by Dahlia Lu
No, not fearless, he thought, but fear took second place to something else.
His fingers caressed the side of her neck. Where did all of her indomitable spirit come from? Because beneath all of that boldness was a disturbingly fragile and vulnerable existence. Her heart was small, and yet it seemed to be housing a love bigger than herself.
His bride stirred under his touch. Her soft cheek snugged against the palm of his hand.
This night, he thought, as he briefly glanced out of the window. Any minute now, destiny would find its way to his doorstep.
“Lucifer has awakened,” he told the demoness.
Her facial expression instantly froze. Then she slowly shook her head in denial. “It’s not his time to wake yet.”
“Apparently it is. I felt it earlier. Soon, very soon, he will be coming here for you.”
For some unknown reasons, she panicked. “Here? Soon?”
Noctis frowned. “Don’t tell me you’re another Kali imposter.”
“I am Kali!” She insisted. “It’s just that it’s been so long… I need time to…” She shook her head again, cheeks blushing bright red. “If he comes, tell him I’m not here.”
Noctis arched a brow at her reaction.
“The necklace! Oh, Amara, I need it back for a few days.” The demoness quickly removed the sapphire necklace from his bride’s neck and put it on herself. “I’m going.” She eyed him. “I am free to go, right?”
“Give me something of yours and then you may leave.”
“Why?”
“That’s for me to know.”
“Will this do?” The demoness pulled the white ribbon from her hair and handed it to him.
“It will have to.” He loosely tied the ribbon around his wrist. Her scent would lead Lucifer right to him.
“On second thoughts, I’m taking Amara with me. I don’t feel safe leaving her here in the middle of a would-be war zone.”
“She stays with me!” Noctis rejected the idea immediately.
“Can you guarantee her safety?” The demoness asked. “Can you make sure she doesn’t get hurt?”
He stilled. He was forced to admit that he could not.
“Fine,” he gritted. “But you will return her to me once I finish my business with Lucifer.”
“If and only if she wants to return to you.”
“If you try to keep her from me, I vow that I will do whatever is in my power to make sure that your eternity will be spent at the bottom of the ocean! Be prepared to face my wrath, woman!”
“You think I haven’t heard that one before?” The demoness gathered his bride in her arms and lifted her up with ease.
“Wait…!”
“What now?” The demoness asked.
“Tell her… I will come for her once this is over.”
“Are you sure she wants to hear that?”
She wouldn’t. “Tell her anyway.”
“Very well. I will deliver your message. Anything else?”
Noctis fixed his gaze on his bride’s sleeping face. After a moment of silence, he shook his head. “No…”
The demoness, along with his bride, vanished.
It felt unsettling watching them disappear. What if the demoness had lied to him? What if she deceived him again? What if she decides to hide his bride where he could not find her?
Focus! Noctis prompted himself. I cannot get distracted now. Not when retribution is so near.
Amara stretched out and yawned.
She was home. Not her apartment home or the mansion home, but home. Not a thing has been changed in her private room inside the floating castle in Hell. Wall scrolls still took up every inch of the wall. The high ceiling was still covered in glow in the dark stars. The shelves were still crammed with jars filled with weird collectable items she’d obtain from her curious adventures. Phoenix feather. Dragon scale. Griffin’s claw.
It was her room, alright.
Amara sat up from her bed and gave her aching shoulders another stretch. Why am I back here? She wondered. The last thing she recalled was leaping out of the second floor window. How had she wound up back home?
“You’ve died and gone to Hell, Amara,” she made fun of herself. Then she gasped when other details came flooding back. “Mother!”
“I’m here, Amara,” said her mother, entering the room with a tray of food. She then rested the tray on the bed. “Are you hungry yet?”
“Did he do anything to you?” Amara asked worriedly.
“No, not really,” her mother replied casually. “He asked me to tell you that he will come for you when this is all over.”
Amara relaxed again. A small smile found its way to her face. “He said that? Wait, when what’s over?”
“According to him, Lucifer has awakened.”
Mixed feelings battled each other for a place on her face: part happy, part sad, part angry, and even part worried. Her expression was a mess, and so were her feelings.
“Does that mean you haven’t seen him yet?”
Her mother shook her head. Her heavy lashes lifted very slowly. “I’m not ready to see him yet.”
“You’re not… worried about him?”
“Needlessly.”
Amara couldn’t bring herself to tell her mother that if Lucifer steps foot into Noctis’s time trap, she may never see him again. She wished she could do something. She wished there was a way for them all to have a happy ending, so to speak.
But what can you do, Amara? She asked herself. You’re just a weak mortal, as you’ve so often been ridiculed.
“The answers…” she realized. “Noctis wants answers.”
“What answers?”
“Mother, do you know why Lucifer imprisoned Noctis?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“I need to speak to someone who does.” Amara sprung from her bed and headed for the door.
“Don’t you want your dinner?”
“No time!”
