The light was a physical weight, a scouring presence that flayed the demonic from my soul, leaving behind a raw, hollowed-out thing that felt horrifyingly mortal. I was on my knees in the damp earth, every breath a struggle against the suffocating purity of the clearing. The holy beacon, a pillar of white stone topped with a pulsating crystal, hummed a single, celestial note that grated on my very essence.
Across from me, Seraphine was in the same state. Her ethereal glamour was stripped away, revealing a tangible, trembling form clad in ruined leather. Her perfect face was pale, her lips bloodless; she was just flesh, vulnerable and weak. The sight should have brought me a surge of triumph, but there was no room for anything but our shared, cold terror.
"This is your fault," she hissed, her voice a dry rasp, all its silken mockery burned away. "Your vulgar spectacle with that winged beast led him right to us."
"My fault?" I spat back, the words tasting like ash. "You're the one who allied with Orcs. You reek of their filth. Did you think a crusader like that wouldn't smell the rot on you?"
At the edge of the clearing, Castian the Vowed stood guard, his one good eye a chip of granite, his silvered blade resting on his shoulder. "Blame is a luxury for the damned," he said, his voice low and absolute. "This beacon does not merely block your foul powers. It starves you."
He took a step closer, his gaze sweeping over our weakened forms. "It feeds on your inherent sin, your very nature, transmuting it into this holy light. It is a slow, agonizing execution. You will be unmade, molecule by molecule, until nothing is left but purified dust. A fitting end for your kind."
His words hung in the sterile air, a death sentence delivered with calm certainty. The light wasn't just containing me; it was digesting me.
In a fit of impotent rage, I screamed at my sister, a litany of curses learned in the darkest corners of the Infernal Court. As the last curse left my lips, I felt a flicker—a spark of defiant energy surging through my veins. The beacon's light wavered violently, the pure white shifting to a sickly, jaundiced yellow for a split second. The celestial hum deepened, stuttering, as if trying to swallow something too foul. Then it stabilized, the white light returning, but the hum was a fraction lower, strained.
Seraphine's eyes widened. She had seen it, too.
The realization struck me. The beacon was a filter, a purifier. But every filter has a limit. It was designed to cleanse ambient taint, not process a direct, overwhelming torrent of pure demonic sin. It was choking.
"It's choking on us," I whispered, the horrifying logic taking shape. My gaze met Seraphine's, and I saw the same dawning horror in her eyes. "We have to make it gag."
"What are you saying?" she breathed, though she already knew.
"This thing feeds on sin," I explained, my voice gaining a frantic, sharp edge. "But that scream… that pure hatred… it was too much for it to process at once. We have to give it a feast. We have to generate the most potent, concentrated burst of pure, demonic blasphemy possible. An act so profane it shatters the very concept of purity."
The color drained from her face. Disgust warred with terror in her expression. "No. Absolutely not. I would rather be scoured into dust."
"And you will be!" I snarled, crawling closer as the light seared my skin. "We both will! Or we can use the one thing he thinks is our weakness and turn it into a weapon. We can take all our hatred, all our spite, all our ambition, and forge it into a sacrament of filth so profound it cracks this holy prison from the inside out."
"He will watch," she whispered, a final, horrified protest.
"Let him," I hissed, a feral grin spreading across my face. "Let the zealot bear witness to the blasphemy that sets us free."
Her jaw tightened, her gaze flickering from my face to Castian's impassive silhouette and back again. The will to survive, that ugly, tenacious Vex birthright, won out over her disgust. She gave a single, sharp nod, her eyes burning with a hatred that now had a purpose. It was a pact forged not in alliance, but in mutual, weaponized self-interest.
At the foot of the pulsating beacon, its pure light casting our every movement in stark, unforgiving relief, I reached for her. My touch was a claim, my fingers digging into the flesh of her arm. She flinched, her hand lashing out to grip my shoulder, her nails biting into my skin.
Our mouths met in a collision of teeth and resentment, a bruising, angry kiss that tasted of blood and desperation. My hands tore at the fastenings of her armor, and she ripped at the rags of my tunic with equal violence. The sterile air grew thick, tainted with the musky, sharp scent of our demonic sweat and arousal—a defiant perfume against the cold purity of the light. Our gasps and moans became a dissonant chorus of rage and exertion against the beacon's steady, holy hum.
I pushed her back against the beacon's cold stone base, the holy energy a constant, searing pain against my skin. I channeled it, feeding the fire. My mind raced with a litany of her crimes against me. *For every moment of mockery,* I thought as my mouth found the pulse at her throat, biting down hard enough to leave a mark. *For every condescending laugh.* My fingers found her, slick and hot with a need her body couldn't deny, and I delved into her without tenderness. She cried out, a sharp sound of shock and unwilling pleasure, her hips bucking against my hand.
She retaliated, her hands tangling in my hair, yanking my head back. Her eyes were black pools of fury. "You think you're in control?" she snarled, and then she was on me, reversing our positions, her body a lithe, powerful weight pressing me into the dirt.
The beacon began to react. The light sputtered, the pure white flickering to a sickening yellow. The stone pillar beneath the crystal vibrated, and the hum rose in pitch, becoming a strained, discordant whine. It was working.
"More," I gasped, the word ripped from my throat.
She understood. Her movements became more frantic, more brutal. It was a desperate, hateful coupling at the foot of an altar to a god we both despised. The light above us shifted from yellow to a bruised, profane violet, casting our writhing forms in a sickly glow. A spiderweb of hairline cracks spread across the beacon's stone base. The whining intensified, becoming an unbearable, screaming shriek. We were killing it, defiling the light with our very existence.
Our climax was not pleasure but a convulsive, shared, and violent expulsion of pure, weaponized sin. A tidal wave of profane energy, forged from a lifetime of sibling hatred, slammed into the beacon. The spiderweb of cracks raced up the pillar, converging on the screaming crystal at its apex.
With a deafening shriek of tearing reality, the crystal exploded.
There was no sound, no fire. Just a silent, colorless shockwave of pure, null-magic energy erupting outward. The wave slammed into me, into Seraphine, into Castian at the edge of the clearing. The last thing I comprehended before my vision whited out was the sight of my sister and my enemy falling, their forms collapsing like puppets with their strings cut, just as I was, into a shared, silent oblivion.