Before Kazaroth could respond to Raziel’s statement, a blinding light overtook them both. Raziel found it odd that even with the defensive magic circle he had cast around himself the strange magic was able to affect him. Strangely, Raziel found that the light had temporarily blinded him. The first thing that hit him was the smell. The strongest of all the scents was iron, the familiar metallic scent felt as if he was bathing in a sea of blood.
Iron.
It seemed to be all around him permeating every pore in his body. He couldn't see, but he could imagine his body bathed in an iron as crimson as his eyes, the metal weighing down his body in a way no blade could ever hope to accomplish.
Mixed in was the smell of something rotting all around him. At first, he thought it might have been garbage or mold, but quickly he realized it was the smell of long dead corpses. The putrid smell mixing with the iron caused his heartbeat to accelerate as he imagined a multitude of maggots and cockroaches swarming and laying eggs around the rotting flesh and decay all around him.
Raziel twitched his index fingers, breathing a sigh of relief that he still had control of his body. Carefully, he felt around with his shoe, his feet sinking into the soft flesh around him until he felt something solid. Smiling at this development, Raziel reached out his hand until he touched something smooth, his hand slick in the fresh liquid metal, sliding across as if he had touched marble. At the same time the surface seemed to be hard and sturdy in a way he couldn’t quite picture.
Continuing his exploration, he felt as if this was a chair of some sort. Strange enough, the chair seemed to be much larger than his body, almost as if it was made for some three-meter-tall giant. On the edges of the seat, there were some pointy bits going downwards, sliding his hands upwards, Raziel pushed himself up onto the seat.
The moment that he did, Raziel regained control of his sight. At first, it was blurry and there was something blocking his vision. Feeling past the iron coating his fingers, Raziel recognized the black material as being hair, more specifically his hair. Pushing the long onyx strands back, he wondered what was going on. Like all male demons, he had ceremoniously cut his hair for the first time on his eighteenth birthday. Since then, he had always maintained short and neat hair.
Once his hair was pushed back, Raziel blinked a few times to clear the remaining blurriness caused by the sudden light hitting his face. Reaching out his hand, the first thing that he noticed was that his right hand was indeed coated in fresh blood. Used to such a sight, this was not what disturbed Raziel. Rather the small size of his hand had him questioning just what was going on. Pulling his left hand into view, Raziel realized that it wasn’t that the chair was big, but it was that he was small.
Quickly, his neck snapped up to see who had done this to him and that rotting feeling from earlier overcame him once again. As he had suspected from the nauseating stench, what surrounded him was something which could only be described as a mountain of corpses. Each body mangled beyond repair, the pale lifeless limbs molding with each other, until he could not tell where one corpse began and the next ended.
The only thing he could make out for sure was there faces. Each forever frozen in time in an expression of agony. Strangest of all was how each expression seemed to be different. One man had his face stretched out in a soundless scream, while another woman had her eyes diluted in silent pain. As he looked into these faces, Raziel realized something.
“I know these people,” came out a voice much more high pitched then his natural deep voice.
Unable to continue looking at the familiar faces, Raziel turned to see where he was sitting on before immediately jumping up, causing his boot to pulverize the silver eye of a traitor Raziel had once called friend. What he had been sitting on was no chair, but rather a throne of polished bone. Each bone seemed to be made of both demon and human coming together in a perfect craftsmanship, like the pieces of a puzzle fitting together. Removing his shoes from the eye, Raziel wondered who could have thought up such a scene. Since childhood Raziel has always been called a lot of things, but even his mind wasn’t this perverted.
Shaking his head, causing his now long black hair to cover his face, Raziel mentally cast a magic circle on himself to wash away all the grime and blood from his body. Surprisingly, he still had control of his magic. This caused him to question just why his protection circles had proved to be useless in this place. Thinking on this, Raziel had only felt this powerless two times in his young life. The first had been when he had joined the party to play in the game of the god once called Somgar.
As soon as the thought came to him, Raziel recalled what scene he had witnessed with Kazaroth.
“How odd,” Raziel remarked into the mountain of the dead.
For the first time since he had gained control of his court, Raziel really began to question if someone from that cursed god’s followers had really managed to survive the witch hunt from a decade ago.
Shaking his head from such thoughts, Raziel cast another magic circle, causing him to teleport to the base of the mountain. Without looking back, he walked into what appeared to be a dark void, shadows dancing at the edges of his vision. If he stared at one shadow too long, Raziel could see a vision of himself killing someone.
The first shadow looked to be from when he was ten years old. Compelled to look at it, Raziel remembered the people who had killed his father and kidnapped his mother. More than that, he remembered the feeling of killing a living creature for the first time. Now it only seemed natural, but back then the feeling of a blade slowly sinking into flesh, moving inch by inch as red iron sprayed across his young body caused Raziel's heartbeat to accelerate and eyes to dilate in near hyperventilation.
Looking at the black, black shadow, Raziel could feel just how cold the sword of the Kingdom of Demons was as he cut and cut and cut until the witches who had destroyed his family were unrecognizable. All the while that iron kept spilling onto him, the scent so deep he could never completely wash it away from his body no matter how long or how much he bathed.
After, Raziel could feel the bile that threatened to rise in his throat at the end of the battle. The mucus mixed with decomposed food rising up his throat, threatening to spill into strange shadowy place he had walked into. To regain control of his body, Raziel focused on breathing and slowly swallowing down the vomit that threatened to spill from his body.
When he was calm again, Raziel shook his head and backed away, but found that he was only met with more shadows, each showing a different time in his young life where he had chosen to take the life of another. Some of the shadows were as childlike as that very first one, while others appeared to have a more adult like form.
Shutting his crimson eyes tightly, Raziel put each of his now tiny hands over his ears, blocking out the sounds of magic and blades swinging while repeating a mantra out loud.
“This is not real.
This is not real.
This. Is. Not. Real”
On and on Raziel walked, not sure of where he was headed. Around him were the sounds of violence and bloodshed as his feet trudged on through this unseen path. All Raziel knew was that if he stopped to look or listen, he would likely never get out of whatever place he was now trapped in. As he chanted, a different part of his brain focused on keeping his heartbeat and breathing steady.
In and out.
As his voice chanted, his mind counted the beats of his heart.
One, two, three.
One, two, three.
One, two, three.
This was the only way he could ensure that he was alive. The shadows were not real. The killing had long since ended. He was alive and he would continue to live. No matter what, that was the one truth that Raziel could hold on to.
As he trudged on while concentrating on these two things, Raziel suddenly felt silence envelop him. Slowly removing his hands and opening his eyes, Raziel noted that this was not an ordinary type of silence, but rather a type of complete silence that should not exist. Even while working in his study, there was often the sound of his pen or of the breeze coming in from the window. Here, all of these little things which reminded him of his life had been replaced with dead nothingness.
For a moment, Raziel wished for the shadows to return before shaking his head at such foolishness. Looking around to distract himself from the eeriness caused by the lack of sound, Raziel found that he had walked into some sort of forest. The strange part of this was that the forest seemed to lack any color. Rather than the shades of brown and greens he was familiar with, the trees and dirt around him were a strange lifeless grey color.
In this strange place which could not logically be, a familiar voice cut through the silence like a knife.
“It has been a long time, little brother.”
