Chapter 162: Consumed by Blood and Fire

Chapter 162: Consumed by Blood and Fire
Elora's POV

The tearing sensation detonated from the very core of my mind.

The moment Darian and I shed every last pretense amid the shattered rubble and pooling blood, drawing ourselves flush against each other, the cold and the heat in the air had already become a storm capable of annihilating heaven and earth.

Our clothes were shredded by claws and raging fire elements, falling in tatters across the frozen obsidian floor.

There was no tenderness whatsoever, no pleasure in any conventional sense. This was a desperate struggle with flesh as the battlefield and souls as the offering.

"Ngh——!"

The instant Darian drove himself forward and split me completely open, I wrenched my neck back and let out a sharp, desperate cry.

The feeling was nothing like mortal love-making. It was two blades soaked in venom and raging fire, plunging savagely through each other's very marrow.

Pain.

Unbearable pain.

Dragon fire raged violently through my body, while Darian's blood — that ice-cold progenitor's essence belonging to the ancestor of all vampire-kind — was threading itself along every place our skin pressed and merged, like red-hot iron needles driving themselves forcibly through my veins and into my very bones.

"Ha… my little moth…"

Darian pressed his forehead hard against my shoulder, his entire body convulsing. Those pale, long hands that had always commanded absolute control were now buried deep into the soft flesh at my sides, grinding the bones of my hips until they groaned. The cracked cavity of his chest was hemorrhaging progenitor's blood in violent surges, and it coiled and throttled with the golden-red dragon fire erupting from my own heart.

"Let it out… Elora, don't hold back…"

His voice was so hoarse it had nearly lost all shape, and his bloodied fangs clamped down hard on my collarbone. The searing pain of his teeth splitting my skin wiped my mind completely blank — but what flooded into me in its wake was something that felt like frozen cedar carrying the mad, obliterating urge of a world being unmade.

I clenched my teeth and drove my nails deep into the raw flesh of his back.

The bones inside me felt as though they were being snapped and ground into powder one by one, then forcibly reassembled under the scrutiny of the progenitor's blood. Dragon fire blazed through my meridians, burning away the vampire clan's curse and corruption, while his blood was reforging this frail, mortal shell I had always inhabited. Even though my body had already been remade once through the spirit spring, this felt like being skinned and dismantled to the scaffolding beneath.

Silas had not lied to me. This was no torment a normal person could survive — this was laying the soul bare over an infinite pyre, this was two people being hammered and melted into a single body.

"Darian… you absolute… bastard…"

I cried out, my voice reverberating through the vast underground sanctuary. Because of the extremity of the pain and the overwhelming convulsions wracking me, hot tears tracked from the corners of my eyes — tears laced with ash.

But I did not retreat. Drawing on the primal instinct of a stray dog from the lower districts, my long, scarred legs locked tight around his waist and pulled him deeper into me.

Not enough.

Still nowhere near enough.

If we were going to be bound together, then we would burn all the way to the bone.

Every trace of reason had left Darian's crimson eyes; what remained was only the most primitive plunder and a frenzy bordering on madness. He moved like a beast that had lost all restraint, driving into me with savage, merciless force. Each collision sent an electric current and a wave of fire crashing straight into my skull, shattering my consciousness again and again.

Pain and pleasure lost all distinction between them in that moment.

Blood vessels were bursting, skin was burning, and with every ragged breath, the back of my throat expelled golden-red sparks.

"Ah——!!"

I threw my head back and dragged ten deep, bone-deep furrows down his back with my nails.

My awareness began to dissolve. The abyssal black miasma roaring from the rift somewhere below peeled away from my perception entirely.

My world narrowed to only him.

Only his breathing, his sweat, the scalding iron taste of blood when his teeth split my lip open, and the chaotic, frantic heartbeats of two people overlapping in agony.

Once. Twice.

In the beginning, my heartbeat was frantic as rolling thunder, while his was as slow and still as water at the bottom of an ancient well. But through the relentless collision and demand that knew no exhaustion, those two utterly opposed rhythms began, imperceptibly, to draw toward each other.

Thud. Thud.