For the next hour, Amara tracked down her demon buddies inside the castle and asked them about the feud between Lucifer and Noctis. None of them have a clue as to what it was about. Since she was running low on time, Amara skipped the greetings and the chit chat, much to her dismay. The demons seemed puzzled by her rash manners.
“What is this about, Amara?” A male demon asked.
“No time to chat. Talk to you at a later time,” Amara replied and dashed off to the next person.
Her quest brought her to the library on the first level. She figured that if the demons couldn’t provide the answer, perhaps the book would. But there were so many books – every book that has ever been written, to be exact. Towering shelves. Endless sections. Where should she begin?
Amara conjured up a search spell. “Find me books containing information on the God Noctis,” she commanded.
Nothing seemed to be happening. She couldn’t have it wrong. She’d used this spell so many times that she’d already mastered it.
Noctis is not his real name, you idiot!
“Summit…” Amara muttered, recalling him correcting her when she’d called him Noctis. “Find me books containing information on the God Summit!”
The book shelves began to shift position. Like a Rubik’s cube, the entire library rearranged itself. Amara patiently waited for the search to be completed.
A few minutes later, the shelves stopped moving. She stepped forward to the first shelf and began scanning the titles from the top left, down.
“Bingo!” She cried out. “The Book of the Gods!”
She pulled the oversized book off of the shelves and laid it flat on the floor. She got down on her knees, bent over the book, and began flipping through the pages. There were thousands of pages, each dedicated to a specific deity. The book appeared to be following a timeline and was not alphabetized.
The alphabet hasn’t always existed, Amara.
That made sense since the book wasn’t in English. They were in strings of symbols very closely related to the
inscriptions on Noctis’s spells. Some pages had illustrations, other didn’t.
“I don’t know any translation spell…” Amara said, sadly.
“Need help?” A male’s voice spoke to her.
“Oh yes,” Amara answered before looking up. When she did, a gasp got caught in her throat. A pair of angelic pale green eyes was staring down at her. Fiery red hair, glossed in a coat of gold, was brushing by his cheek. She’d never seen this man around before. “Who are you?”
“I’m nobody, really,” he said with a dashing smile. “So, do you need help with the translation?”
Amara lifted a brow and then decided that it wasn’t important. “Yes. Yes, I do. I need to find the page for Summit.”
“I’ll help you. It may take several hours.” He waved a hand over the book. The pages were flipping frantically on their own and then stopped somewhere in the middle of the book. He knelt down next to her and pointed at the page in front of them. “Oh, here it is!”
“What does it say?”
“Let’s see here…” His forefinger followed the word as he read. “Summit of Loma…” Then he stopped.
“Yes?”
“That’s it.”
“What’s it?”
“That’s the only thing written here.”
“No designation or anything?”
“Nope.”
“Then what are all those symbols?”
“A record of his deeds.”
Amara tugged at his arm. “What deeds? Did he do some really horrible things?”
“No…” his eyes briefly scanned through the symbols. “He did mostly good deeds in his six hundred years as a deity.”
“Are you sure?” Amara asked skeptically.
“Like ink on paper. In this case, it’s magic on paper. The book is self-written, so it’s quite accurate.”
“It’s hard to imagine he used to be good. Did it mention anything about Lucifer?”
“Not that I can see.”
“Nobody seemed to know why Lucifer imprisoned Noctis – I mean Summit.”
“You haven’t asked me yet.”
“Do you know why?”
“No. I do not.
“It’s not nice to get my hopes up.”
“If you tell me where Nala is, then I will tell you what I know.”
Amara gave him a lazy stare. “How would I know where she is?”
“Nobody seemed to know that either. For some reason, I thought you would,” the mysterious man replied.
“Why are you looking for her anyway?”
“I…” He diverted his gaze for half a second. “I have private matters,” he said and then made a smooth transition to his next sentence. “If memory served, and it often does, there was a little bit of confusions happening. Summit was a mortal.”
“Yes, he’d told me.”
“We all thought that it was Lucifer who’d created a god. That is against the set of laws that keep our world in balance. Out of check and boom! Or something to that effect. It hasn’t happened yet so I don’t know the details. We exist to make sure that doesn’t happen. So… nitty-gritty… the only solution was to get rid of him.”
“And by him, you mean…”
“Summit of Loma,” he mockingly added regality to his voice when he spoke the title. “But, of course, we couldn’t find him. It was only later that the truth be known.”
“What truth?”
“Lucifer made an immortal, not a god. Summit did that on his own.”
He lightly smacked the back of his hand on the page, emphasizing the many deeds on the page. “People chose to worship him because of the choices he made with his immortality.”
“So that’s okay…?”
“No boom yet, right?”
“But what does that have to…? You don’t suppose Lucifer imprisoned Summit to punish him?”
He got up to his feet and shrugged. “Lucifer is always unpredictable. I never understood him and I probably never will. Alright, I’m off. If you have anything on Nala, summon me.”
“But I don’t even know…” He disappeared before she could finish half of the sentence. “…who you are…”
Amara shook her head before returning her attention back to the pages of the Book of the Gods. She began to work the puzzle in her head. Noctis had told her that it was Lucifer who had contracted him into becoming a deity and, according to him, they were friends. Why would Lucifer betray Noctis?
