1344 Truly Accepting Diana as his mother
anwhile, back in the heart of the unfolding carnage, the seven-headed cobra continued its rampage. The monstrous creature, its scales a sickly green under the dim light of the dying stars, ripped through the ranks of Michael's army. Venom, like liquid moonlight laced with poison, painted grueso arcs across the battlefield, leaving trails of disintegrated bodies in its wake.
Michael, watching his forces fall, felt a cold fury build within him. He'd allowed this charade to play out long enough. It was ti to remind Skyhall who they were dealing with.
"You want to dance?" he growled, his voice barely audible over the din of battle, yet sohow carrying to every corner of the pocket dinsion. "Let's dance."
He then moved with pure, primal speed. One mont he was a shadow against the backdrop of stars, the next he was a thunderbolt, a black streak of pure kinetic energy aid directly at the heart of the colossal serpent.
The Ancestors, despite their combined might, despite the arrogance of their borrowed power, weren't stupid. They'd seen what the God of Darkness could do, had witnessed the casual brutality of his attack on Lorian's flagship.
Staying put? That was suicide.
"EVADE!" Eldrin's voice, amplified a thousandfold by the serpent's monstrous form, bood across the battlefield.
The serpentine creature twisted, bucking through the air with surprising agility for its size, its seven heads snapping this way and that as it tried to anticipate Michael's movents.
But Michael was a blur. He moved like sothing out of a nightmare, a whirlwind of shadows and crackling energy. As he closed the distance, his hands crackled with power, bolts of black lightning, lancing out to sear the air where the serpent had been a heartbeat before. The monstrous serpent, despite its size and power, was clearly outmatched, its movents growing increasingly frantic as Michael herded it, a spider playing with its food.
And below, watching the chase unfold, both armies seed to forget their own petty skirmishes.
"By the gods, he's actually fighting it!" a skyhall angel breathed, his voice a mixture of awe and terror. His words were echoed a thousandfold across the ranks of the angels, their earlier confidence replaced by a chilling certainty: they were witnessing a battle between titans.
On the decks of a dozen Skyhall warships, cannons roared back to life, their celestial energy aid not at the monstrous serpent, but at the God of Darkness himself. Blinding white beams lanced through the air, seeking to intercept Michael, to drive him back from his prey.
But this was a tactical error. A fatal miscalculation.
Because the mont those cannons fired, the mont they revealed their true target, sothing shifted in the deanor of the dark army.
The demon army, their primal instincts honed by millennia of warfare, needed no further encouragent. With a guttural roar that shook the very foundations of Skyhall, they surged forward, no longer fleeing, but attacking. Their wings beat the air, carrying them towards the nearest Skyhall vessels. Their goal wasn't to fight, not in the traditional sense. It was far simpler, far more brutal: tear the ships apart, cripple their ability to fire, and let the God of Darkness deal with the stragglers.
And beside them, inspired by the ferocity of the demons, the remnants of the dark army surged forward. They'd been outmaneuvered, outgunned, but they weren't broken. Not yet. They'd tasted Skyhall blood now, and they were hungry for more. But as Michael harried the colossal serpent, a new threat erged from the chaos.
Thorfinn Borgersson, fueled by a potent cocktail of dwarven ale and burning rage, had finally snapped. The humiliation of their previous encounter, the way Michael toyed with him – it was all too much.
He roared and charged. Even as Michael moved with that terrifying, blurring speed, a part of him registered the dwarf's movent. Thorfinn wasn't just blindly charging in a rage; there was a cold, calculating fury driving him, honed by centuries of battlefield experience.
He moved with a speed and agility that belied his stocky fra, his axe—a monstrous weapon that had tasted the blood of a thousand enemies and elves—whistling through the air in a deadly arc.
Ti seed to distort, the roar of battle fading to a dull murmur as Michael registered the threat. Thorfinn's axe, a blur of rune-etched steel, was aid not at his chest, not at his legs, but at his neck.
A clean decapitation. Ambitious…But Michael activated Silenes as the world around him slowed to a crawl. He watched, a detached observer in his own personal ti warp, as Thorfinn's axe, moving at a snail's pace now, arced towards him.
Michael simply chuckled, a low rumble in his chest, and sidestepped.
The axe, robbed of its montum, passed harmlessly before him. He reached out, his hand a blur even within the ti dilation, and casually plucked the weapon from the air, halting Thorfinn's charge as surely as if he'd hit him with a mountain.
The dwarf, caught mid-swing, stumbled, his montum carrying him forward. Michael simply tightened his grip on the axe, letting the weight of Thorfinn's charge pull the dwarf off his feet.
He lifted him, holding him aloft by the neck, as the ti dilation faded, the roar of battle rushing back in to fill the void.
"You little shit!" Thorfinn sputtered, his face rapidly turning purple as he dangled in Michael's grip. "Let go, you bastard! I'll rip your goddamn head off!"
"Wrong move, Shorty," Michael chuckled, shaking his head in mock disappointnt.
"What did you expect?" Michael chuckled, his grip tightening fractionally on Thorfinn's neck. He held the dwarf at eye level, the tip of his dark sword hovering tantalizingly close to Thorfinn's throat. "Did you think you could just swing your little toy axe and lop my head off? Heard of sothing called… godhood, Short Round?"
