"What do you—" A grunt interrupted as Fern kicked a demon out over the edge of the overhang. "—mean you don't know where we are?!"
Hell wasn't known for its contiguous or reliable nature. V had assumed that jumping into a pit would at least mean the entrance remained above their heads, but they had come to the top of the cliff above the frozen lake only to find no exit above them. It was like they'd fallen to the frozen lake out of thin air.
"It's the wrong hell," he answered distractedly.
"There's more than one?"
"Yes and no." Griffon latched his talons into a hooded devil that meandered too close. The familiar remained unable to land killing blows by exerting magic, but the ability to siphon it was another matter altogether. V caught the thorny skull, carelessly spinning it atop a finger as the rest of the body disintegrated. "The Underworld and the Inferno are similar to the night and day kingdoms, though separated by more than mere distance. There are commonalities, but none that would allow me to know my way."
"Then how do you know where we're going?"
"My magic draws me naturally toward a certain destination.. It is where the portal resides and where I entered. As we get closer, even you should be able to feel it, assuming you didn't when you arrived."
"I don't really remember arriving. I woke up already on my feet on a path that took me to some weird woods, and then I was in this big burning desert and I got dragged through a bunch of boiling blood and then all those trenches..." She rubbed gingerly at the back of her neck. The cracked panel caused her no pain, but he imagined whatever machinery was underneath it was probably every bit as vital to her function as his own spine. "Seriously, how did you find me?"
"Your black box."
She nodded as though that made perfect sense at first. A second thought gave her pause, and the third left her squinting at him, incredulous and bewildered. "Pod signal works in hell?"
"No. It was not the signal it emits, but the core within." He shrugged deeper into his coat, tugging his hood against the frigid draft. "Did I eat something strange before the portal opened?"
Her face curdled at the turn of phrase. "Me, almost. Then you went for Jorinde and Jorindel, then Scheherazade and… The book. That's when the reaction inverted. You ate the book."
Could that be the case? Scheherazade still had the grimoire when he left, and it didn't seem any worse for the wear. If nothing else, the attempt was enough to have changed something. The dragon was awake. Attentive. Still perceiving all that he perceived, but in addition to its own observations. Senses it could choose to share with him or not. It could think without borrowing V's thoughts and had taken up the unfortunate pastime of voicing those thoughts.
[Ingrate.]
He rolled his eyes and threw the skull casually over the cliffside to shatter against the ice. "Since then, the dragon has become very…vocal in its assistance. It could sense you, as you sense me."
"Imitation dragon souls…" She shook her head, muttering darkly. "Goddamn it."
"You preferred when they were mere enemy components?"
"No, just— What am I supposed to do when I hear 'oh this bone shard of a real dragon knows how to find me because I've got a convincing facsimile of a dragon's soul for a power supply'? Does Briar know the cores have that much fidelity to them? Can you even make humans out of a soul that isn't human?"
[A shrewd question.]
V cleared his throat and gestured at himself.
Fern frowned and set a hand on her hip. "No offense, V, but I can't think of a worse future than resurrecting humans only for them to all turn out to be shapeshifting dragon-powered witches."
A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. When she put it like that, it did sound like a disaster.
She sighed and ambled along the cliff in search of some means of escape, slapping another Caina out of her way as if it were a gnat. They weren't strong sorts to begin with. At such remote heights they didn't have the boon of numbers to bolster them from annoyance to meaningful threat, especially when they were so conveniently close to a precipice. She snatched the scythe from another, thwacked it across the ribs with the handle, and pinned it to the ice on its own blade.
Griffon whistled overhead. "Enthusiastic, aren't we, lady-bot?"
Whatever it was that left her in such a catastrophic state swirled dark across her face. A murk both deep and poisonous and coldly familiar to V. She came out of it with a shiver and sent the demon's head flying with an imprecise but ruthless kick. What she had endured she did not say, and he would never ask.
The way her voice growled up from the bottom of her stomach was answer enough. "Just working through some things."
