Wings beating mercilessly in combat, the two took to the air.
The Seraphim wanted to destroy its foe, to vanquish anyone who dared stand between it and the task that it had taken on.
The Morningstar cannot… will not be released.
Perhaps it was his humanity that still held on by a thread, but Remy could not bring himself to fully succumb to the angelic nature’s thirst for death. He found himself holding back, acting only in defense against Uriel’s shrieking onslaught.
The angels flew up and backward, their struggling bodies colliding with one of the cells, the impact so great that it shattered the icy covering that sealed the fallen angel inside. The fallen came suddenly awake with a scream.
The disgraced creature of Heaven wailed its displeasure as it pushed away the shattered fragments of its prison to grab at them. With ragged, clawed hands it reached out, grabbing hold of Remy’s wings, attempting to pull him inside the cell to share in his misery.
Remy beat his wings furiously while attempting to fend off Uriel’s attempts to kill him.
The warden took advantage of this distraction, freeing his hand long enough to thrust his sword, the burning tip penetrating the breastplate of Remy’s Heavenly armor with a flash and the stink of ozone. Remy roared, driving an elbow back into the face of the Tartarus prisoner, and with his wings freed, furling them tightly against his body, allowing himself to drop like a stone.
The pain was incredible, a burning sensation spreading across the flesh beneath his armor. Disoriented, Remy spread his wings to slow his descent, but landed hard, rolling across the icy surface.
The pain beneath the armor intensified. On his knees he tore at the straps holding the armor in place. It came away in two pieces, clattering to the ground. Remy gazed at the wound, the flesh around the point of penetration angry, a mottled redness starting to spread across his shoulder and down onto his chest. If not taken care of, the infection caused by the wound could prove deadly.
But this was the least of his problems at the moment, listening to the sounds of flapping wings growing closer.
The warden was coming.
He sensed the angel bearing down on him, and spun around to confront the latest attack.
Uriel dropped, gore-spattered wings fanned out to slow his descent, his sword raised in preparation to strike Remy dead.
Remy tensed, isolating the pain in his shoulder, hoping that he had what it would take to survive this moment.
Two gunshots rang out, tearing away a portion of the angelic warden’s face, a third removing the top of his head.
The angel dropped down atop him, dead weight driving him to the ground. Remy struggled out from beneath the corpse of the warden, his hand searching for the sword Uriel had dropped. He found it, shrugging away the angel’s body as he rose in a crouch to deal with this latest obstacle.
The fallen angel Madach stood in the shadows, a strange golden light emanating from the Pitiless pistol in one hand, and from the Japanese sword clutched in the other, forming a kind of halo around his bedraggled form.
“If we want to get this done, you better follow me,” the fallen angel responsible for setting this chain of events in motion said.
Remy gripped Uriel’s sword tighter as he watched Madach turn away to be swallowed up by the darkness of Tartarus.
He had no choice but to follow.
Come to find out, not only did Madach now have the Pitiless sword and the Colt, but as Remy followed him into the inky blackness, he saw that the fallen angel had—sticking out of the back pockets of his blood-soaked jeans—the twin daggers as well.
“How?” Remy called after him.
They were descending a winding path made of ancient yellowed ice. The walls around them—these too were peppered with the honeycomb cells, some with prisoners still intact, others shattered and empty.
Madach stopped briefly, turning around to speak.
“It’s weird,” he said with a laugh. “Seeing you that way.”
He pointed at him with the barrel of the gun.
“This place changes you,” Remy said, painfully aware of his angelic form. His shoulder throbbed, the infection caused by the sword wound continuing to spread. “And not for the better.”
Remy wanted to be human again, but he wasn’t sure if that could ever be possible again.
Something had happened to Madach as well. Remy could see that this wasn’t the same fallen angel that he’d first come in contact with. There was an air about him, the way he carried himself.
Almost as if he were somehow comfortable with the Hellish environment. As if he belonged.
“The weapons,” Remy said eyeing each of the pieces in the fallen angel’s possession. “How did you end up with them?”
Madach gazed down at the weapons, an expression on his face as if seeing them for the first time.
“I came through Karnighan’s passage into the middle of a battle,” the fallen said, eyes glassy as he recounted how it had been. “The Sentries were fighting Nomads just outside the entrance.” He went silent, continuing to admire the accursed weapons he’d acquired.
“I don’t remember,” Madach then said, managing to pull his gaze from the Pitiless to stare at Remy. “I’m not sure how that’s possible, but the next thing I knew, I was inside Tartarus… and then I found you.”
“And the gun,” Remy said, his own gaze fixed upon the weapon that he’d lost in his struggle. There was a part of him that wanted it back, that wanted to hold death in his hand again.
Madach looked at the gun with loving eyes, rubbing a smudge of soot from its body against his pants leg, smiling when he saw that it was clean.
“It’s as if I’m drawn to them,” the fallen said. “Maybe it’s because they know that I’m the one responsible for all this… for freeing them,” he said.
Remy could just imagine what it was like for Madach, having them in his possession, chattering away inside his head, the images of past violence and death they were so eager to show him.
The air became filled with an echoing, pounding sound, like the one he had heard earlier that had drawn him inside the icy citadel. The vibrations that followed shook the very foundation, rubble raining down on them from above.
The sound was coming from somewhere below.
“It’s the axe,” Madach said, his voice barely audible over the powerful noise.
It was the one weapon of the Pitiless that Madach had yet to recover, and the fallen turned away from him, hurrying down a descending path that led deeper into the bowels of the prison.
“What is it?” Remy asked, following.
“We have to hurry,” Madach answered. “The axe is being used. There isn’t much time.”
The words were enough for him to ignore the aching pain in his shoulder, and to drive him on. If they were too late the end result was more than he had the ability to comprehend at that moment.
They rounded the corner, their movements illuminated by the eerie yellowish glow that emanated from inside the still-occupied fallen-angel cells.
A memory from Remy’s human past flitted through his mind’s eye: a Sunday visit to the New England Aquarium with Madeline. She loved the penguins, perfectly happy to skip any of the other exhibits to watch the tuxedoed birds waddle about in the artificial environment that imitated their natural habitat.
He was suddenly, profoundly disturbed, the memory vivid right down to the penguin-house smells, but there was something horribly missing.
Madeline’s face.
Her features were blurred, as if she’d moved unexpectedly as a picture was being taken—or as if the memory of her was slowly fading away. It was something that he couldn’t tolerate, that he wouldn’t—couldn’t—allow to happen. As his humanity was squelched, pushed deeper and deeper into a smaller and smaller place inside him, his memories—the memories of his human life—were gradually being discarded, seen as useless by the angelic nature that had at last regained dominance. These fragile human remembrances were not what were needed at this time.