Morael

 Lightening crackled across the sky, and thunder rumbled across the vast, empty Stygian Plain. This was my last chance. The last chance for my great experiment to work. The power of angels, mine at last. Or so I hoped, as I had hoped hundreds of times before.

 I looked up to the heavens, gray and silent, as the storm began to swirl above me. That was promising. Summoning on the ley lines was a stroke of genius. I was going to get it right this time.

“Everything is as it should be, my liege,” Nakir came to stand beside me, his king and master, his eyes following mine up to the black, whirling skies above us.

“The power of angels will be mine, Nakir. I will be the most powerful Daemon King the Netherworld has ever seen,” I said softly as the cold underworld winds began to blow.

“Of course, my lord. The ritual is bound to work. Summoning on the ley lines is sure to be the missing piece of the puzzle,” Nakir assured me, his eyes on the crackling heavens above us.

I smiled, watching Nakir’s black eyes glinting in the flashes of lightning. The ominous clouds now had settled themselves over the ley line crossing. “It is time, Nakir. Bring the girl.”

I stepped onto the ley line, on the nexus of its power. I could feel the energy coursing through me, an almost overwhelming sensation, as electric as the lightning that snaked its way across the sky. The host parted for one of the soldiers, carrying the limp body of a young human woman they had snatched from above. She was still alive, but unconscious. I did not want to deal with the screaming and pleading that usually accompanied human sacrifices. I had to focus today. My human sacrificial lambs could get so tiresome at times.  

Nakir gently laid the girl in my awaiting arms and stepped back away from the ley line, joining the rest of the host who were still hunkering against the howling wind. It could only be the sacrifice and me.

I began consecrating the circle, my mumbled incantations lost in the howling wind. My host of daemons stood behind me, rows upon rows of black wings, black eyes, black hearts, steadying themselves against the tempest raging in the sky above them.

As I spoke the words of the spell to consecrate the circle, daemon sigils began to appear in the air around us, starting around my head and expanding outward, growing in size as the hovering, glittering circle began to lower toward my feet. A pentagram began to emerge in the middle of the sacred space, keeping us safe from outside interference.

When the circle was complete, I unsheathed my sacrificial knife and plunged it into the girl’s heart. As her blood began to gush from her wound, I took the knife and drew it across my palm, my black daemon blood mingling with the girl’s, so amazingly red, so amazingly beautiful. The symbols drawn into the perimeter of the circle began to glow in even brighter golden tones, as if stardust had rained down from the sky.  

I looked at my bleeding hand once more—and it appeared that my usually black blood looked as if it were flecked with specks of gold, shimmering as the lightening crashed across the sky. What was happening?

But I had no time to evaluate the odd appearance of my blood.

Because the ritual was working.

As I watched the girl’s blood gush from her body, the sky opened with a deafening crack. The winds began to screech in defiance of my opening the heavens, an abomination I wasn’t supposed to commit. But I was Daemon King Morael of Asirith, ruler of the most powerful kingdom in the Eighth Realm, so who would stop me?

The high-pitched screech grated my nerves as the wind grew, grew, grew, forcing the host and I to hunker against the wind, lest we accidentally take flight.

I began to utter the incantation to summon the angel. “Venite ad me, angelus lucis. Pasce me sanguine tuo. Pasce me potentiam tuam, ut eam augeam. Veni ad me, angelus lucis!”

I took control of my faculties, raising my arms, my incantation growing louder and louder, until I was screaming it into the abyss opening above me.

“Venite ad me, angelus lucis! Pasce me sanguine tuo! Pasce me potentiam tuam, ut eam augeam! Veni ad me, angelus lucis!”

A form began to materialize in the swirling abyss, still crackling with lightning. I saw a body, wings…it was working.

I had done it.

I had done what hosts of daemons had tried before me. My father was the only one who had ever slain an angel and felt their power surging in his veins. Now I flew on the wings of his previous success. I felt my heart swell with pride at accomplishing something my great father did when he was alive.

And suddenly a flash of light, the acrid, sulfur smell of fire and brimstone, and the form came hurtling from its world into mine.

But the thing that landed at my feet was no angel.