"Do not exhaust yourself too quickly," said V, not without understanding. "There will be a time to make your displeasure known before we can return to the night kingdom."
"Fought my way down here, figures I'll have to fight my way out…" Two dripping stalactites caught her eye. "Hey Griffon, can you check that out? I can feel warm air."
Griffon flitted up to investigate and disappeared into a crevice. It wasn't a large gap, but it would admit them if they wished to try their luck. "Whew! A little more than warm in here."
"Most likely it goes under the river," said V, creaking on cold-stiffened joints to join them. "Will you be able to tolerate the heat?"
"I should be able to compensate as long as I don't have to do anything rigorous." She shifted Pod's frigid grip on her shoulders, pulling herself up into the gap and extending a hand back down. "And provided I don't end up in the river again."
The low ceiling inside forced them both to a bent gait. The narrowness would have been forbidding if there were any demons, but they remained alone in the increasing swelter.
It was said that the lowest stratum of the Underworld housed dragons of incredible power who considered the comings and goings of hell's kings beneath their attention. Beings of untamed flame born from a sea of fire who could only be stirred by the call of the strong. There were Caina at the frozen lake, and Abyss demons among the troughs where he found Fern. The odds were not impossible that that the Inferno might also have such a place.
He proved half right. The tunnel opened into a larger cavern system lit in the burnished orange of slow flowing magma far below them. Bulbous sacs lined the walls, each a tiny burning sun nestled close to its siblings. On occasion, blurry shapes within twitched and jumped.
Fern circled around them at a wide berth. "Demons come out of eggs…?"
"Not all of them," V puffed. "At the lowest and highest levels, the Underworld has its own natural order that isn't unlike that of the human world. The Inferno may not differ much in that regard."
"What about the middle?"
"The kind of demon which springs into existence simply as it is and rarely survives long enough to become anything greater, having neither ancestor nor progeny." He scanned along for another hole. Anything to get out of the heat and the clingy swamp it was making of his coat. "Like the ones in the ravine."
One of the eggs ruptured in a firework pop of sparks. The rest in the bunch followed suit, birthing a small herd of squat, fat spiders little bigger than cats. Several rattled their legs and hissed, their mouths aglow with fresh flame. Fern curled her lip and reared back a leg.
"Hey, woah, woah!" Griffon cawed. "Easy on the trigger finger, lady bot! This is a nest!"
"And?" she growled.
"And little spiders mean big spiders!"
"A nest…" V mused. "Phantom's birthplace?"
"Eh, could be."
"You two know one of these things?" Fern asked.
"If by 'know', you mean 'smoked a long time ago'. Could've been V's 4th familiar but just like our princess here, his temper ran a little too hot and got him in trouble~"
Griffon hopped along on the ground, flapping his wings to threaten the spiders back. Even a newborn devil was still a devil, so it took a few pops of electricity at them to get them to move along. "Any one of these guys can become Phantoms if they get big enough. In the meantime, there's probably plenty of female Phantom spiders and we all cook up nice in a fire, so I wouldn't go around smooshing things while we're passing through a colony uninvited, capisce?"
Fern let the spiders trundle off unkicked and watched them scuttle down across the magma.
"…Sooo." V tensed. That was the sound of questions, but questions from Fern were a great deal more unpredictable than those from 49. "Are humans… cross-compatible with all demons or…?"
He paused just long enough to suck in the breath, focus on not considering the answer, and pretend he hadn't heard anything over Griffon's explosive wheeze.
"Hey, I—! Oough…"
She swayed. V immediately latched the cane around her shoulders and snatched her back against the cavern wall. The subtle roar of ventilation kicked up around her. Her feet tripped around one another but didn't fail her. A good sign. "The heat?"
"No. Just some gunk left in my vents. Internal pressure problem, not temperature." She raised the back of her shirt and a pebbly rain of red chunks clattered around her boots. "Let's keep moving. Convection's not gonna do me any favors if we hang around here too long."
