*Chiara

With widened eyes and heightened senses, every demon came into sharp focus. She had no weapon.

As an angelii, she didn't care. The only thing that mattered was to kill and to do that, she could take weapons from her enemy or pull them apart with her bare hands. She flexed lengthened hands and readied her wings for the plunge into the fray.

From above, came a clarion call. Her heart soared in answer. The angelic legions were coming from past the ruined Fountain, pouring out of Heaven itself. As an angelii, she could feel them coming closer, hear the beating wings, smell the fresh scent of new snow on small, winter flowers. Snowdrops. Crocuses. Tiny blades of grass. Pure, crisp, sharp, and filled with life. But they were several minutes away at best.

She angled herself to drop, aiming for the thickest of the fray, the circling demons and Four Horsemen clustered around one hideous demon in the middle.

A voice whispered in her head—that buried part of her that was still Chiara.

Logan.

Save him.

She slammed her wings together and streaked downwards. Logan screamed with pain, a cut sprayed blood from a limb.

Liquid rage boiled, melting the cold steel that lined her heart.

They were going to kill him.

He belonged to her.

He belonged to her and she would destroy everything in her path to get to him. Angelii forms spend very little time in thought or contemplation. They exist for one purpose—kill demons. But the part of her that was Chiara, the angel that normally slept when the angellii form took control, refused to be ignored.

Save him.

He is mine.

All right, as Light Bearer, she could save him for last, at the very least.

The Four Horsemen surrounded the demon she recognized as Logan. Despite the driving need to fight and kill, this was a fight she could not win on her own. However, the legions of angel warriors coming from the skies were still too far off to come to her aid.

A dark fire licked Logan's sword and as he swung, flames spilled outwards, consuming everything they touched. Demons rained to the rocky ground, their blackened husks shattering to ashes.

The Dark Flame. Yes, she remembered him killing a cavern full of nasty Pestilence demons when he ignited them in dark flames.

But the Four Horsemen batted out the flames and kept circling. Like vultures, they watched and waited for an injury or a moment's hesitation in order to devour him.

She veered to the side, sweeping in behind the Horsemen, studying their positions for a sneak attack.

Irrinuum swarmed her, instead

Hissing, she avoided the flying demons. She spun through the air, lighter and faster, flitting between them until she managed to get behind one long enough to grab his wings. With a sharp twist, she broke it at the base. He faltered, mid-air, and twisted to thrust his sword at her. As he began to drop, she dodged sideways, jabbed his arm with her elbow and wrenched the sword free. It spun in her hand, flashing the bright sunlight for a breathless second.

She buried it in his chest. Others came for her.

But now she had a sword of her own.

She was the dawn's light in winter. They fell to the ground, cut down by her blade.

More came.

Fury drove her on and on and on. She had survived the attack on the Fountain. She had survived the dungeon. The Pestilences. The Halls. The fucking tunnels. She had survived, the Light Bearer, Hell itself and maybe today she would die—but so would these demons.

The clarion calls of trumpets sounded—she was not alone.

The first rows of angel warriors streamed through the portal, the fastest, most deadly warriors of the Heavens now fought with her.

She lifted her sword in triumph.

There was a break as Irrinuum turned from her to face these new angels and angelii.

A scream tore her attention back to the Horsemen and their prey on the balcony ledge below her.

War hovered before the winged demon lord, a bloody lance in hand. The demon was injured and flew backwards.

Logan, Chiara whispered to her angelii.

The angelii paused. Logan.

War thrust his lance. It pierced the Dark Flame's shoulder, the point emerging wet with blood from his back, but War didn't let go. He continued to push the shaft through. Then, a hand on the Dark Flame's chest, he drove him downwards to the rocks.

They hit the ground with a crack. The demon cried out in pain, his wings splayed at broken angles and body twisted.

He would die. Caught inside the angelii, Chiara cried out in echoing pain—in recognition of his pain—she knew the pain of breaking of wings and body. She knew this all too well, and while she suffered at his physical pain, the thought that he would die was worse than anything the demons had ever done to her.

