all I could see was white nothingness. For the fracture of a second I felt like I was falling, or as if I had missed a step on the stairs, and then the light receded, silhouettes and figures creeping slowly inwards form the edge of my vision. And with them came the torment.

Shassa’s words rang in my mind: “for your sake, I hope you won’t open your eyes again.” Now I knew what she had meant. My sight swam with red spots and I could still here the rhythm of an ocean, deafening waves that drowned out every other noise. The smell of something coppery filled my nostrils and I couldn’t open my eyes, but that was nothing compared to the excruciating lances of fire that had pierced my body. There were eight of them, one for each arm and leg and four of them clustered together in my back, close enough that it almost felt like a single wound. I couldn’t move a muscle, pure agony suppressed every motion my overloaded brain might come up with.

I had thought I already knew a little about pain, but I had been wrong. In contrast to every other instance I could remember, the flames that seemed to consume my nerves became hotter and more ravenous by the second, each fluttering beat of my heart nearly threw me back into unconsciousness and after a few moments I even begged for the sweet release of darkness. It was unbearable, even my thoughts seemed to be hurting me while I felt my blood trickle along my limbs and pool around me.

I tried to scream but I didn’t have the strength, I tried to move but crystal grazed against my bones and the feeling made acidic bile rise in my throat. And then someone drove the spikes even deeper, through my body and into the ground below. As if from a great distance I heard the splintering sound my ribs made, when they were crushed. It felt like I was being sawed into small pieces and for seconds, minutes, hours, I didn’t know, my world was reduced to eight waves of agony that pulsed through my body. I reflexively tried to curl my tails around myself, a movement I could actually make.

Unbelievably strong hands grabbed them at their base and with a mighty twist and a dry crack, the bones broke. Bloody splitters pierced my skin when they were yanked in the other direction and I passed out. But only briefly.

Cool fingers brushed over my cheek as I regained consciousness to find myself again in haze of agony. I couldn’t even open my eyes and the shallow breaths I forced through my opened mouth, accompanied by the gurgling of blood in my lungs, still left me feeling like I was suffocating. I couldn’t place the source for my torments anymore, my whole body was on fire with waves of pain.

“It gets easier with time. Don’t try to fight, it’ll only make things worse.” That voice. I knew that voice. The spider was with me again. The tiniest spark of something, anger maybe, broke through the stupor I was in, but it vanished just as quickly, buried under a mountain of hurt that crushed everything else. I just barely managed to open my eyes and shift my head to stare at her blearily while tears ran down my face. I couldn’t discern much, shapes and colours flickered and changed and I had trouble focusing on anything at all, but Shassa had come close enough that I could at least guess what she was doing.

I could see a stream of blood trickling down my chest and a black spear of the same obsidian I had encountered in the other realm, was stuck through my elbow, piercing the joint perfectly. I laid on my stomach, Shassa had crouched low to whisper into my ear, and I thought I could just barely make out the shadow of the statue she had been imprisoned under, loom above our heads. The bitch had impaled me the same way she had been forced to suffer!

This time my fury was more than just a tiny spark, clearing my thoughts and dulling the onslaught of tormenting sensations that came from all over my body. With callous disregard for the crystalline stakes that had been driven through my back, I tried to manifest my wings and wring the life from the treacherous arachnoid, but as soon as even a glimmer of energy flowed from my core, the poles activated.

It felt like someone was scraping the inside of my bones, organs and even blood clean, using a rusted wire brush with sharpened points. Despite the blood that filled my lungs, I screamed and wailed, a fine mist of red sprayed from my mouth and nose and a seizure raced through my body, opening the wounds even further as my muscles spasmed. Like a drowning fish on land I gasped for air while my body was tearing itself apart. And Shassa gently patted my head through it all, like a mother would with her sick child.

“There, there. I told you not to fight. You can’t escape. Every ounce of magic in your body will be ripped from you, the moment it forms. I’d put you back to sleep but I’m afraid you’d wake up rather quickly, whatever I tried. I still need your energy, but once I’m done, I’ll end your suffering.”

Surprisingly, she got an answer: “Is that so, lass? Yah have an awful lot of plans, for a corpse. Fire in the hole!”

“Wha…” She never got to finish her question as a blinding flash of light, followed by a thunderclap that shook the ground, exploded behind her. Hot air, that smelled of sulphur and molten metal washed over me, tousling my hair and peppering me with pebbles. At the same moment Shassa twitched and stumbled, two bolts buried in her back and one sticking from the side of her neck. Dark blood sprayed from the wounds and covered me in another layer of gore, a scathing touch of acid against my skin, but I didn’t mind the additional surge of pain. I welcomed it, cherishing the small burns, that showed that the spider had been hit. Accurately.

I didn’t know how or why, but the dwarfs had come and for a few glorious seconds I thought I was saved. When even more metal bolts rained onto Shassa prone form and the heavy footsteps of armoured, armed and dangerous soldiers thundered through the hall, hope, powerful enough to drown out the roaring agony, returned a small part of my strength and my vision cleared. I was back in the hall where I had first seen the spider but this time it was me, who was pinned to the ground beneath the statue. Shassa had dropped to the floor close by but I didn’t see the fallen gods, nor their statuettes. At least not until the spider managed to utter a command in an ancient language despite the bolt that still stuck out of her neck.

Another explosion rang out but my eyes had already dimmed, a new wave of agony held me in its grip. I felt like I was being squeezed dry, the scraping had returned, actively destroying parts of my body now, to draw more energy from my core. I faintly registered distant shouts and hurried movements but soon enough even those vanished behind a maelstrom of suffering.

