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darksiders-week · 10 months

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Rider Of The White Horse - 5 Times Mayhem Turned White And One Time She Just Needed A Bath - Chapter 4: Holy Light

Summary:

Strife sets out on a Council mission to the White City, the heart of angelic dominion, only to find an even icier welcome than usual. As he proceeds into the city, it soon becomes clear that something is very, very wrong...

Notes:

Written for Darksiders Week Day 5: Before the End. Mind the animal harm tag. Obviously there are more chapters to this, so Mayhem will ultimately be okay, but still...

Disclaimer: This work was written for publication on Archive of Our Own and my personal Tumblr (lananiscorner) and is not for profit. Any re-publication on for-profit/monetized sites/apps is not authorized or supported by me. If you come across such a re-publication, please leave a comment in my tumblr ask box. Podfics and translations may be authorized upon request.

Full fic text beneath the cut.

Strife could tell that something was wrong the moment he stepped on the bridge.

The difference was subtle, like the change of pressure in the air when a storm cloud rolled in, or the way nights on Earth changed from simply chill to bitingly cold at the start of fall.

The White City was a place he was definitely familiar with, although the angels probably wished he wasn't.

How many times had he come here now, by orders of the Council? He had honestly lost count, though he was certain it was much more often than they had sent his siblings. As midly annoyed as Strife was that he had become the go-to guy for missions into angelic territory, he had to admit he had no-one to blame but himself. He was the one who had chosen an old angelic fortress for his home. He was the one who had studied its languages, treasures and secrets. He was the one who had taken part in stealth ops into angelic territory long before he had ever even set foot in the Council's chambers.

And if I ever run into another angel like Astarte who actually knows what I did there, it'll probably be the last time the Council sends me to angelic anywhere, Strife thought glumly as he led Mayhem down the gilded marble structure. The sound of her hooves somehow seemed to echo louder and farther than ever before, this time. In the distance, the familiar, majestic silhouette of the White City, the heart of angelic dominion in the universe, with its ivory statues and golden spires, glimmered more than ever in the unnaturally omni-present light surrounding it, a light so bright, so saturated, so hot, no shadow could ever touch it.

And yet something dark hung about the city, like a foreboding aura, a tension that reminded him of a ship seconds before mutiny or a powder keg a hair's width from a flame.

His suspicion was confirmed when he met the first guards.

For starters, their numbers were doubled, which confirmed his suspicion that the increased light—a feat he didn't think was possible and that would surely have made his approach a literal pain had it not been for his visor and Mayhem's armor—was an additional defense mechanism. Another security measure.

And then, of course, there were the looks on their faces. Angels had always been a terribly unfun, stone-faced bunch, but this batch was even worse. Under normal circumstances, Strife would have cracked a joke or two at their expense, but the fleeting look of recognition that hushed over their faces as they saw him approach stopped the words just before they jumped out of his mouth.

They seemed to have been expecting him, which was unusual. The Council did not usually announce visits by their enforcers and it was not as if he had taken any detours before getting here. He couldn't recall any recent trouble between the Council and the angelic hegemony either, at least none that would be out of the ordinary and justify this extra vigilance.

On the other hand, they seemed surprised to see him. Strife was no telepath—that gift was one that none of the nephilim had ever come to possess—but he was good at picking up on seemingly insignifant details and drawing his conclusions from there, often to the point where people thought he had been reading their minds.

Right now, what he read on their faces was 'you actually dared'. 'You actually dared coming here, after all you have done, you half-demon bastard.'

Something was very definitely wrong. Something that had happened without his doing, beyond his control and knowledge. Something that the Council, if they were aware, had conveniently forgotten to tell him about, as they so often did.

Had he known just what it was, he would have just turned his horse around right then and there—goodbye, farewell, and see you again never.

Instead, Strife approached the guards with the same haughty swagger as he usually did. There was no point in letting them know that he knew something was wrong. Feigning ignorance and innocence was about the only advantage he had at this point. To his surprise, the one who stepped forward to greet him was actually a familiar face.

"Captain Tanith—"

"Commander Tanith," the angel corrected him sharply. Strife had thought it impossible, but somehow she seemed even more humorless than the last time he had met her. And that time he had blown up a fair chunk of the White City and unleashed a hoard of blinded angelic beasts onto the squad that had been sent after him. Good times...

