Chapter Twenty-six: The Siege of Avernus

Chapter Twenty-six- Siege of Avernus

The sky above was a gaping wound, bleeding bruised oranges and angry reds through a choking pall of smoke. Each ragged breath seared his lungs, the air a hot, greasy blanket of brimstone and iron, a taste on his tongue like the metallic tang of burnt blood. The very ground beneath them was a living, twitching thing, a constant, bone-jarring shudder from the endless march of the Abyss. But it was the sound that violated him most profoundly: a deafening shriek of metal on chitin, the guttural roars of a billion hungry mouths—each a promise of exquisite torment—and the piercing wails of souls being cruelly forged into new, monstrous shapes. At the head of his erinyes legion, Levistus felt the cacophony not merely as noise, but as a physical assault, a brutal desecration of the elegant silence he craved.

As anticipated, Zariel’s force was but a guttering candle against an endless storm. Her fury, a once-holy light, now sputtered with exhaustion, dimming with each swing as she fought beside him. A primordial horror, a writhing mass of screaming faces and splintered bone, tore through her embattled line. He watched, helpless, as she fell back, her celestial rage now a desperate, waning fire. One by one, the other archdukes had melted into the encroaching shadows, their whispered lies of "defense" a putrid stench of cowardice on the battlefield. They watched from their distant, gilded towers, content to let Avernus bleed, to let Zariel be the fragile shield that breaks the first brutal wave. Only Dispater, the paranoid lord of the iron city of Dis, and he, the prince of the Stygia remained, bound by their brittle, self-serving honor.

His Stygian blade, a shard of midnight ice, pulsed with a hungry, cold blue in the infernal chaos, biting deep into the monster's corrupted flesh. He carved a brutal path toward the treacherous heights, his eyes, burning with a singular, possessive obsession, fixed on the gaping maw of the gorge that cleaved the tormented land. This war, this endless, brutal conflict, was a maddening distraction. Every agonizing moment bled here was a stolen breath in a kingdom already plundered. A single thought, white-hot and possessive as a brand, seared through the frigid fog of his battle rage: Benzosia. A secret paradise woven from impossible life and forbidden desires flashed behind his eyes. The intoxicating scent of moon-lilies. The searing touch of her hand, a brand on his very soul. He remembered the defiant glint in her eye as she met Asmodeus's gaze, her subtle strength. She was the only thing of worth in all the nine circles of Hell. And he, a selfish prince of ice, would not sacrifice his singular treasure for a king he despised. Benzosia was the wife he could not yet claim, but one he would spill oceans of blood to one day embrace without shame or fear.

"My lord…a missive for you…"

A cackling, winged imp, its tiny body covered in weeping sores, materialized in a suffocating cloud of sulfurous smoke, its talons clutching a scroll sealed with the serpent crest of Asmodeus. He seized it, the parchment hot and slick in his hand. The serpent sigil seemed to writhe with a life of its own, its eyes glinting with a malevolent light, mirroring the serpentine coil of ambition in his own heart. He unrolled the scroll, and the infernal script scorched itself into his mind.

Collapse the chasm walls. Funnel them into the gorge. 

Let Zariel’s castle become her tomb.

"Preposterous!"

These words weren't a king's command; they were the venomous hiss of a coward. Asmodeus, a ruler consumed by contempt for his own dominion, was a monarch willing to immolate his kingdom for a game of spite. He saw it all—the insidious plot to loose the demons, a death warrant for his legions, a shortcut for the enemy, all engineered to watch Zariel's realm burn. But his mind, a frigid and precise mechanism, was already whirring, devising.

He would not grant Asmodeus the hollow triumph of overt treason, nor could he directly defy. A third, insidious path unfurled itself within his thoughts. Not treason. Strategic brilliance. He would not collapse the chasm. Instead he would use the abyss itself to reinforce it.

“Zariel!” His roar, a sound of ice and iron, ripped through the battlefield's din. "Hold the line! Reinforce the western flank! They will not pass!" He spun, his Stygian blade flaring with a cold, hungry blue light, and charged toward the most vulnerable point in the defenses.

He was a living battering ram, a point of freezing purpose in a sea of raw chaos. He fought, not to slay, but to shepherd. His blade tore through the smaller, ravenous abominations, carving a bloody path to the largest of the abyssal horrors. A grotesque beast with three mouths and skin like molten slag roared, its breath a foul torrent of fire and acid. Levistus moved with a predator's grace, dodging its clumsy lunges, luring it closer to the gorge's edge. The erinyes legion swarmed, their barbed whips snapping, driving the titanic monster forward. He heard the screaming and the splintering of bone as the beast's immense weight, aided by his ruthless herding, carried it over the precipice. It fell, its thrashing body catching on the sheer rock, its dying screams lost in the roar of the horde that piled on top of it. He repeated the tactic, drawing another leviathan to its doom, then another. The gorge, once a gaping maw of the damned, began to choke. Monstrous bodies, a grotesque mountain of tangled limbs and dead eyes, created a morbid dam.

"We have them!" a voice shrieked, belonging to an erinyes with a bloodstained face, her wings tattered.

He turned to her, a flicker of satisfaction in his eyes, but a hulking nalfeshnee, its grotesque skin a shifting mosaic of agonized faces, tore through the beleaguered line. The shriek of cracking Stygian plate was a death knell. A tusk, coated in the septic energies of the Abyss, ripped through him. He felt his Stygian ice, the frigid core of his power, fight a desperate, internal battle against the corrupting heat of the wound. The world dissolved into a maelstrom of white-hot agony, a symphony of fire and freezing despair. But through the chaos, one image remained, sharp and incandescent. Benzosia's face, radiant and defiant. A searing vision of her laughter in their forgotten garden.

Survive. The silent command ripped through his mind, a guttural plea echoing in the void. Survive for her.

He plummeted. The battle was a distant, dying screech. The last thing he saw before the crushing blackness claimed him was the wild, desperate fury in the eyes of his erinyes legionnaires as they surged, their devotion a ravenous beast devouring their fear, dragging his shattered husk back from the precipice of oblivion.