Chapter 2
“My Saerkhanum,” the fallen angel’s voice rasped from the stony floor.
The First’s breath hitched. Did he answer?
How could he not?
“Master?”
“To me.”
Fear and wrath stalled him, and he glanced at Neyu. Through red-rimmed eyes, she peeled her lips back in a grimace, but nodded.
Saer rushed forward, ignoring the trembling in his knees. Lucifer struggled, and Saer cradled his upper limbs under the fallen angel’s torso.
The familiar icicle blue of Lucifer’s gaze met his, and any remaining dread in Saer’s body vanished.
Neyu didn’t move, though Saer felt her eyes boring into him.
Lucifer’s voice dragged with Its exhausted sigh. “You said you would go.”
To save Neyu. He had begged as much, heartbeats before, and it already felt long ago. Saer’s jaw tensed, and he nodded.
The fallen angel licked Its lips. “I need you to find a cure for this...weakness.” Lucifer growled the last word, disgusted. “I’ll teach you how to travel between our world and the surface—”
The surface?
Lucifer’s body spasmed, and Saer fought to keep his face neutral. More questions amassed. His maker insisted upon creating Its army. But their very creation—Saer and Neyu—debilitated the maker they’d sworn to protect. Lucifer gave them life, sank Its very essence into them.
They’d repaid It, thus far, with disobedience.
The thought made Saer’s stomach churn, while a quieter part of his mind warred against the feeling. Against being forced to serve when he’d been created to be more—
“I’m bound here, unable to take my physical body anywhere else, but you…my Saerkhanum, you must bring me back what I need.”
Saer’s brow furrowed. Fire and heat sustained him, though clearly the fallen angel needed more. Or different. How was he to know what to search for?
But, he’d been created to obey, and not to ask questions, and so the First nodded despite his uncertainty and frustration. To keep Neyu safe, he’d do anything.
“Of course, Master.”
Earth. The word coalesced in Saer’s mind.
That’s what the surface was.
The same Hellsfire used to create Saer held the power to transport him from Hell, to Earth, and back. If Saer had more practice or held more knowledge of this new world, he’d have directed his location with precision. Instead, he relied on fate and chance.
Saer emerged from the roaring fireball with a shudder and a deep growl. Adjacent fauna scattered in a panic. Rodents? Deer? Once more, new words leapt into his consciousness, flooding him with built-in knowledge.
Twigs and pinecones crunched under his silver hooves as the mixture of dirt and melted snow sank under his monstrous weight. The wooded area carried a frigid chill, pulling at his inherent strength.
Heat and Hellsfire sustained him. Cold drained him. That instant decided it for him.
He hated cold.
Saer stretched and shook out his wings to dismiss the uncomfortable sensation and found it invited the frosty sting closer. Steam wafted off his searing flesh, escaping his nose and mouth with each biting breath. The cold persisted.
Cold. Away from Neyu. His distaste grew.
He tucked his wings tight against his back and angled his head upward. In Hell, the cavern of rock hovered over them at all times. High or low, the stony ceiling existed no matter where he’d dug or traversed.
Here, a bright swath of gray coated all else, endless and airy. Sky. Saer’s eyes squinted before long. Perhaps his maker’s cure existed there. Could he touch it?
Saer steeled himself, then thrust his wings out and down, catapulting his body upward.
Cold!
His lungs spasmed as he ascended, a burning pain infiltrating his chest that had nothing to do with fire. Fluid leaked from his eyes in the abrasive and endless gray. Wind whipped against his flesh, thieving his warmth.
Higher. His teeth clenched with the heaviness that built with the climb.
The edges of his field of view shuddered and darkened. He gasped with the sudden realization that he’d forgotten to breathe. The thinning atmosphere poured down his throat, frigid and unforgiving.
Wispy edges of clouds caressed his limbs, dotting his flesh with droplets of condensation.
Higher! Saer willed his wings to thrust downward once more.
They froze instead.
His vision tunneled.
Then nothing.
A permeating and arctic ache throbbed in Saer’s bones. Intermittent light flashed over his eyelids, and he furrowed his brow, attempting to open his eyes. They’d frozen shut. Or he’d lost all strength to open them. Perhaps both.
The red light faded. It returned. Faded. Returned.
Cold remained.
This was life without heat. Without fire.
Without Neyu.
The last thought squeezed his heart in a cavernous chokehold.
Is this what would happen to Lucifer if It never replenished Itself? Descension into a meaningless heap of tissue and bone?
Red light. Darkness. Light. Darkness. Endless.
He’d been here too long.
Faint cracks found his ears, far off but coming closer. A deep, crunching and groaning sound ricocheted in his skull. Saer recognized it as the first time he put pressure on snow.
Familiar crackling came next.
Fire.
Heated light danced behind his eyelids this time, and he yearned to lean towards it. Had he somehow returned to Hell?
A voice cried out in alarm, and the footsteps halted. Not Lucifer. Not Neyu. He didn’t know anyone or anything else.
The voice was joined by another, then a handful more, all deeper in tone. They spoke in a language Saer didn’t recognize, but the patterns of speech suggested agitation.
The steady rush of flames pulled nearer, and his eyelids flickered. They slit open.
Shadows wavered in and out of his blurred vision. Saer tried to swallow, but his throat refused to move.
How did he get here?
A jutting structure hung overhead, and the shadows ducked under it to draw closer, speaking in disconcerted tones just above a whisper.
All walked on two legs and looked around half Saer’s Daemoenic height—if he were standing.
They carried pointed sticks tipped with sharp rocks and packs on their backs. Four held torches.
