Chapter 68 A Deal Proposed
(Apollo)
Time bled.
Apollo didn’t know how long he stayed there—hulking over the shattered throne room floor, massive body hunched, wings heavy as stone, claws buried in molten rock. Long enough for the lava in the cracks to cool. Long enough for the ash to settle. Long enough for the screams to fade into echoes. Long enough that even Hell’s heartbeat seemed to thin, each pulse of the realm a distant, reluctant thud against his ribs.
Hell itself had gone quiet around him.
Even the torture chambers below—normally a constant chorus of sobs and howls—had dimmed to a distant murmur, like sound carried through thick water. Demons had fled the palace halls, giving the Devil’s rage as wide a berth as existence would allow. Corridors that usually crawled with lesser beasts now lay bare, torches guttering nervously in their brackets, their flames leaning away from the throne room as if they could smell the danger.
Only the ruined chamber and his own ragged breaths remained.
He needed to think. Not in the way generals thought, tallying numbers and lines on a battlefield, but in the way a cornered animal thought: teeth bare, back to the wall, every instinct screaming move while something older whispered remember.
He had not allowed himself to remember the past in centuries. Always forward. Always ruling. Always burning something else, so he didn’t have to look at what he had already burned.
But there was one thing he could not ignore now. One thread that connected Adelaide’s fire to everything he had tried to bury.
The village. The pact. The bargain he struck after the Queen’s fall. He closed his eyes. And, despite himself, remembered.
Memory rushed him like smoke pulled backward through a chimney, the present blurring at the edges until all that remained was old ash and older mistakes.
⸸
The human world had been drowning. Not literally—though, given the storms he’d unleashed back then, that might have happened too.
In the aftermath of the Queen’s death, Hell had raged. Tremors wracked the mortal plane. Old demonic boundaries broke. Things that should have stayed in the dark climbed into the light—a hundred lesser monsters slipping through cracks between realms left fractured by war. Skies split open in veins of red lightning, seas clawed at their own shores, and graveyards whispered as things that were not ghosts pressed against the veil.
Mortals screamed to gods who had already fled.
And then one night, centuries ago, he’d been summoned. Not by a priest. Not by a king. By a village. By a ring of desperate Elders standing in a clearing at the edge of a black forest. Torches in their shaking hands. Salt lines drawn around them. Old symbols carved into the dirt that they’d stolen from older books. The trees around them leaned in like eavesdroppers, branches creaking under the weight of watching spirits. The air tasted of iron and rain, of cheap incense and cheaper courage.
He remembered appearing above them in a curtain of smoke, more shadow than shape, the trees bowing back from his presence. The ground sank a fraction under the weight of him, dew flashing into steam, torches flaring higher as if eager to touch him and terrified of succeeding.
They had trembled. Some had fallen to their knees. One had tried to hold his gaze and failed.
The eldest of them—a woman with white braids and eyes like wet stone—had stepped forward alone.
“We call the Devil,” she’d said, voice hoarse but steady. “We call the King of Hell.”
“You get him,” he had replied dryly, his voice rolling through the clearing like thunder. “What do you want?”
They had begged for protection.
Demons had snatched their children in the night. Famine had gnawed their fields. Storms had chewed their coastlines into jagged teeth. The world had grown meaner since the Queen fell. Magic that used to sleep in the bones of the land now prowled awake, feral and hungry, latching onto anything weak enough to tear.
They did not know why. They did not need to. They only knew they were prey.
“We will pay,” the woman had said, throat shaking. “We will bargain. We will give offerings.”
He’d almost left.
He had been newly crowned then. Drunk on power. Bloody from war. There were dozens of mortal villages tearing themselves apart; he had no interest in being their shield. Mortals burned so easily. Why waste time on a single cluster of huts when entire kingdoms still smouldered in his wake?
Then the woman had said, “We will give blood.”
That had caught his interest.
He’d descended—closer, heavier—until his presence pressed against the edges of their clearing like a storm about to swallow the sky. The salt line hissed, reacting to him, runes etched in the dirt glowing a faint, frightened red before guttering out entirely.
“What kind of blood?” he had asked.
The torches had flickered. Some men had looked away, already knowing.
The Elder had not. “Ours,” she’d said. “Our own. But not all. Not at once.”
He remembered how the silence fell then. Thick. Dense. Held like breath. Even the forest seemed to lean back, as if the trees themselves refused to be party to what came next.
“We offer you a daughter,” she had said. “Not once. Not now. But… every ten years.”
His curiosity had coiled tighter. “Every decade,” he’d repeated.
“Yes.” Her knuckles had whitened around the torch. “When your mark comes back. When your shadow falls over our village again, we will give you one girl. Voluntarily. No armies. No war. No more demons slipping into our walls. No storms that swallow our children. You take one. You leave the rest.”
The others had flinched at her words. A few wept. One whispered, “Monster.”
He wasn’t sure if they meant him. Or themselves. It didn’t matter; he’d worn the name longer than their bloodline had existed.
“Why daughters?” he’d asked.
She had swallowed. Her eyes had not left his. “Because their blood calls louder,” she had said. “Because the old stories say kings and gods and monsters always want daughters.”
He had laughed then, genuinely amused at the bitter truth in that. But beneath the cold interest, something else had stirred in him.
A seed of… what? Paranoia? Calculation?
Because he had killed a Queen whose bloodline was said to be impossible to fully erase. Fire like that did not simply vanish. It left traces. Fragments. Echoes in blood. Prophets had whispered it as the palace fell: Flame begets flame. You cannot unwrite fire. He’d silenced them. Maybe not fast enough.
He had searched for years in Hell and found nothing but dying embers.
But the mortal world… Humans bred. Changed. Mixed. Hid.
Hiding would not save them if her line lived. It would only make them harder to find.
A pact with one village was nothing. Insignificant. A drop in an endless mortal ocean.
But, what if?
What if, one day, a daughter’s blood sparked like old fire?