In fact, 'Commander' Tanith not only seemed to be displeased to see him, but rather outright displeased to exist in this same time and space as him. Truly a paragon of angelic virtue. "State your business, horseman, and not a step further."

Strife chuckled as he pulled Mayhem to a stop. The mare stomped her hooves down dramatically, as if to mock the angel's words. Yes, ma'am. Not a single step. As it behooves you.

"Well, first of all, congratulations on your promo—"

"I said, state your business, horseman."

Strife sighed. Whatever had happened to the fine art of small talk?

"Very well. I'm here to see Archon Asherah. By orders of the Council."

"What for?"

"That's need to know, and you, commander, don't need to know."

Two could play this game. If she was going to be as curt as possible, then so was he.

Plus, if he was being honest, messing with whomever he had to chat with in between his deployment and the actual target of his missions was one of the few fleeting joys left in his work.

Tanith gripped her lance harder... then stepped aside and motioned him onwards.

Strife blinked.

Something was definitely wrong. The angels never let anyone pass with so little questioning. They never gave in this easily.

Step lightly, Mayhem. He pulled the mare's reins softly and continued on his way down the bridge. Though his gaze seemed fixed on the city, Strife's attention wandered literally anywhere but the glimmering spires. There were more angelic patrols in the sky. Patrols... and...

Strife squinted against the almost blinding light. What were those little cracks of white lightning dancing against the almost equally bright sky in the distance? They seemed to be spaced too regularly to be natural phenomena. He ran down the list of fortification options he had read about in the dusty archives of his home one by one.

Sentry lights? Too small.

A detection mesh? Too widely spaced.

Aerial mines? Too obvious.

Portal anchors? Wrong shape. Portal anchors were circular, not to mention having so many of them would just be a recipe for disaster. Even the fastest, most maneuverable fliers in the White City needed a bit of space after exiting a portal to slow down. Unless of cou—

He noticed it the same time Mayhem did and pulled her reins only for her to give him an indignant huff, as if to say 'yes, I already noticed this a split second ago and I was about to stop anyway, thank you very much'.

The sounds of heavy combat boots stomping over the marble behind him had stopped. They were not even halfway across the bridge, yet the angels had stopped following him. He was not going to give them the satisfaction of turning around to ask what was wrong, of course, but a quick glance at the reflections in his gauntlet confirmed his assumption.

They were waiting for him, spears in hand, ready to attack.

Mayhem, do me a favor and tap the next stretch of bridge lightly, will you?

His horse obeyed without complaint. Her right front hoof tested the gilded marble in front of her gently, almost as if she were pawing at a sleeping animal, trying to wake it.

Instead of the thud of stone, a soft clink, like a steal wind chime, echoed into void below them.

Marble was not supposed to clink.

Alright then. Strife sighed. We are going to have to do this the theatrical way.

"Mayhem, what the hell?" He raised his voice just loud enough for the angelic patrol behind him to hear. "It's just a bridge. The same bridge we've crossed at least three dozen times by now. Move along, will you?"

Mayhem, eager as ever to match his theatrics, threw her head back and stomped her feet down indignantly.

"I know..." Strife groaned dramatically. "I would also rather be in Hell, tearing through hordes of demons and stealing all their shinies, but you know the drill." He raised his right hand and started counting by his fingers, as if explaining the simplest concept for a particularly impatient human toddler. "One: the Council gives us an order. Two: I say 'yes, sir'. Three, I complain to myself about the mission until I've moved far enough away from them to call you. Four: you show up. Five: I get in the saddle. Six—"

Mayhem whinnied as loud as she could, then bucked and catapulted him across the bridge. Though he had been expecting it, neigh counted on it, Strife nearly landed face first, managing to curl into a roll only at the last moment.

Still, he handed with a thud, not a clink. And that's what mattered.

Thanks, girl.

"What the hell, Mayhem?!"

His horse, matching the show he was putting on, huffed at him one more time, before disappearing back into the ether, leaving behind a group angels that looked as bewildered as angered.

Strife wanted to laugh. Yeah, sucks when you try to set an ambush for someone only for them to side step the main trap, doesn't it?

