The Primeval Era

The bone crunched between her teeth with a sound that made two of the Dominion Warriors stationed near the entrance visibly gag.

Barbatos didn’t notice, or more accurately, she didn’t care. She sat in a carved stone chair inside a marbled dwelling near the corner of the citadel, one leg draped over the armrest, her head tilted back as she chewed. The table before her held what had once been a human. It wasn’t anymore. It had been opened and arranged with the casual precision of someone who had done this thousands of times and had long since stopped thinking of it as anything other than a meal.

She licked her lips, tongue too long and too dark, and tossed the bone aside.

"This one doesn’t taste as good," she said to no one in particular, her voice carrying the bored disappointment of a child given the wrong fruit. She glanced at the nearest Dominion Warrior, who was doing his best to stare at the wall rather than the table. "The next one needs to be younger, okay? Younger ones are sweeter. Something about the Mana not having curdled yet."

The warrior nodded without turning his head.

Barbatos stretched in her chair. She was tall and slender, her frame built along lines that suggested something had taken the concept of beauty and sharpened it until it cut.

Flat-chested and narrow-hipped, she carried none of the voluptuous excess that demons like Paimon flaunted. Her beauty was leaner, meaner, the beauty of a blade rather than a cushion. Her skin held the same unnatural pallor all demons wore, too smooth and too perfect, and her eyes burned with a crimson so deep it looked almost black in low light.

Two small horns curved back from her temples, polished and dark, and her smile showed teeth that were arranged in rows that no human mouth would have produced.

She was the 8th Duke.

She was bored.

Then she raised her head.

Her crimson eyes narrowed, looking through the walls of the dwelling as if stone were smoke, seeing far across the citadel to the distant skies where something had just bloomed with radiance bright enough to make the Mana in the air tremble.

The Holy Daughter.

Barbatos turned her gaze toward the nearest Imperator, a Seventh Circle man whose crimson armor bore the marks of a decorated officer.

"I thought you all said the Holy Daughter was dead." Her voice was flat. "Why are you all so fucking incompetent?"

The Imperator stiffened. "She should be, my Lady. Imperator Jack confirmed the ambush was successful. There’s no way she could have survi-"

"And yet." Barbatos pointed upward with one long finger. "There she is. Alive and glowing."

She stood from the chair and yawned, stretching her slender frame with the lazy grace of a predator that hadn’t decided whether to hunt yet. "No matter. If she’s out here-"

Her words stopped.

Through the walls, across the distance, she watched the situation above the skies change. The Cathedral of the First Dawn, which had been sealed and silent, opened. An aged figure walked out through the cathedral’s entrance, and the white light surrounding him was so dense it made Barbatos squint even through stone walls and hundreds of yards of distance. Paladins and Holy Women flowed out behind him, surrounding him in formations that radiated devotion and readiness, and the rivers of Mana around the cathedral surged brighter as if the structure itself was welcoming him back into the open air.

The Hallowed Voice.

Barbatos smiled.

It was a cruel smile, wide and delighted, showing every row of teeth she owned.

"Alright," she said softly. "The main target has come out." She tilted her head, studying the distant figure’s aura through the walls, and her smile grew wider. "And he... haha. He seems powerful. Very powerful, actually." She laughed, a sharp ugly sound that made the Dominion Warriors flinch.

"The Murderous Saint thought he could control us a bit by playing down the power of a Ruler of an Empire? Downplaying a ruler like him as a decrepit old man? Haha, that arrogant little human."

She cracked her neck.

"Doesn’t matter. I’ll be getting out of here alive regardless, because me and the others already planned for this." Her crimson eyes burned darker. "We’ll summon the brilliance of the Demon Emperor. The Hand of the Demon Emperor will descend and flatten everything of value in this citadel as the first grand message to the Lands of Stone." She looked at the Imperator one last time. "Consider this a promotion in your understanding of how the world actually works."

Then she was gone.

...!

Crimson brilliance erupted where she’d been standing, the air splitting apart as she teleported through space and reappeared in the skies above the citadel. The sunlight hit her slender form, and her pallid skin drank it without reflecting anything back.

She looked across the citadel.

In four other corners of the white city, she saw them rising.

Sitri emerged from a dwelling near the eastern wall, her form shifting between male and female with each step, never settling, her beauty a weapon that changed its shape depending on who was looking. Leopard-spotted wings unfurled from her back as she took to the air, her eyes burning with blue flame.

Beleth rose from the southern quarter on a pale beast that shouldn’t have existed, his enormous frame armored in bone plates grown from his own body, his face a mask of cold fury that never changed expression because it couldn’t. Where he passed, the air turned to screaming.

Leraje appeared in the western sky wearing a hunter’s grin and nothing else, her body lean and scarred from centuries of war, a bow of black bone in her hands with arrows that dripped something that hissed when it touched the air. Her green eyes scanned the citadel below with the patience of a predator selecting which animal in the herd would die first.

Eligos materialized above the northern wall astride a skeletal beast that moved without muscles, his form that of a knight wrapped in shadow, carrying a lance that seemed to drink light from the air around it. Of the five, he was the quietest and the most dangerous, and he said nothing as he rose.

Five Dukes. Five pillars of crimson smoke.

Barbatos smiled cruelly and placed a hand flat against her chest.

The ritual began!