The fires never burned out or even slowed as I wandered the vast unknown of this new dimension. The air was hot and thick with smothering heat. Every step was a struggle as the scorching air moved across my face. Yet, I continued, and I saw many unknown things through my travels. Bodies were freshly slain and of a similar-looking build as the corpse I first laid eyes on in this hellscape; massive, hulking-looking creatures almost as large as my own inhuman form. Yet, the further I walked, the stranger it got.

  My feet burned and charred against the never-cooling ground as I paced across the lifeless frontier. I gritted my teeth through the searing pain of each step, never stopping as I searched for something… anything.

  I saw some sort of structure out in the distance, through the flat plains of the burning world. Fires lingered everywhere that made the figure in the distance a wavy smudge in the rising heat. Still, there were gaps in the hellfire that I could pass through to get to the white structure without any unnecessary fire damage. The blood-red flames licked against my human form as I got closer to the thing I aimed for. The structure's image changed in my eyes as I grew closer to its location. The faint build I thought to be supported by wood was something else entirely; it was a skeleton. Massive ribs shot out of the hardened lava-like surface, like whatever the creature had been, it had sunk down into the molten rock where it found an agonizingly painful grave. The ribs towered out of the earth about twenty feet and were about two feet at their widest.

  Whatever the creature was, it had died on its back. Hints of leg bones barely protruded from the earth at one end of the ribcage, while a massive lower jaw jutted from the hardened earth. It formed a small cave-like enclosure where you could hide out of sight from the surrounding flames. Gnarled teeth and fangs still hung onto the frame of the mandible since the moment this behemoth had taken its plunge.

  I ran my hand the length of the massive rib bone that was within my reach, feeling the petrified bone warm against whatever skin I had left on my palm. That’s when I saw my flesh fading away, only to recover and rapidly grow back across my exposed muscles. My body was in a perpetual fight against the heat of the overwhelming hellfire. I clenched my teeth even harder as I saw the layers of my flesh decaying and dusting away like ash against the extreme temperatures of this new dimension.

  However, my body was even more overwhelming with its ability to regenerate damaged tissues. The monster within me had tremendous power that even this hell couldn't dominate. I kept walking, remembering my mindset for when things were hard… left then right, left then right, through the pain of the incinerating blood-flame. A thunderous booming began echoing in my ears. My heart beat… no, not mine… the monster's. It was… ethereal… somewhere else. But it beat all the same. Boom… Boom… Boom with each step.

  I marched passed the massive skeletal structure up the hill that lay just behind the behemoth’s grave. Once I powered to the top, I saw the expanse that started below…it wasn't another grave; it was a graveyard. Dozens upon dozens of hulking skeletons lay in the massive charred expanse on the other side of the hill. The same type of creatures all lay below where I stood in an enormous stretch of flames, where they all fell. I could not see what had killed them since all that was left of them were bones, but something powerful had to have killed these great titans. Judging from the sheer size of just one colossus, whatever had killed them had to have been on the same playing field as the one that created me. Only he had the kind of overwhelming power that I expect it took to overcome beasts such as these.

  I made the excruciating walk through the boneyard until I was about fifty yards past the last few bones. I watched as the cragged rocks passed below my feet with each step further into the fiery abyss. I was so focused on each step that I didn’t realize how far I was from the boneyard. Once I looked back up, I was in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t see anything in view as I had before. Even the land fell into a flatter and more uninteresting look. The level ground was still littered with hellfire just as before, but there was a dust that had been kicked up in the air that kept me from seeing much further than my immediate vicinity. Only tiny embers glowed through the dust and smog, letting me know that there was a world beyond the thick atmosphere that enveloped me.

  In the loneliness and despair of that world, I thought of Autumn. I thought of all of them; how much I cared for Autumn, Carter, and his acceptance of me into his whole family, and the way Eleanor thought of me like her own son. They all did; the entire Chasse family: Frank, Clara, Wayland, Delilah, Jane, and even Martin’s faces all flashed in my mind's eye. Every conversation, moment, and the relationship I built with them was what I held onto as the incinerating heat grew more intense as I traversed the flames. Would I ever see them… would I ever see Autumn? Caydee… Seth…

  I lost track of time in that world. The only thing I knew to do was to walk. I’d keep walking until I saw something or figured out a way to get out. What I was really waiting for was Jon to show up and pull me out. He was the only thing… person, whatever that I knew could move or pull people through different planes of existence. He was my only hope, but I feared I was lost to even the entity I had come to know. He told me that he wouldn’t always be able to save me, and that there were places I could be trapped.

