The technique was called Hell's Retribution. The circle beneath it — the foundation, the key that made any hell-related working possible — was the Hell's Summoning Circle. And he hadn't derived it from the novel, as he'd originally intended.
He'd taken it from the dot.
---
A few days prior, within Axiros's soul space —
It sat there the way it always had. Small. Inert to the eye. But there was something underneath that inertness — a quality that wasn't quite dormancy, more like patience. Like something waiting for the right conditions.
'Interesting,' Axiros thought, studying it from a distance. 'Completely inert on the surface, yet reactive in a way I can feel without touching it. The question is what it's reactive to. And whether what's inside it considers me a problem.'
He turned it over in his mind for a long moment.
'Only one way.'
He removed the seals he'd placed over it one by one, careful, methodical. Then, before closing the remaining distance, he constructed a semi-sentient seal around the perimeter — one that would read the dot's behavior in real time and snap shut the moment anything moved in an erratic direction. Security. He had come too far and waited too long to risk something he didn't fully understand yet detonating in the one place he couldn't afford damage.
He moved toward it.
Touched it.
And was immediately somewhere else.
---
The memories came without warning and without order.
A girl. Young, standing inside some kind of barrier, completely immobile. On the other side of it, Nihilborn were tearing through two people — her parents — with the casual efficiency of things that had done it many times before and found nothing worth slowing down for. She was screaming. He could see her screaming, her whole body thrown into it. No sound reached them. Nothing reached them.
She beat against the inside of the barrier until her hands gave out. Watched until there was nothing left to watch. Cried until what came from her eyes was no longer tears.
Eventually someone came and pulled her away. By then, the Nihilborn were long gone and her parents were not.
The scene broke and shifted.
Her beloved this time — a man, surrounded by humans. Not Nihilborn. People. They called him a heretic. A slave of the nihils. They executed him on that premise, and the premise was false, and it didn't matter to anyone who was in a position to stop it.
Sophia, Axiros realized. These were her memories. And some fragment of the Old One she had followed — Az'theth — threaded through them underneath.
The scene shifted again.
Sophia, older now, attempting a summoning. Reaching toward something — someone — named Arthur. And there, in the structure of what she was doing, laid out in the working itself —
The Hell's Summoning Circle.
Axiros went still.
He had planned to use a cruder method, something pieced together from what the novel had described. What he was looking at now was categorically better. Cleaner. More precise. A working that someone had refined through grief and repetition until it had become something close to elegant.
He memorized it in an instant. Completely, perfectly, with the automatic totality of someone who had been memorizing things across an incomprehensible span of time.
The memories kept moving.
A warehouse or processing facility of some kind — people being brought in, assessed, stripped. Not of possessions. Of something deeper. The root. The source from which all energy in a person grew — extracted and harvested, the person left as a husk afterward or discarded entirely. Children were particularly targeted. Easy to acquire, easy to forget. No families to ask questions. The energy went into cultivation — borrowed power, piled on top of borrowed power, the architecture of it getting more elaborate and more brittle with every addition.
Axiros watched and felt nothing except a distant, private amusement.
'Borrowed power,' he thought. 'They harvest the roots of others because they have none of their own worth cultivating, and they don't even see the problem with that.' A quiet laugh, entirely internal. 'Power with no name, no substance of its own — it's a ceiling masquerading as a foundation. Idiots. If there were a way to truly forge power from nothing, from the self alone, I would have been omnipotent long before any of this.'
He found the why underneath the operation. Control. Not the loud, obvious kind — the quiet kind, the kind that worked best when the people being controlled didn't know the mechanism existed. The Old Ones had been embedded in the stronghold for only a few years, but the structure they'd built in that time was already deep. Infect the useful ones. Sacrifice the rest. Work from the inside, stay beneath the surface, let the existing power structures do the heavy lifting.
Then the memories fractured into something else — a fragment, brief and partial, from Az'theth's own recollection. A room. Other Old Ones, seated, in discussion. Their mouths moving.
Axiros read their lips.
'The Riquade war is a mere cover.'
One of the others leaned forward. 'What exactly are the Thirteen Families after? What was the real purpose behind starting it?'
The answer never came.
The memory shattered — glass breaking outward in every direction — and he was back in his soul space, the dot sitting exactly where it had always been, quiet and patient and giving nothing else away.
He sat with what he'd seen for a long moment.
'The war is a distraction,' he thought. 'The question is what it's distracting from? Power, the Transcendent fruit? No, its something else entirely..'