They managed to find several large, would-be exit tunnels. Regrettably, every single one opened at the river. Either at the flow's surface or somewhere that was never quite high enough for either of them to trust their ability to glide across it. Especially when Fern made mention that there was some kind of centipede devil the length of a skyscraper living in the river. From her, that was more approximation than exaggeration. Whatever she'd seen was large enough to snatch them out of the air if it took even passing interest in them.
Turning back for the sixth time, they paused at a fork in the caves, neither of them hopeful that the other path would be any more fruitful than the last.
A rising rustle and a gust of hot air kept them from getting too comfortable.
Young spiders stampeded by, leaving small flames as they passed. In their wake came the heavy steps of the nest's matriarch. A Phantom spider glowing like molten gold and crowned with skulls above the smooth jewels of a half a dozen red eyes. Liquid flame dripped from her chelicerae. Each were bigger than V and raised high to admit a hiss that pushed against them with all the suffocating heat of an opened blast furnace.
Fern stepped up, but V was quick to snatch the back of her shirt and dissuade her with a slow shake of his head. Fighting would get them killed for certain in a space so small. Turning their backs would do no better. At the bare minimum, it would be best to withdraw back into the fork they came from, where they at least had open air to try and escape into if it came to that. He stepped carefully backward, avoiding the smaller spiders scuttling between his legs, and Fern followed suit.
The spider matriarch closed the distance to mere feet in the blink of an eye. V stopped. If she wanted them dead, it would be done. This was a dominance display, and one that he was content to leave unchallenged.
Beside him, Fern turned her face away. He pulled it back to front and center with a slow movement from his cane, without once breaking contact with his own reflection in the glossy, bulbous eyes. Acknowledging dominance could pass for respect among high level demons. To let that slip into submission or any show of fear? That was death.
The Phantom spider did not laugh, but V thought her myriad eyes glinted with something like amusement as she turned away, indifferent to them as creatures who knew better than to challenge her in her own nest.
"NOASMI VASEMILIL, EXUVIAE."
When it had disappeared down the tunnel with all its young and they were alone again, Fern leaned close to him. "Did it just talk to you…?"
"Yes." He could barely write Enochian, much less understand it spoken to him. Tracing the sounds out into letters in his mind, he picked it apart until he was able to isolate at least one thing that made sense. "I believe it said something about ascending."
Fern trotted, albeit cautiously, down the tunnel the mother spider had come from. It was just like all the other openings, save a silk thread swaying in the thermal currents. A means to get them to the top of the cliff rather than drop them in the river. Fern tested it first. Tugging and swinging wastefully as she climbed. She needn't have bothered. The thread of a Phantom would have no trouble supporting them.
V looked back into the cave until she called after him to be sure he was alright. The thread was a nice find, but he knew it was not intentional.
'Vasemilil' was not the kind of ascension that had anything to do with climbing.
They emerged from one extreme into another. At the top of the cliff, slushy rain fell over vast, flat plains of churned mud. Footsteps fell around them, heavy as though their invisible and intangible owners were deeply overburdened. They walked in opposite directions. Clashing at times as they marched out an unending crop circle. Fern knelt and touched one of the tracks. The footprints were human, but if she thought anything of this, she didn't say. A hush prevailed. They were wholly alone except for the unseen spirits marching in opposition through and around them.
He glanced behind them. There was no sign of a cliff anywhere, much less a spider's thread.
"Which way?" he asked Griffon.
The familiar flew off with a perfunctory gripe to determine their best course.
The rain had a slimy quality to it as it melted against V's skin and clothes. Like it would congeal into a gel if enough of it pooled on him. He doubted the spiders had come anywhere near such a cold, squalid place. Fern offered neither surprise nor complaint. Steam sighed from her body to join the rolling gray mists. She remained on one knee with her eyes closed and chin up, allowing the rain to bathe away the blood that still clung to her. The stiffness of it in her clothes and hair and the almost elastic film of it on her skin, all washed down and dripped away into the mud. Only her clothes refused to be cleansed. The heat and time had dyed them a persistent russet shade.
