Chapter Sixteen: Lost In Paradise

Chapter Sixteen - Lost in Paradise

The drone of the throne room was a familiar and tiresome symphony of avarice. Levistus stood in the shadows, a practice of patience and observation, watching the preening nobles of the Nine Hells. They were vultures in fine silks, their conversations a meaningless flutter of boasts and whispered betrayals. Then, the symphony ceased. A sudden, sharp silence fell as the heavy doors at the far end of the chamber were flung open.

And there she was.

Panic was a wild bird, and it had burst from its cage. Benzosia. She ran, her hair a glorious, untamed waterfall, her feet bare against the cold obsidian, and her eyes—those celestial windows—were wide with a terror that struck a discordant chord deep within his frozen soul.

The vultures saw a meal. Whispers, slick and venomous, slithered through the air. Levistus heard Basileus’s name, spoken with the fawning sycophancy reserved for the newly powerful, followed by the cruel, high-pitched laughter of cowards. They were feasting on her humiliation, and a glacial rage, cold and precise, began to form in his chest. Asmodeus had gone too far. This public degradation was an act of profound, unforgivable cruelty.

Enough.

He detached himself from the shadows, his movements a deliberate counterpoint to the room's chaotic energy. The sea of courtiers parted before him, their whispers dying on their lips as he passed. They knew his quiet was more dangerous than their noise. He stopped before her, taking in the entirety of her dishevelment, not as a flaw, but as the evidence of a battle hard-fought. He saw no weakness. He saw a queen cornered by dogs.

He bowed his head slightly, his voice pitched for her ears alone, yet carrying an authority that commanded the space around them. "Your Majesty, you are unwell. Allow me to assist you."

He gave her no time to refuse. With a subtle turn, he became her shield, blocking the rapacious gazes of the court. He offered his arm. It was a formal gesture, an anchor in the storm he knew was raging inside her. Numbly, her fingers curled around his forearm, and he felt the faint tremor in her touch. He guided her away, his presence a clear dismissal to the gawking nobles. Let them stare. They were seeing their queen under his protection now.

In the silence of the antechamber, he closed the door, muffling the world away. He gestured to a stone bench. "Please."

Her voice was brittle, like ice threatening to crack. "I am deeply ashamed you witnessed that. How weak, how utterly broken I must have seemed to you."

"I saw a queen cornered by cowards," he corrected, and the ferocity that laced his quiet words surprised even him. "There is no weakness in that."

The silence that followed was heavy with all the things he had kept locked away for millennia. She looked at him then, her gaze sharpening, the warrior queen emerging from the shell of the frightened woman. "Tell me honestly, Lord Levistus. Am I also a steppingstone for you? Do you wish to use my disgrace to heighten your own ambitions?”

The question was a shard of ice, direct and piercing. It was a test he had not anticipated, but one he would not fail. He met her gaze. "No." The word was absolute, a truth forged in eons of lonely observation. "I never would have wished this for you. When I still thought of the Heavens, I imagined you there, radiant and happy."

The confession hung in the air, an impossible bridge between them. "You… imagined me?" she whispered, the words catching in her throat.

"The more I learn of your situation, the more my hope for that outcome diminishes," he admitted, the truth a bitter taste.

She looked away. “When I Fell… it was with a heart full of love. Daft of me, I know.”

“It is never daft to yearn for love.” The words came unbidden, a sentiment he thought long dead within him.

“Naïve, at the very least,” she countered, looking at him. The intensity in his expression made her trail off. “Now my hopes have dwindled. Now, I would settle for some respect. To be seen as an equal in his eyes. To just… be seen.”

I see you. The thought was a roar in the stillness of his mind. He saw more than she knew. He saw the divine light she tried to hide, the strength she thought was broken, the power she had yet to comprehend. An impulse, sharp and reckless, overrode a lifetime of control. He raised his hand and brushed a stray strand of her dark hair from her cheek. Her skin was warm, alive. He felt a dizzying flutter, a current of heat that threatened to thaw the glacier of his heart.

She fought for composure for a few long moments. Then, drawing on a strength she didn’t know she possessed, she stood, her head held high, a queen not of Hell, but of her own shattered heart. "Levistus, come with me."

