Author's Note:

Surprise upload a day early because I'll be busy tomorrow, and a Happy Fourth to all the American readers!

xxx

Chapter Thirty-Four

You will face startling loss. It will threaten to overwhelm you.

Hell

March 8th, 1844

Hans, Kariena, and Stella left the staircase behind and stepped into a darkened hallway. Hans held the torch that he had retrieved from one of the rooms upstairs aloft, casting a flickering glow onto gilded walls. Bas-reliefs depicting scenes of mutilation and torture covered them, except where they were set with alcoves at intervals of a few feet. Hans began to walk, moving the torch to peer into one of the alcoves.

Inside was a desiccated human head, mummified but not wrapped with funerary linen. Empty eye sockets glared back at him, the head's jaw agape in a foul expression. Below it was a small metal plate with a name inscribed on it: Sakina, the Recorder. The name meant nothing to him.

"Pretty sure these decorations are new," Hans murmured back to his companions, keeping his voice low.

"Where are we going?" Stella asked fearfully.

Hans picked up the pace slightly, and his companions did in turn, keeping pace with him as they padded along the hallway deep in Hades's ancient temple. They were headed for a particular room, based largely on a hunch.

"There is a room in this temple," Hans said, "that Hades only showed me once. Inside is a shrine, essentially, to Everdark. If anywhere in this place is its center of power, then that would probably be it."

Though there was no outward change in their surroundings, Hans found his breath coming quicker, and his chest began to feel tight, as if something heavy was pressed down upon it. They were getting close. The dark energy grew stronger with every step they took towards the room, eventually becoming sickening. Hans heard Stella and even Kariena moan softly behind him.

They came to the doorway of the chamber, in this strange, museum-like section of the temple, and Hans stepped inside. His torch lent an unearthly glow to the aberrant form standing proudly on the pedestal in the center of the room, dark wings spread wide overhead. Stella gasped, and Kariena's face paled. Hans looked around the rest of the chamber. He could just make out the walls in dim shadow, as well as the faint orange gleam of the ancient weapons that hung from them.

"Why would Hades keep a place like this in his temple?" Kariena wondered as they followed him inside.

"I wondered that, too," Hans said. "I guess that he felt a certain amount of grudging respect for the Master of the Underworld that came before him. He was certainly afraid of Everdark; perhaps he kept this place to remind himself of its dark power. Or maybe he had another reason."

"Which brings me to the other question," Kariena said. "How on earth is a statue emitting dark magic?"

Hans glanced back at her. "It isn't, if my hunch is correct."

He stepped up onto the pedestal itself. The stat that rose before him was eerily life-like, accurate to the individual, dark feathers that covered Everdark's wings, and the taut, powerful muscles in its abdomen and chest. The texture was eerily perfect, too; Hans was quite sure that if he reached out to touch it, he would feel skin, or feather, or fur, indiscernible from that of a living creature. Hans reached to his boot and drew a large knife. He considered the statue for a moment, and then plunged his knife into its chest.

Immediately, dark, ocherous blood welled up around the hilt of his knife, threatening to stain his hands.

"Jesus," Kariena said softly.

Hans adjusted his grip to start dragging the knife down the statue's chest to open a cavity when the sound of footsteps in the hallway beyond stopped him.

"Shit," Hans said, letting go of the knife and turning towards the doorway just as two forms appeared in it.

One quite tall, stripped of all flesh with a ghastly, skeletal blue skull crowned with flames, and the other a rotting, zombified corpse that was still identifiable as his tutor in magic, Marina Blackheart. Hans felt his stomach turn, and for a moment he found himself quite unable to move, to think, even to breathe.

He waited for Hades or Lady Blackheart to speak. To say something that identified themselves as more than just undead slaves of Everdark. But they did not speak. They both moved at once, raising their hands to flood the room with magic.

"No!" Hans yelled.

What happened next occurred in such a blitz that he was hardly able to comprehend it all. Kariena disappeared in a flash of purple-and-blue light, and then something hit his chest, and he fell backwards. Instinctively, he phased through the statue as he fell, landing roughly on the floor behind it. The floor filled with black fire, unlike anything he had ever seen before. It parted around the statue, incinerating iron weapons hung from the walls and scorching the stone deep black. Hans heard Stella screaming, a horrible, tortured scream, and he felt fear for the first time in a long while.

Nightmarish creatures of shadow were visible in the fire, and they roared and screamed as the fire raged around the room, their voices a haunting threnody that lasted barely more than a heartbeat. The fire stopped, and the room was still again. Hans felt hands drag him into an upright position, sitting with his back to the pedestal, dazed and horrified. Kariena knelt in front of him.

"Hans, this is not the fucking time," she said, voice panicked.

Hans heard footsteps as the horrible creatures that had once been his friends swept into the room.

