Quoted By:
The demon's core does not accept the light of purification peacefully. When the rays of the Lord's judgment pierce through the pulsating tumor of flesh, it writhes in agony and fills the air with an unholy screech. Like steel ripping apart, or an iron nail scratching against a chalkboard, the noise it makes in its dying breath is the sound of hell itself.
Then all falls silent.
For a fleeting instant, the only sounds that can be heard are the faint song of wind and the sizzle of melting snowflakes as they fall upon the demon's superheated flesh. The tentacles that bind your limps fall limp, their pores no longer seeping with liquid hellfire in an attempt to peel away your armor. For a handful of heartbeats, everything is peaceful and serene.
But the greater demon refuses to be purified <span class="mu-i">quietly</span>. The only warning you receive is a brief flicker of hellish black flame that pierces through its rotting flesh. In the blink of an eye, that unlight expands and consumes the greater demon, ripping apart its body in a violent explosion of blood, ichor, and gore. Its explosion rips your body from the limp, burning tentacles, and flings you across the room with such force that you leave a crater in the wall.
You barely feel the impact. The heat of the black ichor, your wounds, the battering you received as you cut your way through the tentacles... your mind is already dead to pain, or else it already would have shut down.
In fact, you can feel it again. That lightness in your head as you slide down the dent you've left in the wall, it reminds you of how you felt when the butchery at Charlemont finally came to an end. Before pain can catch up with you, your mind floats off and away into that sleepy realm of dreams, fleeing from the punishment your body is due.
You have to wonder how long you'll be out for this time. You slept for a week with your sword-lance impaling the Apostate King's heart. Will you be afforded such rest this time around? You can only hope that your dreams will not be so sweet this time, that your heart breaks when you wake from them.
Your vision blurs. The last thing you see before it goes dark is a pair of dainty bare feet skipping towards you, a set of boots moving to block their way, accompanied by the butt of a cane.
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<span class="mu-i">Pasture spreads out for as far as the eye can see, beneath the hill where grows the big lisbon tree. A scene as old as the nearby villages plays out beneath it, the current generation rhyming with that of their grandparents. A group of children frolic in the shade, doing as the children do. Which is to say, they go about their terribly serious business in blissful ignorance of just how trivial those concerns really are.
But if it is not trivial to them, is it truly tivial?</span>