Again I lost all sense of time while I laid there, desensitised to the world, the sole inhabitant of my little island of pain. Every sensation was overwritten by another sharp spike, every thought lost under the suffocating pressure. There were only two possibly outcomes, either I would lose myself, every bit of me slowly chipped away until nothing remained but the pain, a guaranteed descend towards insanity. Or I somehow managed to find something else to cling to, some part of me that hadn’t been buried beneath the onslaught of agony. For an eternity I was lost, it felt like I was trying to climb form the clutches of the ocean onto a rock and every time I found some sort of purchase, another wave dislodged me and threw me back into the churning hell.

I struggled and fought, desperately reaching for anything that wouldn’t burn me, that wouldn’t try to devour what I had left. My heartbeat slowed down to a crawl while I lost more and more of my self awareness. Darkness crept towards me from every direction but I didn’t have enough emotions left to panic, to fear for myself. I didn’t really care anymore as long as the pain would end. And just when the last embers were on the verge of blowing out, I felt something else, far away from my tormented body. Throughout the night, streams of light appeared, the energy, my energy which had been ripped from me, had reacted to my frantic search. Sounds, images and sensations flooded my mind and I rose from the prison of my tortured body on wings of thought.

The hall, the dwarfs and their desperate battle appeared around me. It wasn’t that I could literally see them, I felt, more than I saw, and I was everywhere at once, I didn’t have my own perspective. My perception was bound to my energy, which ran through the statue and towards Shassa who dispersed it into several spell constructs that activate across the hall. I witnessed the pulsing activation of defensive enchantments, now bolstered with my energy and at the same time I knew that she was channeling a small part of it back into the statuettes. Those sparks were than send swirling to the fallen gods who manifested witch a halo of transcendent energy.

It was confusing at first, the simultaneous streams of information were hard to differentiate, but I adapted quickly and made sense of what I perceived. Every last one of my friends had come, my family, Viyara and Erya, the dwarfs, and the elves, only Pete and the children had been left behind. They had apparently challenged the traps and made their way down to the central chamber where they hadn’t wasted a moment.

Viyara had transformed, a towering mass of muscles, silky wings and golden scales that was just now taking to the air in a display of fire and fury, with a pissed off fey on her back. Erya’s eyes were glazed over with her own green strands of magic, sparks of it running along her horns and towards her raised hands were an immense spell construct was beginning to form.

Below them, the dwarfs had formed their ranks, similarly to how they had fought on Boseiju, archers and melee combined into powerful units, bowstrings singing a song of retribution. Astra and Aspera stood side by side, thick bands of magic tying them together from head to toe. Strength flowed from one to the other, bolstering Astra’s spells or lending more force to her sister’s strikes. They moved in concert, gracefully gliding deeper into the hall, their eyes never leaving my prone form under the statue. Pity and disgust were evident on their features but they never missed a step while they headed for the fallen spider.

My mother was distraught. She had taken one look at my mutilated body and apparently lost it. Hands ablaze with churning power, she was charging forward, blind to everything else, except for Shassa and me, her desire to protect and kill warping her usually calm face into a mask of anger. It was astounding how such a small person could become this terrifying within the blink of an eye. Mordred seemed calmer but if I had been on the receiving end of the stare he was appraising the spider with, I’d have looked for a hole to hide in.

And Ahri, well, she was already halfway across the room, her fiery wings catapulting her forwards faster than the eye could follow, a huge sword held steady in her grip. She was going to crash into the legs of the statue, freeing me from its hellish embrace at all cost. As much as I appreciated the sentiment, right now was unfortunately not the best time. I didn’t know how long I had been semiconscious until I had found a way to distance myself from the pain that ravaged me, but the Fallen had fully manifested. I felt the statuettes disintegrate, turning into cracking portals from which the hordes of shadow beasts streamed forth, accompanied by eerie howls that had no place in the world of the living. I could feel them, their strength augmented with sparks of my power while massive swaths of it circled around the gods themselves, turning them neigh invincible. Shassa herself was slowly getting back to her feet, her form pulsing with the first signs of her transformation, her restored concentration allowing her too pull more and more energy from me. This shouldn’t have been a fight, it would have been a slaughter, powered by my own strength.

But now I was awake and ready to command what was mine. I didn’t know what I could do or how I could do it, but I knew that everything she had torn from me was still under my control, her puny will and the feeble enchantments throughout the statue far from strong enough to cope with an immortal. And just now Ahri intended to severe my connection with the statue and thus with the circling web of power. As soon as the legs would snap, I’d maybe be able to regenerate but I’d lose my chance. Right now, within this hall, I was pretty much a fully grown angel, master of everything I touched. I didn’t have much time, but maybe I wouldn’t need it.

I allowed the stream of energy to swallow me completely until I became as much a part of it as it was of me. The pain my body was still trying to flood my mind with, became nothing more than a faint echo, easy to ignore and drowned out by the whole bandwidth of information my magic provided. It was as if I had sprouted an uncountable number of wings, connecting me to Shassa, the statue, the portals, everything the spider, in her ignorance, had fuelled with my strength. Which in turn meant, the more power she had stolen and fed to her creations, the easier it would be for me to dismantle them. With a twist of my thoughts, similar to how I manifested my wings, I took control of the sparkling swirls of energy that surrounded and pulsed through a grinning Sobek. Without a sound, without a trace, he vanished. Silvery blue sparks danced where he had stood for a moment, before they too disappeared, heading back for their source. My body was shimmering ever so slightly while I turned my concentration on Seth.