Instead, what he shouted across the bridge was: "No worries! You can put down the spears! She's not gonna be back any time soon and the only thing that's hurt here is my pride." Strife picked himself up and dusted off his shoulders. "Rider of the white horse, more like rider of the grey menace, am I right?"

Behind Commander Tanith, some of her subordinates were starting to exchange glances that practically screamed 'so what now'? It almost made Strife smile. He loved destroying carefully laid angelic plans. And the upside was that he was now on the other end of whatever painful welcome they had been planning for him and Mayhem.

The downside was that he was now behind enemy lines, minus his horse. Fantastic.

"—lord! Mylord! Mylord Strife!"

His attention snapped back to the streets behind him at the sound of his name. He and his brothers and sister had been called many things by many angels before, but 'mylord' was definitely not one of them. It had a nice ring to it, though, admittedly.

Too nice a ring, actually.

"Mylord?" Strife laughed, clearly a reaction the pathetic little angel he was faced with as he turned around had not been expecting at all. He could see him slink back against the columns lining the bridge almost immediately. Looks like somebody would love for this city to have some shadows right about now. "You call me that again, and I will rip out your vocal chords and have them for breakfast."

The angel paled and cowered, if that was even possible, given that the little milk-faced runt looked like he had barely gone through his first molting. Strife wondered briefly if sending a kid barely old enough to hold a rank was their idea of a joke or just a ploy to try and make him feel some bullshit false sense of security. Too bad for them he had seen what some angelic children were capable of, and if they thought being faced with a child would stay his hand... well clearly they had never talked to Astarte... or recorded what he and War had needed to do after Lucifer had spread his magic among the humans.

"I'm just kidding, lad." Strife marched over to the kid quickly and gave him a short pat on the shoulder. "I don't eat birds. Too many small bones."

Now that he was up close, Strife took quick stock of what exactly he was working with. No weapons. No concealment magics. No suspicious vibrations of magic that usually came with equipment conjured from the void or from equipment vaults. They had really sent a wholly unarmed kid to escort him to the next trap.

That was a new level of cocky even for angels.

"Now then," Strife straightened his shoulders and cleared his throat. "Take me to your leader. And by that I mean Archon Asherah."

The angel complied almost too quickly. Amateurs. Strife wanted to sigh. Instead, he fell into step behind his guide to disaster. For all their military prowess, Heaven's warriors really were abyssmal when it came to ruses. Granted, angelic champions were sworn to truth, but as far as he knew, this rule did not extend to normal grunts. Still, many angels seemed almost allergic to bending the truth a little, to throwing up false flags or other diversions. It made him appreciate humans all the more. Were they pathetically weak? Sure. But goddamn, the Creator had given them some truly creative brains and a healthy dose of self-preservation-focused morality suspension.

As he ascended the long, winding paths through the city—sometimes Strife truly felt like the roads here had been deliberately designed to remind any guest that it was oh so bad they didn't have wings like everybody who actually belonged here—more little alarm bells went off in his head. The city seemed almost deserted, yet there was an unmistakable hum of magic in the air behind pretty much every corner he turned. Every once in a while, he even caught the almost imperceivable shimmer of invisibility spells and glamors atop a ballustrade or column. Most visitors might have missed them.

Too bad the Council had sent the one horseman who himself was capable of glamors strong enough to fool even his own siblings.

His final clue that something truly awful was about to happen, was the place he was being led to.

"The training grounds?" Strife did his best to sound innocently puzzled. It made sense. Sturdy fortifications, none of the few civilians nearby, directly opposite the city archives, so nobody had to worry about accidentally blowing up a library either. "I guess even archons can get rusty after a while if they don't hit a sack of hay now and then."

"Foolish horseman."

Her voice was as commanding as he remembered, although it had been a few milennia, and so was her the grip on her flail, the stern look on her face, and the entire poise of her very being, as Asherah, archon of the white flame and wielder of storms, descended on the arena in front of him. Even tied up in neat braids behind her wings, her flaming red hair still ran down well to her thighs. All six of her wings twitched in mild annoyance, as she dismissed his little guide.

Strife had never seen an angel fly from a place faster than this little creature.

