The Eternal Dance of Light and Dark

by The King of Ravens

Having just survived a nine year long civil war, those of Lucael would be forgiven for entertaining the notion of peace. However, new threats are rising, and as the son of the king, it is Caiellis's job to combat them, despite his youth. But as the leaders of a rival nation declare war and mysterious figures pull strings in the shadows, Cai will be drawn into the fate of the world.

38. A Hero's Death (Part IV)

And here is part four. I'll apologise in advance if anything isn't bolded where it is supposed to be, as the site decided that it wanted to make the entire document bold so I had to go through and re-bold everything that should have been bold. If I've missed anything then that is why.

.*.*.*.

"Ha ha ha ha ha! HA HA HA HA HA! That was truly entertaining! Now do you see, young Caiellis?! Now do you see how futile your resistance is? Subduing your poor daddy has taken everything out of you, and you didn't even kill him! HA! If he, a pathetic mortal, almost killed you, then what possible hope do you have of defeating me?!"

The Archdemon roared at the boy, its voice a tempestuous and atavistic howl of pure pleasure in the act of ultimate destruction, the ecstasy of death and the screaming of millions of souls as they were sacrificed to this primal and dark god of hedonism and indulgence. Caiellis would have been knocked over and sent flying backwards by the sheer force of the intense and capricious laughter if not for Orzhova's reassuring hand, the angel gripping onto one of his shoulders tightly as if afraid that if she held on with any less force then her precious Summoner would be torn away from her. It would leave a bruise, but that was the least of the thirteen year old's concerns, and the world span around him and nausea flooded through his body as the volume of the words washed over him.

Caiellis knew that he was in no condition for fighting, not after barely recovering from being choked to death and still panting desperately because of that, still suffering from an awful concussion that sent ringing through his ears and pain exploding within his fragile skull with even the slightest movement or sound, and broken ribs that made every ragged and painful breath that he took agonising. It was a good job that he had ceased to care about his own well-being after this battle (as he needed to be in a good fighting condition so that he could take down the Archdemon), though he couldn't quite the occasional tear of pain (that's what it is. Not a tear of sadness. I'm not crying because I'm sad) from dripping down his cheeks and sending the Black Sun into a frenzy of purple light that hadn't yet dimmed ever since Orzhova was called to that position.

He briefly pondered replying to the terrifying demon that was eyeing him hungrily, but knew that his voice would come out too soft and shaky and scared for his liking and that the being would probably barely hear him anyway. He felt so small, so fragile and vulnerable against the gigantic beast that was the Lord of Riots, and knew that if the demon wanted to it could most likely crush him to death with one huge red finger.

Calm down, Caiellis. You need to do this. You can't let your mistakes go unaccounted for, and you can't let the demon that you failed to stop go on a rampage throughout the city and hurt the Lucaelians whom you have already failed multiple times already. Everyone is counting on you to succeed, even your dad who hates you with a passion and has never loved you now that you have sent him to sleep and no one else is here to kill the demon, so you can't be getting scared now.

Easier thought than done. The boy resisted to send a mournful glance over at his father, knowing already that nothing he would see would improve his situation or make him feel any differently, and also aware that the cage of his own blood (the wound that had been caused by Marik's sword covered in a crystalline sheen that stemmed the bleeding but did not reduce the pain nor heal the large and quite deep cut) was the safest place on the battlefield. He hoped that the Defiler would have to go through him before attacking their father, although if the demon did target the king and it did have an affect then he could undo the enchantments and free his dad. The thirteen year old tried not to imagine large and tough hands clad in metal gauntlets that had scraped his neck wrapped around his throat and squeezing harder every second, imperceptibly shaking his head to clear his head of the images without hurting himself.

Rakdos grinned exultantly down at the Lucerna boy, who raised the Sword of Glass which was shining with equal amounts of light and darkness, though the illumination emitted from the relic blade was like a tiny and ineffectual candle next to the dark presence of the Archdemon. Cai endeavoured not to stare back into the demon's flaming eyes that promised agonising oblivion in fire and death through excess, tearing his his own green eyes away from the sight of its malicious visage when they began to be drawn into the endless inferno of sadistic passion that was Rakdos's eyes.

Orzhova gripped the boy's shoulder tighter for a second, squeezing in what she hoped was a comforting and reassuring manner for her young Summoner in spite of the direness of their situation, and then let go, launching herself into the air. She flew lazily, the beats of her stunning black wings covered in sticky blood and choking, tainted ash (the respirator around Caiellis's mouth saving him from the effects of that) languid and slow, which allowed her to stay aloft near to her Summoner in preparation for some form of attack or to respond to the Lord of Riots.

Rakdos grinned even wider, his horrifying visage that would haunt Caiellis's nightmares splitting as he exposed his gigantic teeth, each bone covered in demonic blood and thicker than Cai's waist, or at least that was what it looked like to the boy. He let go of his flaming hellfire scythe with one hand, raising the other as destructive Black and Red mana instantly began to swirl around above the massive and meaty palm. The rocky spires and spikes surrounding the hellscape that was the courtyard began to shake, dislodging obsidian rubble which fell to the ground with a series of resounding crashes as the entire hill that the Redhand mansion had been situated upon began to tremble with the force of the spell.

Caiellis adjusted his footing, tempted to try and flee from courtyard and drag the demon into the wider battle, before dismissing the foolish, selfish and incredibly childish thoughts. He had caused this demon to be Summoned into the world of man, and he had to take responsibility for it – even if that ended in him dying, his form obliterate by the Lord of Riots and his soul kept as a personal keepsake of the demon before it tired of him.

Not that that would bother anyone apart from Alexander, Caiellis thought, but not bitterly, just resignedly. His father had put everything into perspective for him, and although he dearly wished that it would be otherwise, what the man had said had been right and Cai couldn't really fault him for it. The youngest Lucerna cast out the thoughts, aware that he would have to be utterly focussed on this battle and only have the emotions required for his magic to work to its optimum extent, but they kept coming back, niggling and itching at the back of his despairing mind and constantly making sure that he knew he was a good-for-nothing, worthless, failure of a Lucerna.

Cai ensured that his posture was as such that he could easily respond to the spell that was being channelled by the Lord of Riots, pre-emptively casting numerous enchantments in front of him that would absorb some of the monumental raw power that was being gathered. He conjured up the Gift of Orzhova as well, not wanting to have to utilise the wings while still suffering from the light-headedness caused by his concussion and head wounds as well as being affected by broken bones, but the power of flight was one which he couldn't simply just not use and he would rather be put under severe discomfort than die – until he had dealt with the Archdemon and cast it out from this world at any rate.

Orzhova positioned herself in front of the boy, not caring if he would disagree with that or not, and added her own defensive White and Black mana to the mix as she prepared for the Defiler to release his strike.

It was taking the being no effort at all to summon up such powerful magic, gathering up mana effortlessly above its hand as it smiled down at Cai, clearly wanting him to know that it was no trouble at all for it to do this to him. The boy simply stared back up at the orb – if it could be called that – or mana that was being formed, the magical energy of pure destruction raw and formless, making the youngest Lucerna hate to think about what would happen if the deranged mind of Rakdos put thought into forming his magic right now.

The air was crackling, saturated with pure mana as the Lord of Riots brought it to the fore, and Caiellis could feel his hairs standing on air and tingling with the sensation, the horrible images of awful deprivation and mindless slaughter that hadn't left him even when he had been fighting against his murderous and furious father pulsing behind his eyes like they were enhanced by the spell being cast. Cai forced himself not to gulp nervously, knowing that it would only hurt his abused throat and distract him, and he raised the Sword of Glass in front of him as more defensive shields interlocked around Orzhova and, more prominently, her Summoner.

Rakdos slammed the orb into the ground, the shaking of the earth becoming a rumbling frenzy of tectonic activity as cracks split across the last remaining pieces of stone on the courtyard. Caiellis resisted the urge to shut his eyes as flaming light and darkness blasted out from the earth, hellish lava spurting up from the wounds of the land as an explosion of gigantic force swept through the entire area. Cai shook and juddered, grinding his broken ribs together as he spat out saliva flecked with blood, and he brought his own mana to the fore as the shockwave of chaotic force rushed quickly towards him, gathering more power every single second. Even though the Red and Black mana of the Archdemon had not been given definition, had simply been a formless mass of magical energy, there was such a huge amount of it that the second Rakdos let go of it it detonated.

Rock and rubble pattered against Caiellis and Orzhova's shields, though the boy paid it no heed as yet more adrenaline flooded through his young and wounded body, seeming to slow down time as the mindless force of the explosion rushed towards him. It was immensely powerful and destructive, but only a fraction of the true strength that the Defiler had to offer, Rakdos had made that blatantly clear without even needing to use words. For a moment, Cai wondered whether or not the Archdemon was still playing or toying with him, if it was still wanting to break the Lucerna spirit within him before devouring it or if it had become bored of his presence and wanted to wipe him out as soon as possible after watching him be abused by his own father and the most powerful Lucerna alive.

The thirteen year old was swaying slightly towards the former, as having his dad arrive and try to kill him, remind him of his cause in his mother's death, his brother's wounding and the danger that they were all in – especially Alexander being all alone and worried for his family – now, his courage (like I have any of that) had been tested to the limit and he had almost been broken. Well, he was broken, and could never be fixed no matter how hard anyone tried, but not to the extent that the Lord of Riots would want it – where he was unable to move and act because of the terror and hopelessness, where he was reduced to sobbing and crying like he had been before Orzhova had saved him from his dad.

He took a deep breath, stopping himself hyperventilating because it would do him absolutely no good, and felt the familiar rush of alternating but strangely complementary White and Black mana through his young limbs as he used up more of it, aptly aware of how little he had left and cutting off more of his overall lifespan so that he could have more.

Although he had always known about the pacts one could take with Black mana to obtain more of it in exchange for life, pacts that needn't be demonic or done with any type of being at all, and been aware that he had the magic of darkness inside of him despite not ever using it (consciously) until a few days ago Cai had always found them abhorrent and had thought that he had never use them. He still did, and always would, but their usefulness in desperate situations like these could not be denied and normally they could be blended well with healing White mana and draining Black, and the fact that they were shortening his life meant nothing to him now.

Orzhova shouted something, probably some form of warning in case he wasn't already started preparing for the force of the blast, and although the angel's voice was low and her divine tones would normally split through any other noise they were drowned out by the rumbling fury of the earthquake shockwave of fire and darkness that was rushing towards him. Again Cai wished that he could contact his angel mentally using the link present between Summoner and Summoning, but the presence of Rakdos was disrupting all forms of mental communication.

The boy braced himself, yearning for larger or stronger limbs so that he could withstand this attack without having to utterly rely upon magic. The shockwave hit, blasting apart shields of glass and burning down waves of delaying shadow that Orzhova had placed down in front of her youthful Summoner, and Cai was pretty sure that he heard a thundering laugh as the waves of destruction crashed into his magical defences. Caiellis could feel his mana straining against the raw force of the demon, the mental struggle hurting his mind as the distracting and horrifying images that wouldn't get the chance to haunt his nightmares made themselves known again, bloody orgies of ecstatic murder and indulgence pulsating behind the boy's eyelids as he tried to remove them and concentrate on protecting himself from the blast.

More spires of rock were ramming themselves out of the earth in response to the release of mana, and Caiellis gasped as he felt the ground shaking even more below him, but he could not move right now because if he did the magic that was extremely close to breaking his and his angel's shields would do so and crash into him, probably breaking every single bone in his fragile body and crushing his internal organs to a pulp. Orzhova's hand shot out of the numerous shattering spheres of glass and the pure Red and Black mana of the Lord of Riots's discharge, grabbing onto his slender wrist and yanking him forwards with a surge of queasiness that almost had the boy retching and gagging if he had not been so focussed.

A gigantic spike burst out of the ground, curling towards Cai like he had been its intended target and it was still trying to reach him, and the boy mentally whispered a silent word of thanks to the Angel of the Black Sun, as he would have been impaled or at the very least knocked off balance by the curved spire of some sort of hellish obsidian. Destruction surged around them, annihilating more of the ground and the defensive enchantments that the two warriors of the light had conjured up. Caiellis was dropped behind his angel as she stood in front of him, holding her scythe horizontally as a sphere of safety that was personally maintained by the dark seraph flared into existence around them, the demon's formless magic already crashing against it as the explosion rocked the courtyard, obliterating the last pieces of masonry belonging to Jarred's former mansion.

Cai added his own mana to his angel's shield, fortifying the light with a crystal barrier of purple emitting stained glass and further augmenting that with shadows that would slow down any rogue projectiles and absorb mana that managed the break through the first shields. All of the other protective enchantments that had been cast had been destroyed by the blast, and that left only the one surrounding Caiellis and Orzhova remaining as the fire and the violent darkness smashed against it.

The boy could feel his small heart thudding in his chest, and he could hear the pounding of his blood in his concussed skull that still bled all over his hair (which was already thick and matted by the Rain of Gore) over the rumbling of the destruction and the laughter of the demon. Light and darkness played over the boy's small and cut hands as he thrust them outwards, the blood on them from the minor scratches on his palms and the torrential downpour of vitae from the storm above Usnaan dripping down as a golden orb of defence and protection was formed into the centre of them.

He poured mana into it, stood back to back to his angel as obliteration swirled around them, quashing the rogue thought that was concerned about the fate of his father (he could not fight if he constantly kept thinking about him, and the only two reasons that he was concerned for a person who had tried to crush the life from his weak form was because the kingdom would be weakened if he died and his big brother would be left without a father that he got on with well, not because he cared personally about Marik's safety – I mean, how could I care?) in this tempest of unfocussed mana crashing around their shield.

The intensity of the shaking increased, cracks appearing in the tile of rock that the two were stood upon (the Angel of the Black Sun electing to remain on the ground to help her Summoner better), and Cai felt more of his own warm blood trickling out of his mouth as he coughed it up, although whether that was because of the abuse to his throat or that the extra strain on his ribs was causing internal bleeding was unknown. A single shard of rocky debris smashed through the sphere of safety, luckily only piercing the shield instead of shattering it, and the boy automatically turned to avoid it before it hurt him. Instead of ramming through his upper chest, something that would have upset his ribs even more and caused drastic injuries because of the sheer velocity of the heavy and sharp projectile, it cut a line down one of his sleeves and only drew a bit of blood, the sharp end of the rock biting into his skin in a stinging pain that flared for a second but was soon lost underneath all of his other torment.

The strain on his magic slowly dissipated, but instead of wasting the defensive sphere that Caiellis had created he let it orbit around him, ready for use should he need it. He turned around quickly, ignoring his pain and the way that the world span around him as he did so, and blasted a small beam of light in the direction of the Lord of Riots.

It was mostly done to destroy the ever-present dust which had been kicked up into the air by the blast, mingling with the ash and the blood and reducing normal visibility to less than a metre – and the Lenses had already been established as useless underneath the Tempest of Craving and now even more because of the entrance of the Defiler, as Guilt sent unbearable pain through him and threatened to blind him whereas Innocence showed him nothing apart from the location of Orzhova which he already knew. To make matters worse, instead of being able to sense the approximate location of the Archdemon through his perceptive sixth sense (made easier by the amount of mana that it had) the power of Rakdos was so immense that all he could detect was it and Orzhova – meaning he couldn't sense the rest of the battle – and it was all around him instead of concentrated into on distinct area.

The youngest Lucerna was not disappointed when the bolt of luminescence impacted straight onto the face of the demon, scouring a line down one of its horns but doing no damage whatsoever and causing the Defiler absolutely no discomfort in any way. Orzhova flew into the air, the beating of her wings clearing the dust around her, and Rakdos slammed his free fist into the ground again. It was done not to hurt Cai, although the juddering of the abused earth certainly didn't aid him and jarred his broken ribs, but to help him in a perverse way, as it sent the rest of the sand particles billowing into the air around them and allowing him to see as clearly as he had before the attack.

It was obvious that Rakdos wanted to be seen, and saw no threat from the littlest Lucerna, something that Caiellis was inclined to agree with at the current moment. Before the Lord of Riots could assault them again, Cai ran across the ground quickly to get into a different position as Orzhova attacked from the side. She let go of her scythe, the golden weapon spinning around her as the Black mana infused into its large blade cut into the fabric of existence, and held her hands together for a second, coating them in golden light. As Cai shot a bolt of darklight out of the Sword of Glass, the protective orb orbiting languidly around him humming almost peacefully, the Angel of the Black Sun placed her hands inside of the symmetrical cuts her scythe had created, dragging out the non-substance of the void and moulding it with her mana.

Rakdos batted aside the beam of White and Black that Caiellis had fired at him, spitting an almost casual fireball of hellish and psychotically screaming flame at the youth that he was forced to deploy the concentrated sphere of protection to ward off, and as he was distracted with that Orzhova used the pure flesh of the abyss to create a circle of doom that she flung at the demon like a circular shuriken (a chakram, some recess of Cai's mind told him, not that it really mattered) used by some of the Isakian disciplines in the Yentarian Republic. The chakram of doom, like a more advanced and powerful version of the voidal blades Orzhova had conjured to slice through enemies before, span through the air, the matter of the void that was full to the brim of Black mana crashing into the Lord of Riots.

"Ha! You seek to hurt me with the unreal substance of the abyss?! Have you forgotten that I was created within the darkness?!" the demon laughed contemptuously, the sound a booming death scream of sybaritic nations succumbing to their desire for bloodshed and pleasure and turning on one another and themselves, ripping through men, women and children in their quest for even greater violent bliss. The circle of darkness moulded into a weapon bounced off of the demon's monstrously muscular arms, and Orzhova only just managed to grasp onto the shadowy haft of her scythe as the demon, moving with a speed that should not have been possible for a being of that size, swung its own crude and flaming scythe that was lit with the pyre of self-destructive carnage in the act of self-gratification.

Every time the demon spoke, Caiellis found himself wanting to be violently and excessively sick, to vomit as if that would purge the corruption of being such a vile being's presence from his body, and he gifted his angel with some more of her Summoner's mana in the hope that she could withstand the blow. He had not forgotten what had happened the last time that the Lord of Riots had swung its barbaric weapon at his personal dark seraphim, Orzhova having been destroyed by the blow which had only been swung a few tens of minutes ago, though after all that had happened between him and his father it seemed like much longer than that. Cai did not have enough mana to Summon her for a third time – something that he had never done before in the first place (and come to think he had never Summoned her twice in one day either if he was not mistaken, as she has Summoned herself this time) – there was no question about it.

The Archdemon seemed much less concerned about toying with or breaking the spirit of his angel, probably because although she was one of his most hated enemies he didn't want to play games with her and simply wanted her out of the way so that she would stop protecting Caiellis from it – also, the Lord of Riots was probably aware of how much Orzhova valued her young Summoner despite having had less than two weeks to actually talk to him, and knew that while the Angel of the Black Sun would never succumb to pain or torture the worst thing he could do to her was kill the youngest Lucerna and force her to return back to Sancturia.

Orzhova was slammed into the ground by the force of the blow, her golden heels carving swathes into the rock as she was pushed back, her whole body tensing as mana flowed around her and increased her strength to far beyond that of a human. That was nowhere near enough and she knew it, and could remember well the trauma she had forced Cai to go through as she Summoned herself again as there was no way that he would have been able to endure the Summoning ritual of a First Sisterhood angel again. Circles of power etched themselves into the air around her, providing her with brief surges of strength before they were destroyed by the spreading fire aura of the Lord of Riot's brutish but undoubtedly effective scythe that pressed into her own.

Her angelic muscles strained, put under pressure that would easily break a normal human or even a Second Sisterhood angel in half, and the demon's gigantic muscles also tensed as they forced her scythe downwards, the ground breaking beneath the Angel of the Black Sun as she glared up at the Archdemon, Rakdos grinning back at her open display of hatred. Orzhova knew that her Black mana was being heavily augmented by her detestation of the demon, as well as her White mana affected by that as well and her desire to purge the evil from the two worlds that was encoded into the being of every angel even if her perception of the world was not as black and white as some of her sisters'.

"I am going to enjoy tearing you to shreds as I banish you from this world," she spat, the words infused with venom that had not dripped from another angel's divine lips, and the Lord of Riots simply smiled down at her, grabbing onto the large handle of his barbarous armament with his other massive hand and increasing the pressure on it. Orzhova gripped her weapon tightly as well, feeling the influx of mana from Caiellis infusing her with more strength that would not be enough, even though she was already very concerned about the amount of life that little Cai was expending to help his angel and provide himself with more mana.

"See, this is why I like you, Orzhova," the Defiler smirked with the spiteful delight of psychopaths ripping the limbs off of animals purely for their own pleasure, Orzhova having to resort to leaning further backwards to avoid being ripped apart by his scythe that she had blocked on the shadowy haft of her own, "You are never afraid to give in to your own inner darkness, and that makes you unique amongst your puritanical sisters. If only you truly cast of your duty to the pathetic Lucerna family and your own angelic kin and walked the path of pleasure, you would always be welcome within my Festivals of Bloodshed. However, I'm going to revel in destroying you and breaking your precious Summoner's spirit before I use his young soul as a plaything more than I ever would that!"

Orzhova would have retorted sarcastically had this been anything less than an Archdemon and had her own personal situation been less dire, but she only had hatred to show to the most powerful demons. Her sarcasm was reserved for others. The demon was breaking her defence, slowly but surely, and hadn't even began to use its full strength as it was not utilising mana, just mammoth strength, to crush her into submission.

Caiellis, who had enough mana inspired by his powerful emotions – more powerful than he had ever felt before, the hatred visibly coursing through him as he watched his angel fighting the Archdemon, the representation of all that he hated – and the amount of life that he had traded away to do something to stop the demon, ran forwards to get closer to the massive being, ignoring the lump in his throat (and not the one caused by his father's hands) and the trembling of his spine in sheer terror at approaching such a creature.

He knew that Orzhova did not have long left, although the angel must have been planning something because she knew that as well, and held his artefact sword sideways, placing the soft but bloody palm of his free left hand to the elegant and scintillating crystalline blade of the weapon that shone with equal amounts of imperious as well as righteous radiance and tenebrosity, the sword flashing purple for a second as it touched its wielder's blood on his skin.

He channelled his hatred of the demon, mixing it with his desire to protect the angel who had chosen him to be her Summoner in spite of the risk and who had protected him a large amount over the past two weeks, and combining the two types of mana that sprung up from these emotions and thoughts together. He had a plan of attack for at least distracting the gigantic and terrifying demon from Orzhova, although its leathery and gore-slick hide had seemed impervious to most attacks so far. At any rate, there was no point in not trying, and Caiellis was anything if not diligent, so he carried on with his spell and suffused the blade of his sword with White and Black mana combined, though the true usefulness of his magic could not be accessed with the Rain of Gore ruining his healing.

Caiellis had always used healing for as long as he could remember, being the only thing that he could contribute to the group that he had been with during the civil war, his four year old body far too fragile and young for violence and his innocent mind not powerful enough to be able top utilising offensive magic. Even in the more recent years of the war before it had ended and he had obtain his Summoning, when he had become reasonably adept at long range spells that would scour their enemies from existence like Tybalt and sometimes his brother (who had learnt from Tybalt but developed his own unique take on the magic) had taught him, healing had been a skill that he had mastered up to a point where it would require total devotion to progress any further, something which being a Lucerna had completely put a stop to.

Taking away that skill put the boy at a severe disadvantage, as he could no longer use the life force that he took from enemies (who, if he was being truly honest, did not deserve it anyway – and neither did he, but that was a moot point now) and repair his own wounds, nor did his natural Lucerna regeneration work much as well – although the resilience of his bloodline was conferred to him, otherwise even the smallest flick from someone would probably kill him. However, it also meant that he didn't have to put any mana at all into draining or healing himself, and he could gather it all into an attack directed at the demon pressing down on his angel.

Cai shut his eyes, taking another deep breath that was supposed to fill his limbs with solidarity but only succeeded in hurting his ribs and the inside of his neck, and the boy would have rolled his eyes sardonically in a less serious circumstance at that. He reopened them, the palm of his hand still bleeding into his blade although not very much and certainly enough to give it much more power as he turned the weapon so that its point was facing towards the demon but his left hand was still on its blade. The thirteen year old sent a scattering beam of erratic light at the Lord of Riots, the golden illuminescence sparkling and twinkling as it impacted onto the demon's left forearm, the massively muscled limb unaffected by the light playing over it that the Archdemon did nothing to counteract and in fact completely ignored it.

However, that wasn't the main part of the spell, only the beginning, and as the flashing light began to spread up the massive being Caiellis ran even closer, wary of any form of attack from the Lord of Riots and crushing the sheer terror in his mind that begged him not to do this, pleading with him to turn around a run. No matter how hard he tried, Cai could not completely quash the feeling at the back of his mind, and knew that it was simply the aura of fear that the demon exuded that made all humans bar none scared of it in the end – or perhaps it was simply because Caiellis was pathetic and not worthy to be a Lucerna, as maybe his father wasn't scared of the demon like he was, simply wary of its titanic power levels.

He let go of his sword with his left hand, curling his slender fingers round an imaginary object as he clenched and unclenched them, golden light coloured with imperiousness and prosperity spilling from the small hand. Spinning contrails of shining radiance began to be matched by twisting chains of darkness that were birthed from the right side of his body, wrapping round the crystalline Sword of Glass and empowered by the Black Sun staining his gaunt cheek. It was very likely that he wouldn't be able to do much damage to the Defiler – but if he could disarm or restrain it, even for a brief moment, Orzhova would be able to escape her fate and attack whilst the boy was distracting their enemy.

A lacuna of void darkness began to form within Caiellis twisting and twirling fingers, pulled into his existence by his hatred of all things demonic for what they had done and what they represented, and the glittering particles of light brightening the demon's lower arm as the hand attached to it gripped his flaming scythe tighter began to spread out even more over the being's bracers and bare red skin that dripped with unholy blood from the sky. Cai pressed his fingers into the orb of blackness and dark magic that he had created, the tendrils of shadow roving around him focussed into that one point as they began to pour into it, darklight enshrouding the boy in its gloomy brilliance and he squeezed his hand into a tiny fist.

The darkness burst out from it, etching smoking sigils into the air all around it that Caiellis couldn't read but were of a similar style to the ones that he had seen before when executing the Merciless Eviction for a few seconds before the curved emblems faded, and the light illuminating the Lord of Riots started to be infused with Black mana as the being was only a few seconds from crushing Orzhova's commendable resistance as their scythes ground against one another in a flurry of blinding sparks made from holy light and passionate fire. The small particles of luminescence that had been sparkling up and down the Defiler's left forearm and the spiked bracers that it was clad in as well as the two horny protrusions extending out from the curve of it and stopping just past the demon's massive elbow became black and seared into the beast's skin, collecting together and turning into baleful sigils of malevolent intent that marked the demon.

The darkness blasted through the air towards them, each shadowy tendril infused with hatred and large amounts of Black mana as they reached for the Archdemon, and as they wrapped around the demon's arm they plunged into the circular glyphs excoriated into the demon's flesh. Instead of doing what would have been obvious and attempting to use that to unbalance or restrain the Lord of Riots, Caiellis relaxed his breathing and thought of all those in the city below that it was his duty to protect and the fact that he needed to repent or atone in some way for what he had failed to do, White mana blossoming forth within his relic sword's glass blade as he continued to tightly squeeze the ball of darkness which the chains of tenebrosity had burst forth from. It was slightly unnerving that the Defiler was completely ignoring him even though its strength was being reduced and sapped by the Black mana wrapping around its gigantic left arm, still pressing down on Orzhova as she gifted her young Summoner with more mana, the medallion of the Black Sun symbol attached to her elegant and ornate golden armour glowing with light as it transferred her angelic power to the boy who was her Summoner.

Light coiled around the left side of his body, interacting with the darkness held in his left hand and coating it in golden radiance as it twisted round his think body and made its way round his right arm towards the shining beacon of incandescence that was now the Sword of Glass, making the blade of mana channelling glass light up even brighter. Instead of being separated at two sides and only mingling together in the Lenses of Guilt and Innocence (as the one associated with darkness had always appeared in his left eye, which was on the side of the body that lit up with White mana normally, and vice versa for Innocence), the light and darkness swirling around him began to become a familiar maelstrom of shining blackness and dark radiance that he focussed into the blade of his sword.

The lacuna of pure shadow in his left hand that was spilling twisting darkness all around him began to shine with holy light, and he ran it along the length of his relic sword, the chains of night attached to it now connected to the Sword of Glass as he poured mana out of it. Cai could feel his heart pounding in his chest as he cast the spell, light discharged from the blade in a thundering flash that reminded him of his father's wrathful magic but coloured gold instead of pure white. The chains of shadow lit up, the darkness turning into the powerful light that would cleanse the demon of corruption and hopefully allow him to restrain it and pull Rakdos away from Orzhova even more, but Cai wasn't going to stop there and instead of just letting the darkness be turned into light and relying solely upon the conversion of the Black mana into his much preferred White he slid the Sword of Glass into the ground and began to channel both types of mana in his free hands.

He pushed his slender palms out in front of him as if he was physically pushing the demon that they were facing towards, swirling light and darkness playing around his young and small form that surged with the mana he was using, the black luminescence of unlight that he had grown accustomed to blending with the golden-coated shadows and the purple light like the haunting glow of a funeral procession and the regrets of long dead ghosts mixed with the oppressive and blinding radiance of a sun that demanded worship, all of them crackling with coruscating arcs of purple lightning which was not related to the elemental electricity that was borne from Red mana at all. The chains of darkness turned into lucent incandescence began to be infused with all of these qualities of White and Black mixed, the powers of darkness and light combined suffusing the spell with draining properties that would tear any lesser foe's essence apart and annihilate their entire being.

Rakdos roared in annoyance, the ground beneath Orzhova instantly bathed in hellfire as the demon stamped its massive foot, plumes of hissing lava shooting up into the air because of the action as the earth rumbled again, but instead of capitalising upon that the Archdemon was forced to pull away from the Angel of the Black Sun. Cai leapt back as he saw the demon suddenly turning towards him, the spiked chains of bloody metal crashing around into the ground around him and almost slamming into the boy because of his proximity to the denizen of the hellish regions of the abyss, and had to instantly end his magic as the Lord of Riots pulled effortlessly out of the fetters of White and Black draining its substance into themselves.

A massive arm swung towards the youngest Lucerna at such as speed that Caiellis knew he would be hard pressed to get away from, the marks scoured into the red skin of the demon fading, the fact that the wickedly spiked bracer on its arm had been ruined little consolation. He yanked the Sword of Glass back to him on the magical tether which he had attached to it ever since first losing the weapon (and in spite of his dad breaking earlier the fact that it was made from constant mana energy given form by an enchantment he had cast upon the weapon meant that it could never be truly broken), grasping onto the handle of the artefact armament from the Lucerna citadel vaults tightly as he leapt into the air, disregarding the rush of nausea and sickness that pounded through his skull.

Again a defensive shield of light and darkness formed around him, a sphere of golden mana conjured by the mixing of the two magics overlaying and interlocking with a globe of stained glass much like the aura allowing him to fly now, and the boy saw the back of the demon's fist that was probably bigger than him and certainly thicker crashing through the air towards him.

It hit him mid air, slamming into his shield and cracking it to pieces as the force of the explosion (which was designed to work in this mana, Cai's quick-thinking mind thinking of a shield that when destroyed would knock him backwards) sent him flying back, just out of reach of the Archdemon's first swing that had shattered his shields. He released mana, and the fragments of the stained glass which had formed his defensive spheres launched themselves at the demon's fist, imbued with a mournful purple glow of White and Black mana combined. He added more shards of glass into the mix, blades of crystal that mimicked his dad's technique of creating a projectile armoury of lucent sword slashing through the air and crashing into the Lord of Riots's hand.

Most of them simply shattered into even more pieces as they impacted onto the incredibly tough and mana saturated skin of the Archdemon, the fingers of the most powerful demon in the City of Pleasure that were thicker than Caiellis's waist and probably his upper body including his shoulders unaffected by the sharp shards colliding into them, but some, the ones that Cai had created himself and saturated with the excess mana from the spell that he had been forced to drop, drew the blood of the demon, a vibrant yet dark and malicious red liquid dripping out of them, but they were only flesh wounds.

Despite Caiellis's shield taking the brunt of the retaliatory blow and knocking him out of reach in that first backhand strike, the almost weightless youth was still sent flying by the sheer force of the hit, twisting and turning over and over and over in the air and sending revulsion pounding in sickening waves through his skull, the images in his mind caused by the insanity-inducing aura of the Defiler deciding that this was the perfect time to show the boy an utterly disgusting scene of a mass orgy of blood and excess and things that innocent thirteen year olds – or adults for that matter – should never have had to seen, things that should not have been ever done by humans.

Black spots appeared in front of Cai's vision because of being flipped repeatedly head over heels in the air like when his older brother had been messing with him in the past and almost made him throw up, although this was many times worse than that and the boy couldn't stop a thin trickle of vomit mixed with blood from dripping down his mouth before it was flung into the air. He thought he might black out, which would be extremely dangerous not least because of the speed that he was flying chaotically through the air, and tried to get his stained glass wings to control the spiralling fall/flight before his spinning trajectory led him to be splattered against one of the many spires of rock surrounding and curving over the Redhand hill.

The beating of the Gift of Orzhova seemed to do nothing to slow his descent nor control it, and Cai could barely breathe because of the air knocking the breath from him and the strain that his broken ribs were placed under. He conjured up another pair of wings, and with that he could stop himself from spinning violently through the air, stifling a gasp of relief and shock as he managed to stop himself just before he was slammed into a massive claw of obsidian curling over the plaza, something which would probably have killed him. His head hurt even more now, the effects of the concussion caused by having it split open on the last remnants of the once-pleasant mansion which had now been utterly destroyed exacerbated by his violent trip through the air, but now with his four wings of shining stained glass he could stay aloft and stared back at the demon, now on the same level as its horrifying visage of a face.