  Actually, the more I thought about it, it seemed like Jon knew exactly what would happen. He told me that I’d have to get stronger, and I did; he said I could be trapped, but I wouldn’t die, and here we were; he told me I’d kill Peter, but that was yet to happen. Did Jon know all this would happen to me… and it wasn't just a general warning? Had he seen what I would endure and known that I would still make it back? What did I need to do? I still had to kill Peter. I knew I would. I could feel it within me like the monster had it on his mind and wouldn’t stop until he had his talons buried deep inside the necromancer’s body. But how did I get there?

  “Walk,” the ominous voice rang out inside my mind.

  It came out of nowhere and took me by surprise. So, my legs continued as soon as the entity’s dominating voice registered in my mind. It was like I had new energy and direction. He wasn’t there with me, but was guiding me somehow. His voice felt… different… like it was blended into the thundering heartbeat of the monster. I didn’t have any questions. In that moment, I trusted him. I knew he was going to drive me to where I needed to be. He wasn’t pulling me out, but he was showing me the way. I followed.

  After a few more hours of burning and regenerating, again and again, I came upon a mountain that shot up high into the sky. The rocky growth extended out further than I could see in either direction, but I could see the top of the cliffs above. Directly in front of me was a massive opening in the base of the mountain. The missing rock looked like it was carved out by someone or something. It was huge… what could have made such an impression on the side of the mountain in this lifeless world?

  I continued, stepping through the opening like an ant walking through a human’s doorway. The shade of the mountain cloaked me from the reddish hue of the flames. It was the first time my flesh tasted relief from the heat. The shade was cooler and more temperate than the outside world. The deeper I walked through the shadows of the darkening cavern, the more I felt my body solidifying and strengthening back to normal. My flesh and muscles mended themselves rapidly in the darkness of the cave. I knelt for a moment, resting on my hands and knees as the pain escaped my mind and body. The supernatural power of my monster returned me to what I was. I was no longer a raw nerve being tortured by every second of my existence.

  I stood from the ground in the low-lit entrance of the mountain, the only light hitting me in the back. The opening that led back into the fiery desert slowly got smaller and darker the further I continued inside the cave. Soon, I was in complete blackness, but that was okay. My eyes shifted to match the black of the heart of the mountain, allowing me to see my way through the inner workings of this massive rock growth. It started to remind me of the caverns and tunnels beneath St. Louis. I felt a familiar vibe as I continued through the stone pathways. Then, a new light appeared in the distance before me.

  A new opening appeared in front of me as I continued through the depths. The light grew brighter and more visible as I approached the tunnel exit. I soon realized that I was coming upon a chamber at the end of this tunnel. Something was there… something alive. I could feel the vibrations of something moving within the room. I heard the hissing breaths suck and escape past the teeth of some kind of beast.

  I walked through the entrance and into the chamber with no hesitation. The Entity had led me there, and I knew there was a reason. I wasn’t going to stop no matter what awaited me within. Yet, when I saw what sat within the opening… it shocked me beyond words.

  There was a chair… a throne maybe. It was built from bones that were so massive they had to be from the skeletons of the beasts that lay dead out in the land of hellfire. Ribs, arms, teeth, and spines built a central pedestal that was much larger than any normal man would require. Only… the thing staring out from the throne of bones was no man…

  Bright orange eyes stared at me from across the chamber as I stepped in. This… thing sat high in the chair made from multiple skeletons. If he stood up, he might have been around twelve feet tall. His body was scaly and coarse all over, having a darker orange color than his glowing eyes. The scales were darker and more pronounced around areas that housed vital organs. The most noticeable feature about it was the horns. Massive horns protruded from the top of his skull, curved backward and down to form a circular loop of bone, and then shot straight back up towards the rocky ceiling. If I could have ever pictured a demon, this is what it would have looked like. Its sharp, extended fangs grinned at me as I stepped into the area.

  I looked around at the void within the mountain where I stood. Holes were bored into the sides of the walls around the circular chamber, dark and dry from the inner heat. Where did they go? Then I noticed how similar the bones looked compared to the felled beasts I saw in my travels through the foreign land. A thought popped into my head as I stared into the massive pile of bones where the throne of the demon rested: was this the thing that killed all of those great behemoths outside? This looked like a throne room that was built on top of the bodies of its enemies, or anything that it had killed. The bones were trophies of the things it had slain within this realm, and the trophies made up its kingdom within the mountain.

