The judge instinctively dropped his quill, which was behaving less like a writing tool and more like a cranky ancient power bank giving out one last jolt of revenge before dying.
It fizzled dramatically, then landed on the marble floor with all the dignity of a fainting Victorian lady. It was ironic, considering he had always fancied himself a lover of all things Victorian — just apparently not when they were collapsing in his throne room.
Judge stared at it the way one stares at a toaster that just launched a flaming bagel. The feather bristled, making faint crackling noises like it was chewing on its own indignation.
"Oh, what now?" he muttered. "You were perfectly fine turning a ti explosion into a knife, but this is where you draw the line?"
The quill twitched again, shaking out a spark that nearly burned the corner of the parchnt. Judge paused, eyes narrowing. This wasn’t so rebellion — it was a refusal. The thing wasn’t rejecting the act itself either; it was rejecting the reason for the said act.
Satan wouldn’t just ask sothing like that out of nowhere. Even a puppet needed a guiding hand. Judge sighed. "You want motivation? Fine. Let’s give you motive, thod, and lodrama."
He leaned back, pressed his knuckles together, and thought the command instead of writing it.
Ask Tenebris how he escaped the seal.
His voice repeated in Satan’s mind; it would’ve made Satan jump if not for his ntal condition. His brain had almost fried itself due to the overuse of Psyche, but for so reason, he still found himself moving. Almost as if he is being guided.
The quill trembled as if embarrassed, then grudgingly rose to start writing.
Satan’s eyes flickered, violet for a heartbeat, then drowned in its violet hue. His voice erged with that uncanny echo — half his, half his subconscious, like a duet between drunk and "ok to drive".
"How did you get out of the seal?"
The air cooled. Even the residual ether, which had been flailing about like a drunk ghost, froze in place.
Tenebris — currently wearing Percival’s body like a mildly dissatisfied coat — stopped mid-motion. For the first ti since the battle began, he halted just when he was about to strike. He turned, and every shimr of reality bent a little closer to him, as if gravity itself wanted to hear the answer.
"Your lord must really not trust you," he said quietly, every syllable soaked in disdain. "He sends a puppet to ask questions he should’ve answered himself."
Satan blinked. "Puppet? Consider yourself lucky that my lord isn’t intervening in our fight."
Tenebris ignored him. "So be it." His face suddenly got dangerous, "You want answers while fighting? Then bleed for your very lord who only observes."
He raised his hand, and the courtyard forgot how to exist.
The ground twisted, walls lted into ink, and the stars overhead rearranged themselves into equations that refused to solve. Satan stumbled back, defending against shapes that weren’t supposed to exist in three dinsions.
Judge’s quill scratched faster, struggling to keep up.
"Both were pulled to a reality dictated by the lord of night. The world itself had beco undone as the creator willed it. Tenebris fought while talking, his voice tearing through the chaos that Satan failed to even comprehend. Whose head had gone beyond recovery."
Reality rippled like a wet canvas. Tenebris’ attacks weren’t spells — they were more like corrections he issued upon reality. Every swing of his arm rewrote the world’s syntax, forcing it to stutter between possible versions of itself.
Satan ducked as an entire tower appeared sideways, then imploded into sothing his eyes could not perceive, but he could feel sothing — remorse for everything he did and withheld doing.
Through the storm, Tenebris spoke — each word surfacing through the distortion like a drowning truth gasping for air.
"I was promised rest," he said. "An end to endless vigilance. The Princeps ca to when my dominion was crumbling, and my people... they were dying under my rule."
Satan flinched as a wave of refracted gravity sliced past his shoulder. He could feel himself being torn away as his body adapted to the contradicting gravity. But he asked in a dead tone, devoid of pain or aning. "You an — because of you?"
Tenebris didn’t answer directly. He tore the air open, revealing flashes of ruined lands — his mories, maybe. "Because I believed in the wrong eternity. I ruled thinking stability was rcy. But rcy grew stagnant, and stagnation rotted everything."
The ground under Satan turned transparent, and he barely managed to conjure a spatial lock before falling through the cracks in existence.
"Princeps showed what I had done," Tenebris continued, voice now breaking between anger and grief. "He promised a world that could live without gods. People who could rely on themselves. I accepted sleep — a seal, he called it — so they might build that world."
Judge’s hand slowed. His expression wasn’t mockery now; it was concentration sharpened into sothing close to empathy.
Satan parried another wave that refracted the concept of ti; he sohow made it vanish, as if nothing had existed there to begin with.
"But you woke up," he said, breathing hard.
"I woke up," Tenebris growled, "and found this."
His gestures ripped the scenery apart — revealing flashes of cities, not ancient or holy, but modern and miserable. Streets clogged with smoke, children begging beneath towers of gold, the starving praying to saints that never answered.
"Tell , where is the peace I was promised?" His words cracked like thunder. "Why do the greedy still feed on the ek? Why is the world just as ugly as before I closed my eyes?"
The world around them shattered into pure ether, and in the fragnts, Judge caught glimpses of faces — humans fighting, dying, laughing, repeating the sa futility Tenebris had tried to end.
Satan lowered his arms. "You thought you saved them. And now you think you failed."
Tenebris’s eyes blazed with divine fury. "Failed? I was betrayed. My sealed sleep was twisted into farce." He slamd his hand to the ground, and the courtyard folded inside out. "And for what? So the Princeps could build another throne atop the corpses of hope?"
For a brief, insane second, Satan pitied him with what little consciousness he had. Which was odd, because pity wasn’t in the job description.
Judge, anwhile, stared at the parchnt. The quill was writing on its own. Judge only occasionally made Satan talk and did nothing more. Things were not proceeding as he had thought they would; maybe he could reap benefits out of this encounter.
Tenebris’s voice rose through the chaos. "You, puppet of my betrayer — tell ! Has your master built the world I was promised? Has he freed them from the chains I once bound?"
Satan hesitated. Behind him, debris floated aimlessly in a sky that had forgotten its direction. "I... don’t know."
Tenebris froze. His fury didn’t fade — it just stopped being loud.
"Then he lied," he whispered. "The Princeps lied."
Judge’s breath caught. The quill cracked again; it was the sa as last ti — refusal. Satan had gone beyond the point of saving; his brain had beco a lted puddle of matter. It was struggling to keep his body moving despite the dead mind.
Beside Judge, Solarae was in deep thought as if he had rembered sothing.
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