The Broken Halo

The bloody array pulsed once, and every corpse moved.

A shoulder was dragged across the ground. A heel turned. Nine hundred and ninety-nine bodies shifted until their chests rested over the waiting inscriptions.

Tarvak began struggling again.

Simon watched the blood beneath the nearest body crawl upward against its weight.

"Take off your shirt," Lilith said.

He looked at her.

"The inscriptions must reach your skin. And put the sword inside your heart, where it belongs."

Simon willed the Chaos Blade to shrink. It became a narrow black streak and sank into his chest, settling within the Chaos Flame inside his Infernal Heart.

He removed what remained of his shirt. The Chaos Wraps stayed around his arms.

"Now stand there."

Lilith indicated toward the smallest circle. Simon lowered himself into it, his bare chest exposed to the cold drifting over the ground.

"Cross your legs. Palms upward. Once the blood touches you, do not leave that circle."

"What happens if I move?"

"The connections will remain, but you will not enjoy discovering what they pull out of you."

Simon sat.

Lilith turned her gloved hand.

The corpses slid into nine circles, one hundred and eleven bodies in each. Narrow lines extended beneath their chests, joining the larger rings without crossing them.

"First, we establish the blood you are leaving behind."

She pressed two fingers toward the ground.

The lines pierced the corpses.

Something knocked from inside a dead guard’s breastplate.

Then another answered.

Badum

Simon’s gaze sharpened.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine hearts began beating.

The sound travelled through the ground into his seated body. Some beats were thick and wet. Others scraped against broken ribs.

"They’re hearts are beating despite been dead," he said with a tinge of intrigue in his voice.

"Yeah. The array is moving the hearts, not returning their lives."

Blood welled from severed necks. Instead of spilling freely, it followed the inscriptions toward the centre.

"Their bloodlines are related to yours. The array will draw out what they share and use it to hold your weaker bloodline open," Lilith said.

"Open?"

"Your Sky Tiger suppresses it. I cannot change something that disappears beneath the stronger blood every time it is disturbed."

Simon looked at the corpses again.

"So they hold it in place."

"Long enough for us to work."

The beating continued. The bodies remained motionless around their working hearts.

Behind them, smoke lowered toward the ground. It gathered along the outermost ring and stopped rising.

Lilith lifted Jorra’s heart.

Unlike the others, it had never needed the array to make it beat.

The moment it passed above the rings, every forced heartbeat faltered.

Tarvak made a strangled sound.

"Keep it away from me."

Lilith ignored him.

"This supplies what the other hearts cannot. Actual Daemon blood."

She held it over the stripped skull.

"We are not making you inherit Jorra’s bloodline. We are using its nature to draw yours beyond the limits of an ordinary demon."

Simon followed the distinction.

The nine hundred and ninety-nine hearts would hold the bloodline he intended to change. Jorra’s heart would make that change possible.

The skull rose beneath it.

Jorra’s heart settled between the Superior Demon Lord’s horns. Fine red markings spread across the bare bone, descending into the empty eye sockets.

"The skull holds the passage through which that power reaches you. The stronger a demon that owns the skull, the less is lost keeping the passage intact."

Simon’s severed horn lifted from the slab, and it came to rest against the skull’s brow.

"And that?" he asked.

"The part of you that tells the array which bloodline it belongs to."

Lilith glanced at him.

"You possess two. We are not tearing apart the wrong one."

Blood entered the hollow skull.

It should have filled quickly, but it did not.

Simon could see down through one eye socket. Far below it, red light moved through a darkness that could not possibly fit inside the bone.

He narrowed his eyes curiously, but Lilith turned the skull away.

"Watch me."

Simon obeyed.

He had seen sacrificial formations before. Most fed something, summoned something, or bought power from something stronger.

He looked at the arrangement before him.

"This is truly something else."

Lilith’s golden eyes remained on the runes, then she gestured at Tarvak.

"Release your wind."

Simon let the sphere unwind.

Before the commander could fall, blood rose from the array and caught him beneath his back. It carried him to a narrow oval beyond Simon’s circle.