When she was done, she stood beside him and stared out at the crowded yet aggressively empty expanse of mud. Whispered, as if she didn't dare disturb the squelching of the footsteps, "It's so empty..."
That was the way of hell. It was a callous, malignant plane—more so than he ever understood when he let himself fall there. Owing to his tunnel vision, he'd thought of it as only a place where human pains like grief and terror could be scrubbed out of him. Demons did not feel such things, whether they were weak or strong.
But it was more than that too.
He'd only been able to appreciate it twice. Together with Dante and alone as he stumbled through hell on the razor's edge of death. In the thin spaces between the constant adrenalines of battle and nightmare, he'd glimpsed hell with unguarded eyes. Twisted and lightless and covered in perverse imitations of things that grew in the human world. Repugnant and unrepentantly vile in almost every visible aspect and in many more that could only be felt. It stank. Blood and rot soaked the soil, the air, the atoms that made up the entire realm. Yet grasses still grew. Trees. An abundance of maggots to each rare butterfly that also called hell home. Poisonous, of course. But lovely.
At times it simply felt like hell was simply where everything from the human world came to decompose and attempted to do so with a certain dignity despite innate brutality. Like mushrooms feasting on soft dead things beneath wet soil and mold spores expanding in chaotic patterns.
Those things had their own beauty. So, too, did hell. A solemn loveliness that existed in the moments when no blood flowed, and only the relentless loneliness of it remained.
V had occasionally gotten a similar feeling in the city ruins. When there was nothing to see but half-crumbled, overgrown architecture, and bodies of beings he barely understood rusting in the sun. In hell, the comfort of isolation was its transitory nature. The beauty was partly in the reprieve from chaos. In 11945, solitude was forever, even if you had someone beside you.
Perhaps that was why he'd felt so comfortable there.
A clash of metal, echoing as though from a great distance, brought Fern to attention. V looked up, but without any tension. For him, the sound was burned in. He would recognize the sound of Rebellion clashing against the Yamato anywhere.
Apparitions danced at the edge of the visible. A flash of blue. A splash of red. Twin glints of silver sparking against one another. At the then-seeming height of his folly, there'd been a rain like this, hadn't there? He was surprised just how little the ghosts affected him. It was a mistake already made. The many paths that might have opened it if he had been a little less proud (a little less haunted by the mere possibility of being hurt) stretched before him, but each was merely a daydream. It was beyond any devil, or even hell itself, to tempt or shame him with his own past.
[Yet you are not beyond regret.]
Shut up.
Fern watched the battling shapes with unguarded wonder. Focused on them as though they held some secret she had not expected would be shared with her. "That's him, isn't it. Vergil."
"Before our unfortunate sabbatical in hell."
"The blue one, right?"
The confidence of her guess stirred far more in V than the sight itself. Something that might have been pride and might have been distaste and was likely both tangled into such a knot that the only way to be rid of it was to slice through entirely. "How do you know?"
"Cause he's got that look on his face you get when you're about to become somebody's problem." She emulated the electrified gleam in Vergil's eye and V's own smirk at the same time, then dissolved into gentle laughter. "You move alike, too. In italics."
He tasted the implications of that description as he repeated it slowly to himself. Was that her way of describing a combination of precision and flourish? In the fog, his own ghost danced. Steps he remembered, performed in a body he couldn't quite recall the feeling of living in. "I don't think so."
"…Does it feel incomplete to not be him?"
"It used to." He scraped for somewhere solid to sink his cane, but the earth was all mush. "Since coming to your world, incompleteness is not something I feel. It is simply something I know myself to be."
The dragon rumbled with amusement. He'd have liked to ask it if it had something to share, but Fern whispered another question into the gloom.
"…Will you forget us when you're him again?
