The city had the wrong kind of quiet.

From the roof of the gutted tram station, Prague looked arranged: Tomas puppets on the walls at even intervals, Enforcers moving in patrol routes with the dull competence of men who'd done the same walk for years. The river slid on as if it had never tasted blood. A breeze nosed through, carrying a cooler thread from the east that scrubbed the worst of the pit-stench from the square. For one slow breath, Ying believed the geometry might hold. The lines they'd drawn today — barricades, watch points, new orders humming through the Contractors like a re-written hymn — might be enough to keep the city upright.

She let herself imagine a mundane problem. Ration queues. Fuel allotments. Someone to get the turbines at the river works spinning again. Logistics you could solve with paper and stubbornness.

The air collapsed.

Not wind. Not thunder. A pressure change that started in her inner ear and hammered outward, turning sound to wool and chewing the breath from her lungs. The tram wires bowed without moving. Concrete under her palms felt suddenly soft, as if the whole roof had slumped in its bones. Down in the square a Tomas puppet froze mid-step. An Enforcer's baton stopped halfway to its loop. Pigeons slid out of the air as if the sky had been emptied.

Ying stayed very still. A habit born in laboratories and hallways you weren't supposed to be in: when the pressure drops, you don't move first.

The sky split.

It didn't open so much as come apart along a wrong seam. A jagged cut across the clouds, spilling light that wasn't light — black radiance that threw white-edged negatives across rooftops and made the river flash like oil.

"Everyone down," Victor said, low, instinctive. He had one arm braced around Max without noticing.

A figure stepped through the wound as if it were a curtain and he were late to a service. The ground didn't tremble. It rippled, stone behaving like water around each footfall.

He was a boy. Thirteen, maybe — though something about him made the number feel meaningless. Black hair hung in uneven lengths, drifting slightly as if underwater. His limbs were too long for his frame, angles stretched past what bone should allow.

His eyes were voids. Not black in the way of pigment, but the way of absence — places where the world had been cut out. Looking into them was like leaning over the mouth of a well and never hearing the stone hit bottom.

Behind his head, a red halo flared and folded into a black sun. It burned with a calm that hurt, swallowing the light and giving back heat without warmth. The longer you stared, the more it felt like it was staring back.

Moloch.

Ying's hands had already found her blade. Reflex put its weight in her palm. Another part of her — the one that had rewired feeds in Institute basements while alarms rang — was counting. Four Enforcer squads nearby. Three Tomas clusters between here and the bridgehead. Liz at her left, shoulders tight, halo a low murmur. Chloe on the parapet, body angled toward the square. Alyssa planted like a wall. Dan stood where Max could see him, light banked, jaw set.

"Protocol," Ying said. The word felt absurdly small. "Run."

No one argued. Alyssa reached for Dan. Victor shifted Max behind him. Chloe eased to the balls of her feet. Liz's halo brightened, sharp red on wet stone.

A flare of red bloomed at the edge of Ying's vision. Liz's halo spiked, and the air warped with it — threads of psychic force knitting into a dome that curved over them, translucent but dense. The psychic dome snapping into place around them with a sound like glass under strain. The air inside turned thin and hot, every breath tasting of iron. Pressure creaked through it in slow waves, as if the sphere itself could sense what was coming.

The Tomas puppets at the perimeter twitched but didn't advance. Moloch's gaze hadn't turned toward them yet, but the halo above his head seemed to lean, casting the dome in black-red shadow.

"Stop," he said.

No thunder. No roar. Just expectation.

The word hit like a deep-water current, an invisible weight pressing from every direction. Ying felt her knees dip, the breath forced thin in her chest. The pressure was absolute, pressing into her bones — but it didn't crush her. She could still shift her grip on the blade. Liz's dome held, groaning faintly in the psychic register, each pulse of Moloch's will colliding with her shield and sliding off like surf against rock.

They weren't free. Every movement came as if wading through wet sand, every thought dragging behind it a shadow. But they weren't frozen. They could move, could act. Because Liz's will, shaking but unbroken, refused to bow.

Moloch walked, looking at none of them and all of them, the way a physician sees a whole theatre with one pass of his gaze. The halo burned a perfect emptiness into the mist drifting off the river. Reaching the yard's heart, he turned toward the pit and smiled, as if admiring a child's clever drawing.

"Prague," he said, a benediction. "Order suits you."

Moloch's eyes found them properly. It didn't feel like being looked at. It felt like a hand opening to set them in its palm.

"You built a wall," he said. "You repaired a machine that devours you and made it defend you instead. Saints do less."