"Foolish or not," Strife argued, "the Council has sent me here so you can explain this." The ornate spike-covered ball appeared from the vault concealed in his gauntlet in a quick flash of red light. Strife tossed it at her feet with a curt nod. With its twin dangling non-chalantly from the other end of the chain Asherah was holding, very little was left to interpretation. "It was found in the corpse of one of the Council's own watchers. Care to explain, Asherah?"

The archon looked at the spiked ball, back at him, back to the ball, and smiled. "Frangĕ."

Strife hit the ground before the word was finished. Against the adamantine of his visor and armor, the thousands of angelic weaponry shards sounded like little more than the pitter patter of rain, yet he knew that when he got up, his hands would resemble a porcupine. He rolled aside as quickly as he had dropped, leaving Asherah's flail to land in little more than glowing hot sand, then sprung to his feet.

She was on him in a second of course, a true warrior of angelic myth. Fast, strong, precise. Deadly. Strife's body moved on sheer instinct, hundreds and thousands of hours of practice with Fury and his other ranged-weapons-wielding siblings paying off once more. Still, Asherah would not have been an archon had she been deterred by his evasions, or the shadow clones he summoned to distract her. They were little more than flies to her, as she advanced on him with terrifying speed, their bullets ricocheting off a shield of pure thunder that surrounded her, but not her flail. Strife wondered briefly if this behavior was hostile enough to justify killing one of Heaven's finest when he got back to the Council. And if she knew about her weakness yet.

Then, he spotted the flaming sword high in the sky.

"Michael?"

Now Strife was thoroughly confused. Not by Michael's presence—oh no. If he were an angel trying to murder a horseman, he'd send the best, too—but rather by his abstinence from the battle. What good was a flaming sword if you were not going to wield it against your enemy?

"You know..." Strife holstered his guns and pulled out his twin daggers as he dodged another flail swing. "I would love to have a chat with Mikey up there." The next swing nearly made him a head shorter. "Think you could—" The third one nearly cost him an arm. "—just pause a minute so I can ask him what he's doing?"

"Less talking!"

Asherah swung her weapon again, but this time, Strife was faster. His daggers came down on its chain in a neat cross, fast as the lightning surrounding her, and pinned it to the sand below.

"More fighting, I know." Strife knew she couldn't see it, but he grinned behind his visor as he took one hand off his daggers to punch the angel in her face. That was the problem with bullet shields. They never blocked melee attacks. And nobody ever expected him of all people to get his hands dirty. "I should hook you up with my sister—you two'd get along like a house on fire!"

She dodged his next blow effortlessly, shooting up from the ground with the kind of speed only three pairs of wings could afford, and placed herself beside Michael. Strife was just about to complain when he finally read the words Michael was uttering from his lips.

"Oh fu—"

The flaming sword landed right in front of his feet, a homing beacon for what Strife finally recognized as strike mirrors, angelic weaponry designed to bundle and reflect holy light, returning it with hundred times intensity to whatever source cast the first ray.

And which source could be brighter than Michael's sword?

Strife dodged, recalled his daggers, and watched helplessly as the flame-colored light shot forth from the sword to a thousand mirrors surrounding the city, only to be returned as one white beam of destruction. The arena crumbled beneath his feet, sending him tumbling amidst the debris, grasping for purchase and dodging the bullets of a hundred angelic canons that had likely been waiting for him to take the fall here ever since he had avoided the bridge. It made sense now, that the young boy had led him through all those winding paths, even if there had been a shorter way to the arena.

They had needed time to move their trap.

What was far more concerning than the blatant attempt to murder him, though, were the words that were thrown at him in between the angelic lead.

"Die, traitor!"

"For the Hellguard!"

"For humanity!"

"The Council's will be done!"

The Council? Strife planted a bullet into the one that had shouted that particular nugget at him out of pure spite, even as he kept leaping from temporary refuge to temporary refuge. Above him, the White City rapidly shrunk into a tiny spec of glimmering light. He wasn't too surprised, if he was being honest. It was not the first time that he felt as if the three stone faces had been trying to get rid of him and his siblings. Still, he wondered what had set them off this time.

For humanity? What in god's fucking name had Strife ever done to them? Of all of his siblings, he was arguably the one who liked them the most, silly and ineffectual and trite as they were. He had been to Earth many times, each time making sure to cause as little damage to them and their planet as absolutely possible.