He could see his father still trapped and unconscious in the prison of crystals made from his youngest son's (biologically his son, though Marik had professed that he didn't think of Caiellis as one) own blood, and the Lord of Riots seemed to pay no heed to him, preferring to fight a conscious and reacting opponent. Caiellis felt extremely dizzy and wanted to throw his guts up, but managed to cast a short spell of purely beneficial White mana which Uncle Tybalt had taught him long ago upon himself that cleared his vision and removed the vertigo and some of the sensation of faintness from his mind to the point where it was the same as before, though slightly worse as his concussion was accentuated while in the air.

He glared at the Lord of Riots, trying to muster up his courage once again as it fixed him in its petrifying and fiery gaze that Cai refused to look into just as he refused to look at the flickering inferno between the demon's two upper horns, as out of the corner of his eyes he had seen the flames twisting into the form of figures that murdered one another and embraced orgiastic acts of passionate coupling together as they killed. That meant he had to concentrate mostly on the Defiler's terrifying and huge teeth, each of the individual fangs easily the size of a Lucaelian greatsword and stained with the blood of the Sire of Insanity which it had eaten at the start of this battle between a Lucerna, his First Sisterhood angel and an Archdemon.

The demon smiled at him, full of the dark mirth of one who had orchestrated a million different and unique deaths and had thoroughly revelled in each one of them, hefting its flaming scythe once again. Cai knew that it that weapon got anywhere near him then he would have no chance as he was not an angel, just a mere mortal, and that he also could not rely on his small size and relative speed because in spite of the fact that a huge scythe of that weight should have been ponderous and lumbering the dark frenzy of the Lord of Riots made it able to reach absurd speeds.

Orzhova, free of the demon's scythe bearing down on her and threatening to send her to the Mind Realm once again, beat her magnificent black wings stained with blood and launched herself into the air. Several balls of smoking fire spontaneously combusted into existence around the Defiler in an almost casual and nonchalant manner, as if the spells that would drain the mana of a human mage were nothing to Rakdos (which was true), and they trailed ash and thick smoke as they were fired at both the flying Cai and his now aloft seraph. There was a huge number of them, more bursting into flaming life every second as the Lord of Riots spread its arms out wide, the flames on its head dancing wildly as the demon invoked large amounts of passionate and feverish Red mana, launching it at its two foes and smiling and laughing maliciously all the while.

Cai dove out of the way of one of the blasts, having access to four wings increasing the manoeuvrability the aura granted him despite using more of his mana to create (although normally just the usual pair of wings sufficed and the boy had no inclination to change that and normally conjure four wings – not that he would have any need in the future to do that anyway). A slash of black sunlight bisected another one of the oily fireballs that reminded Cai of the bituminous blast that the Defiler had used to remove the enchantment which had allowed the youngest Lucerna – and the youngest Lucaelian warrior in the army - and his guardian angel to remain unaffected by the Rain of Gore.

The boy arced the Sword of Glass through the air, drawing himself a shield with the celestial golden light mixed with flecks of somehow solemn tenebrosity that bled from the crystal blade that instantly blocked a powerful gout of flames, the Red mana surrounding Caiellis for a second as his shield absorbed the power, turning it into healing mana that scattered away instead of helping the boy's wounds. He dove and twisted, dodging past the screaming storm of flames that seemed simultaneously indiscriminate and chaotic but also targeted at him and moving with a sadistic desire to do pain to the boy opposing their master, all the while keeping an eye on Rakdos to ensure that he did not do anything else – although the amount of mana that the Archdemon had meant that it did not have to move to cast spells.

Cai instantly sensed a build up of destructive Red and Black magic which he had detected before from those who wielded those chaotic and individualistic colours of mana together. His mind working in overdrive despite the numerous distractions and the pain he was in, the thirteen year old immediately dropped as far as he could in the act of evading the closest fireballs (and all of those that didn't hit and weren't nullified by any of his magic twisted round and arced towards him again) as the Lord of Riots raised his two hands, his scythe clasped in the meaty fist of his right, and crashed the two together.

The force of the shockwave sent a rippling wave of destruction all around the demon, and Cai instinctively raised his hands in front of his face as it washed over him. That was a mistake, as while the wave of obliteration did shatter his shield and his wing it sent a screaming peal of sheer noise into his ears. Instead of just being a loud ringing, Caiellis could hear the sounds of vile deprivation, hedonism taken to the extreme mixed in with the screeching ring of the sound that reverberated and echoed inside of his head, blocking out all other sound.

The thirteen year old was pretty sure that he had yelped in surprise and pain as he started to fall, though he had expected this and pulsed out Black mana from his sword and luminosity from his left hand. Shadows slowed down the speed of his descent, tendrils of shadow that were not corrupt or noxious grabbing hold of him and steadying him as he fell, and he hit the ground with a loud crack that he couldn't hear over the screaming in his head. He still felt the force of the impact shuddering through his abused and thin form, but bent his knees into the landing like he had been taught long ago. The White mana had formed a place for him to land safely underneath it, though it did shatter like a pane of glass when his feet touched it and it nullified most of the energy of the sudden halt. For once Cai was glad that he wasn't heavy, as it would have required much more of his mana that was being used up every second in maintaining Orzhova out of the lonely cathedral of his Mind Realm.

That wasn't to say that it didn't hurt, and the youngster wouldn't be surprised if his already broken ribs had been damaged to the point of beyond repair because of the strain that he was putting them through. He gasped in pain, holding the cracked bones in one arm as he pulled himself back to his feet, knowing that he needed to get moving especially because he couldn't hear anything over the wailing in his ears, like when he had just had his head burst open on that wall of Jarred's mansion. Caiellis could feel a trickle of warm blood coming from his ears, and hope that that didn't mean that he had been permanently deafened because he didn't want that and it would be very dangerous in the middle of this battle, though slowly but surely some sounds were making it through.

That included a rumbling growl of ferocious thunder from the Tempest of Craving that heralded more lighting flashes of crimson coruscation. Cai looked back up at the demon, its gargantuan bulk illuminated by the bursts of scarlet and corrupt electricity as the blood poured onto its leathery skin reflected the random bursts of light spat out by the roiling storm above which darkened the entire city and blocked out the harsh but warm light of the Welkalite sun. Orzhova was also lit up by the red fulmination, the Angel of the Black Sun hating the fact that her fragile Summoner whom it was her responsibility to protect after all that she had put him through in choosing him to carry her and be her host in the material plane was once again confined to the ground and at the capricious mercy of Rakdos.

She launched herself into the air, her own purple coruscation of haunting lightning crackling around her golden scythe and mixing with the shadowy handle of the weapon, and intended to attack the demon from the side.

The littlest Lucerna looked back up at the Archdemon, mana flowing around him and through his limbs as he automatically began to start casting some form of guarding enchantment that would allow him to resist more damage; he felt bare without them when in the middle of a battle as he knew that if his weakling body was hurt than the damage would be large without any form of protection or magical shielding, especially since he was not strong enough to be able to wear even medium armour tailored towards his exact size and fight at his full capabilities.

But, as he stared up at the massive Lord of Riots, truly hit for the first time by how large that it was as it towered above him and glowered bloodthirstily down, his mind stopped processing the thoughts necessary for the defensive auras and shielding. Rakdos was huge, and it seemed that Cai had somehow not figured that the demon could easily kill him with just one of its smallest fingers without even using the sharp talons on each digit. Terror flooded through the boy's mind, oblivious to the fear-inducing Red and Black mana that the demon was using to augment its already normally terrifying aura of fright, and Cai could feel unnatural dread creeping up his spine as he made the mistake of looking into the Defiler's seemingly huge and all-encompassing eyes of fire.

Caiellis's hearing returned, but the screaming inside of his skull did not stop, the same images in his head those that he saw within the eyes of the most powerful demon he had ever seen, and as such he paid no attention to Orzhova's shouted warning to him as he stared back up at the Lord of Riots. This was all hopeless. There was absolutely no point to this defiance of his, and that was not the demon making him think that because the demon wanted to break him. But as Cai stared up, transfixed by the flickering gaze of a being who had trampled over the corpses of thousands of civilisations and ripped apart angels and other demons alike, mesmerised into paralysis because of the pure fear inside of him, he realised that there was nothing he could do to damage Rakdos.

Every time he had tried, his attacks had been ineffectual and barely scratched the Archdemon, and each time the retaliation from the Defiler had almost killed him until it pulled back and let him live on for a bit longer. Cai was so scared, so damn scared, and he couldn't move, he couldn't think as the demon leaned down over him, blocking out the light from the Tempest of Craving as it reached down towards the boy. Cai was barely aware that he had started shaking and hyperventilating in pure fear, almost cancelling the spell that he had cast on his father as his frightened mind decided that fighting his maddened and furious father who had tried to crush his neck and choke him unconscious was better than this, better than battling with all he had against a demon that was toying with him and could crush him to a pulp by merely batting an eyelid.

He knew that he had to atone for his mistakes, that the Lord of Riots was his burden to bear and that it was his responsibility to kill it, but he was only thirteen, and he was so scared, and angels dammit I just want my big brother to help me and save me from the pain and the fear. Alex would know what to do, Alex always knew what to do, but Alexander wasn't here and his little brother was all alone in the darkness. Cai was powerless to move as the demon, savouring his fear, closed in on him, though one part of him insisted that he had to fight back, that all of this defiance and agony that he had gone through could not be for nothing.

He wished that he was strong enough to fight, brave enough to oppose the demon any more, but as Rakdos leaned further down towards the shuddering form of the youngest prince who felt smaller than ever, he knew that nothing he did would be enough.

Orzhova scowled and tried shouting Caiellis's name again. The boy had a habit of falling for the fear-inducing spells of their foes – no, that isn't fair at all. Cai is barely affected by them, as other, lesser humans would simply give up there and then and have their minds permanently broken, but my Summoner is only a tender thirteen years of age and, irrespective of the fact that he is a Lucerna, Cai can't be expected to fight against an Archdemon alone. I'm only surprised that he hasn't succumbed to its aura of terror and dread already. It is my duty to help him and protect him from that.

The Angel of the Black Sun hated being separated from her small and unassuming Summoner in the midst of a deadly battle, particularly since because of the demon in the abyss that had talked to them and frightened Caiellis (though that fright was quickly replaced by the panic incited by the presence of the Defiler), as then she couldn't protect him as well from any of their foes' attacks. Also, unsurprisingly enough, most of them targeted him anyway because he was more fragile and much more susceptible to mental attack, as well as the reality that he was a human and a Lucerna, and his pure soul would be coveted by all demons and all other infernal denizens of the nether realm.

She abandoned her spell that had been targeted at the demon, firing the radiant darklight which she had not had time to mould properly into a spell that might hurt such a strong being, and flew towards the position of her frozen and trembling Summoner. The fact that their mental link had also been disrupted and stopped was even worse, and Orzhova had little clue of what was running through the boy's mind besides fear and desperation as well as sadness and sorrow at the violent betrayal of his father. His adorable green eyes were open wide in shock, the pupils large and reflecting the flames that were within them, and the Angel of the Black Sun realised that he had inadvertently started staring into the eyes of the demon when he had looked up.

Red and Black mana was not particularly known for mentally freezing or enthralling their foes, but the panic inducing power of the chaotic mana was amplified and heightened to obscene levels by the Archdemon that exemplified it. Furthermore, the magic of emotion mixed with the magic of darkness could cause a person to become extremely violent and turn on their allies (though not in the way that Marik had done, as that had been full of intention and he wouldn't have been able to speak properly had he been affected in that matter) or to be filled with fright and unable to act.

Cai was in the grip of fear, and his young mind would be filled with it to the point where he could not think of anything else, a concept that was at the same time alien but very familiar to the dark seraphim.

As an angel, she did not feel fear, not in the human sense of the word, merely the dreadful aura of the demons which she knew well would incite the former emotion in humans, but being an avatar of Black mana as well as White she was well accustomed to the emotion of terror – having inspired it many times in Xarius's accursed reign, turning soldiers and Sancturia creatures alike into paralysed children like Caiellis was at the moment, although her own brand of that was borne of equal amounts of terror and awe because of her White mana, not just the former. However, she could feel apprehension, nervousness, concern and worry, for herself when her sisters came close to capturing her in her escape into the abyss and for her precious young Summoner whom she wanted to protect with all of her divine heart.

That concern was at the forefront of her mind as she dove towards Caiellis's location, the fortifying White mana that she tried to conjure up within the youth rendered useless by the presence of Rakdos and the surprisingly subtle wall of blackness that had been created around the boy by the formation and solidification of the demon's unnaturally dark shadow that danced around the slender youth and reached towards him with claws of darkness that weren't yet close at him to rake at his magical essence and soul, as there was no doubt that this form of magic would target that.

She could see just by looking into Caiellis's eyes, something that her enhanced and post-human vision allowed her to do, that his sanity was close to breaking point, and some of the images that she saw reflected in those wide green orbs worried her a significant amount because they would only be the tip of the iceberg of what was happening inside of his head. There was no way that she could surprise the demon, as it had to know that she was coming to save her precious Summoner, and despite the fact that its predatory gaze was fixed firmly upon Cai Rakdos could most likely sense her White mana and know exactly when she would approach.

The angel's hate-filled scowl deepened as her mind analysed the situation, aware that the Archdemon was baiting her in as there was no way that she could let Caiellis be slain but powerless to do anything about that. That sad truth of the matter was that Cai was limiting her power, though not inhibiting it intentionally and she was sure that in time with the rate of growth and progression that he displayed he would be able to access nearly if not all of her strength and have enough mana to cast her most powerful spells – or even go beyond that and craft some of his own – but the fact remained and her young Summoner's exhaustion at the moment as well as his young age meant that she was unable to cast some of her most powerful magic.

Nevertheless, Orzhova had never felt so protective over another being before, even her sisters whom she had been created with and had been her only company back before the birth of Xarius (whoever chose to name their child that was a fool, although it did have a nice ring to it) and matching how she had been when she had first met the youth that would define her and her second and current Summoner's life even over a hundred years after his death. That strengthened her White mana, and she grasped the medallion representation of the Black Sun sigil in her left hand as circles of pulsating light began to pulse outwards from it.

She spun her ornate scythe round, gathering mana in the blade of that as she flew towards her Summoner, a blast of White mana from her destroying some random fireballs which arced towards her. Orzhova placed the sigil of her symbol and her Summoner's birthmark in the middle of the sun shaped heel of her weapon which was connected to the large golden blade, the purple darkness shrouding the weapon and pooling in the centre of the larger symbol coalescing around the light of the medal in her left hand and hanging on a chain of large golden circles. The Angel of the Black Sun let go of the chain, and instead of falling to her side once again or being consumed by the midnight blackness of her scythe it hovered, the chain extending as Orzhova grasped the shadowy handle of her weapon with both hands, the whole blade infused with White and Black mana.

She narrowed her onyx black eyes that were filled with coruscating purple energy that looked like lightning at the sight of her Summoner now, as Cai had fallen to his knees, destitute, the Sword of Glass slipping from his grasp as he stared unblinkingly and fearfully up at the Lord of Riots. Hmph. So that is true then.

The shadows that had been forming up around the boy, the shade created by the demon tainted and corrupted as it made shapes around small Caiellis, were given shape and definition by the psychotic and crazed mind of the Defiler. She had heard rumours – mostly from the time she had once invaded Rakdos's realm to put a stop to the expansion of his territory within Sancturia, not that any of her sisters would ever give her credit for that – that such was the power of Rakdos that even he shadow took on a cruel life of its own.

This seemed to be happening around Caiellis as the demon leaned towards him, reaching out its massive hand that would wrap around Cai and crush the life out of his young form or lift him up into the air, ready to be devoured by the demon or taken as a plaything or pet back into Sancturia or wherever the Archdemon would go next now that it was in the material realm. The shadow of the demon was fusing together and converging on three distinct points around Caiellis, the substance of the shadow knitting together the unholy flesh of dark creations that Orzhova had never seen before.

They were tall, almost monstrously so though not as nearly as tall as the Archdemon whose shadow had created them, and were clothed in black leather made from the darkness that wrapped around their supple and vaguely feminine forms, though they would be considered androgynous without the sight of breasts covered by white and gold plates shaped like grinning cherubs in a mocking parody of the decorations of the Sanctum Angelica and the territories of the light that left much of the beings' flesh bare above it. They were clad in black leather armour that formed surprisingly elegant and fluted shoulder pads and extended downwards from them into the shadows. The avatars of Rakdos's power had no legs as far as the angel could see, simply distending off into the malignant darkness of the Defiler's shade, but that was not the most disturbing part of them.

Wickedly curved and thick sabres that looked more like brutal butcher's cleavers were held in the humanoid but spindly left hands of the creations, but the other arm was like a mutated and corrupted growth that was fused into some sort of horrific weapon of metal and spikes which the angel had no doubt in her mind would be employed with savage purpose. All semblance of humanity was also erased by the strange helms that the beings wore, although Orzhova had a feeling that they were actually part of the creatures' heads. They were a mixture between the beaked heads of birds and the sucker proboscises of insects that extracted the vital fluids of their prey, and coloured bright red – the colour of vivid blood that was the exact same shade as the Rain of Gore. They had the whirling tongue of the feeder insects that Orzhova had mentally described, but modified and changed to become nightmarish and disturbing, and had massive horns of bone extending out from their heads.

To complete the creatures, the avatars of discord birthed from Rakdos's malevolent shadow, they had two large black wings similar to that of Orzhova's but nowhere near as majestic or imperial as the angel's, more like the mottled black pinions of a scavenger crow that feasted upon the dead at the end of violent conflicts. Orzhova would have shouted a warning to her Summoner as the three avatars swirled around him, cackling insanely and shrieking at the boy which would do no good for his concussion nor help his already frightened mental state, but she knew that Cai would not hear it. He hadn't seen these new foes that were nowhere near as dangerous as their progenitor but still formidable in their own right, especially with three of them, as he hadn't yet been able to tear his gaze away from that of Rakdos's.

Inside, Caiellis's head was screaming at him, parts of him telling him that he was pathetic for giving in so easily like this, that he was giving up on his big brother and all those people who had sacrificed their lives for him, but he didn't really care. This Lord of Riots was a god, an atavistic and cruel false deity of the most infernal and deepest hells, but still a god, and he was just a mere mortal – and a child at that. There was nothing he could do, and he wanted someone to come and help him because he knew that he couldn't do it alone. His damn father had been supposed to aid him, but had just made his son more scared and called him a failure (amongst other things), though he couldn't really blame Marik.

If there was any point, he might have screamed, might have ran as far away from this horrible hell-hole as his skinny but small legs would take him, but since there was none all he could do was kneel down and watch as the demon reached down to snuff his life out. This was what his life had amounted to, he realised, this was it and all of them knew it.

A flash of light broke away part of the panic in his mind, and he saw Rakdos's grin widening. Was the demon still playing with him? Couldn't he just end it all already and free him from this terror and pain? Or was the demon just smiling because Orzhova was-

Orzhova!

Caiellis blinked once, and tore his gaze away from the demon's flaming pits of eyes, the flickering yet simultaneously indescribably bright and claustrophobically inferno of pleasure and vice leaving disgusting after images in his retinas that matched the ones occurring in his mind. He spat a mental curse at himself, damning himself for how easily he had been caught off guard, and the rumbling laugh of the demon assured him that he was still in significant danger.

Of course I'm in danger, you stupid fucking idiot! What the hell was I thinking? I almost died and all this effort to atone for my crimes of getting other people hurt and killed and allowing an Archdemon to enter the world, would have been for nothing if I had done. Get up, you worthless, useless child. Get up, you don't deserve to die yet. Your older brother and your father who loves him are in so much danger because of you, and you were just going to throw your life away without even damaging the Lord of Riots a little bit? How pathetic.

Despite the self-damning and very cynical and pessimistic tone of his main mental voice that viewed his own life as nothing and saw the Archdemon as his fault, something that needed to be erased by him alone, the rest of him, the bit that he tried to ignore and not let affect him, was still terrified, wanting to huddle up on the ground, bring his knees to his chest like he had done so many times in the past and curl up into a foetal ball, as if that would ever solve anything or make his problems go away. The only thing that that had ever done was to motivate his elders who took pity on him to help him and try to help him with whatever was concerning him, but the only one that was here on his side was Orzhova and she was already doing everything in her power to aid her young Summoner – and she did not have time to play into the motherly role which he had never had while she was fighting to save his life.

It was clear that Cai had recovered from whatever had afflicted him for the most part, but the boy still stayed where he was, cultivating the appearance that he was trying to overcome his fear – which was not far from the truth at all, in fact it was the truth but unlike some others the youngest Lucerna could fight with terror in his mind, because he had been forced to ever since he was four years of age.

Rakdos laughed again, chilling Cai to the core but also sending hot breath wafting up and down his body. The sound sent ringing pains through the boy's head as he almost fell to the ground and gave into the temptation to clutch his agonised skull, before suddenly slamming its hand into the ground.

Cai was faster, reacting extremely fast and glad of the illusion of being more afflicted by the aftermath of being paralysed by fear, leaping backwards ever so slightly before turning to attempt to carve into the demon with the Sword of Glass. Then he found that the relic weapon which had served him so well recently had been dropped on the ground, though at least it was still connected to him by the magical tether he had created and as such could be accessed later, but the fact that he had no sword made him hesitate for a split second.

Caiellis cursed inside at his own laxity, knowing that he should never drop his weapon within a battle and that he was going to suffer for it now, and as he leapt back on conjured stained glass wings that he knew would not last long and had no intentions of maintaining past stabilising himself and getting away from the Lord of Riots he raised both of his hands. Many scintillating blasts of light shot out from the boy's palms, dazzling streaks of golden brilliance that lit up the space between him and the Archdemon with its celestial lustre. The multitudinous beams of illuminescence sent scattering impacts of White mana up and down the Defiler's lowered arm as it crashed into the space that Caiellis had been in, the reactionary blasts of the prince scouring thin lines of purification across the demon's flesh which only blackened it ever so slightly as it laughed, seemingly fully enjoying this fight.

It sprang forwards, scythe arcing towards the retreating prince, until the unlight rays of a dark sun crashed into it, illuminating the being in its deathly glow as the Angel of the Black Sun twirled her scythe above her head, the golden medallion shining with glorious light in the middle of the dark heel of her weapon, contrails of radiance and tenebrosity spinning out from the rotating scythe and sending spiralling bolts of darklight impacting into the Lord of Riots, who merely smiled as the rush of unique ecstatic pain from the magic of light and darkness shuddered through him. He had spent too long in the abyss cementing his position as an Archdemon, and it had been too long since he had been Summoned into the material realm – as the last time he had entered this plane he had merely been a greater demon, a lieutenant in his supposed creator Malfegor's armies, and that had been because as he did not have as much power as he did now and as such had not been constrained to Sancturia without a conduit.

"IT HAS BEEN TOO MANY YEARS SINCE I LAST FOUGHT A LUCERNA!" Rakdos roared in delight, revelling in some semblance of a real challenge despite the fact that he was nowhere near using his full power, but the Archdemon supposed that he could be a lot less soft on little Caiellis and Orzhova. He beat his massive wings, sending air tainted by corrupt ash and blood buffeting across the plaza as the Tempest of Craving, one of his most prized creations, crackled overhead and sparked with more thunderous lightning as yet more of his minions were spat out at the City of Pleasure, the human monument to hedonism and excess that entertained Rakdos immensely, below.

Cai was forced to abandon his attack and hold his arms crossed over in front of his face, light collecting around them as it formed a shield of glass and luminescence that would protect him from any potential damage in the squall of corrupt air blown around the courtyard. The demon's voice instilled him with equal amounts of terror and hatred that vied for dominance within his head, one part of him cursing himself for what he had let be Summoned into Usnaan when the task of taking the huge capital city of Welkas whilst the other insisted that he should run and that there was nothing he could do.

It sent waves of white-hot pain through his skull, but after he heard the words Cai frowned in consternation when he heard more screaming from underneath him – well, rapidly approaching him since the atavistic howl of Rakdos had predictably broken his glass wings – and detected several mana signatures that were very similar to the demon's but noticeably distinct and unique, three of them if he could perceive it properly over the pounding inside of his head exacerbated by the noise and visions inside of his mind and the huge presence of the Archdemon that disrupted all of his senses, made him feel every sensation in the extreme yet also confused and distracted his magical sense.

He yanked on the chain to bring his sword to him as he looked down whilst falling, though he had not gone far enough up in the air to do anything but jar his ribs when he landed, subconsciously providing mana to his angel who was evidently planning to start some form of powerful ritual which would hopefully damage the Lord of Riots but also aware that he had to be by her side and add his own magic to it to complete it fully. Three nightmarish and ghastly figures that were made from the fevered dreams of demons rose up to meet him, each of them wielding a brutal sword that was dripping with some sort of poison or liquid, though what was more disturbing were the strange claw-esque appendages in place of their right arms that clicked and whirred in an insanity-inducing tune as they reached towards him.

Orzhova's magic gave the youngest Lucerna a brief respite from their Archdemon foe who turned to deal with her and battle against the First Sisterhood angel, and Cai knew that he had to deal with these weird and macabre avatars quickly so that he could help her against Rakdos. He landed, efficiently rolling and pushing down the surge of nausea that threatened to rise up and swallow him completely in the action, and he suddenly felt hugely claustrophobic as the clammy shadows pressed in at him from all sides, the cloying darkness that reminded him of the abyss back home and the horror that the vampire Aksua had once used but had been destroyed completely by Akroma (who was also fine, kneeling next to Marik but making no moves other than that, though she looked to be unconscious and unable to move and help – not that she would anyway) slowing down his movements as the discordant yet rapturous wailing of the avatars closed in on him.

He knew that he needed to pay attention to what was happening between his angel and the Lord of Riots, but he could only focus on the current enemies and could not see through the solid black shadow of the demon that hung over him like a cloud of darkness. Caiellis pulsed mana into his sword, a blinding sphere of incandescence pushing back the shadows around him and burning the questing of murk that reached towards him, but it did not dispel the shade and he still couldn't see his angel. Cai instantly knew what he should do, but it would be very risky and he wanted to assess the capabilities of these new foes formed from the shade of Rakdos before he took the gamble and did what he was planning – as if he defeated them very quickly and managed to get out of the darkness and aid his seraph then it would be unnecessary,

They descended on him like scavenger vultures in Welkas and crows and larger ravens in Lucael would swoop down on their immobile and dead prey, shrieking and whispering maddening words all the while. Caiellis could feel the pull of their malevolent speech encouraging him to give into the rage at the heart of being and submit to the Festival of Bloodshed, to shrug off the constraints of morality and let the anger and thirst for blood consume him. Cai had never been a violent person, even play-wrestling with his older brother and accidentally hurting the older boy (even though it was much rarer than the other way round it still happened) was too much for him sometimes, though he suppressed his naturally gentle nature underneath the disguise of the determined prince that he wore during war or battle. It helped that he hated those who gave in to the darkness and preyed upon the innocent, but he wasn't about to be driven into a bloodthirsty frenzy by the screaming of some incarnations created by the Lord of Riots.

He saw that they had no legs, and were simply connected to the blackness underneath and extending from the Lord of Riots, and an idea that wouldn't cause him harm to try sprang into his mind. Caiellis ran, darting as fast as he could away from the creatures, but instead of running out of the admittedly massive shadow of the Archdemon the shade of Rakdos simply followed him, making it seem like he was sprinting in an endless void of darkness like when he had initiated the Voidwalk that had led him here. It wasn't unexpected, but Cai would have preferred to get away from these avatars of discord without having to expend any mana at all.

He swiftly turned around as the shadow solidified in front of him, evidently tired of his fleeing, and was met with the disturbing visage of the three phantasmagorian creatures chasing him again. The golden and white faces covering their unnatural breasts in a corrupt imitation of some Lucaelian iconography laughed and giggled at his antics, whispering to each other in exaggeratedly hushed yet still loud and high pitched voices, like the overblown mutters of two children making their voices more hissing in an attempt to not be heard by other people nearby yet not actually decreasing the volume in words that Caiellis could not understand – although the sheer variety of strange noises that was almost on the cusp of human speech that accompanied the whirred shrieking of the main heads of the creatures and were made by the lower faces made the boy reticent to think that it was an actual language at all.

He removed the noises from his mind, aware that they were just distracting him from what was actually important which was slaying these enemies. The small thirteen year old raised the shining beacon of the Sword of Glass up, his eyes flicking between the three avatars as they spread out around him, one heading towards him at a straight angle whilst the other two made their way round to attack from the side and the back, the shadows behind him returning to their previous state and allowing the beings to surround him now that there was no chance of escape.

A flashing blade almost caught the boy off guard, and he twisted his skinny body round as the sword arced towards him from a strange angle, though he hypothesised that the shifting and ever-changing nature of the demon's shadow meant that the normal laws of physics did not apply here. He managed to just evade the gleaming weapon, though it was closer than he would have liked as the metal still cut into the fabric of his already brutalised and torn light armour, only not reaching to the fragile and bruised skin underneath. The scrawny teenager whipped the Sword of Glass around, holding his left palm to the flat of the blade as one of the incarnations pressed in on him against it. He grunted at the strength of the strange minion of debauchery as its sword scraped against his and its claw pushed his blade down against him, snapping violently and frenetically as it got closer to his face.

He blasted a wave of White mana through the crystalline blade of his artefact weapon and into it that sent the avatar reeling back, the vaguely female creature knocked away by the discharge of golden light that was soon swallowed up by the darkness. Cai turned and deflected the strike of another vile creation with his sword, unwilling to take the brunt of the powerful blow on himself again, and launched a pulsing flare of luminosity into the being, the spinning orb emitting light all around it and forcing the avatar of discord back. The third life within Rakdos's cruel shadow reached towards him, its slashing sword blocked on a shield of glass that Cai created without even looking round, the blade smashing the protection which let the shards of the magical crystal slice into it. It ignored the pain and grasped at the boy with its pincer arm, who was forced to leap forwards to avoid being grabbed by the appendage.

That left him coming to his feet face to face with another one of the beings, and while he blocked its sword on his own and blasted a bolt of radiance at its disturbing right arm its vicious and strange proboscis-like tongue thrust towards him, the end of it sharp and maliciously barbed. Caiellis yelped as it fired at him, and he withdrew quickly before another avatar rammed into him, scraping and clawing at him with its taloned arm as he was too close for its scimitar cleaver – which was arcing round to be rammed into him – to be used quickly enough.

Caiellis cried as the blade claws of the avatar cut into him and lacerated his flesh, and in response to the pain that the Welkalites would find exquisite but Cai could only think of as horrible yet extremely precise, like he was being attacked by some sort of insane surgeon intimately familiar with the human and how to cause the most pain as possible, a blast of White and Black mana discharged out of him, the purifying magic of light mixing with the destructive and ruinous force of the darkness and blasting the avatar away from him. The White mana explosion also had the added benefit of removing the neurological and hallucinogenic substances that had been injected into his bloodstream by the claw, though as it could not heal him cleansing his body of the effects and the foreign toxins was extremely painful.

He bit his lip on a part of it that he had already gnawed to pieces and was bloody and red because of this battle and the amount of pain he had gone through as the venomous and perception-altering narcotics that had been rushing throughout his veins was systematically purged, and quickly jumped to the side to avoid a screaming blade that hacked into where he had been stood. The shadow of the demon was slowing him down, and these incarnations of death were far more formidable than he had anticipated. They were also terrifying as they snaked around the interior of the darkness towards him, and Cai would probably have been quite horrified and frightened by them had he not been fighting a being as powerful and spine chilling as an Archdemon only moments before.

These avatars of discord and strife, while strong, were nothing compared to the one whose shadow had given them form and dark life, and Caiellis needed to deal with them quickly so that he could aid his angel against the greatest threat. He ignored the stinging of his new wounds, the back of his shirt shredded completely by the blades and covered in warm and sticky blood (as the jacket which had been covering the softer and thinner fabric of the shirt had already been destroyed by having it scraped along the jagged, rubble-strewn floor and a wall and burnt), and turned round to where his chittering and hissing enemies had consolidated.

It was with no small piece of satisfaction that he noticed that the one who had stabbed him only had one arm, the other destroyed at the elbow by his mortifying magic. Cai took a deep breath, knowing that he was about to do something that could be extremely risky and end with him unfocussed and in pain, but it was that or not know his angel's position or activities for when he finished off these twisting creatures of nightmares and insanity. He closed his right eye, keeping his left firmly open and fixed on the enemies that were closing in on him once again, preparing to attack the small boy in their midst from different sides like they had done before, and steadied his breathing which had become hitching and irregular because of the pain.

He had never before used one of the Lenses of Guilt or Innocence on their own but mixed with his normal vision, having either focussed solely upon one or combining the two together when using his more powerful magic (though, as he had proved now underneath the storm that punished the usage of the Lens of Guilt, he could use his strong spells without the Lenses), but now he was going to try it so that he could track the Angel of the Black Sun whilst defeating the enemies that detained him here – as that would allow him to destroy them and then add his power to Orzhova's magic by reaching her side.

His right eye above the shining purple birthmark of the ominous Black Sun on the otherwise pale (in the bits not covered with blood) and thin yet still extremely babyish and young cheek became suffused in milky golden light, and Cai paid no heed to the way that his head pounded as the vision of Innocence interspersed with his normal sight until the two were overlapping, though the only thing that he could see in the yellow sight of Innocence was part of his angel – as roughly half of her being showed up in each of the Lenses as he had found out before. He could see Orzhova through the shadow and the body of the demon that was blocking her, and could see her generating White mana – which meant that she must have been channelling Black as well. However, the fact that he had sacrificed half of his physical vision to be able to locate his guardian angel meant that he could only use his left eye for now in fighting these enemies.

Nonetheless, the Lens of Innocence empowered his White mana while it was active, which would be perfect in eradicating these disturbing foes from existence. One avatar launched it/herself at him, and opened its claw wide as it reached to strike at his face. Caiellis pulsed mana through himself, seeing through the Lens of Innocence that his angel needed help, and he ducked underneath the strike of the claw before rolling forwards, evading the rapidly descending sword that would have cut him in two. A tendril of shadow reached towards him from the ground, but instead of annihilating it with his mana he reached out to it himself with Black magic, his own mana of darkness interacting with that of the shadow and subverting it to his will after a mental battle of a few seconds.