  “Who are you?” I yelled across the chamber to the beast that eyed me intently.

  The demon looked over to a hole in the rock at his left, motioning out towards me. A snarl ripped out from the darkness of the cave, the light of the chamber’s flames not showing me what lay within. Then, a voice appeared in my head… it was the one sitting in the middle of the room. This voice wasn’t as powerfully dominating as the being from the fields. This voice was darkly twisted and evil, with a snarling rumble inside my mind.

  “I do not know how you arrived here, or how you survived the wastes, but you will die… now!”

  As soon as the voice stopped talking within my head, something crawled from one of the holes in the wall. Dark leathery flesh clawed out from the small tunnel as wispy white hair raggedly hung from the nape of its neck. Massive teeth gnashed at the sight of me.

  I recognized it immediately; it was a devourer. It was precisely the same as the beasts from the rooftops that night in the alley. The big bottom jaw was a dead giveaway as it approached me on all fours. Snarling growls escaped its mouth, along with the same thick drool I remembered from the others. It wanted me dead.

  I had nothing on me; no blade, no clothes, no nothing. Yet, I never needed any of that. I had my greatest weapon waiting within. I felt it surge against the walls of its cage the moment it saw the creature sitting on the throne, and then again when the horned devil spoke within my mind. My monster wanted out… bad.

  When the devourer lunged forward off some jagged rocks beneath its hole, the beast in me lashed out violently. I met the devourer’s skull with fully extended talons, severing its spine at the base of the skull. I didn’t decapitate it entirely as the front of its neck was still holding the head close to the beast’s motionless body. It fell out of the air with a thud before it slumped and relaxed its muscles for the last time.

  I turned and gazed with my solid black eyes to the one on the pile of bones at the chamber’s center, talons slick with blood. As the blood dripped off each talon to the rocky surface below, it boiled and burned away from the temperature of the rocks. The place was heating up.

  Within the firelight of the chamber, I stood against another being from a foreign dimension. He eyed me curiously from where he sat, never standing as he motioned again to the same hole in the wall. More devourers appeared from the darkness, about five in total. They circled me as I stood above their dead brethren. I felt the cage in my mind open, and my fury was unleashed.

  The transformation was complete before I had even killed the second creature. I moved viciously through the area of the chamber where the fighting took place. The pack of devourers thought I was prey… they were wrong. They split up as they tried to attack me from all sides like a pack of wolves. When the first one lunged at me and had my attention, the others followed suit to catch me off guard. It was no use.

  My massively growing body muscled every one of them down to the ground in an instant, ripping their insides out and casting them to the scalding floor beneath us. I grabbed one of their skulls with both hands and crushed it with a tight squeeze. It squealed and squirmed beneath my monstrous grip for a moment until the shards of cracked bone impaled whatever brains it had. The rest I just brutalized under the power of my unstoppable blows. The hard and jagged rocks all around us were the perfect utensils to help me quickly rip the beasts to ribbons. The rocky chamber was basically a giant cheese grater, allowing me to slaughter them all.

  In only moments, I stood in my fully transformed state, towering over the boiling innards that were cast all around the jagged edges of hard stone. I stood tall, near the same size as this creature that looked at me with a furious superiority.

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  The burning orange eyes were wide at the sight of me once I was entirely transformed. The demon-looking creature stood from its pile of bones. I could feel a power in the area growing as the stone structure around us began to vibrate. The low-lit flames that had given us light inside the mountain were burning brighter than before.

  “I see now why he could not take you,” the thing spoke in my mind. “Peter has made a grave mistake with you…”

  It seemed like he was preparing for one massive attack to end me before I could close the gap between us. His glowing orange irises bore holes into me as we stood in our locked gaze.

  “I’m going to kill you!” my fanged mouth roared. The words came out before I even thought them. It was like the monster could feel something about this thing. It was like the beast inside of me had met him before; when it used to inhabit another… maybe Jon.

  The orange eyes blazed even brighter, growing visibly more agitated with each passing second as it realized something that I had not uncovered.

  “You are… familiar…” The demon glared at me with interest now, cocking his head around as he studied my monstrous form.

  Something inside of me reacted, recognition emanating from within the monster itself.

  “You are… how can that be? You have been dead for eons… brother?”

  Brother? What the fuck did he say? The monster raged within and without.