His mind stalled behind his eyes. It hadn't bothered V, but then he had not truly given it any thought. It was unlikely that he would truly forget them. He didn't want to. Yet the likelihood of getting exactly that irked him. In a way so familiar he couldn't help but scowl at his own foolishness.
"Would it surprise you if I admitted I would like to?"
She shriveled back, confused and more than a little hurt. "Even 49?"
Dante fought him for every little thing he tried to call his own. From the cradle up until the top of the qliphoth. The book of Blake poems shone in his memory, but it was just one of a dozen case studies in the endless irritation of never being able to simply have something because he was part of a set. V would presumably have to share his own existence in the same fashion upon his return. If it was as it had been, there was much of him that would sublimate down beyond any semblance of self. The marriage of heaven and hell ultimately produced something beyond the sum of its parts. But he'd lived as a whole for over a year now. Without the instinct to rejoin or the threat of his own death to light a fire under his heel.
It wasn't that he personally wished to forget his time here; he simply didn't want Vergil to remember it.
"It may be because I am him that I think so in the first place," V acknowledged somberly. "But there are things which I would prefer to belong only to me."
She stiffened and turned away, uselessly wicking water from her clothes and smoothing her hair and tugging at her soggy gloves. V knew the depth of what he'd said. But it didn't escape him that in the scope of a YoRHa's complicated relationship with memory, it might have meaning that he did not have the insight to fathom.
She cleared her throat. "You ever figure out how you got separated again?"
He thought for the thousandth time of hell. Reclamation. Recombination. It did happen, and he could remember everything about when he'd been separated last time, so why was there such an abrupt blank after being sprawled on the ground with Dante, exhausted and staring at the starless sky? There was no evidence Vergil had split himself again. No evidence it had even crossed his mind.
The dragon huffed. [If it could not be, then it must not be.]
Something you know that I don't?
[My own being is manifest bones and I ponder it not. Why should I have any care for the intricacies of another's existence? You are. Is that not sufficient?]
"No," he answered Fern, finally. "No more than I figured out where the red dragon's body could be."
Griffon returned. "Jeez, what is this a funeral? Come on, I found us a way out of this dump."
The reprieve lasted only as long as it took them to trudge out of the mud and onto a path carved through an empty red landscape. It seemed to lead up yet carried them vaguely down. Space was distorting more aggressively, and the almost gravitational pull in V's body suggested they were nearly there. The basin calling to whatever measure of itself had sealed the cracks in his being.
Fern stopped as they reached the top (bottom?), nearly stumbling in her attempt to step back.
Broken down ramparts glittered with the peeking eyes of an unguessable number of demons. A score of them rushed out, spurred by Fern's show of hesitation. Armored, serpentine things he did not recognize and a swarm of annoying looking bat creatures with cyclopean red eyes. The lion's share remained behind to gauge just how difficult this prey would turn out to be for them.
"Do not hold back," he advised. "A demon is at its most powerful in its own realm."
"I'd noticed." She raised her fists, eyes sharp on the threat before them. "Griffon, care to give me a head start?"
The air shuddered with lightning, ozone replacing the stink of blood. Fern surged forward, a dark blur atop the red dust. Three demons had fallen before the opening shock wore off and they realized she was in their midst.
"Wait, shit—look out!"
A bird several magnitudes larger than Griffon dropped from the sky It swooped through the half-stunned demons, devouring most of them whole and a few of the more unfortunate ones in pieces. Fern managed to dodge its beak only to be bowled over by the gust as it took off and perched atop the parapets.
"Holy shit, is that the size you can grow to, Griffon?" Fern coughed and climbed back to her feet, still at the ready even as she grinned wickedly at Griffon. "Are you just a little baby devil?"
"Shut the hell up! I'm gonna shock you!"
A rumbling 'hmph' emanated from the monstrous devil bird as it cleaned its beak on the black stones. It resembled a parrot he thought, in that way hell had of producing warped reflections of human world nature. Four eyes all situated on one side of its head regarded them with animal indifference. "A reminiscence merely dreaming of being a devil has nothing to do with me."