The arm of darkness wrapped around the incarnation missing half of its arm, tying it down as it shrieked and hacked at the chains of shadow wrapping round itself with its sword until Caiellis fulminated a coruscation of purple lightning that was a combination of mostly Black but also some White mana through it. The magic seared into it, ripping apart the fabric of its entire being and destroying it as Caiellis leapt upwards, slashing his shining blade through the avatar in front of him. He heard an ear splitting scream of agonised ecstasy from his current target, and was grabbed around the neck by the claw appendage of the avatar and shoved backwards. Adrenaline rushed through the boy when the being touched his already heavily bruise throat, and he tried to stop the shaking of his limbs as he sailed through the unnaturally gloomy shade created by the Archdemon that darkened the shadow of the Tempest of Craving above even more.

After almost being choked to death by his father and having a primal fear of being strangled that eclipsed most others, that was definitely one of his greatest weaknesses in this conflict. He fought to get his frightened mind under control, telling himself that the incarnation had barely squeezed his abused throat, but the pressure that had been placed upon his severe bruising made his head spin and made him feel extremely faint. Dizziness washed over him and sent him reeling to find his balance as he landed on the ground, blinking his left eye rapidly as he tried to get his normal sight under control again and erase the tears of fright and pain that had welled up within both of his eyes but didn't distract the Lens of Innocence.

He mentally snarled in annoyance at his father for bruising his neck and making it so that even the pressure that the avatar had placed upon it had almost knocked him unconcious as it threw him away, and, his annoyance at his father replaced by an instinctive fear as he threw his body sideways. A bolt of fire that had been launched by the last monster's claw sent waves of heat over Cai that scorched him but didn't outright damage him as he dodged it. He wanted to conserve his mana whilst fighting these foes, but time was of the essence if he was going to get to Orzhova before she was sent back to the Mind Realm. The boy silenced a wailing and childish part of him that begged him to drag on the fight with these creatures longer so that he didn't have to face the Archdemon again, reminding it that Rakdos would come for him after his angel was finished anyway.

The two remaining incarnations circled around him, snapping their pincer claws threateningly as fire sparked over them, as it taunting the boy by telling him that they could launch waves of flame at him whenever they chose. Cai could feel his blood pounding in his skull, and his frantic desperation to end this fight was rising, his desire to get back to his angel and battle against the Lord of Riots who was already out of control and overcoming his Summoning suffusing his mind and refusing to let him think of anything else. He raised his sword to the sky, the crystal blade shining with bright yet cataclysmic White mana with an edge of midnight tenebrosity as he mustered his desire to help his angel and made it into something tangible and powerful.

The monsters of nightmares shrieked and howled at the boy as they sensed what he was doing, and they unanimously agreed to attack him as soon as possible. One of them headed round the front, flapping its feathered wings in an erratic and irregular pattern of beats that was incredibly discordant and distracting to anyone who heard it, whilst the other blended back into the tainted shadows like the corpse of its companion had when it had been killed. Caiellis kept on channelling his mana into his blade, an orb of light surrounding him and pressing back the shadow and his left eye roving around, looking for the enemies.

His back and neck hurt more than it did before, but it was just another thing for the youngest Lucerna to push to the back of his mind and ignore, something else that did not bother him because he wouldn't have to deal with it after he banished by the Archdemon or it turn killed by it, the second possibility infinitely more likely considering his condition and the sheer power of the demon.

Although if you let it kill you before you remove it from this world or at least heavily wound it so that your father can deal with it when he is freed from your spell, you will die a coward and a disgrace, you will die without making amendments for your many mistakes which have put everyone who has ever wasted their time trying to protect you and loving you in danger.

Cai let out a cry that was tinted with a divine and mana infused resonance as it pillar of light shot out from his sword, this one pure white, which was rarer for his mana ever since he had obtained Orzhova and started to truly use Black magic but still very possible for him, the cleansing column of blinding illumination piercing through the cloying shadows that were almost as thick as tar and were beginning to make breathing difficult even with the helpful aura around his mouth that purified the air he was breathing in (or maybe the pressure put on my neck and the additional strain on my ribs has made it harder to breathe?).

The ground started shaking around him as the air was saturated with surprisingly wrathful mana that exuded the need to dispense judgement upon the evil and the corrupt, the pure White mana flowing out of his sword taking quite a toll on the reserves of magic that he had left, although if he wanted to he could have made this spell even more powerful and destructive (which would have been incredibly pointless considering this would be powerful enough to destroy the avatars). There was the thrumming sound of a powerful mana discharge as some of the light began to be coloured slightly more golden, and he could faintly perceive the hymns of a haunting yet stirring choir as the pillar of light blasted towards the sky began to be answered by two more lucent beams as he had planned.

Instead of allowing the avatars rushing towards him to attack him in the brief moment before the spell was completed, he gathered up his hatred of the darkness which had ripped his mother away from him and made his life like it was now into his free left hand, pointing his bleeding palm (which would have sealed up by now even without healing and just having access to his Lucerna regeneration – or if he wasn't as fragile as he was now and his body scabbed faster) towards the ground and the shifting darkness underneath him.

He pulsed Black mana out of his hand as the avatar charging straight at him was about to reach him, and the other one concealed by the murk of the demon's shade was starting to breach it and reach towards his head with its claw, and he bent the shadows towards his will with the hate-filled darkness of his own that was not corrupt, simply haunting and full of hatred. The coils of his own Black mana which was distinctly different from the Archdemon's sadistic and malevolent shadow and could be seen within it wrapped around and restrained the discordantly shrieking avatars, and it pulled them to the ground just as they were about to strike him and tear through his soft flesh.

The two columns of light chose that moment to breach the darkness which had followed Caiellis here, smashing into the two incarnations given cruel life by the sheer power of the demon that meant that even its shadow could gain a form of its own. It shredded their malicious essence made from Red and Black mana, cleansing their taint form existence and appearing to Caiellis in both his normal vision and the Lens of Innocence suffusing his right eye that he would be able to deactivate soon. They shrieked at the prince, clawing impotently at the ground as they tried to move until their forms were utterly annihilated by the purifying light, the substance of shadow that made them ripped into its constituent particles of darkness and destroyed by the White mana.

Cai ended the spell as the incarnations died, unwilling to waste any more mana than necessary, and carved a path out of the shadow with his shining sword as he headed towards the location of his embattled Angel of the Black Sun. It was still dark outside of the intensification of the Lord of Riots's shade, but the second he left it he allowed his vision to turn back to normal as he saw his angel engaged with the demon in a magical duel of huge quantities of mana, though Cai had already been able to feel that and had supplied his angel with as much magic as he could while he had been fighting the avatars. He ran to her side, though at first since he was near to the side of the massive demon he had been tempted to attack it from there – but that would have only ended in him being assaulted by the Lord of Riots, as while it was blasting bolts of hellish flame and lightning at the First Sisterhood angel it could easily turn around and crush him into a pulp.

An explosion of destruction and fire shook the ground next to him, raining debris and shrapnel down on a shield that he quickly created as he disregarded the numbness in his limbs and traded more live for magical power, knowing that if he had not done so many of them so far he would have already succumbed to the exhaustion. The rock fragments pattered against his glassy protection as he avoided a bursting eruption of frothing magma and lava that was stimulated by the mana that the Archdemon was outputting, and even though Rakdos seemed to be enjoying the exchange he also appeared slightly bored as he blasted wave after wave after wave of fire at the Angel of the Black Sun.

Caiellis didn't make the mistake of looking into its flaming pits of eyes or the fire in between its horns this time round, but as he reached the point roughly below where his angel was flying, panting because of the fact that he had been forced to sprint around around the entire courtyard, the demon smiled at him sadistically again.

"I'm glad that you managed to deal with my avatars of discord without being too hurt, little Lucerna," the demon chuckled at him, the sense of boredom vanishing now that the boy had returned to the main fight, raising its fist with the scythe within it and slashing it down through the air, a screaming wave of fire blasting out from the swipe towards the dark angel and her recently arrived Summoner. Cai sent a brief glance at Orzhova, who was not wielding her own scythe as the weapon, infused with huge amounts of mana, span above her head. The angel glanced down at him, the pale perfection of her face streaked with bloody droplets that joined the golden tears already etched there, and her onyx black eyes that shone with power and crackled with purple coruscation were filled with unflinching determination and hatred. She was scorched, burnt and covered in ash and blood (most of which was not her own) but other than that she seemed fine, and Caiellis silently whispered an apology to her for leaving her so long.

Then he span his head around again as the tide of flame rushed towards them, the fire taking up the shape of souls that screamed their hatred of order and restraint at them as they surged through the air, howling their exultation at being used as a weapon by the unholy manifestation of destruction and depraved pleasure behind them. Cai could feel the heat of the inferno from here, the torrent of flaming souls combusting in an unnatural crimson flame that rapidly closed in on the two soldiers of the light. He could also feel the power of the mostly raging and blazing Red but also malefic Black mana in that savage but no doubt effective spell that Rakdos had cast, and the demon leaned towards them as if in eager expectation of their response.

It scorched the already abused ground as it passed over it, and the smallest prince gulped involuntarily as he saw it burn through one of the many curling talons of obsidian and other volcanic rock that he didn't quite know that had smashed through the ground with the catastrophic entrance of the Defiler, drowning the rock underneath the superheated flames that ate at it and utterly incinerated the spire, which was a grim reminder of how quickly yet agonisingly it would kill Cai if it touched him, even though he had a gnawing suspicion that the Lord of Riots would let it destroy his guardian Summoning and cause him as much agony as possible as it immolated his young limbs and set his clothes alight but didn't kill him and left him scorched but still alive.

He tried to ignore the disturbing thoughts of being burnt to within an inch of death and left without his dark angel that his mind helpfully provided vivid and gruesomely detailed images of, telling himself that he didn't mind how he died so long as he could do it in a way that would either banish the demon back to Sancturia or make it easier for others to do so, but he couldn't help but feel scared as the flames surged over the ground towards them. Orzhova dropped to the ground in front of him, unfurling her black wings which had none of their awe-inspiring majesty diminished by the ash or blood sticking to them, and pulled down her scythe from where it was spinning and being charged with more and more mana every second, slamming the bottom of it into the ground as he gripped its handle with the fingerless gloves worn on each of her angelic hands, the fingers delicate and feminine and yet stronger than even the most gargantuan and monstrously muscles human being.

Circles of light and darkness flashed out from Orzhova as she wordlessly conjured up a shield in front of them, the fact that despite the reality he had only known the angel for a week yet they were better at working as a team than some people and their Sancturia creatures who had known each other for years meaning that she did not have to speak, physically or mentally, to know that her Summoner knew what he had to do to help. Caiellis knelt down behind the angel, quashing the brief feeling of security that being behind and protected by the member of the First Sisterhood engendered within his mind because he knew that it wouldn't help him in the slightest, and also ignored the sharp stab of pain from his ribs as he completed the motions.

He pressed the slender fingers of his left hand into the ground, some unnecessary part of his psyche commenting that he looked like some form of nature mage, and rammed the Sword of Glass in his right into the earth. It was covered in gore from the torrent of blood ejected perpetually by the roaring Tempest of Craving above, and it was hot, sticky and wet, but that didn't stop the boy running his mana through it. This was one of the most powerful spells that the Archdemon had released as of yet, but Caiellis was sick of being on the defensive.

He was intimately familiar with that style of fighting of course, and usually it didn't bother him as he protected himself from attack and slowly drained his opponent of energy and life as he waited for the right time strike and emerge victorious, but with his healing prevented and his mana pool being expended more and more every second fighting a conservative battle was not going to allow him to win. The Archdemon had more strength, more power and much more dark vitality than him, and being reactionary all of the time was meaning that while he survived he wasn't achieving anything and was just delaying the demon. That would have been all well and good if reinforcements were arriving, but Caiellis had no guarantee of that and knew that even if they did more likely than not they would be swept aside by the Lord of Riots before they could help – unless they were extremely powerful members of the army, but Cai couldn't rely upon anyone else any more and he wasn't intending to.

However, constantly being on the back foot and defending himself from attack after attack from the demon was wearing him down quite fast and ensuring that he did nothing in response, which was what the Lord of Riots wanted as it would make it much easier to break him, especially since every one of his own assaults of radiance and darkness had been repelled with effortless ease. The hopeless pit of hollowness and despair that he had given in to many times over the course of this battle but managed to pull himself out of each time at the bottom of his stomach was getting larger and larger, and he knew that the next time he was drown in its depths of sorrow and sadness it was very likely that he would not escape.

He dragged himself closer to Orzhova as a transparent shield of some sort of crystalline material made from lines of light and darkness that flowed over one another and drew characters in a language that Caiellis could vaguely understand but not read, keeping his hand placed firmly on the ground and the Sword of Glass still stuck into the earth where he was saturating the ground with mana for the Angel of the Black Sun to build up their aerial defences with by providing her with a foundation – as this needed to be one of their most powerful shields. However, Cai was concerned that apart from some limited magic the Lord of Riots hadn't used anything yet that was extremely powerful or something that the young adolescent would classify as being utterly demonic, and had not expended much Black mana at all, preferring to use Red in these explosive conflicts with its two opponents.

"Orzhova," he said, hating how weak and shaky his sounded, how his voice was raw and shuddering from the whole ordeal of this fight and still drenched in sadness from the betrayal of his dad. The angel didn't answer him, but he hadn't been expecting one and was mostly focussed on his spell as she was as well, the flames devouring the ground that they rushed over as they filled his vision with fire, "We can't keep doing this. We can't keep just defending against his constant attacks, but at the same time any small strikes that we do don't achieve anything. We need to be able to use some sort of very powerful spell, but we don't have enough time to do so."

"I am generating White and Black mana in my scythe with the medallion in the centre of it, Cai, so hopefully that will allow us to cut out most of the ritual in casting a spell that could hope to damage the Lord of Riots," Orzhova responded, though Caiellis barely heard her spell over the roar – more like scream – of the flaming wave that was turning from a bloody crimson to a black fire of ash and embers as it approached quickly. The angel mentally winced at the usage of her language, as while she hadn't been focussing on her reply too much since they had to guard against this attack (which was concerning her as it seemed to be gaining power as it came towards them), she didn't have to use the word "hope" so much. It was clear that little Cai, who was staying remarkably calm and able to act in this situation even for a Lucerna teenager, was looking for guidance from his angel, since he had been right and this endless defence was accomplishing nothing for them, so she should have been more confident and gave off an aura of certainty in their victory that she, despite being an angel, didn't quite feel.

In spite of what she would like to think, that was what any of her loyalist sisters would do, make their Lucerna Summoners feel like they had a real chance of succeeding and banishing the Archdemon from this plane of existence, and she had to believe that the spell they would cast after this flaming attack subsided through the plan that she had for it. So she added after a brief delay of weaving sigils of light and shadow into the air around her, words and symbols of power that would aid her in her magic as circles of mana similar to those conjured by young Alexander and all the Lucernas before him in the Summoning ritual of her sibling Aurelia, "We will be able to go on the offensive soon, Caiellis. You should let me take the lead, however, because of your wounds and your fragility without healing magic."

The boy nodded, and although one part of him said that he should be at the forefront of the fight because of the fact that this was his crime, his atonement, another reminded him that Orzhova had a lot to atone for as well as he did, and that she would last much longer facing the Defiler up close. His angel's voice broke into his anxious trepidation, the words harsh yet still gentle, as if Orzhova was trying to comfort him in the middle of this fight, "Even though you have progressed a large amount in your capabilities to use Black mana over the course of this battle, when I tell you I want you to invoke the feelings that you felt when your mother died. I don't have enough time to explain the full plan right now, but be ready for sudden movements and just do as I say. Also, stand up. We are going to turn the tide of battle, mark my words."

Caiellis nodded again at the angel's words, feeling slightly more emboldened by them even though that was just the effect of being talked to by a seraphim of the exalted First Sisterhood. He rose to his feet unsteadily, trying to stop his pathetic and weak body from trembling as he stood behind the angel and watched the massive wave of fire rushing towards them. Orzhova primed the shield, a design of protection that Caiellis had never seen before opening up in front of them like some sort of inverted flower of glass and shadow with its nectar the celestial golden illumination that spilled out from within it.

He studied the shield for a moment, wondering how its purpose would differ from the other ones that they had employed in the past and the usual form, before repressing his natural curiosity which had decided to reach past his shell of determination to slay the Archdemon which currently had a tenuous hold on suppressing his emotions. Cai trusted Orzhova utterly and completely, which was strange when one considered that the only people he had ever done that to before were those who he had met when he had only been very young and his family, and assured himself knowing that she had lived far longer than he had and knew what she was doing.

He couldn't see the Lord of Riots through the flames of darkness and crimson light that incited terror and panic simply by looking upon them, but whenever the black flames that reminded him of a night he remembered in perfectly agonising detail in spite of his age flickered and turned bloody he could perceive the gigantic and dark silhouette of the Archdemon stood behind it. If he was concentrating so hard on being ready for his angel's signal to turn the tide, he would have snorted when he realised belatedly that they hadn't even managed to move Rakdos from the pit of lava that he had originated from in the titanic Summoning ritual which had allowed him to enter the world. That sparked another thought within Cai, though he filed it away for later as the tidal wave of black and red fire approach.

A kind of nervous excitement warred with sheer terror that ate away at the boy from within and did everything it could to dislodge his grim resolve to end the existence of this demon in the material plane if it was the last thing that he did as the first lot of the flames began to impact upon the shield, rushing along the ground like eager hunting hounds rushing ahead of the stampede of their handles, the outlying vanguard fire that first began to brush against the protection but not overwhelm it nor get anywhere as high as the rest of the wave of fire would.

Caiellis readied his mind to delve into his horrifyingly accurate recollection of the night that had ruined his young life, and the youngest Lucaelian in Usnaan looked up at his angel as she finished writing the elegant and eerie symbols and hieroglyphs into the air with her nimble and slender fingers.

"Now!"

The angel shouted at him, her heavenly voice suffused with an otherworldly resonance borne of her mana that was enhanced by her protective instinct over this young and fragile boy who was her first true Summoner and her instinctive hatred for all spawn of the darkness that opposed the light despite the fact that she was half formed from Black mana and the darkness that came from the core of her angelic being. Caiellis felt her hand grasp onto his slender wrist and pull him upwards as she launched herself into the air, the sudden flight augmented by twin contrails of radiance and darkness that followed each of her wings as she beat them and rose into the air, dragging her Summoner with her by his wrist as more magic flowed around him.

The angel rose higher and higher to the point where Caiellis was worried that they might be struck by a rogue bolt of lightning from the Tempest of Craving, and even though the angel's strong grip should have hurt his wrist as she pulled him upwards, it only caused minor discomfort which was nothing to him after all that he had gone through so far in this battle. The wave of fire slammed down upon where they were, and Cai gasped in pain as some of the sparks of blackness touched his legs, burning and searing the skin even with the shielding protection upon it before Orzhova roughly yanked him away from it.

The Angel of the Black Sun threw her scythe up into the air after having grabbed hold of it, each of her fingertips lighting up with a combination of darklight and imperious radiance as coruscating purple lightning crackled all around her, and instead of glancing down (or across at considering how tall and titanic it was) the Lord of Riots Caiellis focussed only upon generating mana for this spell, feeling that in spite of not wasting any energy conjuring up wings for himself he wasn't falling, letting go of the Sword of Glass and placing his two small hands together as if in prayer. Consecrated light and abyssal darkness separated into their constituent elements around him, taking up their usual positions at the left and right of his body as they seeped out of his skin.

This was all or nothing, and the boy was going to put everything he had into this spell in the hopes of damaging or destroying the Defiler. The strange shield that Orzhova had made far below flared with light, and as the angel swept her hands around in two symmetrical arcs from in front of her to behind (and it Cai hadn't been so centred on his generation of mana he would have realised that his angel was no longer holding him). A massive thrumming and burning noise could be heard from the ocean of fire beneath them as the inverted flower shield with petals of crystal and stained glass which they had left behind exploded into light, the magic flipping over so that the nectar of divine celestiance within it was pointing upwards, and within that began to be birthed a star of dark light much like the one that was conjured in Orzhova's Summoning ritual and for other powerful spells.

The Angel of the Black Sun that rumbled beneath clapped her hands together, a loud booming sound of the alternate energies of malevolent tenebrosity and sanctified luminescence colliding together and combining into a ball of golden imperiousness that scattered beams of celestial darkness all around it. The star of unlight in the middle of the shield that was being consumed by the inferno of hellfire surging all around it shone with its deathly light, absorbing power from the Black mana within the flames all around it as the magic of light nullified the fire that passed through or near it as it rose in size. The young teenager could vaguely perceive the sounds of a humming choir in the background over the passage of the flames as he combined light with darkness within his two hands over and over again, the coils of gold that had been wrapping round his left side passing over to his right and meeting tendrils of tenebrous midnight that they coated in light.

Orzhova's hands and arms were like the conductors of an orchestra of light and darkness, White and Black mana playing around them and saturating the air with words and symbols that the boy could vaguely recognise as the characters of luminosity were overlapped by those of smoking gloom and vice versa. The angel drew a circle of light and dark with her hands in front of her as the sun conjured within the flames below by the powerful shield that she had created rose in size even more, floating off the ground as the flames were attracted into it and absorbed into its shining sphere of darkness as it emitted equal amounts of golden light and rays of black luminescence that barely penetrated the surging hellfire that washed over it and was dragged back into it.

Orzhova placed her hands together in the middle of the elegant and embossed circle that she had drawn, glyphs of mana attracted towards it like moths to a flickering flame as they connected to its edges. The circle of golden light expanded, and in its place it left one of darkness that was at the same time identical but different, like the words that had attached themselves onto the first ring of imperious light were given a different meaning by the smoking darkness of night. She pulled her hands apart once again as that second circle began to expand also, pulsing outwards in a ring of shadow that left behind one of a haunting purple luminescence that lit up the angel in a mournful glow of sadness and loss that Cai could feel even from his position.

The light collecting round the fingers of the angel's right hand turned purple, as did the darkness flowing round the slender digits of her left, and Caiellis felt the angel move behind him with this new circle as the others kept expanding and releasing more of the same time of light in a concentric display of alternating exalted golden and malevolent black radiance. Cai knew that while he had already started to collect the emotions of hatred and despair that he had felt on the night of his mother's death, he shouldn't start delving into them fully until the main portion of the spell began where he would be able to release all of his power, hopefully being enough to overwhelm the retaliatory spell that he could already sense the Archdemon casting as rapturous and primal Red and Black mana swirled around its gargantuan form, though Cai didn't look over at it as he focussed upon his mana production.

Caiellis felt his guardian angel run her hands down near to his sides, a tingling sensation rushing through his nerves there as mana was pulled out of him and he felt the power in Orzhova's hands, and then the circle of purple and haunting light pulled itself in around him. It was still large enough to completely surround him, but smaller than it had been before and smaller than the Angel of the Black Sun who still had her own alternating concentric rings of dark light and bright darkness that pulsed out from around her that were much larger but not more powerful than the one orbiting vertically around Cai.

The flames above them were pulled towards the circulating and rotating star of darkness in their midst, the hellfire caught by its malevolent gravity and sucked closer as it expanded with the mana absorbed into it and placed within it by the seraphim as it rose up from within its shattered cocoon of glass petals that still shone with a dying light, a ghostly glow that the boy could barely perceive and knew that it was one of his less common colours when casting his spells. The circle rotated around him as his angel was aloft behind him, and as the representation of the Black Sun underneath them that was more unstable and not as overtly powerful as the one that birthed his angel in the Summoning ritual and allowed him to channel his more formidable sorceries swelled even more with the flames that it consumed.

Orzhova raised her palms to the sky as darkness and light spilled from them, opening her majestic and terrifying black wings wide in tandem with another pulsation of a new circle of both of the old ones combined. The boy's mana rose every second, though there was absolutely no hint of the sensation of being close to the divine or the uncharacteristically egotistical thoughts that sometimes sprung up in this time, probably because Cai thought even less of himself than he did then and that whatever heights of mana he might reach he was certain that the Lord of Riots would be able to match them.

Instead of stopping the two in their powerful ritual of White and Black mana, Rakdos seemed perfectly content to let them cast it and match it with a spell of his own, but as opposed to staring in hatred at the demon the boy who was levitating in the air with the mana that was flowing through his young form shut his eyes, ready to plunge fully into one of the worst experiences of his short lifetime that were only slightly challenged by others, such as when his beloved big brother had almost died because of his little sibling's weakness and when his dad had wrapped his hands around his neck only minutes ago, though that last one paled in comparison to what he would be going in to, the event that ruined his entire life and had defined it every since it happened.

"Novae Tenebra," the angel said, and while she did not shout the words, merely spoke them over the rush of flames and mana, the syllables were intoned extremely loudly and over all else. Caiellis couldn't help but open his eyes so that he could see what was going on as he sensed the mana underneath him swelling to a breaking point, and as he looked down (ignoring the very brief sense of nausea that came from realising he was simply floating in the air and held aloft only by the magical energy) he saw that the sphere of black radiance underneath him was intumescing with the amount of mana from the flaming wave of Red and Black that it had absorbed.

Orzhova coated her palms with White and Black mana in different amounts of golden coloured light and twisting gloaming, whipping them through the centre of the circle that was around Caiellis as her Summoner watched and readied himself, having a vague idea of what was about to happen and what the purpose of the shield which had created the greedy sun of darkness underneath them in the flames was for. It swelled even more, becoming massive and unstable, and exploded.

Instead of a detonation of darklight that would spray across the entire courtyard, the imperfect replica of the Black Sun below them imploded in on itself, ripping its fabric of unlight in two as rays of deathly luminosity spilled out of its cracked core of crystal that it was exposing that was still absorbing power from the tsunami of infernal fire burning everything as the star around it collapsed in on itself. The force of its malignant gravity increased; it started consuming everything around it as the rest of the excess mana in the area was dragged into it, swirling around the exposed heart of shining glass before plunging into it until there were no flames left.

Orzhova cut across the circle vertically from the bottom to the top, this time with her scythe that had been spinning in the air above the two, and Cai felt the rush of air and power from the golden blade of his angel as it bisected the ring of haunting and sorrowful power behind him. The medallion now held in the heel of the scythe that was shaped into the sigil of the disgraced angel pulsed with a blinding yet dark glow as she reversed her grip on the weapon so that the blade and the symbol within it was pointing darkness, the light held in a lacuna vortex of darkness that turned the rays of radiance into more darklight that fired down into the crystalline core of the imperfect sun below.

It detonated in time with the true emergence of the choir without mouths that sang haunting hymnals of words that the boy had never been able to understand but had always been on the cusp of doing so, like he was a young baby again that knew vaguely what others were saying to him but could not make the words himself or ascertain the specific meaning of each one when there were so many of them. The chanting chorus of voices drowned out all other sound around the youth, enveloping the word in the sonorous yet judgemental hymns of deep voices as well as the singing of children that was out of tune with the rest of the words but brought with it an undertone of innocence broken by the cruel reality of life and dreams that had been ripped apart by the advance of evil and those who abused power.

The melancholy song of devotion and pledging everything to the cause of sanctity rose in volume, though Caiellis knew that this was only the first verse and that the crescendo of this haunting melody that was to the same tune and beat as the one within his Mind Realm would come when he fully thrust himself into his darkness, despair, hatred, and desire for holy retribution – as while his White mana was still more powerful than his Black a significant amount of the latter had been unlocked over the course of this battle and he couldn't solely focus on generating the mana of darkness to balance it out with his White magic this time. He had certainly come a long way since he had unlocked Orzhova and his first Summoning of her against his champion (who was probably blaming himself for not being at Caiellis's side right now) Mysos, as back then the Angel of the Black Sun hadn't even trusted him to conjure up Black mana on his own in their more powerful spells and only relied upon him to supply the light when they cast the Culling Sun – a spell that would be far more powerful if they chose to cast it now.

The explosion of the core of the sun created by the shield was channelled upwards by Orzhova, a massive pillar of ruthless dark light and prosperous golden luminescence and emotive purple radiance rising upwards and engulfing Caiellis and his angel who was stood behind him. The boy felt the sheer amount of mana that had been absorbed from the Lord of Riots's attack and repurposed into energy that he could use flowing through him, making him feel more powerful than he had ever done before as this was the culmination of all that had got him to this point, the pain he had gone through and that others had gone through to give him one final chance at slaying the blight on this world that was the Archdemon the lustful Orders of Passion had sacrificed their New Empire of passion to that was the Defiler rushing through him and invigorating his mana stores.

He siphoned off parts of his own life that he didn't have much left of at all to obtain more mana even as the huge beam of darkness and light illuminated his skinny body that was covered in numerous wounds, lacerations, cuts, tears and bled crimson liquid all around him, the amount of mana that he had rising tremendously as he was infused with the new energy from the erupting supernova of darkness from below. The boy could feel his brown hair which had been matted down by the sticky blood from the Rain of Gore buffeting across his face and head, and he could feel each part of his body being filled with huge amounts of magic, more than he had ever channelled before.

He pushed down the sudden and unwanted thoughts of panic that rose up from within, wailing that perhaps he couldn't take this much mana inside of him, and the parts of his psyche that were calmer and more focussed on the task at hand rather than his safety counteracted that by saying firstly Orzhova wouldn't use him as the conduit of this spell unless she was confident that he could channel this much White and Black, and secondly it was his duty and responsibility to do so and if he couldn't he would die the death that he deserved for being so weak and pathetic.

Like when he and his Summoning had cast the Merciless Eviction on the steppes outside of the small city of Jeksaan, his first battle in the Lucael/Welkas war between the two kingdoms, he would be the main focus and caster of the spell. That was most likely because he was the Summoner, and that meant that it was his mana, his mind and his weaknesses that were the limiting factors upon the magic, not his angel's, and that Orzhova probably would have preferred to cast it herself if she had been able to. That put even more responsibility and pressure upon him to get this right and finally remove the stain of one of his many mistakes from the world.

He shut his eyes once again, though he could see circles of white and black and all of the greys in between the two extremes pulsing behind his closed eyelids, causing pain in his head that he ignored because he knew that it was caused by the huge quantities of mana rushing throughout his thin body and mind, and he knew that behind him Orzhova would be reading the ritual and going through the spell-casting motions that would allow him to take control when he was ready and see this through to the end.

The littlest Lucerna, held aloft by the light and the darkness seeping out of his skin and crashing through his wounded and abused form which had very clear battle damage upon it, was not wrong. The Angel of the Black Sun forced her face to become calm and impassive, as it had been twisted in sheer loathing of the demon that was making her and young Cai do this and that was favouring one part of her spell – more than ever she needed a balance so that the huge quantities of mana she and her Summoner were wielding could interact in the ways that she wanted them to.

She traced a symmetrical arc with each arm over the circle aura of evocative and emotional purple that, unbeknownst to her Summoner, came from the thirteen year old himself instead of his angel (and Xarius had never been able to conjure this type of light, though because Orzhova had been able to he could manipulate her coruscations of purple lightning), the words of a language that Caiellis couldn't understand (not that he was looking) more prominently imprinting themselves onto the tainted air with either smoking gloaming or dazzling phosphorescence depending on what they said, as though the boy could not outright read them she was sure that her favourite human could remember the six essential tenets of White and Black mana combined which she had wielded before.

She sliced her shining hands through the circle once again, connecting the four brightest and darkest sigils that she had created so far in preparation for the addition of the final two, and a larger spinning character that was similar to the one of Judgement that she had used in the Merciless Eviction but distinctly different formed in the middle of the violet circle of emotion and pure mana.

"I require more Black mana," the angel spoke, her voice soft and whispering as if she didn't want to disrupt the ritual by speaking words that were not included in the spell. Cai nodded again with his eyes clamped resolutely shut, feeling the chaotic and demonic power that the tempestuously laughing epitome of vile turpitude was conjuring up, digging into the reserves of courage that he still had left so that he could face his memories again and go even deeper into them.

Orzhova knew that her Summoner was about to do as she asked, mostly because this had been his greatest weakness in mana ever since he had unlocked her, but his desire for the banishment of the demon so that he could protect others and atone for the mistakes that he perceived himself to have caused (as that was what the angel sensed within his mana) was almost equalled by his hatred of this being and the sadness inside of him that he would increase by going into his memories.

Cai took a deep breath, knowing that he should focus on what he wanted to achieve as well as the memories like last time so that the mana that he generated was given focus and direction, and as the energy already created surged around him from the nova explosion of the sun that had eaten the wave of hellfire he plunged into the greatest source of pain within him for what could well be the very last time.

I want to achieve victory over the Lord of Riots so that the Lucaelian army can be freed from the city of Usnaan.

-Caiellis turned from the sight of his older brother to his mum, gazing up at her face as the comforting and loving expression that adorned it quickly changed, morphing into one of motherly concern, and she held up her hand-

I want to give the Welkalite citizens freedom from the despotic Orders of Passion who have sold their souls to demons of forbidden pleasure and excess so that no more innocent lives are abused and exploited by demons and those who follow them.

Mana flooded out of the youngest Lucerna heir, tears of shining light spilling out of his closed eyes as he relived the memories, and Orzhova used that opportunity to start creating the last two glyphs that would orbit the centre one, pulling the medallion which had snapped the magical chain of coins attached to her waist when connected to her scythe out of the heel of her weapon, where the bindings that chained it to her armour sprung to life again, and she infused the already shining sigil with more of the mana of her enemies converted to her cause as she pressed it against the spinning symbol in the centre of the circle.

- "Mum, what's wrong?" Alex asked, instinctively grabbing hold of his little brother as he sensed the change overcome his mother; even at the age of eight he was very protective of his younger sibling and pulled him closer when Cai tried to squirm away and go stand next to Emili-

I want to prove that I can actually do something, that all of the time and effort and love that other people have put into me wasn't a waste.

