Senior night tonight… I feel so busy. But here's the next update : )

Disclaimer: ME? hah!

Of Knights and Dragons

Chapter XXI: Descent into Hell

"…but if it had to perish twice / I think I know enough of hate / to say that for destruction ice / is also great and would suffice."

(Robert Frost: "Fire and Ice")

Leaping down the steps two and three at a time recklessly, feet skidding dangerously on the damp stone. "Erik!" He flew down the last flight of steps, sliding recklessly into the water before he could halt himself. The corpse-cold touch of the lake slowed him, mind-numbingly chilling, and he stumbled back out onto the shore.

Only then did he see the craft, innocuously moored off to the side of the stone pilings. He seized the pole resting nearby and leapt directly in, pausing only long enough to steady the craft before roughly pushing off.

How long had it been since he took a gondola down the canals of Venice? It took him a few minutes in this timeless place, muttering under his breath, to gain control of the craft.

Then suddenly he was out of the narrow stone channels and onto "the lake"—vast, cold, quiet, seething with slow and turbid mist. His strokes reflexively slowed, the words he had been shouting before not dying away in the back of his throat, possessed and enraptured by the silence, swallowed by it.

He was vaguely aware of a faint humming sound. His stokes ceased altogether and his head tilted to the side inquisitively, listening. It was such a beautiful melody, really, and it seemed to be coming from… the lake? How peculiar. He crouched down carefully so as not to tip the boat, putting the pole aside as he listened.

The siren's song wailed up from the eerie depths, slyly enticing. It was so hauntingly familiar, but he couldn't quite place it, like a song from his childhood twisted into a strange new creature he could not speak to or understand, slowly driving him mad.

Where was it from? Perhaps it was something Christine used to sing. He couldn't remember. Why did her name trigger something in his mind, something he thought he should be doing, crossing the lake? Something about…

Suddenly the surface boiled as with the breaching of a leviathan, a deepsea creature all arms and eyes and cold, wet grasp that wrapped around him, around his neck and chest, latching on and dragging him under. He had time for one desperate breath before the boat tipped and he went careening in, still in the clutches of this lake-thing. The freezing water hit him like a slap that tore his breath away, the wails of wraiths and corpses squeezing, squeezing, begging him to die.

Was he still alive? He could feel iron tentacles wrapping around him, but no, those were hands. Darkness flailed at him with a thousand stinging whips, or was that the ice-cold water frothing in front of his eyes. He struggled mindlessly for a moment, then with a little peaceful smile gave up entirely to this particularly peculiar dream. There was a burning sensation in his lungs… how odd… what could that abominably bright thing be?

A candle.

With a sudden heave he was hoisted up onto something firm and warm, so blessedly warm after the numbing cold of the lake. His fingers curled mindlessly around the stone shelf, feeling for… for what? He didn't remember.

The world fell away beneath him, or was he being lifted? Something pressed against his back, a solid hard gridlock, but he didn't care that it hurt him, so relieved to just be out of the killing water, to be out of the lake, away from that song and the clutching leviathan that inhabited those nether depths.

Something seized the front of his shirt and shook him. "Enjoying your pleasure cruise, Vicomte?" snarled a sibilant voice.

Raoul snapped back into awareness. "Erik!" he managed to gasp out.

The man in front of him pressed him harder against the grate, until Raoul hissed in pain. "Erik is dead, Chagny," the Angel of Death told him with a calm coldness more chilling by far than the lake. "Though, if you're looking for him, I'd be happy to send you on your way."

"The two of us will greet Christine then by morning," Raoul yelled back, surging forward—to find himself abruptly halted and gasping at the lines of fire across his chest, his wrists, his legs. So he had been tied to the grate. The position was hauntingly familiar; he choked back bile in his throat.

"Who?" Uriel said innocently, with a hint of a smile.

"Christine, Erik! The girl you loved—"

"Angels don't fall in love," Uriel said idly, boredly, as if what Raoul was saying meant nothing to him.

The Vicomte gaped at him uncomprehendingly. "Raphael d'Halier and the Parisian Knights have Christine, and they mean to kill her by morning," he said, hoping this was some kind of joke, a cruel play by his archenemy. "I admit I'm completely useless, I couldn't go to the police, and so I came…"

"In search of a dead man," the Angel of Death said with a little smile, shaking his head. "How foolish of you, Vicomte."

Raoul stared at him, feeling his anger boiling in his veins. "I was beginning to think that Christine was right, that you weren't so much a monster as I believed you were," he began slowly, the heat in his veins slowly creeping into his voice. "I thought perhaps my memories of you were flawed, incomplete. How foolish and wrong I was! She saw a dream-god, an Angel, a magnificent Phantom, a glorious and dangerous dragon that loomed in the shadows. Deadly, yes, but powerful, and unfailing. How wrong she was! I was right—there is nothing here but a broken fragment, to distorted in body and mind to ever be more than a—"

His vision exploded in black and white, and a taste of iron in his mouth. "Next time, Vicomte, you don't wake up," said a low harsh voice in front of him. Despite the blood and the aching pain, the clinging cold of the lake on his skin and on his clothes, Raoul could almost have cried out in joy, because he recognized that voice.

"Erik, please, if we…"

"We?"

The single word cut Raoul short, and his vision cleared. There he stood, the legendary Phantom—or was it the Angel? They were one now, he thought; how ironic, that Erik go in the guise of Uriel to save what Erik alone loved and Uriel would kill—there in complete black, looking strangely proud and noble against the candles…

…proud and noble, for a monster.

"I lost her once, Chagny. Once is enough. Perhaps at long last it is the time to finish what should have been done three and a half years ago, were I not too weak to do them." He turned, then paused, looking back. "Enjoy your stay, Vicomte. I might be back… later. Perhaps after Christine expresses her thanks to me…?"

So Raoul stood, helpless, watching with cold eyes as the golden-eyed fiend picked up a few items from about his home and vanished into the shadows. The air about him was cold… so very cold.