by SM Reine
“I know,” Elise said as reality faded back in around her. A cold reality where there was a dead boy in front of her and Belphegor with James’s blood on his hands.
Elise understood that James needed to die, and yet she felt like she had already lost against Belphegor. Like there wasn’t anything left worth fighting over.
Belphegor didn’t look triumphant. He looked angry.
Angry, and afraid.
“Killing Nathaniel won’t stop the genesis,” Belphegor said. “Furthermore, you can’t assemble a new pantheon unless you kill yourself as well—and whatever else you have dredged from the Origin. The only way out of this is suicide. What’s victory worth to you?”
At this point, when almost everyone Elise loved was dead, beyond her reach?
“Everything,” she said. “Anything.”
Elise lifted her swords, and with Yatam and Eve at her back, she attacked.
Without any physical limitations remaining, Elise was no longer merely fast. She saw every possibility played out in front of her in every instant: Belphegor’s possible dodge to the left or right, how she would chase, which of them would succumb first.
The next heartbeat brought another cascade of possibilities, and so did the next. A million different ways either of them could die.
It would only take the right moment, the right possibility, to slaughter Belphegor.
They danced together at a speed beyond comprehension, moving through time as well as space. When Belphegor dodged, he didn’t just move to the left; he slid into an ancient desert crossed by spice merchants on camels before sliding back into Eden, outside of time and space. Elise pursued him through it.
Her thrusts drove him back to a time where the Earth was unpopulated, chasing him over a log that bridged an icy river through the mist.
Belphegor didn’t have any weapons, but he didn’t need them. His forearms were stone deflecting her attacks.
He shoved her hard enough to send her flying. Elise felt time vortex around them, punching her out of ancient history into modernity.
Almost modernity. She smashed into parquet flooring hard enough to shake the entire building, and looked up to see that Belphegor had tossed her into Motion and Dance, the studio that she had once run with James. It was nighttime outside. Blue exercise mats were spread across the floor.
She was stunned to stillness, hands tight on the falchions.
There was a photo on the wall—a poster-sized shot of Elise and James at a competition.
Pain punched through her at the sight of it.
Elise had let Belphegor kill James just so she wouldn’t be weak.
“Move,” Yatam said from behind her, almost casually.
She rolled. A fist smashed into the parquet where she had been resting, cratering the wooden floor. The hole it left was much larger than the gauntlet that Belphegor wore in his armored form. She glimpsed a vast body that could crush the streets of Dis under his skeletal foot, and then he attacked her again as the steward.
Elise leaped away from him—and away from Motion and Dance.
She threw herself into a place where she was strong, a place without the painful reminder of what had happened to James.
The crystal bridge from the Palace of Dis to the fissure gleamed among the smoke over the city. Elise had leaped into a time when everything was intact, when she had still ruled.
Belphegor strode up the bridge, smoke billowing away from him as he approached her. Fire burned within his eyes.
“You learn quickly,” he said. “It took me centuries to learn how to travel temporally.”
“You haven’t had centuries.” She leaped back when he lunged at her, leaving several yards between the specters of their physical forms. Dis pitched around them. The crystal bridge was suddenly shattered again and the city was burning.
“I’ve always been God,” Belphegor said. “I’ve had eternity.”
She thought she understood what he meant now. Her soul was stretching in every direction, expanding to fill the universe with herself.
It did feel like she’d lived forever. Like she’d always been on this side of the Origin, just waiting to wake up to it.
Belphegor thrust his will against her, manifested as a fist to the gut. She staggered as reality swam dizzily around her.
They were in a doctor’s office. James and a girl who looked like Elise were sitting across from a doctor, who was calmly explaining that she had been born an aberration. She had complete androgen insensitivity. She was genetically male in an otherwise female body.
She had always assumed, until that day, that being a female kopis was just the luck of the draw. That she was one among thousands only by coincidence. She hadn’t known that all kopides were male, and that there was something significantly wrong with her.
Metaraon had made her that way. A female to be Adam’s bride, yet also male enough to be kopis, and strong enough to murder gods.
James had been there for that appointment. He had held her hand through it. He had reassured her that there was nothing “wrong” with her at all. He had made her feel as close to normal as a teenage girl who slaughtered demons could ever feel.
He had loved her, even then. He had taken care of her when nobody else would. When Elise wouldn’t even admit she might need the help.
The reminder was emotional warfare from Belphegor.
“Stop it,” she said, shoving both of them out of the office.
“Does it hurt?” Belphegor asked.
He knew it hurt. He was guiding her to the most painful places in her memory deliberately.
A god might not have been able to kill another god easily, but he could make her wither.
“Fire with fire,” Eve said. “Let’s take Belphegor where he hurts the most.”
It was Yatam who supplied the responding setting. They appeared in an ancient version of Dis with a river running through its center, flooded by the fissure to Eden.
At the time, Dis had been a desert oasis. The wind smelled like sage, the trees hung heavy with dates, and what few buildings stood in the shadow of Mount Anathema resembled the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Lilith, the serpentine demon goddess, stood among the trees and fountains. A man groveled at her feet.
