Chapter 2 #2
He didn't know who she was. He had been tortured beyond all human reason, his identity stripped down to raw nerve endings and broken bones.
He didn't remember her laugh, her hair, if they'd even ever met.
But the moment the Demon Lord's malice pivoted toward that distant, glowing warmth, a primal, ancient instinct roared to life from the deepest, best part of Garrett's soul.
Keep him away from her.
It didn't matter that he was hanging from chains. It didn't matter that his blood was turning gray and poisoned. That woman was his line in the sand.
The Demon Lord leaned in close, his breath smelling of ozone and rotting ash, a cruel, mocking sneer twisting his features.
"Look at you," Leviathan taunted, his voice scraping against Garrett's raw nerves. "Boohoo... she can't find you, the poor little Guardsman. Wonder why?” He cackled with unadulterated joy. “Oops, you’re buried too deep in the dark, I’m afraid.”
Running a long, jagged claw down his chest, the scent of burning copper filled the air as more of Garrett’s life essence ran down his body. “Drop those pathetic mental blocks, my boy. Let me in, and you can have it all. You can go to her."
Slowly, agonizingly, Garrett lifted his head.
The movement was small, a brutal scraping of bone against silver wire, but the sheer effort of it made the chains rattle with a sudden, heavy resonance.
He didn't look like a victim anymore. He looked like an apex predator cornered in the dark.
He locked his bloody, crimson-tinted stare onto the Demon Lord.
His voice tore past a throat ruined by smoke and ash, dropping into a low, terrifying growl.
"You can have my body," Garrett rasped, the words dripping with a cold, lethal absolute. "You can have my blood. You can have every damned breath left in my lungs. But you will never have her."
Erupting in a temper tantrum of utter calamity and chaos, the Demon Lord completely lost it. The calculated tormentor vanished, replaced by an explosive, ego-driven rage monster. "I will tear her from your ribs!" Leviathan shrieked, his hand slamming onto Garrett’s forehead.
The Demon Lord didn't just probe. He detonated his consciousness outward.
Diving deep into the thick bedrock of Garrett's mindscape, he was intent on ripping the identity of this mysterious savior out by the roots.
He tore through the gray fog of the ten-year sorcerous coma, shattered the remaining White Magic barricades, and plunged headfirst into the central canal of Dark.
But he didn't find a helpless, amnesiac Guardsman as he had before.
In the deepest, most heavily guarded cavern of that shared soul, the oily dark of the Demon Lord slammed to a violent halt. The shadows recoiled, beginning to smoke and burn.
There, waiting in the absolute center of the vault, were two massive, cosmic eyes.
They were not Garrett’s. They were titanic pools of blinding, Ancient Draconic Fire, burning with the catastrophic heat of a dying star.
The Dragon King, Aodhan, who had been silently holding the line from the other side of the world, masking his presence through the shifter's agony, glared out of the darkness.
His gaze locked onto the invading entity, heavy with a suffocating, terrifying pressure and the absolute promise of unmitigated retribution.
The Demon Lord didn’t just pull back– he was violently hurled out of Garrett’s mind. He was unceremoniously thrown out with wild abandon.
In the physical room, Leviathan gasped, a choked, wet sound tearing from his throat as he stumbled backward.
His boots skidded across the stone floor.
His hands flew to his temples. A sudden, pressurized hiss escaped his nose and ears as black, viscous Demon blood erupted from his nose and ears, sizzling like battery acid when it struck his pristine robes.
For three breathless beats, the Demon Lord trembled, staring at the hanging shifter with a look of genuine, wide-eyed shock. His chest heaved. A glimpse of a cosmic predator had just shattered the unwavering certainty of his dominion.
But shock instantly curdled into a rabid, humiliated ego. "You miserable, tricking vermin," Leviathan roared, his voice losing its smooth, oily cadence, degrading into a dual-toned shriek that shook the dust from the stone ceiling.
He lunged forward with explosive speed. He didn't use a slow, calculated probe this time. He weaponized brute, destructive force. He grabbed a heavy, jagged spike of solid, corrupted iron… a weapon forged in Hell’s fire specifically to execute high-tier immortals, ghouls, and demons.
With a sickening, wet crunch, Leviathan drove the spike straight through Garrett's right shoulder. Pinning him violently against the stone pillar behind him, the Demon Lord twisted and jerked the pike in every direction.
Garrett’s world shattered into white static. His spine arched off the pillar. His jaw locked in a silent, agonizing scream as the iron tore through muscle, tendon, and the edge of his scapula. The silver wire on his wrists tightened, slicing down to the bone.
The Demon Lord leaned in, his face inches from Garrett’s, his breath a foul stench of sulfur and burning rot.
"I don't care what ancient lizard is hiding in your blood," Leviathan snarled, twisting the iron spike deeper still into the bone.
"I will grind this shell to dust. I will peel the scales from your flesh one by one until the Dragon King inside of you begs to crawl out. Look at me, Guardsman. Look at me as you die.”
The pain was a black hole, pulling Garrett under.
The Dragon King's presence in his mindscape was buckling under the sheer, physical trauma being inflicted upon his physical body. The glacial walls were melting into ash. The fire in Aodhan’s eyes was flickering.
Garrett was slipping. He could feel the golden thread—the only thing connecting him to sanity, to the girl, to the waking world—beginning to snap, fiber by fiber.
The Demon Lord raised his hand, his fingers curling into claws, cloaked in a suffocating, pitch-black miasma meant to snuff out a soul permanently. "Let her watch you fade," he venomously whispered.
Garrett, barely conscious, his vision swimming in a thick haze of red, forced his eyes open one last time.
He didn't look at the sorcery. He didn't look at the weapon in his shoulder.
He focused entirely on that tiny, lingering ember of warmth deep in his soul.
With the very last ounce of his ironclad will, he didn't try to fight Leviathan. He didn't try to protect himself.
He gathered the entirety of his remaining soul and threw it like a flare across the Void. A silent, desperate, protective roar meant for only one person in the universe. “Run!” He roared.
And miles away, across the world, the woman he knew he would always protect suddenly gasped. Clutching her chest as a phantom heat scorched her soul, she breathed a single word, “Garrett.”