Chapter Twenty-three: Upturned

Chapter twenty -three: Upturned 

The power radiating from the ruby was no mere wave; it was a physical trespass. A psychic poison that hummed at the raw edge of his senses, a maddening thrum that clawed for entry, whispering promises of dominion into the darkest corners of his soul. Levistus stared at the monstrous, beating heart of damnation and saw not a gem, but a perfect reflection of its creator. Asmodeus. Both were exquisitely corrupted things, beautiful on the surface but seething with an unstable, voracious power that sought only to consume.

“Blasphemy.”

The ruby’s malice was a seductive song, a low, ancient whisper that slithered directly into his essence, bypassing his ears entirely. You could wield me, it hissed, the thought not his own but planted deep within the bedrock of his being. You could protect her. You could have her. All this power, yours for the taking. Take it. Take me. It was the ultimate temptation, a promise of the strength to shatter every cage, to claim every desire. For a single, terrifying pulse of time, he felt the pull of it—the profound and absolute allure of unmaking the world in his own image.

With a supreme act of will forged over millennia, he tore his focus away, wrenching his gaze toward the only anchor that had ever mattered. Benzosia. He drank in the sight of her, a desperate attempt to dislodge the encroaching madness. But the vision that met him offered no comfort, only a new and more profound horror. The same vacant, mesmerized glaze he felt clouding his own mind was mirrored in her eyes. Her defiant spark, the very flame he fought to protect, was wavering, being consumed by the gem’s oppressive aura. She was caught in the same psychic snare. It was feeding on them both.

His gaze flickered to their host. Bloise wasn't smirking; he was basking. The expression was one of pure, intellectual sadism—the look of an alchemist admiring the elegant precision of a slow-acting poison. It was the final, damning piece of the puzzle clicking into place. The tour, the boasts, the ruby—it was all a deliberate, calculated trap. Bloise hadn't just revealed a secret; he had activated his most exquisite weapon and was savoring its effects.

The pressure in the room intensified, becoming a physical weight that made his chest ache, the very air turning thick with insanity. A thousand tactical possibilities screamed through his mind. Attack? Folly. Bloise was a king in his own demesne, and they were flies in his web. Run. The thought was a cold, sharp command. He looked at Benzosia, at the vacant horror in her eyes, and all thought of his mission burned to ash. The war was worthless. Everything was worthless if she was lost to this corrupting influence. Nothing else mattered but getting her out.

He met her gaze across the chamber, and for an instant, the madness receded. He saw her, and she saw him. He was still trying to formulate a plan, to find the seam in their enemy's defenses, when her expression hardened with a terrifying resolve that outpaced all of his calculations.

“Such craftsmanship is truly… overwhelming,” Benzosia murmured, her voice carrying a thrill of awe that sent a blade of ice down his spine.

Her body swayed, a sudden, alarming list to the side as if the strings holding her upright had been cut. Terror—sharp, absolute, and overriding—shattered his tactical mind. He lunged, his only thought to catch her before she fell. “Careful!”

His arms closed around her, pulling her against his chest. For a fraction of a second, he felt the fragile warmth of her, the solid reality of her in his grasp. But she wasn't collapsing. Her body was a tense, coiled spring, using his own forward momentum to pivot them both. He felt her jerk sideways, a deliberate, powerful wrench that sent them stumbling into a tall, ornate brazier. He saw it then, a flash of pure, unholy glee in her eyes—a wicked grin that was there and gone in a heartbeat. He tightened his grip to stop her, but it was too late. Her final, decisive shove sent the burning brazier toppling.

For a single, frozen moment, the world stopped. The complex web of calculations running through his mind was obliterated by the sheer, beautiful audacity of her move. He had been playing chess, planning three moves ahead, and she had simply flipped the board. The shock was a physical jolt, a current that ran through him, followed by a slow, spreading heat in his chest that had nothing to do with the erupting flames. It was admiration—fierce and unwilling—for the magnificent, reckless creature in his arms.

The reaction was instantaneous and catastrophic.

Volatile, shimmering alchemical fire met the priceless, irreplaceable scrolls lining the walls of the vault. The ancient parchments, dry as tinder, vanished in a whoosh of unnatural, black-tinged flame.

For a heart-stopping moment, the liches froze. Then, a collective shriek of pure, academic horror tore through the chamber.

“The archives!” Bloise screamed, his beautiful glamour flickering violently to reveal the withered, rotting corpse beneath. “My work! You clumsy bitch, you’ll ruin everything!”