For the Hellguard? He couldn't even remember the last time he had killed one of them.

Traitor? It was the one that was lobbed at him the most often. Strife had bullets for those angels too. "You have no idea how little that narrows it down!"

He fell, dodged, and shot, for what seemed like an hour. Was there a direct pipeline from Heaven to Hell? If so, he was surely about to find out. With his last assailant gone, but an alarming amount of strike mirrors still around, even this far in the depths, Strife reached for the bridge stone he always kept with him as a last resort. There was no way in hell he was going to call Mayhem into this death trap. His hand warmed slowly as the stone started glowing, ready to take him to the beaches of Kizerath.

A second later, the stone shattered, and so did the fingers in his hand and the bones in his arm as Asherah swung at him once more. When she had rejoined the fray, he could not tell and it hardly mattered. Strife landed on a fairly horizontal piece of debris floating in almost perfect equilibrium between his body on one side and the head of Asherah's flail on the other.

The archon herself floated graceful as a feather, just safely out of his reach. "You will die here for the treachery your brother has committed on Earth, wretch. May the Creator have mercy on your soul."

There were so many things Strife wanted to ask as he dragged himself back onto his two feet and used a healing shard to mend his broken bones. Which brother? What the fuck had happened on Earth? What made her think the Creator was going to drag Himself back from abandoning the universe just for one wretched nephilim?

Instead, all he could do was yell a desperate 'no' as he recognized the next words on Asherah's lips, as Mayhem materialized underneath him, putting him into the saddle without his command and arguably against all reason.

As the mirrors lit up once more.

If he could not think of a place that the angel's would not chase him to right here, right now, they were both going to die.

And for once, his mind was drawing a complete blank.

Just a blink of an eye later, the white light descended on them once more.

Mayhem reared, screamed, and gallopped off into void between worlds.

He could hear her screaming even as they trampled through the ether, a desperate flight from flames that had already engulfed and penetrated her body.

If she hadn't reared, they would have had him. If she hadn't reared, he would have died.

He could feel her buckle under the pain as they finally emerged from the void.

This time, he was thrown off not for show, but for good. He crashed into something hard, yet brittle, fell a good thirty feet, and finally ended up in a shallow pond.

No... Strife coughed as he got up and surveyed his surroundings. Not a pond.

Ponds did not have stone borders. They did not have angel statues in their middle either. Not usually anyway.

A fountain.

All around him, the broken concrete and glass husks of what humanity had dubbed 'skyscrapers' jutted up in a harrowing display of hostility, interrupted only by the corpses of humans. And angels. And demons.

What the Hell had happened to Earth and what was Heaven's involvement in this? What was his brothers' involvement in this?

At least, those were the questions he was sure he should have asked. Instead, another one burst from his throat.

"Mayhem?"

The silence that answered was deafening.

"Mayhem?! MAYHEM?!!"

She had to be alive. She had to be. She had had the strength of will and body to take him to the one place angels would not dare to touch for fear of the Council, even as she had been burning up from the inside. Surely she had survived this. She must have.

Strife cursed and waded out of the pond, back to and through the suspiciously nephilim-sized hole he had torn through the building on his way down. Was he going to attract every demon on this sad little rock shouting for her? Sure. Did it matter? No.

"MAYHEM?!!!!"

At last, a soft whinny came in reply, though it was almost too faint to hear. Strife hurried into the direction of the sound, dodging and disposing of a member of the Legion and his axe practically on sheer instinct.

He found her on the far side of a dead garden between two buildings, half her armor scattered around her, dented and broken beyond use and repair. Her fur shone bright as the White City itself from the flames still coursing through her, and though touching her burnt his fingers even through his gauntlets, the pain must have been nothing compared to the agony she seemed to feel.

The sounds she made were barely equine. They were barely that of a living thing.

"It's okay, Mayhem." What a lie. "It's gonna be okay, girl." Probably a lie, too. "I'll figure something out."

He'd have to. There had been many healing spells in the books of his angelic fortress. He had even studied some of them. Yet of course, not a single one of them provided a remedy for angelic light.

The only remedy he knew was darkness. The presence of demons. Shadows to leech the light.