Not a man—a skeleton.
Belphegor.
He didn’t look like any of the forms that Elise was familiar with. Not the steward, nor the general, nor the towering monster. He was a shriveled, pathetic thing, like a runt that had been abandoned by its mother and wasted away to nothing. He had two arms, two legs, something like a face, and the resemblance ended there.
But it was definitely Belphegor. Elise could feel him.
“You sicken me,” Lilith said. “Your obsessions are perverse.” It was somehow worse to hear that coming from a demon than it would have been from an angel.
And indeed, Eve was there, too—Eve, and younger forms of Yatam and his sister, Yatai. They all glared at Belphegor with total disgust in their eyes. It looked like the one issue that they had all ever agreed upon was the fact that this creature, this skeleton, was an abomination.
“Kill him,” Yatam urged.
“We can’t,” Eve said.
Yatai’s lip curled. “Sentimentality.”
“She’s right. We cannot,” Lilith said. “It’s impossible. This thing is beyond our ability to kill.” She seemed to look at Elise when she said it, even though Elise wasn’t really there. “Belphegor has been settled too deeply within the fabric of time. He must exist now, as he must exist centuries in the future.”
Belphegor the god stood apart from the conversation, staring at it in disgust.
“They turned on me, the only surviving ancient, when they should have worshipped me,” he hissed, rounding on Elise. “You turned on me.” She understood that he was speaking to Yatam and Eve, her other aspects.
Elise drove the glowing white point of her godsword into his chest.
He was too stunned by the sight of the a
ncient city to react in time. He didn’t even attempt to dodge the blow.
Instead, Belphegor looked down at the sword. His thin lips stretched into an expression that didn’t seem quite like a grimace or a smile. He seized Elise’s wrist and pulled her in closer. Blade scraped against bone, the hilt vibrating in time with his heart fluttering against metal.
The desert oasis of Dis melted away.
Darkness consumed them. Vast nothingness.
There was no time, no world—only the space between Belphegor and Elise as his body’s systems rapidly shut down. “What do you know of avatars?” The whisper of his breath over her lips tasted like old graveyards.
Elise didn’t know much beyond what James had told her of avatars—that gods needed them to walk on Earth, like Nathaniel did through Benjamin. Her thoughts unfolded between them. She didn’t need to speak for him to know it.
Belphegor responded with equal candor, both mentally and verbally. “I am an avatar. Nothing more. And I’m not the only one.”
He died before Elise could ask how that was possible.
At least, his avatar died.
Elise jerked the sword free and allowed Belphegor to fall. He landed on the ground beside the Tree, though she wasn’t certain when they had ended up in the garden again.
His body flickered between those of the steward, the armored general, and the monster. When it settled, he was only a skeleton, quickly devoured by Eden’s mossy ground. Green tendrils crept over him, sank into his bones, sucked him away into nothingness.
The garden didn’t react to his death. She didn’t feel him leaving the way that she had felt Nathaniel leave.
The Belphegor that Elise had known for years wasn’t the real thing at all. She had always been dealing with an avatar—and that was all she had killed. An avatar. Not the real thing.
“How the hell has he had an avatar longer than he’s been a god?” Elise asked.
Yatam scoffed. “Don’t think so linearly.”
She stretched herself across existence, searching through Heaven and Hell and Earth for any sign of Belphegor’s true form. He should have been easy to find. He shared in the same godhood she did; he should have burned like a flare.
“Where did he go?” she asked, sensing nothing.
“Try Malebolge,” Eve whispered.
Elise appeared in the moldy yellow wasteland. She was surprised to see that Malebolge hadn’t changed much during Belphegor’s rampage. He’d made Heaven and Earth burn, but left Malebolge largely untouched. There were obvious sinkholes dotting the landscape in Hell, but the sky was intact, giving no glimpse of any other dimension.
Lights still burned in the market, situated deep within the pelvis of the giant skeleton that formed the city. The population remained there. In fact, judging by how full the staircases along the walls of the city were, it looked like Malebolge was taking refugees from elsewhere in Hell.
“He’s in there?” Elise asked, frowning.
“Not exactly,” Yatam said.
She heard distant screaming, and she realized that the dimension was starting to deteriorate, just like the rest of the universe. The city was shifting. The ground trembled, bones rolled, people begin to leap out of the pelvis. Elise braced herself, prepared to see how the dimension would fall apart and where they would end up next.
Yet her position didn’t change. It wasn’t the dimension moving—only the skeleton of Malebolge itself.
The first arm to lift was so large that Elise felt like she was falling, rather than the bones simply rising. There was no muscle to propel the movement. No tendons held them together. Yet they moved anyway, wrenching free of the yellow soil with a mighty groan.
Once freed to the shoulder, the arm twisted, planting a skeletal hand on the ground.
It pushed. The skull ripped from Coccytus, tearing the ground between the two worlds apart.
The entire skeleton sat up slowly.
Newborn god or not, dread swarmed Elise at the sight of the ribcage emerging from the ground. The skeleton became erect enough that the dwellings built into the rotten meat of the cadaver began to tumble out.
