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Cries tore down every floor of the splendorous Citadel, the Goddess’s greatest and last remaining stronghold in Heaven.
The chambers above, once resplendent in splendor, were now slick with stains and dust and cracked walls. Young angels, heads of blonde, brown, black, red hair, short or long, products of their creator’s attempts to do something different with each new generation, ran back and forth from room to room, agonized cries echoing as they carried holy water, blankets, bandages, and whatever else could help. Groans, whimpers, and screams of pain echoed from the rooms of the citadel. Some of the older ones looked gaunt with sunken eyes and greying, drooping wings. Others had very recently been created, some less then a week before the end of the Siege. Some a day before. They didn’t have the dead eyes and stressed skin of the older veterans, but time would certainly change that.
Beyond the cracked, scorched walls of the Citadel, there was a wasteland of carnage spanning from torn down walls to burnt down forests and plains, all the way to the glowing sea of light surrounding Heaven. Embers and smoke rose from the ashen ruins.
Above the Citadel, a golden sun glowed and hung over the great spires. The land illuminated by it was strewn with craters, rubble, and skeletons, some of them way too small. Entire homes, temples, bases, and other structures with millenia of history hadn’t even left visible ruins behind, only dust and crimson horror.
The sun contained the Goddess herself, a living beacon of light shining that projected down on the last stronghold. Her soothing voice assuring the wounded and their caretakers that Heaven would recover, that they would recover.
Even as she floated in place inside of the massive orb of light projecting from her body, acting as a source of strength and determination to those that could feel their creator’s warmth, even as her voice echoed intermittently, she’d had yet to show her face to her creations.
Not since the end of the Siege, when the Abomination was finally slain at the greatest of costs. Costs that showed in the land around them.
For the first time since the Wars, Heaven itself had been attacked. Not a skirmish on the outskirts, not in a cowardly hit-and- run attack by assassins that wouldn’t risk a direct confrontation against her massive armies.
It had come under a prolonged, sustained assault, for the first time in a very long time, an entire month of horror.
Be they veterans of the Wars or young caretakers and servants born after it who had never shed blood before, no survivor was left unchanged by this battle.
The battle that had lasted a month. Already, it had many names.
The Battle of Heaven
The Massacre of the Innocents
The Slaughter of Paradise
The Rending of the Garden
The Blood Times
The Betrayal
Doomsday
The Siege
Heinrich’s Siege.
In the depths of the Citadel, in black winding passages, was a room that few knew about. The smell of blood and something more concerning wafted through it.
Then, whatever forces were meant to block the sound failed as the door splintered open in an explosion of sound, a scream of pain radiating and dispersing against the hard black walls, leaving shears in the stone work.
The screams distorted and grew louder and deeper as they echoed down the black halls, geting louder and louder and louder.
The agonized roar of a Tyrant in labor.
The Tyrant wrenched her head back, blonde hair frazzled and slick with sweat and blood as tears ran down her bloodshot eyes, mouth filled with fangs that grew and changed from second to second. Her arms and legs, changing from human to beast, be it lion, squid, or reptile, swung wildly around her as she sat on a blood and sweat soaked birthing bed in the wide underground expanse. Ropes and restraints had been broken long ago on an earlier hour of labor.
Her swollen breasts were slick with sweat.
And then there was her belly. More importantly, what lay inside of it.
It had swelled and grown with the life inside of it, the womb now pulsating and glowing with eldritch purple energy as her body fought to get the thing inside of it out. Her crotch, open and wide, bled like a river, steam coming out of it.
A glowing scar ran from shoulder to crotch, heavenly and demonic energies mixing into a red light. Heinrich Hein’s last gift to the Monster Lord.
And with another kick and a sickening tear, the glowing scar opened. Blood began weeping down both sides.
“We’re losing her, hold her down-”
A team of young angels dressed in white robes frantically ran across the room, nearly tripping over the bodies and limbs of their unfortunate fellows. Some still moaned and tried to crawl with one or two limbs left. Some bodies lay limp, covered in blunt wounds from wildly swinging limbs or jagged scars and bite wounds, blood pooling under them.
Recently forged by their creator, the young angels had not had much time to develop personalities or desires beyond the purpose they had been made to fulfill. Some of them were younger then the Siege itself.
Their current trial by fire would change that.
If they survived.
One angel tried to help hold the struggling mother down, and was rewarded by a sharp long nailed claw clutching her throat. She only had time to widen her eyes as the limb, bent and crooked, dragged her to the turned face of the expectant mother.
It had shifted into something that nobody so young was ready to see.