A slow, predatory grin spread across Levistus’s face. She had started a fire; he would give her an inferno. With a roar of exertion, he shoved a towering bookcase. It toppled with a groan of tortured wood, sending a shower of burning scrolls and papyrus into the center of the room, feeding the blaze.

All thoughts of capture were forgotten. The liches, their king included, became a frantic, chittering mob, swatting at the flames with bony hands and priceless robes, their greed for knowledge overriding all other instincts. It was the perfect distraction.

“This way!” Levistus grabbed Benzosia’s hand, his grip a band of iron, pulling her from the vault. But instead of heading for the exit, she twisted, pulling him toward the atelier.

“The scrolls, Levistus!” she cried over the din, her eyes blazing with a new, fierce clarity. “We need proof! No one will believe us without it!”

He saw the shift in her then, the horror replaced by a terrifying, exhilarating battle-lust. She darted towards a worktable, a fallen angel turned Valkyrie. He hadn’t planned for this, but he would be damned if he let her face it alone. He became a whirlwind of ice and steel, shattering the skeletal guardians that erupted from the floor, creating a desperate perimeter around her as she swept stacks of arcane scrolls and coded parchments into the folds of her gown, stuffing them into her bodice, her sleeves, anywhere they would fit.

A skeletal warrior lunged past his guard. He spun, his blade a whisper of ice, cleaving it in two. “Are you done?!”

“Almost!” she cried, grabbing one last, heavy roll of parchment.

That was all he needed. He seized her, pulling her flush against him. The chronos shard in his pocket burned with a cold that promised release and demanded a price. He pulled it free, the sliver of frozen time pulsing in his palm. A phantom echo of the bargain he’d struck for it—a memory of a shadowed bazaar and the taste of his own power being bartered away—flashed through his mind. A worthy price, for her.

He crushed it.

The world didn't tear; it shattered. Reality fractured like a pane of glass, the sound a deafening, silent shriek. For a heart-stopping instant, he saw a thousand different moments at once—the fall of a star, the forging of his blade, Benzosia’s laugh in a garden of impossible light. Then, with a violent lurch that felt like being turned inside out, they were pulled through a screaming vortex of time and space.

They landed hard, tumbling onto the cold stone floor of a small, windowless room—a safehouse he had prepared for a day he prayed would never come. For a moment, they just breathed, chests heaving, the fire of adrenaline in their blood. They had done it.

Then came a sound that was not a scream of terror, but a shriek of pure, unadulterated agony.

“Zosia?”

The scrolls, tucked against her body, did not smolder. They combusted. A brilliant, black-tinged flame erupted from her bodice and sleeves, instantly engulfing her gown. The cursed parchments, bound by Gehenna’s magic, refused to be stolen, immolating themselves and their thief. The fire clung to her, a living thing, searing delicate silk and perfect skin with equal, ravenous hunger.

For a single, frozen moment, Levistus’s mind went utterly blank. The millennia of tactical discipline, the icy control forged in Stygia—all of it incinerated in the face of this new, absolute horror. The scent of her burning flesh hit him, a sickening perfume that struck him directly in the soul.

“Off!” A primal roar of denial tore from his throat. He moved without thought, a creature of pure, protective fury. He was on her in an instant, his hands tearing at the burning fabric, at the flaming pieces of parchment that were melting into her skin. He ripped the gown from her body in great, scorched handfuls, heedless of the flames that licked at his own fingers, his only focus on extinguishing the fire that was consuming her. When the last flaming scrap was torn away, she stood before him, naked, shivering violently from shock and pain, angry red welts already blistering on her arms and torso.

“The proof…” she whispered, the words catching in her throat, thick with despair. “It’s gone. All of it.” A choked sob escaped her, a sound of utter defeat that shook him back to his senses.

“Look at me,” Levistus commanded, his voice a low, firm anchor in the storm of her grief. He gently tilted her chin, forcing her gaze to meet his. His eyes burned with an intensity that had nothing to do with loss and everything to do with her. “This was a victory. The proof, the plans, the matrix—all of it is ash. Bloise cannot replicate them. Asmodeus cannot claim them.”

“Are you certain?” she asked, her voice small, her gaze still clouded with failure.

“Cursed objects cannot be copied,” he said, then gently scooped her into his arms. She felt impossibly fragile, her trembling form a stark contrast to the unyielding strength in his. His touch was a fortress. “He can no longer make his stones, Benzosia,” he murmured against her hair, though he knew his words were only a logical balm, not an emotional one.