"Hans, you need to fight with me," Kariena said. "Get the fuck up!"

Her words jolted him back to the moment, and he stood up, drawing his swords and setting his jaw. This was just one more fight. Just two more bad guys to deal with. No different from the dozens of other wizards that he had killed in their war against darkness.

"We need to stay together," he said. "We'll deal with the woman first."

Kariena nodded, and then there was no more time. She teleported, and then Hans rolled out from behind the statue, his swords held out to his sides. He came up in a crouch and immediately slashed at the legs of the zombie before him. One of his swords took it through the ankle, and then he saw the gleaming little tips of two knives burst through the front of its chest. The stench of rot and death was nearly overpowering.

He hazarded a glance towards the front of the room and saw a pile of bones crumpled in a heap near the doorway, stripped of their flesh by the unholy fire. Stella was gone.

Hans brought his other sword around to strike it again, but it remained standing even without one of its feet. Dark energy seemed to hold it aloft, and that same energy caught his sword an inch before it met Lady Blackheart's dead flesh. Hans felt a rend as something tore at his heart, threatening to separate his very soul from his body. Kariena tore her knives from its back and stabbed it again, and again, and again, seemingly to no avail. The creature turned its rotted head towards him and fixed hollow empty eye-sockets on him.

"Aaarrggghh!" Hans cried out, dropping one of his swords and clutching at his chest. He had never known pain like this before. It was as if his very heart was being flayed.

The creature that had once been Hades rounded Everdark's statue and raised its hands. Hans went insubstantial and Kariena teleported away as another torrent of fire swept through their half of the room. Hans saw it rage around him and through him, the flames igniting Lady Blackheart's skin. And yet still she stood, and slowly clenched a burning hand as she stared at him, and the tearing in his chest doubled.

He fell to a knee, roaring with pain. His body threatened to lurch back into reality as well, but Hades continued to pour more and more fire into the room. He had never remained phased for more than a second or two at a time, and now it exerted him as he never had been before as he was forced to remain in the ethereal plane for long seconds that stretched out to eternity.

Pain. He was in so much pain. Pain of body, mind, and spirit. He knew that if he let go, it would be over. All he had to do was let go.

He…

He felt the magic inside him waver, and threaten to die. He could not keep this up. And he wondered if he really wanted to.

Hans vaguely saw a flash of light, and then the fire stopped. Hans shuddered back into reality, collapsing to his hands and knees. His skin glistened with sweat, but the adrenaline of a man who had just faced death flooded him. The pain in his chest felt inconsequential by comparison, and he wondered how just moments before he had been contemplating giving up. Hans pushed himself to his feet and saw Hades crumpled to its knees. Kariena slashed through the vertebrae of its neck, and time seemed to slow as the blue skull tumbled through the air, its wreath of flame extinguished.

Hans lunged to his feet and rammed his swords through Lady Blackheart's corroded chest. It screeched and clawed at his flesh with supernaturally sharp talons, leaving bloody furrows in their wake. Hans roared and swept his swords apart, tearing the corpse in half at the armpit. It hit the ground in a writhing mess of slashing limbs, and he rammed his sword through the top of its skull with a sickening crunch. He tore his blade free and kicked the corpse backwards, where it slid several feet in its own blood to come to a rest at the base of the pedestal.

Breathing heavily, Hans turned back to Kariena, who stood behind Hades's crumpled form on the other side of the room.

"Thanks," he said.

Kariena nodded. "Are you going to be alright?"

She paced around the dark robe, casting a disdainful glance down at the blue skull that had shortly before been borne upon it.

"Yeah," Hans said, looking back at Marina Blackheart's defiled body, now in pieces across the floor. His stomach turned again just looking at it. She had been his mentor. His friend. "Yeah, I think I will."

"Good, because I –"

There was movement at the edge of his vision.

Hans whirled around to see Hades's headless skeleton rising from the floor. Moving supernaturally fast, the foul thing cast aside its robe and lunged towards Kariena's turned back, arms outstretched.

"NO!" Hans yelled, throwing one of his swords at the skeleton.

Kariena saw the alarm in his face and began to teleport, but at the same time one of the skeleton's bony hands closed around her wrist. Hans's sword struck Hades's body in the ribcage, shattering several as it passed through them, and causing it to wrench back. Flame exploded in a flashing burst where Kariena had been, and then she appeared in a swirl of light against the far wall of the room, clutching at a charred stump where her arm had been. The spiral of flame cleared, and ashen bones lay at Hades's feet.

"NO!" Hans roared again, rage boiling into his blood.

He began to charge towards Hades, but something hit his back, and then pierced through him. He looked down and saw a shadowy, necrotic claw bursting through his abdomen. It tore back out and he collapsed against Everdark's pedestal, clutching at a tear that split him nearly in two. He was holding his own intestines against the wound, some of them ruptured. His spine was broken, and he could not feel anything below his waist. A shadowy ghoul stood over him, its movements orchestrated by Lady Blackheart's sundered corpse.