  I stepped forward instinctively, approaching to attack. My dark hide, black eyes, and talons lurched forward on a massive frame towards the horned creature. Even amongst the creatures within this place, I stuck out like a sore thumb. I didn’t belong; he said so, and I felt it. Once I had transformed inside the cave, I felt a force on me like it was fighting every move I made. I wondered if it was the one on the throne… or was it something else?

  “Stop!” the horned monstrosity ordered me as he reached beside the massive throne, pulling what looked like a sword from the bone hill. Now he was standing, and he was taller than me, but I knew that it didn’t matter to me. His muscular frame looked like it would decimate his prey.

  He held a massive leg bone from one of the creatures of the wastes. It was honed and sharpened to form the shape of a simple-looking sword, deadly but basic in form. Yet, the way he held it told me something. This creature, the king of this boneyard, did not want me to come any closer. He had a rage in his eyes but a defensive nature to his stance. It was like he was waiting to see what I’d do.

  Was he afraid? Why would he be afraid of me? What would make a creature like this so shaken that he’d falter in his own home territory?

  “You tried to kill us once, annihilator. You cannot kill me here! You are a mere fraction of what you once were.” He angrily growled in my mind, sure of who he thought I was now. “You cannot kill here in my domain!”

  Suddenly, the being raised his non-sword arm and opened a palm towards me.

  I roared and leaped through the air to him, trying as hard as I could to close the gap and sink my talons into his scaly flesh. I felt the monster inside my mind, fully taking over. It wanted to end the beast of this mountain. I felt a force pushing me towards him, like somehow if I did kill him, it would right many wrongs; bring balance back in a way that was needed for a long time.

  “I cast you out!” the demon-looking creature ordered inside my mind.

  As soon as my right hand made contact with his extended arm's shoulder, my talons cut through his thickly scaled hide and revealed a blood of the blackest variety. It almost looked like motor oil pouring out of his flesh. An audible snarl escaped from the creature for the first time. I only heard it for a moment, and then I was in flames.

  Fire surrounded me in an instant, engulfing me in a column of hellfire that sent me backward with explosive force. I felt a slam against my back, followed by a deafening crack. Then, a pressure pushed me through the stone, driving me through solid rock for what felt like miles. Then… I was airborne. The demon’s power had sent me straight out of the mountain, and I was back in the open expanse of the burning world.

  Then, like the fabric of the earth itself cracked open, the mountain stirred. A deep, grinding moan split the fiery chaos, as if the bones of the world were breaking under the weight of something ancient awakening. Stone split with a thunderous groan. The great mountain ahead, once still and burning, shifted. Fires clung to its flanks like moss on the back of some sleeping beast, surging outward from cracks in the surface of the mountain. The world trembled as titanic limbs unfurled from the rock, unfathomably vast and rough like slabs of jagged armor. Dust and stone rained down in curtains as the slumbering colossus took shape, shoulders heaving mountainsides, arms the width of valleys, legs that quaked the charred soil with every step. The sky shimmered with heat as it rose, its silhouette framed in the warped horizon like a dead titan breaking free of its tomb.

  The air pulsed with power. Every breath I took burned with the charge of something devastating in its magnitude and unholy in its wrath. I stood frozen, a monstrous thing myself, and still… I felt small. Irrelevant. A smear of ash in the shadow of something that should not walk.

  It was not just a giant. It was judgment. A tremor rolled beneath my feet as the walking mountain twisted, stone cracking and folding inwards like molten plates, its features reshaping. No longer simply rock, it became the infernal image of the demonic creature I had seen before, risen now in stone flesh: horns of obsidian, a crown of jagged cliffs, and those same burning eyes. Eyes like twin furnaces of orange fire, staring down into my soul. Eyes that knew something about the monster within me.

  And then, from its carved chasm of a mouth came a voice. Not a sound, but a deep, tectonic groan, like an entire world exhaling its last breath. The very air around me shook with the weight of it. Language bent and broke inside it; words that I couldn’t understand, but I knew it was speech.

  “Krakiag mortu pleziak Myordrakien!”

  The end had come for me. And it wore the face of a power too great to survive. I hadn’t felt fear in years. Not real fear. Not since the change… since the day I stopped being just a man and became this thing made of claw and sinew, shadows and rage. The world had tried to break me, and I had broken it back, again and again, until fear was just a faded scar in the back of my mind.

  But now… staring up at that? Terror gripped me like a hand around my throat.

  The mountain had moved. I watched it rise, not slide or collapse or erupt, but stand. I felt the world shudder. I felt it in my spine. In my chest. In my teeth. And then it looked at me.

