Sinners' Kingdom #1: The Book of Lust (Complete)

72

The deepest place on Earth is a basin at the very bottom of the Mariana Trench. It's so deep that it dwarfs Everest. You could move and put the entire mountain inside this place, the Challenger Deep, and the peak would still be a mile underwater.

But even at that depth, the immense pressure can't crush and grind bones to dust. It collapses lungs, compressing air, and it would crack a human's ribs long before he ever reached the bottom, but human bones are resilient. The water would press and press, but the bones would stand up to the test long after the body was already dead, thirty six thousand feet deep and resting on the ocean floor for the scavengers to empty.

That desolation was what swallowed me up, a great maw that yawned and opened up to complete, abyssal darkness. It was nothingness. It was endlessness. It was infinite space that devoured. It was a sea rushing in to fill every empty pocket of space, every thimbleful of air, the bottom of my last breath when it rushed out of me in a shuddering exhale as the pressure of the man's — demon's — aura overwhelmed me. The purity of the void, dark and empty, swamped and filled me until it replaced everything else inside, pouring and pouring. Sight, hearing, all sense of touch and awareness shrank to a pinpoint. I reached for it, desperate for any escape no matter how slim, only for it to wink out of existence and leave me drowning in the abyss.

This was the true might of a demon lord, a Prince, an Infernal being that stood head and shoulders above the rest. I should have known it was like this. Mammon and Lust had said it time and again, that they were in a weakened state, that they weren't at their prime. Yet somehow it had escaped my understanding that the overwhelming power and presence I had sensed from them must be diluted, nowhere close to their true form. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have been so blind? Losing my physical sight was nothing compared to this crushing realization that I had been so oblivious all along.

Even against all their menacing strength and danger, I had dared to think I stood a chance. But this... if this was what the true power of a Prince of demons was like, then I might as well have walked naked into a blizzard, believing I was immune to the cold. I had been so naive. I had been so arrogant. I had religiously checked myself at every turn, keeping the demons at arm's length to carefully preserve my ego, the all-important sense of self, and retain my identity as one Sable Solaria.

But even that dread and caution had been hilariously prideful. Dread and caution implied I thought I ever had a chance. If I'd known this was the reality, I would have accepted it all calmly, knowing everything was all over and there was nothing anyone could do anymore.

Vast. Consuming. Consumed. Immense pressure greater than anything even the ocean's deeps could offer swallowed me like a paper boat in the maw of a whale. The infinite abyss was inescapable, unknowable, an expanse that touched and flooded every corner of the universe...

Except for one strange glow in the hollow madness. Except for one familiar flame that illuminated my soul and flared bright, searing, a beacon reaching for me to pull me out of the titanic waves and onto the shore.

The light warmed. The light burned. The glowing heart of flame poured into my veins as I wrapped my hands around it and pulled it in close. I held on so tight I became one with it. Where did it begin? Where did I end? The life-saving heat sank into me and sloshed like boiling magma, warming the frigid expanse like the first ray of the sun across arctic permafrost. The thick layer of ice that had crept around and encased my heart, a breath away from freezing me completely, thawed again. Clouds of steam poured and rolled away from me in dense, white plumes.

This must be a hallucination, summoned up by my brain scrambling to make sense of the impossible and incomprehensible happening to me. But it felt so real, all of it. Especially the warmth that lit up my entire body from the inside like a blinding lantern conquering the darkness of deep night.