*****TW*****
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I inclined my head.
"Yes," I told him. "Right here."
He drew in a breath that shook all the way through him. Then he pulled.
No hesitation. No pleading. Just a single, brutal motion.
The shard carved through the side of his neck in one dragged line. There had been a soft sound, almost gentle, and then there had been color everywhere — dark and bright at once, spilling over his collar, pattering onto the floor in uneven drops. The air thickened with the iron tang of it, hot and immediate, and his hand slipped as his strength left him all at once.
Hugo dropped.
He crumpled to his knees first, the shard sliding from his fingers, then toppled to the side, his body landing on the concrete with a heavy thud that reverberated through the small cell. His eyes stayed open at the start, wide and stunned, as if some part of him could not quite believe what he had just done.
I froze.
For the first time in longer than I could count, my body refused to move. My chest tightened sharply, an unfamiliar stabbing pain lodging beneath my ribs. Breath caught high in my throat. I felt something seize deep inside me.
Then I coughed.
It tore out of me, rough and involuntary, as if the act of watching him die triggered some forgotten reflex. One cough, then another, racking my lungs like a useless attempt to drag in more air.
This was not how my kind reacted to human death.
I had watched thousands fall. I had coaxed some toward it, pulled others through it, walked beside a few as they begged for more time. Never once had my chest clenched. Never once had my breath accelerated. Never once had my body echoed theirs.
He lay on the floor, a growing pool spreading under his cheek, his hand twitching once before going still. The mark beneath his ribs burned — I felt it from here, a violent tightening that snapped along the tether between us like a struck wire.
I backed away from him and sat down hard on the edge of the bed.
My breathing came too fast, shallow and ragged, each inhale sharp, each exhale incomplete. My hands pressed against my knees, fingers digging into the fabric of my trousers to steady the trembling.
I knew I would see him again. I knew his essence would not scatter. I had walked him to this brink for that very purpose. Yet watching him die in such a human way, in such a small human room, turned the moment into something I had never prepared for.
A different presence shifted the air.
I looked toward the body.
The Angel of Death stepped closer, his form now nearer to Hugo's fallen shape. He had already stood in the corner, watching, but now he moved with that terrible serenity only his kind possessed. He bowed over Hugo, his posture neither tender nor cruel, simply precise.
The same chill slid through me that always came when he drew near. My existence recoiled from his order. I, who thrived in the fractures and the rebellions of creation, felt an old, familiar dread stir when faced with a being who never disobeyed.
After minutes from standing there and just watching, long minutes, he knelt beside Hugo, one hand hovering a breath above the broken skin as if tracing something only he could see.
Then, for the first time in all the centuries I had known him, he spoke. I would always leave before this exact moment.
His voice held no accent, no age. It sounded like a verse half-remembered from a holy text, the echo of a prayer spoken long before language belonged to men.
"Child of earth," he said, "leave the dust to the dust, and carry only the breath that was placed within you. What the world broke, you no longer need. Rise from what bled you, and step out of your sorrow."
The words moved through the cell with a strange gravity, settling over Hugo's body, over the spreading stain, over me.
My chest seized again.
I clutched the edge of the mattress, fingers digging into the thin fabric, and tried to steady my breathing while Death reached down, unseen by human eyes, to take what remained of the boy I had marked.
I knew I would meet him at the other side. I knew this was not the end of him.
Yet the sight of him lying there, emptied, neck torn by his own hand at my instruction, set something inside me ringing like a cracked bell.
I did not flinch from death. But this time, for reasons I could not wholly name, death flinched through me.
The Angel vanished with the same silence he arrived in, dissolving into the dim air as though the room swallowed him whole. Only Hugo remained, his body folded on the concrete with his head turned slightly to the side, the wound darkening along the line he carved. The stillness around him felt absolute, the kind of stillness that belonged only to things that would never rise again.
I stood there for a long moment, looking at him.
My chest tightened again — a sharp, involuntary clench that stabbed deep enough to unsettle me. It thrummed behind my ribs like an echo of something ancient, some instinct I had never needed, some ache I had never been built to carry.
I did not understand it.
I had guided countless souls through their endings. Watched them break themselves on the edge of their own despair. Pulled their spirits toward my realm with practiced indifference. But watching Hugo fall had carved something jagged into me, something I could not name. The weight of it did not lessen even as his body lay cooling on the floor.
Feelings like these were not meant for creatures like me.
I tore myself away.
The descent opened beneath my feet, a rift of shadow folding into itself until the cell dissolved around me. The prison's gray walls vanished in an instant, replaced by the thick, pulsing darkness of the crossing. The air felt heavier here, charged with the familiar density of souls being drawn from one state to the next.
When my foot touched ground again, the landscape of my realm stretched before me — a vast expanse of shifting color and silence, built of memory and ruin, layered with the echoes of every life that had ever fed it.
And they waited.