"Don't," Liz said through clenched teeth. She pushed again; the command bent a fraction, then hardened.

Chloe's voice was quiet enough to pass for thought. "Ying."

"I know," Ying said. Protocols were habits drilled into bone: scatter, break line of sight, avoid open ground, voidslice out.

Moloch's halo pulsed — a slow, deliberate flare that sent ripples through the air. The red sphere around them quivered under the pressure, fine cracks webbing across its surface.

Ying felt it in her teeth, in the base of her skull, the psychic equivalent of a building groaning before collapse. Liz's halo flared harder, but her hands were trembling, blood beading fresh at her nostril. The cracks held — barely — each one a reminder that if the dome went, so would their last inch of freedom.

"Did you think Belphegor's silence would go unremarked? A choir ends, and the cathedral does not notice?"

Victor's jaw moved. "We noticed."

Moloch laughed softly. "Yes. You are very good at noticing yourselves."

Ying measured distances again. If the barrier broke, she'd move for Liz first. Chloe wouldn't need her. Alyssa would buy time. Dan would follow Max. Victor would lay down his life without hesitation.

"Protocol," she whispered, letting him hear.

Moloch's gaze returned. Approval, perhaps. Recognition.

"Run?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

Ying felt the fear slide into a drawer. Not gone. Waiting.

The pit pulsed red. Liz's halo brightened. Max drew a full breath. Victor's claws clicked against the rail. Alyssa's knuckles creaked. Dan's light throbbed under his skin.

***

The dome was holding.

Barely.

Every second felt like pushing her hands against a collapsing wall, the red light braced against Moloch's command. The air inside was wrong — hot, stretched thin, tasting of copper and stone dust. The pressure wasn't static, either. It flexed, testing her shield like a predator pressing its weight against a cage. The glassy surface hummed with strain, a low vibration in her jawbone.

She refused to blink first.

Moloch walked toward them as if the square was his private garden. His boots left no sound on the stone, but the ground still seemed to ripple around him, each step turning solidity into water. He didn't hurry. He didn't need to.

Then — slowly, deliberately — he began to clap.

It wasn't the mockery she expected. No sharp smirk, no cutting tone. The sound was rich, full, almost warm. It echoed in her bones in a way that felt like being praised for an exam you never took.

"You've done beautifully," he said, as though he was delivering a sermon to a congregation he already owned. "Prague is clean. Defended. Belphegor, chained and obedient."

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His eyes tracked over the barricades, the anchored Enforcer squads, the watchtowers lit against the dark. "That…" His lips curved slightly, "…was art."

The dome creaked. Liz forced her focus inward, red light curling harder around them. Moloch wasn't attacking, not directly, but every word he spoke was another ounce of pressure on her ribs. He was looking at them the way you might look at a child's diorama — impressed but faintly amused that the glue was holding.

Then he named them.

"Saint Chloe the Spectre." His gaze flicked to Chloe, who hadn't moved an inch since he arrived, blade still at the ready, stance like she was already halfway into her attack.

"Saint Ying the Shadow." His tone made it sound less like a compliment and more like a title carved into a gravestone.

"And Saint Liz…"

His eyes met hers. She felt the weight behind them — not a shove, not yet, but the suggestion of what it would be like if he wanted to shove. "…who walks the mind's corridors."

Her breath came in ragged bursts. Each one felt like it scraped the inside of her ribs. She could feel the dome flexing under him — not a crack yet, but the kind of groan that meant one was coming.

Not again.

Not after fifteen years trapped in her own mind. Not after waking to find him half-dead on the stone. Her halo burned hotter, red bleeding toward white at the edges, as if rage alone might weld the cracks shut.

Her jaw locked. "Don't call me that."

The name felt like a brand. She could feel the others tense at her voice, but she didn't care. She wouldn't let him shape her into something for his altar.

Moloch's smile didn't falter. "Oh, but saints don't choose their canonisation. Others see the miracle and give it a name."

Her hands ached on the dome, knuckles whitening though she wasn't touching anything. Heat bled into her fingertips. She wanted to push harder, to show him that his "saint" could break his grip in half — but she didn't know if she could.

"Why are you here?" Max's voice cut through, raw and flat. He was leaning heavier on Victor now, but his eyes were fixed on Moloch, unblinking.

Moloch tilted his head, as though he found the question quaint. "To thank you," he said simply. "And to tell you what comes next."

His gaze drifted past Max, taking in the rest of them, the battered but unbroken circle inside her shield. It felt like he was tallying them, measuring exactly how much they had left to give before they collapsed.

