Chapter Twenty-nine: Ruby of Ruin

Chapter Twenty-nine: Ruby of Ruin

The great chamber was silent, thick with the suffocating terror of the summoned lords, but it was not the silence that crippled Levistus. It was the presence of Benzosia.

She sat on the smaller seat, adjacent to the throne, her body held with a terrifying rigidity, exposed in the flimsy silk of her nightgown. His gaze devoured the sight of her: the dark bruises of Asmodeus’s grip on her arm, the fierce, defiant lift of her chin, and the terror that flickered—but never truly conquered—in her own eyes. He knew that body, knew every secret curve, every fragile point of vulnerability. Seeing her so openly violated, yet still radiating the ancient, fierce power of her celestial blood, ignited a complex, brutal cocktail of protective rage and damning, consuming love within him.

The air in the Malsheem’s war council chamber tasted of salt and fear, but the flavor was dull on Levistus’s tongue. He stood, his head bowed, his heart a battlefield, his mind a fortress of ice. He hated this suffocating paralysis, the powerlessness of his position. The cacophony of the court's dread—Mammon’s blatant cowardice, Dispater’s calculating dread—was a feverish, discordant vibration that laid their souls bare. This psychic noise, sharp and grating, was a constant reminder of the failure of the Hells, yet he forced himself to endure it.

"Are all assembled?" Asmodeus's voice resonated not through the air, but directly within the minds of those gathered. His chilling stillness was infinitely more terrifying than his legendary rage.

Reality tore open in the center of the room with a sound like the shriek of tearing flesh. A battered Erinyes General, one of Zariel's fiercest commanders, stumbled through the pulsing void. Her intricate armor was cracked, weeping black ichor, and her magnificent black, scaled wings were broken, bent at impossible angles as if she had been torn from the sky. She collapsed onto the polished floor, a gruesome monument to a battle irrevocably lost.

"My liege!" The Erinyes' voice was a ragged croak, thin with failure. "The outer walls of Dis... breached! The abyssal horde... it is numberless, advancing on Nessus!" The sheer terror in her shriek tore through the council's silence, a stark herald of doom.

Mammon shot to his feet, his gilded form trembling violently. “Your soul stones have brought the wrath of the Abyss upon us! We are undone!” his voice cut through the burgeoning chaos, a terrified squeal laced with genuine horror.

“You’ve always thought too small, Mammon. Have some faith.” Asmodeus’s voice was not a shout, but a chilling, silken calm that promised Levistus the worst was yet to come.

Mammon ignored him, his fear overriding millennia of servitude. “Send more of your legions, Zariel! If the Nessus falls, we all burn!”

"My legions are already bleeding into the dust of Avernus!" Zariel snarled from her swirling portal, her warrior's rage a tangible, burning heat. "And you dare question my defense, Mammon? Your coin could buy a thousand legions, yet you cling to it while Hell burns! This realm is consuming us because of your avarice!"

"It doesn't matter!" Dispater's voice, a low rumble of polished granite, sliced through the argument. "The Abyss is a plague, a mindless, endless hoard. This is not a battle we can win. This is dissolution. Our armies mean nothing now."

Levistus glanced at Zariel. A silent conversation, a perfect, chilling understanding, passed between them: Get her out. Their obedience was sworn to this King, but their shared loyalty remained to the Morningstar.

Asmodeus’s cold, diamond-hard gaze settled on his herald. “Basileus, go fetch,” he commanded, the hungry glee in his eyes a macabre delight that sent a fresh wave of unease through Levistus.

The terror in his gut coalesced into a single, frantic word. Impossible. He forced the dread down, trying to grasp the facts. He’d witnessed the scrolls burn, treated the dark marks they left on Benzosia’s body, and Bloise himself had admitted the crystal was not yet completed. It cannot be. The truth was a physical force, heavier than any lie, settling in his stomach.

Basileus returned in a blur of shadow, his arms cradling an object wrapped in velvet the color of dried blood. It was held with the chilling reverence of a priest presenting a blasphemous relic. The velvet did not merely lie there; it pulsated, the shape beneath it a throbbing, contained chaos. A low, insistent hum, like the buzzing of a thousand tormented flies in a charnel house, grated on his very bones, a sound that violated his very core.

“Impossible.” The word was a rasp of disbelief that threatened to choke him.

A wave of nauseating corruption, palpable and cloying, rolled off it, a stench of rot and decay that threatened to unravel Levistus's sanity. His blood ran cold as a premonition of utter destruction seized him. A quick, desperate glance at Benzosia confirmed his terror. Her eyes, wide and horrified, were fixed on the wrapped object, her teeth digging into her bottom lip, drawing a bead of crimson.

The Ruby of Ruin.

Basileus drew the blood-red velvet aside, and the chamber plunged into an unnatural, agonizing stillness. The colossal ruby flared, a monstrous, black-hearted sun that thrummed with the condensed corruption of a fallen Seraphim. It was not merely a weapon; it was an undoing, resonating with a perfect, crushing order that grated against the chaotic essence of Levistus's soul.

The air fractured into a single, agonizing thrum. With a gesture both savage and majestic, Asmodeus seized the ruby, lifting the stone aloft in a fist crackling with pure celestial power.

He did not crush it; instead, the colossal crystal flared to life in his grip, becoming the ultimate, terrifying conduit. Through it, he drew upon the entropic corruption—the true, poisonous energy source of the Hells. The power did not enter him fully, but flowed through him, transforming him not by consumption, but by absolute, cosmic command. Asmodeus shuddered, a sound of pure, dark ecstasy, as the limitless, dark energy obeyed his will. Levistus watched in existential terror as Asmodeus's form swelled, briefly holding the shadow of cosmic scale—the terrifying reflection of a god who had just unbound himself from all natural law, a threat greater than the Hells could possibly contain.

The psychic shockwave that followed was not a sound, but a void of feeling that struck Levistus like a physical blow, threatening to empty his very existence. He watched, unable to look away, as the unmaking unfolded. The raw, shrieking power of the Abyss was instantly snuffed out. Obsidian mountains did not crumble—they instantaneously powdered, the dust collapsing into the voids beneath. Rivers of fire recoiled, leaving behind vast, desolate beds of blackened glass. The endless tide of the primordial hordes was violently unstitched, their essence dissolving into vanishing motes of grey dust, settling on the new, silent plains before being erased entirely, as if they had never been.

This was not an end, not a conclusion to a war. This was its unmaking.

A terrifying vacuum where sound had been deliberately, brutally unmade followed. Asmodeus lowered the empty fist, his smile a cruel, perfect sculpture carved in triumph. 

"Do you finally understand the difference between a king and a god?" he murmured, his voice a soft, reasonable sound that was more terrifying than any roar. "I am your god now. I am the Law."

He then turned his attention to Benzosia, his smile widening into a possessive smirk as he placed a large, possessive hand on her belly. 

"The queen is with child, a Morningstar prince," Asmodeus announced, his voice vibrating with absolute, cold triumph, "and through him, I will usher in a new era. An era where corruption reigns both the mortal and infernal Realms."

The realization hit Levistus with the finality of a collapsing star. His fortress of ice shattered completely, exposing a raw, visceral core of horror and agonizing, absolute certainty. The ice in his soul fractured, the pieces falling away to reveal the devastating truth that transcended all logic and strategy. It was a new, terrible equation: one that had unmade not just Hell, but his entire existence.

A child. His love, his life, his breath—she was carrying the heir to this monster, yet the sacred blood thrumming in her veins and the secret tremor in his heart told him the horrifying, beautiful truth: the heir the monster claimed could very well be his own.