It’s a million dollar question, Amara.
What would turn one friend against another?
But wait…
According that man who was here earlier, Noctis became a deity on his own. Did Lucifer imprison Noctis in order to escape his responsibility?
There was lot of he said she said, and not a lot of fact to go on.
Perhaps she had been looking at it through the wrong angle. Her mind retraced her thoughts a few more times. She’d only heard Noctis’s one sided story. Lucifer wasn’t around to tell his side. What were his reasons?
If she couldn’t find the answer soon, Lucifer and Noctis would fight each other until one was destroyed or trapped between time and space forever. Kali would lose her Lucifer or Amara would lose…
Either way, it would be a disaster. Her mother has suffered a long enough wait, and Noctis may not be likable, but she didn’t want anything to happen to him. If she couldn’t figure it out any time soon, she may need to make something up.
“But I already lied to him so many times…” Her guilty conscience was setting in.
Only one more lie. Just one more lie, Amara. So many lives depend on it.
How could she stop him if she didn’t know where he went? How could she save her mother if she couldn’t find them? She forced her brain to think.
I can teleport to them, the thought came to her. But how?
She’d only successfully done it twice, and that was because she knew where she was going. How could she teleport to a place she’d never been before? How would her body know where to go?
Amara shifted back to the mansion, wound up extremely dizzy, quickly shook it off, and hurriedly ran upstairs to retrieve her channeling gauntlets. Perhaps with their help, she could teleport to the place where she needed to be. She took them out from the nightstand’s drawer and slipped them on.
The first thing she needed to do was to concentrate and think of his destination. What destination? She didn’t know where he had gone. Could a person be a destination?
We are bound, he’d said to her.
“Well, let’s see if that means anything…” Amara inhaled a deep breath and concentrated. “Noctis. Take me to Noctis,” she said, as if saying it out loud would make her body realized the command.
Nothing.
She tried again. “Take me to Noctis!”
Amara began to feel the effect of frustration. Time was running out. She closed her eyes and screamed, “Take me to him, damn it!”
Her head was spinning. Her heart was racing abnormally. Her balance was off. Amara involuntarily leaned to one side and found a wall where there had not been one before. The hard concrete material was pricking at her bare shoulder. She wondered if she had shifted to the right place. Her confusion left her when she looked to the sky.
Chapter Twenty-One
It did not take long for his age-old adversary to track him down.
Noctis had planned to shift to a remote place as far away from his home as possible to have his confrontation with Lucifer. It did not go as planned. Lucifer blocked his way before he could teleport out of the city. He had no choice but turn the city into a battle zone between them.
They each stood their ground on a tall building. Their blue gazes clashed with one another the moment Lucifer arrived. There it was; the unbendable sharpness in those infinitely beautiful blue eyes. Beautiful was not a word generally used to describe men, but there were very few words than can describe the archangel accurately. Beautiful was the closest description Noctis could think of. His son may r
esemble him, but nothing was really comparable to the real thing. Lucifer was made to command attention.
“Lucifer,” Noctis snarled. All of his pent up rage flooded back all at once.
“Imposing as always, Lucifer,” Noctis attempted to control his voice as well as the swelling rage bubbling inside his chest. “I don’t know what came over me when I mistook your son for you. When I ripped his left arm off, I thought to myself, this is far too easy. Not the Lucifer I know at all.”
Those blue eyes darkened dangerously. They bore a warning.
“Oh, have I hit a soft spot?” Noctis taunted. “I didn’t know you had one.”
“Been a while, Summit,” Lucifer calmly greeted him. “I see that you are freed. The age of the gods has long since passed. I supposed it is about time. You are free, Summit. In every sense of the word.”
“Oh thank you, Lucifer,” Noctis said with sour sarcasm. “How magnanimous of you! I am most grateful that you decided that it is so!”
Lucifer gave a low, sullen chuckle. “You wish to settle old scores with me?”
“And new ones,” Noctis added.
“New ones?” Lucifer questioned. “How have I offended you?”
“Not you per se. Your… Kali.” Noctis opened his palm to show Lucifer the ribbon around his wrist. It had been used to lure Lucifer out, but now it seemed to have another purpose.
Noctis noticed Lucifer’s blue eyes lightened several shades. So it wasn’t a rumor. That deceitful woman really was Lucifer’s one and only weakness. All the better.
“Where is she, Summit?” Lucifer’s voice deepened significantly. The calm and composed man Noctis once knew simply wasn’t there anymore. “What did you do to her?”
“The question should be what did she do to me! That woman–” Noctis gritted his teeth when he remembered how that woman tricked him into absorbing her memory. It had almost driven him insane. If the mortal hadn’t intervened, he would have torn her to pieces. Noctis decided he wanted Lucifer to suffer this a little longer. Every second of Lucifer’s suffering was worth it to him. “Give her to me, Lucifer.”
“What?” There was sharp incredulity in his voice.