  Those eyes… locked onto mine, and I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t fear of death. This was different. This was the fear of being… insignificant. A monster like me, and I still felt like dust under its gaze.

  My talons flexed. My weight shifted. I didn’t realize I was backing up until my heel caught on broken stone and I stumbled, knees dipping slightly. My voice didn’t work. My heart shouldn’t have been able to race anymore, but it did. Thunderous clangs inside of my chest and head that echoed out into the abyss of my mind. The monster wasn’t scarred… it was primed. My human side, though… this was something different. This wasn't earthly battles or fights with criminals. This was beyond me…

  And then… There it was: a tug. Not on my body. Not even on my thoughts. It was like something behind my mind had stirred. A presence… something to my left, just out of sight, whispering with weight, like a curtain gently lifting in a breeze I couldn’t feel.

  I turned toward it slowly, and realization hit me.

  The blade. The one I never used but felt all the time. It became almost forgotten in my mind since I was too afraid to pull it. The one hidden in that invisible crack between worlds… always there, always watching, humming at the edge of my existence like a sleeping predator. I remembered what he told me… the entity that gave me my power. That blade… it wasn’t meant for the world. Not this one. It was too much. Too absolute.

  I couldn’t summon it near friends. I couldn’t even think about it too long without the air around me warping into a death-hungry frenzy. But now? Now I needed it.

  I reached, not outward, but through. Through something unseen, beyond the veil of space. My claws pierced nothing, and yet I felt resistance, like wading through ink, and there it was: the hilt.

  Cold, ancient, and heavy with meaning that I couldn’t decipher. The moment I wrapped my hand around it, the world flinched. A ring filled my ears… high, violent, and endless. I pulled, and the world around me ripped… and the blade came with it.

  In this moment… in this world… its surface didn’t shine. It didn’t feel like it belonged in this world… or any world. It was like it wanted to kill the physical world… all of it. Light died near it. Color drained from the air around me. The charred ground beneath my feet withered in a way that I couldn’t understand. The wind changed direction. Even my own monstrous aura recoiled, as if in reverence. Then, my monstrous hunger for death latched on, and I felt myself start to absorb power from it. It flooded me… filling me with something… overwhelming.

  It was in my hand now, and the titan… the walking mountain paused.

  That was the first time it stopped moving. That was the first time it felt real, like it saw me not as an insect, but as something that might matter.

  The groaning tectonic voice echoed through the atmosphere, “You feel… different. You feel like the other… the one that came after you…”

  The titan-demon sounded confused and searching. I didn’t think it felt threatened by me yet, not truly, but it was recognizing more. Like it… knew the entity and the monster both… but as separate things from separate times.

  I raised the blade slowly, muscles screaming, skin splitting around the edges of my claws where the weapon's vibration ate into my darkened flesh. I could barely hold it this time when I had so easily before. Something about it had changed… or maybe it was the situation.

  The air bent. The blade trembled in my grasp, not like a weapon, but like a living thing, as if it had been waiting for this moment longer than I’d been alive. Longer than this world had spun in its orbit.

  Its hum rose to a pitch I could no longer hear with my ears, but felt in my bones. The shadows around me no longer just stretched, they reached, slithering along the cracked earth like hungry tendrils drawn to something profane.

  Then the blade shivered, and the sky split.

  High above, far beyond the heat haze and the blood-colored clouds, the air itself cracked open like torn fabric. A jagged rip yawned wide in the heavens, horizontal like a mouth, tearing through the horizon with a soundless scream. It wasn’t light or energy that poured from the wound, but shadow. Pure, roiling blackness, ink-thick and writhing like smoke underwater.

  The titan shifted. It turned its head, ever so slightly. Not in curiosity… in fear. This whole world… his entire domain was filling with it.

  The darkness came screaming downward, like a waterfall, crashing into the earth and striking me like it had a target. I barely had time to move… no, I didn’t need to. It knew… the monster knew… it had always known.

  The shadow struck my chest like a hammer, but it didn’t stop at the surface. It poured into me.

  I gasped, and the air lit up with cracks of dark lightning. My body jerked as the first wave hit, then the second, the third, an endless torrent of something older than the blade, older than the creature above me. Something buried deep in the spaces between existence, now funneled directly into me through this monstrous relic of a blade.

