Chapter Thirty Eight: Rage Unleashed

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Rage Unleashed

Pain, sharper and deeper than the frozen shards of Stygia, carved through Levistus’s chest as he lowered Benzosia’s body onto the mosses. The weight of her—usually so light, so ethereal—felt like a mountain of lead in his arms. He laid her at the foot of her favorite tree, the silver-leafed willow that had always seemed to bow in her presence. Its branches wept in silence, the only sound the frantic, ragged thrum of his own heart. With trembling fingers, he pushed her eyelids down, forever shuttering that precise, haunting shade of turquoise.

The world felt smaller. The air in the garden, once sweet with her essence, now tasted of copper and ash. The last words she had whispered were already beginning to slip through the cracks of his breaking mind, like water through a sieve. The lingering heat of her lips was a ghost-burn on his own, fading into the cool dampness of the air. Grief, raw and absolute, threatened to drown him, but beneath the sorrow, a different kind of heat was clawing its way to the surface. A lifeline he could cling to when death was no option.

Rage.

His shirt was heavy, drenched in the blood of his dying love, the fabric plastered to his skin like a second, grisly layer of armor. His hands were coated in the drying warmth of it. He watched the dark fluid thicken into a tacky, iron-scented crust on his knuckles. He found himself clenching his fists not just in anger, but to keep the substance from flaking away. He wanted to keep her on him. He wanted to stain his soul with her.

Lucifer.

The Morningstar would answer for this. He was the only one with the power to have intervened, yet he had discarded her life as if it were a spent candle. He was as complicit as Asmodeus—his was not the hand that held the blade, but it was the hand that had stayed folded in the shadows while she bled.

The transition was a violent tearing of reality. The chaotic, sulfurous heat of the Malsheem vanished, yielding to a silence so profound it felt like a mockery. The air in Lucifer’s pocket dimension smelled of ancient vellum, cold woodsmoke, and a maddening, sterile peace. It was the scent of apathy, and it set Levistus’s nerves on fire. All his legendary discipline—the icy control forged in the howling wastes of the Fourth Circle—was currently boiling, a sub-zero supernova ignited by a single, desperate thought:

Benzosia.

His gaze swept the room. It was a fire-lit study, a monument to scholarly indifference. And there he was.

Lucifer, the Light-Bringer, the First of the Fallen, sat in a high-backed velvet chair. He was lazily paging through a mortal’s leather-bound volume—Dante’s Inferno, Levistus noted with a fresh surge of bile. Lucifer looked up, a slow, practiced smirk spreading across his perfect features, only to have it falter when he saw the gore-slicked nightmare standing in his sanctum.

“Whose blood?” Lucifer asked. His voice was unyielding, blank as a fresh grave.

That was the spark.

The universe narrowed until the only thing that existed was the blue of Lucifer’s eyes. They were close to hers, but the shade was wrong. It was hard, clinical, and devoid of her warmth. Thought ceased. Strategy, his greatest weapon, vanished. There was only a white-hot, singular impulse.

“This is your fault!”

Levistus didn’t remember crossing the floor. One moment he was by the portal; the next, his fist was connecting with Lucifer’s jaw. There was a satisfying, brutal crunch of bone, and the book went flying into the shadows. “She asked you for help! She begged for protection, and you couldn’t be bothered to look away from your own reflection!”

He dragged the Archangel from the chair by his fine silks, his own voice a guttural roar he didn't recognize.

“She was your sister! Your own blood! She is DEAD!” Levistus bellowed, another blow landing high on Lucifer’s cheekbone, splitting the perfect skin. “Asmodeus butchered her while you sat here reading?”

He punctuated the scream by slamming Lucifer’s head against the ornate stonework of the hearth. The sound of skull meeting stone echoed through the silent dimension, a dull thud that vibrated up Levistus’s arms.

“Stop!” Lucifer wheezed, coughing up a spray of gold-flecked crimson. “What…?”

Levistus didn't stop. He felt ribs give way under his relentless assault. He heard the wet-leather sound of his knuckles splitting against angelic flesh, mixing his own blood with hers and Lucifer’s. He hit him again and again, fueled by the memory of Benzosia’s last breath, of the life being drained into the dirt of the Malsheem.

Through it all, Lucifer did not fight back. He took every blow, his body breaking, his blood staining the priceless rug a deep, shocking crimson.

Then, Lucifer began to laugh.

It was a jagged, rattling sound that vibrated through the soles of Levistus’s boots. He faltered, his fist raised for a blow that would have surely crushed the Morningstar’s windpipe, but the sheer wrongness of that mirth stayed his hand.

"Go ahead," Lucifer choked out, a triumphant glint in his bloodied eyes. "Kill me. Do it! It would be the kindest thing anyone has done for me in millennia!"

The defiance in the words forced Levistus to actually look. As his fury ebbed, the air in the room felt… thin. Levistus was the Lord of Stygia; he was intimately familiar with how power felt when it moved—the chill of a gathering storm, the pressure of a rising tide. But the air around Lucifer wasn't rising. It was falling. There was a literal pressure drop in his ears, a vacuum forming where divinity should have been.

He realized now why Lucifer wasn't fighting back. It wasn't just penance or shock; the Archangel was physically hollow. Levistus’s preternatural senses, honed by eons of watching for the slightest shift in the political winds of Hell, began to trace the currents of the room. The immense, celestial energy that should have been radiating from the King of Hell was being pulled away in a silent, violent stream.