Saer’s nostrils flared as he struggled to draw that warm air into himself with a feeble inhale. If the creatures would come closer…whatever they were…
His attention drifted past them to where pine trees stood. Branches lay in broken heaps along the sides of those nearest him. He must have fallen from the sky and rolled to where he lay now, under this rocky ledge, swallowed by the cold. He remembered none of it.
The two-legged creatures gestured with animated motions, pointing at his body. Something fur-lined covered their frames and most of their heads. Animal skin. Pelts? One turned its hooded face towards Saer enough for the torchlight to catch on its features.
The being’s cheekbones jutted, gaunt but stoic. It looked rail-thin, yet bore fire. What sustained them, fed them, if not fire?
Other similarities caught his attention. Two eyes. A nose. A mouth. Hair. The face of an imperfect angel. Did they house what his maker needed? Were they the key to returning to Neyu?
His heart skipped.
Their skin looked fragile—like Lucifer’s skin.
Each time their arguing rose, one would shush them, like they feared disturbing Saer.
Closer, he willed. He needed the fire they bore.
The one nearest Saer let loose a disgusted sound and snatched one of the torches from its bearer. Lip curled up, the skinny creature stomped towards him.
Something emanated off the two-legged being, warm yet not heat. It washed against Saer’s skin, and he flared his nostrils again, like he could smell it. Whatever it was, instinct told him it belonged to him.
Saer forgot the newness once the creature crouched, torch a hand’s breadth from his face.
The ribbon of flame licked his skin, and he exhaled a relieved growl.
Shrieking, the creature dropped the torch. It scrabbled for the pointed stick at its back while the rest of the two-legged beings screamed and rushed forward.
The torch rolled against Saer. He sucked the blazing heat in his body just as the first creature lunged.
Pain. Piercing, bright, and sudden. Saer’s cry left as an agonized bark, his throat raw with disuse.
The pointed stick lay embedded in his chest while the creature pressed forward, pushing the weapon deeper.
Crimson blood gushed out of the wound, tendrils of thicker steam skimming off the fluid the moment it met the crisp, forest air.
Saer rolled, using what energy the torch brought him to push upright just as the remaining two-legged beings reached him.
They hollered and stabbed forward, pierced his flesh, right hip, left lower leg, abdomen, pushing him into the jutting stone wall.
Again, and more, they stabbed harder than he could have anticipated with their bony limbs.
Saer pulled at the heat of their torches, siphoning the flames.
The burst of energy provided enough strength to yank at the spears, rending them from his thick muscle or breaking them off at their entry points, and he roared.
Stumbling backwards, the creatures regained their footing one by one.
Scarlet ichor spilled from Saer’s wounds, down his body, coating his silver hooves.
They glared at him with dark eyes, chests heaving and weapons poised. Not one fled.
Their bravado both impressed and disoriented him. They dared challenge him when he dwarfed them, overpowered them?
Saer bared his teeth and snarled while they shouted a rallying cry and lurched forward again. The first creature to reach him snapped its fingers around one of the blood-coated spears still lodged in his torso. Red fluid touched his attacker’s flesh, and the creature jolted back, gasping.
Then shrieking.
The being fell to the ground, howling and wiping hands on nearby snow.
Grisly, white blisters bloomed on otherwise scarlet flesh where Daemoenic blood touched.
Saer swiped at the being but missed as he stumbled.
He flailed his arms at the attackers, shoving them to the ground or tossing them through the air.
Wherever his blood touched their flesh, blisters rose and split, oozing yellow fluid to mix with the thick, scalding ichor.
The Hellsfire in his blood protected him. Yet, the more he lost, the more his vision tunneled, like when he fell from the sky. Saer groaned and lurched past the two-legged beings who scrambled backwards, at last rethinking their strategy.
He stumbled past two skinny hares tied to a tree branch, discarded in the snow.
Two scrawny hares for that troop of creatures and likely more from where they came from.
Is that why they looked malnourished? Had they meant to use him as meat?
His swirling mind reflected on their skinny limbs, the starvation in their eyes.
A last, wretched cry erupted from the two-legged beings, and they charged Saer again. Desperate, he fell forward and gripped their pelt-coated arms.
They had heat in them. Not fire, but heat. He yanked on it with all the metaphysical urgency in his body.
The creatures gasped and shuddered, stiffening. A modicum of warmth slid through Saer while their lips turned dusky.
The beings spasmed and collapsed. With their fall, an abrupt and unnameable something escaped their unmoving remains—an effervescent and glimmering tendril of light. There one moment, then forgotten in a wash of cold.
Saer’s knees gave out. He slumped next to their bodies; the snow crushed under his weight.
No warmth anywhere. He needed fire for strength, heat of some kind to sustain him. None existed in this desolate, frozen landscape.
Pain surged through his body as adrenaline wore off. Blood steamed and pooled under him, melting the snow and seeping into the hard ground beneath.
Was this what the rest of life would be? How could he complete his mission like this?
Lucifer would die if he failed. The conflicting thought squeezed its bony fingers around his neck.
What if another group of those creatures found him?
He’d never see Neyu again. The constriction around his throat tightened, strangling.
Neyu.
Lucifer sent him to find the cure and he’d failed. Defeat coated the back of his tongue with its sour tang, but he’d swallow it if he could see her one last time before he was unmade.
Home.
Saer inhaled as best he could, tasting iron on his tongue and thick blood in his throat. He held the frigid surface air in his lungs and squeezed his eyes shut.
Home.
Just as Lucifer taught, he invoked the ability for travel between Hell and Earth.
Hellsfire overtook him, combusting. The flames devoured his body, blazing on the surface of his black skin. Red and blue ribbons lashed out from his winged form, swallowing him, transporting him.
Back to Hell.