Chapter 152 The Prince and the Parasite
The atmosphere atop the ridge didn't just chill; it curdled, the moonlight reflecting off Michael’s armor with a clinical, bone-white glare that felt more like a threat than a light.
He stood there like a statue of marble and vengeance, his presence radiating a sterile heat that made the very insects in the grass fall silent.
Down in the gut of the valley, the darkness began to heave.
A low, tectonic groan vibrated through the earth, a sound that felt less like a voice and more like a shifting of the world’s crust. The Black Dragon’s ribs expanded, a massive bellows of obsidian and shadow, exhaling a cloud of gray ash and dead, skeletal leaves into the air. Then, the horror began.
The shadow of the great beast started to buckle and collapse inward, the sickening sound of wet bone cracking and resetting echoing against the valley walls. Thick, armor-like scales dissolved into pale, bruised skin with a sound like tearing silk. Within heartbeats, the monster was gone, replaced by a man standing amidst the settling soot.
Abyssara wiped a streak of ash from his jaw, his movements jerky and raw. His eyes didn't just shine; they smoldered like dying embers in a hearth filled with salt.
"What is the Prince of War doing so far from his golden cage?" he rasped, his voice still carrying the gravelly weight of the dragon.
Michael descended the slope, his boots ghosting over the gravel with an eerie, weightless precision. He moved with the terrifying grace of a predator that had never known fear. "I tracked a shadow that blotted out the stars," he said, his voice ringing with a chilling, effortless authority that seemed to push back the natural darkness of the night.
"I wondered what creature possessed the arrogance to fly freely in a realm where it is forbidden. Then I saw the wings. The same wings my Father bound in the deepest pit of the abyss, meant never to taste the wind again."
Michael stopped a few paces away. The air surrounding him began to shimmer, distorted by a faint, holy heat that smelled of ozone and sun-scorched stone. He was a beacon of light in a graveyard of shadows. "Tell me, Abyssara.
Who broke the iron my Father forged? Who was foolish enough or arrogant enough to unshackle the Black Dragon?"
Abyssara’s lip curled back, revealing a row of teeth that were still a fraction too sharp, a flash of serrated ivory in the gloom. He braced his weight, his muscles coiled like a spring. "If you’re here to play executioner, Michael, draw your steel. I’m tired of riddles."
"I am asking a simple question," Michael countered. He didn't reach for the hilt at his side. Instead, he folded his arms, his gaze boring into the demon with a terrifyingly calm, almost clinical curiosity. "The mightiest of the damned doesn't simply walk out of Hell. Who opened the gate?"
“And why should I answer a puppet of the throne?” Abyssara’s voice was a low snarl, the sound of grinding stones.
The two stood in a heavy, suffocating silence. The air between them seemed to thicken, pressurized by the sheer weight of their opposing natures.
Abyssara studied the Archangel, his gaze lingering on the hilt of the blade that remained undisturbed at Michael’s hip. In any other century, Michael would have ended this encounter with a flash of celestial steel and a clean decapitation; he was a creature who had spent eons distilling a holy kind of pleasure from the systematic slaughter of Abyssara’s kind. The fact that his sword remained sheathed, his fingers relaxed, meant the Angel was hunting something far more precious than a demon’s head.
He was hunting information.
“Perhaps,” Michael suggested, drifting a step closer. The holy radiance from his skin bit into the gloom, casting Abyssara’s features into sharp, unflattering relief. “If you tell me who is responsible, I might find a reason to let you keep breathing. I can taste the bitterness on your tongue, Dragon. It hangs in the air like rot. Something is eating at you from the inside out.”
Abyssara’s eyes shifted, the amber glow of his pupils flickering. He knew the jagged history between the brothers; he knew that Michael’s hatred for Lucifer was a wound that would never scab over, let alone heal. If he played his cards with enough malice, he could turn the Prince of War into a blunt, holy instrument of his own design.
“If I told you it was your brother,” Abyssara began, his voice dropping to a gravelly, conspiratorial rasp that seemed to pull the shadows closer. “If I told you Lucifer Morningstarl the King you despise above all others was the one who snapped my chains and led me from the Pit. What then, Prince of War?”
A slow, jagged smirk spread across Michael’s face, a sharp contrast to his divine features. It wasn't a smile of joy, but the cold, hard glint of a hunter who had finally found the killing trail. If Lucifer had freed the very beast their Father had banned from the sunlight, it was a betrayal of the highest order the kind of transgression that would strip the King of Hell of everything he held dear. It was the ticket Michael needed to buy back the favor he had squandered.
“Tell me what has you so disgruntled,” Michael urged, his voice shedding its metallic edge and turning as smooth as silk. “My brother wouldn't free a monster without a leash, and he certainly doesn't act without a cold, calculated reason. And yet, here you are, flying in the face of his commands, reeking of rebellion.”
“My Master has found a new pet,” Abyssara spat, the words dripping with a venom that felt physical.
“Oh?” Michael’s interest sharpened, his head tilting like a raptor’s. “How so?”
“He is creating another me,” Abyssara growled. He clenched his fists until the tendons stood out like whipcord and his knuckles turned a ghostly white. “He is molding a human girl Selena into a vessel for my power. He wants to forge a new Abyssara to sit at his side. He wants to replace me.”
The wind picked up, a sudden, mournful howl through the twisted trees as Michael let out a soft, dark laugh that lacked any trace of humor. The news was a feast better than he could have imagined. If he brought word to the High Throne that Lucifer was experimenting with mortal souls to craft demonic weapons, Lucifer would be hunted to the very edges of the universe.
Michael looked at the demon, his eyes turning cold and calculating, reflecting the moonlight like frozen glass. He didn't need to risk his own standing or soil his hands to hurt his brother.
He had the perfect, desperate weapon standing right in front of him.
“Why suffer a rival?” Michael whispered. He stepped fully into Abyssara’s personal space, the oppressive holy light from his skin making the demon’s shadow hiss and recoil against the earth. “You should be the only one of your kind. The entire realm should tremble at your name alone not hers. Not a human girl’s.”
Michael’s jaw tightened, his mind flashing back to the sting of his own losses, the ancient scars of everything Lucifer had torn away from him. He wouldn't let his brother know the peace of a woman's love. Not while he walked in the cold.
“Kill her,” Michael commanded, his voice a low, toxic hum that vibrated in Abyssara's marrow. “Break the new toy before he can finish it. You stay the only Dragon, and I get to watch my brother weep over a corpse. It’s a fair trade, don't you think?”
Abyssara looked at the Angel, the seed of murder finally taking root in the fertile soil of his resentment. Two monsters, one of light and one of dark, stood in the wreckage of the forest, united by a single, murderous goal.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
My lovely readers,
I really wanted to show the "toxic" side of Michael's holiness here how he's just as manipulative as any demon when it comes to his brother. This is the ultimate "enemy of my enemy" situation.
How do you feel about Michael's role now? Is he the "good guy" anymore, or has his obsession with Lucifer turned him into something else?
Poor Selena has a target on her back from both Heaven and Hell now.