It was not a request. It was a gauntlet. An invitation to a path from which there would be no return. His mind, ever the strategist, raced through a thousand calculations, a thousand risks. They all led to the same conclusion. He gave a single, sharp nod.

He followed her back into the labyrinth. The oppressive atmosphere of the Malsheem, which he had never learned to fully tolerate, felt suffocating. It was a tomb, and she was alive, trapped within.

“I could have sworn it was this way,” she muttered, her weary desperation resonating with something cold and long-dormant within his soul. “Past the grotesque, leering frame with the animated, dancing stone golems.” A sigh, fragile and heavy with a defeat he found himself increasingly unwilling to witness, escaped her. “Honestly, I’m not certain I could find my own chambers again without a divine map.”

A ghost of a smile touched Levistus’s lips. "There is no shame in requiring assistance, Benzosia. Even for a queen." He tapped an obsidian mirror, its surface a void that greedily drank the meager, flickering light.

Before she could reply, the imp materialized. “The queen has been walking a long time,” its voice grated.

"Indeed," Benzosia conceded. “Would you be so kind as to show us the way again? To the secret place?” He watched as she deftly bribed and commanded the creature, first with gold, then with a ruby plucked from her gown. Clever. Resourceful. She was adapting.

The imp led them to a hidden door, unassuming and strange. As she reached for the key, another impulse, stronger this time, seized him. He placed his hand on the small of her back. He felt her entire body jolt, a tremor of pure shock that ran straight through his arm and into his chest. For one breathtaking moment, she leaned into the touch, a silent, desperate plea for comfort.

"It is… imperative that you do, Benzosia,” he whispered, his voice dangerously close. “This place… it’s concealed within a pocket dimension. I suspect not even Asmodeus, in all his suffocating paranoia, is aware of its miraculous presence.”

She dismissed the imp and opened the door. The gloom beyond was tangible. He took her hand, his grip more of a possessive claim than a comfort, and led her through.

And then… they emerged.

His mind, which had processed the fall of stars and the birth of horrors, simply… stopped. He halted, his breath snagging as if caught on a hidden barb of pure, unadulterated astonishment. The air, clean and sweet, was an assault. After millennia of breathing the stagnant rot of Hell, this purity was a physical shock, almost painful in its intensity. It was not a garden. It was a miracle. A rebellion. Trees of spun moonlight, fruits glowing with internal fire, flowers of impossible color breathing a perfume of pure creation. Waterfalls like liquid crystal sang a hymn of resilience. In the heart of Hell's despair, she had created Eden.

He reached out a hand, noting with a detached sense of surprise that it trembled faintly—a betrayal of the iron control he usually maintained. His fingers, accustomed to the biting chill of Stygian iron and souls frozen mid-scream, brushed against a silver leaf. The surface was cool, but it was the coolness of life, not of death. It felt... vibrant. He inhaled, and the fragrance of untainted creation—of hope itself—seared his lungs, a scent that had no place in the Nine Hells, a scent he thought lost to memory forever. For eons, even in his memories of Heaven, he could feel His presence—the indelible, omnipresent mark of our heavenly father. But here…

He turned to her, his cold control shattered by a profound, soul-shaking awe. "It is your essence I sense here, Benzosia. Woven into the very air." His gaze was no longer that of a lord or a schemer. It was the gaze of a worshipper. "You have wrought a true miracle."

The cold rage he felt toward Asmodeus ignited into a white-hot star of hatred. He had taken this—this creator of wonders, this goddess—and had tried to break her, to make her nothing more than a beautiful possession. He was a fool.

“Since Asmodeus does not allow me to leave the Malsheem often, we could meet here,” she suggested. The invitation was a declaration of war.

“If you promise to keep me… fully informed,” she continued. “Lucifer’s fate is as much my concern as it is his… and, it now appears, yours.”

She was offering an alliance. A conspiracy. His fingers brushed her hair again, a deliberate act this time. “Azadiel… fears for your safety. Or perhaps,” he said, his voice a low vibration, "he fears what you are becoming." Asmodeus was not a forgiving king, and the penalty for treason was an agony beyond imagination. But the thought of leaving her to face him alone was now impossible.

