God Ash: Remnants of the fallen.-Chapter 1390: Blackfyre.

From here on out, every choice he made could lead him down one of those two paths, and the difference between them was not always obvious from where he was standing. Sometimes the path to one thing looked exactly like the path to the other, until you were too far along to easily turn back.

Nero glanced down at his hands.

They were clear as ice crystals in the torchlight, without a visible blemish on them. Lyon had done excellent work. Beyond the fresh scars that marked the recent damage, his skin was clean, his fingers steady. Looking at them, you wouldn't know what they'd done. What they were capable of.

And yet this body, his body, was equally as monstrous as it was human. Equally as capable of the gentle act as the terrible one. The Heretic Eyes that saw what others couldn't. The Vineheart that processed corruption rather than succumbing to it. The Yang form that had taken control in the depths of that black lake and eaten something ancient and enormous and simply refused to stop.

The dove and the raven, occupying the same chest.

He thought about Rummel Abellion.

The creature had concealed its true nature so completely that even the Oracle couldn't pierce the obscuration. It had worn the appearance of something grotesque and yet claimed divinity. Had been cruel and mischievous and sadistic, and yet had looked at Nero with something that might have been genuine curiosity when it couldn't understand what he was.

Could it be that Rummel Abellion had been the same as him? A being of dual natures, not angel and human but something else entirely, something that existed in the space between categories that the world insisted were mutually exclusive?

He didn't know.

Perhaps he never would.

He exhaled and kept walking.

His room was where he'd left it, which was more than could be said for most things in his life recently. Small, simply furnished, smelling of stone and the faint traces of his own existence accumulated over the weeks he'd spent here. He entered, locked the door behind him with the deliberate care of a man who had learned not to take private moments for granted, and sat on the edge of his bed.

The quiet settled in around him.

He remained still for a while, simply existing in the silence, not thinking about anything in particular. Then he straightened, checked the door again, looked at the window, confirmed what he already knew to be true.

He was alone.

He reached inward, toward the space where the Oracle's accumulated messages resided, and summoned the runes.

They manifested in the air before him, glowing golden against the room's dim light, hanging suspended with that familiar quality of existing slightly outside the normal rules of physical space. A cascade of them, more than he'd processed recently, accumulated during the chaos of the trials and everything that had followed.

Nero read through them methodically, working from the oldest forward. Status updates. Incremental changes to his condition. The Oracle's commentary on various things he'd encountered, some of it useful, some of it cryptic in ways he'd learned to leave alone until context provided clarity.

He worked through the accumulated messages with the focused patience of a man who understood that information was the most valuable currency he possessed.

Then he found it.

It was marked differently from the others. The runes that formed it carried a different quality, a weight and brightness that set them apart from the regular stream of Oracle communication. He read them slowly, making sure he understood each word before moving to the next.

***

{Rejoice, Heretic. You have slain a Chained Prince of Heaven, the Ruler of the Sporefire, and the Star of Great Calamity, Rummel Abellion.}

{Due to the high hierarchy of the being you have slain, you have accumulated for yourself Divine karma. You have received 100 Seals of Sin.}

{You have acquired the skill: Grimfyre.}

{Grimfyre: A Flame of Curse, strengthened by darkness, it devours the corruption.}

***

Nero stopped reading.

He sat completely still, the golden runes hanging in the air before him, their light steady and patient while his mind attempted to process what he'd just taken in.

A Chained Prince of Heaven.

Rummel Abellion hadn't been lying.

Not about that, anyway. Not about what it was. It had been an angel, a genuine one, a being of sufficient rank that slaying it generated Divine karma substantial enough to grant him a hundred Seals of Sin in a single notification. A hundred. He'd spent months accumulating his current total through battles and trials and near-death experiences that should have killed him a dozen times over, and this single act had added a hundred.

What in the absolute world had he done?

He stared at the runes for a long moment, the silence of the room pressing in around him with new meaning. Then he thought of standing in that dark corridor, looking upward through the stone and the soil and the distance, waiting for divine retribution.

And receiving only silence.

A Chained Prince of Heaven, the notification had said. Chained. Already imprisoned, already bound, already removed from whatever place holy beings occupied in the order of things. Perhaps that distinction mattered. Perhaps slaying something the heavens had already condemned and sealed away was different from slaying something still in service.

Or perhaps the heavens simply didn't care.

He took a long, slow breath.

Then another.

The excitement began to build despite himself, a warmth spreading through his chest that had nothing to do with the Vineheart and everything to do with the simple fact that he had survived, had grown stronger, had come through something impossible and emerged with something to show for it.

A new skill.

He let the runes dissolve, taking one more moment to collect himself, to contain the feeling before it became something unseemly. Then he raised his right hand, palm upward, and reached for the newly acquired skill.

Grimfyre.

A Flame of Curse, strengthened by darkness, it devours the corruption.

The idea of it was magnificent. A flame that consumed corruption rather than simply burning. A cursed fire that drew on darkness as its fuel. He could already imagine what it might look like, feel like, what it might be capable of in a fight. Pale and cold, perhaps, like the blue light of the fungi. Or pitch black, like the Yang form's shadows. Or both, somehow, impossible fire that contained its own contradiction.

He focused.

The skill responded.

Something manifested above his palm.

Nero looked at it.

A single tongue of flame, roughly the size of his thumbnail, pale grey in color, floating above his palm with all the energy and menace of a candle in a room with no draft. It flickered once, with what might have been uncertainty about its own existence, then steadied into a small, unimpressive, entirely unheroic little flame that illuminated approximately nothing.

The silence in the room seemed to deepen around it.

Nero stared at the flame.

The flame, if it could be said to do anything, seemed to stare back.

"What the hell is this?!"