She barely had time to widen her eyes or scream as her patient’s mouth, now filled with fangs, tore into her neck. The mother growled and then moaned in relief as fresh blood and meat slipped down her throat. The other angels stopped briefly, looking with fear in their faces. Fear of the monster, and fear of what would happen if they fled this room.
The most senior of the nurses, one taller then the others with shoulder length disheveled red hair that had been tied back to get it out of the way with little care or sense for style, stepped forwards. The erstwhile leader of this operation, who watched through red eyes as she looked down at her bloodied and sweat slicken robe, then at the dying angel and the monster feeding on her sibling.
Promestein’s gloved hands clenched as her red eyes narrowed.
Into the fire.
She lunged at the scared belly, suture in hand, as she sprayed disinfectant powder onto it. Never holy water, it didn’t react well with the essence of Darkness.)
The wound sizzled as a tentacle swung in her direction. Promestein narrowly dodged the swinging tentacle with reflexes born from hundreds of years of getting into fights with her own shadow and imaginary opponents in the darkness of the Cave.
The mother continued feasting on her prey, now reduced to a barely intact torso dripping with gore after she’d consumed the head and neck. She hadn’t even glanced at her reflexive attack.
As Promestein began to seal the wound shut with a large suture of glowing string, the other angels, emboldened, began trying their best to hold the writhing monster down as they cried out in fear or stared ahead with glazed, sunken eyes among the few who had lasted longer then a day in a room where labor had been going on longer then some of them had been alive.
Promestein reflected on how she’d gotten to this point as she stepped back, pressing against the wall as more transformed limbs lashed about madly from the mother’s position. The few lucky angels were thrown off. The unlucky ones were grabbed and used as a source of stress relief.
Barely a month into her “parole”, carrying for a wounded, delirious, pregnant, and thoroughly deranged Monster Lord, the Siege had begun.
Perhaps the suffering they had experienced would make her siblings or creator appreciate her more. Perhaps it wouldn’t, the vain blonde bitch hadn’t shown her face once she finally descended from her ivory tower to confront her former champion when Heaven had already been burned and despoiled all the way to her the walls of the citadel.
The resulting fight, what little she could hear of when tending to her worsening patient, reduced Heaven’s splendor from zero to minus.
The Terror Twins were in the higher floors of the Citadel. One was recovering from being disemboweled and mangled, the other refusing to leave her sister’s side. Eden, from a safe distance, was sent to keep watch over their “Guest”. Most of the named higher ups were dead, mangled, traumatized, or so mangled and traumatized they might as well be dead.
The Goddess, a light shining in the darkness, remained floating above the Citadel, coordinating efforts like she did during the Wars from behind the massive ball of light she used like a shield and a third eye-
-She dodged another blow. The other angels, stepping back, looked at their dead companions and heaved and cried, some puking. Promestein could feel Eden’s gaze from above, her creator’s toady watching down from the window of a room above the massive black theater to make sure the birth went smoothly.
The child of a Hero was a valuable commodity, regardless of the mother’s race. Or whether or not her weakened body would manage to heal itself and what was within after being struck by a sword that had been warped by the spilled essence of so many powerful creatures.
The Bitch always did like to violate her own rules when it was useful to her.
Then, the Tyrant grabbed the birthing bed with both hands, head wrenching up to stare at the ceiling as the lower half of her meal fell and joined the mess on the floor. Her legs, curled into long meaty tentacles, held on to the front of the bed frame for dear life, her body wracked with pain as she howled with foaming jaws and white eyes. Promestein covered her ears as a few more angels fell, their ears and eyes leaking blood as they collapsed, foaming or puking blood out of their mouths.
A few (un)lucky ones covered their own as they curled up on the ground as far as they could. Even Eden could be heard shouting as the glass above the operating theater cracked.
With one eye open, Promestein could see something slick moving through the Tyrant’s snatch.
One month into the siege, the baby was finally coming out.
She lunged forwards with determination, hands held out.
“Push, Push!”
She didn’t know who shouted it first, herself or the angelic nursemaids. The remaining maids, now numbered at two, grabbed and held the cephalopodic legs to the side as hard as they could. Perhaps it was the determination that came from knowing this arduous task was almost done, perhaps it was desperation. The mother, who once commanded armies and personally slaughtered masses with ease, could only scream soundlessly with an open mouth, her voice exhausted after her latest scream. Her last meal began coming up, blood and meat splattering out across the room in a crimson mist at the desperate nurses. The freshly sewn wound began to weep blood. The mother certainly had no shortage of it.