- "Haldren? Jack? Is there a problem?" the queen asked, standing up off of the nursery floor and moving in front of her children, as the two bodyguards that had been dutifully stood in the doorway were pacing slowly towards them with a menacing stride. Cai knew that something was wrong, he could feel it in the way that the men was scarily walking inside the room from where they had been stationed outside. Before the four year old had gone to bed tonight (and subsequently woken up because of his awful nightmare that had scared him from going to sleep even after daddy left, meaning that mummy and Alex had got up with him and tried to comfort him), the two guards had ruffled his and Alexander's hair and been nice and friendly, but now they were completely different-

Orzhova added the two final symbols to the rotating circle around her young Summoner as power blossomed to life within his slender limbs, knowing that he must have been causing himself an immense apart of emotional pain to produce this much dark energy and hating the fact that her Summoner and friend (though it was a strange friendship between a millennia-old angel and a thirteen year old prince, Orzhova still considered their relationship as one of friendship) had to endure this much strain and anguish because of his duty as a prince and what had happened to him with the death of his mother and the outright betrayal of his uncle and the more subtle disloyalty of his father.

I want to erase the stain of my mistakes from this world and for people not to be hurt any more because of me and my weakness.

- "Yes, there is," the muscular giant of a man named Haldren who Cai had never thought was so scary before sneered down at Emili as he came closer, his companion who was not quite as tall but still a brawny and large man of at least six feet in height going round the other side of the room as the mother of two made sure that she was covering her children at all angles, sensing the threat exuding from the normally boisterous but kind young brothers who had been chosen and recommended for the Lucerna Guard by none other than her husband himself. He then adding mockingly, "My queen. There has been a slight change of plans." -

Caiellis could feel the power rushing through him as he was bathed in light and darkness from the detonating sun below him and the potency of the Angel of the Black Sun's magic that shone all around him, and as he went further and further into the memory that haunted his nightmares ever since it had happened the level of mana suffusing him increased exponential in tandem with the choir of sadness and judgement increasing in volume even more. Orzhova placed her hands at the head of the circle which stopped rotating in time for her to add the last two emblems of power, clasping them together as the light overwhelmed the darkness and they shone with incandescent brilliance, etching one symbol into the air at the top of the ring of power and then slicing her hands downwards.

And I want to kill this demon so that no one else has to suffer because of it.

- "What sort of a change of plans?" Emili questioned, her bright green eyes narrowing in concern for her sons as she tracked the movements of the two guards, placing herself in front of her children as she tried to make sure that they were behind her. Haldren grinned sadistically at her as his older brother did the same, and the darkness in the room intensified. Cai tugged on his big brother's sleeve as the older boy held him even closer, his own blue eyes doing the same as his mother's but occasionally looking to the woman's for guidance. Alex had been stepping up his training a lot more recently, and even though he was only eight years old Caiellis could feel the power in his older brother's grip and the way that he reacted to the situation.

He would like to say that, with his mummy stood in front of him and his big brother who could use some amazing magic like both of their parents and the other grown ups holding on to him, that he felt safe and protected, but as the faces of the two bodyguards began to contort and twist in on themselves, the skin rippling in a disgusting manner like the two men's faces were puddles of water and little Cai had just stepped in it, he couldn't suppress a whimper of fear and couldn't stop himself pushing his face into Alexander's side-

Caiellis wrenched himself out of the memory as he felt his mana levels raising to breaking point and detected a massive surge of power from the Archdemon on the other side of the hellscape the once pleasant but neglected private Redhand mansion. He knew that if he continued he would be overwhelmed completely by the amount of magic power coursing through his fragile form, and while he didn't care about being hurt it would destabilise the entire spell and stop it doing anything. Besides, the Lord of Riots was preparing its own strike of corrupt mana – finally showing what dark feats it was truly capable instead of utilising a perversion of elemental Red magic – and the boy needed to be ready to repel it with his own instead of wallowing in his horrible experiences and self-pity.

The light surrounding Orzhova's joined palms became dark and malevolent as she pulled them downwards through the circle and the power of her Summoner increased, the Black mana that he was supplying to the ritual meeting and almost surpassing his White before he opened his eyes, green irises welling full of shining tears, and saw the demon again, his righteous hatred of it strengthening his magical power of light.

"With the final addition of Light and Darkness," Orzhova's otherworldly and heavenly voice which was imbued with a divine sonority spoke, breaking into the funerary and sombre song but in perfect time with the singing and chanting of the haunting melody, her words far more like those of a hymn than those of a proclamation and in flawless synchronisation with the tune that was drowning out all other sound but was being met by an equally loud cacophony from where the Lord of Riots was stood. It was an angelic language that she spoke in, but once again her Summoner could understand the words perfectly as he unclasped his hands and spread them out in tandem with the Angel of the Black Sun's words, knowing despite never having cast this particular sorcery before exactly what to do and how to manipulate the mana that was rushing through him.

Orzhova continued, her words becoming more steely as she pushed the emotion back inside of them, but instead of turning blank and judgemental as it had done during the Merciless Eviction the timbre of her voice became filled with raw emotion that was desperately clawing out from the cage of emotionless detachment from around it, hatred intermingling with immortal sadness that the youngest Lucerna knew far eclipsed any emotion that he could ever feel, as well as a desire for vengeance upon this demon that echoed Cai's own, "The Circle is complete. Ambition. Prosperity. Hatred. Justice. And now Light and Darkness. All will combine. All will become one, and become expressed in the needs of the Summoner."

The central sigil at the heart of the ring began to spin as the entire circle of haunting power passed over Caiellis, placing itself in front of him so that he could see the completion of the preliminary ritual as the six sigils of the tenets of White and Black combined in Orzhova and her Summoner began to be drawn into the centre, forming into the central hieroglyph of power that pulsated with the energy of dying stars, holy darkness and midnight light. It was an elegant and consecrated symbol of curve lines and magisterial excellence, but within its meandering and coiled structure there were jagged and harsh lines that shone with dark power infuse with the light of death. It was similar to the first combined sigil that Cai had ever laid his young eyes upon, Judgement, but different in form and purpose, like they were two siblings to the same parents made up of the same parts but uniquely different in personality and function.

"Retribution," Caiellis proclaimed, his voice strong and imbued with a resonance borne of the powerful mana filling his young body and the young tone of his words pervaded with the loss of innocence and the vengeance that would be wreaked upon those who sought to inflict pain and suffering upon others, and it was at the same time as Orzhova's whisper of the same, her angelic voice suffused with an expressive tonality that was filled to the brim with solemn sorrow and the burden that had been placed upon her young Summoner, as well as a fateful strength that came with a promise to subject those who had caused this to happen to the Retribution that would come.

Had Caiellis had enough time to ruminate upon the past, he would have remembered that the last time they had cast an apocalypse level spell the roles of him and his angel had reversed, that it had been him whispering in muted awe of the destructive power that he commanded, whereas now the dark seraph's fateful pronouncement was one of misery instead of a desire to dispense justice and aid her Summoner in doing so, and instead of a childish and young murmur of wonder and veneration mixed with dread his own powerful voice was suffused with an adamant tenacity to make those who had wronged him and thousands of others pay for their crimes, to make them feel the pain that they had caused and to be punished because of it – in that respect it was very similar to its sister Judgement, but Retribution was channelled from the magic of the enemy that was flowing through Caiellis in a desire to avenge the wrongs of the Archdemon and evoke justice by doing so, whereas Judgement had been more about wiping out all of the guilty instead of vengeance directed against one specific being.

The melody of light and darkness, good and evil, in the background sang out of the large central sigil that had absorbed the smaller ones which were simply ideals to be combined into one goal, like the many cogs of a great machine that worked together in perfect unity to produce the desired outcome of their creator but much more potent and meaningful than any simply machinery. Orzhova added her own angelic voice to the chorus, directing the words but ultimately becoming a part of the choir instead of leading it, and her lyrical and enigmatic words stirred Caiellis's broken heart to a deep sadness that punctuated his every action.

Light spilled out from his hands, brilliant and powerful as it spoke of glory and peace as well as the sacrifices that would have to be undertaken so that a world of compassion and love could be created, and globules of midnight darkness formed up around the sigil of Retribution that sang in its desire to inflict vengeance upon the Lord of Riots for what it had done to the two worlds and that the debaucheries and slaughters that it had committed, creating vile sins and giving them to mankind under the guise of forbidden pleasures, had to be punished. The illuminescence danced atop the black shadows, overturning the gloom and exposing it to the melodious words of the choir without a mouth, and the boy could feel the Black Sun birthmark which had been imprinted onto his cheek ever since Orzhova first entered him in his tumultuous Angelic Descent which had caused many others to want him dead so that the darkness of a Lucerna could never be seen again, ironic considering that there was a corrupted heart in their midst that played them for fools and was far more evil than Caiellis would ever be in his life.

Cai reached his small and thin hands towards the glyph imprinted into the air that was shining with darklight, ignoring the pain that blossomed within his fingers and knowing that it was testing him to see whether or not he would be worthy of its divine power. Orzhova had led the ritual of the Merciless Eviction, merely leaving him to dispense the justice of Judgement at the end once she had almost effortlessly tamed the sigil which already knew that she was ready for such dominance over the combined forces of light and dark. Retribution did not yet trust Caiellis, did not think he was deserving of such monumental strength because of his age and as such causing immense pain in his hands as he reached towards it to see if his desire to wield its power was greater than his desire to preserve himself.

He easily pushed past the pain that was designed to test whether or not whatever he had suffered up to this point was worthy enough to unlock this power, the emotional agony that he was in allowing him to overcome the pain that felt like his entire soul was being put to the test to see if it could withstand this agony. Retribution quickly acquiesced to his power and his desire to see it in action, flowing around his outstretched fingertips as it began to shine with even greater power, circling around him as it sang in its words of mysterious origin but unequivocal meaning. The ideogram span around him up to where it reached his face, where, as he had expected, it imprinted itself onto his stinging cheek, the Black Sun birthmark there increasing in diameter and therefore size as it accommodate this new sigil, the second that had been imprinted upon it in Cai's history.

Mana swirled around his birthmark, the conformation of his royalty that he did not deserve but would use to do something right and protect the people and his loved ones by eliminating this Archdemon and banishing it back to the hells of Sancturia shining with darkness as Caiellis placed his hands over the enlarged Black Sun that began to form the physical representation of itself above it. It was stamped with the Hieroglyph that depicted Retribution, and as it expanded and was pulled into life from the orb now growing in size above his cheek Caiellis pulled it in front of himself, the rumbling of the dark star to the same tempo of the singing and haunting opera that was drowning out most other noise as it reached a crescendo of power and volume. He infused it with more mana every second as he placed it in front of him, walking forwards on steps of light and crystal as he increased the distance between him and his angel, not needing the Lens of Guilt this time to identify his foes.

"Ha ha ha! HAHAHAHA! THIS IS ENJOYABLE! THROW EVERYTHING THAT YOU HAVE AT ME, YOUNG LUCERNA! USE ALL OF YOUR POWER IN DESTROYING ME, OR I WILL BREAK YOU AND ANNIHILATE THE ARMY OF PITIFUL LUCAELIANS THAT YOU AND YOUR ACCURSED FAMILY BROUGHT WITH YOU!" The Lord of Riots's voice was a tempestuous scream, an atavistic howl of pleasure and the culmination of the realisation of all wanton desire and lust for violence and bloodshed made manifest in the roar of the Archdemon that made Cai hate him even more, hate it even more than he had thought was possible, his hatred of this being rising to the point where it met the levels of detestation and loathing that he reserved for one another, but unlike the hatred that he showed for Johnias which was weakened slightly by not ever seeing the traitorous scum of a Lucerna after he betrayed this execration was not held back or limited by having no memories of the one that it was directed at being a corrupt avatar of evil and degeneracy.

The whole courtyard began to be illuminated with the deathly rays of the star of darkness stamped with the sigil of Retribution that floated in front of Cai and began to swell in size, this true Black Sun much more impressive than the imperfect one underneath which had taken in the unholy mana from the Defiler and given the ritual a taste of its vile foe that the vengeance would be wreaked upon. The Lucerna who looked incredibly small and fragile next to such power that was being generated by the two sides of the battle but did not feel it continued on his slow and measured walk forwards through the air, each of his footsteps like splashes of light and golden incandescence against a glittering vista of sparkling darkness as the Black Sun in front of him and compressed by his hands that were not actually touching the star of unlight moved in synchronisation with the one who had created it.

Orzhova flew into the air above him, still singing her haunting melody of words that the boy could no longer understand they were so sublime, incomprehensible to mortal ears and unknowable by all those who had not walked paths through the brightest and highest heavens and the darkest and lowest hells. The Angel of the Black Sun that spun beneath her and began to drag in all of the mana saturating the air around it in preparation for its arrival twirled her scythe, the golden edge of the blade suffused with a midnight gloom that was the product of the shadows of the veil of the sky that concealed the holy light of the angels from the Kingdom of Light as she span it in the air. Each beat of her black wings that were now surrounded in golden light caused spiralling coils of incandescence to be launched out of them and play around her Summoner's young and innocent form, infusing him with more power that he could then pour into the Black Sun.

She let go of her scythe once more, the weapon renaming orbiting around in the air and releasing glorious dark power all around it, and charged her hands with the combined power of White and Black, vitrifying crystals of mixed light and darkness all around her and creating powerful stained glass sculptures of crystal to either side of her angelic form. She released them with a swipe of her left hand, the beautiful, delicate and exquisite crystals humming with the song of mournful Retribution as they travelled and orbited all around Caiellis, all six of them taking up the same positions that they had during the creation of the Circle and the formation of Retribution that now gave this star of darkness that her Summoner had created even more vengeful power.

Rakdos laughed once more, raw mana surging out of him as he began his own occult and demonic ritual that would match Caiellis's own and allow him to combat the magical power of the small Lucerna and his guardian dark angel, the Rain of Gore increasing its intensity and power as massive droplets of blood began to pour down from the Tempest of Craving. All who were on the battlefield below and had enough time to stare up at the roiling heavens would definitely see two hellish gates shaped like a gaping maw of darkness and lava opening even wider, but even those that didn't would hear the rumble of thunder shaking the earth and feel the strikes of vivid crimson lightning heightening in frequency and dark power.

The six crystals of purple glass formed up around the Black Sun of Retribution, spinning around it like ships pulled into a whirlpool within the ever-changing Yentarian oceans (as Lucael had no particularly large bodies of water within it apart from lakes and treacherous rivers) but instead of being sucked into its shining dark mass – which is what would have happened if even the slightest imbalance of emotions, actions and mana within the spell was formed – they remained hovering around it, affected by its tenebrous gravity but not consumed by it. The Black Sun began to shine with an even greater intensity of light, illumine beams of darkness coiled with incandescent gold bursting out of it from all angles, and as the second – and final – verse of the melody began the rough yet flawless crystalline spheres that Orzhova had created began to shine as well, but the light from the sun of Retribution began to be focussed into them.

As Cai had expected, as he felt a sense of awe in the power he commanded rush through his young veins that he suppressed so that he could focus utterly on the battle at hand, the crystals began to reflect and refract the light, connecting each of them with beams of darklight that created a matrix of shining darkness around the originator of the shining darkness, malevolent tenebrosity mixing with holy radiance as the light emitted by the Black Sun was reflected back into the sun itself, causing it to expand even more as it swelled with the power entering it and rumbled to the beat of the haunting song of Black and White mana.

Orzhova created one final crystal, holding it in her hands as the mana that she wielded formed into it and drew the lattice structure of the stained glass into existence, then when it was finished she beat her magnificent wings and launched herself into the air above her Summoner who was far too small to hold the terrifying manifestation of his birthmark any more her own amethyst creation emitting rays of darkness and light that crossed over each other and infused Caiellis with yet more mana, the sonorous hymn rising in volume as the innocent singing of the children within it turned to sobbing and crying that the boy was intimately familiar with.

"Caiellis. I think it is time that we truly began the Twilight Reprisal, and wipe out the taint of the Lord of Riots from this city," Orzhova cut in smoothly, her voice more powerful and forceful than before as her words reached her Summoner's ears over the rest of the mournful song that was rising to a deafening level and drowning out all else, though at the back of his mind the youth could hear the noises of depravity and chaos coming from the Defiler's side of the plaza.

Rakdos grinned widely once more, ripping his scythe and his left fist through the fabric of reality as the mana levels of his opponents kept rising. Blood, crimson and wet, exploded from the wounds in the fabric of the world, spilling out onto the hellscape of the Redhand mansion plaza in gallons of bubbling scarlet vitae that was combined with the Rain of Gore from the roiling storm above and flooding over the courtyard, surging against the sides of the massive obsidian spires that newly wrenched themselves out of the earth, far larger than the ones before it had been.

Seven of the volcanic spikes thrust out of the sides of the hill and reached over as the floor was drowned in an endless sea of blood and souls that screamed as they were continuously plunged into the ocean of gore that they were swept around in, the naked and vulnerable bodies of the human spirits trying desperately to claw their way out of the sticky blood that thrust them under and had them gasping out choked screams of pain and begging for mercy at the uncaring Lord of Riots, who simply grinned even wider as he exposed his glinting teeth.

Caiellis tried not to look down into the mass of poor souls which had been claimed by the Defiler in this battle and in many others, knowing that if his concentration was distracted then he would fall into it and be consumed by the whirlpool tides of vitae that gyrated around the bottom of the courtyard that seemed much larger than it had been when the boy had first entered it and fought Tradax, the reality warping powers of the Archdemon twisting the laws of physics and extending the size of the plaza on top of the hill to the point where it became more like a hellish slaughterhouse arena, or an open topped throne room for the king of forbidden pleasure.

The images in his mind that had been pressed back by his surging mana of righteousness and Retribution seethed to the fore, pressing themselves in behind his eyelids as if they were trying to take physical form and burst out of his eye sockets, and Cai pushed them back down as he was shown one that he had seen before, one that was being enacted underneath him – he was drowning in a wave of blood and body parts and screaming souls that washed over his mind and burnt his skin with their searing heat. He couldn't get out, and every time that his head broke the surface, gasping for breath and coughing up lungfuls of the hot blood, he was plunged under again.

Cai ignored the feeling of being out of breath that he had become so intimately familiar with recently and the tightening of his throat as it tried to stimulate his gag reflex for the blood that wasn't pouring through it – as he had his mouth resolutely clamped shut to combat the increased intensity of the Rain of Gore – and instead focussed on another rush of pure hatred and pity that shuddered through his body, bringing out more of his White mana as he ruthlessly traded parts of his life essence for more Black that could match it and maintain the balance that was so key within a spell of this power.

All of the other souls that Tradax, Carramoshk or Rakdos had used in their spells so far had been the spirits of the devotees of the pursuit of rapturous bliss at the expense of others, crazed Welkalites and those from long lost sybaritic civilisations that had howled their lust for ever increasing pleasure and their hatred of restraints and morality at the youngest Lucerna as they were launched at him in power torrents of soulfire and darkness.

However, this time the poor souls that were swept round by the tide of blood underneath them that would have carried Cai away were the innocents, those who had been killed and abused by the debauched servants of the Lord of Riots, those who had been exploited by the Orders of Passion, who had died fighting against them and trying to free the Welkalite people, or those who had been sacrificed upon the altar of hedonism to fuel the degenerate passions of their oppressors. The boy knew that within the endless tide of souls that were endlessly drowned and swept round by the blood of all those who had been slain in war and slaughtered to feed the thirst for blood of others, there would be those nameless soldiers who had sacrificed their lives to protect him in the siege of Fort Egetau after he had been knocked unconscious by the explosion trying to save them, and it was about time that he atoned for that and laid them to rest.

Nevertheless, there were not just innocent spirits within there, as those of the damned, the Welkalites who had fought in the name of passion and freedom from any constraints on their frenzied debaucheries, those who had served the Orders of Passion willingly and devoted their lives to reaching the ultimate heights of orgiastic and corrupt bliss and those who had sold their souls to foul demons for more power screamed for pity as they were swept along by the infernal whirlpool of gore and the blood of humans. It seemed that the Defiler made no distinctions – each person, whether they were innocent children or vile murderers, who had died as a result of this war or many others connected with this Archdemon, was subjected to the same torments and were drowned by the ocean of blood.

He spread his fingers wide as he pointed his palms towards the slowly spinning Black Sun that was absorbing the refracted and reflected light of itself all around it in twirling displays of black light, and out of his left hand he shot a pure ray of undiluted White mana into the rumbling sphere of unlight, connecting the magic of light to the sigil of Retribution stamped on the centre of the dark star as out of his free right (the Sword of Glass levitating by his side, ready for him to pick it up and wield it should he choose) he blasted a bolt of unadulterated and absolute Black mana into the symbol which had been created.

He slowly moved his palms so that they were next to each other but remained separate even though the light and the darkness was perversely attracted to each other at this small distance, and as more of the light from Orzhova's crystal which was now shattered into many fragments which surrounded the medallion of the ominous emblem associated with her that pulsed with alternating blasts of darklight and incandescence reached him he slowly combined his White and his Black into one single beam of golden darkness and dark radiance that was channelled into the now massive sun of Retribution.

Rakdos ripped more holes in the fabric of the world, tearing the barriers between the physical plane and Sancturia asunder as they bled a hellish red light onto the courtyard that illuminated everything not next to Caiellis in its bloodthirsty glow that enhanced the rage of every single being within it and made every desire within their heads one of bloodthirst and murder. Caiellis's haunting light of judgement and reprisal battled for supremacy in the more middling regions with this new blazing glow of violent intent which would turn even the most calm and kind pacifist into a brutal and sadistic murderer with a wanton lust for blood and savagery.

The boy could hear maddened screaming of thousands of souls conflicting against his own emotive and vengeful melody as he felt his desire for the banishment of this foul demon and the destruction of everything that it had ever tried to do rising even more. The Twilight Reprisal, as Orzhova had called it, was close to completion, and as the mana within him and the Black Sun of Retribution rose, sending rays of deathly illumination spreading across the plaza and overwhelming the Defiler's malicious red light and becoming simultaneously brighter and darker every second. It was blinding, and the only reason that Cai could see without having access to his Lenses was the fact that he was casting the spell, concentrating his desire for the destruction of this being that had wronged so many into the massive black orb in front of him that pulsated with golden and dark light and dragged luminosity from around it into its large but not bloated bulk.

Rakdos torn more rents in the flesh of the physical world, gobbets of steaming viscera streaking down from the heavens and turned into purified dust by the proximity of Caiellis's magic whenever they threatened to land on the slender teenager. The soul bodies in the water of their own vital fluids shrieked in a discordant chorus of destruction, depravity and death, turning on each other above and below water as they tore one another apart and cavorted in a maddening dance to the dark and chaotic melody of unrestrained and brutal pleasure.

There was more horrisonant howling, a blaring noise of the mixture of hedonistic screams from all kinds of human and inhuman creatures and obtrusively and violently loud music from instruments made out of bone, sinew and the essence of ecstatic and frenzied pain, a discordant cacophony of vile carnivals of debauchery and sin that all were invited to but amplified to such horrifying levels that would have murdered Caiellis instantly and sucked him inside of his own insane mind forever as the sanity was ripped form him had he not been in the midst of his own powerful ritual. It was like the scream of excess and decadence and bloodshed and passionate murder that had heralded the birth of the Lord of Riots in this world, but instead of a howling cry that beckoned the Defiler into the material realm this was the sensual apotheosis of rapture and psychotic delight.

It crashed against Cai's own song, threatening to overwhelm it before the boy pushed it back as he channelled even more mana, the alternate energies rushing though him enough to erase his entire soul in a single heartbeat should a balance not be maintained, and the two tunes – one melodious and sombre, the other wild and fervent – battled for auditory dominance in the courtyard. One thing that could be heard above all else, above all of the sounds that would deafen one without huge amounts of mana rushing through them, was the bellowing and diabolically fanatical laughter of the Archdemon that cut through Orzhova's song and the frenzied screaming of his victims.

Seven rents in the fabric of reality were opened, a number that had significance not lost upon Cai who shut his eyes against the darkness of the demon and refused to let anything distract him at this pivotal moment which could – would – decide the entire outcome of this massive and brutal war. Rakdos laughed, howling its atavistic craving of the death of order and the fevered worship of all those who partook in this Festival of Worship, and those writhing souls drowned in unholy yet fully human blood in the surging tides of viscera underneath him who weren't afflicted with a desire to murder and claw and bite at one another engaged in acts of passionate and unconsensual coupling, an orgy of souls and the unprotected bodies of the dead as limbs entwined and bodies wrapped around one another, some killing and tearing at one another whilst others shrieked in lust and orgiastic bliss as they were forever drowned in blood.

The crystal spheres that reflected the light of the dark star of Retribution rose to a shining intensity of darkness, a blinding fierceness of glorious and imperial incandescence that nearly eclipsed the light of the sun and sent flashing beams behind Caiellis's eyelids as he reopened them, his green eyes suffused with light a power despite not being able to truly use the Lenses of Guilt and innocence. Had Cai been able to look at his reflection, he would have noticed how similar he looked now to when his big brother Summoned Aurelia or used any of her more powerful spells (and just because the youngest Lucerna hadn't yet seen Alexander utilise any of the magnitude that he was now didn't mean at all that he couldn't, and Cai knew that his sibling preferred to dispatch his foes quickly with a mixture of magical and physical attacks instead of relying upon the overwhelming but relatively ponderous force of spells like these to do so), but instead of an ardent fire suffusing his irises with its passionate zeal there was a shining and blinding glow of purple emitted from within his emerald orbs that wouldn't be looking cute now.

Caiellis mentally commanded the Sword of Glass to bring itself around and in front of him, and, only breaking off from infusing the physical manifestation of his birthmark which had only been held by one other Lucerna for a moment, gripped the handle of his crystalline relic weapon tightly as the mana that he commanded rushed through the upwards pointing blade. Orzhova was ready for the beam of purple light that rushed through the sword which matched her young Summoner perfectly and had been the best thing that King Marik had done for his youngest, holding her slender hands either side of the golden sigil of her Black Sun which was surrounded by the fragments of glass from the final amethyst she had constructed as the bolt of luminescence rose up to meet it.

Orzhova whispered the words of the Twilight Reprisal that she had barely used within her exile and before, her voice still loud and cutting through the words of the choir as it reached a zenith of haunting and mournful noise but remained distinctly different from a funeral dirge as she manipulated the light of her second Summoner round, refracting the light and the powerful mana it contained back down towards the crystals around the Black Sun in bolts of pure White and Black.

The spheres of glass, each representing one of the points of the Circle that Cai still hadn't found out the official name of (circle of what? Not that it really matters right now), detonated in fragmented sprays of iridescence that exploded all around from them, though each of the infinitesimal shards were imbued with the shimmering power of the Twilight Reprisal as yet more refracted light from above impacted into them and illumination from the unlight orb in their centre infused them with power.

Instead of falling away from the sun and landing in the sea of blood and writhing souls underneath them that made acidic bile rise within Caiellis's throat and sent the repugnant scent of stinking lifeblood and debased pleasure clogging up his nostrils, a disgusting aroma that would have had him retching if he hadn't been in the middle of channelling his own potent mana, contenting itself on making his stomach churn revoltingly, the shards of crystal were attracted once again by the malevolent gravity of the Black Sun near them, spinning around the sphere of Retribution as the sigil upon it expanded in size and glowed with a scintillating phosphorescence that promised to deliver vindication upon the target of this spell.

The Lord of Riots raised his free hand, the demonic fist coated and surrounded by blood and black fire that spat embers of corruption, pointing it at his Tempest of Craving above as a crackling storm of insane lighting rose up from within the unnatural clouds, a single but massive bolt of demonic electricity fulminating down from the ruptured heavens, far larger than anything that had ever been spat out of the Tempest of Craving so far. The gigantic coruscation wrapped around Rakdos's fist, the huge hand of the demon that was wrapped in leather made from human skin that was forever stained red sparking with the lightning rushing through it, and he then smashed it into the centre of the roiling sea of blood underneath him which had been vomited up from the sundering rent in the walls of reality below it.

He laughed again, and roared as the lighting was conducted throughout the sticky tides of viscera and stinking gore, flowing through the bodies still engaged in sadistic acts of violent bloodthirst or passionate coupling as they entwined within one another and setting them alight and screaming as it crackled throughout their forms. The demon ripped open another tear in the world, this one with his flaming scythe that was lit by the pyres of endless hedonistic revels of pleasure and pain, but it did not last long as he used it to etch a malicious rune on the air that Cai did not look at despite his eyes being dragged towards it by the unnatural compulsion within his head; it would distract him and probably sear itself into his vision forever. He could barely see jagged lines, pulsing with unholy darkness and fire, a baleful sigil that represented rage and war in all of its vile forms written onto the tainted air of the hellish courtyard.

As the iridescent shards of dark yet not evil incandescence orbited around the Black Sun and came closer to plunging within it every second as they constructed a lattice of crystalline darklight around it, the lightning that was coruscating through the ocean of blood (that Cai was for a second concerned would be drowning his father and the Angel of Wrath, but his cage did not let anything in or out and the king would be in an invulnerable cocoon of safety and protected until either he died or chose to release his dad, whereas as Akroma was a Sancturia creature she would simply retreat to his Mind Realm) started to become darker, black energy coursing through the blood-slick ground that was drenched in the blood from the lake of vitae above it.

Rakdos clacked his teeth together, his face contorting into a leering sneer directed from the boy across from him, and Caiellis glared back at the Archdemon, the focus of his desire for retribution and the being that had caused this entire war, exacerbated the friction between him and his father, taken him and his precious older brother from safety and almost killed the seventeen year old, and been the reason for thousands of death from each side. The Black Sun in front of him began to move higher up above him, shining down on the blood beneath them that crackled with the black lightning of corruption and turpitude, as the star of darkness absorbed the last remnants of the shattered crystal orbs that had been orbiting around it.

The Lord of Riots roared in exultation, sensing that Caiellis was about to begin his attack as the Black Sun rose even higher than them both, above the boy before he closed his eyes and floated further above it, coming to the side of his angel who kept her gaze firmly fixed upon the actions of the Defiler railed against them. Rakdos raised up its free right hand, squeezing the massive fingers into the centre of his palm as a bloody morass of darkness and fire that exuded lust and craving for all things that should not be, the tear in reality and into the demon lord's realm of flame and brutal hedonism flaring out within his massive palm as he closed his fingers over it. There was a bursting expulsion of blood, and the strange vibrating thing in the demon's hand of sinew and flesh throbbed to the sound of a malignant heartbeat – until Cai realised that the thing in its hand was a heart, albeit and impure heart corrupted by millennia of decadence and evil, red and fleshy and soaked in the same malicious gore as everything else.

The courtyard and the sky above it was shaking around the two, Caiellis's Black Sun of Retribution rising higher into the air as the boy stepped up on pillars of incandescence that rippled in the air like he was stepping into a pool of invisible and sublime light, staying close to the star of darkness as it rose higher and higher and the choir reached its ultimate climax.

The haunting singing began to reach a fever pitch, causing the whole world to tremble in a mixture of fear and awe as the lyrical and deep voices got louder and louder, Caiellis becoming filled with a rush of energy and emotion that coursed through his young form as he stood diagonally above the sun of unlight he had created that flashed and scintillated with many different combinations of White and Black mana, incandescent rays of darkness dissolving everything not of the side of the Kingdom of Light that they touched and burning deep and scouring scars into the ocean of blood beneath them, although as of yet the black radiance coiled with shadowy yet imperious gold could not penetrate the foul corruption blighting the air around the Lord of Riots, taint more powerful than Cai had ever encountered before shielding the Defiler from his spell as the demon squeezed the heart of corruption and sin in its left hand harder, raising it up above its head as seven streams of black blood began to cascade into the whirlpool of roiling souls and viscera below.

Caiellis could hear the otherworldly and atavistic screaming of ancient beings that craved blood and violence from the brutal portals into the nether realm, into the domain of the Lord of Riots, and even though he tried not to look within the rents in the fabric of reality itself he could see through to the other side, a vast and cavernous dungeon palace of depravity and such vile scenes that were the physical version of what the boy had already been mentally assaulted by, enough debauchery and sadism to make even the most insane and psychotic Welkalite reveller want to vomit up their internal organs (though they would probably enjoy the sensation), and the boy tore his gaze away before he was forever locked within them, looking again at the Lord of Riots and focussing all of his hatred and his desire for the Retribution that the aptly named sigil on his dark star would bring upon the Archdemon that he would destroy with the Twilight Reprisal of him and Orzhova.

As the walls between Sancturia and reality swelled even more, filling with the tainted power of the demon that warped everything around it, the cacophonous and discordant rapturous and pained screaming heightened in volume to match the boy's song also getting louder and more powerful, the two melodies of a dark heaven and tempestuous hell battling out in tandem with the enemy colours of White and Red both combining with Black and smashing into each other in random explosions of colliding energy that none of the combatants paid any heed to. Caiellis felt more powerful than he ever had done before, wielding strength that he wouldn't have thought was possible for a person of his age or fragility, but then again he was a Lucerna prince and the line of rulers unbroken since the times of Matalis Ortus was famed for being able to use apocalyptic magic, and many of his ancestors – including the most recent, his own father, and then his grandfather – had used spells which were even more powerful than this one.

The seven rents of the skin of the material plane in front of the seven massive spires of brimstone that twisted like talons into the courtyard shone with an even more passionate and malicious blazing light than before, howling shrieks intermingling with sadistic squeals and the eternal hunger for pleasure that would never be satiated no matter what dark deeds were done in its name. Caiellis felt the sudden urge to cover his ears as his emotive melody of judgement and vengeance rose in volume even more, becoming deafeningly loud even to its caster as the Black Sun rumbled and swelled in front of him, and Orzhova's slender hand entwined with his even smaller and thinner one as she took it and placed it upon the star of malevolent yet awe-inspiring unlight, the boy's tiny palm touching the symbol of Retribution as light and darkness exploded from all sides of the sun.

Orzhova let go, her guiding influence gone as Cai knew to place his other palm (sheathing his relic weapon as he did so) in the centre of the symbol that was larger than both of them, silently telling the youngster that the spell would truly be his to command now as energy rushed through him from the contact, draining him dry of mana that was used to fuel the expansion and emission of the Black Sun. There was no going back now. There were no countermeasures, no alternate plans, no strategies to fall back on should this one fail. It was all or nothing, something that Caiellis wasn't particularly fond of, but as he stared into the flaming eyes of the demon with his own green orbs that were alight with power, he knew that it had to be.