The angellii, Light Bearer, dropped. Air whistled sharp in her ears from the dizzying speed and the ground raced up to meet her in the blink of an eye. She landed, hissing her fury. Her wings blazed hotter than fire, and anger sparked in her chest like white coals.

She would destroy these foul things. She would tear them to pieces. She would eat their hearts.

What was left of the Dark Flame groaned. Convulsing, his lifted his head a moment, and a bloodied hand batted uselessly at the lance in his shoulder.

War laughed and twisted the shaft.

"Angelii," he said. His voice slithered through the air. It coiled around her, cold and barbed. "Meet me in battle after I kill this one."

The Dark Flame shifted suddenly, too injured to maintain his daemonium. Logan, transformed, returning to a winged class demon, and lay broken on the ground.

Through the jarring noise of battle, she heard his voice.

That voice that spoke to her for countless nights in the darkness when she needed it the most. That voice that cut through the angelii and went straight to Chiara.

"Change back," he whispered. "Fly for me, Chiara."

Fly for me.

He didn't want her to fight.

Losing him was breaking her as surely as falling to the ground had broken him. Chiara screamed inside the angelii.

War ripped the lance free of Logan's chest and raised it above his head, aiming now for Logan's heart.

He was going to die and she couldn't save him.

Rage detonated, setting off an explosion in the angelii's chest. She shifted. She transformed. She broke—faster than War could strike.

In the instant she broke and changed, a ripple of power tore through her, out of her, whirling through the air like a physical wave, shaking the ground, bending trees on the mountain side, and scattering lesser demons as well as most of the angels, still in flight.

Only the strongest held their positions. A heaviness fell over them, like the pressure before the thunderstorm, dread twisting the demons's expressions. The angels pulled away, surveying the new threat.

She was wrath and rage.

Rage at everything these monsters from hell had done to her, what they were still doing to her, but most of all, what this Horseman was going to do to Logan.

It happened fast—so fast, she didn't realize what was happening. One instant, War was poised to kill Logan, and the next, she was something else.

In a blink, she had War in her grasp.

She lifted War by the neck with one hand. "You die now." She grabbed his head with her other hand, ready to twist it off.

A spear went through her belly. The pain was distant, though, negligible. Rot spread through her abdomen almost immediately. She shook her head, letting energy coil through her body. She dropped War to rip the spear free and face Pestilence, the Horseman who had thrown it.

She hefted it to her shoulder. Took aim. He fled. She sent the spear spinning through the air after him, striking him full in the back. He kept riding, though as the other Horsemen fled from her, as well. They regrouped out of her reach. The hordes of Hell darkened the skies above and the ground around her. Hissing her fury, she beckoned them closer.

Shouts sounded. Tenebrist.

Terror coursed through the ranks of demons, causing a wave as they paused their onslaught and hesitated at the sight of this new enemy.

So. She was a Tenebrist, a twisted, broken monster made of shadows, woven together when the power of the angelli succumbed to the endless wrath of the daemonium.

She didn't feel twisted or broken though. She didn't feel like a thing from the shadows.

She felt like a creature made of power and wrath. A wondrous, indestructible monster and she reveled in the fear she caused.

"Come to me," she whispered. "Let us fight so I may destroy you all."

As a Tenebrist, forged by misery, pain, and sorrow, there was nothing that could stand against her. Not from the Midlands, Hell, or Heaven itself.

At her feet, a dying demon moaned and crawled away from her, back to the arched opening of Hell at the far end of the great balcony. A faint memory stirred in her. Logan. She would destroy him, too, after she rid the world of the demons and angels.

Logan. The Dark Flame....

She didn't have flames, though. Her hands filled with a tingling, freezing power. She had winter's dawn, cold and sharp as ice.

She lifted her hands and the nearest wave of demons screamed in agony as a hoary frost covered them. Shafts of ice pierced their chest, rising out of them covered in crystalized gore as the demons froze from the inside out.

*** Chiara's angelii has broken and transformed into the monstrous Tenebrist - nothing will stop her from killing everything in her path .... thank you for reading and hit the star! ***