Thorfinn snarled, his face a mask of fury and sothing else… desperation. He kicked out, his boots connecting with Michael's chest plate with a clang, but it was like kicking a mountain. He was utterly outmatched, and they both knew it.
"Let go, you overgrown bat!" Thorfinn spat, even as his struggles began to weaken. "I'll gut you like a fish, you hear ?"
But there was a tremor in his voice now, the fear he'd been trying so hard to conceal finally breaking through.
Michael saw it, saw the mont realization dawned in Thorfinn's eyes. He wasn't walking away from this. This… this was it.
And sothing about that realization, about the raw terror in Thorfinn's eyes, must have struck a nerve. Because the dwarf, his face contorted in a mixture of rage and sothing colder, sothing more calculating, stopped struggling. He stared up at Michael, a chilling smile spreading across his lips.
"You know," he rasped, his voice barely a whisper now, but every word dripping with venom, "there's sothing you should know. Sothing about the day you were born…"
Michael frowned, a flicker of unease running down his spine.
"Spit it out, dwarf," he growled, his grip tightening instinctively on Thorfinn's neck.
"Twenty-eight years ago," Thorfinn began, drawing the words out, savoring the way Michael's eyes narrowed.
"It was who ripped you from your dear mother's arms. You weren't even an hour old, you little shit. Pathetic."
"What?" Michael stiffened, the amusent fading from his eyes to be replaced by a chilling emptiness.
"Oh, we had our fun with the bitch," Thorfinn chuckled, a wet, hacking sound. "Thirty days, we kept her alive. Thirty days of watching her break, knowing we'd taken everything from her. And in the end… she practically begged us to throw you into that portal, like the piece of trash you are."
The laughter died on Michael's lips, his amusent replaced by a bone-chilling certainty. Thorfinn wasn't lying. He could hear it in the dwarf's voice, see it in the cruel gleam of his eyes. This… this wasn't so pathetic attempt to break his concentration.
This was the truth. And the worst part? He recognized it. Deep in the recesses of his mind, behind the walls he'd erected to keep the pain and confusion of his earliest mories at bay cracked. Like a dam breaking under the strain of a thousand years of pent-up fury, those mories he'd suppressed, locked away in the darkest corners of his being, surged forward.
He saw her then as if through a haze of tears and fading light. Diana. Her face, so young, so much softer than he rembered, etched with exhaustion but still… beautiful. She was clutching two bundles close to her chest, her arms a protective cage around…
Two babies.
Him.
And Noah.
Michael's grip on Thorfinn's neck loosened, his own breath catching in his throat as he watched the scene unfold, a detached observer in his own personal hell. He saw the three elders, their faces twisted into masks of cold disdain, their hands moving in a blur of arcane gestures. He felt the tendrils of celestial and arch energy, dark and invasive, as they word their way into Diana's mind, twisting her thoughts, her mories…
He saw her fight back, and felt the raw, primal strength of a mother's love as she resisted their attempts to sever the connection, to turn her against her own flesh and blood.
Day after day, they'd tortured her, he realized, his stomach twisting into knots. But she never let go. Not once.
He saw the tears streaming down her face, tasted the salt of them on his own lips as she whispered words of love and comfort, a desperate attempt to shield them, to make them smile even as her world crumbled around her. They thought they'd broken Diana. Thought they'd crushed her spirit along with her defiance. But she hadn't given in, not completely. She'd fought them, tooth and nail, for him.
Thirty days. Thirty goddamn days she'd held on, enduring their torture, their manipulations, all to protect him, to shield him from the fate they'd planned.
In that mont of soul-crushing revelation, Michael understood. Those faces, etched into his mory since infancy, those bastards who'd ripped him from his mother's arms and tossed him into earth. The ones who did all of this were none other than Devdan, Erael, and Thorfinn. When Devdan and Erael realized Thorfinn had broken the news to the Dark Lord, Devdan's usual arrogance was replaced by fear. And Erael, her cold, calculating gaze finally cracking, revealing a sliver of sothing akin to… fear?
At that mont, a surge of raw, primal rage, unlike anything Michael had ever experienced, ripped through him. It was a visceral, all-consuming fury, fueled by years of suppressed pain, of betrayal, of the agonizing realization that everything he thought about Diana was wrong.
His eyes, usually a cold, steely gray, turned pitch black as black smoke began to snake out from beneath his armor, drawn to his rage like moths to a fla.
Despite his bravado, Thorfinn felt a jolt of primal fear run through him. The casual smirk, the air of amused detachnt Michael had worn only monts before, was gone. Still, a part of him, the part that was fueled by spite and the bitter dregs of his dwarven pride, couldn't resist one last jab.
"Oh, she fought alright," Thorfinn rasped with a thin smile playing on his lips. "For a while. Scread your na, begged us to stop. But in the end… she broke. Just like we knew she would. She even helped us toss you into that portal, did you know that? Couldn't get rid of you fast enough."
"You three are going to die in a way that no one has ever died…And you are going to wish you had never laid a hand on my mother," Michael said with cold furry and finally admitted with all his being that Diana was his mother…And he was truly prepared to go to any legnths to save her.
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