Pain ran through him, but it was not a distracting pain, merely a reminder of how much mana he was using and how much life he was giving away to do so, a reminder of the fact that he was only thirteen years of age and as such was not old enough to be using spells like these yet, though Cai ignored the pain, knowing that whether he succeeded or failed that it would be gone soon. With his hands touching the surface of the sun that did not emit any heat at all, instead radiating emotion, light and darkness, and the sigil of Retribution thrumming beneath his slender fingers and spread palms, the song of vengeance and justice reached a haunting scream of those that were wronged by this demon, overwhelming the shrieks of depravity and madness from all around the boy and his aloft angel.

Rakdos squeezed his hand tighter, the thick fingers of his huge hand crushing the still throbbing heart of malignancy and hedonism within it to a pulp as the large talons upon each digit sliced into the demon's own crimson skin, drawing his own black blood as it mingled with the cascades of corruption already falling into the sea of black lightning and souls. Each of the pillars of obsidian that had tears in reality opened up in front of them began to rumble, and chains of black iron and bronze that had veins of humans that pulsed with a pink and lascivious light and alternated with that obtrusive glow with a dark red blood running through the fleshy veins of the brass and iron that all shot across the whirlpool or gore and screaming tormented souls to the centre.

The youngest Lucerna focussed all of his energy into the sun, and it acquiesced to his wishes, moving forward and consuming power all around it as it ponderously but still quickly because of its sheer size floated in the direction of Rakdos. It would impact into the demon, tearing apart his essence and scattering his corpse back to the unholy hells from whence it had been Summoned and consuming the mana that constituted his physical form within the Material World.

As the shuddering and thrumming reached a point where Caiellis's eardrums would have exploded irrespective of how much protection he had, the melody of death, light and darkness suddenly fell silent, the voices of the innocent dead lost within it, before a single sound sprang up. It was like the childish crying and singing of the other innocent children within the song, but even more sad, and with a jolt of recognition Caiellis found that it was his own voice, the voice of his four year old self, that was making the noises, the haunting song that he could barely remember singing at the same time as crying, the lullaby tune interlaced with a loss of innocence and love that no four year old should have to go through and coloured with a deep sadness that reminded the youth of the loss he had suffered through.

As sorrow rose up inside of him, it stimulated a surge of determination, his adamant will to make sure that no one else had to go through the same as him and to protect the people who had helped him and others through dark times, which in turn brought on a burst of powerful hatred directed at those who would force people to go through that, the dark beings that tore apart families and tempted others with bribes of power to subvert them under their control, the most disgusting and foul beings to ever exist, the demons, one of whom he would stop now. Despite having the same colour of magic that made demonic beings inside of him, Cai hated them more than anything else, and he hated himself for sharing a quality with them even though his Black mana was so different to theirs that it may as well be a completely different form of magic.

The Black Sun of Retribution rumbled in time to its wielder's crying of the past, Caiellis's young and otherworldly voice matching that of his four year old self as he sang the song of justice and punishments for crimes against the human race, Orzhova not adding her own angelic words to the tune and allowing her young Summoner to sing it on his own, each of the syllables that he formed empowering the Twilight Reprisal as the star of darkness drew in mana and energy from everything around it, a fate that the demon would meet when it reached him, and the many symbols of Retribution upon it shone with a blinding incandescence as it crashed through the air, down towards the Lord of Riots.

Caiellis followed it on its path, letting go of the massive orb of darklight and drawing the Sword of Glass that instantly lit up with light and darkness, as the Black Sun began to drag everything into it with its malevolent gravity, pulsing with alternating waves of purple, incandescent filigree gold, and blinding darkness that erased all traces of the crimson light of violence and hedonism which had covered the courtyard only moments earlier.

Rakdos's own vile blood that surged in rivers of taint down his hand and into the centre of the tides of crimson pulled the pulsating chains out of each of the scars in the skin of the world of man into the middle, where an occult circle of hell was beginning to be formed as the boy's magic headed towards the Lord of Riots. Huge bursts of raw mana were coming from both combatants, but whilst Caiellis's was tempered to a specific purpose and empowered by his emotions the dark energy of the Defiler was formless yet defined and utterly chaos, discordantly ordered with a complete lack of order as the true power of the Archdemon began to be shown. The demon laughed at the show of power from the Lucerna opposing him, the seven pointed star of corruption and chaos within the vortex of swirling blood and lightning chained by fleshy metal to the other world beginning to spin violently as a tide of noise poured out of it, rising to meet the Black Sun bearing down upon its master as destructive power flooded from it.

The oceans of blood became a surging ring of gore around it, occult imagery and the power of a dark god of blood and pleasure screaming out its defiance of order and its insatiable hunger for depravity and rapture and bloodshed as it rose up, the massive ritual circle of spikes and flames and death spinning in a psychotic frenzy, an empyreal abyss of gore and hedonism ripping itself into reality around the seven pointed spinning circle.

Rakdos raised his scythe, roaring at the sky and his Tempest of Craving, and the unholy storm responded, flinging out more bolts of crimson lighting across the battlefield as if it was clearing its throat of detritus before disgorging a gigantic meteorite of hell-fire and black soul flames that fell at a massive pace towards the courtyard, matching or even eclipsing the Black Sun of Retribution in size and power. Caiellis would not give in, and he poured all of the power that he had into the Sword of Glass, pointing it at the star of unlight that was swelling with the unholy mana of the demon that it absorbed and turned towards its cause of Retribution as a beam of iridescent purple fired into it. Orzhova pointed her own scythe at the gigantic orb of midnight as the meteorite of tainted flesh and brimstone that left trails of blood and ash in the air fell down from the sky in the opposite direction to the Black Sun, a beam of light that was coiled with swirling shadows launched out of the heel of her long weapon as she added her own power to her Summoner's spell.

I cannot give up now!

I will achieve victory over the Lord of Riots so that the Lucaelian army can be freed from the city of Usnaan!

I will give the Welkalite citizens freedom from the despotic Orders of Passion who have sold their souls to demons of forbidden pleasure and excess so that no more innocent lives are abused and exploited by demons and those who follow them!

I will prove that I can actually do something, that all of the time and effort and love that other people have put into me wasn't a waste!

I will erase the stain of my mistakes from this world and I will make sure people can no longer be hurt any more because of me and my weakness!

And, most of all, I will to kill this demon so that no one else has to suffer because of it!

Caiellis mind was filled with these thoughts that were borne of his mana, the emotions giving life to the magic as the energy in turn strengthened and empowered his feelings in a cycle of enhancement that had the boy saturated with power and the most pure forms of emotion that he had ever felt before, though that did not include the time when he his mum had died in front of his eyes and he had exploded in annihilating black fire. Those emotions had been just as unadulterated and absolute as these, and as Cai repeated the mantra over and over in his head the relatively thin beam of purple iridescence coming out of his sword was wrapped in coils of purple light that snaked round its sides and increased its power even more. He flew in the air next to his angel as Orzhova combined her own heavenly and divine bolt of light and darkness with that of her Summoner's ray of mortal emotions empowered to the highest level.

The Black Sun started to rip through the counterattack of the demon, and Cai did not let up with his power, pouring every drop of mana that he had left into the assault, into the star of Retribution, into the Twilight Reprisal that would banish Rakdos back into the hell that it belonged in and free the city of Usnaan from the darkness at the heart of the Welkalite rulers. Hatred, a desire to protect, a desire to avenge, a desire to finally prove himself, and a desire to destroy the Archdemon that had caused this brutal war, all took physical form, combining together in a glorious and awe inspiring mix of White and Black mana that shone with a blinding darkness in the combined magic of the youngest Lucerna and the exile of the First Sisterhood and infusing his spell with more power than Cai had ever felt before.

And yet, it was not enough.

It was nowhere near enough.

Rakdos howled and boomed with laughter, slamming his demonic hands together as brutal and primal sigils of bloodshed and hedonism that flashed with a murderous crimson light of their own weaved themselves into the air like bloody lacerations upon the tainted air of the City of Pleasure itself, the demon's roar echoed by that of the Tempest of Craving above and the gigantic meteor of ash, hellfire and blood that was drawn towards the seven pointed circle which caused the world around it to warp into a vortex of empyreal flesh and matter, chaotic Red and Black mana present in such an intensity as to bend the physical plane inside out and easily break the fragile walls between the realm of humans and the realm of magic.

Wisps of blighted blood and contaminated viscera that were joined by the very real human version of such things, the vital fluids of innocents and the guilty alike, burst out of the air around the demon's hands, everything roiling around in the power of the Archdemon as the bloody ocean of gore rose up with the flesh of the carnal realms of the abyss tha the Defiler made its home within like a massive object had been dropped within a sea of blood. It showered Cai in gore that instantly burnt off with the mana flowing through him as he kept pouring more into the Twilight Reprisal.

And then the meteorite hit.

It slammed into the front of the Black Sun, a descending star of insanity and degenerate passion that crashed into the massive orb of hatred and Retribution. There was an explosion, a gigantic detonation that would wipe out the entire city if left unchecked as the mana of the two sides in the eternal conflict of good and evil collided violently. Caiellis's emotive melody was snuffed out by the sounds of millions of voices, demonic and human, howling in a frenzied rapture of destruction that sent pain instantly surging throughout the boy, blood spurting out from his nose, ears and mouth in spite of the shield of golden glass that Orzhova had created out of his head. It was the power of a god, a dark, vindictive, capricious and utterly evil god, but a god nonetheless, and the boy wept tears of blood as the sheer sound washed over him.

The meteorite, augmented by the power of the empyreal vortex conjured by the smoking occult circle burnt onto the air and enhanced by the massive mana potency of the Lord of Riots, smashed into the Black Sun of Retribution, growing larger every second as it and the thing that it had collided with both destroyed one another, ripping through the fabric of reality and the combined White and Black mana that the boy had spent so long generating and perfecting with his balance of power and emotion that had been the most powerful thing he had ever conjured in this short life of his.

Caiellis screamed in pain as the backlash of the power he had wielded rippled through him, sheer agony overloading his nervous system and making him drop the Sword of Glass which had still been supplying energy to the Black Sun of darklight, but he could not hear his own pain and agonised howls over the unadulterated shrieking of thousands of voices as they pledged their allegiance to the Lord of Riots, the Defiler, the Prince of Pleasure, the Monarch of Sin, the Archdemon Rakdos, in return for forbidden bliss and the destruction of morality and society. The sounds of frenzied exultance overwhelmed Cai as he whimpered and screamed out at the torment flowing through him in spite of the fact that his angel, who had abandoned the Twilight Reprisal, was putting all of her mana into protecting him.

The Black Sun was smashed into the ground by the fallen star of blood and infernal hellfire, a cataclysmic eruption annihilating both of the two epic manifestations of their masters' different mana types and objectives, and Cai barely felt the sensation of beginning to fall the pain that was flowing through his nerves that the boy was pretty sure was incinerating every single sensory device in his body. It was exquisite, amplified to the extreme by the presence of the Lord of Riots, making every single sensation that he felt register within his young mind and ensuring that he could identify every single different type of pain that he suffered – including the numerous wounds that had been inflicted before this.

"MY REBIRTH IS AT HAND! LET THE FESTIVAL OF BLOODSHED TRAMPLE OVER THE OLD ORDERS, AND LET THE MALICIOUS PASSIONS OF ALL WHO WOULD REVEL IN THE DARK GLORY OF MY PRESENCE EMBRACE MY GIFTS OF CARNALITY AND BLOODSHED!"

Despite the fact that there was already tremendous noise echoing throughout the courtyard and above it as Caiellis fell towards the ground, the bellowed words of the Lord of Riots still cut through the din, the demon's roar reaching every corner of the City of Pleasure and imbuing its defenders with dark power and encouragement knowing that their malevolent patron was watching over them, spurring them into an even greater frenzy of bloodshed and murder as they assaulted the Lucaelian crusaders trying to save them from the deprivation of their masters. The emotions that had been empowering Caiellis suddenly fled from the small thirteen year old as he fell, leaving his mind an empty void to be quickly filled by fear and terror at the fact that his most powerful spell had not even touched the Lord of Riots. The Twilight Reprisal had done nothing.

As the detonation of mostly Black mana blasted across the courtyard, Orzhova surrounded herself in a shield of mana that would allow her to resist the damage and swooped downwards, diving through the air and the spontaneous explosions ripping through the area and grabbing hold of her falling Summoner, the boy's face highlighting that he was in absolutely no condition for conjuring or using his wings of stained glass and stabilising his own position. The Angel of the Black Sun held the limp body of her Summoner close, hoping that he was conscious and still able to fight, as while normally if the boy lost consciousness for a protracted period his mana would be drawn inwards and his guardian seraph would be pulled back into their shared Mind Realm the fact that she had Summoned himself and was using up his mana to do so meant that he could still be asleep or unconscious and she would remain in the physical realm.

Caiellis started thrashing in her grip, convulsing as he tried to get his bearings and resist the pain that was crashing through him, and Orzhova turned him so that he could be upright instead of sideways so that he wouldn't choke on the blood coming out of his mouth and nose, which would help him in recovering as she landed on the ground, instantly raising an extremely powerful shield from the mana that she had reserved within her to ensure that a balance was kept and to have a plan for after the spell if it failed.

She cradled the thrashing form of the boy next to her chest, running White mana over him that would hopefully shield him from the corrupt power of the demon that was afflicted him and causing him to throw up blood and have it streaming out of his nose and eyes. The Angel of the Black Sun refused to give up, for as long as her young Summoner was still alive there was still hope, hope that she would not let go of for as long as Caiellis still drew breath – whether that breath was painful or choked or not, he was still living, and it was the angel's duty to protect him from this magic.

All Caiellis could hear was screaming, white-hot noise that stabbed into his ears and brain as he saw himself enacting the awful actions shown in the debauched displays, or having them enacted upon him by those who he loved and trusted to protect him, disgusting and vile imagery that was far darker than anything a mere human could ever muster up blazing in a frenzy of hedonism within his head. He could only vaguely feel the strong and firm grip of a being holding him close, and could only just see the Angel of the Black Sun's wings shielding him as Orzhova used her own body to protect her mortal Summoner from harm. Consciousness – well, awareness, since throughout his ordeal Cai had not slipped into blessed unconsciousness and had been awake throughout all of the pain that was still rushing through him, pain that he knew he deserved for failing but pain that he would desperately try to get away from if he could move.

It felt like someone had wrapped sharpened and barbed wires of metal that were covered in the most toxic and agonising poisons around his whole body and tightened them to the point where they were digging into his bones and ripping through his flesh. He felt as if he was being plunged into a fiery pit of agony that dug into him with spikes of infernal metal and burnt his fragile flesh with blazing plumes of hellfire as he was eaten alive by a ravenous mix of demons and humans. He tried to bat them away, escape from the fire and get the people eating him away, but the venom-dripping barbed wire that was constricting around his naked form held him down, choking and strangling him as it stabbed into his bruised neck and punctured his lungs.

The thirteen year old shrieked out, he couldn't breathe, he couldn't think over the pain, and he wanted anyone that would listen to save him from the agony of death at the hands of the Archdemon. Then, the pain that was preventing him from being aware of his surroundings abated to the point that he retained cognizance of what was happening around him, and he cried tears of blood and the normal variety into the person that held him to their chest, slowly stopping his convulsive thrashing as he pressed himself closer to them, instinctively knowing that this person – or angel – could protect him from the wave of death from the colliding meteor of blood and infernos and the Black Sun of Retribution that had failed to do anything but expose some of the Archdemon's true power and drain him dry of most, if not all, of his mana.

If the situation had been any less dire, Orzhova would have had no diea what to do to comfort a crying Caiellis within her arms, but since she had to focus on the spell she couldn't spare any thought or effort to his emotional and physical crisis right now apart from infusing him with protective mana that would hopefully help. The boy looked up at the face of his angel, her twinkling onyx eyes shut in concentration, and he wiped the tears of blood and the normal variety away from his face. He knew that it was the endless determination of angels to succeed that was making her do this, but the boy almost choked out "what's the point?" at the Angel of the Black Sun.

He stayed silent, knowing that his pathetic voice would not be heard over the rush of mana that smashed into their shield, sending more waves of crushing and stabbing and burning and paralysing and slicing and ripping and tearing and immolating and dying pain through his already abused form. His angel tightened her grip on him, bringing him closer as she pulled her black wings round, her back to the direction of the Archdemon and the waves of blood and fire smashing into them, allowing her to focus their shield on a smaller area and as such concentrate her mana.

It was agonising, and even she almost screamed out at one point, but she knew how awful and despairing her Summoner understandably was, suffering through pain that no mortal child should have ever had to go through, as if Orzhova, an angel of the highest and most exalted echelons, was at the point of shrieking in torment then it must have been ten times worse for the boy, and if she gave into her pain now then there would be no one to be strong for Cai, something that he desperately needed.

She bit into her tongue at the roiling mana crashing into her shield, breaking through it and burning her back and wings, covering them in tides of steaming blood as malicious souls tore at her with their hands and broken nails, biting her with their teeth in their unnatural hunger for flesh and blood, tearing off feathers and scrabbling at her armour as she focussed on protecting Caiellis, her innocent Summoner and her first true friend, one of the only people – mortal or otherwise – that could come anywhere close to understanding her, especially now because Serenity had been sacrificed. Her objective was to protect the boy and keep him as safe as possible through the demon's unholy magic and the explosion of the meteor and Black Sun crashing into the ground together, and it was clear that the frail youngster was afflicted by the backlash of using up so much of his mana and not accomplishing anything with the multitude of pacts with Black magic that he had used to stabilise the balance and ignore his exhaustion.

Orzhova did not mind Caiellis using pacts with the substance of darkness itself to gain more mana, as that was something that she did herself, but she had warned him that he always needed to be able to heal himself with the mana that he gained. There was little to no risk using the pacts when the healing and draining magic of light and darkness combined was available, but when it was not they were very hazardous and she had cautioned him numerous times only to use them when they were necessary. They definitely had been, but it didn't stop Orzhova being angry about the fact that her precious Summoner who was three times the Lucerna his brutal and traitorous father could ever hope to be thought so little of himself that he did not mind sacrificing parts of his life essence to gain more power in doing what he thought was his duty.

Caiellis screamed into Orzhova's chest, his head resting on her armour that was covered with blood and ash that leaked into the cuts on his cheek and the split in his head, that sensation of pain one of numerous different ones amplified and accentuated by the foul magic of the Archdemon that he could pick out individually but which all combined into one endless and discordant symphony of torment that screamed into the boy's mind.

His throat was in agony, both within his head as the poisoned and burning barbed wire coiled around him was choking and stabbing into it, and within reality where he had only just recovered from a violent strangulation and the bruises on his neck flared into life with each of his whimpered screams. That didn't stop him however, as while usually even when screaming one part of him would be telling him that it was utterly pathetic and that he should be acting like a Lucerna, not a spoilt brat that couldn't handle a little bit of pain, right now there was no point in stopping.

There was no point in fighting any more, there was no point in resisting any longer, even though Cai knew tha the demon was his problem and that he had let it be Summoned into the material realm by being too weak to stop it, and a part of him wished that Orzhova would just drop the shield so that the Archdemon's mana could wash over him and kill him, free him from the pain going through him even though he knew that death in the Lord of Riots's clutches would be far more agonising than what was happening now. He also knew that there was no way that the Angel of the Black Sun, the First Sisterhood angel assigned to him from birth who had watched him all of his life, would allow him to die now, not after how much she thought of him and how precious she found him, so for now he pressed himself closer to the angel, still sobbing and crying and yelping helplessly in the pain rushing through his fragile form, taking only a tiny bit of solace in the fact that the angel was protecting him and that he still had access to someone from the exalted First Sisterhood to help him in this fight, a tiny and cracked wall against the tide of hopelessness that surged within his mind.

He was in so much pain, it was hard to do anything, colours and sensations and images exploding behind his eyes to the point where he was no longer sure whether he had them clamped shut or resolutely wedged open, and it felt like every inch of his body was being subjected to at least five different types of murderous pain at once, all of them blending together in some cacophonous harmony of torment that screamed as it surged through him.

Stop, please! Stop! Stop … stop … stop … the pain … I can't … pain, can't move … can't breathe … can't think … help!

Want … want my big brother … want help … want pain to go away … go away … go away … can't …

SCREAM-

The pain and the wave of destruction that had almost sent the Angel of the Black Sun back to the realm of Cai's lonely mind suddenly abated, and although the boy wanted to cry in the relief that flooded through him he knew that it was because the Archdemon had chosen to stop his mana there and then, pulling back his attack that had already had cuts and lacerations springing up on Caiellis's fragile body from the malicious mana of the Lord of Riots permeating the air and causing the wounds without anything physical touching him, and he was aware that he was being spared because he still had some tiny hope left, some tiny inch of determination not to be defeated by the evil Defiler, and as long as he had that the Lord of Riots still wanted to toy with him and crush his defiance out of him.

The youngest Lucerna hated the fact that he was utterly at the Lord of Riots's mercy and that the demon had chosen to spare him because of the fact that he still had agonies to test upon his royal opponent and still wanted to play games of torture with him, especially after feeling like he could actually destroy the physical form of the Archdemon and banish it from Usnaan. It was as if the Defiler was reminding him who was in control here, and that Caiellis was simply a toy to be abused and broken at will until Rakdos tired of him and moved on to fresh prey in the form of the rest of the Lucaelian army.

Orzhova let go of her Summoner, wanting to help him and nurse maid over him but knowing that she needed to protect him from the demon on the other side of the courtyard, unholy Rakdos who was probably already preparing an attack on her downed and whimpering charge, holding her scythe in torn fingerless gloves that leaked her angelic blood all over the shadowy haft of her weapon.

Cai slumped, still feeling the pain of all of his physical and mental wounds in perfect detail on his frail and weak body, closing his eyes and wishing more than anything else for an end to this all, and end that he had not earned at all yet as Rakdos still existed in the City of Pleasure, but an end that he craved for because it would stop all of the pain, stop all of the emotional agony that had defined his piteous life. The Sword of Glass was by his side, after having landed there, and he let his tears flow freely down his cheeks in the same way that the torrential Rain of Gore did now that all of the powerful spell-casting had ceased. The courtyard was much like it had been before the warping of it by the demon's most recent spells, and apart from the larger spires rising up and curling over it at either side and the many cracks in the obsidian which had replaced the old rock of the mansion patio that spewed lava and blood it was otherwise unaffected by the tremendous magic that had the potential to destroy entire cities which had taken place here.

Out of the corner of his eye, Caiellis could see his father still inside of the crystalline cage of his own blood that lulled the man into a peaceful sleep, with Akroma covered in blood but still at his side, and he was more tempted than ever to rouse him from his slumber – even being strangled in the hands of his father was preferable to the fate that the Defiler no doubt had in store for him. He was exhausted, wounded, and suffused with hopelessness, but as long as his First Sisterhood angel remained in the world with him there was always a chance, no matter how small, that they would prevail over the hedonistic darkness conjured into the city of Usnaan.

Cai stayed on the ground, not moving in any way as he stared at the back of his angel stood in front of him, Orzhova having sustained numerous brutal wounds that she paid absolutely no heed to as she guarded him from attack, and he knew that he should be moving – he should be fighting for as long as he kept breathing (and otherwise in the case of being choked almost to death), but there seemed to be little point and the youngest Lucerna knew that he had to control his emotions before he could be of any use to the Angel of the Black Sun or have any hope of damaging the Lord of Riots.

But … what is the point? The Twilight Reprisal was my most powerful spell! I have nothing left … it didn't even touch Rakdos … what am I supposed to do against it? What am I supposed to do against that power? I can't do anything! I have no mana left, and even if I did my most powerful spells wouldn't even scratch the Lord of Riots … we need all three Lucernas and their First Sisterhood angels here, on the same side … and even then we might not prevail … but instead I'm all alone, with a big brother who I led into the city and is still trying to fight me if he isn't dead already, and a father who rightly hates me and wants to kill me for what I have done.

I'm useless … I can't do anything right … why was I born as a Lucerna prince? Why did mum and dad even bother keeping me alive when I was born instead of just ending the life of the little weakling son that they never even wanted in the first place? There is no point to my existence … and I can't do anything … I can't be a prince … I can't protect my older brother like he has done so many times in our past … I can't follow my father's orders and I can't protect the Lucaelian army as is my duty … I can't make anyone proud … and I can't restore Orzhova's tarnished reputation … and I can't kill this Archdemon. I can't. There is no possible way, as if the Twilight Reprisal didn't do any damage at all, then nothing I have left with either.

Keeping her malevolent and hatred filled onyx gaze upon the Lord of Riots who gazed down at the boy and his angel at the other side of the hellscape the courtyard had become, looking no different than he had before apart from the fact that he was even more threatening after conjuring up some of his more occult and demonic magic, the dark seraphim of the First Sisterhood stepped backwards and towards her Summoner who was simply sat up on the ground and looking with a haunting gaze at the floor. She cast a quick glance at him, satisfied that at least his physical wounds were too bad (although they were still awful and it horrified her to see what had been done to him), and placed a hand on his shoulder.

When the boy whimpered in pain at the contact, gasping out a choked sob as the mana rushed through his abused body and nestled in his internal pool of magical energy which had been damaged and would need hours of rest and recuperation to repair, Orzhova tried to make her voice as soothing as possible when she said, "I know it hurts, Caiellis, but trust me when I say that you need the mana."

The boy looked up at her, a question in his welling green eyes which had seen so much death and pain in the cruel world of man and yet still managed to remain innocent and pure, and she elaborated, "I held some of my own internal White and Black mana back whilst we were casting the Twilight Reprisal in case something like this happened, so I'm glad that I did. It is painful, as you have exhausted your mana, but you need it to continue fighting."
One part of Caiellis's psyche screamed at the angel in fury at the fact that she had held back, conserved some of her power during the spell of Retribution that Cai had put everything into and expected her to do the same, blaming her lack of certainty for the failure of the spell, but the thirteen year old couldn't bring himself to be angry at his angel, not now, not after how he felt and everything that he had gone through.

Orzhova had been right to hold back some power, and the boy harshly berated himself for blaming the angel when it was his fault for not being strong enough, as he was sure that without him holding her back and placing limitations on her strength because of his own detestable weakness the Angel of the Black Sun would have at least been able to damage the Defiler. He accepted the mana from her, though it sank to the bottom of his exhausted and completely empty mana pool and didn't erase the hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach that only had something to do with his lack of magical power, and then placed his cut and sliced palms on the steaming ground as he tried to push himself up.

The world spun, like it had when his Summoning had forced his dear father off of his windpipe and he had tried to surge to his feet after that, and he pushed harder, scraping his palms on the brimstone debris from the destruction that had happened here but ignoring the brief sensation of stinging pain as the remaining skin on them was torn off, rising up to one knee before he took a break, panting heavily in the exertion but refusing to let his weakness get the better of him. Orzhova kept flicking between the main threat within the capital city of the New Empire of Passion and her young Summoner who was still pushing himself to the limit despite the hollowness in his green eyes.

She wished that she still had a mental link to him so that she could know more of what was going on inside of that young head of his, and she also wished that she could say something to inspire him and fill him with motivation again, but after all that he had been through in this battle and before it with the degradation of the relationship between the king and his youngest son and when Alexander had almost died there was little Orzhova could do to sugar coat the direness of their situation. Instead of wasting time on words that weren't coming to her as she watched Cai struggle, wanting nothing more than to help him to his feet (as strange feeling since before that she had barely felt protective over anything before and had always maintained that everyone should look after themselves), she turned back to the Lord of Riots, who seemed perfectly content to watch the two interact and obtain all the recovery that they could.

He winked sadistically at her, unable to stop a bloodthirsty and vindictive grin from splitting across his hellish features, as if realising something that the Angel of the Black Sun had known at the back of her mind for some time now but refused to give conscious thought to, as if even merely thinking of it would bring it to malicious life and that by not paying any heed to it she could believe that it wasn't true (a tactic that many of her self-righteous sisters had seemed to perfect, at least going from from her interactions with them). She snarled back, cursing under her breath in words that she was glad that her innocent Summoner couldn't understand, words that she was grateful he couldn't hear being spat out of angelic lips and gracing the world in the voice of a seraph from the highest order.

Orzhova knew that no matter that she didn't want to even consider it, Cai had to know, no matter what that would do to the boy's emotional state. If she didn't tell him then it would happen within a matter of less than two minutes anyway, and though it made the Angel of the Black Sun feel worse than she had ever done – including when she had been prosecuting Xarius's orders and condemned by her sisters and even her usually forgiving Mother – it could not be ignored any longer.

She turned back to the small boy, who had managed to get up to one knee, not understanding how King Marik could not simply feel huge amounts of love for his youngest son who was as determined as he was compassionate and reminded her a huge amount of poor Serenity who had been killed by the Arch-Heretic Johnias in the same way that Caiellis's mother had, and placed a steadying hand on his shoulder as he threatened to fall back onto to ground. The angel hated to do this, hated it almost as much as she hated the Archdemon that was endangering the life of her Summoner and those who he loved and felt the need to protect, but it had to be done.

"Caiellis," her voice, clear and full of an adamant determination that Orzhova hoped to convey onto her Summoner that she didn't truly feel, broke through the silence that had descended, the thundering rumble of the Tempest of Craving and the screaming of the battle seemingly incredibly distant and far away, like this was one conflict that was separate from the climax of the war raging around them. The youngest Lucaelian to ever have set foot within the City of Pleasure (as children weren't much use to the Welkalites as slaves or even torture experiments and were simply killed or left behind in the raids) snapped his gaze towards the eyes of the angel, tearing his eyes away from the grinning Archdemon which he had been staring at and pondering the futility of his obstinacy.

Her pale face was grim, sad, and the golden tears etched on her cheeks were joined by streaks of blood and ash painted onto her angelic and flawless features. She was sorrowful, Cai could see that, but also making great pains to hide it from him, and he gulped nervously before regretting doing so. Anything that could give a First Sisterhood pause was definitely something to be worried about, especially with the state that he was in, although perhaps it had something to do with that because for some reason Orzhova actually cared about him.

Orzhova repressed a sigh of melancholy sadness that would make this situation even worse, knowing that she had to stay strong for her Summoner's sake so that he was not worried even more than he already was after the failure of the Twilight Reprisal, and she almost gave into the temptation to lie to him – which would almost certainly kill him – when she stared deep into his mournful green eyes which were already full of despair and hopelessness, but that would be a great injustice to him and he needed to know whether she wanted to tell him or not. She felt like she was failing him, and wished that there was something she could do, and in her moment of hesitation she glanced over at the Defiler who had leaned forwards to watch like he was simply observing some form of theatre show and they weren't in the middle of a brutal battle which had just seen Caiellis throwing his most powerful spell at the demon.

A determination to protect her Summoner rushed through her alongside another surge of hatred, and she turned back to the boy, squeezing his shoulder firmly enough to be reassuring (she hoped, as it was often something that Alexander did to salve the emotional state of his little brother when he was in distress so it should have a similar effect) but not tightly enough to exacerbate any of the wounds that he was suffering. She tried to keep her midnight eyes resolute and focussed instead of as mournful as she felt inside, and Orzhova continued, "You do not have enough mana to sustain me for more than a minute longer, and if you do then you will fall into unconsciousness and easy prey for the demon. That is why I am going to return to the Mind Realm now, so that you have enough mana to fight against it instead of only having one less minute."

The words hit the boy like a physical blow, and he had to grip the ground tightly to prevent himself from toppling over because of the awful statement, even more dejection and despair rushing through him and making him want to cry even more than before. He stared back up at Orzhova, his vision blurring with the droplets of viscera from the Rain of Gore that stung them as well as the tears that were beginning to mist up within his large green eyes, and protested, "No, you can't leave! You can't leave me alone! I can't fight without you!"

Orzhova tried to hide her grimace, knowing that this was tantamount to signing to boy's death sentence, but the cold, harsh truth of reality was that the young and vulnerable teenager had an infinitely greater chance of emerging triumphant at the end of this battle if she left now instead of draining any more of his lacking mana. To that end, she endeavoured to keep her voice as neutral and encouraging as possible as she said, "Yes, you can, Caiellis. Believe in yourself, and victory over the Lord of Riots will be possible."

"No it won't! No matter how hard I believe, I can't win against him without you! I can barely stand on my own, Orzhova, and I … I don't want to be alone against him! I need you by my side! Please, stay with me!" Caiellis begged, unable to stop the tears of sadness and terror from pouring out of his eyes as he couldn't resist sending a glance over at the Archdemon, who simply smiled balefully back and licked its gore-stained lips in anticipation, sending a shudder of pure horror through the youngest Lucerna as he turned back to his angel. The boy's voice made him sound every bit of his thirteen years instead of much older, and Orzhova felt like she was abandoning him to his fate – which she was, and there was no alternative.

"Caiellis, listen to me. You cannot sustain me for much longer, and when I disappear you will be knocked unconscious and easy prey for the Lord of Riots. If I go now, you will have enough mana to fight him, and have enough mana to banish him from this plane. You can do this, my young Summoner, I am certain of it," Orzhova told him, staring straight into his bright green eyes that were filled with sadness and fear as he hitched out another painful sob and hoping that she was impressing her trust in him upon the boy, who pleaded, "I can't! Not alone! I need you with me, Orzhova! I don't care that I can only keep you out of the Mind Realm for a minute, because I … I don't want to be left alone against that. I would … rather die with someone... that I can trust by my side … instead of being all alone … you … you can't leave me, please."

I wish that I didn't have to. I wish that I could pull you into the Mind Realm with me and take you away from all of this violence and pain, but I can't and I will not let you give up on any chance of victory – not now, and not ever. "And I, and a lot of other people, want you to live instead of only having another single minute of me! This is hard for me as well, Caiellis, and trust me when I say that I don't want to leave you, but I have to if you are going to have any chance at surviving!"

The Angel of the Black Sun hadn't meant to shout, and her Summoner's face contorted in fear not directed at her and hollow despair at the possibility of being left alone, but her powerful emotion would not be repressed any longer and she couldn't hold it inside of her. She wasn't angry at Caiellis, just at the situation, and wished that it would be different, but there was only one course of action that they could take which would end in the Archdemon gone and Orzhova was not going to countenance her Summoner sacrificing his life just so he could not die alone – he was far too young to die, and Orzhova had barely known him, barely had a chance to interact with him.