"That was a very stupid thing you did there to keep me alive," Strife said gently as he got up and started banging the nearest piece of rubble he could find against a burnt out car. The clank echoed through the dead city. If that didn't attract the attention of every demon within a mile... "And I'm about to do something very stupid to keep you alive."

True enough, he could already hear the first demons rushing in, growling in hunger and howling in anticipation of battle. Strife gave one last look at his horse behind him and drew his guns.

Sure he was going to let them close enough to drench her in shadow. He was also going to kill every single fucking demon who tried to lay a hand on her.

And then... then he would have to find his brothers.

#Darksiders #Darksiders Week #Darksiders Week 2023 #darksidersweek2023 #Day 5: Before the End #lananiscorner #darksidersweek

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darksiders-week · 10 months

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The Leviathan's Tail

Summary:

Strife has lost count of the many, many times he has tried to conquer the obstacle course called "Leviathan's Landing". Dis has not. She decides to provide him with a little hint...

Notes:

Yes, I am still alive. This is the first thing I've written in months, so probably rusty as fuck. Anyway, his was written for Darksiders Week 2023, Day 1: Celebrating Genesis. Can't say I liked Leviathan's Landing--quite the opposite in fact, but bless whoever found that little exploit for the third section of it.

Fic text beneath the cut.

The platform collapsed under his feet once more, and so did what little was left of his patience. Strife cursed as he fell through the void, seemingly endlessly, before one of the giant, undead snakes that had made its home in there found him and catapulted him back up to the beginning with an unceremonious flick of its tail.

Leviathan’s Landing, Vulgrim had called it, and now Strife finally understood why.

“Have you been attempting this ridiculous excuse of an obstacle course again, brother?”

“Of course not,” Strife scoffed in response. “I just came here for my daily dose of void diving.”

He wasn’t sure if War had been making fun of him or not. It was hard to tell with the big guy, and the fact that he and Strife had not had much to do with each other before defecting from the nephilim did not help. He had been a part of the Crimson Oath—meaning what you say but never saying what you mean had been second nature to Strife, drilled into his very being from the day he took the crimson. War, on the other hand, had been fighting at the front of Absalom’s forces, a vanguard, a bruiser, as brutally effective as gracelessly blunt, and in many ways his demeanor came to match.

Even now, as War raised an eyebrow ever so slightly before turning back towards the serpent hole, Strife was not entirely sure if he had even noticed the sarcasm in his brother’s reply. Strife was going to give him the benefit of the doubt, though. If even one good thing had come out of their third visit to Eden, it was that Strife had learned his younger brother was a lot smarter than one would assume from a front line fighter who had gotten hit in the head a couple dozen of times.

Unfortunately, Strife thought with a sigh as he looked back on the increasingly narrow pillars shooting up behind him, there was a better chance of snow falling in Hell’s furnaces than War helping him with this. As he trudged back to the serpent hole, frustration slowly turned into anger.

He was supposed to be the one who was good at this sort of stuff. Finesse. Swiftness. Sure-footed work under frantic circumstances. This was his element… and yet here he was, sulking after the Creator only knew how many attempts at tackling the damned third section of this utterly insane obstacle course.

He wanted to shoot something. Or even better, punch it.

Perhaps I should ask War to let me borrow that gauntlet for a minute.

The thought had never had more appeal. Unfortunately, the cold, unforgiving universe once more decided to laugh at him.

The serpent hole was where it had always been—or, well, where it had always been since Strife and War had gotten here—for all Strife knew Vulgrim reshuffled and redecorated the place every X number of years—but War was not. Knowing his brother, he hadn’t gone back to Vulgrim and Samael for a chat either, which really left only one sensible option. With a deep sigh, Strife headed towards Dis.

“Brother, I swear by Lilith’s tits, if you went to fight Dagon without me…”

“Then what?” Vulgrim’s ‘associate’ was on him in a hot second, the bauble she had been tinkering with flung carelessly back into the void with a flick of her wrist. The smile on Dis’ face was as unmistakably smug as the tone was tantalizing in her voice. “Will we get to see an epic brawl between two of the last nephilim in existence? I would pay for seats to that show…”

“Aaaaaand you’d be getting ripped off.” Strife smiled underneath his helmet as he brought out his guns. “You wanna see a fight between any number of the four of us? Just ask who should be in charge or claim that one of us is light years ahead of the others, and you’ve got yourself a nice little show.”