Promestein saw a bloodied head crowning-
She pulled-, carefully turning it to avoid hurting it-
And then, with one final gush that completely turned her lower half red, the baby was out. Catching it in her hands, Promestein took a deep breath, then looked down.
And stared.
And immediately felt revulsion.
She held it as far back from her face as possible, torn between throwing it and running, and the scientific desire to understand something new.
Any other angel would have chosen the first.
Its body was covered in a molten grey carapace, from head to toe, from limb to limb. Metallic wings and spikes covered in blood jutted out across its body and limbs, all covered in the same molten material. Strings of the molten grey flesh, freshly hardened, lay like webbing between the protrusions. Like a twisted crown, hardened, unmoving wings and tendrils emerged from the sides, back, and top of its misshapen lumpy head. The lower half of its face was covered by melted, fused gray flesh. Its open eyes were red smoldering pits-
-That turned up to look her dead in the eyes.
Its lower half split open, revealing a lipless mouth with sharp, needlelike teeth-
Those jaws bit down on her left arm. Pain lanced through her, the smell of copper got sharper-
There was a scream, hers or anothers-
-Promestein fell back, pain lancing through her body-
-A tentacle tore the thing from her grip as it shook a bloody chunk of her flesh in its mouth and swallowed it with jaws more like that of a crocodile then a newborn baby-
But that thing was no human child.
Promestein fell on her rump, backing up as she held her agonized bleeding wound, eyes wide and bloodshot as she backed away from the spectacle in front of her.
The last two angel nursemaids were slammed into the nearby wall, crumpled and mangled beyond all recognition. The world felt sharper.
She could hear puking and whispers from above, Eden’s summoned harem confronting their master.
The Monster Lord, her features settling back into that of the human women with elfin ears, cradled and cooed as she held her child to her chest with arms that had snapped and bent back into that of a woman’s. The birth of the baby had drained her energy as surely as Angel Halo had, like many sealed victims of its bite.
She looked at her newborn proudly, with tear stained eyes, and smiled through lips stained by blood, saliva, and vomit. She gently kissed its forehead and cheeks as it silently looked at her and burbled at her through its hungry mouth.
The sounds it made were not sounds that ordinary children made.
Promestein could only look at the scene. Birth had been something she’d spied on many times before, from the viewing pools above back when she’s still been-
Agony lanced up her arm, this time it was something new. She turned to her bleeding arm in shock, hyperventilating as black glowing spikes began crawling up her veins under her skin.
Angel Halo’s bite, poisoned by the blood and essence of horde after horde after horde of monsters and angels, had not just corrupted its wielder.
Survival became everything.
Spying a nearby dropped surgical machete, Promestein grabbed it. Gritting her teeth, she braced her arm against the nearby blackstone wall. She raised the blade-
The new mother giggled, wiping blood off of her baby’s face-
Promestein brought the blade down-
She raised her infant to her breasts-
Flesh tore and blood sprayed, and she was torn between relief and pain as one agony faded and another began. Eyes blinded by blood, she started cutting back and forth, even as the pain began to return and ratchet rapidly-
The infant latched on like a hook with its sharp teeth, greedily sucking and audible even from across the room-
Chop
The tyrant turned mother moaned and arched her back on the bed, blood and milk leaking out the side of her breast as the baby sucked greedily.
Chop
She gently pressed the baby’s head to her breast with one hand while stroking its back with the other.
Chop
-With a sickening tear and drop, Promestein severed her mutating limb before it could spread the infection to the rest of her body.
She fell back against the wall, body and face racked with sweat and blood. Through blurry eyes, still slick with blood, sweat, and tears, she could see the thing feeding on its mother still while she lay back, a proud smile on her face. Promestein’s vision was beginning to fade.
The room and the bed were thick with the scent of blood, puke, amniotics, and something else. The mother’s tenderness contrasted with the blood soaking into her bed, the slaughterhouse of mutilated bodies and limbs and rivers of flowing crimson all around her. Some of it was turning dry like paint while far more was pooling or winding around the room like a stream.
She could barely hear the sound of marching footsteps down the halls behind her. Only now that the baby was born, and the mother exhausted, had the Goddess bothered to send non-disposable units.
So many dead little sisters. Because you weren’t good enough.
Somehow, it was only the second worst day of her life.
Slumping down to her side, before she lost consciousness, Promestein could hear, in perfect clarity, the mother’s first words to her child.
My little, precious, precious, precious little boy~
My little monster~
My little angel~
My
Little
~ber~
~ser~
~kir~