Through Flame and Blade

Ch. 50 Darkness

*Chiara

Chiara was trapped in a nightmare of death and cruelty. She'd been trapped before in different ways. By chains in the dungeon, or by expectations and traditions in the angel world. But nothing like this.

Nothing was like being trapped inside the Tenebrist—her broken angelii.

Nothing was like the pool of tar that sucked her down into half-sleeping, suffocating darkness while she knew, while she watched the horror that her transformed body unleashed on the world.

She killed demons by the hundreds. The Tenebrist froze them slowly, letting them suffer as she pulled them inside out with the cold until they hardened to crackling ice.

But worse, she knew the Tenebrist wouldn't stop with demons on the battlefield. Angels hovered on the horizon, wings flashing with sunlight.

Then there were the rifts that opened to the Midlands, where the soft, weak humans dwelled.....

And there was Logan, who had crawled away from her in fear and disgust, leaving a dark red trail of flowing blood on the ground.

When she was done here, she would creep through the bowels of Hell, hunting and killing until no creature remained. She would cross the bridge through the portal to the realm of Heaven and tear it apart stone by stone, angel by angel.

She would never stop.

And Chiara watched it all while drowning in the thick pool of her subconscious, caught in a nightmare she couldn't control.

Images from the Tenebrist came to her—the destruction that thing inflicted. Memories, too, though, swamped her. Moments she thought were lost to the past came back to her now. Sparring with Ythaniel when she was little, the crack-smack of wooden swords echoing in the marble courtyard of their home. Mother calling for her to come in and finish her philosophy reading.

"You'll be the best fighter of all of us," Ythaniel whispered, as she pouted. "Give it time. You'll show everyone who you truly are."

Ythaniel. Chiara cried alone. I'm still here. I'm not a monster!

Then Daviid was there, walking from out of the dark tunnel at the edge of the training arena. "It's not my job to train you. It's my job to send you running back home if you aren't fit to be a soldier. You want to fight demons? Of course you do, but, demons are not the worst creatures you'll face."

Tenebrist. The angels would crash against her like waves of the ocean, breaking and dying at her feet, their courage driving them on and on until none were left.

Chiara sunk deeper into the suffocating sludge, misery consuming her.

Another memory—Logan in the Hall of Greed, a stolen crown on his head. He twirled a massive broad sword in his hand, and grinned wide at her.

Then Zeigfel was whispering in her ear, "You will never escape."

"Logan," she gasped, begging him to find her, to help her. She couldn't breathe. Thick sludgy tar-like goo filled her mouth. She choked. Mired in the sucking black liquid of her inner self, she flailed. "Logan!"

She went under into blackness. There, she only saw the visions of horror that the Tenebrist fed her from the real world.

The battlefield was a wasteland of rocks, frozen corpses, broken trees, and the remaining hordes of demons clinging to the side of the mountain.

No. There were others still alive—a sky-full of angels in full angelii.

The Four Horsemen must have fled, the cowards.