“But it isn’t even rightfully his,” she retorted. “Asmodeus is merely… holding the seat warm for Lucifer.”

Her lingering naivety was a painful reminder of the angel she had been. "Not anymore, Benzosia," he said, his voice hardening with grim reality. "He is far less, and infinitely more, than your memories allow him to be." The Asmodeus she loved was a ghost. The one who ruled them was a monster.

“Gadreel… was never your most significant, nor your most dangerous, threat.” He paused, his voice dropping. “Your wings… May I… see them again? Here? In the light you’ve created?”

She nodded. Vast, midnight wings, edged in silver, unfurled to catch the ethereal glow. The sight was a physical blow. She was not a fallen angel. She was a dark goddess, radiant in her own impossible paradise, crowned in shadows and light. She had not been diminished. She had become.

The glacier in his soul finally broke. He sank to one knee, not in supplication to a queen, but in sheer awe of the miracle before him. “Benzosia…” Her name was a prayer.

A surge of power, wild and untamed, erupted from him. His own wings, vast and scaled like the ancient glaciers of Stygia, burst forth. He rose, a predator unchained, and seized the moment. "Come," he commanded, and launched himself into the pearlescent sky of Eden, pulling her with him.

A startled cry was torn from her lips. "Trust me!" he roared over the wind, beating his wings to create an updraft that lifted her, supported her. "Feel it, Benzosia! This sky belongs to no one but us!"

Hesitantly, then with a surge of power, her own magnificent wings caught the air. A laugh, joyous and incredulous, bubbled from her lips. They soared, they danced, they were free. He pulled her closer, the universe narrowing to her face, wild and exultant, his storm-tossed eyes burning with a clear, fierce light that was all for her.

“Do you… desire me, Levistus?” she whispered against the wind.

The truth, raw and unvarnished, broke free. “Yes.”

He saw the shock, the immediate fear that flashed in her eyes. Asmodeus. The name was a phantom between them. "Oh," she breathed. "I shouldn’t have asked… you shouldn’t have said…"

"Maddeningly," he confessed, the word a rough, unvarnished truth ripped from his very core. "Desperately. Completely." He leaned closer, the universe narrowing to the space between their lips. "Benzosia, damnation has been my reality for an age. It could never darken my heart to you, because in all that darkness, you were the only memory of light."

A soft sound escaped her, the snap of a final tether to reason. Instead of answering, Benzosia closed the small distance separating them. She pressed her lips to his.

For one frozen instant, he was still. A thousand years of discipline, of icy control forged in the desolate wastes of Stygia, screamed at him to pull away. This was madness. This was ruin. Then, as if a dam of eons had burst, instinct—raw, untamed after millennia of iron-willed denial—took over. The fortress of his soul, built from pride and eternal winter, didn't just crack; it was obliterated. He kissed her back, not gently, but with a desperate, hungry collision that echoed her own plea. It was the kiss of a drowning man finding air, of a damned soul tasting grace, a raw, possessive claiming that he knew, with terrifying certainty, would irrevocably brand them both. With a small huff, she ran a hand up into his hair, pulling his head down, crushing their lips together as she melted against him. It was a kiss that tasted of stolen moments and impossible dreams, of shared damnation and the defiant beauty of a paradise forged in despair.

Her hands wandered down his chest, pulling at his shirt. The cool press of her fingers against his bare skin jolt him. This is too much. Too fast. What would Asmodeus do to her if he knew? He gasped, pulling back slightly, his hand covering hers, stilling her movements. “Stop.”

Devastation flashed across her expression. “This was my mistake–” she began, her face hidden by her hair. “I should not have kissed you–”

He pulled her against his body once more, and kissed her, stealing her thought and breath until she became quiet, until her skin burned hotly and her body shuddered against his. “Now I have kissed you,” he said, his voice low and firm. “And believe me when I say, it was no mistake.”

“He will end us.”

“He will not know.” In the secrecy of paradise, high in its pure, impossible sky, their stolen fire was a glorious, terrifying burning—a fire that would forever brand them both.