The chimera threw Lady Margaret with the casual, contemptuous force of something disposing of an object that had served its purpose, hurling her across the space between them like a stone thrown at nothing in particular.

She crossed the distance without control or awareness, her broken form offering no resistance to the arc.

Elder Darrien moved.

The veil of blood rose around him in the same instant. It softened the impact, absorbing the force of her arrival, and his arms found her as the momentum bled away, catching her unconscious body.

He stood there, holding her, and looked at the chimera.

"Fiend of Gore." Beelzebub’s voice carried the particular satisfaction of something that had won, knew it, and was taking its time with the knowing.

One clawed finger traced the line of his own neck, coming away slick with blood from a wound that had stopped mattering to him some time ago.

"You are as terrible as they say. Truly." The acknowledgment was genuine, which made what followed worse. "But did you actually believe you could win against both of us? In this state?"

He tilted his head, the expression of someone genuinely curious about the answer.

"If you had focused purely on buying time, your companion might have had a chance to escape." He let that sit for a moment. "But the old mad fiend wanted to kill me. He wanted me to think his motives were pure delay, that he was spending himself just to give her more time, when underneath that, he was looking for the opening."

"Looking for the kill." His lips pulled back into something that resembled a smile on a face that had not been designed for warmth. "So now the defeat sits in your mouth. I wonder, old fiend. Do you ask yourself whether a different choice would have changed anything?"

He spread one hand in a gesture of magnanimous concession.

"Let me spare you that burden before I add you to my collection. It would not have changed much, and sure, if you had been in your prime, killing one of us, perhaps even injuring the other, would have been within the realm of possibility, though it would have cost you everything even then." His eyes moved over Darrien with a cold glint in them.

"Speak for yourself, Beelzebub."

The draconic figure’s voice arrived from above, heavy and carrying the specific edge of something that had taken offense to the statement.

Beelzebub turned, the small smile finding new angles on his chimeric face, his eyes narrowing with an amusement he did not bother to restrain.

"Oh?" His tone was silk over something considerably harder beneath it. "Did my comment wound your pride, Sire?" He inclined his head, the gesture performing deference without containing any. "Do forgive me. I spoke only of what I observed."

Elder Darrien stood between them and said nothing.

His bloody eyes moved from one Sin General to the other without settling on either, carrying no emotion that either of them had placed there. No anger at the taunting, and no fear at what stood before him and what it represented.

No desperation in the face of what was coming.

He stood with Lady Margaret in his arms, and the devastation of the surrounding land at his feet, and the lilac sky above.

"So, old fiend." Beelzebub spread his arms, the gesture expansive. The world seemed to grow quieter with it, the ambient sound of the ruined landscape stilling as though it too was waiting for something. "You have nothing to offer as your last words? I am sure my King would wish to learn of it."

Elder Darrien’s eyes found Beelzebub.

And for the first time since the chimera had begun speaking, something moved across the old fiend’s face. Not defiance, or bravado. Something quieter and more genuine than either, the expression of a man accepting something.

He smiled.

"I regret only one thing," Elder Darrien said, his voice hoarse and sounding spent. "That I will not be alive to witness the demise of that spineless cur."

Beelzebub was mid-breath when the ground detonated.

Every corpse covering the ruined landscape erupted simultaneously, the countless dead giving up what remained of them in a single, catastrophic instant, flesh and bone and blood bursting outward in every direction as the reality around them warped and turned crimson.

The sky above became gore, so did the ground below, and the space between was filled with it, a domain of blood and viscera and death asserting itself over every inch of available existence with the focused, total completeness.

"A final effort," Beelzebub scoffed, tilting his head with the particular contempt of something that had seen this kind of desperation before and found it tedious. His face arranged itself into a snarl that carried amusement beneath the disdain. "To achieve exactly what?"

Elder Darrien smiled.

He had no intention of explaining.

