Page 94 of Devoured
For a moment, he just stared. Then his eyes recognized her face—her features. His face transformed in a way I’d never seen before. The arrogance crumbled. The certainty shattered. What remained was just horror and shock.
“No...” He dropped to his knees beside the body, hands hovering over it without quite touching, as if contact would make it real. “No, no, no... Alan... what did they do to you?”
He reached out with shaking fingers to touch her face—or what remained of it.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and for the first time since I’d known him, I heard real emotion in his voice. Raw, unfiltered grief. “This wasn’t supposed to happen to you. You were supposed to be safe. Protected. I promised...”
Too little, too late.
But his pain tasted sweet from between worlds, like aged wine finally uncorked.
The blood pool erupted again.
Marion climbed out first, gasping and retching. The journey between worlds wasn’t kind to human physiology. She collapsed on the stone floor, covered in the thick crimson fluid, shaking violently from the trauma of the crossing.
“Never... never again...” she gasped, trying to wipe the blood from her eyes.
Isaac followed, coughing and spitting out the foul liquid. His hands flew to his throat in panic, checking that everything was still intact. The memory of the Judge’s torture was still fresh, even though I’d managed to heal him.
“We’re alive,” he kept saying, his voice hoarse. “We’re actually alive. Marion—we made it!”
They were battered, traumatized, covered in blood from the pool—but they were still themselves. People who had survived an impossible nightmare and somehow made it back to the world of the living.
Sela emerged last. Her gray hair hung loose and wet with blood, falling past her shoulders. Red liquid dripped from the ends, streaking down her face. Her eyes swept the room, blinking hard to clear the blood from her vision.
They all stood ready to fight. Marion’s fists were already clenched, Isaac’s jaw set with determination. The cultists backed away from the emerging survivors, terror replacing their ritual confidence.
Then came the Executioner—my Executioner.
He rose from the blood pool like something born from nightmares. Bare-chested and magnificent, scars telling stories of centuries of divine punishment. His blade dragged behind him, scoring grooves in the stone that bled.
“Executioner!” Varnar stood with pathetic hope, still kneeling beside Alan’s corpse. “You’ve come! We need the Judge. We need—”
The Executioner’s helmet turned toward him slowly. Not the blind obedience of a servant anymore. He was mine now, and Varnar could sense it. The temperature rose another ten degrees. The blood in the pool started to boil.
My turn.
The blood pool began to bubble. I rose from the crimson depths like something born of nightmares. Blood flowed off my gray skin in sheets. My body lifted without effort, ascending from the pool. My horns gleamed wet and black, crowning my transformed head.
The wedding dress clung to my transformed form. It had grown with me, stretched to fit. The stolen skin throbbed with its own heartbeat.
I was no longer the broken woman who’d entered the Realm Beneath.
I was its god now.
“Hello, Varnar.” My voice cracked the windows in spiderweb patterns. One cultist’s ears began to bleed. Another dropped to his knees, overwhelmed by the presence of something that should not exist. “Looking for the Judge?”
“What... what are you?” he stammered, stumbling backward, nearly tripping over Alan’s corpse.
“I am what happens when you push someone too far,” I said, stepping onto solid ground. The floor fractured beneath me. “When you mistake survival for weakness. When you create the instrument of your own destruction—and call it treatment.”
“Where is the Judge?” His voice climbed toward hysteria.
“I killed him and then consumed him.” I said it casually, like I was mentioning what I had for breakfast. “Turns out gods can die if you poison them with enough concentrated despair. He tasted like eons of other people’s pain. Gave me heartburn.”
I surveyed the room, nostrils flaring. The scent of unrepentant souls was intoxicating. Every cultist reeked of crimes they'd never regretted, atrocities they'd justified, suffering they'd inflicted while sleeping soundly.
Behind me, Marion shifted. “The patients—“ Her voice cracked with urgency. “We have to free them!”
