by Thomas Green
She turned slowly, towering above Aisling. “You will marry Jarl Bjorn.”
The spell ended, illusion disappearing, and Katherine was back to her old clothes, standing in a simple room covered with runes. Painfully, Aisling faded to memory, a mere reflection of the daughter Katherine so wanted.
It hurt. More than anything she ever experienced. A moment ago, she was a queen wedding away a beautiful daughter, planning grandchildren. Now, she was back to being an ordinary paladin.
The gates behind and in front of her opened. She passed the trial.
Lucas 15
I PASSED THROUGH THE GATE OF KINGS. Katherine tried to clear herself with a spell, but dried tears covered her freckled face.
Whatever happened inside, it was going to mark her, which was why I wanted to bring someone else for this to begin with. “You alright?” I asked as I approached her.
“Yeah,” Katherine said feebly, “I’m fine now.”
She wasn’t. But I let it be at that, motioning with my head for the others to follow. I noticed this in-between, square chamber had slight gaps between the floor and the walls. So did the ceiling, so in case someone failed the trial, this room would crush the person like a hydraulic press.
Trisha was the first to enter, stamping her staff on the floor with every step. She kept her expression neutral until she got close to Katherine, then her face twisted into a smirk. “You look like you’ve just realized the difference between who you are and who you’re supposed to be. Sucks, doesn’t it?”
“Let her be, Trisha,” I whispered.
“Of course,” Trisha said, smiling, and continued along.
Amaranta rushed to Katherine to help her, and I left them to that, passing through the gate. We entered a hall strikingly similar to one we passed before, having four exits and a pedestal between them. This time, the pedestal was empty though. Above it shone a text made of light. ‘You’ve brought the yarn, right?’
I glanced at the others. “Did we?”
Joseph’s eyes widened. “I… I… I… dropped it when falling through to the previous maze gate.”
Great. “Trisha, you’ve been here for a while. Got an idea what this maze is about?”
“Unexpectedly, it’s a maze,” she said, smirking again. “And since I have done some actual research before coming here, in particular, I scoured the Void for fragments of souls of the previous expeditions into Lucielle’s labyrinth, and I found four groups reached this place.”
“Get to the point,” I ordered.
She rolled her eyes. “Goddess, you always have to finish first, don’t you? My point is that this is a huge, stupid labyrinth with the same Minotaur as the previous one. We split into groups, use our blood to mark our ways, and we eventually map the whole area.”
That actually made sense. “I go with Katherine, Trisha with Joseph, and Amaranta with Zhang. Trisha, your goal is to find and disable the Minotaur. The rest of us will search for the exit.”
Trisha gasped theatrically. “Goddess, you would endanger me by sending me against that savage beast practically alone.”
“You passed the previous Minotaur encounter by yourself, so don’t bother pretending it’s a problem.”
Trisha clicked her tongue. “This is demon abuse.” She punched Joseph in the shoulder, saying, “Come,” and headed into the rightmost tunnel. “And our symbol is a hoof.”
Amaranta exchanged a look with Katherine that I didn’t understand. But Katherine turned away from her, and to me. “Which tunnel do we take?”
I motioned with my head and entered the leftmost one. “Our symbol is a cross,” I said. Once we made the turning, I used my knife to prick my finger, and drew a symbol of a cross on the wall.
Faintly smiling, Katherine followed, steps heavy.
I continued into the long hallway. As we passed side exits, I drew a blood mark by every decision we took. Since the other teams did the same, we would eventually cover all possible routes in the labyrinth and find the exit.
A distant roar echoed through the tunnels. The Minotaur. A loud thump followed the sound, the hallway shook as if hit by a slight earthquake, and the tunnels went silent. The Minotaur met Trisha.
Katherine smiled tiredly. “What do you think she’s done to him?”
“Well, since she’s twelve feet tall and weight easily two tons in that armor, she probably stuffed him into a wall or something like that,” I said, returning the smile. “And you look like you need a rest.”
She waved it off with her hand. “I’m fine.”
“Sure,” I took off my hat and my coat, putting them on the ground by the wall. “But we’re going to stop here to rest, anyway.” Demonstratively, I sat on my coat.
Katherine shook her head, smiling gently. “Help me from my armor.”
I got back up to my feet and untied the laces at her back. She pulled off the breastplate, and slid out of her greaves, dropping her gauntlets. Much smaller and frailer, dressed in a light gambeson, Katherine sat onto my coat, exhaling slowly.
I sat next to her, leaning against the stone wall. “I should have brought some more of Trisha’s beer.”
“It’s disgusting.” Katherine reached into a small pack by the armor’s waist and pulled out a large vial that originally had to serve for something else, but now was filled with the beer. “But it has alcohol,” she removed the stopper and drank a bit.
I took a sip after she handed it to me, wondering when she filled the vial. She had to have done that when I was drinking. “So, what happened at the trial? And don’t tell me you’re okay because you haven’t looked okay since the gate opened.”
She sighed, shivering slightly. I wrapped my arm around her back and pulled her gently to me to heat her up. Katherine relaxed, resting her head against my chest. “It forced me to remember things I had once decided to forget.”
