And Vin unleashed a wave of hellfire on the Old One. Asmodeus shrieked and pulled his head away from his hand, a massive distance, but Vin breathed hard and shot the hellfire like a stream from a flamethrower. It crashed against the monster’s face and neck, poured over his shoulder, and new light lit up the dark cavern.
Asmodeus didn’t let go. Screaming, two mouths open and unleashing multi-layered roars of gargled, distorted sounds, the Old One set his dozen eyes down on Vin, and squeezed again. Vin’s hellfire stopped. His glowing spikes died. The tiny dragon’s voice came to a halt.
“I have wielded the hottest hellfire from Her depths themselves. I have wounded the archangels. I have served at the right hand of Lucifer! And a useless child of the deceiver dares to attack me? You shall live, ragarin. You shall live for centuries as I tear away each piece of your flesh. You shall live for millennia, and know what it means to have each of your bones removed and forced down your gullet. You shall know–”
A gold beam shot out from the darkness and joined the flickering red light of hellfire. It crashed into one of Asmodeus’s eyes, and again the two-mouthed beast unleashed a godly shriek of fury and pain.
Only one thing made a beam like that. Mia looked down into the black, and glowing weapons lit the darkness, far off to the side. An angel’s sword, and an angel’s huge shield. And four other shapes stood behind them, with short horns and skinny tails. The incubi.
One of them held her egg. Her pupper was alive.
Mia found the strings and hit them as hard as she could. Not a mindless sound this time, but a specific note, and a specific song. She needed to move rock, and move a lot of it, but she’d struggled before to make a small tree shake. That wouldn’t do. She needed to move the rock. She needed to move all of it.
Something in the depths listened to her. Something in the ocean with her heard the note, and echoed it a million times louder than she could.
Play me a song, child. I will play with you. I will dance for you.
“I hear it,” Asmodeus said, slowly turning his eleven eyes to glare down at them and the angels. “I hear Her. I hear–”
Mia played the song, and the ceiling opened above them.
Asmodeus froze. Mouths open, ready to bite down on someone, anyone, the colossal distance between his head and his own limbs was the only thing that stopped him before he noticed the ceiling opening up. It cracked apart and rocks rained down, but boulders landing on Asmodeus were pebbles compared to him. Mia did her best to split the ceiling nicely over where her and the demons — and angels — were, but giant boulders fell down around them, nonetheless.
The black swamp fell upon them like an opening curtain of ooze. Far far above, the valley split apart and revealed its dark fog to them, lit only by puffs of blue fire, and cracks of amber in the canyon walls. Hell shook, an unending hellquake that forced even the titan to tremble, and the vibrations pulsed down his limbs into Mia’s body. But she played the song, eyes set on Asmodeus.
Rumbling, the Old One reached up with several more limbs, and pushed himself to standing. They were beyond deep in the ground, and even standing, the kaiju-sized monster could not reach the top of the canyon. Mia spread the canyon further, until Asmodeus couldn’t reach both walls at once, and the long creature standing on his many legs fell forward, and planted a half dozen arms against one of the great walls.
They were still trapped in his grip, and if they didn’t get out, Asmodeus would just climb out and eat them. Or eat them now before he even tried. She had to get them out, get her egg, get the incubi, and get the angels.
She called on the batlam rune. Potram faded, and hard black metal replaced it. Pain scorched her mind as something snapped the bones of her broken arm back into place. Something filled her palm. Her staff, with its glowing amber jewel.
She reached down with the song, found deeper notes, heavier notes that changed the sound. And she summoned hellfire.
“Unmarked,” Asmodeus said, “you dare–”
The ground shook again. She’d done this trick before. The ocean sang to her, danced for her, and bathed her mind in the brilliant chaos of swirling reds and yellows, and death.
Hellfire erupted from under the monster. It tore up from the depths, swirling in a spiral as it ripped through rock, melted it, and cleared a path. The pit of Asmodeus’s chamber was deeper and wider than they could have known, but Hell’s reach was far deeper, deeper than the Old One’s song could reach. And Mia drew up hellfire and drowned the creature’s belly in destruction.
He let go. Shrieking again, the beast twisted and turned in the growing bath of amber liquid and flame. The hellfire crashed against his belly, his legs and tail, but the swirling waves could not burn through his hide. No wonder this creature had survived this long.
Mia fell. Her demons fell. A growing lake of hellfire waited for them, and Mia called on the song. Rocks shot out from the ground, from beneath the tens of millions of skulls Asmodeus had collected, and shot to the sky. Being gentle was not possible. Mia’s feet crashed against stone as it rose up, and a dozen other wide pillars of rock skyrocketed with her and her companions.
She launched them up and over the canyon edge, past the falling streams of remnant guts and black ooze, and into the Black Valley. Harnessing a song moving a scale of rock she could not imagine left no room for nuance, and tiny bodies, hers included, were thrown to the muck with the grace of a child throwing a handful of sand into water. They scattered, rolled through the black, and somewhere in Mia’s mind, something told her she’d just broken a leg.
She couldn’t feel it, not yet, not while the ocean enveloped her and she swam within its currents. Her armor snapped the bone back into place. She didn’t care.
She stood up and cast her gaze at the canyon she’d opened up a hundred meters from her.
A hand the size of a building reached up from the canyon, followed by another, and the head of a two-mouthed dragon with twelve eyes, one of them bleeding, ascended.
“Unmarked! I will have my song, unmarked!”