Both of them, it seemed, could not be killed.

"Get the hell out of here!" Hans screamed at Kariena, real terror setting in as Hades turned towards her again. She was unresponsive. He couldn't see her face from where he lay.

Jesus Christ, Hans thought, trying to struggle to his feet even if he knew it would be impossible. He glanced down again and saw, through his torn shirt, that his skin around the wound was rapidly blackening. He was corroding away.

Kariena slowly rolled over, and pushed herself into a kneeling position with her remaining arm. Her scarred side faced him, and Hans could see that there was no open wound. It had been totally cauterized by the dark fire. She turned to meet his eyes, and he was surprised by the lack of fear in them.

"It isn't fair that it has to be like this," she said. "We were supposed to have time to build a life together someday. But there's no other way. I hope you were right, Hans."

"Kariena!" Hans said, a single tear rolling down his cheek, "Kariena, I –"

She threw her remaining knife into Hades's advancing form. It stumbled slightly, and she teleported. It lashed the ground where she had been with flame, and then she appeared above Hans, reaching out and closing her hand around the knife that he had plunged into the statue of Everdark. She began to fall, and with it, she dragged the dagger downwards, tearing open a cavity in the statue's chest.

Something fell out of it and clattered to the ground beside Hans just as she landed in front of him. She leaned forwards and kissed him on the lips just as Hades's flame struck her from behind.

There was a flash of light and Hans felt momentary, searing pain, and then she was gone, her bones falling to the floor around him. He stared forwards, unable to think. One second stretched to infinity.

Kariena…

Was dead.

Hans's vision blurred, and he felt a horrible loss, but a familiar one. That same, exact feeling he'd had when Mallory had slipped through his fingers over a decade ago was back. Hopelessness, and weakness, and terror.

And incendiary, all-consuming anger.

For some reason, Hans's vision settled on the thing that had tumbled out of the cavity in Everdark's chest. It was a small, dark disk, irreflective of light. It looked to be crafted of stone, and it seemed very familiar to him.

It was a tensing disk.

Without thinking, Hans snatched it with a bloodstained hand and rammed it into the tear in his own abdomen.

FOOL! YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!

Hans could not formulate any thought in reply to the voice which suddenly screamed in his head, for his chest threatened to burst under an explosion of magic greater than anything any human in history had ever experienced. More power than even Elsa possessed rippled through him, bursting from his eyes as trails of red light and boiling in his blood with insatiable fierceness.

"AAAAAGGGGHHHHH!" Hans screamed, all of his pain and fear and rage amplified ten thousand times as he touched the face of a god.

And then, he felt hatred. Hatred so pure and all-consuming that it was as if he had never known the emotion before. Simply destroying Everdark now would be far too merciful a response to what it had done to him. Hans embraced the power coursing through his body, and the searing, unstoppable pain that came with it.

His body failed and his heart stopped. Energy ruptured his skin and poured out of him in the form of a brilliant light. His body was being incinerated, but his mind was opened to something else entirely. He became conscious of his ability to think about everything at once. His mind moved quickly, jumping between dozens of topics in a fraction of a second, and devoting to each a startling clarity.

It was as if…

It was as if he had become a god.

Hans realized that he had the power to craft for himself a vessel, not unlike a body. He did so, and it stepped out of the ashes of his old form, a being with a herculean musculature and a halo of light that obscured its face. He was more than a human now, and before he could consciously decide otherwise, his very appearance had been sculpted to reflect that.

Hades lashed at him with fire, but the magic parted around him without so much as a thought devoted to it. He raised a hand and it flashed with luminous brilliance, and the skeleton that had once been master of the underworld disintegrated, reduced to atoms. Without turning his gaze, he did the same to Lady Blackheart. Let them finally be laid to rest.

Sorrow immediately gripped him again when the room fell silent, and he knelt beside the remains of his beloved. He raised her skull, pristine and white, and touched it to his forehead, shedding the tears of a god. In his newfound, infinite understanding, he recognized that there was only one way to bring her back.

If he sacrificed all of his power, he could do it. He had already suspected, on some level, and now knew for certain, that this was how he had been recalled to life after his death in New York City. Hades had already given up his power, so that when Hans died, he would be given a second chance. Something of a parting gift, from an old friend.

But Hans could not do the same for Kariena. He wanted to, more than he had ever wanted something before, but he knew that by doing so, he would doom all of humanity in the process. With his current power, there was only one thing that he could do.

Take Everdark's armies away from it.

Hans set Kariena's skull upon the floor again with careful reverence, the loneliness and loss constricting his chest and choking his voice.