“Like?”
“Like the reason why I was raised by the Church to begin with. I wasn’t born an orphan or given to the Church willingly.” Her voice deepened, flow of words slowing down. “But when I was four, fire burned our house with us inside. My father burned to death, as did our servants and my grandparents… but I didn’t. I don’t burn.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Don’t be. The kicker is that my mother had supposedly died at my birth. But since I didn’t inherit my flame from my father, it had to be from my mother, and someone so powerful that her daughter wouldn’t burn in a fire wouldn’t die during birth. She faked her death, I’m sure of it, faked it so she didn’t have to bother with raising me.”
“Even if she did,” I said, trying to sound confident, “I’m sure she had her reasons.”
“I hope so.” She sighed. “But I doubt I’ll ever get to hear them.”
“Is this why you once sabotaged your own angel nomination?”
“Yes. I want to remember who I am. And, if anything, Amaranta has proven to me it was the correct decision. Which reminds me… I don’t think she will pass the Trial of the Holy.”
“You won’t pass it either,” I whispered.
“But you will,” she said, smiling once more. “Lucielle’s fall was the inability to forgive you. The trial will be about forgiveness, and you’re good at that.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What makes you say so?”
“You’ve got a million reasons to be vengeful to others. Your mother once stole money you raised to fund your sister’s cancer treatment and bought herself a new car instead, and what did you do? You didn’t want to harm her. Evelyn tried to kill you, twice, and you offered her your home to live in when she had nowhere to go. Lucielle once murdered you, you have known for years, and you still work for her doing nothing against her. You will easily pass Lucielle’s trial.”
“I’m not a good man, much less a holy one.”
“No, but you understand the principles.” She smiled. “If you ever had the chance, you would have been an excellent angel.”
Well, if anything, I was good a
t hiding the darkness. Softly, I kissed her forehead. While it never was to be, I loved the sound of that.
She slid upward, making my lips graze her face, before she stopped with her lips in front of mine, her breath fast and shallow, eyes closed.
I took the invitation and kissed her.
Clumsily, Katherine started unbuttoning my shirt. Okay. I grabbed her gambeson and pulled it over her head. “By the way,” I said, looking into her eyes. “I don’t have any condoms.”
“I’m on contraceptives,” she said, caught my nape, and kissed me.
Watching Katherine cleaning blood from her inner thigh before pulling back on her pants, I realized I fucked up. The blood was from me taking her virginity, so there was no way she ever took contraceptives.
And since my most common partner, Vivian, didn’t have human reproductive functions, I didn’t even think about not finishing inside her. Katherine seemed pleased though, which lifted my mood. I liked to think I was rather good in bed, and Katherine’s stupid smile felt like a validation.
I helped her put on the armor, tying the straps. What the hell happened to her during the trial that she had done this?
I knew I would never find out, and I didn’t plan to waste mental strength on guessing. We rearranged our clothes, and headed into the labyrinth, Katherine oozing good mood, me guilty. After about an hour of walking through the tunnels, making cross marks as we did, we crossed a path of hoof marks drawn in blood on the walls. We exchanged a glance and turned to follow them. We spent a lot of time doing other things, while the others were searching for the exit, so odds were that the others had already found the exit and were waiting for us.
About half an hour of walking later, we heard Trisha shouting from the distance, “Asshole!”
I shrugged and headed that way. The shouting repeated, growing louder as we got closer. A few minutes later, we reached a wide hall, where Tricia stood by the exit, shouting into it.
Trisha was in her full-sized form, and in her tail, she held the minotaur lifted in the air. He kept kicking and struggling, but he clearly couldn’t get out of the succubus’s grasp. She smiled victoriously when she spotted us, saying, “I told you he hears on that.”
Katherine snorted and I felt a slight sting of embarrassment.
Amaranta and Zhang were inside, sitting on the stairs in front of a massive gate, which looked just like the previous gate, with the same thorn and a smaller door in the middle. Just this time, the light-made letters above the gate read:
‘This is where your path ends, at the Gate of the Unholy.
Intruders who passed this gate: 0’
I stretched my neck and walked forward. “Trisha, do we know what’s this one about?”
“Goddess, help me… how am I supposed to know if no one ever passed?” She rolled her eyes. “Not a fragment of a soul ever left this gate upon entering.”
Okay. I walked to the gate, pricked my hand on the thorn at the small door in the center, and pressed my palm against the pentagram in the middle. The small door opened, darkness swallowed me, and drew me in.
A moment later, I stood inside a church, dressed exactly as I was before. By the altar stood an old priest, polishing a steel crucifix with a piece of cloth.
The priest smiled, stopped, and said, “Welcome to the house of the Lord.”
I got an idea of what this was about. But better check first. “How do I pass the gate?”
He smiled sadly. “I am afraid that I cannot help you. For as long as I live, the gate will remain closed.”
As I suspected. The first part of the trial was to commit murder on an innocent priest. A rather efficient test to filter away angels. I focused for a second, formed a sphere of rotating aether in my palm, aimed at the priest, and let go. The blast disintegrated the priest, tearing a hole into the church’s wall.