And yet — the way he spoke… it almost sounded like he meant the thanks. Like they'd been unknowingly playing his game all along, and this was the part where he revealed they'd made the perfect move for him.

Liz didn't loosen her hold on the dome. If anything, she tightened it, the red flaring a fraction brighter. He could speak like a priest all he wanted.

She wasn't kneeling.

***

The closer Moloch came, the smaller the world seemed to get. The black sun burned above his head, eating the light and giving back heat without warmth. His limbs were too long for his frame, moving with a slow, inevitable precision.

Max's chest locked. His lungs wouldn't fill.

Flashes struck like hammer blows — the metal chair bolted to the floor, the straps cutting into his wrists, the cold stink of a windowless room. A voice in the dark, calm and patient: One more soul, Max. Just one more. And then another. And another. Until the hours became days, the days became years, and time meant nothing except how long it had been since he'd said no.

Every instinct in him split apart.

One half screamed run. Find somewhere Moloch could never reach. Burn every road behind him.

The other half screamed fight. Tear into him now, before that halo flared and the chains came again.

Both paths ended in the same place.

And still, he stood his ground.

Moloch stopped just outside the dome. He laid one long-fingered hand against it, and the barrier sagged inward as if gravity bent toward him. Red light warped at the point of contact, faint cracks spiderwebbing out.

"You have made me strong, Max," Moloch said. His tone was liturgy — steady, certain, almost warm. "Or should I call you 'Flame Father'?"

The title twisted in Max's gut. Not for what it implied — but for how true it was.

"Every soul you have woken. Every battle you have fought. Every Demon Lord you have broken — they have fed me."

Max forced the words out through a throat gone dry. "Fed you for what?"

Moloch's black eyes fixed on him, steady and patient. "To take the throne that waits above your sky. To burn open Heaven and sit where the old God rots in chains."

Then the corner of his mouth curved. "I have already told you this. Do you not remember? Before you had the lovely dream…"

Max's heat spiked. He remembered. The dream that broke him.

Liz standing in sunlight, free and laughing. The others alive. The sky clear, the darkness pushed back until it was nothing but a shadow on the horizon. Victory without cost. Peace without weight.

And then waking — chains on his wrists, the smell of smoke in his lungs, Moloch's voice behind his ear.

It had all been a lie. A perfect, cruel lie.

Max took a half step backwards.

Victor stepped forward, placing himself between them. His claws had already half-shifted, blackened at the tips. "You'll have to get through me first."

Moloch didn't glance at him. "You will not be the one to stop me."

He looked to the pit, voice dropping almost to reverence. "Belphegor was a sponge, soaking up the last of you. And now I wring you dry."

Max's breath went sharp, heat rising under his skin. "You already tried." The words came out raw, almost spat. "In your perfect little dream. Don't you remember? You gave me Liz back. You gave me victory. You made me believe it was over." His throat worked, muscles tight. "And then you tore it apart… just to watch me break."

The halo flared — shadows bled toward him, the weight of his presence doubling until Max's knees nearly buckled.

A hot spike of panic tore through him. Five years of chains. Five years of Moloch's voice behind his ear. He could feel the straps again, smell the smoke, hear the quiet insistence: Open the next one, Max. It will all end if you just open the next one.

Liz's voice cut through the pressure like a blade. "You're not taking him."

Her hands pressed against the inside of the dome, crimson light flooding her halo. "Not again. Not ever." Sweat ran down her temple. Blood beaded at her nose. Her jaw was locked.

She had been trapped for fifteen years. He'd been trapped for five. And still, she stood in front of him.

That was what kept him upright.

This wasn't a threat.

It wasn't even a boast.

It was a statement of destiny — one Moloch believed with such perfect certainty that, for half a heartbeat, Max almost believed it too.

Almost.

***

Ying had had enough.

Not of the weight pressing on her ribs. Not of the ache creeping up her spine. She was done with him — the sermons dressed in velvet, the mock gratitude, the black sun burning holes in the world.

Her gaze cut to Liz. No words. Just a sharp jerk of the chin — now.

Liz's crimson halo ignited like a detonating flare, flooding the air with red light. The psychic dome swelled, forcing itself wider against the invisible pressure. Cracks raced across its surface, each one groaning like stressed steel. The air inside went thin and hot, dry enough to scrape her throat with every breath.

Blood welled at the corner of Liz's mouth. Her knees trembled, but her eyes didn't leave Moloch's. "Not again," she breathed. The words weren't for him. They were for Max.