He felt her silent tears soak the skin of his neck, each one a scalding brand on his soul. He held her tighter, a desperate, futile attempt to become her shield, to absorb the tremors that wracked her fragile frame, to stand between her and the universe of cruelty that had brought her to this.

“Those burns need tending.”

He carried her deeper into the safehouse. The soft, rhythmic light from glowing crystals cast shifting patterns across her skin, highlighting the angry welts that marred her arms and torso. The air hummed with quiet, protective magic, but all he could focus on was the fragile weight in his arms. He passed strange, intricate clockwork devices that clicked and whirred, a quiet counterpoint to the frantic hammering of his own heart. This place, this desperate collection of untainted things he had hoarded, was a sanctuary he never imagined he would share. He laid her gently on a bed piled high with dark, soft furs.

“I apologize for the lack of luxury,” he said, his voice rough. “I never expected… you.”

The cool, still air was an accusation against the angry heat of her burns. Levistus moved with a precision born of a thousand battlefields, retrieving a small trunk. The scent of ice and mountain herbs—the scent of his home, of Stygia—cut through the lingering stench of burnt parchment and charred silk.

He knelt before her. His hands, hands that had shattered bone and commanded legions, felt clumsy and foreign. He dipped his fingers into the cool salve. “This will sting.”

He worked in silence, his focus absolute. This was not a queen he was tending; it was the fragile, living heart of his own damned existence. He watched as the Stygian herbs worked with impossible speed, the angry heat of her welts receding to a dull ache beneath the surface, leaving only the memory of pain. Every gentle stroke of his fingers was an apology, a vow, a prayer he hadn't known he was capable of forming.

When he was done, he prepared a cup of water, lacing it with a tincture to dull the pain and grant her the mercy of oblivion. “Drink.”

He held it to her lips. He saw the tension ease from her limbs as the potion took hold. For a long moment, the only sound was her soft breathing. He watched her, this exhausted, emotionally flayed creature, and felt something shift within him, a tectonic movement of ancient, frozen grief giving way to a fierce, protective fire.

“Levistus,” she whispered, her voice thick with the sedative. “We need to talk.”

“You should rest, Benzosia,” he urged, his storm-grey eyes dark with concern. “You are injured. Medicated.”

“No,” she insisted, her voice gaining a desperate strength. Her hand reached out, not for his hair, but to cup his jaw. Her touch was a brand, a jolt of heat that sent a tremor through his entire frame. “The ruby… it whispered to me.”

A cold dread, sharper than any Stygian ice, pierced him. He tried to pull back, but her grip held him fast.

“It promised me a life free from Asmodeus,” she confessed, her eyes wide with the remembered temptation. “A life with you. It showed me Eden—our Eden—flourishing. It showed me a future, a happily ever after… with you, with our child… and I was tempted. Gods, Levistus, almost beyond redemption.” Her voice broke on a sob. “I don't want to feel afraid anymore. All I ever wanted was to be loved.”

The confession was a cataclysm. A war raged within him. Honor screamed at him to pull away. She was injured. Vulnerable. Her mind clouded by potions and pain. To touch her now would be a violation, a betrayal of the very protection he sought to offer. It would make him no better than the monsters she had fled.

But her words… her plea… it was a fire that melted the last of his icy resolve. He had spent an eternity in a frozen hell of his own making, and she was the only warmth he had ever known. To deny her now, to offer her cold logic when she begged for love, felt like a cruelty more profound than any sin he had ever committed.

He looked at her, at the raw, desperate hope in her eyes, and knew he was lost. With a low groan that was equal parts surrender and triumph, he leaned forward. He did not claim her lips. Instead, he pressed a soft, reverent kiss to her forehead, then to each of her eyelids, then to the tear-stain on her cheek. His heart was at her feet.

“Benzosia,” he breathed against her skin, his voice thick with a millennia of unspoken longing. “You have always been loved.”

And with that, he captured her mouth, and in the secret, hidden heart of his last resort, he showed her what true worship felt like.

It had been long enough since he last touched her to convince himself it hadn’t been as wondrous as he remembered—but damn him, he’d been deluding himself. She was infinitely better. Her kiss was as ravenous as his own, lazy and deep, her tongue tangling with his, hands burying themselves in his hair, pulling, urging for more.

He stopped long enough to look her over, to be certain she was still lucid, still with him. Her turquoise eyes glittered with pure lust, not a drug-haze.

