The Twelve Apocalypses: A Damned Soul's Path to the Abyss

I was never claustrophobic. Neither was Hayden. Even if tight spaces were an issue for him, he would have trained himself out of it or been killed for failing to do so. That meant the feeling of tightness in my chest had nothing to do with claustrophobia.

But the realization that we were two barriers away from getting squished by literal tons of stone?

That was a problem.

I was honestly proud of myself that I didn’t spiral into a twitching mess on the ground. But I knew better than to trust in my own continued courage, or in the numbness of the emotional void lingering inside me. Instead, I chose to draw strength from the two commanders.

Graighast was still fussing over his brother, though I could see the mounting frustration on Glaustro’s face as the other demon invaded his privacy. Not that Glaustro was in any condition to protest such treatment. His skin was glistening with tracks left by his own blood. The tide was now stemmed, but he looked shaken and weak.

We were only alive because of the barrier he had thrown up against the explosion. But he was paying a steep price for our survival.

It took three potions before Glaustro finally grunted, pushed his brother away, and swayed to his feet. Even then, he looked like a single stiff breeze might knock him over.

"Hayden Hall, to me," he rumbled, managing to inject a shocking amount of strength into his voice.

I didn’t hesitate to obey. The last time the man had given such an order, he saved my life. The least he deserved was my loyalty.

"Commander?"

My voice sounded squeaky in my ears. He nodded firmly at me anyway, and unless I was way off the mark, it was approval I saw in his eyes.

"Explain what happened, soldier."

Soldier. Not recruit. Soldier.

In spite of everything, I smiled.

"I didn’t react well to being teleported, commander. I felt sick to my bones when I showed up, and all the glowing cracks in the room just made it worse. At first, I thought they were some sort of ritual lines. Possibly to anchor the teleportation. I only realized they weren’t when I took a closer look at them. They were… odd."

"Odd how?" Graighast butted into the conversation, much to Glaustro’s visible displeasure. Notably, though, he didn’t snap at his brother.

I struggled to explain. "It hurt to look at them, and it was like… like they both were and weren’t there. They’d vanish and pop back into view constantly. The demons couldn’t see them, and none of my fellow recruits seemed to share my symptoms."

Both sergeants frowned. Then Glaustro’s eyes widened, and he took a step closer to me, gripping my shoulder. For a moment, I felt a vast presence peer directly into my soul.

When he pulled away, Glaustro was giving me an odd look.

"You are almost halfway through your ascension, soldier. Did you spend all the souls you had on it? Against my advice?"

I almost winced at the mild warning in his voice, but even that fear was quickly subsumed by the void in my chest.

"No, sir. I still have around three hundred souls, sir. I just decided it would be best not to carry such a large number of souls with me."

"That’s why you put some of them in the bank, soldier." Glaustro sighed, but he didn’t seem upset. "While your decision to suddenly progress your ascension by as much as fifty percent is… suspect, it did allow us to recognize the trap laid by our enemies. Unless I’m seriously wrong, whatever offensive ward they placed here was set up in a way that rendered it invisible to a regular demon. I assume it targeted our mana in some way, since it had that much of an effect on you."

Graighast looked taken aback, but I didn’t know why. Glaustro immediately noticed my confusion.

"Ascension is the process of establishing a proper link to the heart of the Abyss, as well as acclimating your soul to its mana," he explained. "This happens by gradually replacing a percentage of your mana with mana born of the Abyss. Demonic mana, if you prefer. The ability to see mana and interact with it depends on our soul and the mana it exudes. So, since half your mana is now demonic, and the ward was designed to prevent anyone with such mana from detecting it, you had an adverse reaction."

"And all the recruits, as mortals, noticed it immediately," I said in a hushed voice. "Except they saw that demons weren’t reacting to the spectacle and decided to ignore it, too."

Glaustro nodded bitterly. "The trap almost worked. If you hadn’t drawn my attention to it, and I didn’t sense the subtle emanations of mana the ward was releasing…"

The demon trailed off, but I could read the unpleasant conclusion in his grim expression.

We were quiet for a second. Then a new thought occurred to me, and I felt my stomach plummet, even amidst my current emotional numbness.

"What about the rest of the troops?" I asked desperately. "The demons that were already dispatched? This ward couldn’t possibly have covered the entire city, right?"

Bronwynn’s face kept flashing through my mind. He had tried to warn me, to stop me, when he noticed something was off. I still wasn’t sure what had happened back there, and my memories from before I passed through the teleportation matrix were fuzzy, but he was definitely worried about my well-being.

"No one has tried to reach us yet," Graighast stated in a dangerously cold voice. His eyes were flinty, and he kept stealing glances at all the blood splatters on the outside of Glaustro’s barrier. "Logic dictates that if they were in any condition to try, they would have done it by now."

The void in my chest wavered in a cloud of worry.

Bronwynn had seen to my burns. He had shared his wisdom with me, no matter how reluctantly. He had tried to warn me away from doing something stupid when he noticed the stupid mortal recruit was acting strange.