Beelzebub went still. The draconic figure above shifted, the slow, proud certainty of its bearing interrupted by the same thing that had interrupted Beelzebub’s smile.

All three of them looked to the right.

She was suspended in midair. Human, clearly, and exquisitely beautiful, with long hair carrying shades of black and gray and the colors between them in gradients that seemed to shift depending on the angle.

Young, unmistakably young, young enough that the first response was to recalibrate the rest of the impression against the age, to go back and look again.

And then one looked at her eyes and stopped thinking about her age entirely.

Her irises moved, the colors within them flowing like liquid that could not decide what it was, murky gray bleeding into the deepest black, bleeding into a kaleidoscope of a million impossible colors that had no names because they had no right to exist in a visible spectrum.

Looking into them was looking into something that looked back with intent and madness.

A crown of shifting energies rested atop her head, its form changing continuously, never settling into a fixed shape, the energy of it cycling through configurations that defied the consistency required to be called a design.

And around her, the fabric of reality was coming apart.

Dissolving at its edges, the solid fact of the world melted away from her presence in tendrils that immediately filled with things trying to claw through the gaps.

Eyes appeared in the dissolving fabric, and jaws, and shapes that had no names because names required the mind to hold a thing long enough to label it, and these things did not stay long enough for that.

They burst through and were gone, and new ones replaced them, a continuous, churning, impossible procession of horrors and wonders pressing at the boundary between what was and what the space around her permitted.

Beelzebub reacted first. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

He did not taunt, nor did he attack. He turned and ran in the opposite direction with the immediate, uncommented-upon urgency of something that had made its decision before the decision had finished being made consciously, the pride that had filled every syllable he had spoken for the last several minutes simply absent, replaced by a single animal imperative.

He hit the boundary of the Gore domain at full speed.

The crimson fabric of gore and blood that had encompassed everything simply ceased to be crimson, ceased to be fabric, ceased to be a domain in any recognizable sense.

It was consumed and replaced in the same instant, swallowed by a twisting, churning mass of impossible things that spread outward from the point of contact.

Some of the colors arranged themselves into creatures. Impossible creatures, shapes that the mind reached toward and then retreated from before it could finish forming the image, present and then not present and then somewhere else entirely.

Others arranged themselves into things, vast armies of incomprehensible scale assembling their ranks. The whole of it moved with the internal logic of a dream, everything shifting and bleeding into everything else, present at one moment and gone the next.

It was not chaos as a description.

It was chaos as a fact, as the most fundamental and complete expression of the concept, stripped of every metaphor and reduced to its actual nature, which was this.

The thing itself.

Undiluted and uncontained and entirely indifferent to what the mortal minds around it could accommodate, and when one looked at it, the things within it looked back.

"GET OUTTTTT!" Beelzebub’s roar tore through everything, panic-stricken in a way that his voice had never been during the entire preceding engagement, carrying the raw, unpolished quality of something that had bypassed its own composure entirely and arrived at something more honest.

A heartbeat later, he was silent, and still, and his wide eyes were fixed on the girl, his breath coming in ragged pulls that had nothing to do with physical exertion.

"Pathetic." The draconic figure’s voice arrived from above, laden with disdain, the golden eyes momentarily clouding at their centers before burning back to their blazing, proud clarity as he reasserted whatever had been threatened.

"Sire." Beelzebub’s voice had found a different register, the panic gone but replaced by something that was not quite its opposite. Something careful, something that was doing the work of reason over the objections of instinct. "She has grown. Considerably more than the reports suggested."

"Is that why you ran?" The draconic figure’s growl came through closed teeth, each word carrying the weight of contempt that had found a specific and worthy target. "You filthy coward."

Beelzebub’s teeth came together. The muscle along his jaw worked for a moment before he answered.

"We have to fight together, or we will not make it." A pause, the words arriving with the flat precision of someone who had arrived at the answer and was presenting it without decoration. "At the very least, we will not be sane at the end of this."