The rain fell in a slow, steady curtain, each drop a shard of liquid glass, shattering against the earth with a sound only the old gods could hear. The city below pulsed with indifferent light — headlights tracing rivers of gold across wet asphalt, neon signs humming like forgotten prayers. Above it all, perched upon the crooked spine of an ancient stone parapet, a figure watched.
Samael.
The rain touched him, but did not dare to soak his form. It slid from him as though repelled by something older than gravity — a thing born of fractured light and the bone-deep memory of divinity. His red hair, darkened by the storm, clung to his sharp features. Eyes like twin shards of ancient sapphire flickered, reflecting each bolt of lightning as though they were messages carved into the sky.
From this height, the city was a breathing, bleeding organism. A mass of fragile lives strung together by longing and grief. And somewhere within its maze of streets and trembling lights — him. The child. The boy with green eyes like trembling leaves before the storm, and the wingless sentinel who clung to him with desperate grace.
Samael's lips curved — not into a smile, but a faint crack in the cold, flawless mask of his face.
"Still guarding your crumbling light, Hael."
The thought was neither bitter nor kind. It was a simple, inevitable truth. Light never learned. It clung, it bled, it burned, and in the end — it always fell.
A shadow circled overhead, a creature without shape, no more than a wound in the sky. Samael lifted a hand, and the dark presence descended, coalescing into the loose suggestion of a figure cloaked in the folds of the storm.
"Your time draws near, my Lord," the figure murmured, voice the soft crackle of dead leaves.
"It always does," Samael replied. His gaze remained fixed on the figures below — a young boy cradled beneath an umbrella held by a pale-haired man. He saw the way Hael's hand lingered at the small of the boy's back. Saw the flicker of worry, the quiet tightening of the jaw. The light within Hael was dimmed now — not from failure, but from wear.
Samael could smell it. Grief's slow rot. The coppery scent of mortal dread, thick as iron in the rain.
"Soon," he whispered. "Let him wear his heart raw. When it breaks, we harvest what's left."
The shadowed servant bowed and vanished, a ripple across the storm.
Samael unfurled himself from the parapet, stepping into nothing. Gravity ignored him. The world bent around his will. The city dropped away beneath his feet, and the air thickened, heavy with the scent of scorched stone and old, smothered prayers. The rain hissed as it met his passage.
Down, past the mortal veil. Past forgotten ruins and lightless caverns where no god treads.
And then — the Gate.
An arch of bone and obsidian, taller than mountains, crowned in the bleached remains of titans long dead. The door split open at his touch, revealing a kingdom drowned in red-gold gloom. The earth here smoked. Ash fell like snow.
Hell.
But not the crude cinder-pits of mortal tale. This was a kingdom of endless stone towers, rivers of ink-black water, and skyless reaches where fire burned without heat. In its heart rose a throne forged from the bones of fallen angels — nine of them, their names long scratched away by the passage of his reign.
Samael crossed the vast hall. His footfalls stirred no sound, but the shadows shivered. The damned pressed their faces to the stone, feeling his presence like the weight of drowning.
He seated himself upon his throne, the carved horned crown gleaming above his brow. In the gloom, the lingering essence of Valerie's soul flickered, caught in the folds of his kingdom's netherwind — her grief still sweet upon his tongue.
"One wound begets another," he murmured. "Soon, little wyrm. Your turn comes."
The rain outside the veil thickened, each drop a silent omen.
And from his iron seat, Samael began to weave the next coil of his quiet war.