Of course, the truth was it probably wouldn’t even take that much. If there were two things that were in a nephilim’s blood, it was to wander… and to fight. In hindsight, perhaps that was why Absalom’s excuse for attacking Eden had always rung so hollow for him.

“A home for our people.”

As if their people were the kind that wanted homes.

As if they would not get bored less than a month into living there and move on to another planet to mess up.

As if any permanent settlement was not only unrealistic and completely out of character for almost all of them, but also an amazing opportunity for one of the many, many, many races who wanted his kind wiped from the universe completely to attack them where it hurt the most.

Except that was us. Strife hated it when the little voice inside his head was right. It was us who wiped them from the universe. Didn’t even need another race for that.

“Hey, Dis, you wouldn’t happen to have seen War, would you?”

There was no point in lingering in the past, no matter how many times its ghosts tried to claw their way back into his mind.

He often wondered how many centuries he was going to have to remind himself of that fact before it finally worked.

“The big guy?” Dis looked up from whatever potion she had been brewing—where had she even been hiding the vials and ingredients?—and nodded towards the serpent hole. “He bought some more trinkets from me before going to the arena. I thought you’d already demolished the place?”

Strife shrugged. “Yeah, pretty sure we did. But then again, War’s the kind that doesn’t mind repetition.”

“But you do?”

“Sure do. It’s boring. And I’ve got better things to do with my time.”

Dis grinned ear to ear. “Like tackling Leviathan’s Landing for the two-hundred and sixty-eighth time?”

Oh you little demon bit— “I have not—”

Suddenly, the temptation to shoot her was almost unbearable. Strife knew the feeling. The itching at the back of his neck. The tingling in his veins. The blood lust that was so common for all of his kind. Too bad all the stuff she sold was useful. And she was kind of cute. For a demon anyways.

“It has not been two-hundred and sixty-eight times.”

“Oh it has.” Dis shook the vial she was holding twice and smiled as it turned from dull gray to vibrant blue. “I counted.” She gave him a quick wink. “Your enthusiasm and tenacity really is quite endearing.”

“I’m gonna shoot you just for that tone in your voice.”

Strife sighed. He wanted to say he couldn’t quite place why it pissed him off so much, but unfortunately he could. That dreadful mixture of cheeky seduction and almost mothering ‘bless your little heart, you tried’ kind of condescension was something every nephilim had known from the day of their creation.

“You know, Dis… if you’ve got nothing helpful to say, maybe say nothing at all.”

“Very well,” Dis scoffed. “Go catch a Leviathan’s tail then, for all I care.”

Whatever warmth had been in her voice had turned into to ice. Strife was hardly surprised. A slighted demon sounded like she wanted to murder him. In other news, fire was hot and Samael could not be trusted. He watched her float back to her books and beakers and whatever else she had stacked up in that makeshift laboratory of hers, took a deep breath and holstered his guns.

There were other demons to kill in the arena. No need to waste his time and ammo on the demon who was supplying him and War with upgrades.

He was just about to enter the arena and find out which section exactly War had run off to, when he caught the glimmer in the distance.

How he had never noticed it before, Strife couldn’t tell. His senses were usually unusually sharp—more so than most other nephilim’s in fact—it had always given him an edge he had sorely needed. Perhaps he had always been to distracted by conversing with War. Perhaps the angle had never been right. Either way, he could see it clearly now—the unmistakable glow of a creature core, and a big one at that. Strife stepped over the serpent hole and headed down the rune-riddled path towards the core instead.

It led him back to the big door. As once before, the keys he and War had found throughout Hell’s realms materialized automatically, shooting forth into their locks, no doubt drawn in by some powerful magic. There were not enough of them, of course. There hadn’t been last time either, and both he and War had agreed to leave the door alone until they had found a sufficient number to open the door.

As much as Strife loved a mystery, right now, the idea of what was hiding behind the gate was not nearly as interesting to him as the glow high above it, little more than a glimmer now that his sight line was blocked by the stone wall shooting up above the door. Strife climbed up one of the torches by the side, hoping to get a better look.

Who would put a stone wall above a door in the middle of nowhere? And who would put a core up there? And what kind of co—Oh.