She knew that it was selfish, but that was because of her Black mana (in two ways – as firstly the magic of darkness was about and almost exclusively focussed upon the self and as such it was very self-centred, and secondly because it heavily restricted the amount of Summoners which she had been able to have and made every one of them immensely precious to her whereas some of her sisters had had more than ten times the number that she had) and her protective instinct for her fragile Summoner and friend (as angels had a lot to learn from humans just as the Lucaelians could and had learnt much from their heavenly benefactors and guardians, and one of the few tenets of her Mother's that Orzhova agreed with now was that humans were in no way inferior to the angels that aided them, even though in her mind it was only the certain few that this rule applied to) was from her White magic.

She turned away, unable to look into his beseeching emerald orbs that pleaded with her to stay, and turned her face away under the pretence of staring over at the demon and the storm, but truly it was to hide the fact that she was crying from Caiellis. Golden tears much like the ones already etched on her pale features streamed down her cheeks before she brushed them away, unwilling to let Cai see her like this because she knew that it would break him even more and completely destroy whatever limited effects her words were having on the distressed boy. The littlest Lucerna had too much to worry about without seeing his First Sisterhood angel in tears, and the Angel of the Black Sun violently brushed them away, refusing to give into her own personal weakness because there were much more pressing issues at stake and she was supposed to be an angel of the First Sisterhood.

She did not want Caiellis to be even more disheartened than he was, and she could feel the boy reaching up to the hand that she still had laid on his bony shoulder and grasping at her wrist, the black leather armour there already burnt and ripped by the battle that they had gone through, squeezing it tight like that would stop Orzhova from having to leave him to fight against the Archdemon Rakdos alone. The Angel of the Black Sun wished that she could stay by Caiellis, but she could not, and she had already wasted enough of his mana being here and talking to him, trying to soothe his distraught emotional state as much as possible before her inevitable departure.

"I'm sorry, Caiellis. But I have to go now. You can win this fight against Rakdos, and I believe in you," Orzhova told him firmly as he started shaking his head frantically, holding onto her tighter like his life depended upon it, and the angel refused to use up any more of Cai's mana – she had said all she could, and now was not the time for sentimentality. She returned in a flash of spiralling purple that had an extremely melancholy colouring to it, just as Caiellis cried, "No! You can't go! Don't leave me! Please! Please..."

His thin fingers swiped at empty air as he tried to keep holding on to the Angel of the Black Sun, the only thing that could keep him safe within this hellish courtyard that contained the Defiler within it. The youngest Lucerna started breathing faster as it truly dawned upon him that, for the first time in fighting the Lord of Riots, he was truly alone against the Archdemon, and with that realisation came a rush of despair and dejection. "No! No! Nonononononono! Come back! Please, Orzhova! Please don't leave me … please …."

Caiellis screwed up his tiny hands into fists, curling over and tempted to punch the ground in frustration at the sheer hopelessness of the situation, but he knew that more than anything it would probably just hurt him so let his hands fall despondently by his side instead, his face millimetres from the ground as he bent over like he was kneeling in supplication of some divine being. Wracking sobs that were some of the worst he had felt so far in this emotionally agonising battle afflicted his scrawny frame, and he could feel the demon's gaze burning into him as he cried because of how hopeless and desperate the situation was. He thought he had been ready to die. He had been wrong, but it wasn't death that scared him – it was the thought of spending an eternity in the Archdemon's clutches, forced to endure countless tortures and watch the people that he loved die over and over and over again in myriad different ways until Rakdos was bored of him.

He was all alone, all alone against one of the most powerful and evil beings known to mankind, and there was nothing that he could do to stop it from doing whatever it wanted, stop it from committing whatever nefarious deeds it chose to because he had barely any mana left.

Caiellis cried, tears stinging his eyes as they fell out of them and mingled with the blood cascading down him, the torrential Rain of Gore pounding into his back with steaming gobbets of crimson viscera that exacerbated all of his pain and his despair. He sobbed, whimpered and let the tears fall, not caring what anyone would think if they saw him, before harshly telling himself to get up, berating himself for this weakness and telling himself that because Orzhova had believed in him and he still had mana left he could still fight. He looked up at Rakdos, the demon's horrifying visage twisted into something even more disturbing by the tears blurring his vision and the blood-slick hair that went into his eyes before he brushed it away. The demon smiled back, full of a predatory hunger for his broken soul, and Cai shuddered involuntarily, having no angel to hide behind this time.

The Lord of Riots almost casually raised its free hand, occult sigils that birthed crimson fire of screaming souls into the air around it as it effortlessly conjured large quantities of Black and Red mana through its demonic skin. It grinned at Caiellis, flicking its wrist in the direction of the boy as a superheated gout of soulfire was launched through the air towards him. Aware that he did not have enough mana to waste by conjuring the Gift of Orzhova and that the Lord of Riots would probably destroy it instantly, the boy quickly and shakily rose to his feet, conjuring up a shield of White mana and aware that the attack wasn't particularly powerful – well, it was, but not to the standard of assault one would expect from an Archdemon.

The adolescent prince knew that he was being toyed with, that the demon was just playing with him and making him realise the true hopelessness of the situation, and as he raised his protection of shining, glass-esque light around him, he tried to use that brain of his that was the pride of Uncle Tybalt and his older brother to figure out something that he could do. It was slightly infuriating, but much moreso terrifying, that he couldn't think of anything, every idea that he had either requiring more mana than he had available – as there were no more pacts he could take without dying instantly and having his soul claimed by Rakdos anyway – or something that he knew already wasn't going to work against the being that had resisted the Twilight Reprisal without even sustaining a scratch from it.

The shield began to absorb the fire that crashed into it, souls of flame clawing and scratching at the protection in their hunger to get at the one within, and Caiellis took a step backwards as the intensity began to increase, hating the fact that he had to use up the mana that Orzhova had gifted to him so that he could fight against the demon for as long as possible. He wasn't really even sure anymore why he was still resisting, why he was battling against it when he knew that either he would be forced to use all of his mana in defence and accomplish nothing or go on an all out offence with the exact same result. However, some deep, primal part of him still clung to the thought of having peace, of escaping the clutches of the Lord of Riots and finally getting away from the pain, and he grasped onto that thought, holding the precious emotions in his mind as he also created a picture of Alexander, Uncle Tristram and Uncle Tybalt together like when they were in the civil war, all of the happy times that he had had with them in spite of the bleak reality of the war raging around them, and nestled it next to the wish that he would escape from the pain in his life.

These were the people who had protected him who were still in the city and being attacked by the forces of the Defiler and the Welkalite army, these were the three people who had risked their lives over and over again for him and others and made his life bearable up to this point. These were the people who he loved above all others, and although he would have given almost anything to have his father amongst them the man hated him after all that he had done and Caiellis couldn't show love to hatred and forgive him for what he had done to his youngest son, so Marik didn't show up in his mind.

Cai imagined his big brother's smile as he teased his younger sibling and ruffled his hair in the way that the youngest Lucerna had always found annoying (especially if he did it really rough) but also endearing. He imaged Uncle Tybalt beaming proudly at his youngest student's academic success, talking to the aged man about books and myths and legends and anything that concerned him personally that he couldn't share with others. He imaged Uncle Tristram grinning at him, him and Alex telling Caiellis that he really should eat more and the man always knowing when to provide support or comfort should he need it.

He held those images in his mind, close to the desire for an end to the pain and anguish that had afflicted him all the way through his life but heightened to the extreme in these last few moments in the Welkalite capital, as he defended against the attack. Caiellis's shield glowed red where the fire impacted upon it and was absorbed, and he sweated in the sweltering heat that had already expanded across the entire courtyard but was exacerbated by this infernal attack. He felt the intensity of the fire increasing, and bit his lip where it was already red and bleeding as he felt his whole body aching with the amount of mana that he had released so far, too much for even a Lucerna because of the fact that he was only thirteen years old and not fully developed yet.

The boy yelped, his pain crashing through the hold that he had managed to build up upon it which allowed him to actually act and protect himself as talons of hellfire clawed through his shield, the stained glass protection of interlocking shards formed from White mana smashing apart as the claws of flame sliced through them. They raked at Caiellis as he shut his eyes against the simultaneously burning and slicing pain, tearing his shirt (as his leather armour jacket had already been ruined beyond repair and only a few scraps of it stuck to his armour) in a massive slash down the front. The glass that had been crystallised upon his lower abdomen, preventing the wound that had been caused by his father's greatsword from bleeding uncontrollably and making him even more faint than he already was, shattered in the impact as he was flung backwards off of his feet by the flaming strike.

Souls, but distorted, phantasmagorian perversions of human ones, reached out towards him with blades rammed into their arms, the fire of spirits claimed by the Lord of Riots hungering for Cai's blood and pain as they sliced at him, a wound torn down his front from just below his collar bones down across his chest, crimson blood jetting out from the slash that was deep but not penetrating to his deeper organs. Instead of evaporating when it touched the flame, the boy's vitae swirled around it as he was knocked backwards, tongues of fire from the souls driven insane and angry by endless torment trapped within it reaching out to lap at it before it was pulled away, though Cai did not see that it was dragged back to the Archdemon on the other side of the courtyard as he was sent tumbling and sprawling backwards, rolling instinctively in the air to prevent his head being smashed against the rock as he fell and instead scraping another tear in his shirt in his front as he collapsed to a halt.

Breathing heavily, Cai cursed himself for the brief arrogance he had allowed himself – since the attack hadn't seemed all that threatening compared to what he had faced so far, he had attempted to be conservative with the mana that he used in the shield, only using as much as was necessary to prevent him from being harmed instead of putting all that he had into it. The pain of the large rent down his chest was agonising as he pulled himself up to one knee, warm blood trickling down him and joining the claret liquid spilling out of the rest of his nasty gashes and other wounds which mixed with the corrupt gore of the torrential and bloody rain.

However, the fact remained that at this point his mana and capacity to inflict damage upon the demon was far more important than his life and safety, as if he had wasted all of his magical energy in resisting the fiery attack he would be able to do nothing else – and Rakdos probably would have just increased the power behind his unholy assault and easily overwhelm any resistance he might be able to mount with the amount of mana he had left.

The boy barely managed to stifle the cry that raced up his bruised throat, almost bypassing his ability to maintain control of his pain receptors. He wasn't exactly sure why he even did it, but he supposed that one part of him still clung to the small shreds of Lucerna and Lucaelian pride within him that had already been torn to tatters in not giving the Lord of Riots the satisfaction of seeing him in too much pain – one scream was enough for what had happened, one scream for this wound was the only one that he was going to get. He tried to remember what he knew of demons from the admittedly lacking material he had absorbed detailing them and his own experiences, but even if he could have thought clearly over the ringing within his head nothing so far even compared to the sacrilegious power of an Archdemon.

He tried to drag up some semblance of information from the vaults within his mind, knowing that he needed at least a little bit of a plan more than "survive and attack whenever you get the chance" if he was ever going to even wound the demon and prove that Orzhova's seemingly groundless belief in him was not unfounded, but he couldn't think with any form of clarity. His brain was oddly but understandably absent of anything redolent of coherent thought, and the only thing that was running through his distraught and befuddled mind was that this defence was entirely hopeless and that he wished that Orzhova had stayed with him instead of leaving him alone. In fact, it was increasingly difficult to focus on anything else but the sadness eating away at him from both the inside and from without, the despair that he felt at being alone with the most terrifying being in existence, and the fact that that being wanted him to suffer through an eternity of agony inflicted by it.

"Exquisite," the demon murmured to itself, licking its lips as Caiellis shuddered in horror at the sight of the Lord of Riots tasting his child opponent's blood despite the fact that by now he should have built up an immunity to seeing that from the creatures of the darkness, especially since he was a Lucerna with coveted vitae running through his young veins and the fact that he was still a child made it even more desirable and easy to acquire. He felt sick to his stomach with the things that the Lord of Riots had forced him to see, and clamped his left arm around his stomach and chest at the reopened wound and the newly torn one. His slender right hand ghosted over the handle of the Sword of Glass, and he grabbed onto the relic weapon, using the downwards pointed blade to keep himself at least on one knee as he stared back at the manifestation of all depraved sin.

At thirteen, he was too scrawny and short for even his young age, and as he knew that he couldn't keep moving for much longer before his wounds overwhelmed him, he grasped at anything even vaguely resembling a modicum of hope or protection, within his mind and in the real world, with grim hopefulness. He thought of the endless combat lessons that he had been forced to go through, one part of him knowing that they would be useless here, especially against this sort of opponent who was not a human or anything close, and he wished that anything would offer him the life saving driftwood that he desperately needed to stop himself from drowning in the river of defeat.

The demon's wings opened wide, scraping at the edges of the massive spires of obsidian that curled over the courtyard like talons of black, volcanic rock, pulsing with spider-web blotches of crimson mana made from the Rain of Gore pouring down them that formed into symbols with meanings too terrible to behold around the Lord of Riots. It seemed ever more massive as it leaned over the entire plaza, flaming eyes fixed upon the shivering (in spite of the heat, though it was shudders of pain that wracked Cai's fragile body, not because of any non-existent cold in the burning temperatures) teen on the other side who was leaning against one of the rock spikes for stability, and although this one was not one of the newer and more massive ones it still towered above him and made him look even smaller to anyone that would be watching.

The kid wanted nothing more than to curl up into a foetal ball and block the inhuman sounds of the Defiler whispering to itself and licking its lips stained with the boy's own blood, as while the words of Rakdos were only spoken as a whisper of ecstasy they carried across the entire plateau, the malicious words distorted as they cut into the Lucerna's soul and spoke to him out of the shadows curling around him. However, holding his head in his arms and nestling into a ball would not achieve anything, and it would not protect him at all - not that anything he could do would protect him otherwise.

He wanted Orzhova here; the angel had made him truly believe that they could win or at least do something to the unholy yet divine avatar of carnage and carnal pleasures, even if such a possibility was unlikely, but she wasn't here and he was all on his own now. Cai blinked tears out of his eyes as he stared back at the demon who had orchestrated this entire war and corrupted the entire New Empire of Passion so that they would serve under his destructive whims, and tried to stop himself from hyperventilating or bursting into more tears of hopelessness.

"How does it feel, Caiellis, to be abandoned by all who have professed that they were going to protect you?" the demon Rakdos asked him, its voice full of a dark but genuine mirth, and to Cai's ringing ears it seemed like the denizen of the abyss was trying to stifle howling laughter of malicious hysteria. The boy could have laughed himself, almost falling into hysterics at the though that he, a mortal boy who couldn't even save a few soldiers or stop his older brother getting hurt and almost killed, had ever thought that he could challenge the Lord of Riots, and while he sensed that some of the dire amusement in his mind was caused by the malevolent and insanity-inducing aura oozing out from the Defiler, the rest of the mania was from him and him alone.

He didn't answer, not that the demon would be expecting him to, and the wingspan of the being seemed to increase even more; Rakdos seemed to pull himself higher up and stand straighter so that he was leaning over the youth even more, too far away even with its massive reach to touch him but never far away from it to escape from its psychotic and nightmarish magic.

He felt more scared than he had ever done in his life, even the night when his mother had died and he and Alexander had been forced to run out of the burning and besieged Capitalia Lux alone as Tybalt, Tristram and other loyal soldiers who were nearby covered their retreat as they were pursued by horrors and demons, even more scared than he had been when Alex had been almost killed by the last vampire and he had – and could – do absolutely nothing to help him. He knew that it was selfish, that he was more scared for his own eternal soul than that of his brother's at the time, but the Archdemon accentuated all fear around it so that even the most minute concerns developed into full blown terror that could freeze a person's limbs and prevent them from thinking about anything else – as Caiellis knew.

"How does it feel, knowing that you are all alone and that nothing you can do can affect me? How does it feel to know that I am going to break your soul, Lucerna child, and feast upon it for all eternity once I have done?" the words were horrifying, especially spat out of the demon's mouth, and Caiellis launched an almost blind bolt of desperate incandescence out of his crystalline blade. The shimmering and blinding beam crashed into the demon's face, but did not even char the unholy skin before he brushed it away with his hand. The Lord of Riots flicked his fingers once the light ran over them, and it was instantly corrupted, becoming dark and bloody like the occult sigils that were cut into the air and obsidian spires. Caiellis down on his tongue hard as the corrupted light was launched back into him, the spray of coppery blood in his mouth nothing compared to the agony that erupted through him as he was lifted off of his feet and crushed against the base of the spire that he had leaned on for support by the Red and Black mana.

He gasped out a silent whimper of pain, his lungs feeling like they were being crushed and compressed hard, and as the intensity of the torment increased his back arched against the pressure of the unholy mana, his mouth opened in a wordless scream as he bucked against the suffocating weight that made him feel like the pain magic was blasting a huge hole through not just his body, but his almost shattered soul as well. The agony abated, and he slumped, his chest bleeding from the wounds already inflicted and steaming from this new magic, some of his skin blackened like he had just been burnt by a massive bonfire of the damned, heaving out one pitiful breath after another as he tried to muster up some sort of resistance.

The boy conjured a shield of iridescent stained glass shards around him, but the second he did so Rakdos snapped his massive fingers together and it broke, smashing apart into millions of tiny yet incredibly sharp fragments as a rough sphere of empyreal symbols and unholy characters the colour of pulsing blood that alternated between deep crimson and burning scarlet and evil coal-black formed up. Cai raised his arms in a pathetic defence as his own corrupted magic rained down on him, the fragments of his shield slicing into him and tearing his clothes and bare flesh to shreds as he picked up numerous lacerations, blood spurting out from him all around him as the glass cut into him as he cried and tried to do something against the pain, trying to summon up shadows around him that would protect his fragile and vulnerable form from the magic of the Lord of Riots.

The substantial darkness formed up around him, clothing him and the shredded clothing that he still wore (though he was nowhere near naked and a lot of the fabric was painfully stuck into his open wounds that were probably being infected, especially because he was in the presence of the taint of an Archdemon) in a shroud of solid ebony that prevented the rain of glass from cutting him even more, before Rakdos cackled again, his booming voice the herald of more agony as tears of pain streamed unbidden down the boy's cheeks.

Orzhova, come back! Please, I need you here! I can't … I can't fight this alone...

A pulsation of unholy blood throbbed through the shadows surrounding him, and while the betrayal of his own glassy shield abated the Black mana that he had employed to protect himself from that was now turning against him. They turned red and malicious, and the smallest Lucaelian within Usnaan tried to duck and weave away before realising that because his shield of darkness had been so perfect, so all-encompassing, that there was no escape.

Tendrils of tainted blackness wrapped around him, snaking round his arms, his legs, his chest, his neck, and squeezing tight as it yanked the Sword of Glass out of his hands, the grip of the shadows burning into him with agonising Red and Black mana as he was held, struggling to breathe and thrashing against his own magic that had been, once again, turned against its conjurer by the dark power of the Lord of Riots which had overwhelmed and corrupted it without the mana of a First Sisterhood angel to reinforce its sanctity. He put all of his strength in trying to pull away from the bonds restraining him, but the hold that the darkness had on him was unyielding and incredibly strong and he felt like he was trying to tear himself out of chains of steel that cut into his skin.

He could see the Lord of Riots laughing sadistically at his predicament, and he tried to get a hold of the few drops of mana still left in his mind that Orzhova had given him before she departed, but found that in his panic it kept fleeing from him. He pulled against the grasping arms of darkness wrapped around him and constricting him, but even without his numerous painful wounds draining his energy and strength physically he was too weak to managed to break out of the shadowy ropes and bounds without any mana. Alexander would have been able to do it, that was something that he was sure about, because even though there was only a four year (and a month) age gap between them it seemed like the older boy was infinitely stronger than he was.

He tried to remember the many non-magical and hand to hand training lessons that he had taken, grappling against Alex and more rarely Tristram (with the latter more likely teaching him something instead of sparring against him), desperately wishing that he had paid more attention to the lessons which had seemed so pointless at the time – that wasn't to say that he hadn't, but it always seemed to him that no matter how hard he tried and how dirty the tactics were that he sometimes resorted to even get one victory, trying to win against his much stronger brother – or even Tristram who was even stronger than Alex – was an exercise in futility, just as this was.

Think, dammit! What did Uncle Tristram and Alex tell you about facing a physically stronger opponent? How did you break their holds? What had they said about fighting someone bigger than you? Come on! I don't want to die like this ... I can't give in now …

He knew that wrestling and fighting against other humans was barely similar to being held and restrained by tendrils of incredibly strong shadow, but it was the only thing that he had reference on and since his mana refused to come to him through the pain and panic (increased even more by having his breathing restricted by the shadow hooked round his throat and the arm of darkness squeezed around his broken ribs). Though all he could think of was that the only times he had ever managed to escape from Alexander's serious submission holds (as he could do it when they were playing if the older boy wasn't putting strength into it) was before his brother had initiated them properly and he had managed to wrench out of them before he got a good hold on him. This was different; the shadows were already wrapped around him and the demon's predatory laughter in combination with his pain and terror was making it even harder to think clearly.

The youngest Lucerna's breaths became faster and shorter as a figure began to materialise out of the shade of the Lord of Riots leaning over him and obscuring the light of the Tempest of Craving's crackling discharges. An avatar of discord, hissing threateningly and excitedly at him, began to pull itself up out of the tainted darkness, moving towards him with a menacing gait as the claw appendage of its right arm began to whirr and spin in a terrifying manner. Cai flailed and jerked within the bonds that held him still and squeezing him tightly, burning into his pale skin with painful marks as he pulled desperately against them, the incarnation of the demon's cruel shadow and fear itself moving ever closer and chittering to itself in ecstatic glee at what it was about to do to him.

"Angels, no! Please! Get away from me! Please, let me go!" Caiellis screamed, his voice raw and strained as with his hyperventilation and the tendrils of Black mana tightening around him in response to his increasingly desperate threshing he found it hard to get air into his lungs. The claw of the nightmare, looking even bigger than he had first seen on the three which he had already dealt with, whirred as it reached towards him, and the numerous cut which had been dealt by the avatar's sadistic sisters' talons flared up in sympathetic agony (and had the boy been in any less of a desperate circumstance he would have wondered how his body knew which wounds had been inflicted by them).

He tried to pull away, drag his vulnerable form backwards and away from the blades that inched closer, glinting scarily in a red flash of crimson lighting from above that was accompanied by a boom of thunder, but the shadows held him still even as he pulled against them. All of his wounds hurt, and as the boy tried to pull himself away he saw the full extent of what had been done to him when the shadows yanked him closer. In the panic and the adrenaline, he hadn't realised that he had been hurt this badly, but one part of him harshly told himself to suck it up because of the fact that he told himself that his injuries were nowhere near as bad as Alexander's the night roughly a week ago when Aksua had almost killed him, and even then the seventeen year old had had a vampire's curse to contend with as well.

The avatar of discord reached towards him as he tried to turn away from it, protect his tender and soft form from the gleaming talons of its right limb, tipping his head back away from it as they reached towards his face, the two faces on the creature's body armour whispering maliciously and laughing at his plight and resistance. The darkness tightened even more, the shadow curling around his neck that he was stretching painfully backwards to try and get away hardening and constricting, pulling him back forwards so that he could not escape and making him feel his father's hand around his neck again.

The glinting talons of the being borne of the Defiler's shadow reached for his face as Cai tried to turn away, unable to shut his eyes because of the terror that he was in despite wanting to, his survival instinct overriding his fear and forcing him to watch as the being's torture device of a right arm got closer and closer.

"No! No no no! Please! Stop! Get away! Stop! No!" he pleaded, though his begging fell on deaf ears as he tried to twist and thrash out of the iron grip of the darkness, feeling like he was within one of Alex's wrestling holds on him and that the older boy was angry with him, as such not holding back too much and being far too hard on his little brother. Terror overwhelmed one part of his mind's desire to see what was happening so that he could avoid it and potentially capitalise upon any chance of an escape, and he clamped his eyes shut as a hand of pure gloom held his chin up towards the avatar, preventing him from turning his head away.

He struggled endlessly in fear, the sensation of his tears spilling out of his closed eyes very familiar despite the fact that he really did try not to cry, until his eyes were wrenched open by little fingers of darkness that evidently wanted him to see what would happen to him. He thrashed some more, all of his pained and exhausted muscles tensing and straining against his bonds as his eyes were forced open and he was made to watch as the two blades of the avatar of discord went towards them.

No! Not my eyes! Please! Stop! Anyone, help me!

It took the thirteen year old a moment to realise that he had screamed the imploring plea for mercy, not just thought it, as he tried to reflexively clamp his eyelids shut as the long and sharp blades reached towards them. He kept shaking, hoping that at least that would make the being's torture of him difficult, wrenching his head up in spite of the shadows surrounding him as they plunged towards his emerald green eyes, adrenaline giving him strength and allowing him to avoid the strike towards his eyes.

His vision was blurred by the tears and the pain as he earned a tightening of the tendrils of darkness for his trouble, his sight beginning to grey out as the one round his throat pressed in on his bruises. The blades of the being's horrible weapon arm cut open his already gashed and pale cheeks, scoring lines of blood on them that began to trickle out because of his dodge of its first attack. A cut was ripped through the Black Sun birthmark, and as if in response to the desecration of the Lucerna symbol or because of the pain of the blades touching him and slicing open the flesh of his cheeks Caiellis suddenly found that he could access his mana.

He grasped hold of it, flinging it out of him in a formless and desperate blast as the avatar snarled and him in response to his movements which had prevented it stabbing into his eyes and the shadows began to choke him. A blinding blast of light exploded out of the boy, ripping apart the malicious shallows around him and destroying the incarnation of Rakdos's shade, and he fell to his knees after the detonation, panting heavily again as he pushed his hands onto the floor to stop himself toppling over from exhaustion and terror.

The demon's laughter pulsed into his brain, the booming malignancy of the sound crashing around within his skull as he coughed violently. The places where the shadow had been wrapped around his skin were red and raw, like rope burns but much more painful and awful looking than that as they were seared by infernal fire. It had taken almost everything out of him in trying to resist his own mana that had been corrupted and turned against the Lucaelian youth, and as usual he hadn't accomplished anything of note and was only trying to preserve himself instead of dealing damage to the Lord of Riots. He wanted to scream, to shout at the injustice of the world and the hopelessness that flooded through him, to sob and cry because of the pain he was in and how horrible his life had been, and he would have done so if he thought that it would have achieved anything at all.

"Did you not enjoy the treatment of my avatar of discord?" the Lord of Riots barked, chuckling with black humour at the boy who was trying to get himself together again, but every time that he was injured again or hurt and subjected to torture and pain he was finding it harder to do so, and not just because of the increased amount of wounds building up on his frail body. It was because every time he was pulled underneath the tide of anguish and distress building up inside of him, drowning underneath his sorrow and trying to claw his way to the surface once again, and managed to raise his head above the fear again, he came out short of breath and more submerged than he was before. It was getting harder and harder to keep up with this composure of trying to fight back when he knew that there was no point and nothing he could do, no matter how much he hated this demon and no matter how much he wanted to help other people.

Caiellis didn't favour the sovereign of sadistic passion with a response, although a voice in his mind insisted that he should shake his head so that the Archdemon would stop hurting him and leave him alone, a voice that he quickly silenced even though the words of sadness and despair wouldn't leave his mind. Exhaustion, something which had began to grow ever since he escaped his father's choking grasp because of the temporary salvation given to him by the Angel of the Black Sun, was rising up within him, and now that the adrenaline which had started flowing through him back when he was in the Voidwalk and being threatened by the lord of that realm of nothingness was starting to fade its grip on him was getting stronger.

His instincts and reaction speeds were slowing down because of the pain and tiredness due to the amount of exertion his body had suffered through, and now that he had no one else to guard him whilst he recovered he wasn't even afforded a brief respite from the endless crushing assaults. On his knees and breathing heavily, Cai didn't move when he felt a flare of mana from the Defiler until his mind screamed at his body to do so, the boy feeling incredibly sluggish like he was trying to wade through tar that was pouring into his nose and mouth and clogging up his mental passageways. He managed to break out of his sudden and shocking narcolepsy in the short stint between trying to fight for his life against tortuous attacks, and flung his wounded body to the side as a pillar of volcanic rock slammed up where he had been stood.

The thin boy had dodged too late, and the spike of rock smashed him in the side as he leapt away, gouging a deep cut within the calf of his left leg and sending him spinning round with the impact force, dizziness and disorientation making it hard to stay upright as he tumbled to the right. He pushed himself quickly to his feet, almost falling over as he did so, and was about to launch a blast of combined light and darkness at the Archdemon Rakdos before before hesitating, remembering what had happened last time he did so.

The Lord of Riots spread his massive arms wide, as it baiting Caiellis into attacking him so that he could make the boy's manifestation of mana treacherous once again, turning the emotions within it to rage and making the magical energy lust for violence and the blood of its conjurer. He waited like that for a few seconds as the boy glared at him like a kicked puppy, pulling on the magical tether connecting him to his discarded Sword of Glass and yanking the blade back into his grip, holding it tight like the ancient weapon would be able to protect him from a being that powerful. Cai tried to feel the reverence that came from seeing the glorious deeds of his ancestors within the blade, trying to think of what Queen Arie, who had wielded the weapon last in warding off a large siege from the forces of the abyss, would do, but he couldn't. He knew that she would fight until her dying breath, as was her duty as a Lucerna to the Lucaelian people, but she hadn't fought against Rakdos … she had never known …

"What is wrong, little Caiellis? Are you scared? I'm wide open for your attacks. Aren't you going to banish me so that you can become a hero and save your precious Lucaelian force from my wrath? Well?!" Rakdos growled at him, his voice seeping with the desire to do violence and break the will of this Lucerna child, the first Lucerna that he had the opportunity to fight in too many years and the first ever child of the hated family that he had ever fought. The Archdemon thought that it was incredibly stupid that the two Lucerna children, the precious heirs to the throne of the Kingdom of Light currently held by a man who he would easily be able to finish off once he had broken Caiellis, had been taken into this city to fight – at least one of them should have been kept within the "safe" Lucael, but now the hated Lucerna family which had thwarted the advances of the demons and beings of darkness like Rakdos's Archdemonic "brothers" for over a thousand years could be eliminated in one fell swoop.

The Defiler thought that it was deliciously ironic that he, the newest Archdemon who was resented by the others of that rank because of the fact that he was not one of the original seven and had killed Malfegor, would wipe out the Lucerna family that his brothers had spent millennia trying to kill and claim for their own. Well, apart from the traitor one who was taken by one of the Lord of Riots's siblings, but he was already a pawn of the darkness and would allow them to finally destroy the hated Kingdom of Light established by the angels in the mortal realm. Had he been capable of feeling empathy or sympathy in any form, Rakdos might have felt sorry for Caiellis, who was clearly a boy not big enough nor old enough to be fighting against him, and he should have been kept within the kingdom in the event of the two other Lucernas being killed.

But now Caiellis was at his mercy, and he was going to fully enjoy this experience. The fact that his victim was a child bothered him not one bit; he was a demon, and almost all humans were the same to him irrespective of their age – the only thing that distinguished them to him was their differing power levels, and the boy stood shakily and trembling on the other side of the courtyard to him was powerful indeed. He might have had cause for concern had Caiellis been an adult and been able to access the full power of light and darkness Orzhova provided, but since he was not he was the perfect target. He was so close to breaking the Lucerna spirit of the child it sent shivers of feverish excitement through his demonic spine.

Caiellis took an involuntary step back at the words which pealed through the air towards him, hurting his ears and sending ringing pains through his head again, and blinked back more tears. He needed to be able to see clearly, something which was almost impossible with the Rain of Gore splattering into his eyes every few seconds after the bloody droplets dripped down from his hair, and even harder when he was crying because of the pain and despair, which meant that he had to stop it. Rakdos clicked his fingers, and the air around Cai ignited into roaring flames that the boy managed to ward off with a shield of pure light, something that he made sure had no resemblance to glass whatsoever and something that he could pull back inside of him the second he saw any motion from the demon that would suggest him taking control of it.

He stumbled and almost fell over forwards when his back bashed against something solid, and he directed a quick glance over his shoulder to see one of the massive spires at the edge of this battlefield looming over him, and knew that there was no further he could get away from the Lord of Riots. Rakdos smiled maliciously at him, taking a massive step forward that had the ground shuddering and booming as he did so, and a sudden surge of fear rushed through the boy as he realised that he was cornered. However, before he could do anything to rectify that situation, the Defiler had already raised his hands and several smoking fireballs began to launch themselves at him from all angles, making sure that he had to defend in a stationary manner instead of running to one side and escaping from his predicament.

Caiellis let golden mana wrap in coils of radiance around the blade of his Sword of Glass as it lit up with holy light, channelling the mana through the relic weapon in the hope that that would stop it from being corrupted, keeping it close to him and his ideals so that there was less of a chance of it turning on him as he absorbed some of the first few orbs of hellfire that impacted onto the shield around him. Cai was wary for any extra attack, feeling his body beginning to give out on him because of the strain of all of this fighting, and as he was driven back into the spire by a storm of burning magic the boy kept flicking his eyes up to the approaching Lord of Riots – the demon was too large to fit where he was now, but that wouldn't stop him from killing Cai or subjecting him to torture too horrible to imagine or think of if he was allowed to get close.

He crossed his arms over his face, holding the Sword of Glass in his right as his protective White mana reinforced by only a tiny bit of Black magic defended him from the endless attack of fiery missiles that combusted into existence and instantly arced through the tainted air towards him. The shuddering impacts of them upon his shield were shaking his entire body, and he knew that it wouldn't be long until they broke it open and started to burn him alive, something he would rather like to avoid. There was nothing he could do right now, however, and he had to grit his teeth and bear it as the inferno washed against his shielding mana, the mere act of using his magic sending shuddering pain through his hollow and exhausted form.

The Lord of Riots took another step forwards, the increasing proximity of the Archdemon sending shivers of sheer terror up and down Caiellis's spine as he focussed on blocking the fireballs. He gathered up White and Black mana within him, dragging up all of his reserves of mana that were left for the next few spells, and deactivated his shield, swinging his sword in a wide arc. From the crystal blade of the weapon, a wave of shining darklight phosphoresced out of it, the dark illumination destroying the mana essence of the balls of flame rushing towards him, and he instantly pulled Black mana into his free hand, focussing his hatred of the demon into it.

