Chapter 157 The King Who Burns
(Apollo)
“That’s better,” Apollo murmured. The words fell like absolution.
His magic burrowed inside, curling through the twisted remains of its essence. It slipped past ruined flesh and broken nerves, sinking into the core that still pretended to be a soul. The contact carried a faint echo of resistance, like pressing fingers into cooling wax that had once been warm and alive. Once, this kind of intimacy was pure satisfaction. Now it felt disturbingly close to routine—like tracing the same sigil into stone until the lines wore smooth and the meaning faded.
He remembered when pain had still been revelation. When every scream had peeled back a new truth about damnation. Now it was muscle memory. Habit. A rite performed too often to still carry awe.
He drove the fire deeper, hunting for a fresh spark in the creature’s fear, a new angle of pain. His power moved with surgical patience, probing, parting, peeling back torment like a priest separating flesh from bone. There—an old guilt, sticky and sour. He latched onto it, dragged it to the surface, and flayed it before the soul’s mind’s eye until it wailed. The guilt smelled like rancid smoke and spoiled wine. He peeled it open with clinical precision, forcing the soul to relive what it had done and the precise moment it chose not to stop. That moment always pleased him most. Not the act itself, but the choice. That quiet, almost holy instant where restraint died, and sin was welcomed like a guest.
“Look at that,” one of the demons on the upper walkway laughed. “Our king still has it.” Their laughter rang sharp and reverent, the sound of believers reassured their god had not gone soft.
“Always will,” another agreed, lifting a spiked chain for emphasis. The soul at the end of it whimpered. Its legs ended in cloven hooves now, but its hands remained eerily human. The contrast never failed to draw the eye. Proof that Hell did not erase humanity. It curated it. Preserved just enough to make the loss exquisite.
“The King who Burns,” someone snarled reverently. “Make it bleed, Majesty.” The title rolled through the cavern like a prayer answered by Devilfire.
He could. He did. He dragged out the process, spreading the agony thin and wide, savouring every strained gasp and choked cry. He stretched seconds into eternities, pulled nerve and memory apart until even time seemed unsure how to move forward. The soul’s ember flickered in his grasp—a tiny, sickly light—but it did not stir anything in him beyond the faintest curl of satisfaction. It was like drinking lukewarm wine—enough to warm his throat, nowhere near enough to touch his core.
This used to be the best high he could get. There had been a time when this alone had steadied him. When the breaking of souls had filled every hollow place inside his chest with righteous heat.
He strained for it now, pushing his power harder, making the soul feel every atrocity it had enacted tenfold, forcing it to endure the weight of its own cruelty compacted into seconds. The fire sharpened, compressing decades of sin into blinding instants of consequence. It screamed until its throat tore. Its voice cracked. Its ember shuddered.
Nothing inside him rose to meet it like it used to. The emptiness unsettled him more than the screams ever could.
He thought, unbidden, of a mortal girl with her head thrown back on an obsidian bench, body shaking with pleasure instead of terror. Of the cracked sounds that had spilt from her when she came on his cocks, the way her magic had wrapped around his like molten gold.
That memory carried the heat of a different kind. Alive. Reactive. Defiant. The memory struck him with far more force than the present did; her breathless whimpers, the way her nails had skated helplessly over stone, the moment her flame had flared bright against his own. That fire had met him instead of yielding. Had dared to answer back.
Her screams taste better, he thought savagely. Even when they were threaded with pain, there had been something else underneath. Want. Choosing. The flavour of it lingered in him in a way this did not. Her agony had been a sharp spice on top of a sweeter core; this thing was nothing but ash. Ash belonged to endings. She tasted like beginnings, and that frightened him more than he would ever admit.
He snapped his hand. The motion was abrupt, irritated, stripped of ceremony.
The chains flared white-hot for a heartbeat, then went slack. The soul sagged, hooks creaking, ember guttering down to a meagre, ugly glow. Not spent, not erased—he wasn’t done with it yet. Punishment was never meant to be merciful. It was meant to linger. He let it hang there, mind cracked open and raw, as a warning to every other ember in the room. The sight of it—swaying slightly in the furnace-breath, jaw hanging loose—drew a hush of hungry satisfaction from the watching demons.
This was a promise: you are never done paying. Judgement without end. Hell’s only gospel.
The demons roared approval. A few jostled each other, eager to see who he’d turn his attention to next. Some pressed their trophies closer to the edge of the walkways like offerings, their chained souls thrashing. Others knelt, foreheads pressed to hot iron, whispering little prayers of cruelty, asking to be chosen, to be used, to be noticed by the flame that ruled them. They prayed to him the way mortals once prayed to the heavens. Not for mercy. For proximity.
“Majesty.” A low, careful voice cut through the din.
Apollo didn’t look immediately. His gaze tracked instead to a cluster of newer demons gathered near the far wall—horns still smooth, wings too glossy, the hunger in their eyes less tempered by patience. They watched him like acolytes at a sacrament, each flinch and scream reflected in those eager faces.
This was what he did. What he was. King. Beast. Flame. A living scripture written in fire and bone.
He had been forged in this work: in the breaking of souls and the shaping of terror. The title “Devil” was less a name and more a job description.
So why did it all feel so… thin? Why did the silence between screams weigh heavier than the screams themselves?
He finally turned his head.
The one who’d spoken stood slightly apart from the others—a shade-slim demon with skin the colour of smoke and eyes like chips of onyx. No horns worth noting. No wings. Shadows clung to its shoulders anyway, drawn there by a knack for going unseen that had made it useful. The darkness around him did not behave like ordinary shade. It breathed. It shifted as if listening, as if the walls themselves had lent him a fragment of their secrecy.
A clever shadow. A trained one. The kind that learned where to hide and when to be quiet. Useful in corridors and whispers, in stolen glances and watched doors.
Not like Cael.
Cael was not borrowed darkness. He was the absence of light itself—an eclipse rather than a veil. Where Aethan’s shadows clung, Cael’s commanded. Where this one hid in the palace’s blind spots, Cael was the blind spot. Aethan vanished because the walls forgot him. Cael vanished because the walls obeyed.
One listened. The other ruled.
Apollo had fashioned them both, but only one had ever been trusted to stand at his back when the throne room went quiet.