Until at last, the two hearts, slamming against each other through the walls of our chests, arrived at the same terrifying, uncanny resonance.

I felt my soul torn free from my body, entwining itself with Darian's — that dark soul that had been circling in the void for centuries. We bit and clawed and embraced and fused in the emptiness. Dragon fire consumed his deathly cold, and his immortal power anchored me against dissolution.

Going to die, I thought dimly, my eyelids growing as heavy as slabs of stone.

And there, at the very edge where my flesh and soul were both on the verge of collapsing into dust —

A thunderous crack.

A boundless surge of energy that no language could adequately describe tore open from the deepest place where our bodies had pressed together.

It was no longer pure golden dragon fire. It was no longer the ink-black progenitor's blood.

It was a crimson flame — blazing forth like the most extravagant sunset the world had ever witnessed.

The ancient covenant, lost for ten thousand years, was reborn in this moment within the commingled blood and bone of Darian and me.

The markings spread like golden serpents awakening from a long sleep, surging violently across our joined skin — racing from my sternum up to my throat, then coursing down Darian's spine and into his limbs.

"ROAARRR——!!"

From the depths of the abysal rift came the sound of some ancient presence releasing a scream of absolute terror.

The black tide that had been straining to swallow the sanctuary whole recoiled the instant it touched the crimson dragon flame, hissing with an ear-splitting shriek as though blocks of ice had been dropped into boiling magma, dissolving into wisps of white smoke in the span of a single breath.

The crimson wave of fire detonated outward from the two of us as its center, expanding in a perfect ring.

The underground sanctuary shook with a thunderous, grinding roar, and enormous stones rained from above.

The abysal rift — that gaping wound that had yawned and hemorrhaged endless death-energy for untold centuries — was forced shut by an irresistible power under the pressure of the crimson dragon flame. Runes wove themselves across the void into a colossal sealing formation that reached from the earth's core to the roof of the heavens, and crimson chains carrying the dual resonance of the dragon clan and the vampire bloodline reached out from the emptiness and drove themselves into the deepest extremity of the rift, suppressing and shredding every last trace of black miasma and every shrieking wail into oblivion.

The cries of despair grew faint, and then there was nothing at all.

How much time passed after that, I could not say. The violent storm gradually quieted.

The vast sanctuary fell into a silence as complete as death, with only the residual warmth of dragon fire still hanging in the air and the thick, sweet-iron scent of blood.

I collapsed against the cold stone altar, utterly drained, every inch of my body aching with the burning soreness of someone who had just crawled out of hell's boiling oil — but I was alive.

And moreover… something was stirring through me. A power that was ancient and deep in a way I had never felt anything be before.

Darian lay heavily against my chest, his breathing ragged and rough, and those crimson eyes of his showed — rarely — a dazed, hollow vacancy that came only in the wake of true exhaustion. At his left breast, a crimson rose sigil, identical to the one now faintly glowing at my own sternum, pulsed gently in perfect synchrony with my heartbeat.

A life-binding.

I could feel each of his heartbeats with absolute clarity, could feel the flow of power surging through his veins, could even sense — distantly — that thread of obsession and fierce, dark satisfaction that had yet to fully dissolve from the depths of his soul.

"We… survived," I said, my voice hoarse and faint as a candle guttering in the wind, yet carrying — though I had not noticed it myself — the faint shape of a smile.

Darian let out a low sound that was almost a laugh, buried his face against the curve of my neck, and breathed in the remnants of dragon fire still clinging to my skin with something that could only be described as greed.

"Indeed… my little moth."

He raised his head slightly, and a corner of his bloodied mouth curved into an arc of satisfaction that was also, unmistakably, teasing.

"From today onward, even if you wish to die… you'll have to ask me first."

I lifted an arm gone so weak it had nearly lost all sensation, patted the back of his head, and turned my gaze toward the ceiling of the sanctuary.

The tremendous force of the sealing that had just occurred had punched through to the roof far above. Up there, with the complete sealing of the primary rift below, the black clouds that had blanketed the sky over Arcanum were dispersing at a rate visible to the naked eye.

The foundation of the abyss had been severed.