Wayne Barlowe - God's Demon

The black blade wove in and out of Eligor’s guard but never actually found him. The Guard Captain, for his part, maneuvered his opponent so that he could better see his lord high atop the throne. Eligor could hear Beelzebub coming together in a noisy, furious cloud of gyrating flies and blazing sigils and it was all he could do not to stop and watch, but Faraii was persistent, his blade thirsty.

Eligor grasped his lance at its end and, extending it with a fierce snap of his hand to its fullest length, swept it in and under Faraii’s arm, slicing a neat crescent from his side. The Baron neither cried out nor flinched, and for a moment Eligor was not actually certain the hollowed figure that kept doggedly advancing upon him had been injured at all. Forced backward, he worked his weapon, as Faraii had once taught him, like the darting tongue of an Abyssal and caught the Baron yet again. This time the wound, which was broad and had penetrated directly into the center of his bone-shod foot, seemed to impede him and his footwork became, Eligor saw, slower and more deliberate.

The fighting demons around them began to close in, and Faraii, never taking his eye from Eligor, reached out with his free hand and grasped the wrist of a hovering Flying Guard lancer. With a twist and a pop that Eligor could just hear over the insistent buzzing, the Baron effortlessly wrenched the wrist and the lance that grew from it free of its owner, easily speared him through the chest, and proceeded to wield it along with his sword. Two green glyphs, potent with magic, appeared and began to snake around the tips of the two weapons.

Eligor’s calm, the strange confidence he had been feeling that was so different from his usual Passion, began to fade, receding into a place where he could no longer look.

What skills did Melphagor harbor that can help me with this?

It was an Art Martial, Eligor thought in something close to panic, that must come from the Fly, acquired from some nameless demon who had probably ended up rotting on the very floor upon which they stood. Certainly it was nothing the Baron had ever spoken of or shown Eligor in their time together. In Faraii’s hands the two weapons became as one and then split to go their separate ways only to converge again, with lightning speed, at Eligor’s throat or chest or wrist. Or conversely, they never met, moving independently in whistling arcs so intricately interwoven that it seemed to him as if they were being directed by two different individuals. Eligor could only dodge and parry and try to get back and away from the two glyph-tipped points without any consideration to landing his own blows. Fatigue was beginning to show in his own moves, to slow him just enough to be a danger, and he realized that he could not sustain this kind of defense for too much longer. His wings, especially, felt leaden.

There are two individuals! Faraii and Beelzebub. They are fighting me separately and together.

More and more, as Eligor twisted and jabbed, he began to focus on the unwavering green eye of Beelzebub. It became an irritant, a hated symbol, and finally a yearned-for target.

From somewhere, buried deep within Melphagor’s acquired, collected knowledge, came a glyph to give Eligor hope. It was not a difficult casting, but its potency was in its timing. Because it was a glyph-of-transpiercing it had to precede his weapon’s tip by the minutest distance to be effective and not be blocked, and as tired as he was growing, Eligor was not at all certain he could perform both the casting of his lance and the glyph at once. He reared back, floating momentarily up and away from the duel to gather himself, and then, with a great rushing of wings, he dove down and threw the glyph and his lance as swiftly and surely as he could. Faraii’s weapons came up to meet Eligor, and their glowing tips came so close to his eyes that they momentarily blinded him. He thought his casting was true, but the dazzling green light made any certainty impossible.

When the weapons fell away he saw that the lance had caught Faraii precisely in the eye, jolting his head back and fusing instantly into the bony tissue. The eye split, radiating a shiver of searing energy downward that blew his body apart, its already worm-eaten limbs disintegrating into clotted masses of desiccated flesh and bone. His head, still mostly intact but smoking and cracked from the intense heat, fell heavily atop the breastplate, bounced once, and stuck into the floor by the protruding lance point.

While the battle in the dome continued, the fighting just surrounding Eligor ceased, combatants lowering their weapons as the impact of the moment sank in. Hearing the cheers from his troops above, he alighted, favoring his wounded leg and folding his aching wings. The charred remains of Faraii lay before Eligor, and as he looked down he felt only relief. It was done. As much as Eligor had once admired the demon, the Baron had been too great a threat to his lord; Faraii’s destruction was a necessity, as much as or more than the destruction of the Knights, but it was not something in which he would take any pleasure.

He saw no disk—the intense discharge of energy had seemingly precluded that—but he did see the black sword lying amidst the remains and he bent down and picked it up, feeling its lightness and balance. All eyes were trained upon him and he thought to say something, something stirring for his appreciative Guards, but a thunderous roar from the throne brought his and all the other demons’ heads around.

Beelzebub had finally materialized.

The ramp trembled as the two Behemoths, goaded by their mahouts, beat upon the gate with their massive hammers. Any signs of their fatigue vanished as their drivers tapped lightly, suggestively, upon the spikes driven deep within the bases of their skulls. With their heads bowed and their chinbones dug into the ramp, Hannibal saw the raw, physical power of their heavily muscled, sweating bodies, saw how they strained and flexed as they put all of their weight into each blow. The gate was broken in a dozen different places, held together only by the wide bands of metal that spread across them like veins, and while the tendrils of its curse-glyphs wound, briefly, around the giant souls and then spiraled away into the sky, it seemed that it would split apart at any moment.

A siege commander, standing between the Behemoths, guided their strikes, placing target-glyphs upon those sections of the reinforced portal that appeared weakest. Hannibal could see light from within peeking out of the long cracks.

He peered into the relative darkness of the battlefield behind him; since the wall had failed Dis had been plunged back into the unilluminated gloom of Hell. There was no longer any fighting in the front lines; Beelzebub’s legions had been either destroyed in combat or crushed in the rain of gargantuan debris that had filled in large sections of the Belt. Even now, far from the ramp, Hannibal felt the dull concussion of giant slabs slamming into the lava as they continued to be chiseled away by the bombardment of glyphs.

And the rain of destruction had not been limited to the wall alone. Glyphs arced high into the air to land amidst the towers and minarets within its confines, jarring some of them loose. These rose, Hannibal saw, into the black sky, turning and cartwheeling slowly, and began to float away from the Keep.

Put Satanachia’s sigil appeared at the ramp’s base and Hannibal saw that its owner was mounting the incline and heading toward his position, his staff in tow. His presence was welcome; the Soul-General found himself feeling more loyalty to the Demon Major than toward his own kind. The cold glances Hannibal received even from his trusted souls holding Gaha’s reins were distancing, something he was not accustomed to as a general. Something in Hell he would have to get used to if he was to maintain his position with his demon lords.