He blasted a bolt of pure darkness at the creature out of that hatred. Rakdos didn't even bother to bat the Black mana away with his hand or corrupt its intent to kill him, simply let the magic of the shadows smash into his face. Caiellis increased the intensity of it, golden coils of holy radiance wrapping around the beam of darkness and hatred that should have been ripping apart the demon's essence but was doing nothing to it. The light did not solve that, and the boy almost took a step back before being painfully reminded by a jab of hurt as the bruising on his back from being scraped along the floor and pressed into a wall flaring into life that he was still next to the massive and thick spire of curling brimstone behind him and that there was nowhere he could go.

The Archdemon was looming above him, and Cai, with a snarl of annoyance and hatred that came out more like another whimper of pain and anguish, redirected his mana to the tip of his sword. If Black mana augmented by White didn't work against the Lord of Riots when they were this close, then he would switch it round and use White mana enhanced by the murderous effects of Black. A shining beam of incandescence shot out of his Sword of Glass, impacting into the burning eye of the demon that Caiellis had aimed it at, but instead of doing any damage the demon simply kept moving forwards and the flaming orb glinted as it stared down at Caiellis with a predatory hunger.

The boy tore his gaze away when he felt his eyes being pulled with a dark compulsion to stare into the eyes of the Archdemon and become forever lost within the maddening temptation within, flicking his free left hand as his slender fingers drew sigils into the air around it. A scattering detonation of darklight exploded up and down the demon's bare chest, the unnaturally huge muscles of the demon unaffected by the magic that Caiellis was flinging at it. The boy began to become frantic, sending bolt after beam after slice of combined White and Black mana that was fuelled by his desperation at the Lord of Riots, each of the magical attacks enough to reave the soul from a human being and annihilate it essence, but each one did not even hinder Rakdos in any way as he strode towards Cai, the Archdemon's booming footfalls like the pounding of an ancient religion's beliefs of a funeral god that beat a drum whenever one was about to die.

He pressed himself further back into the spire, not caring that it hurt his back as he launched attack after attack after attack at the Lord of Riots, each one not hurting the demon or even tearing apart its unholy flesh as it got closer to him, unnatural dread mixing with the perfectly natural terror that Cai felt in horrifying blend of fear that had the boy shivering insensately.

"Get back! Go away! Leave me alone! Stop! Get away from me! Get back! Get back!" Caiellis shouted and yelled at it, barely away that he was actually saying the words as he desperately flung mana around him, radiant explosions of purifying White mana alternating with ebony detonations of desolating Black mana that the Lord of Riots merely waded through, laughing at the pitiful resistance of the youngest Lucerna all the while. Caiellis would have dropped his sword if not for the white-knuckled grip that he had on it because of the fact that he was trembling and shaking in the proximity of the demon so much, wanting to act courageous and face his foe head on so that his last few moments could be worthy of the heroic Lucerna family which he wasn't truly a part of but unable to muster up that sort of death-defying bravery at the moment.

No, it wasn't death that scared him – death didn't bother him at all, especially not now, not now that he knew the true reason for his dad hating him and had realised the reality that every single person he had ever loved had been put in danger because of him, but thought of spending an eternity of torture in the Lord of Riots's personal hell chilled him to the core. He knew that he deserved the perpetual pain for what he had done and what he had failed to save or help – angels, his mother had died because of his weakness and his older brother who was so selfless and had always risked his life for Cai's sake had almost followed suite, and while he and Alex hadn't talked about the night which had almost killed the seventeen year old the thirteen year old was sure that his brother had been forced to submit because Aksua was hurting the younger of the two when he was trapped within her horror's dream realm – but he was just so damn scared and he wanted nothing more than to have peace and escape from all the pain and sadness, not be thrust into an endless world of it.

"And what are you going to do to force me to do these things? You have already done everything that you are capable of! You cannot harm me!" the demon roared, almost deafening the poor child below it who was trying to look as small as possible as if that would save him from the Lord of Riots who could smell his fear as well as his delectable soul. Any other demon or taunting servant of them might have told him to submit, told him to give in, but Rakdos was not any other servant of Black mana and enjoyed violence in all of its forms – and he enjoyed proving to others who was stronger and oppressing the weak, and to that end he didn't try to stop Cai resisting him; he liked the feeling of the boy's pathetic and desperate magic pattering harmlessly off of him just as he would enjoy the feeling of snapping his weak bones and breaking his soul.

He pressed his back against the wall of obsidian behind him that stretched up above him as the demon leaned closer, grazing his back against the pulsating rock and burning himself on the tainted sigils that sprung up with the contact, but all he could think of was putting as much distance as possible between himself and the Archdemon that was closing in on him. He could feel the sensation of warm tears streaking and streaming down his cheeks, and while for now he was out of the perpetual torrent of blood from the sky as the spire behind him was blocking it out he could still feel the cuts on his cheek inflicted by the most recent avatar of discord bleeding heavily as his crimson vitae pooled on his cheeks and spilled out.

The Lord of Riots reached towards him with a massive hand, blocking out everything else in his vision as it grasped in the direction of the boy, and Cai cowered even further down, huddling his skinny and small body further against the painful rock of hell as he resisted the temptation to shut his eyes, holding the handle of his sword with such a desperate and tight grip that would have easily broken bones if he had been as strong as his brother or father. The gigantic hand of the demon reached down towards him, and as it got close to him Caiellis charged all of his mana into the Sword of Glass, slashing at the palm of the being in a thunderous detonation of incandescent White magic mixed in with blasts of dark shadows that curled around the light.

The blade of the prince bounced off of the hard skin of the demon, the force of the powerful blow achieving nothing shuddering up Caiellis's wounded form and making him gasp in fear and pain. The Archdemon touched him, wrapping his massive fingers that were thicker than the boy's thighs around his slender form as he struck again at it with his relic sword. The second contact was made with Rakdos, pain, instantaneous and blinding and the worst thing that Caiellis had felt so far, exploded throughout the boy's body, psychotic screaming in his mind drowning out his own whimpers as the hand of the demon closed on him. The Defiler yanked him out from his useless hiding place as he thrashed and shuddered in the grip of the demon – it was like being touched by the Sire of Insanity once again, but a thousand times worse and all of the boy's wounds flared, screaming for his attention, into life once again, baying for more pain to be inflicted upon him to join them in their agonising revel across his body.

The Lord of Riots tossed the boy like a discarded rag doll across the courtyard, and Caiellis's head span as he was launched through the air for the umpteenth time in this battle, but the sensation of flying through the tainted courtyard and crashing to a tumbling and scraping halt on the ground was nothing compared to the utter torment that the Defiler's touch had induced within him, the shrieking chorus of a thousand dying worlds that were consumed by the unholy pyres of their own lust and overindulgence mixing with the demon's laughter that echoed throughout Cai's head, smashing apart any chance of having coherent thoughts as he spasmed for a second on the ground in unadulterated agony at having a being of that power touch him.

Orzhova's words rose unbidden to him as he tried to get control of his unmanageable shuddering and trembling, her dire warning flashing within his mind within the whirling tempest of pain and screaming: "You running in behind me is exactly what the Defiler wants you to do, and if he touches you then you die, simple as that." He wasn't dead yet, though Cai wasn't exactly certain of that fact because he knew that if he did die before the Archdemon was banished then he would be subjected to this pain forever and wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the agony within reality and the agony of the tortuous afterlife that Rakdos had planned for him.

Shaking, Caiellis pathetically pulled the ineffectual Sword of Glass that he had inadvertently dropped as he had had every single sense in his mind converted to be focussing solely upon his pain, indescribably glad that he had had the intelligence to create this tether after almost losing the blade before Tristram had found it and taken it with him because of the fact that he had proven numerous time that he was too weak to keep a hold on the blade within battle.

Not that it would do anything to the demon that seemed to be immune to all of his magic (although the fact that he had stopped the Twilight Reprisal by using his own foul magic suggested that it would have done damage to it had the Lord of Riots simply allowed it to crash into him, and Caiellis would see that if he could think properly through the pain and the terror chilling his limbs despite the immense heat), but he felt more comfortable with a sword in his hands, felt like he had some form of defence if he was holding a weapon and a way to protect himself for the forces of the darkness that hunted him down. He had been made like that by the civil war when he and Alexander had been relentlessly tracked down and attacked by all forms of creatures, and although at first Cai had been too weak to use any form of useful offensive magic even at four years old he had felt safer with a knife to clutch upon so that he could beat back the nightmare creatures that descended upon him.

Hissing in the pain that periodically rushed up and down his entire body, the smallest Lucerna rolled and pulled himself back to his feet, trying to stop the worst images that he had seen so far – and that was saying something with the amount of vile visualisations he had been subjected to over the course of this battle – blared into his mind and danced behind his eyes, screaming out within his head along with all of the panic and terror that he was drowning within. He pulled his bloody and wounded form to his feet, rapidly blinking back tears of pain and stifling whimpers all the while as he flicked his blurred gaze towards the Lord of Riots that was already stepping slowly towards him, gazing down at his prey like one might gaze down at a fly before squashing it, or in this case subject it to the most painful mental and physical tortures known to the world.

He dragged up all of the mana from inside of him up to the surface, feeling the familiar grip upon his magic slackening and becoming harder and harder to obtain as his magical reserves started to run out – and as White and Black mana seemed to be based upon emotions and thoughts (like all mana, but more than some others) the fact that he had neither good enough to repel the Lord of Riots meant that his magic was weaker. The Defiler stepped towards him again as he kept his form low down enough that ringing pains weren't sent through his head.

Stop! Leave me alone! Someone help me!

His heart was palpitating faster and faster like some sort of insane drummer was playing his instrument at an extremely fast rate within his ribcage, the urge to scream returning at full force as the demon's hand descended towards him again. He summoned up a powerful shield, feeling the burn inside of him of wanting and trying to use mana that he just didn't have any more, and as he tried to run backwards the massive hand of the Lord of Riots wrapped around his shield.

Instantly, it started to break, a horrible cracking and shattering sound like the breaking of a thousand cathedral windows in unison by the anarchistic revels of the ones who would follow Rakdos, and the boy gasped in more pain as he felt his mana dying as the Lord of Riots squeezed.

His vision was filled by the massive hand of the Archdemon, and as he curled up, whimpering within his orb of glassy mana that surrounded him, large and incandescent fractures began to appear on his protection, as the gigantic fingers of the Defiler closed harder around it, cracking the shield as he squeezed. Cai cried, terrified of what would happen if Rakdos decided to pick him up again and chose not to throw him away like some sort of toy that was no longer wanted. His slender palms were open and pushing away at his shield, like his pathetic resistance would be able to do anything against the might of the Archdemon bearing down on him, and golden mana flowed from his small hands into the shield as it cracked and splintered into shards of crystalline luminescence that glittered as they faded into nothingness and took parts of the youngest Lucerna's protection with them.

"Please!" he yelped, his voice laced with desperation as his shield began to truly break, and the Lord of Riots boomed with the thunderous laugher of a dark and malicious god who revelled in the suffering of humanity, blood welling up within his hands and running down his palms as the scrapes and gashes upon the skin opened up with even greater force because of the mana that he was pulsing through them, spikes of pain stabbing into the hands as he shut his eyes. The shield finally cracked with a screeching break of mana, but instead of being crushed into a pulp by the Lord of Riots's massive hand that could break Caiellis's fragile body with a single finger, or being picked up by the demon and dangled in front of its rows of sharp teeth, the boy didn't feel anything but the malicious aura of the demon immensely close.

He risked opening his eyes for a second, his hand on the Sword of Glass holding the hilt of the blade tight as the other one's nails dug into his already bleeding skin he was squeezing his left hand into such a tight fist, and saw the crimson flesh of the demon still around him, wrapping almost fully around his body but not touching him yet. He could feel the heat and the malevolent mana seeping from the skin of the Defiler, and let out a muted whimper at it, knowing that it could crush him to a pulp whenever Rakdos chose and there was nothing that he could do about it at all.

Dark magic, swirling sigils that pulsed with a malevolent red the colour of freshly spilt blood ripped themselves into existence from the demon's palm, spinning around Cai like smoky tendrils as the boy instinctively tried to pull away. The demon's hand was suddenly removed, and the youngster gave an involuntary gasp of relief at the proximity of the demon decreasing, breathing out the gasping breath which he hadn't realised he had been holding in.

"Pathetic," the Lord of Riots growled at him, although within the disgust at human frailty and fear within the snarl there was a dark and sadistic amusement present at watching Caiellis writhe in torment and whimper at the utter mercy of the merciless demon. The boy could feel the demonic and occult magic from the lowest hells of the underworld within the abyss saturating the air around him and making it immensely hard to breathe now that the golden respirator of light which Orzhova had gifted him with which had been purifying the air that he breathed in had gone, and was about to try and raise another shield of mana to push them away before crimson orbs of power appeared all around him, the sigils of darkness and destruction coalescing into spheres of Black and Red mana that surrounded the youngster.

Cai didn't even have enough time to brace himself before they began to attack him, crimson lighting crackling within some as it was blasted into him, electrifying his young form in arcs of pain that had him instantly screaming in the agony rushing throughout him. Some others pulsed black, and the boy was assaulted by thousands of needles of venomous and malicious mana that stabbed into his nerves as the lighting coruscated through him, and others set him alight and burnt him with evil hellfire that seared his pale skin raw.

"AAAAAH!" Caiellis howled in the pain surrounding him, grasping a hold of the tiny piece of mana that he had left and desperately flinging it out of him, the White and Black mana combined instantly consumed and obliterated by the malignant power of the Archdemon as pure and unadulterated agony in all of its physical forms coursed through Caiellis. He couldn't breathe, he couldn't think, he could only scream.

Make it stop! Make it stop! MAKE IT STOP!

This was by far the worst pain that he had gone through so far, and it was only getting worse, every single one of Caiellis's sensed assaulted by a variety of agonising stimuli in a riotous carnival of torment which would have had him begging for mercy if he could make any other sound than the choked screams of anguish and agony that he was releasing which he couldn't hear over the pounding in his skull – but he could hear them, his shrieks of pain warped and distorted until they were shrill howls that sliced into Caiellis's eardrums, or even corrupted even more and made into hedonistic and orgiastic wails of dark rapture and ecstasy within the pain.

He was being burnt, electrocuted, sliced, cut, smashed, crushed, strangled, stabbed, had all of his bones broken, was being subjected to the most horrifying and hedonistic screams that cut straight into his mind and made him want to scream as well, though not in pleasure. He was being hacked apart by cleavers dipped in toxins that heightened every sensation to their optimum feeling, ripped apart by the knives of the most foul inhuman pain artisans, throw into walls of spikes and squeezed to death by the massive hand of the Lord of Riots as his bones were ground to dust and his internal organs smashed to a pulp; he was subjected to the most vile and unnatural narcotics and drugs that drove talons of fire and darkness into his brain; he was flayed alive as layer after layer of skin and muscle was removed by slicing blades and knives; he was being eaten alive by the human and demonic revellers of the darkest festivals of self-indulgence and had all of their tortures inflicted upon him.

And there was more than that, the orbs of agony and crimson causing him pain that he had never even though existed before now and did not bear speaking about, exposing to torments that he had never considered before in his life despite knowing that they existed, and others that he had dismissed at being inconsequential sources of pain that had been amplified to the direst and most agonising levels. There were things that he felt happening to him that he didn't even know what they were, things of a psychopath's mind drenched in insanity and given the unholy power of a false god that words would simply fail to describe, agony so painful that nothing would ever describe it pulsing throughout the thirteen year old boy.

STOP! SOMEONE HELP ME! PLEASE! PLEASE, MAKE IT STOP!

He wanted his brother. He wanted Uncle Tristram and Uncle Tybalt. He wanted his father, the father that he remembered and the father that would protect his youngest son from this. He couldn't care less how childish or pathetic that want was, that a Lucerna should have been able to endure on their own and rise above the base desire for the help of family or loved ones. He wanted them. He didn't want to die like this – and more than that, he didn't want to have to be within this forever, the pain increasing every single second even though he was sure that nothing could be as painful as this.

It was strange; in other parts of Cai's life and something he was certain would happen and had happened to others, when the pain reached a certain point, a level of agony that could not be surpassed and consumed everything, the body simply shut down its senses and could not take any more. However, with this, there was no respite, no halt in the pain, and it kept getting higher and higher and higher with no limitations upon it.

He couldn't see anything past the malicious crimson glow that filled his sight, he couldn't hear anything over the screaming of millions of souls subjected to the same level of torment as him for all eternity after their deaths, he couldn't smell anything because of the nauseating scent of burnt flesh combined with the horrible aroma of freshly hacked apart meat and the odour of oceans of blood spilling out from the slaughterhouses of hell. He couldn't taste anything other than the coppery tang of crimson blood within his mouth and the sickly sweet taste of taint and corruption with it, and he couldn't feel anything other than the unrelenting pain that consumed everything and refused to give him any breaks.

Sometimes it seemed like it would stop, decreasing in intensity to the point where primal hope flared up within the prince's mind that it would finally cease, before returning with an even greater intensity. Through it all, the youngest Lucerna could hear the tempestuous and psychotic laughter of the Lord of Riots and feel its dark caress upon him that caused him physical and magical agony worse than almost all humans on the planet had experienced.

STOP! ANGELS, STOP! END IT! SOMETHING, PLEASE, END IT!

Cai screamed and screamed and screamed in the agony as the crimson orbs of pain surrounded him, shuddering violently as blood poured out from his open mouth, nose, eyes and ears again, spilling down his young form in trickles of scarlet. He felt like he was being sliced open as numerous cuts opened up upon him, all of his wounds reopened and flaring into painful life once again, and lines of darkness drawn by blades of magic ripped through his pale skin, branding him with the occult sigils associated with the Lord of Riots as they were cut onto him by the unholy magic, marring his pure form with their malicious intent as the boy shrieked in agony.

The boy's eyelids fluttered from where they were clamped shut, although blood leaked out of the closed eyes and dripped down his face like crimson tears, and the green orbs of the youngest Lucaelian in Welkas moved rapidly behind the closed lids. Had his eyes been open, they would have been bloodshot and red from the vital liquids pouring out of them and pooling at the bottom of them, and his pupils were dilated to the point that there was barely any green left within the irises, though instead of being only blackness because of the expanded pupils violent red light shone through them.

As the Lucerna prince was marked by the symbols of the Defiler, his agony increased exponentially, his screams of pain becoming raw and choked as he struggled to breathe from the blood welling up in his mouth from his throat and pouring out of it, and he convulsed on the ground as the orbs closed in on him and utterly surrounded him in a cage of unceasing pain.

I have to … keep going … can't stop now … can't stop now … have to … help the Lucaelian force … have to … slay the Defiler … and … atone for … my mistakes …

Have to … save Alex … have to … save people who … protected me …

In spite of all of the pain and terror swirling around within the boy's brain, Caiellis somehow managed to create a sanctuary for himself, an oasis within the endless seas of agony and horror that roiled in his head, reinforced by these gasping thoughts of determination and his adamant will to succeed that was the core of his being. He knew that if he held onto that, no pain, no matter how horrible, could overcome him, and even though at the back of his mind he was aware that that wasn't true and that he was already slipping away into an abyss of torment and already begging for mercy, he grasped with all of his force with the few almost coherent thoughts within his agonised and abused young mind.

He didn't know how he managed it, how he kept going within the endless agony of the dark magic cast onto him by the Lord of Riots that put him through every type of physical and magical pain that he had ever experienced and far more besides that. His entire personality and mind was being lost within the agony, but he still managed to keep a hold upon his ideals, these last few thoughts, a sliver at the core of his being that the pain could not degrade as it washed away everything else with its torture, the fateful combination of terror and pain preventing him from acting or even thinking as it consumed everything but that last fragment of determination which he protected with all of the mental might that he could muster.

Then, the agony suddenly stopped, though instead of instantly pulling away and leaving him bereft of the torment it faded to the point where he could regain consciousness and awareness of his surroundings, and with that the little determination which he had mustered up because it was the only thing that he could hold onto within his chaotic mind filled to the brim with endless pain was swallowed up by him being given access to the rest of his brain again, hopelessness and helplessness flooding through it and washing the sliver of resolution away under its tides of despair.

Cai coughed violently as the convulsion wracked his painfully thin body when he tried to breathe in, the blood flowing back into his mouth as he was laid backwards with the back of his head on the ground and clogging up his windpipe until he pushed his head and throat vertically and allowed it to run down, his body still hurt like hell – but this pain was much more specific than the combined sensations of ultimate agony from before, shuddering up and down his slender and small form, and despite the fact that objectively the agony that he had been suffering through earlier had been worse subjectively this was because he could actually feel the pain again instead of having his mind and senses overloaded by the amount that there was – it was like what he had thought about earlier, where one's body would shut off its sensory capabilities and shut down when the torment became too much, but not the same as that as he had been able to still feel all of the pain.

It was just that there had been that much of it that it became everything that he could feel, subsuming all of his other senses underneath the tidal waves of excruciation, but now that he could feel himself as well as the pain the fact that there was a hope to escape from it but it was forever too far away made it first. Now that he could feel himself, remember who he was and what he had to do, the pain was worse because even though he had a brief respite from it now he knew that it was only going to get worse, especially when Rakdos primed his next assault that Caiellis would be able to do nothing about.

The boy was assaulted by a hollow sensation and the pit of his stomach and within his mind, like he was immensely hungry and thirsty all at once but physical sustenance could not fill him, and as he tried to pull up some mana so that he could mount even a pitiful and useless defence against the demon he found that there was absolutely nothing left. There wasn't even a single droplet of magical energy remaining within his Lucerna mana pool, and in spite of the reality that his magic had been achieving nothing and not harming the Archdemon in the first place the realisation that he had nothing left, nothing at all, made even more terror flood through Caiellis.

He had always known, even when he was only four or five years old participating in some mild sparring sessions with his older brother despite his age, that he had an over reliance upon his magic because of the fact that his physicality was so worthless, but no matter how hard he had tried to train and get stronger nothing had happened, even now when he had supposedly hit puberty and was supposed to start growing taller and eventually filling out (although Caiellis was aware from the experience of watching others and, to a lesser extent, himself since he had grown in the past few months but the fact that he was still way too small and his gain of height was nothing compared to his already much taller brother's meant that it was almost unnoticeable, that usually adolescents became much thinner when they got taller, and Cai wasn't sure how that was going to work with him when he was already as thin as a twig – not that he would ever reach that time), and he had been physically weak for as long as he could remember.

However, his magic had always been strong, and because he could use that to make up for his deficiency in strength and resilience he had developed a kind of dependency upon it, something which had been highlighted and brought into light when he had been kidnapped by the Master of Violence Arendus Draal and reduced to utter uselessness by the shackles upon his mana that had been placed upon him. Now that he had no magical ability left, now that his entire mana pool had been exhausted in this ruthless and agonising and emotional battle which had seen him brush against the door of death several times, he felt even more hopeless than before.

The chance of him damaging the Archdemon, something which had been minuscule even when he had access to all of his mana, his guardian First Sisterhood angel Orzhova had been by his side and he was casting his most powerful spells, dissolved into nothingness. He had never even been able to win against his older brother when they were both being serious in their sparring matches (or rarely their full blown fights which had progressed from angry arguments into violence between the brothers, something which had always ended badly for Cai), so how was he supposed to defeat the Lord of Riots with no mana left to call upon?

"Are you ready to surrender yet, little Lucerna child?! Are you ready to embrace the Festival of Bloodshed as your destiny?!" Rakdos demanded of him, the Archdemon still incredibly close as the boy took this chance to begin to crawl backwards away from him, not caring that pain exploded through him at the motions and he tore the bare flesh of his back (as the shirt had been utterly shredded by all of the falling and scraping he had done, the shreds of fabric stuck painfully to his open wounds and gashes) to tatters as he dragged himself backwards over sharp shards of rock and rubble.

Half of him wanted to turn around and scramble fully across the ground away from the Archdemon, but the other part of him would not countenance turning away from the demon because of what it might do to him when he did so and the fact that he wouldn't be able to see it (no matter that he could do nothing to stop its actions anyway), so he continued to slowly and painfully drag himself backwards over the abused ground as he sent terrified flicks of his eyes up to the demon's monstrous visage, though he knew to avoid its baleful eyes that were fixed upon him.

He was aware that he would never be able to escape, but that didn't stop the part of him that he tried to keep locked away as much as possible, the part of him that was still a young, innocent and scared child ripped away from anyone that would protect him and plunged into war and violence that he couldn't help with at all, from trying to get away from the Archdemon so that it couldn't do anything more to him. As he escaped, he panted for breath with each of the movements that sent waves of exhaustion and pain rippling throughout him, and as he raised one of his hands that had been pushed behind him to hold his back off of the ground something out of the corner of his eye caught him.

He raised his palm, bloody and red from the numerous gashes and lacerations upon the small and delicate hand that was not suitable for a Lucerna at all, and stared at it in horror when he saw the malicious lines of some sort of symbol carved upon it, pulsing black and crimson in alternating emissions of demonic light. He could feel agony whenever the thing that looked like a scar cut into him but didn't bleed pulsated with its malevolent glow, and a kind of sick and morbid curiosity mixed with utter horror at being defiled by the Archdemon came over him as he saw that the horrible pattern that hurt his eyes merely by looking it and summoned up images and thoughts of madness behind them as he flicked it over them tracing down his hand and onto his wrist.

Despite the fact that his lightly armoured jacket had been all but utterly obliterated, he still wore the last remaining sleeve of it upon his right arm which he was now looking at, the watch upon it which had been given to him by the father that hated them when he had asked for it back in Lucael destroyed beyond repair by the violence of the battle (although, strangely enough, the bent and burnt hands upon the timekeeping device read 08:17, which wasn't right at all since the attack had started after that point – and in retrospect he probably should have thought that it would have been destroyed in the bloodiest battle of his life and not strapped it on automatically as he got dressed (Alex going back to his own tent once the two had woken up and had a terse conversation in the morning which had aptly exemplified their worry and tenseness)) before he ripped it off and pulled at the sleeve which was stuck to his skin by the blood which had soaked through it from the endless Rain of Gore coming from the unholy storm above.

His mouth opened in shock and fear as he could see the symbols extending up his now bare arm to the sleeve of his shirt and underneath that, somehow marked onto his skin by the unnatural power of the demon. There were sigils of darkness, hedonism, violence and indulgent destruction, seven pointed stars mixing with jagged and warped symbols that distorted as the boy gazed at them in horror, writhing under his gaze like moving needles in his skin as he began to breathe faster. Somehow he hadn't considered this, assuming at the back of his mind that the fact that he was a Lucerna prince, a descendant of Matalis Ortus Lucerna with his own First Sisterhood angel to use, that he would be immune to the corruption of the Archdemon, but it seemed like without Orzhova to protect and purify him the Lord of Riots was free to leave its mark upon him, staining his body and hopefully not tainting his eternal soul – as when Cai obtained his freedom from his pain he wanted to be able to have peace.

"Wha … What have you done to me?" the boy asked, barely able to breathe out the words in horror past his hyperventilating, and although his voice was quiet and broken from all the shock and pain and screaming that he had gone through the post human auditory senses of the Archdemon still heard it. Rakdos smiled down at him, full of a predatory need to break him and subject him to eternal pain as well as a kind of dark benevolence, replying with sadistic amusement, "I merely imparted my blessings upon you, little Caiellis, now that your angel isn't here to stop me any more, in preparation for your departure from this world. Now there is no chance of you escaping from me, or other intervening and saving you from your fate. Why do you look so horrified, young Lucerna? In the same way that your beloved First Sisterhood angels mutated their Summoner's flesh and mark them with their sigils, so too do Archdemons like to brand those who are of a special significance to them. You should be embracing this gift with rapturous applause, not terror!"

The Archdemon stamped its foot, and Caiellis was sent tumbling as a shockwave of geomantic force rushed through him from the thunderous impact of the weight of Rakdos, sprawling across the jagged ground again as all of his wounds drained more and more of his energy in trying to get back up. He couldn't escape the fact that his body was sullied, corrupted, and he could barely tear away his gaze from looking down his front and seeing the dark branding of the Lord of Riots tracing lines of malice and spite up and down his pale body which was already covered in numerous painful wounds, the pattern going over some of his larger gashes and pulsing underneath it like it was within his flesh and not just on the surface, and the boy couldn't stop himself from brushing his finger on them. There was no physical feeling from it, no lines or breakages in the skin that he was touching, which showed that, as opposed to what it looked like, it wasn't a scar, but when he touched them he could feel the sensation of prickling corruption and stabs of sadistic pain into his fingertips.

It was like the sensation of touching a Lucerna birthmark – physically, it felt the same as simply touching normal skin, and to theoretical humans with absolutely no mana whatsoever that didn't actually exist it would feel no different to making contact with anywhere else on the person's body, but magically the birthmarks thrummed with the divine power of the angel which had given the descendant of the First King their blessing. However, instead of the feeling of impressive awe mixed with a tinge of haunting melancholy that the boy had become used to from his Black Sun on his right cheek, or more rarely the sensation of righteous zeal and encouragement that he had felt whenever he had touched Alexander's Swords of Flame on his right bicep, the massive non-pattern of sadism and depraved barbarity etched upon him caused him pain in his sixth sense to touch and heightened the maddening pounding within his skull.

Caiellis had to stop his churning stomach from distracting him too much, pushing the bile that rose up within him from the revolting stain of the Archdemon of hedonism upon him which had threatened to burst out of his mouth, holding one of his hands over it as he was certain that he was going to throw up (and it showed how much self control the thirteen year old had that he did not give himself credit for that he hadn't vomited his guts up yet) as he touched the other to his gaunt left cheek, trying not to image his reflection tarnished and debased by the spiralling yet jagged and sharp patterns that were on his face as well, wondering if he was permanently corrupted by this or whether it would disappear when the demon was banished from this plane of existence.

"No matter. I hardly expected you, an accursed Lucerna, to be grateful for my gifts," the demon snarled as Cai began to start crawling back away from it again. Rakdos suddenly threw his flaming scythe, the boy letting out a cry of panic as the flaming blade of the screaming weapon arched through the air towards him, but instead of consuming Caiellis within the hellfire blade it smashed into the ground behind him, sending jagged sprays of obsidian debris into the air and utterly blocking off his path of escape. The boy knew that he was stuck, and after sending a frightened glance over to the scythe behind him he looked fearfully back at the demon that towered over him again.

Rakdos raised its massive left hand, an orb of bloody empyreal matter appearing within it out of raw Black and Red mana, and the youngest Lucerna couldn't help but let out an utterly pathetic whimper as several chains of fleshy metal ripped themselves out of the fabric of reality and wrapped around him, constricting round his thin body like the shadows of his own corrupted mana had before and burning into his skin in the exact same places, though this time it felt like savage spikes were being driven into him as well. He tried to move his arms despite the chains holding them to the ground, though the ropes that looked suspiciously like the bloody intestines of some sort of being that was much larger than a human but combined with bloodthirst brass metal allowed him a relatively reasonable range of motion, like he was shackled to a point out of this world and unable to move too far from it but not held utterly immobile like the last time as the Defiler, mimicking its avatar of discord set upon the youngest Lucerna earlier, strode menacingly towards him.

Cai knew that he should be thinking rationally about this, that he should try to remove the bonds on his arms and legs before this one, but he couldn't stop himself from grabbing onto the fleshy tendril once again encircling his bruised throat and trying to pull it off of him. It wasn't squeezing hard, but the boy still had a primal fear of it and that meant that it would have to be that one first, and even though the chains stabbing into his arms restricted his movements he was able to grab onto the thick tendril round his neck, pulling at it desperately but not making it move at all as he struggled, kicking his legs against the ground as he tried to move them as well.

The whole brand of the Archdemon was blazing with agony at the touch of its unholy magic, and the simultaneously unreal yet corporeal spikes stabbing into the boy from the chains wrapped around his arms, legs, throat and lower chest (proving that the spikes didn't actually exist otherwise they would have been ramming into his neck and ribs and lungs when they weren't) caused him huge amounts of pain as he thrashed ineffectually. He was trapped, and while the last time he had managed to escape by blasting his mana out of himself this time he didn't have any to use in that method of breaking free.

"I must say, for your pathetic size and species you are very resilient to pain, as even though you do scream you do not give up," the Defiler smirked maliciously at the trapped youngster who was still pulling at the chain round his neck as he strained against his bonds with his legs, trying desperately to break free and escape. Rakdos squeezed his talons into the orb of raw and corrupt magic controlling the dark forces restraining Caiellis, and the chains of metal and flesh tightened massively, crushing Caiellis's broken ribs and bruised throat as well as pulling his arms away from trying to free himself and to the ground. He ground out strangled shrieks of agony as he felt spikes of pure torture piercing into his fragile flesh all around him, and his still bloodshot green eyes bulged as the chains simultaneously throttled him and squeezed down on his ribs.

A few of the same spheres of agony inflicting crimson which had forced him to scream until his lungs bled earlier orbited around him and sent pulsations of excruciating pain flooding through his already tortured limbs, and he couldn't even move his thin arms from where they had been dragged to the ground to try and yank at the worst rope of the substance of hell of them all, the one that was making him go through one of the things that he hated most out of anything in the world. His fingers squeezed into fists as he pulled them at the bonds holding them down, his mouth opening wide as he tried to suck even a tiny breath into his lungs.

No! Not again! STOP! STOP IT! PLEASE! I CAN'T KEEP GOING THROUGH THIS! SOMETHING STOP THE PAIN! I CAN'T BREATHE! Please...

The Lord of Riots said something else, but the boy couldn't hear it over the pounding of both blood and panic within his head at being subjected to this once again, and his vision of the creature was blurring every second. While his father had taken time with the murder of him, this chain was not and it had instantly started at the final pressure that Marik had used, and it was as such strangling the boy much faster as his tongue began to swell in his mouth. The pressure eased up, pain abating to a tolerable level like it had done so many times already with the Defiler which would bring him to the brink of dying from the utter agony and then give him a tiny respite before almost killing him again.