It was a magical vortex, invisible to the eye, but to Levistus, it felt like a physical weight being dragged across his skin. Every ounce of Lucifer’s essence was being siphoned, channeled with agonizing precision toward a single, innocuous object resting on the mantle: a simple, unadorned wooden box.

The box didn't glow. It didn't hum. It simply existed with a gravity that felt heavier than the mountains of the Nine Hells combined. Levistus felt a shiver of ancient, primal trepidation crawl down his spine. He knew of only one presence that could consume such a vast, continuous sacrifice of power.

“What’s in the box, Lucifer?” he asked, his voice becoming dangerously quiet as he stepped back from the broken form of the once mighty King.

Through split lips, Lucifer gave a triumphant, bloody grin. “Victory,” he rasped. “And damnation. The reason I cannot leave this circle.”

Lucifer pulled himself to his knees, clutching the edge of the mantle, staring at the box as if it were a lover. “I succeeded, Levistus. I have defeated God.”

He reached out, giving the wood a possessive pat before leaning back, his breath coming in shallow hitches as he tried to straighten his ruined clothes.

“I see.” The revelation was a cataclysm. Lucifer hadn’t been hiding; he’d been a jailer. He had sacrificed his Realm, his allies, his family—Benzosia’s very life—for a prideful vendetta against a Father who had long forsaken them.

The rage Levistus thought he had spent returned, no longer a simple fury, but a cosmic force. He unleashed a singular, overwhelming blast of Stygian power—not at the broken angel who so clearly welcomed his own end, but at the monument to his betrayal.

“NO!” Lucifer lunged, but his body was too shattered to move in time.

The box flew through the air, tumbling end over end before splintering against the hearthstone.

There was no explosion. No thunder. There was only a wave of silent, blinding white light that consumed the room, followed by a sudden, profound emptiness. It was the sound of a thousand bells falling silent at once. It felt as though a weight had been lifted from the world, and yet, the resulting void was terrifying—a God-shaped hole in the fabric of existence that made the soul ache with vertigo.

“That was all there was left of Him,” Lucifer glowered, staring at the splinters of the box. “He won’t be able to gather Himself back—”

“Did you fucking hear me?” Levistus stepped into Lucifer’s space, his voice trembling. He didn't care about the void. He didn't care about the silence. “Asmodeus killed Benzosia! I am wearing her blood! I don't give a single shit about your Father, or your throne, or your petty cosmic balance. I want her death avenged!”

“Benzosia is dead?”

A new voice cut through the tension. Azadiel—Michael—stood in the doorway. He looked as though he had just awoken from a deep, mystical slumber, his eyes clouded with the backlash of the box’s destruction. “When? How… Lucifer, what have you done?”

“I killed God,” Lucifer said, his voice regaining a hint of its old silk. “Technically, the final blow was Levistus's. But the architecture of the kill? That was mine.”

“You… what?” Azadiel’s hands dropped. He staggered back, his boots scuffing the crimson-stained rug as if the very ground had turned to glass. The divine light that usually hummed beneath his skin flickered, then dimmed, leaving his features grey and haggard. For an immortal, he suddenly looked very old.

Lucifer straightened his collar, clearing his throat of blood. “It had to be done.”

“Bullshit,” Azadiel whispered hoarsely. “There is a balance, Lucifer. A structure…”

Lucifer’s lips twisted into a smug, bloodied smile. His eyes were filled with the same unquenchable fire that had started the First War. “The balance? It’s an illusion. Our Father crafted His throne through our divinity. He devoured Asherah, absorbed her essence, and then unleashed those primates onto Gaia to harvest their souls. He is not a God; He is a parasite.”

“I do not give a damn about God or His crimes,” Levistus snapped. “This is about you, Lucifer. Your inaction makes you complicit in her death.”

“You still don’t see the bigger picture,” Lucifer answered, his voice turning snarl-sharp. “This is about all of us, about finally being free.”

“You’re delusional. You got your revenge and won nothing. You created a power void—one that Asmodeus is now looking to fill.”

"He wants to become a God.” Azadiel stated the impossible, yet somehow he knew it was the truth.

“Exactly.”  Lucifer smiled conspiratorially, his teeth stained red. “Lucky for us, I have figured out how to contain Gods.”

“She is truly gone?” There was the heaviness of acceptance in Azadiel’s voice, a shattering of the hope he’d carried for his sister.

Levistus’s legs finally gave out, and he collapsed onto his haunches, burying his face in his blood-stained hands. “You knew all along that she would die?” The rage was gone, leaving only the hollow, aching misery of the truth.

“I knew her fate should she ever fall from the Heavens.” Lucifer picked up a crystal decanter of amber liquid and drank straight from it, wincing as the alcohol hit his split lip. “So I took  the necessary steps to ensure her soul had an anchor. She isn’t lost to us. Not permanently.”

“The garden.” Levistus looked up, his eyes rimmed with ice and tears. He gripped his blood-crusted shirt, feeling the stiffness of the fabric. “You bound her to the soil? You tied her to a patch of dirt?”

“I bound her light to the only thing in this wretched Realm she ever truly loved, besides you, I suppose,” Lucifer said, his voice dropping to a low, jagged rasp.

“Your foresight is just another brand of cruelty, Lucifer.” Levistus’s jaw set, his grief sharpening into a lethal focus. “If she is not lost to us, then get her back.”

“While Asmodeus still lives and breathes? Surely not.” Lucifer passed the bottle to Azadiel, who took a heavy swallow before handing it down to Levistus. “There are plots yet to plan, and pawns who need to be put in place.” He nudged him to accept, a quiet bidding for him to understand the gravity of the war they were in. “We must prepare the world for her return.”