Imp
Imp was mid-sentence—explaining troop rotations to the Dasari who had taken command during his absence—when the world lurched.
He felt it. Not through sight, not through magic, but through something deeper and older than instinct.
Something had consumed his protection spell.
Not dispelled. Not broken.
Consumed.
As if the oasis itself had been swallowed whole by an unseen mouth.
Imp turned—too fast—his cloak snapping behind him.
And there Grall stood.
Or… what had once resembled Grall.
The pristine armor was ruined—crushed, smeared with ash and gore, cracked open like the shell of some enormous beetle. But Imp's eyes were not drawn to the metal.
They were drawn to the places where Grall's bandages should have been.
The air bent inward around him, pulled toward him in thin strands of dying light. His eyes were black pits—no, orbs, sucking in the world like tiny singularities. Thin streams of dark crimson ran from them, tracing his face like rivulets of blood weeping from a corpse.
For a moment, Imp forgot how to breathe.
Grall's voice, when it came, did not belong to anything mortal.
"Open a portal to Hell."
It wasn't a request.
It wasn't even an order.
It was a verdict.
Imp frowned, trying to gather himself. "I can do that, but in a moment. I am in the middle of—"
Grall's hand clamped around him.
Cold.
Not temperature cold—life cold.
As if every moment of Imp's existence drained out through the contact.
"Do it. Now."
The words cracked the air like splitting bone.
Imp's throat went dry. For the first time in centuries, he felt fear prickle down his spine.
He raised a hand. A portal ripped open in front of them.
The instant the portal whirled to life, the other side showed demons scattering like ants from a kicked nest—something was wrong there too. Very wrong.
Grall didn't look. Didn't hesitate.
He leapt through.
A blast of air slammed into Imp's face as he vanished—hot, dry, and shrieking with dead magic. Every blade of grass around the portal withered, curled, and rotted to gray dust.
By the time Imp stumbled forward, the portal had already sealed shut.
He realized, with a cold twist in his gut, that he had never told Grall how to return.
Good.
A treacherous part of him thought.
Let him stay there. Let Hell deal with him.
But even Hell wasn't enough.
Imp pulled out the communication stone, hands trembling.
"Gods help us… Grall has gone to Hell."
---
Grall — or what remained of him
Madness gnawed at his mind like a thousand mouths. But a thin sliver—one desperate strand of sanity—kept him focused.
A purpose.
A target.
A reason to continue breathing.
He stepped into Hell.
The sky burned. The ground writhed. Screams echoed like a choir of broken bells. But Grall felt none of it. His pulse was a void. His breath a whisper of death.
Demons barred his path—some hungry, some brave, some foolish.
He cut them down in single strokes, Oathbreaker splitting bone and sinew like wet bark. The blade pulsed with a hateful glow, drinking their souls as if they were nothing more than drops of rain.
He moved for what felt like a year—though time in Hell twisted, fractured, and folded upon itself—before finally seeing him.
The demon who had taken Leah.
The demon who had eaten her soul.
The creature knelt in a pit of bones, sucking marrow from a femur with obscene relish.
Grall's vision narrowed to a single point.
Rage did not consume him.
It clarified him.
He stepped forward without sound, Oathbreaker raised.
The demon didn't hear him until its arm hit the ground.
It screamed. Then it turned. Recognition dawned. And with it—fear. The demon's eyes bulged as it took in the black voids where Grall's eyes should be, the bleeding light, the death trembling around him.
"You…" it whispered. "You're not whole yet."
Grall didn't speak.
The demon licked its lips, trying to hide its panic. "She is gone, orc. Gone forever. Consumed. Defiled. Played with. Every piece—"
Oathbreaker silenced him.
The demon's head rolled, still smiling a bloody, trembling smile—as if satisfied that its words had been planted like barbs in Grall's heart.
Grall stared at the bones.
The tiny bones.
The familiar shape of elf-finger joints.
A lock of hair.
His breath collapsed.
Pain knifed through his skull. He fell to his knees, clutching his head.
And something inside him—broke.
A scream tore from him, so raw and unnatural that Hell itself shuddered. Power erupted from his body in a tidal wave, devouring everything it touched—stone, demon, fire, magic. Life died in widening circles.
When his eyes opened again, they were void—deeper than black.
