They arrived in the middle of a massive runic circle atop a tall tower, and the capital of the demons spread out below them in every direction.
Obsidian crimson structures climbed and twisted across the landscape as far as anyone could see, towers and halls and bridges built in a style that had no interest in comfort or beauty, only in size and the impression that size produced.
Crimson light pulsed from the deeper structures the way it had pulsed from the Dominion of Crimson Stone, except this was the source rather than a copy of it, the original from which the Murderous Saint’s stolen empire had borrowed its character.
This was the Empire of Hatred. This was where the Demon Emperor sat at the top of the 72 Thrones and looked out over everything he had built from consud souls.
Damian didn’t care about any of it.
He kept his eyes on the Demon Emperor, who had noticed exactly how little Damian cared about the architecture and had concluded, correctly, that the fastest way through this was to keep moving.
"This way," he said.
They went into the tower.
Damian followed with Serala beside him and the Demon Emperor leading, and his heart was beating loudly enough that he could hear it over everything else.
His Ama. Was he really about to see her again? After eight sumrs of hiding, of pretending to be a farr, of carrying her loss as the thing underneath every other thing. After the night above the Cradle when his father’s spirit told him she was still burning.
After everything that had brought him to a tower in the middle of the demon capital with the Demon Emperor walking ahead of him scared out of his mind.
He kept his composure on the outside. The inside was a different matter.
They floated up through the levels of the tower, past floors that Damian didn’t bother to examine, until they reached one of the higher levels and arrived before a crimson door.
Two demons stood guard.
Barbatos was one of them, recovered from whatever the Demon Emperor’s Eye had done to retrieve her from the Covenant, her slender fra and four-horned companion turning at the sound of arrivals.
The other was a tall demon Damian didn’t recognize but whose presence registered as another of the Dukes. Both of them took in the scene in front of them with the specific confusion of guards watching their own Emperor lead the enemy who had bound several of them in chains of sunlight directly to the door they were guarding.
They opened their mouths to ask the obvious question.
Damian tapped his finger.
Barbatos and the demon beside her exploded. Not dramatically, not with a drawn-out demise, just a tap of his finger and the application of THE Primordial Source and then two demons becoming a fine spray that the crimson light caught for a mont before it settled.
He didn’t wait for any further introductions.
He waved his hand and the doors opened.
What was behind them was not what the rest of the tower had prepared anyone to expect. The floor opened into a vibrant garden, full and green and alive, with unique demonic birds moving between the plants and small animals threading through the undergrowth.
It was the only thing he had seen since arriving in the demon capital that looked like it belonged to sothing other than hatred. At the center of the garden sat a small hut, and outside the hut, two figures were tending to a herb that grew in vibrant spirals out of the dark soil.
One of them was a succubus demon.
The other was the one Damian focused on, and the mont he saw her, everything else in the room stopped mattering.
She had the outline of his mother. She didn’t have a physical body. What stood by the herb was a collection of Mana and pure will arranged into the shape of a woman, illusory and shifting slightly at the edges, but unmistakably her, the sa way a voice heard after years is unmistakable before the mind catches up to the recognition.
The Empress Rayhana Vakochev, soul without flesh, present and tending a garden in a tower at the heart of the demon empire.
Their entrance pulled her eyes over.
She blinked at Damian. Confusion first, the natural confusion of a soul seeing an enormous transford being she didn’t recognize standing in her doorway with verdant tattoos and obsidian eyes.
Then sothing shifted. Incredulity, dawning slowly, the careful disbelief of soone afraid to hope they were seeing what they thought they were seeing. And then recognition flooded through her all at once.
She began to walk toward him.
She trembled as she ca, her illusory form shaking the way a body would shake, and her voice when it ca was the voice he had been carrying in his mory for eight sumrs.
"Is that... my Little Lugal?" She ca closer, her steps uncertain. "Is that my Little Prince? Damian, is that really you?"
BOOM!
Even changed. Even transford twice over into sothing the Lands of Stone had never produced. Even standing twice the size of any normal man with flas in his eyes and a power that had just unmade two Ancestral Celestials over the River of the World.
His mother still recognized him!
Damian trembled.
"Ama," he said, and his voice cracked the way it had cracked above the Cradle when he called out to his father, the way it only cracked for the two people who had made him. "Ama!"
HUUM!
And like that, a mother and son t again.
Damian’s massive fra folded down and his arms ca around the illusory woman who stood half his size, and she was real enough to hold even without a body, real enough that the embrace ant what an embrace was supposed to an. Behind them, Serala watched with bright eyes and said nothing, because there was nothing that needed saying.
The Demon Emperor, off to the side, looked around the garden while fidgeting, his eyes moving across the walls and the exits and the open sky beyond the tower’s edge with the focus of a being checking whether anyone was paying enough attention to him to notice if he left.
But after so long. After so many years.
Damian had his Ama again!
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