The reality around me collapsed, shattering like a broken mirror. As the fragments faded, I stood in the Void. The endless emptiness spread around me, littered with stars and swirling energies. Of course, the trial wasn’t as simple as committing a murder.
“It’s been a while since I had a visitor,” an alluring voice said and I looked up. In the middle of the emptiness floated a diamond throne. In it sat a blonde man dressed in a plain, white cloth. I recognized him instantly. Lucifer, the angel, a copy of the soul I now carried within me.
“When I met Lucius earlier,” I said, forcing my voice to sound calm, “I wondered if you would be around.”
“I am in no mood for sentiments,” Lucifer said and waved his hand. The Void around me swirled, attempting to compress me into nothing through a black-hole amount of pressure.
I focused, cancelled the powers around me. With the continuing thought, I shattered his throne, and warped the Void, turning the endlessness into the sands of the coliseum, tribunes empty, an image I remembered from a photo from when I visited Rome.
Lucifer landed on his feet, looking toward me curiously.
I understood why no one ever passed this trial. The test was, essentially, to defeat an archangel under the physics of the Void, a feat only ever managed once, when Lucielle dragged Lucifer from the Heaven’s Gate to Earth, so she could kill him there. I took off my hat, smiling at him. “I am Lucas, but people call me Lucifer.”
A broad grin split his face. “So, I am alive. Now, I wonder, will it count as suicide when I kill you here?”
I returned the hat to my head. “How about a bet? If I can make you admit defeat, you will help me transfer your memories into me.”
He paused for a moment. “Why would you want that?”
“There’s this girl, to whom I gave the angelic blessing, whom I named Lillith, and whom I call my daughter. She needs to learn how to live with her wings, with the power, and with the responsibility of being the archangel of light. But I cannot teach it to her without knowing it myself, can I?”
He narrowed his eyes. “How exactly did you get my soul? Because a man of virtue wouldn’t murder a priest as calmly as you did, but any other man would tell me a very different reason.”
“Oh, I am not a man of virtue. I merely was the smartest out of all who chased after the soul crystal containing your soul.”
“And you also had to be the strongest of them all,” he added. “Very well, I will accept your bet, but if I can make you admit defeat, then you will take my place here, setting me free.”
Given our souls were nearly identical, that was actually possible. Under the non-existing restrictions this place provided, I could remove any differences between our souls to make them match, and then stay here as him, satisfying the boundaries of his imprisonment, so he could leave.
Aside from being imprisoned for likely an eternity, I would have to literally destroy everything that made me Lucas. “I accept.”
“Well then,” he said, and smiled. “We have no need to talk any further.” He spread his arms lightly, the arena around us shattered into shards of glass, and we were back in the Void. A halo of light formed above his head, wings of light bursting from his back.
Right, Lucielle created this image from her memories of Lucifer from before his fall. Now, how was I going to defeat him? I had no idea how angels fought each other, so I left the first step to him.
He stretched out his hand, light flashed in his palm, and an unbelievable magical force hit my shields. I ejected my spirit from my body, my physical form disintegrating a split second later. Only my sword remained, floating in the emptiness.
Okay. I didn’t see that coming. Instantly, I wreathed my soul in an absorption barrier, and grabbed my sword’s hilt. That the archangel of light would attack me with light was something I should have thought of before, but I didn’t quite understand how instantaneous such an attack would be.
Lucifer smirked, and made the light flash in his palm again. The same attack hit me once more, but this time, I had the absorption shields up, and they devoured the attack.
He frowned, analyzing me.
I observed
him, doing the same. In terms of pure strength, I was a tiny candle next to his blazing sun. But he had clearly never seen the absorption shield, meaning the entire discipline of aether absorption was something he developed after his fall from grace.
The nearly almighty archangel of light apparently had no need for petty tricks like those I employed. I focused. Letting him figure me out wouldn’t help and me losing my physical body was a problem since I had to recreate it to be able to leave this trial, meaning I couldn’t spend all my strength.
With a concentrated thought, I turned the emptiness around us into water, sinking us into an infinite sea. Since I wasn’t physical anymore, I didn’t need to breathe, and the water would refract his light, weakening his attacks.
He outstretched his power to alter the environment. I spread out my aether in tendrils of darkness, catching the energy he just emanated, absorbing the power.
Lucifer stared at the thousands of tendrils of darkness filling the water, and then scowled. His body turned into light and exploded into a supernova. All the water instantly disintegrated, and I had to put all my strength into my shields to absorb the attack. Not enough. Pain reverberated through my soul, but I concentrated all my thoughts on the shield.
The supernova ended in a moment, and we were back in the Void, where Lucifer reformed out of nothing, wearing an ever-deepening frown.
Nearly blind with pain, I squeezed the sword hilt, teleported straight to him and slashed. Skillfully, he weaved from my strike. I teleported in the direction where he dodged, and jabbed with my left arm, fingers outstretched, aiming for his eye. The strike had zero weight behind it, maximizing speed. He bobbed his head away, but my fingers grazed his temple.
The moment I made contact; I injected a burst of aether into him. His left eye exploded. He turned into light and flashed away.