Tarvak kicked as everything in his instincts warned him about what was soon to happen.

"NO! Get this off me!"

Red bands closed around his ankles and torso. Another supported his neck without choking him.

From where he lay, he could see Simon speaking to empty air. He could see a Daemon heart floating above a skull. He could see his dead guards lying among hundreds of bodies.

Nobody answered him.

Lilith drew a curved line between his circle and Simon’s.

Unlike the others, it remained black.

"The vessel receives what we remove. He must stay alive until the transfer ends."

Tarvak’s heart began pounding.

Something beneath the oval answered it.

He stopped kicking.

The answering beat came again, deeper than his own. His eyes searched the blood around his shoulders.

Simon looked at Lilith.

"How long will this take."

"Depends on you."

Simon narrowed his eyes.

"What do you mean?"

However, she did not elaborate.

Her fingers moved over the empty air before Simon’s chest. Blood climbed from the ground, touched his abdomen, and began writing across his skin.

The first rune felt cold.

The second burned.

By the third, he could feel the pattern pressing beneath his flesh, though nothing had cut him.

"Keep your demonic energy steady," Lilith said. "When your Sky Tiger responds, restrain it. Do not let it crush the bloodline we are separating."

Simon nodded.

"Your body will try to protect its current shape. That is why you need to remain conscious. Follow my instructions, not whatever reflex the pain produces."

"And my regeneration?"

"Let it preserve the flesh. Do not force more energy into it every time you hurt."

Her gaze sharpened.

"The objective is not to remain unchanged."

A voice rose beneath Simon.

"Why?"

It sounded like the demon who had pleaded while he gathered the bodies.

Another followed.

"Please..."

The blood around the circles thickened. Faces pressed against its surface without breaking through, mouths opening beneath a skin of red.

Simon’s killing intent was withdrawn. The mask remained inside his ring.

These were not its visions.

"The resentment," Lilith said before he asked.

He could feel it now.

Hatred pressing toward his circle. Fear caught in its final moment, repeating without anything left alive to feel it.

"You made yourself the centre of their suffering. The outer array gathers what still reaches for you and forces it along the same path."

"A path into me?"

"A force against what I need broken."

The faces turned.

Every one of them looked at Simon.

The ground beneath him seemed to tilt, although his body remained upright. In pools between the ruins, the reflected smoke vanished.

He saw stars.

They were too close together. Some moved against the others, tracing shapes his mind could not finish understanding.

He looked up.

Smoke still covered Velmora.

When he looked down again, the stars had gathered beneath his reflection.

Lilith placed a gloved finger beneath his chin and lifted his face.

"Not there."

For the first time since she began, her voice carried something harder than impatience.

Simon held her gaze.

Around the array, surviving fires bent inward. Flames stretched horizontally without wind. A broken doorway cast a shadow that continued beyond the wall it should have struck.

Tarvak began begging again.

The words emerged in Simon’s voice.

His own mouth was closed.

Lilith’s expression did not change.

"The preparations are complete."

Simon pressed his tongue against his teeth, grounding himself in the small, familiar sensation.

Fearless kept his thoughts from scattering. It did not make anything around him less wrong.

"What do I do?"

"Look inward. Find the blood your Sky Tiger has buried. Do not pull it free yourself."

He closed his eyes.

Beneath the stronger presence of the Byakko lay something faint and stubbornly familiar. The part of him he had carried since his first breath in the Demon Realm.

His One-Horned Demon bloodline.

"I have it."

"Hold your attention there."

Lilith pressed her palm against Jorra’s heart.

Its next beat stopped every other sound.

The skull’s horns filled with dark-red light. Simon’s severed horn split lengthwise against its brow, exposing a single shining thread that stretched toward the healed place on his head.

The black line leading to Tarvak opened like a narrow wound in the ground.

"Do not move," Lilith said.

The first drop fell from Jorra’s heart.

It passed through the skull and entered Simon’s bare chest without leaving a mark.

Every vein in his body tightened.

Deep beneath the Sky Tiger’s presence, the bloodline he had held in place began to unravel.