"Don't act all high and fuckin mighty after you lost one of your eggs on our side, dipshit!"
V raised a brow. "Someone you know?"
"Huh? You were there, V, granted you weren't doing so hot. Remember? Big ugly bird fetus with a broad on its back?"
"Malphas?" V's face scrunched. "This is Malphas?"
Griffon tilted his head. "Uuhh, yeah?"
"Who was the woman then?"
"How the hell should I know?!" He flew up, flicking his tongues childishly at the unruffled devil. "Probably some sorceress that stole from a nest and then couldn't keep the thing on a leash. What are you even doing here, don't you have some tomes full of forbidden knowledge to read or something?"
Malphas bore the jabs much the way one might tolerate a minor annoyance. He had no use for dominance displays. Just like the demons it fed on; they were permitted to exist in his sight the same way uneaten food was permitted to stay in a pantry. "A giant gate to an unknown world is worthy of observance." It laughed again and preened its wings. "The passage of the girl and the rind as well."
"Of interest," she repeated, slow and flat with a suppressed swell of temper. "Understandably, the last time something showed unexpected interest in her. "Why would I be of any interest to demons? Is it my core?"
Malphas' seven eyes opened fully, rolling toward Fern with absolute focus. "Knowledge requires tribute."
"Buzz off, Polly!"
V barely heard them.
The demoness he met when he first closed the gate called him carcass. Now Malphas referred to him as the rind. Even the Phantom spider had called him—exuviae, was it? A word he didn't know that he initially mistook for Enochian. If it was as Latin as it sounded, he could make a guess what was meant by the 'ex'. The outside, the shell, something left behind when the inner portions were removed.
Only V was the inner portion. An organ ripped free of the body. The entire premise of his bid for survival was that he required something to live inside of. Urizen was the carcass. Urizen was the shell. He was the container drained of everything that wasn't pure demonic power and desires bereft of the human reasons that had birthed them, and a single thought possessed V.
The demons knew something he didn't.
[You would be a fool to sacrifice to devil in the name of self-knowledge.]
"I don't intend to," V muttered, scales creeping up his arm.
"Oh, are we doing this?" Griffon hopped eagerly onto V's shoulders. "Tell me we're doing this; I can't stand this asshole."
"We're very close to our destination," V said simply. "And one of the basin myths was a that sufficient spilling of demons' blood could summon it."
Fern rolled her shoulders and braced on her heels without question. "I take it this is the time to make my displeasure known?"
"That it is." He took a deep, steadying breath. It was one thing to bolt through hell with a destination in mind. Resolutely ignoring devils was a good way to temporarily leave them confused about the strength of their opponent. He'd been gone well before any of them could call his bluff. Facing the number behind those walls would be different. "Don't die."
He snapped, and Nightmare bore down on the ramparts, shattering them and forcing Malphas from his perch. Griffon soared after him with a raucous laugh, and V followed after Fern.
Whether she took the myth about spilling their blood very literally or she was still 'working through some things', he couldn't say. Either way, she tore through them with strength she had never wasted on androids. Maiming more than she killed. Leaving the broken and spilling on the ground. The only demons who never survived her passage were snake-like demons and the great grinning devils whose auras reminded him of Baphomets.
Working through some things it was.
V kept close in her wake, the cane aglow as he cleaned up. After all, he was living proof that a devil only nearly dead could still cause a world of trouble. He caught one by the throat which had the audacity to climb back to its feet and reduced its head to ash in his claws. Amalgamated lizard bats surrounded him, forcing him to work quickly at summoning copies of his cane to pierce them out of the air.
He gave an annoyed huff of a sigh. They were small fry, but it was difficult to deal with groups without Shadow to rely on. Particularly while Griffon was busy harassing Malphas.
[You do not use your full capabilities and then you complain?]
