Chapter 49 - Mark

The first time Lazar had seen a fallen mark, he’d been accompanying Julius on an assignment.

He could still remember the tenseness in his muscles as Julius had recited the banishment chant, the other seraph’s voice steady in contrast to the faint tremor in his hand. Years of practice did nothing to soothe the nerves, and to this day, Lazar could remember the face of the fallen human, backed against a stone wall, eyes wide with fear, resignation, and a tinge of awe.

The man had been on the brink of falling completely, his soul damaged past the point of no return and a waiting feast for the Oblivion. In the second when Julius completed his chant, wind and light whipping around him, Lazar had caught a glimpse of the human’s mark. How it sat on greying flesh like a scar. How the thin lines snaked outwards like creeping vines set on entangling their victim. How they stopped centimeters away from the face in a crude frame.

The seraph remembered the brief hints of Leon’s fallen mark, already past his wrists when he’d last seen the boy. The memory made the fading ache in his chest temporarily reignite, and he shook the thoughts away, forcing himself to inspect his chest.

Before, those dark coiling lines had been roughly the size of his palm. Now, the jagged edges covered the length of his hand when his fingers were fully outstretched.

Multiple thoughts ran through his head at once.

The mark had expanded the moment he’d drawn the essence into his soul. The strand must have widened the crack as it entered, worsening the pre existing damage from falling and thus causing the mark to expand.

In order to use magic, essence had to be drawn into the soul. If he wanted to avoid this happening again, he’d have to find a way to pull in essence strands without disrupting the cracks.

The seraph’s mind churned, running through magic principles and searching for an alternate method. He’d never heard of another way. He wasn’t sure one existed.

At the same time, behind those rapid thoughts was another growing source of apprehension. Flashes of a red sky. The ghostly sensation of the whipping wind. That voice and hazy figure, a presence at once familiar and not.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It was a little shaky at first, but he forced it to smooth out, the pain of the mark’s expansion by now a dull, pulsing ache. It was all too easy to lose himself in his thoughts. The everpresent tension coiled in him seemed more ready to snap than ever before, a taut string fraying at its ends.

Amidst his rising turmoil, the sound of Ciel’s voice pulled him back to the present.

“That the first time your mark grew?”

Lazar slowly opened his eyes again, and grey met gold. The flesh eater hadn’t moved from her former position, still leaned casually against the tree. Her gaze was studying his mark with an almost clinical detachment.

The seraph exhaled and silently buttoned his coat up until the fabric once again hid the mark from view. It did nothing to lessen its presence.

“Yes,” he said simply. Ciel hummed in acknowledgement, cocking her head.

“Well, looks like you’ve got one of the abrupt ones. Bit of bad luck on your part.”

Lazar slowly rose to his feet, swaying a bit and using a nearby tree to steady himself. His halberd had fallen down beside him, and he picked it up, the metal cool and biting against his skin.

“What do you mean?” he asked warily, and the demon shrugged.

“I’ve seen tons of fallen. Usually the marks grow slowly, but there’s some that do what yours does. Sudden bursts. Lot less predictable and a lot more painful.”

“I see.”

Ciel paused, silent for a few moments as she studied him. She raised an eyebrow. Her visible golden eye seemed extra bright under the clear blue sky.

“So? Did something else happen?”

Lazar’s head snapped up, and the demon looked amused. Some of the tension in his shoulders dissipated, and he managed a strained smile.

“Was it that obvious?”

“Well, I figured it had to be more than just the mark. You’ve got a pretty high pain tolerance. I seriously doubt you’d be that pale just ‘cause of it, and for the record, you’re already pretty pale on a normal day.”

Lazar laughed weakly at that. Perhaps he should be more alarmed at how well the demon could read him, but he was more focused on the mark, on the colliding realms, on the memory. Or, more accurately, on the fragment of a memory.

The seraph stepped over to the fabrics he’d tied to the branches. A few had been knocked crooked when he fell, and he worked to right them. The barrier, predictably, had failed. He wouldn’t be able to use spells until he found a solution to essence strands causing soul damage.

“I saw a few glimpses of an old memory.” Lazar’s voice was slow and hesitant. “Or, I believe it was a memory. I seem to have forgotten most of it.”

“Oh? Must’ve been a nasty one.”

The seraph shook his head. “Not particularly. I just find it a bit… confusing,” he settled on. His brows furrowed. “It was from quite some time ago. I saw someone and heard a voice. I don’t recall who they were, but there was a strange aura about them. They felt familiar.”

It was hard to put that presence into words. It was as if he were staring into the core of a fire, but there was no warmth to accompany it. The person’s aura had filled the air like a vast sea, yet carried no true weight. There and not there. Present and gone. It was a ghostly sort of power, one that felt like—

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“—like being consumed by light.”

Lazar’s eyes widened in realization.

The distant throne. A shadowy figure seated atop that he couldn’t pull his eyes away from. Cold radiance so intense it burned. There was no one else in the realms with a presence like that.

The answer seemed obvious in retrospect, and yet Lazar still struggled to believe it. The mere idea that he, a simple servant, could’ve met the Light at some point was ludicrous, and yet the aura had been the exact same. It was the presence of the Cycle’s power, harnessed by the Light. Just as every soul could instinctively recognize the sensation of the Void, so, too, did they innately know the Cycle, their creator.

The reminder of the Void brought back an image of the white tear and the colliding realms they currently stood just outside the boundary of. Lazar knew with a bone deep certainty that something was deeply wrong, and now, he was increasingly beginning to believe that his fall, Julius’s actions, that early memory—all of them were connected in some way.

The seraph realized his surroundings had fallen silent. When he looked up, Ciel’s golden eyes were fixed on him, the earlier humor replaced with an uncanny, hard flatness that instinctively put him on edge.