“Don’t stop, Levistus,” she whispered, tugging him back down.

He avoided her mouth, kissing a path down the column of her neck, across her collarbones, and down to her breast. He savored one peaked nipple and then the other, reveling in her husky moans, in the arch of her back encouraging more.

More… he wanted everything she was offering, more than he’d wanted anything in his entire existence. He'd never craved physical pleasure before; now he thought he might expire from the need of it… of her.

He kissed his way down her body, avoiding the faint pink patches of skin, over the soft swell of her belly. His tongue dipped into the recess of her navel, then licked a trail lower, pausing at the top of her mound. He looked up at her to find her watching him, her expression one of breathless anticipation.

“Are you with me?” he waited for her nod, shaky as it was. “I want this… need this…”

Her hand dug into his hair, yanking. “I need you inside me. Please…”

“I want to feel you on my tongue,” he rasped, the confession torn from him. “I… nothing has ever been better…” The memory of her pulsing against him haunted his dreams and waking thoughts. Knowing he could make her come undone gave him purpose.

He parted her with his fingers, circling her swelling bud with the tip of his tongue before sucking it into his mouth. Her mewling cry encouraged him, and with voracious intent, he devoured her. Licking, sucking… following her little cues to decipher her pleasure until she was swollen and weeping liquid honey, her panting breaths interrupted by soft moans. He sucked at her clit, rubbing the tip of it with his tongue until she tensed, letting out a guttural moan and releasing into ecstasy, crying out with each throb, her fingers ripping at his hair, making his cock ache with a violent need.

“Please… please…” her voice was hoarse, her grip on his hair unrelenting. “Need you…”

He rose to his knees, swiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and lined himself up with her entrance. Both of them held their breath as the tip of his cock nudged her slick heat.

“Fuck… you’re so wet. So hot…” Her core pulsed again, and he let out a hoarse shout, pushing himself into her, agonizingly—torturously—slow, savoring the feel of her tightness milking him inward. “Lord. Mercy,” he gasped, pressed to the hilt with her writhing underneath him.

“Wait,” he nearly whined, the pleasure unbelievable. “Be still… a moment…” He was going to come already, the feel of her wrapped around him was too much, so much better than anything. He’d never experienced pleasure of this magnitude…

She squeezed her thighs around his hips, the backs of her feet pushing at his rear. His hips bucked, pushing him deeper, his eyes rolling back as white-hot bliss consumed him. He thrust once, twice, then spent himself inside her, pumping her full as her legs tightened to keep him. He collapsed over her, wrapping his arms underneath to pull her up to meet his kiss, hungry—gluttonous. He wanted more, didn't think he’d ever get enough.

He kissed her as his cock revived, still deeply buried inside her, their mingled wetness leaking over the tops of his thighs as she pulled herself up to straddle him. She rocked her hips, then moved up and down, their kiss only breaking for quick moments so he could look down to where they were joined, still not believing this was real, that this was happening.

“Harder,” she cried out against his mouth. “I need you to…”

Her words were his undoing. With a growl, he tipped her onto her back and plunged in hard, deep, then again. She was crying out with every thrust, her skin flushed and dewy, her lips swollen from his kisses. Never had she looked so entrancing. Never had she appealed to him in such a way. She had always been this untouchable object of his affection, there to admire from a distance. Now he was slamming his cock into her while their intermingled juices pooled beneath her, debauched—and all for him. Filled with his essence, crying out for more. From him.

He grabbed the backs of her thighs, pressing her legs up toward her chest, trying to go as deep as he possibly could, thrusting ceaselessly. His thumbs flicked across her nipples as he hit a spot inside of her that made her gush, her moans turning frantic. He kept hitting that same spot until she arched up, screaming her release, nearly pushing him out as she tightened around him. The pulsing of her insides was all it took for him to reach his own end, the orgasm tearing through him with the finesse of an explosion.

He fell over her, pressing his face into her neck as he fought to regain some equilibrium, to breathe. Her legs slid down, wrapping around his lower back, her arms around his neck. She leaned over and kissed his eyebrow, making him smile. He was reluctant to pull out, to let her go, to ever let this moment end. Contentment. For the first time in his life, he wanted for nothing else but to exist in this moment, with her.

“I want more,” she rocked her hips up, giggling at his hissed breath.

“Hells, Benzosia,” he breathed, a low laugh rumbling in his chest. “You’ll be the death of me.” But damn him if he wasn’t ready for more. This, he thought, was a death he would welcome.