"Before Everdark, Hades was Lord of the Underworld," Hans said. Somehow, he knew that he needed to speak these words aloud, and that they would have power. "In time, he came to think of me as something like a son. I am his rightful successor, not the usurper Everdark. With this power, I can claim my right. Let it be done."

A god's words carried with them the weight of law, and his surroundings sloughed away, replaced with a featureless void.

THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE! Everdark's true voice, that of a violent, chaotic force of destruction, raged at him. YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POWERFUL ENOUGH! THE MAGIC SHOULD HAVE TORN YOU APART!

"You will lose," Hans said, his words injected with all of his hatred. "Once my friends and I are done with you, you will have nothing left but oblivion, and the weight of your own failure."

Their powers clashed against each other. It was as if Hans had been plunged into a mighty void, an endless expanse of night, all of it imbued with a force that threatened to crush him. But he had strength of his own, a blazing beacon of radiance that pierced the blackness like the first rays of a new dawn. They roiled against each other like raging seas, and with each blow Hans tested the seemingly boundless limits of his new strength.

THE STRENGTH OF A GOD DOES NOT MAKE YOU POWERFUL, HUMAN. YOU WERE TOO WEAK TO SAVE YOUR LOVER. TEARING HER AWAY FROM YOU WAS A PRIZE INDEED.

"The tensing disk inside of me is yours, isn't it? It's the power of the Lost Immortals. After you killed them, you stored their strength here. Hades never took it for himself because he knew that so much power would destroy him. Even you were too scared to risk taking it into yourself. So you waited, biding your time for the moment that you were powerful enough to absorb their souls."

THE PROTECTOR'S LIFE IS SLIPPING AWAY AS WELL. EVEN WITH YOUR GREAT STRENGTH, YOU CANNOT SAVE THEM ALL. YOU WILL PROVE ONLY YOUR OWN HUBRIS, BOY.

"You can't believe that I was worthy of all this power. An ordinary human, capable of absorbing the souls of not just one god, but one dozen?"

EVEN NOW, MY SOLDIERS WILL SLAUGHTER YOUR EMPRESS LIKE A PIG. WE WILL PUT HER HEAD ON A PIKE AND MARCH IT THROUGH THE STREETS OF YOUR DEFEATED CITIES.

"But I'm not an ordinary human," Hans said. "I am the Avenger, recalled to life with the sole purpose of exacting retribution for your murder of the Lost Immortals. Of course I'm worthy of their souls. I am the only one who is worthy."

NO! Everdark roared. YOU ARE NOTHING!

Everdark's strength faltered, and Hans struck it with all his might, crushing into the darkness with of twelve forgotten gods. He felt a vicious pleasure as it screamed with pain, and then a brilliant triumph as it fell away from him. It was retreating, giving up. The Underworld was his.

In the next moment, Hans was standing in the depths of Hades's temple again. He felt a new, tremendous weight upon his shoulders, a burden that he would bear until the end of time, if he had to.

He took a shuddering breath, and then closed his eyes. His part in this story had finally come to an end. He wasn't happy, but he was finally on the path towards peace.

xxx

The weight around Elsa's neck slackened, and then disappeared. She gasped for air, clutching at her neck, and whirled around to see that Mercier and his furies had collapsed to the ground. They no longer moved, but even as she watched them, they faded away, rose petals rising from their disintegrating forms and billowing in a soft, supernatural breeze.

Two polearms clattered to the ground on either side of her, followed by the heavy cloaks that the flying wizards had worn. The wizards themselves were gone, a swirl of red and white petals drifting through the shattered windows of the cathedral.

Elsa looked around with wonderment and awe.

Something marvelous had happened.

xxx

Anna Siguror watched with a cool detachment as the soldiers burst through the chamber's doorway. The last two members of her personal guard leapt into the fray, the sound of clanging steel on steel filling the room. They fought valiantly, but within seconds, they were overwhelmed and hacked to pieces. Anna backpedaled until she touched the wall, and knew that she had nowhere else to go. She turned towards the doors that let out on the balcony just in time to see them burst inwards, a horde of enemies practically falling over themselves as they stormed into the room.

Goodbye, Michael. I hope that you have a long life before you rejoin me and your father, Anna thought, falling to the ground and raising a hand as an enemy drew back his sword to finish her off.

But… he stopped, his arm held aloft, and for a bizarre moment, Anna saw fear in the man's eyes.

What…?

Then his sword fell out of his hand, clattering to the ground. He collapsed to his knees, clutching at his face as he turned to flower petals before her eyes. In a heartbeat, the room was filled with a storm of them, and borne aloft by an unseen current, they floated out the window.

Anna ran after them onto the balcony to see, silhouetted against the setting sun, a sea of roses before her eyes.

She had not dared to hope that salvation would come. She had not dared to think that she would survive this night. Now, faced with the reality that she would see her son again, Anna fell to her knees and began to sob uncontrollably.