“So, you think you met the Light.”

The flesh eater still stood in her earlier location, making no move to step forward. Slowly, Lazar nodded. He was acutely aware of those keen eyes studying him.

Ciel was silent for a few moments, expression unmoving. And then, she shrugged.

“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of shit going on.”

Lazar blinked, taken aback by the abrupt change in behavior. The flesh eater waved dismissively, stepping away from the tree and gesturing towards Carran. “Well, you wanted to tell that Alaric guy about the warping, right? Might as well head over now.” The words came out in her usual lax drawl.

No, Lazar thought. The longer he studied the demon, the more he could see the lingering tension present in her muscles even as her movements remained casual, the gleam still in her eyes. There was something there, churning beneath the surface with more energy and genuine emotion than he’d ever seen from the flesh eater before.

“There’s someone I need to pay a visit. An old friend.”

He’d never learned who that person was.

A sinking feeling rose in his stomach as the pieces began to fall together. From Ciel’s sharp gaze, she knew what he was thinking.

“Ciel,” Lazar began, voice slow and careful. “You said you had a score to settle in Elysium.”

The demon didn’t react. “I did.”

Lazar exhaled a long breath, steadying himself before he continued. There were many ways to broach the subject, but in the end, he went with the most direct one.

“Are you targeting the Light?”

The words sounded loud in the empty forest, unnatural and alien. Ciel didn’t respond right away, but the silence was answer enough.

“You’re serious.”

The demon chuckled lowly, and her golden eyes were sharp. “What, do you still feel loyal to the Light or something? Shouldn’t you be over that by now, considering—”

“You have to know how dangerous that is.” The seraph cut her off, and Ciel paused, something resembling surprise briefly flashing across her features before they smoothed out again. She snorted and leaned back against the bare tree trunk.

“You’re one to talk. You’re going after a Guardian.”

“It’s not the same,” Lazar insisted, and both of them knew it to be true. If the Guardians stood at the top of Elysium in terms of power, then the Light was on a different plane altogether. To target her was a suicide mission, one he suspected would result not only in death, but in the complete annihilation of the soul. The Light wouldn’t hesitate to send someone to the Void. He knew that all too well.

Ciel didn’t respond for some time, and Lazar wondered if she might genuinely be reconsidering her plans. Then, the moment was broken, and the demon’s mouth twisted upwards.

“To be fair,” she said simply, “I knew her before she was the Light.”

Before she was the Light.

Lazar’s mind raced. The current Light was widely known to have been a former Guardian. There was no official confirmation of it, as the Light was forbidden from revealing their former identity while active, but it was a widespread, unspoken piece of knowledge.

The Light before the current one had been Light Cato, who had stepped down before Lazar’s birth and begun living in isolation after he’d passed on the title. There’d been a brief interim between Lights, which was fairly common. There was no guarantee that a seraph would be capable of handling the Cycle’s power—it could easily tear their souls apart—so it was customary to wait a few years before officially announcing a new Light. Lazar himself had been born during this period.

If Ciel had known the current Light beforehand, then she had been in Elysium during Light Cato’s reign and, somehow, met and possibly befriended the current Light when she was a guardian.

The picture that was forming was one far more complicated than he’d originally anticipated. Ciel must have ended up back in the Abyss fairly soon after the current Light had taken the mantle, or perhaps it was immediately after the Light’s ascension. Perhaps the Light herself had banished Ciel with her new power.

It was a story that sounded all too familiar, a voice whispered in the back of his head. Lazar’s lips thinned, and his hand drifted over to his mark. Some of the pain from the expansion still lingered, a ghostly, but ever present sensation.

“It’s not the same.”

Ciel spoke suddenly, and Lazar looked up.

“What?”

The demon pushed away from the tree and strode forward, stopping once she was directly in front of him. She leaned forward a little.

“I can see you thinking, seraph.” She grinned. “For the record, it’s nothing like your whole situation with that Guardian, even if it sounds close.” She brushed a few stray hairs back. Some of the extra eyes were visible again, and the skin on the left side of her face shifted as she warped the area to obstruct them from view.

“What do you mean?” Lazar asked warily, and Ciel’s smile lingered.

“Well for one, technically I betrayed her first.”

Any words he’d meant to say died down. The seraph’s jaw clicked shut, and he scrutinized the demon. Her expression remained unreadable.

Around them, a light breeze rustled the bare branches. The sun, formerly at its apex, slowly began its descent downwards. If Lazar wanted enough time to inform Alaric about the realm collision and show him the area before it was dark, then he’d need to return to Carran soon.

Ciel seemed to know this too, as she stepped away and took a seat atop a jagged grey boulder with relaxed ease. She jerked a thumb in the direction of the village.

“You go get Alaric. I’ll stay here and make sure nothing enters.”

It was an obvious diverting of topics, albeit one with merit. Lazar frowned at the demon, briefly glancing back in the direction of Carran, then up at the sky. His fingers tightened and loosened around the halberd, then tightened again. Finally, he exhaled.

“I’ll return with Alaric soon,” he said. The conversation wasn’t over, not truly, and both of them knew it.

Turning away, Lazar hurried back through the barren trees. Growing instability in the realms, his own cloudy memories of meeting the Light, and now Ciel’s connection to the Light as well. It felt like the more layers that he managed to peel back, the more were revealed beneath.

Lazar turned his essence perception back on. He felt no pain in his chest, and the strands appeared easily. That, at least, didn’t seem to cause further damage to his soul.

The further he went from the area, the more those strands smoothed out, untangling themselves from the knots they’d formed near the warping sections of the forest.

Lazar turned his head, and there, through the gaps in the branches, he could see the realm gate beaming up into the clear blue sky, threading the realms together and glowing with the Cycle’s power. Bright, radiant, and foreboding.