Ying moved the instant she felt the dome expand. Her blade rose, the black edge shimmering with voidlight, and came down in a decisive arc. The world tore like wet canvas. A wound in reality bled darkness, a vertical gash wide enough for a body to slip through. Cold, scentless wind poured from the opening, tugging at her hair.

It wasn't a door. It was an escape ripped from the bones of the universe — and it would not stay open long.

"Move!" she snapped, the command cutting sharper than her blade.

Alyssa lunged for Dan, locking a hand on his forearm. "Let's go!" She dragged him toward the gap, her boots skidding on the stone.

"Move!" Chloe barked, voice sharp, almost brittle.

"Not without him," Alyssa shot back, fingers tightening on Dan's arm.

Ying's eyes didn't leave the voidslice. "You will have him — on the other side. Go!"

Victor's claws flexed as he seized Chloe's wrist, yanking her forward. She stumbled but didn't resist. Her eyes were locked on the black sun above Moloch's head, the way its corona shifted like a predator pacing behind bars.

Even the Enforcers, still lingering at the edge of the square, froze mid-stride. Human eyes glanced toward their master, the reflex drilled too deep to break in a single heartbeat. They were Contractors — human, yes, but bound to obey when the demon's voice called. Without Belphegor's order, stepping forward felt like walking off a cliff.

"Forget him!" Ying barked. "This is your city now."

They hesitated, shifting in place, caught between habit and survival.

Moloch didn't raise a hand to stop them. He just stood there, hands clasped loosely behind his back, as if they were playing out a scene he'd already watched a hundred times. His head tilted slightly to one side, like a man appraising a painting.

The faint curve of his lips wasn't anger. It wasn't amusement.

It was indulgence.

The kind an adult gives a child who thinks they can run.

Liz gritted her teeth, pushing harder against the psychic strain. The dome warped around Moloch's outline as if space itself leaned toward him. Every heartbeat sent another spike of pain through her skull, but she refused to let it collapse.

Ying stepped halfway through the voidsplit, keeping her sword angled between the team and the demon. "We are not yours," she said, voice steady enough to cut stone.

Moloch's black eyes slid to her, calm and utterly without doubt. "You were mine the moment you stood in my shadow."

The wound in reality hissed, its edges fraying. They had seconds…

***

They were almost through.

The wound in reality hissed and writhed, its edges flickering like torn film in a projector. Chloe could feel the pull in her bones — cold, insistent, promising somewhere else. Somewhere away.

Victor was half a step from shoving her in when movement snagged her eye. Moloch's head tilted, the black sun behind him shifting in slow orbit. His hand came up. Just one finger.

And he wagged it.

"No, no, no…" The words were soft, almost chiding, the tone a teacher might use when catching a student about to cheat on an exam.

The voidslice didn't explode. It didn't vanish.

It shattered.

Hairline cracks raced across the surface like frost on glass. The hiss deepened into a groan, and then the whole thing fractured with a brittle snap.

Shards hung in the air — twelve, maybe more — each one a window into somewhere wrong. A jungle burning under violet skies. A cathedral full of kneeling, eyeless priests. A desert littered with black bones that hummed in the wind. Every piece was a war zone, a hell, a prison.

Moloch stepped forward, his bare feet touching the light of the shards without flinching. Each footfall rippled the reflections, distorting the horrors inside as if reality were his to stir.

"Together," he said, voice warm as a hearth, "you are dangerous. Alone…" The smile touched his eyes now, slow and certain.

"…you are mine to shape."

The pull came without warning.

It was not wind. Not gravity. It was the feeling of a hook buried behind the heart, jerking each of them toward different shards. Chloe's heels skidded, one hand clutching Alyssa's sleeve as the shard before them shimmered with blinding snowlight.

"Dad!" Liz's voice cracked, her halo flaring bright enough to throw Moloch's shadow back. She caught his hand — for a heartbeat, he was hers.

"Dad, hold on—"

The shard behind him burned orange, fire behind black bars. The pull wrenched him away, their hands sliding apart.

Victor roared, fighting toward him, but another shard — this one a bone-strewn pit — swallowed him whole.

Dan reached for Alyssa, but the snowlight took her and Chloe together.

Ying was last, standing her ground until the final instant. Her shard was silent, all light and shadow. It closed over her like a coffin.

The gate slammed shut, and the black sun was the only thing left.

In the echo of nothing, Moloch's voice followed her, close enough to feel against her ear — not a whisper, but a benediction.

"God smiles upon thee."

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