A man limped toward the light, each step dragging blood across the stone. The glow ahead was blinding — impossibly pure, like it didn't belong in this world. Legends called it the Angel's Light. They said that anyone who reached it would become something more than mortal. A god. Elliot didn't care if that was true. He only knew he'd killed too many to turn back. His chest heaved. His once-blue shirt clung to him in rags, soaked in blood — his or someone else's, it didn't matter anymore. His fingers twitched, coated in rust-colored grime. Bloodshot eyes, cracked lips, yellow teeth gritted into a twisted grin. He looked like a corpse that refused to lie down. White hair slicked with sweat gleamed under the light. For a moment, he let himself believe he'd made it. That he'd won. Then he heard footsteps. Behind him. Slow. Measured. Not human. Elliot froze. His grin faltered. Slowly, he turned — the light casting his shadow long and jagged across the ground.
A figure stood in the distance. Small. Red. Grinning.
The Angel's Light pulsed — but its warmth no longer reached him.
It stood no taller than a child, but the air bent around it like heat off a furnace.
Skin the color of fresh blood. A grin too wide for its face, stretched like torn rubber. Its eyes — perfect yellow circles — stared at Elliot with the joy of something that had waited *a very long time*.
Elliot's legs locked. That thing shouldn't be here. He had faced beasts, sorcerers, monsters born of rot and shadow. But this… this *thing* radiated wrongness — not violence, not threat, just a quiet, bottomless certainty that it *knew him*. His badge — bent, half-torn, still
clinging to his chest — shimmered faintly in the light.
The Imp tilted its head. Its smile deepened. **"You look disappointed."**
Its voice was soft. Too soft. Elliot's mouth opened, but nothing came out. The light behind him felt farther away now, like the path to it had stretched impossibly long.
The Imp took one step forward. Just one.
And Elliot's knees buckled.
Elliot forced himself to stand. His limbs trembled, lungs scraping for air like broken bellows.
"I was *chosen*," he rasped. "I *earned* this."
The Imp said nothing. It just stared. Smiling.
"You don't get to take this from me," Elliot growled. "Do you know how many had to die for me to get this far? I *will* become a god." He bit into his forearm — deep. Skin split open. Blood poured freely. He didn't flinch. "**Enchant.**"
The word came out more like a snarl than a spell. His body convulsed. Veins bulged like cables under his skin. Bones popped. Muscles tore and reknit. His arms twisted downward, cracking at the elbows, as metal erupted from the flesh.
**Scythes.** Long, jagged, blackened like charred bone. They scraped against the ground, leaving gouges in the stone as they dragged behind him. Elliot's face split into a blood-soaked grin.
The Imp still wasn't moving. Instead, its eyes — once round and yellow — slowly narrowed into half-moons, gleaming a vivid, unnatural green. "You're still facing the wrong way," it whispered.
Elliot turned his back to the light. Elliot roared. He surged forward, dragging the scythes behind him like anchors. With one violent twist of his arms, he spun — the blades howling through the air, slicing deep gashes into the stone beneath his feet. Blood sprayed from his own arms as the scythes cut into his flesh with every turn. He didn't care. The pain was background noise now — dwarfed by fury, by obsession, by the divine light he still felt behind him.
"*I will not die on my knees!*" he screamed. The Imp didn't move. Didn't blink. Didn't flinch. Only as Elliot closed the gap — scythes tearing through the ground in a wide arc — did the creature finally raise its hand. It wasn't a defensive gesture. It reached out... and pulled down on something invisible in the air. Elliot stopped mid-swing. His breath hitched. The air rippled like water. And a voice — soft, broken, human — pierced through everything:
**"Elliot... please come home."**
The world tilted. The glow of the Angel's Light dimmed, washed out by something softer. Warmer.
Elliot blinked. The battlefield — the Imp, the broken ground — melted into mist. Standing before him was a young woman in a sundress, auburn hair spilling past her shoulders in lazy waves. Her eyes were a familiar hazel brown.
**Diane.**
She looked exactly as he remembered. Not as she'd been the last time he saw her — pale, cold, gone — but *before that*. Before everything fell apart. Tears streamed down her cheeks, fast, steady, endless. They pattered against the ground without ever stopping, as if some unseen faucet inside her had broken.
**"Elliot,"** she said, voice trembling. **"Please come home."**
He staggered. The scythes scraped against the stone, suddenly too heavy to lift.
"Diane?" he whispered. His voice cracked open like a wound. She stepped forward. Her face didn't change — still that same look of sorrow, eyes locked on his.
**"You're an idiot."**
The words echoed strangely, like they didn't belong in her mouth.
The ground beneath Elliot split.
The illusion shattered like glass — no noise, no flash. One blink, and Diane was gone. Elliot dropped to his knees, staring at empty space, arms limp at his sides. Then the ground bloomed.
Dozens of ruby spears erupted around him in a perfect circle — thin at the tips, but widening like thorns as they rose. They hovered for a moment, humming with restrained force. The Imp watched, hands behind its back, smiling like a child at a puppet show.
Then it nodded.
The spears moved all at once.
One pierced through Elliot's calf — then another through his thigh, his shoulder, his hand. A dozen points of contact, so fast they seemed to arrive before the sound. He didn't scream at first. His mouth opened, but no noise came. His eyes were fixed on where Diane had stood. Then the second wave came. The spears didn't just pierce — they twisted. Spiraled. Tore. Limbs were wrenched apart like rotting cloth. Flesh peeled away in ribbons that didn't fall, but hung in the air, suspended by threads of glowing red light. One final spear drove through his skull with the sound of cracking porcelain. His head slumped forward, cleaved and caved on one side. The body that fell wasn't recognizable as a man. The scythes dissolved into smoke. The badge on his chest fluttered, somehow untouched, and landed in a puddle of blackened blood. The Imp stepped lightly through the ruin, its bare feet making no sound. It stopped beside what remained of Elliot — or rather, what hadn't yet dissolved. The limbs were gone. The torso, hollowed. The face, split and crumpled. But the badge still lay there, half-soaked in blood.
The Imp knelt and picked it up between two fingers. It turned the scrap over once… then tucked it into the folds of its skin, where pockets shouldn't exist.
"So desperate," it murmured. "So certain." Behind it, the battlefield stretched into a quiet graveyard. Bodies — hundreds, maybe more — lay twisted across the grey stone. Some were still intact. Most weren't. They didn't decay, they didn't rot. They simply *sat*, as if frozen mid-suffering. Faces stuck in agony. Mouths stretched too wide. Eyes rolled back or missing entirely. A symphony of failure preserved in silence. Whether they had fallen to Elliot or the Imp… no one alive would ever know. The Imp turned once more to the light, now pulsing softly at the far end of the field. Then it vanished — not with a sound, not with a flash — just *gone*. The badge was gone with it.