Diablo's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

The black thread of Diablo slipped back into the orb with a snap. The gold cracks on the inside of the shell dimmed. Diablo staggered in his void shape and pressed a hand to the curved dark. Creusus had felt him. Creusus had pushed back. Whatever power Creusus had stolen from him, he was using it now to seal the very cracks Diablo had opened. Diablo bared his teeth at the shell. He would try again. He always tried again. He fed the hate into his hands and pushed. Nothing happened. He pushed harder. A single gold line brightened, then faded. The orb drank his effort like dry sand drank rain. Somewhere outside, Creusus exhaled, and the last of the crack closed. Diablo sank to the floor of his cell, if a cell the size of a plum had a floor. To keep from going out entirely, he did what he had done every day since the stone hall. He told himself the old stories. He needed the heat of them to stay alive. He remembered a village he had walked through once, whole and terrible. He remembered the mother who had begged him for her child's life on a road of black mud. He remembered the exact pitch of her voice. He had used it to laugh. He remembered a city he had turned against itself with a single whisper in the right ear, and how the streets had smelled after. He reached for the next story and found something wrong with it. The mother's face came back too clearly. Not as a trophy. As a face. Her hands had been small and red from work. The child had been asleep against her shoulder, unaware. Diablo had killed them both without slowing his step. He tried to push the memory away. It stayed. Another came behind it. A boy he had burned inside a barn. An old man he had made kneel in his own doorway. A girl who had run and not been fast enough. He had used these deaths as kindling for a thousand years. Now the kindling looked back at him. He curled his black hands into fists. "No," he said. His voice was thin inside the shell. "No. These are mine. I earned them." But he saw them. He saw the mother. He saw the child. He saw every face he had passed over on his way to being feared. The hate was still there. Under the hate, for the first time in a thousand years, something else moved. A small, cold weight in his chest that had not been there yesterday. Outside the orb, Creusus began to walk again. The shell rocked with his stride. Diablo pressed his forehead to the dark and did not push. He listened to his rival's footsteps and understood, with a fury that shook him, that he could no longer light himself on the old fires. He would need a new fuel. He did not yet know what.