He didn't have the answer yet. But he would in the future.
---
"So this is what hell looks like here." Axiros glanced around, unhurried. "Same format as always. Different world, same idea."
He stood on a vast plain the color of dried, oxidized blood — flat and featureless in every direction except for what stretched above and around him. Souls. Millions of them, packed across the plain in every conceivable state. Some writhed. Some sat with the quiet acceptance of things that had stopped expecting anything. Some looked almost content, which said something about the lives they'd left behind. A million years, give or take, before judgment came for each of them.
Time moved differently here. Three thousand times slower than on the surface of Cinderveil. Axiros registered this and felt the familiar impatience of someone with a list of things to do and no interest in waiting.
A prickling sensation moved across his awareness. Faint, probing — something testing the edges of him without committing to it.
'The Archkeepers,' he noted. 'Already. Not surprising. This is their house.'
He looked at the horizon. Infinitely distant, or close enough to make no difference.
"This is going to take too long," he said to no one.
He exhaled once.
Then two wings tore out from his back — vast, overflowing with energy that had no business existing in a place like this, the light of them cutting against the dark red of the plain like something that had arrived from the wrong world entirely.
He took off.
The reaction around him was immediate. The souls nearest to him stumbled backward, staring. Then the staring turned to shouting.
"Wings — he has wings — why does he have wings — we've been here an eternity and nobody gave us—"
The complaint spread outward like a ripple, and within moments it had become something more physical. Some of them tried to replicate it, throwing themselves upward with varying degrees of desperation and achieving nothing. Others went straight for the direct approach — reaching for him, grasping, trying to pull the wings down or tear them free.
Axiros put them down without breaking pace. Millions of them, swiftly and efficiently, with the particular ease of someone whose soul — even fragmented, even reduced to a sliver of what it actually was — outweighed every other presence in this place by a margin that didn't have a convenient number attached to it.
He didn't kill any of them. The Archkeepers would notice, and he had enough to manage without adding that to the list.
'Desire,' he thought, glancing down at the scrambling mass below him as he climbed higher. 'It doesn't matter where you put a soul. Strip away the body, the memory, the identity — and desire is still there, running the same loops it always did. Hell, heaven, the void between worlds. It doesn't care about the container. It just keeps reaching.'
He almost found it funny.
The horizon stayed distant for a long time. He flew at his absolute limit — no friction out here, no air resistance, nothing pushing back — and still the plain stretched on beneath him for hours. He had been cast into the inner rings, closest to the center, which meant the colosseum was as far as it could possibly be. He had spent most of the time he had navigating.
Eventually, the horizon resolved itself into something solid.
He dropped down.
In front of him stood a colosseum — massive, ancient, built at a scale that assumed its visitors would arrive already humbled by the journey. It rose against the dark red sky like something that had always been here and expected to remain long after everything else was gone.
Axiros looked at it for a moment.
'Phase one,' he thought. A faint smile. 'Let's begin.'
He walked toward it.
---
Hours earlier — the moment Axiros had cast himself downward —
Azra looked up from his work.
He was mid-judgment, the soul in front of him frozen in the particular suspended state that the process required, but something had pulled at his attention from across the plain. He scanned for it, found it, and held very still for a moment.
"An anomaly has arrived." His voice was calm in the way that things were calm when they had seen enough to stop being surprised by individual incidents. "Looks like a Godfall spawn. Another one."
Every head in the colosseum lifted.
The Archkeepers were thirty-two in total, each processing hundreds of thousands of souls simultaneously, their attention spread across the plain like an enormous net. When Azra spoke those words, that attention converged.
"Not them again." One of them leaned back, the sound in his voice somewhere between contempt and exhaustion. "The last time a Godfall family member showed up they sent a hundred trillion souls down here in a fit of temper. A hundred trillion. Do you remember how overcrowded it was? I was processing for six ages straight without a pause."
"That period was," another said slowly, as if selecting the word carefully, "deeply unpleasant."
"Should we suspend judgment for now?" Azra asked, his eyes still tracking the distant shape moving across the plain at speed that the souls around it couldn't match. "We cannot manage two active problems simultaneously. The backlog alone would be—"
"Yes," said the other thirty-one, in unison, before he finished.
The colosseum went quiet.
Judgment, suspended.
Thirty-two pairs of ancient eyes turned toward the horizon, and waited.
---
"Welcome, kin of The Godfalls. The archkeepers welcome you, what business do you have here?" Azra, along with the others welcomed Axiros.