He gasped in a lungful of air, the bruises already on his throat (the front of which was bare of the savage desecration scattered up and down him but the back covered by it) joined by new ones which weren't in the shape of fingers and were more like rope burns, like the shadows had done but on his neck instead of just his arms and legs, though the fact that they were like that instead of specifically on his windpipe meant that they would be less effective. Cai wondered how long he could last from being plunged in and out of a sea of pain, but as long as he had that little piece of determination within him to atone for all of his crimes despite all that had been done to him over the course of this violent battle he wouldn't give in; he would endure for as long as he could because that was his duty and he wanted peace, peace which wouldn't come if he died and was claimed by the demon.

"Like I said: you are an excellent toy because pain does more to you than most but you refuse to give into it!" Rakdos laughed, full of demonic humour that almost had Caiellis bursting into psychopathic hysteria as well at the fact that an Archdemon was saying this about him, instead, he reached his hand up to his face – the chains still on him but slackening to the point that they had been at earlier, and the crimson magic of agony still revolving around him but not torturing his abused body – and scrubbing the tears away, resolving to attempting to give the demon as little enjoyment as possible it could from inflicting him pain. He dipped into his mana pool, but there was still nothing there, and could have laughed grimly and bitterly at the fact that Orzhova had told him that she believed he could have defeated Rakdos with what she had been able to give him after he had foolishly wasted all of his magical energy in the Twilight Reprisal.

"Please," he wasn't able to stop himself from pleading, more tears spilling out of his haunted eyes as he tried to pull at the constricting tendril around his neck. His voice was innocent, broken, shaking and raw from all of his screaming as well as all of the bruises and squeezing of his throat from both his father and the dark spells of Rakdos, imploring a being that did not understand nor had ever felt the concept of mercy for that exact same mercy. He sounded every inch his thirteen years, and breathed heavily as his trembling fingers scrabbled at the steely flesh round his neck, even his thin digits unable to get underneath it and push it away, and he was far too weak to pull it off. The Lord of Riots simply grinned with the vile pleasure it had been finding in all of this fight down at him, slightly tightening its hand around the throbbing vortex of pure Black and Red mana within it, and Caiellis stared back up at him pleadingly as the chains began to slowly tighten around him.

"Please..." he begged for a second time, his voice strained by the tightening of the chain and scared at the thought of going through something that never got any better or more bearable the more that he went through it. He was reminded of that time long ago when he had only been seven years old and picked up on this fear which hadn't been that much of a problem for him all of his life (since, unlike something like a phobia of heights – or public speaking, his much more pronounced fear that at least wasn't as bad as it was before he had given the massive speech to the entire army – usually when he was being strangled he was in a situation to be terrified in already, instead of being filled with fear in relatively normal situations) until these past two weeks, when his older brother had been insistent on testing out his new wrestling moves on Caiellis who hadn't been in the mood at all.

Alex had been like that relatively often – enough to make it not a rarity but not enough that he would ever be doing it with the intent to actually hurt Cai or bullying the younger boy with it, and had often been obsessed (in the youngest Lucerna's mind, at any rate) with submission manoeuvres – and who better to practice them on that his little brother? Cai had understood why, of course, even at seven years of age, because his older sibling needed someone weaker than him (or at least someone who wasn't stronger than him) to test the moves on, otherwise they would just break out, and he needed someone who he was comfortable with and who knew he wouldn't be trying to kill him.

The two brothers had gotten into a form of a fight, as Caiellis had been suffering with a headache in the aftermath of the migraine he had had the day before and really wasn't in the mood for his brother to be putting him in some form of painful hold and demonstrating, whether he meant it in an insulting way or not, how much weaker the younger of the two was than him. They had pushed each other around a bit, not yelling at each other because they knew that Tristram and Tybalt were downstairs trying to plan and talking about important things, hissing at one another.

Cai had given his brother a particularly hard shove that had caught Alex off balance, making him painfully jab his elbow into a wooden cabinet. The seven year old had been forced to stifle giggles at the expression that his brother had pulled and the yelp of pain that he had made, and that had annoyed his older sibling even more than he already was. Alexander had told him then and there that he was going to test the move on him whether he liked it or not, and shoved him painfully up against the wall. He had grabbed hold of Caiellis's small neck, even at eleven years old able to almost fully wrap his hand (which had been quite thin at the time thinking about it, but not to Cai since he was so much smaller than his brother – to him the hands of Alex had always been large) around his little brother's throat, and easily lifted him off of his feet.

The younger boy had started panicking instantly, desperately telling his brother that he was really sorry for shoving him and laughing at him as Alex had lifted him further up into the air to the point where Cai had been on the same level as his brother (which might not have been much if they height discrepancy between the siblings hadn't always been so pronounced) and smirking at the way that even with only one hand Cai hadn't been able to pry his brother's fingers off. He had told the youngest member of their party and family that the more Caiellis resisted and the more he pleaded with him to let go the harder he was going to squeeze – which would have been all well and good if the seven year old Caiellis hadn't already not been able to breathe in his brother's strong grip and hadn't already been panicking because he was only seven.

Eventually, it got to the point where the older boy was squeezing so hard that Caiellis had fallen unconscious convinced that his big brother hated him and wanted to kill him, and woken up to a concerned Tybalt and Tristram and a very, very guilty and scared Alex staring down at him. He didn't speak to his brother for a week, and tried to stay away from him as much as possible until Alexander finally managed to corner him and apologised profusely to his little brother. In retrospect, Alexander had probably been intrigued by his own strength and hadn't known the extent of how strong he actually was, wanting to test that out on his brother, never wanting to choke him out or make him really scared of him, and Cai had never really blamed his brother for it since they were both boys and boys were often far too rough – especially boys that happened to be older brothers, even more so with ones that had younger brothers.

But the fear had persisted, one that he had been able to push down when either his brother or very, very rarely Tristram placed him in a choke hold because he knew that they wouldn't hurt him at all (especially since the Guardian only did it to show his students the technique, taking it in turns with Alex and Cai should they ever need to use it and didn't have access to their magic to subdue opponents without hurting them too much).

This reminded him of that, but instead of pleading with an annoyed big brother who didn't know the extent of his own strength he was begging an Archdemon who wanted to put him through the pain and the fear.

"Please..." he gasped out, his voice quiet and small because of the increased pressure, and though the chains didn't increase the amount that they were choking him and restraining his limbs, allowing a very thin trickle of air into his lungs, they were still strangling him and he would go unconscious because of the lack of air and the pressure on his wounds that was sending dizziness and faintness through him.

His eyes locked with those of the Defiler, who cocked his terrifying head to the side and licked his lips at the struggling boy. He snapped his fingers within the orb of mana, and crackling electricity flooded through Caiellis's body from the crimson spheres around him, and as the boy choked out screams of pain he continued, "This is definitely one of your greatest fears, I can feel it. If your father hadn't exposed it to me when he tried to kill you, I might never have known. However, you prove my point once more. Even though you are suffering, and there is nothing you can do to stop it, you still persist and still remain unbroken. That gives me the opportunity to try something else!"

Caiellis pawed at the restraints around his throat – his arms able to reach there because of the fact the chains on them weren't tightening very much – but couldn't even dislodge them slightly, as Rakdos spat something, spiralling contrails of blackness and blood forming from the inhuman words which sent shivers of madness through the boy as he tried to shut his ears off from hearing them. The Archdemon slashed its claws through the air and Cai gasped as a huge rent in reality opened up in front of him. Or at least he would have done if he would have been able to breathe properly, but he paid almost no heed to the strangled wheeze that left his mouth as he gazed in horror at what he saw through the tear in the fabric of the world that had opened up in front of his restrained form.

The image was tinted crimson by the matter of hell that was washing over it, and Caiellis's vision was blurred from the lack of breath and the pain that was rushing through him, but what it showed was unmistakable.

"Alex!" Caiellis shouted, though his voice was raw and full of emotion at seeing his older brother again for the first time after he had taken it upon himself to end this war on his own and left the relative safety of his big brother's side to Voidwalk to the private residence where he was now. More panic, and concern for the person he loved most in the world, surged through him when he saw his beloved older brother being attacked by the Master of Violence Arendus Draal who had been the one that had started this whole war in the first place by violently subduing Caiellis back at the Scholaria Magnus. Alexander was hoisted off of his feet by one hand of the massive Welkalite brute, and Cai let out a whimper of emotional pain and suffering when he saw that the huge man's hand was clamped firmly around the seventeen year old's throat.

"Alexander!" Cai choked out again, straining against the chains that stabbed into him and held him down in an even greater frenzy as more tears began to pour out of his eyes. His big brother looked dead; he wasn't doing anything to stop the Master of Violence choking him to death. Aurelia was across in the large open space outside of the Slaughterhouse Colosseum where the eldest prince and the Welkalite fought, battling frantically against a large demon son of Rakdos who seemed to be far more powerful than a "normal" greater demon if such a thing existed. His feet were dangling numbly off of the ground, and Cai knew that it would require someone with tremendous height and strength to be able to hoist his brother into the air by his throat like that – and Arendus certainly conformed with that, as the youngest prince was sure that the Master of Violence would have easily been able to snap the smallest Lucerna's neck or probably even physical tear his head from his shoulders if he hadn't have been under orders to take him alive so that he could be used as a bargaining tool to take the two princes.

Alexander wasn't moving. Alexander wasn't moving.

Spines of a malicious and hellish origin similar to the chains that choked and held down Cai now were poking out of his back, the boy's own crimson blood dripping from them as they wriggled within him, and Alex's broad chest which easily put Caiellis's to shame that would only get even bigger as he got older wasn't moving up and down with the powerful breaths that his brother usually took. The older boy's eyes were bloodshot and bulging, something that Caiellis would also see if he looked at his own reflection in a mirror, and they were looking off into the distance as if he could see Cai there.

"Let him go! Let him go! Stop killing him!" the youngest Lucerna gasped out, seemingly oblivious to his own predicament now that he could see his sibling, thrashing against his bonds in the desperate need to help his older brother, despite one rational and cold part of his psyche which had somehow survived through all of the pain and anguish informing him that the eldest prince was far away and that the only way he could help was killing the Lord of Riots now.

Alexander was in danger because of him. If he hadn't of left, if he hadn't ran off on his reckless and stupid mission here which he had failed anyway, then his big brother wouldn't be there, dangling in the air with the air choked from his lungs and looking small and fragile like a lots little boy next to the hugely proportioned Master of Violence. It had been stupid, selfish of him to make his brother worry by Voidwalking to Tradax's location instantly, and now instead of Cai paying the price (it didn't register to him that overall he had actually suffered far more pain than his brother had over the course of this battle) it was his brother doing it once again. He knew that Alexander was wounded. He knew that he shouldn't have left the older boy alone, not after only being a week since he had almost died, and now Alexander was going to die because of him.

"Let him go! Let go of my big brother!" he screamed, his own voice coming out as a raw gasp from all of the screaming that he had done which had shredded his vocal chords, and he dug his fingers into the ground, not caring that the shards of obsidian upon it cut into him as he tried to get out of his suddenly tightening bonds, fear for himself and fear for his loved ones rushing through him. That desperation was fuelled by the need to help the one person in his life who had always protected him ever since the moment of his birth, made him feel welcome and wanted, been a friend when he needed one, a shoulder to lean and cry on and an obstacle to attempt to surpass, a mentor when Caiellis required it and someone who would always make an effort to cheer his younger sibling up if he was down. He had saved Caiellis's life numerous times over the courses of their two lives fraught with danger and peril, and the younger boy hadn't even begun to start repaying that favour.

That desire to help his older brother fuelled his desperate strength, and, screaming (or choking out, depending upon how you looked at it) his defiance of the Archdemon all the while and the danger that his brother was in, managed to pull up his right arm and reach towards the rent in the flesh of the world that showed him his brother for just a second. His fingers were stretched towards the image of the older boy dying in the arms of Arendus just like he had been dying in the arms of their father less than an hour of almost unrelenting pain ago, like by touching the picture he could save his older brother, but the chains tightened even more and with a strangled gasp the arm was pulled back down to the ground.

"Alex!" he wheezed out once more, thrashing against his bonds so that he could somehow come to the aid of his dying brother, and the Defiler gazed down at him with a predatory intent, its flaming eyes lit up with ravenous hunger for the broken soul of a Lucerna as his malevolent visage was pulled into a wolfish and exultant grin. "Yes, your beloved big brother is in danger, dying to the Summoner of one of my most powerful sons! And you can do nothing to help him! You cannot stop him from dying, and once he has been killed all alone with no one to help him I will claim his soul and feast upon it for all eternity just like I will with yours!"

Tears of self-loathing and utter terror burned down Cai's cheeks that were already stained with blood from the cuts upon them and the Rain of Gore above, and he couldn't move his hands to wipe them out of his eyes. He choked out more sobs, the chain round his throat squeezing tighter with a malicious strength but leaving him enough air to breathe so that he could scream in pain and whimper for mercy for himself and his loved ones and Rakdos could bask in that.

"Alexander..." he cried, knowing that his father was right – he was worthless, utterly useless and the older boy didn't deserve a pathetic and weak younger brother like him – or, more precisely, he didn't deserve a strong and compassionate big brother like Alexander. He had put him in danger again, just like when they had been abducted, just like when his four year older sibling had thrown himself in front of blows destined for the younger prince all of those times in the past, just like when they had fought Aksua and he had been thrust into a perfect world of dreams and had been too weak to fight his way out when he had known that something was wrong.

And he couldn't do anything to save him. That was the worse part, the final nail in the coffin of spikes that rammed into him and pierced him with barbs of emotional, mental and physical pain for all angles. He couldn't do anything but watch his older brother be choked to death all because of Cai's weakness and stupidity. All of this thrashing, crying and screaming was accomplishing nothing, and Alexander desperately needed his help. If he had slain the Lord of Riots by now, or even better killed Jarred Redhand or even Tradax before the ritual had completed, then his brother wouldn't be in this situation, and that just made Cai hated himself even more for what he had allowed to happen.

"But it is not just your brother that is in danger," the Defiler told him, Rakdos's grin splitting his face as he increased the amount of pain that Cai was suffering from his orbs of crimson torment, controlling all of the factors that were torturing Caiellis like a puppet-master artfully manipulating their dolls to obtain the perfect effect or a chemister from the Yentarian League of Xechun carefully mixing together explosive substances to produce the best product, a subtle touch uncharacteristic of one of the louder but no less insidious Archdemons ensuring that Cai was suffering the maximum amount of pain that his body could take without being utterly consumed by it.

The boy choked and screamed as another rift opened up in front of him, this one coloured with a much darker shade of scarlet to the first. The youngest Lucerna was loathe to tear his eyes away from the image of his older brother, thinking that he should be there to witness all of his sibling's pain and punish himself for it in his attempts to save him, not wanting to look away in case something happened or his brother was killed, but the chain wrapped around his throat had a growth of fleshy matter burst out from it and turn his head so that he was looking at the other one.

Caiellis gasped in shock as he saw his older brother's best friends, the Montlea twins Leodred and Elizabex, with their father Carlis and Uncle Tristram and fighting against an albino woman with murderous and defiant red eyes that wielded a ravenous greater demon which exuded hunger and battled against the Capitalia Lux Guardian's Athela of the Aegis who must have been the new Master of Gluttony considering the fact that somehow Caiellis's oxygen-starved and hurt mind was able to pick out that they were fighting within Banquet Street.

Well, he said fighting, but Elizabex and Tristram were both unconscious and covered in blood. Horrified, Caiellis stared at the downed form of his physical combat mentor and one of the two people in his life who had loved him without being related to him in any way, and he blanched when he saw that the thirty year old who was much more of a father to him than his own dad had his right arm missing, hacked off at the elbow and pulsing with a poison of malicious Black mana. They were both stirring, however, and when he heard a scream of pain the youngest Lucerna looked over to the battle.

Leodred, Cai's big brother's best friend since before the thirteen year old had even been born who the youngest Lucerna found slightly annoying (especially when paired with his brother as the two reckless youths set one another off) but still liked in spite of being extremely shy around him and his sister, was trapped within the splintered rubble of a large and garish market stall, and the lithe woman who moved with the grace of a predator (reminding Cai of Aksua, though while the last vampire had tempered that grace with the aura of her beauty which could lull almost all who looked upon her into complete submission and had walked with a knowledge of the effects of her appearance, this woman did not and was much more like a ruthless huntress than the covetous vampiress) leaping towards him.

"No!" Caiellis shouted as his father friend Carlis charged in front of the blow aimed at his trapped son, the blade plunging through him as he was lifted off of his feet by the strength of it.

"DAD!" Leo howled in anguish as his father died right in front of his eyes, the image of the man impaled by the sharpness of the malicious blade overlayed with that of Caiellis's own mother with the claws of the grinning demon rammed into her stomach, and Cai was filled with horror at the sight of the death of one of the most influential generals in the kingdom, the death of the father of Alexander's best friends (and technically his as well since he did not have any others to call friends) that he had never really ever had the chance to speak to but knew that he was a great father and had struggled to get to grips with his children like Marik had but, unlike the king, had much more of an attempt to do so and had eventually succeeded.

The woman threw the body away from her and turned her fiery and piercing red gaze upon the sobbing Leodred. I could have saved him. If I had just been stronger, faster, smarter, Carlis wouldn't have died, and Leo and Elizabex wouldn't have been left without a father now. The thoughts rose within Caiellis's mind, tinged with significant amounts of self-loathing that prickled his eyes in the tears that fell out of them, electrical crimson conducting and into his writhing body from the orbs of agony that swirled in a mad dance around him, and the Lord of Riots boomed with more tempestuous and atavistic laughter.

More rifts were torn open in front of the boy's face that was streaked with tears and blood both from his wounds and the endless Rain of Gore from the rumbling and screeching sky, and as the youngest Lucerna was choked and electrocuted and burnt as new spheres of fiery agony were summoned up around him he looked upon them, weeping as he did so as the full scale of his utter failure to help anyone became truly apparent for the first time.

He saw his beloved Uncle Tybalt and the silent and dutiful Guardian Lelia battling desperately against a conceited and arrogant youth that the thirteen year old remembered from the Scholaria Magnus peace negotiations that seemed like many months ago instead of less than two weeks, a Master of Passion from one of the depraved Orders (though it had to be Wealth since all other major Orders of Passion had been taken) which had sold their empire and the innocents within it to hedonistic and wicked demons in the name of obtaining more power to rule over those who they exploited who could wield the destructive and selfish combination of Red and Black mana.

Lelia was picked up by a many armed demon formed from the dark desires of all mortals and covetous beings from Sancturia, an archfiend of depravity that was surrounded by pure darkness and sickly corruption, and tossed out of the window of what Caiellis assumed was the top floor of one of the three edifices to greed and wealth, and the boy shouted out as the semi-conscious young woman who was courageous and had rallied her people after the massacre at Gol at the same age that Cai was now was tossed almost casually and certainly sadistically out of the window.

Uncle Tybalt, the Hierarch of Capitalia Lux who had been Caiellis's teacher for as long as he could remember, was one of the few people that the boy could call friend – though he was family to the youngest prince as he had been raised by the man and the much younger Tristram, and had preferred Tybalt at the start because of his greater familiarity with him and then at the ages of six to ten when he had disliked Tristram because of the rigorous exercise and combat regimes that he made them go through. The aged teacher and his youngest student shared many similar interests, and the thirteen year old knew that Uncle Tybalt had shaped the way that he thought about things and approached problems.

The man had taught him almost all that he knew which wasn't simply knowledge of life in general (that had mostly been covered by his brother and his own experience), and he could fondly remember the look of pride on the venerable Hierarch's features as he completed mathematical tasks set for those at least four years older than him – even some which Alexander had struggled with. It had been the look of pride of a teacher, a mentor who was proud when their student excelled, but also of a parent, a man who had tremendous pride in his young charges that were almost like sons to him – and were in everything but name and blood.

Tybalt was nearing the end of his tether in this brutal and tough battle, and Caiellis grimaced and felt sick as he saw the Guardian who was a thousand times the protector of the Lucaelian people that he could ever be being launched out of the window, and he heard Tybalt's cry of shock resounding round inside of his head. But, something that was somehow worse than the sight of Lelia dying right in front of his eyes, was the amount of golden statues in the dark room that he was only just noticing now were not simply decorations. Caiellis suddenly realised that they were soldiers, turned into sculptures of precious metal by the dark magic of the Master of Wealth and his greater demon, and his heart began to beat even faster within his skull as he began to comprehend how many were dying because of his own weakness in failing to slay the Lord of Riots.

They were the Swords of Silence, an elite formation that had survived the massacre of Gol and had been instrumental in obtaining victory over the forces of Johnias, comprised of powerful veterans and expert warriors who were all sworn to silence until the perpetrators of the heinous acts inflicted upon their once beautiful and serene city were brought to justice, and they had been turned to gold and killed like they were mere chaff by the power of the Master of Wealth and his unholy demon of turpitude.

There were more fissures in the thin skin of the physical world torn open in front of him, and the boy choked out what was a mixture between a wail of fear and pain and a cry of emotional agony when he looked upon them, the chains around his throat and limbs tightening around them like the constricting motions of a snake and making it increasingly harder to think or even breathe properly, and although he was being strangled hard it was child's play for the Lord of Riots to give him just enough air to scream and whimper, albeit every sound that came out of him was extremely strained through the pain and anguish and the fact that his throat was raw with howling in agony and the amount that it had been squeezed violently.

He gasped in pain and sadness as he saw the Lucaelian army being decimated in all Quarters of the Welkalite capital. He could see Mysos, his father, Xathan, the Slayer of the Wicked and the Guardian of Cassida Principia, and his two other daughters fighting with their elite regiment within some sort of unholy pleasure den within what must have been the Hedonist's Quarter, a demon that did not seem to be bound to a human Summoner fighting against them with vile magic as it pinned Mysos up against the wall with one hand and blocked his father's desperate attack with the sword blade (which was more like an oversized dagger than anything) in its other, the Guardian's massive broadsword which was similar to Cai's own father's weapon shining with light as his angel dove in at the denizen of the abyss to be swarmed upon by hordes of scantily clad hedonists with psychotic red and black gleams within their unnaturally wide eyes.

The indulgent tormentor squeezed hard, digging its large and sharp talons into Mysos's side and raking rents down his armour as he tore it open, explosions of blood exploding out on each side as the boy and Caiellis's champion tried stoically to hold in his screams of pain for as long as possible before he gave into the urge and started howling in agony. Xathan and his two older children were assaulted by the members of the Order of Rapture, pain artisans blasting them with vivid pink lightning as dancers and performers leapt down from the ceiling alongside carnival devils and other, more grotesque creations.

He saw his four personal Lucerna bodyguards within a long street between the Champion's Quarter and the domain of the Order of Gluttony, and tried to reach out towards them to help them when he saw that Drax and Aymer were possessed by a maddening rage that made them turn on their comrades. Their Summonings had faded, but so had those of Ruthia and Lancalo, and the two who remained sane were covered in wounds from trying to non-violently subdue their comrades, not yet ready to fight back fully against them. The largest of Caiellis's praetorians, quiet and solemn Aymer (who was as large as Arendus Draal) whom he had always seen as a gentle giant despite witnessing several of his brutal exploits in battle as he wielded his massive strength and huge form in the service of the Lucerna family, was screaming loudly as he smashed his fists into one of the buildings forming the walls of the street, Ruthia just managing to dodge out of the way of the momentous punch which would have left her crushed to a pulp.

Lancalo had a long gash down his body which had pierced through his armour, and was breathing extremely heavily because of a smaller but no less horrific hole in his lower abdomen which must have caused excessive internal bleeding. The middle aged bodyguard was grimacing as he moved to avoid another one of Drax's flashing strikes, and Cai hated to see his warriors turned upon one another by the dark magic of the Lord of Riots in front of him. He didn't even bother wondering if that was what had happened to his father, because for one the man was a Lucerna and had the crown to protect him and secondly he had been perfectly aware of what he was doing whereas the maddened members of the Lucerna guard seemed utterly insensate and driven to violence by the screaming inside of their heads. Marik had meant to do what he had done, and while one section of Caiellis blamed him for it the rest of him knew that the man had not been in the wrong.

He saw streets that were flooded with the blood of the slain and the sky above, Welkalites and Lucaelians alike drenched in gore as they waded through the waist-height lake of vital fluids to battle against one another. He saw whole regiments of loyal warriors from the Kingdom of Light slain as rifts in reality were torn open below them, the whole city around them warping and changing as they were murdered screaming by the pure substance of the forsaken abyss. He saw regiments of soldiers beset upon all sides by hordes of shrieking Welkalites and unholy devils that wielded tongues of flame as whips and rode upon demonic hell-hounds, laughing and giggling with malicious hysteria as they charged down those soldiers who had become possessed by dread as tried to flee.

He saw whole divisions of the Lucaelian crusader force slain by greater demons that descended from the sky in fiery gouts of infernal death as they ripped the souls from their victims and feasted upon them. He saw soldiers that he recognised from his own army who had survived the battles of Jeksaan and Fort Egetau impaled as the ground grew spikes and massive spires of obsidian much like the ones surrounding the courtyard which Caiellis was being tortured upon burst forth from the earth.

He saw soldiers turning upon one another, ripping apart brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives and friends in the lust for blood that gripped them and controlled their every action, and cried as he watched the rage infused victors of the conflict begin to consume those who they had fought alongside in a cannibalistic frenzy for human flesh as the tore at the dying warriors with their teeth.

He saw groups of men and women who were part of many different regiments and came from many different cities brought together by the violence of the war cornered into cul-de-sacs within the sprawling City of Pleasure as the hellish influence of the Defiler made reality buckle and warp around them as demonic beings ripped themselves out of Sancturia and into the world of man, praying for the help of the angels and the Lucerna rulers that Cai knew would never come. He sobbed and whimpered as he saw them being torn to shreds, screaming and dying with thoughts of the ones who were supposed to protect them on their minds.

It was a massacre. Everywhere he looked, Lucaelians were being cut down and overrun by the psychotic warriors of the Welkalite Empire as they screamed in pleasure at the violence and howled their worship of their new dark god who had entered into the world and blessed them with such magnificent and rapturous bloodshed. There was screaming, the screaming of the insane Welkalites who basked in the slaughter of the invaders who had been trying to bring peace to their nation and free them from the corruption of their dictatorial masters and those demons that controlled them in turn, but what was worse than that was the screaming of the soldiers as they were slaughtered and died in their droves, their faith that the Lucerna family and the holy angels would deliver them from this hell that Usnaan had become remaining to their dying breath for some but wavering and faltering for others as they were killed.

The screaming pierced into Caiellis's young and abused thirteen mind, screaming that he should have stopped because of deaths that could have been prevented if he had just been stronger and better. The scenes of seemingly endless violence exploded around him, somehow worse than the images of horrific debauchery which the Lord of Riots had placed within his head because he knew that these were real – and worse, he knew that these were his fault, and real. If he hadn't have recklessly, Voidwalked here, if he had completed his duty to stop the ritual conjuring the Tempest of Craving instead of failing horribly to do so and barely surviving for long against the Archdemon that emerged, then these people with individual hopes, dreams, families and personalities wouldn't be dying within the city of torture and slaughter that Usnaan was becoming.

I … I failed all these people … I failed my big brother … I failed my Uncles Tybalt and Tristram … I failed my father … I failed my mother, all those years ago … I failed my bodyguards, my friends, the families of my friends … I failed every single person in the army which has come to this city because of my weakness in allowing myself to be captured and used as a negotiation asset. I failed all of them. I even failed myself.

Caiellis's vision was almost utterly obscured by tears, but that didn't stop the thousands of scenes of Lucaelian warriors who had depended upon him to succeed so that they could emerge victories died because of his weakness penetrating into his mind. He was able to move his arms, though the chains dug painfully into them and scraped of flesh as he pulled them up, and he didn't realise he had placed his hands over his ears to dry and drown out the sound of everyone who he had ever known from his own nation dying in front of his eyes, everyone that had ever been precious to him preyed upon by vile demons and their equally nefarious Summoners as the Lord of Riots laughed.

"Stop! Stop hurting them!" he shrieked as the chains tightened around his neck, coughing for breath in between screams of anguish and pain as he looked upon what an utter failure he had become and the awful consequences of his weakness which was placing every single Lucaelian within the City of Pleasure in immense danger. He curled up into a foetal ball, only the chain around his neck acting with any real tightness, huddling his thin and gashed knees up to his equally as abused head and placing his hands over it, trying to shut his eyes to block out the images that continued on no matter that he was no longer looking at them. He shuddered in pain, arcs of agony crackling along him as a far greater emotional torment wracked him with sobs. He had failed, but instead of him paying the price it was everyone else who had been willing to give their lives to save the Welkalites from their own self-destruction, everyone else who had been counting on him to pull through and end the Tempest of Craving above.

He need to save them, he needed to slay the Defiler and banish it from this world and free Usnaan from its corrupting influence, but he couldn't do anything but shudder and tremble and scream and sob and cry and choke and gasp for breath and curl up into a ball and will it all not to be true.

"Need … to help … need … to save ..." he wheezed out, not even aware that he was doing it as he pressed his head further into his knees, one hand covering his head and the other tugging desperately at the ever-tightening tendril of fleshy iron wrapped round his fragile throat that was causing him physical pain that almost matched the mental agony he was suffering through. He didn't know where the Sword of Glass had gone, and he couldn't open his eyes to see because all he saw were black spots in front of his vision that was blurred by tears, and the images of his friends, comrades, family members and soldiers who had looked up to him despite his age and unimpressive stature and the fact that he had done nothing for them dying in front of him stopped him from being able to focus on anything else.

"How can you save them if you cannot even save yourself?!" the Lord of Riots boomed, Rakdos laughing tempestuously at the boy in front of him who was finally snapping under all of the tension and pain – both mental and physical – which he had gone through over the course of this battle and his entire life. He dug his talons harder into the orb in his hand, and Caiellis's sobs were choked as the chain squeezed harder around his neck, cutting off his air almost completely apart from a few choking sounds that he could make as he tried to escape from all of the pain and death which had been caused by his weakness.

Suddenly Caiellis was four years old again, watching his beloved and kind mother die right in front of him and powerless to stop it. He had reached out to her, just as he was trying to reach out to the Lucaelians who were dying within the further city, and just like then he couldn't do anything to help those who had given up everything for him. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how far he delved into his mind to find even a tiny speck of his magical power that he could use to resist and save them, there was nothing he could do and he was filled with self-loathing to a degree that he hadn't ever experienced before.

The runes cut into the youngest Lucerna's skin by the unholy blessing of the Defiler flared with dark power as he screamed and choked in anguish at the voices of the dying and the dead that swirled around him, pointing accusing fingers of desperate cries at the one who had failed them, Rakdos leaned forward with a predatory and sadistic smile etched upon his demonic features that were the stuff of the nightmares of angels. This was what he had been waiting for. Caiellis had been able to resist all of the huge amounts of pain inflicted onto himself, but what he couldn't escape from was the dying of the people who he cared so deeply about.

As the tendril of corruption tightened round his abused and bruised throat, the agony that was flooding through him increased in intensity, and the screaming of those dying in the city below due to his failures increased in volume and number, Cai tried to hide himself away. He shut himself off from the horrible, horrible noise and the pain of dying in the worst way possible, retreating inside of his mind. The Mind Realm was blocked, probably by the pain that he was in, so he went elsewhere as he desperately attempted to get away from the cruel reality of life. He tried to find that sliver of determination and solace that he had managed to grasp upon earlier that had stopped him from succumbing to every type of physical pain at once, holding onto it with all of his mental might and desperation and childish need to have somewhere safe.

That was not safe either. Even there, in his most private sanctuary that he had built for himself, the screams of the dying that formed a wail of accusation howling out Caiellis's name as they left this world of hate and war penetrated through the walls of his mind.

He huddled further inwards, no longer aware that he couldn't breathe, trying to block them out, trying to block everything out so that he could be alone and have peace away from his failures and pain, but they followed him in there, the desperate cries of those who he loved and those who had depended upon him to save them screaming within his head as his mind was filled with the images of them dying. Alone, in the pain and the agony and the sadness, Caiellis tried to push them away, but when the sight of his brother hanging limply in the hands of the Master of Violence appeared to him, the thirteen year old couldn't keep them out any longer.

The sanctuary that he had built for himself was useless, and nothing could protect him from the reality of his failure and the consequences of his weakness and stupidity. The screaming kept getting louder and louder and louder, the pain increasing every second as stars exploded behind Caiellis's closed eyes and agony exploded through his limbs, and the boy tried one last time to lock himself away. The death and the screaming followed him in there, swarming around him and drowning him in guilt and despair as he screamed out in anguish himself, squeezing his tiny and weak hands into fists as he pressed them into the sides of his head.

He had failed them all. And both he and them knew that as the shrieked at him in fury for letting them die and get hurt because he was too weak to complete his duty. Shutting himself away or screaming himself didn't get them out, nothing could get them out of his head, nothing could free him from the screaming of those who he had failed, nothing could deliver him from the hell that his life had become and nothing could erase the consequences of his weakness from the world.

The image of Alexander appeared to him again, the boy's body scarred, limp, broken, his head lolling backwards and his bloodshot eyes staring up at his little brother. The hands clamped around his throat didn't let up no matter how much Caiellis screamed at them to, the insurmountable pressure they were applying cruelly mirrored by that of the fleshy tendril strangling the youngest Lucerna that had followed him into his most inner regions.

His big brother's eyes, once so blue and vivid, gazed up at him. There was accusation in those eyes, anger and hatred that Cai could never escape from, but much worse than that was the lack of life that he saw in them. Alexander coughed once, a horrible, heart-wrenching sound that ripped up lungfuls of blood from both him and his brother, before releasing a horrible choked scream.

He had failed Alexander. He had failed the only person who had treated him with the love and affection that he had always craved. Now he was dead, and the Lucaelian people were sure to follow. It was over. For all of them.

And then suddenly, Caiellis broke.

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New Summonings and Creatures in this chapter:

Rakdos's Carnival: Avatar of Discord