The moment the Great Elder's order was heard, a quiet grief swept through the sane succubi. Their expressions twisted painfully, but not one of them disobeyed.
With trembling hands, they drew on their power and launched themselves at their corrupted sisters.
Under the Elder's lead, the tide finally began to turn.
One by one, the Blackened succubi creatures twisted beyond recognition and fell beneath the merciful strikes. Pain in every blow, but hesitation meant death, and the succubi knew this.
Blood suffused with the Fallen Land's taint, stained the Elder's limbs as she fought. She moved with raw destruction, Soren could see the agony behind her eyes.
For all their cruelty and allure, the succubi were still a people, still a family.
To kill their own even corrupted, was a wound that would scar an entire generation.
Soren remained on the sidelines.
And the longer he stood there, the heavier the turmoil curled inside him. He wasn't one of them, but seeing a people forced to butcher their kin… hurt him deeper than he expected.
The Fallen Land's aura… now he understood why the ancient elder had spoken with such despair.
After a long, brutal stretch of battle, the last shrieking Blackened succubus fell. The remaining warriors overwhelmed her with grim determination, ending the nightmare at last.
When the Great Elder approached Soren again, her body was streaked with blood… fresh red and corrupted black.
"Soren… have you decided?" Her voice trembled, barely controlled.
Nearly a third of the succubus clan corrupted or slain by corrupted lay dead. Her grief was raw in her eyes.
Soren exhaled slowly, the answer had formed the moment he saw Mephisto's shadow in her visions.
The threat could no longer be ignored.
"Handle what needs handling here," He said softly. "Once everything is settled, we leave for the Fallen Land."
The Elder bowed her head… relief, exhaustion, gratitude all bleeding together and turned to her people to prepare the rites.
✦••┈┈••✦••┈┈••✦
It didn't take long for the succubi to gather their dead, everybody, corrupted or not, laid gently upon a massive bed of dry wood stacked high beneath the open sky.
The Elder raised her hand, and a pale violet flame flickered to life, drifting like a petal on the wind before settling on the pyre.
Blue flames leapt upward, swallowing the bodies of the ordinary succubi and turning them into drifting motes of azure light… sorrowful and beautiful.
The Blackened ones burned differently, a shadow-tainted flame, leaving behind darker embers that scattered like fallen stars.
The entire clan gathered around the towering pyre. At the Elder's signal, the succubi began to chant.
Their voices wove together in haunting syllables… an ancient lament carried through countless generations. It was a song of grief and remembrance, of praise for life and mourning for what had been lost.
A hymn to honor the souls returning to the abyss, twisted or pure.
Soren didn't understand the language, but he felt it.
The sorrow.
The fury.
The love.
The aching plea for a future without such suffering.
The song wrapped around him like a cold wind and a warm embrace all at once.
He stood watching the last sparks drift into the crimson sky, and for a long time, he said nothing.
Because there was nothing to say, only a vow forming quietly in his heart.
The last embers of the pyre faded into the night when the Great Elder quietly stepped beside Soren. Her silhouette was still rimmed with smoke, and the scent of ash and sorrow clung to her like a second skin.
"Soren… are you mourning them?"
He let his gaze linger on the drifting sparks above the funeral fire. "A little," he admitted. "I never imagined the abyss could be like this."
"The river of life flows without end," the Elder murmured, eyes half-closed.
"And so does its song. Even in death, they return to us carried in memory, in blood, in the stories we sing. As long as we remember, our people never truly vanish."
There was a steadiness in her that Soren hadn't noticed before.
When he first encountered the succubi, he saw only an alluring, chaotic race known for mingling with other demons. He had dismissed them as frivolous, shallow.
Now… he understood their interwoven bloodlines were not an indulgence but a survival strategy. A promise that their kind would endure.
"Come," The Elder said at last. A weary sigh slipped between her lips. "If you truly are the one our prophecy speaks of, then the abyss is waiting for you."
"For all of us." Together, they left the funeral flames behind.
✦••┈┈••✦••┈┈••✦
Far away, deep within the Fallen Land, the corrupted aura churned and coiled. After its violent eruption, the black mist had thinned, but its retreat only made the land feel more unstable… like a beast drawing breath for another roar.
The disturbance hadn't only ravaged the succubus territory. It rippled through the entire abyss.
Drawn by the malignant pulse, demons of every kind began converging on the border of the Fallen Land. Many were already warped… skin cracked with black veins.
The aura had hollowed out their minds until only bloodlust remained. They tore into each other along the way, the weak shredded by the frenzied strong.
A merciless selection.
But once they reached the edge of the Fallen Land… all movement ceased.
The Blackened demons stood motionless, their scarlet eyes fixed inward, toward the shifting darkness at the land's heart.
As if they were waiting.
And in that roiling abyssal mist, something watched them back.
A pair of dark eyes surveyed the gathering horde, every new arrival made their gaze burn brighter.
Those eyes belonged to Mephisto.
Mephisto who had stepped into the Fallen Land as a desperate fool… and emerged transformed. His body had become the vessel for the abyss's purest, most malevolent essence.
The corruption didn't control him… it magnified him. Fed him promises.
Ambition was now a blazing star in his burnt-out mind.
Mephisto wanted… the entire abyss.