  The ground cratered beneath my feet. My limbs split, widened, grew; thick cords of muscle expanding, warping, wrapped in pulsing black veins of coiling smoke. My claws elongated, reshaped, and curled like blades of void-metal. My back arched as bone tore through flesh, vast spines rising from my shoulders, unfurling into jagged wings that cast no shadow… but erased light. I roared, and it wasn’t just a sound. It was a signal. The hellscape cracked for miles. The mountain-titan took a step back, and that step flattened an area beyond my human mind's comprehension. Its gaze narrowed.

  I looked up at it… no, down, now. I was taller than I had been, larger, heavier. I was like him… a titan not meant for the living world… and I felt… more. It wasn't just me… it wasn't just the monster anymore. Something else was with me, entering this unseen world through the tear in space. It was… the entity… Jon or whatever he wanted to go by.

  My heartbeat echoed like an eruption. The blade in my hand had melted into my arm—fused into me. It pulsed there now, a black-hot brand of power that reached through every part of my being, unlocking something I didn’t know I had. Something that didn’t belong to just Sam, or the monster, or even the entity itself… but something more. The culmination of something too great for any world. The entity inside me stirred with power as it joined me and the monster. There was a feeling in us… not fear… not rage… not pain; but recognition.

  “Yes,” its overwhelming voice spoke from within. “That’s it. This is what you were always meant to become. Not a man. Not a monster. An ending.”

  The mountain-titan growled; a long, low sound like boulders grinding together, and took another step forward. But now, it moved with caution.

  I didn’t move, but something in me did. There was no thought, plan, or even rage. It was like a tide had come in beneath my skin; cold, vast, and unstoppable. My body shifted on its own, not uncontrolled, but driven by the fused will of everything I was and everything that lived inside me in this moment. The man who had once been Sam, the beast that dwelled within, and the entity that remained in the fields that had bound everything.

  One moment, I stood still; the next, my massive form surged forward like an executioner’s guillotine dropped from the heavens. The titan barely had time to react. Its great, burning eyes widened, those colossal limbs shifting in a vain attempt to defend itself, claws like towers rising to intercept. But it was too slow. Too small, somehow, in the face of what I had become.

  My arm, now fused with the blade, moved like a god’s judgment. The talons shimmered with the blade’s edge, five fingers of pure oblivion, not tearing, not cutting, but erasing. The moment they touched the titan’s rocky flesh, there was no resistance. No explosion. No roar of impact. There was just… silence. Complete, devouring silence.

  Where my arm passed through, the titan simply ceased to exist. No blood… No ash… No stone… No scream. Parts of the mountainous creature vanished in a line of absence, erased like chalk under an invisible cloth. Black lines of void ran along the contours of the borders of the places I had struck. It was where the overwhelming hunger of the blade ate everything in existence. Its body, its soul, its legend… gone.

  What remained of the mountain buckled, trembled, and collapsed. And I stood there, arm still extended, breath held… as the silence continued to spread. Then I felt it. The air was thick with death. Not just of the titan… but of something bigger. The sky shuddered. The clouds above warped, spiraling inward like they were being sucked away. The ground beneath my feet groaned. Deep cracks split the scorched landscape, bleeding steam and fire. The wind howled once…and then fled.

  The world felt wrong. Like it had lost a cornerstone it didn’t know it needed. Like the moment I struck, something ancient had realized: this place should not exist anymore.

  The ground tilted. Chunks of land drifted upward, slowly, unnaturally; gravity no longer certain of its direction. The sky fractured along the rip I’d opened before, widening, spreading across the heavens like shattered glass.

  Reality… this hellscape world… was breaking.

  I stood in the middle of it all, a giant, wings draped in shadow, talons still radiating the echo of that single, merciless strike of judgment. I had destroyed something… something that should not exist. And now, the world that had given birth to it was coming undone.

  Then… I felt the flood of power that granted me this powerful form start to leave me. As it surged away from my core, everything faded, my strength faltered, and I felt a flash of heat across me. I was burning again. I was in a portal just like I was with Peter, leaving Martin’s parking lot.

  The flames seared and blinded me as they took hold around me, twisting and pulling me around violently. It was just as before, except this time I wasn’t being pulled by someone else; I was being pushed. There was no hand on my arm like when Peter pulled me, I had a force over my whole body, and it was driving me as far from that hellscape as possible.

  In the heat of the hellfire wormhole, I remembered the look in the horned devil's eyes as he gazed upon my transformation. It recognized... and it was scared… Who was the entity?

  Then, a different force from another direction snatched me from out of the blazing heat, ripping me from within the hellfire to whatever lay outside of it. All of the red flames, blinding light, and raging inferno were snatched away, only to be replaced with cold blackness… and I was gone.