And now he was somewhere out there, possibly injured. Possibly suffering. Possibly…

I was part of a demonic invasion. I knew we were technically the aggressors. Still, I felt a spark of resentment against the locals erupt inside me, burning even through the emotional void. It was different from the bloodlust I had before. This was hatred, the type one reserved for true enemies.

"We need to dig our way out." Graighast stared upwards, eyes narrowed like he was trying to peer straight through all the stone.

For all I knew, maybe he was succeeding.

"By all means, brother." There was still venom in Glaustro’s voice, even if it was much less pronounced than before. "If you want to do it, go ahead. I’m a little busy holding up the roof after stopping the spatial explosion."

Graighast sighed and shook his head before closing his eyes. He focused. Mana started to drip off him, slowly at first, then turning into a deluge. But it didn’t spread out. It pooled around his feet, its color deepening as its texture grew richer.

Standing so close, I felt the pressure of his mana mounting every moment, until it reached an almost suffocating crescendo. Then he raised his arms. His claws slashed through the air, slowly forming a string of runes that gradually built up into a circle of symbols. Just looking at it hurt my brain. It was linked in some arcane way I couldn’t understand, but a single glance burned the formation deep into my memory.

Finally, the demon finished. The runic matrix pulsed. As Graighast stepped away, all his prepared mana surged into the shape of a spear. It hung suspended in the air for one second, then rocketed up through the runic matrix. Passing effortlessly through the barriers, the spear erased a perfect circle of stone from existence, leaving a hole at least three yards wide. A shaft of pale sunlight filtered down into the cavern.

All I could do was gape at the stunning show of might. Graighast didn’t even seem winded. His face was still set in a grimace of displeasure, like the extraordinary feat wasn’t worth mentioning.

That only made the question all the more alarming: if this was the level of magic Graighast could casually conjure, just how powerful was the ward that had almost killed us all and knocked Glaustro nearly out of commission?

"A brute-force solution, I admit, but it worked." Graighast looked at the surviving mortals and the other five demons. "Gather round now. It will be easier to get us out of this wretched hole if you’re clustered somewhat closer together."

People rushed to comply, and Graighast patiently prepared another spell. It was much simpler this time, a mere few runes carved into the air, and no pooling of mana around his feet. Once it was ready, the spell sank into the ground beneath us, making the rock flow like water until we were standing on a circle of glowing stone.

The circle rose, carrying us up into the air. We passed through the brothers’ protective domes. The barriers rippled around us, shrinking until they covered us tightly. The circle continued to rise, and we rose with it, higher and higher through the hole Graighast’s spear had created.

The promise of freedom and the gentle sunlight drifting down on us almost melted away the void inside my chest. That is, until we finally cleared the hole and got our first glimpse of the city.

Ruins stretched as far as the eye could see.

Countless houses had been reduced to piles of rubble. Once proud walls were now heaps of rock. The explosion had clearly originated from within the city because the debris was scattered far past its previous borders into the surrounding fields.

To my utter shock, the city was not entirely lifeless.

Scattered groups of demons milled around the ruins, most severely hurt. Some were little more than quivering torsos riddled with grisly wounds. Many others were missing one or more of their limbs.

"Pretas, report," Glaustro’s voice called angrily.

The demon who stepped forward was barely injured, just a few gashes and bruises. My eyes widened a fraction. This was the demon who had torched my arms, and then offhandedly given me advice about my weapon after I made him laugh.

"Yes, commander. We followed our orders and rushed from the concealed tunnel to storm the city’s defenses. The barrier was already up, but we separated into groups, thinking we could quickly pin down and take out the sacrificial sites. That’s when we noticed something was wrong, commander."

Pretas’ expression was sour as he paused, his eyes briefly flitting to all the badly hurt demons before he continued.

"There were far too few defenders. They barely had enough people to cover the walls, and even then, not very well. We couldn’t spot any civilians either. We thought they were just hiding at first, but we couldn’t sense their emotions or their souls. The explosion erupted when we were just about to reach the wall."

"You said the barrier was already up?" Graighast asked.

Pretas nodded. "Yes, sergeant. It only exacerbated our losses. Without the barrier, the explosion would have launched us away from the city, but most of us would have made it. Since it was up, it trapped the explosion and amplified its power. There was a synergy between the two. I swear on my soul the explosion doubled in strength when it bounced off the barrier. Only those of us skilled at putting up defense wards and mana shields survived."

’Survived’ was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. ’Barely squeaked by’ was much more accurate. Most of the demons around us resembled twisted pieces of art rather than living creatures.

But as callous as I might sound, their suffering was none of my concern. I was barely paying attention as Pretas continued his report.

No, I was desperately scanning the crowd for the one demon whose survival I actually cared about. The longer I couldn’t find him, the more my heart sank, shaking the emotional void that had a grip on me.

Nothing. I couldn’t find Bronwynn. None of the wriggling, mutilated demons even resembled him.

He was gone.

The unfeeling void inside me finally cracked, then shattered, drowning in a tide of uncontrollable rage.