The ascent took three days.
Or maybe three centuries. Hard to tell when you're walking through a wound in reality.
The Demon Lord, he'd stopped using his true name somewhere around year four hundred of the vigil, kept moving. One foot in front of the other. The Flame Sword dragged behind him, its blade eating the darkness in hungry gulps. Every step up sent fresh cracks through the tunnel walls. Light bled through. The sick orange kind. The kind that made his teeth ache.
Seal's failing faster than I thought.
His chest burned where the Saintess's blade had gone in. Holy steel. Blessed by the Celestial Choir itself. Fucking rude, considering he'd spent the last eight centuries keeping their precious sun from collapsing into a singularity of pure sin.
The Sorrow-Stone pulsed against his throat.
"Father... your heart is leaking."
"I noticed."
He pressed a hand to the wound. Black blood. Still flowing. The holy magic was eating its way through his core, and every heartbeat sent another crack through the seal.
Somewhere above, a woman was screaming.
He stopped.
Listened.
The scream cut off. Then, quiet. The kind of quiet that followed a collapse. A burial.
He kept climbing.
...
The first Hero he found was still alive.
Buried under a collapsed archway, legs crushed, white armor stained red. A boy. Couldn't have been older than seventeen. His sword lay three feet away, just out of reach. His eyes went wide when he saw the Demon Lord emerge from the darkness.
"No, no, no, no,"
"You're blocking the path."
The boy scrabbled backward, dragging his useless legs, leaving a smear of blood on the stone. "Stay away from me! I'll, I'll kill you, I swear on the Celestial,"
"Your legs are pulp." The Demon Lord crouched. Red eyes met terrified blue. "You're not killing anyone."
Except maybe yourself, if you keep moving. The femoral artery's torn. He's got maybe ten minutes.
"Please..." The boy's voice cracked. Tears cut tracks through the dust on his cheeks. "Please, just let me go. I didn't mean to, I wasn't supposed to, they said you were evil, they said,"
"They always say that."
The Flame Sword hummed. Its light caught the edges of the boy's soul, and the Demon Lord saw it: fear. Regret. And underneath it all, a bright, stupid courage that had gotten him conscripted at sixteen and sent to die in a hole in the ground for a lie.
Just like all the others.
"Hold still."
"I don't want to,"
"I said hold still."
The boy's mouth snapped shut. Good instincts.
The Demon Lord reached out. His fingers found the collapsed stone pinning the boy's legs. Breathed. The stone didn't move, it dissolved. Fine gray ash running through his fingers like sand. The boy screamed as the pressure released, but the scream turned into a sob when he looked down and saw his legs were still there.
Broken. But there.
"You, you saved me?"
"Don't make a habit of it." The Demon Lord stood. His knees popped. Everything hurt. The Flame Sword's light flickered once, twice, then steadied. "Listen closely. When you get back to the surface, you're going to see things. People dying. The sky falling. The Empire telling you I caused it."
The boy stared up at him. Still terrified. But something else was creeping into those eyes now. Something that looked a lot like the first crack in a faith that had never been questioned.
"I didn't cause it. You understand? I was holding it back. And your Saintess just put a fucking hole in the dam." He turned away. Started climbing again. "Tell them. If anyone's left alive to tell."
"Wait!"
He didn't wait.
Behind him, the boy's voice echoed up the tunnel: "Who are you? What are you?"
The Demon Lord kept walking. The Sorrow-Stone pulsed. Inside it, that voice, soft, eternal, so fucking tired, whispered again:
"Father... they're starting to remember."
He touched the crystal. Felt the warmth of something that had been with him since the beginning. Something that had watched him bleed for a world that spat on his name.
"Don't get your hopes up," he muttered. "They never remember for long."
The tunnel narrowed. The light thickened. Somewhere above, the surface was dying.
And somewhere in the dark between, the Demon Lord kept climbing, leaving a trail of black blood and broken seals behind him like breadcrumbs for the end of the world.