Thea stood near the threshold, arms folded loosely, expression unreadable. their wings shifted behind them in slow, deliberate curves, catching the dim glow of the horizon.
"Thirty thousand two hundred fourteen," Thea said as soon as I arrived, their tone unbothered, as though announcing the hour instead of a soul. Hugo's soul. My soul.
I kept my gaze on them, the ache in my chest tightening, unfamiliar and sharp. "This is not the same."
Thea lifted one shoulder. "It is another soul added to your count. Whatever you want to name it, the number rises. A soul taken is a soul taken."
The weight of their words pressed into me. A part of me recoiled, another part resisted the truth of the count, but I forced myself to swallow it.
"Close the count," I said quietly.
Thea studied me, something knowing flickering in their eyes before they nodded. "Very well."
They tapped two fingers against the small ledger they carried — a thing older than angels, older than the concept of record itself. The faintest shift ran through the realm as the tally sealed.
"This is the last," I said, though I knew the realm did not respond to declarations. Fate did not shift because I demanded it. Thea knew it too.
They exhaled, amusement curling at the edges of their voice. "Whatever you say. Nothing I haven't heard before."
The ache inside me pulsed again — a hollow throb beneath my ribs, spreading outward like a bruise I could not dispel.
"That was hard," I murmured.
Thea's expression softened, not kindly, but with a rare acknowledgement. They smiled — small, knowing, a touch of respect in it. "Well done, Corvian."
They turned and walked away, their steps quiet, leaving me alone at the threshold of my own realm, with nothing but the sealed number and the echo of Hugo's absence pressing against the raw place inside my chest.
The path narrowed as I approached the gates, the ground beneath me turning dark and brittle, as though the plain itself feared to stand too close. A heavy stillness pooled in the air, thick with the remnants of old fire, the kind that lingered even after flame died. The ache beneath my ribs continued its slow, steady pulse, but I forced my breath to settle as the final stretch opened ahead.
The gates loomed in the distance.
The Door of Descent.
They rose from the ground like the spine of the underworld itself, carved from stone older than the first star that ever burned, older than angels, older than the notion of salvation. The slabs stretched high enough that the sky bent to accommodate their size, the arch above them warped and cracked as if the heavens once strained to hold something monstrous back and failed.
The stone surface was dark, not simply black but layered in depths that swallowed the eye — char, obsidian, the dim red of dying coals pressed beneath the earth. Veins of molten color wound through the panels, glowing in sluggish pulses, as though trapped fire breathed weakly within the rock. The glow shifted without rhythm, flickering like a heart that beat when it wished, not when it was told.
Carvings covered every inch of the doors — not clean lines or sacred symbols, but raw impressions gouged deep into the rock, etched by the movement of suffering across millennia. Some resembled limbs contorted in impossible angles, others looked like the sweep of wings long burned to ash, and others still seemed like open mouths frozen in soundless cries. They bled into one another, forming shapes that dissolved the moment the eye tried to anchor them.
The stone looked alive.
When I stepped closer, the carvings stirred, the surface shifting with a slow, deliberate motion that refused any single meaning. The realm always molded itself to whoever stood before it, revealing fragments rather than full truths. This time, the rock stretched into a valley of twisting silhouettes that rose and collapsed in endless succession, as though the stone attempted to remember every being who had ever crossed its threshold and failed to choose which memory to keep.
No two shapes remained the same for longer than a breath.
Some elongated upward like pillars of smoke, others sank downward like shadows fleeing light, and some split into branching paths that folded back into themselves. The carvings were neither welcoming nor threatening — they simply existed, ancient and indifferent, reflecting the weight of eternity in motion.
Heat radiated from the doors in slow waves, carrying the scent of scorched earth and the remnants of old incense burned in forgotten rituals. A low vibration thrummed through the ground, subtle enough that only beings like me could feel its cadence — the hum of souls passing far below, the steady churn of a realm with no beginning or end.
I stood before the gates, the vast stone slabs towering over me like a monument carved for no worshipper, no king, no conqueror. Only descent.
My hand rose. The stone met my palm with warmth, as if it recognized me through some primordial instinct rather than through the memory of my footsteps. The heat seeped through my skin, grounding me in the reality of this place — a realm I had walked for ages, a realm that had shaped me long before I shaped others.
I placed both hands on the doors.
The slabs groaned, heavy and low, the sound rolling through the plain like distant thunder beneath the earth. The seam widened slowly, dragging firelight through the gap, and the breath of the underworld washed over me — heat, smoke, and the faint echo of something ancient shifting in the depths below.
I inhaled.
The smell of smoke curled into me, steady and familiar, settling into the space behind my ribs like an acknowledgment.
The gates opened wide.
And I stepped forward, letting the warmth consume the last remnants of the world I had left behind.
I don't wanna talk
If it makes you feel sad
And I understand
You've come to shake my hand
I apologize
If it makes you feel bad
Seeing me so tense
No self-confidence, but you see
The winner takes it all
The winner takes it all
The End