"I can't maintain Nightmare for very long."
[The creature is merely an accessory. I meant your birthright, oaf.]
Birthright…? His eyes flicked to the bracelet. "You do know I am not an actual witch."
[You walk the hell of your mother and believe her power will not answer you. Are you still so used to doing everything by your own power, or are you merely stupid?]
He really wasn't fond of this mouthy addition to his thoughts. "The opposite. The last time I dabbled in the Umbran, I nearly died."
His memories flicked with unexpected clarity through his mind. It was going through them. Reading them to see what he meant for itself since it wasn't with him then. And when it knew, it laughed.
[You lack power… Oh, do not sulk. The fault is yours. You guard yourself so relentlessly you refuse to take even what is already yours. If the devils call you husk, might it not be because you have neglected to fill yourself?] Nothing touched him, but something slithered up his arms, raising the hairs along them. [Your nightmares feed well. Can the same be said of you?]
He did guard himself. Enough to be wary of what the dragon hoped to gain from this. But Griffon was occupied, and Shadow was gone. Only Nightmare remained. Too powerful for him to summon again so soon, yet nonetheless with him. Dyeing his skin and hair.
It was surprisingly easy. And grew only easier. The markings swirled through his clothes and up off his back and arms, lashing out with all the voracious force he recalled from when they first found the dragon's bones. The devils unfortunate enough to be caught in the tide dissolved with strangled cries, and a rolling laugh escaped V.
[There now…] Violet flame climbed the leylines through V's scales. [Is that not better?]
He whistled and Griffon dropped from the sky like a bullet. Once at his side, he unraveled into ichor that spun obediently around V. Neither the familiars nor V understood this state. It was something new. Something the basin had given them. He'd assumed it was simply a means for the familiar to keep themselves and their host alive. Honey for the hive when magic was in short supply.
V required extraordinarily little to not be hungry. But he understood now that he was far from full.
Malphas descended, and V felt that same electrified glower that Fern had imitated rise to his face. It had been a gaunt and bony life. A feast sounded like just what he needed.
"Alekhine."
From a across a sea of butchered devils, a faint 'acknowledged' found his ear, and the flash of Pod's laser follower shortly after. It scored directly into Malphas' opened mouth, and sent it crashing into the thick layer of blood that had overtaken the inner walls.
[Flame!]
That was more like it. V bounded over a wing and gouged his claws into it. Burnt feathers singed his nose, but it didn't last. Violet-white flames scorched the appendage so thoroughly it was charred and uselessly before he'd even fully gotten control of his output. The dragon had taken strength from his greater reserves of magic as well. It seemed elated by this—or perhaps that was own exhilaration.
Malphas was a lot to consume, and only served to make V more aware of his own capacity. He never came close to anything like fullness, or that burn of volatile magic that maso had left him with when it turned on him. There were no memories to him. No soul or essence that V had to bear as a price. He might as well have been drinking from the basin. Demonic power would reject one who wasn't able to handle it, but the only rejection he endured was Malphas' attempts to dislodge him. The wild thrashing that slowed and finally stopped as V slowly cocooned him in ichor and ate him alive.
It was quiet when he landed back on solid ground. He smoothed his hair back and licked absently at the corner of his mouth. Devils didn't taste so vile when they were devoured magic-first.
Fern approached him slowly, like he might eat her too. "I take it you were hungry?"
"Not at all," he answered with a subtle smile. "Come. I believe our work is done."
The blood gathered and congealed around V's feet. The world distorted around them. Dimmed to an endless shore of crimson sand lapped at by a black tide. Griffon materialized and flapped busily out ahead of them.
"Ohhhh, shit. That's not good. That's—definitely not good."
The portal had dropped him right here on this same shore an indeterminate time ago. He'd stood right in that place, feeling the sucking cold of the night kingdom and the sickly heat of hell churn over the unmoved basin. A cold scar extending up from the shallows.
Now he felt nothing. He saw nothing.
The gate was gone.