He found the answer as he was balancing on the edge of the torch, flames licking dangerously close to his dangling scarf. From up here, he could see most of this corner of the void. He could see the entrance to the Boatman’s Labyrinth and Dis’ lab just before that. He could see the serpent hole. He could see the entrance to the Gauntlet. He could see the beginning of Leviathan’s Landing.

The beginning with the first pillars.

And the damned pillars.

And the second portal.

And the floating rocks that curved throughout the empty space like a winding snake.

And the third portal.

And a glimpse of the beginning of thrice-damned path he had just wasted hours on, bending gently in his current direction.

“You have got to be kidding me!”

This was it. This was the Leviathan’s tail. The end of the course. He couldn’t see if from where he stood, but he was as sure that there was one last portal up there as he was sure in his aim with his guns.

“Bless you, Dis, I promise I’ll bring you something really neat from the next vault I crack.”

Strife took a deep breath, then jumped towards the door, shadow-dashing mid air to land on one of the tiny outcrops in the rocky facade. If someone had told him to climb up this wall a week ago, he would have told them to get bent. Now, he was determined to scale this jagged piece of floating rock even if it was the last thing he was going to do.

As it turned out, getting above the door was the easy part. Getting up the wall behind it… Strife cursed under his breath as he tried to scale the rocks. Why did Lilith had to have been so incompetent at creating a hybrid between angels and demons? Where were the wings? You’d think that would be the first thing she would have taken from the angels. The wings. But noooooo. All he had was this stupid shadow wing thing he had gotten from Samael.

He had lost count of the many times his fingers had slipped from cracks to small and thin for a firm hold by the time he felt ready to climb back down again. Even though he was on the scrawny side as far as nephilim went, there was no way to get a good grip here. He almost missed the balancing act that was the pillars in the first section of Leviathan’s Landing.

Balance…

The idea that had sprung into his head was frankly crazy and likely to end with him losing parts he would hate to miss, but when had that ever stopped him? Strife shook the tension and soreness out of his limbs, then tackled the wall again.

This time, he planted one of his twin daggers firmly in the deepest horizontal crack he could find and clambered up onto it with as much care as he could muster. The tempered demon steel bent ever so slightly under his weight, but still, his feet remained steady. He had stood on worse. He just needed to put the thought of an arm’s length worth of razor sharp steel out of his mind.

The second dagger went into another split in the rocks, this time blade up. It was risky, but he could do it.

Strife took a deep breath, jumped up onto the hilt and immediately vaulted even higher, to grab the ledge at the top of the cliff. He hung on by the tips of his fingers, but he was going to be damned if he was going to quit now. With one last huff and a curse, Strife pulled himself to the top.

The core was humming quietly in front of him, its magic vibrating in the air, soft as the buzz of a bee on a warm summer’s day. It almost seemed to mock him with how peacefully it sat there, considering the violence this obstacle course had inflicted on him each time he had tried to get here the ‘right’ way.

“You little sucker…” Strife grabbed the core quickly before the universe could pull some new cruel joke on him and catapult it out of his reach by some contrived shenanigans.

I can already hear War’s response, Strife mused as he climbed down carefully, retrieving his daggers along the way. “You have not only cheated the creator of this course—you have cheated yourself.”

War could get bent. At the end of the day, Strife now had three Leviathan cores and War had none. And that’s what really mattered.

His brother was waiting for him by the serpent hole when he returned. Going by the few bits and pieces of demon that still clung to parts of War’s armor, it had been an entertaining run.

“So… how far did you get?”

“I stopped after the hundred and sixty-fifth wave.” War shrugged ever so slightly. “The arena is starting to bore me.” Then, he nodded towards his older brother. “I assume you tried the leviathan’s trail one more time?”

“Actually,” Strife grinned, even though he was fully aware War could not see it, “I grabbed the leviathan by its tail this time.”

War sighed. “You make as little sense as ever, brother.”

“Thankfully.” Strife thumped him on the shoulder quickly. “Now, shall we return to our regularly scheduled hunt for minor demon lords with delusions of grandeur?”

A rare smile graced War’s usually stern face. “Yes. Let’s go and kill Dagon.”

#Darksiders #Darksiders Week #Darksiders Week 2023 #darksidersweek2023 #Day 1: Celebrating Genesis #lananiscorner

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