Something that big wasn’t meant to move.
Belphegor wasn’t inside Malebolge.
He was Malebolge.
Rather, he was Ba’al—the three-faced ancient demon that entire Hells had been built around, apparently by Lilith as a prison for a creature she found entirely repulsive.
“This was his original avatar,” Eve said, sounding far too calm about the whole situation. “We killed this one, but he’s easy enough to reanimate, as you can see.”
Elise could see.
She also had no idea how she was going to kill him.
Twenty-One
Ba’al shifted his weight onto one hand to wrench the other arm free of the wasteland. Stone crumbled away from him. Putrid, rotting tissue stirred with the motion, making the entire dimension reek of garbage and death.
More of the city fell away. The apartments in his chest seemed to tumble from between his ribs in slow motion, splattering in the sludge and erupting like pus. The borehole through his breastbone poured incorporeal nightmares into the air.
Elise glimpsed Yatam in the corner of her vision. He looked bored, inspecting his fingernails. “You should probably kill that.”
Her mouth worked silently. She wanted to snap at him, shoot back an angry response.
She didn’t manage to say anything at all.
Elise had done the impossible before. She had killed enemies exponentially larger than her with and without magic. She had entered quarantined dimensions, killed Adam, and brought down ethereal cities.
This was something else entirely.
“You can do it,” Eve said. It felt like she touched the back of Elise’s neck, spreading warmth and reassurance through her. “We’ll all do it together. You’re not alone.”
It did make her feel slightly better to hear that. It did not make Elise feel more optimistic about her odds. “This whole ‘Belphegor is a city’ thing would have been great to know in advance,” she said, gathering her resolve, squaring her shoulders.
Yatam’s smirk smoldered through her mind. “I’ll keep that in mind for all the future city-sized demons you’re required to fight.”
Elise had never really liked that guy.
Ba’al stood. Ice crusted his skull, flames leaping from the three mouths. His hands stroked his chins, his chest, his bared hips, as though searching for missing bones.
Then he turned his attention on Elise.
She felt the moment that he noticed her. They were gods of the same pantheon, so there was nowhere to hide; he would have been able to find her anywhere, given the time.
The weight of his eyeless gaze made her feel puny.
“It’s only an avatar,” Eve reminded her.
Only. Right.
Ba’al’s hand swung through the space between them, reaching for Elise.
Instinctively, she wanted to phase to him—the way she would have crossed that distance as a demon. But now she was so much more than that. Omnipresence meant that she existed everywhere simultaneously, including the center of Malebolge.
She moved her consciousness to the pelvis where the market had been. Now most of the ramshackle buildings had fallen away. A few demons clung to the bones, crying their woes.
Elise hovered off of the street, seeking the light of Belphegor’s true form among the chaos. She only saw demons filled with fear—demons that had believed Malebolge was their final refuge, and now didn’t know where to go when that was taken from them. They clung to their tables and stalls until those also collapsed, and then fell with the debris.
Bones larger than redwoods swept toward the market. Ba’al was moving to scratch Elise like an itch.
She scaled the ribs, darting through his bones in search of Belphegor’s true form as the city collapsed around her. Ba’al was moving too, striding across the wasteland toward the side of the cavern that formed Malebolge. H
e shed the remaining pieces of the city inside the cadaver as he shifted.
A steady pulsing filled the air. A rotten heart rested at the bottom of what had been the Amniosium, beginning to beat now that Belphegor had reanimated his avatar. Every contraction of the muscles squeezed fresh sludge out over the breastbone, cascading over down his chest in a sludgy waterfall.
Belphegor wasn’t there, either. Only nightmares. Elise recognized a few of them in passing, people who had worked for her, and people she had killed.
When she reached the collarbone, that massive hand caught up with her, swatting her away from his neck.
She hung in the air in front of him.
The face tipped down to look at her. Hovering near his frontmost chin, she couldn’t even see his eyes above her. Flames smoldered beyond his fangs, inside his skeletal maw. The fissure to Limbo was gone now. All that remained was blazing fire, as incredibly hot as the icicles dangling from his jawbones were cold.
Those flames were so bright that she almost missed the glint of Belphegor’s presence inside Ba’al’s skull.
“There he is,” Yatam said.
Finger bones pinched down on Elise, crashing together with the sound of a collapsing skyscraper.
He’d caught her.
Ba’al pushed her toward one of the mouths. He was trying to push her into the flames, seeing if the brilliance could kill her as it would have killed her before she entered the Origin.
Maybe it would have worked if Elise had still been a demon like Yatam, but she wasn’t exactly a demon anymore, and Belphegor was going to have to try harder than that.
She slipped from his grip effortlessly and reappeared inside Ba’al’s skull, near the ear canal.
The skull bones weren’t as barren as the rest of the giant cadaver. Tissue remained inside, swimming with crimson-tinted fluid, pulsing in time with the beating of the heart. The inner half of the canal was a jungle of rotten organic matter that dangled in long, veined ropes.
Belphegor glowed brighter here. He was definitely within.