And Grall was gone.
Only The Reaper remained.
He rose, laughter spilling from his mouth like cracked glass.
A group of demons approached, weapons raised.
With one swing of Oathbreaker, they fell in neatly sliced parts, the ground sizzling with their dissolving flesh.
"All demons must die," he whispered, voice scraping like rust across steel.
"Every one. Until she returns to me."
---
The Reaper's Descent
Layer after layer of Hell fell before him.
His body moved with mechanical grace, cleaving through swarms, hordes, armies—until he reached the demon lord of this layer.
The giant feasted on a dragon's leg, drooling black ichor, oblivious to the approaching doom.
"You," The Reaper growled.
"Demon. Die."
The lord barely turned before he was cut in half, his body collapsing in two thunderous, steaming slabs.
But The Reaper did not pause.
"Leah," he screamed into the bleeding sky, "what must I do to bring you back?!"
Silence answered.
Then—something answered.
Something only he could hear.
The Reaper nodded slowly.
"Yes. All of them. I will kill every last demon.
And then you will come back to me."
He descended the stairs.
Hell trembled.
And one by one, its lords fell.
For the first time in its existence, Hell feared.
---
Meanwhile
In the Shadow World, Wreag walked alone.
A second set of footsteps appeared beside him.
He turned.
A lone soul drifted next to him—a woman with soft brown hair, eyes filled with grief and love.
Wreag's breath caught.
"…Leah?"
The soul nodded quietly.
"Help him," she whispered. "Before nothing remains."
---
The lone soul once called Grall drifted like a half-formed shadow beside Wreag, his voice hollow as he spoke of his own death. He told the old orc everything he had learned in the black stillness between life and oblivion—about the Reaper, the thing that had severed the last trembling thread tying his soul to flesh, and about the twisted fate that had swallowed his wife whole.
Wreag listened in grim silence as they walked through the grand hall. Its magnificence was rotted by the faint echo of screams beneath the floor and a cold draft that smelled faintly of iron. When Grall finished, Wreag grunted.
"Sounds like a pain in the ass to die like that," he muttered, though his voice carried a strange tension—as if he feared saying anything louder.
"It is," Grall admitted, though the smile on his translucent face felt brittle, wrong. "But at least you all are free now. Your prison is no more."
"That we are!" Wreag bellowed, his sudden cheer echoing too loudly. He slapped Grall's spectral back, though his hand passed partly through the soul's form. The contact left a smear of frost across Wreag's palm.
Grall chuckled weakly and glanced across the hall where two orcs raised mugs to a shared war story. Their laughter seemed… off. Muffled. As if something watched through their eyes.
"In truth," Grall whispered, "we need to prepare."
"Prepare?" Wreag echoed, tone mocking but hollow. He knew exactly what Grall meant—he simply wanted to force the words out of him. "Prepare for what, Chieftain of None?"
"To stop the Reaper," Grall said, too quickly. He did not want to speak those words aloud. He especially did not want the others involved. That monster wore his body now. It walked the world with his hands, his voice, his face. And Grall knew it should be him alone who faced it.
Wreag's expression shifted, something ancient flickering behind his eyes. "You're right, Chieftain of None." His smile twitched. "We do need to prepare. Prepare you, that is."
Before Grall could react, two orcs seized him from behind. Their grip was cold—colder than any living flesh. Their fingers sank slightly into his spectral skin like hands plunging into wet clay.
Grall thrashed, shocked to find that his former strength had bled away with his body. His voice cracked.
"Wreag—what are you—?"
But Wreag only approached slowly, eyes glinting with something hungry.
Darkness swallowed the hall.
---
The Reaper
The Reaper descended into the lowest layer of Hell, each step leaving blackened footprints in the frost. His armor dripped demon blood that steamed violently in the frigid air. His blade pulsed red as if still drinking from its kills. Ash and soot coated his face, tinting his skin the color of a corpse left too long in the cold.
He had no love for demons. He had less now than ever.
"Leah…" he whispered into the icy vastness, voice cracked, trembling. "Tell me what I must do… Tell me how to bring you back…"
No answer came. Only the creaking of ancient ice shifting beneath his boots.
A demon emerged—a creature sculpted not from flesh but from jagged shards of living ice—and lunged. The Reaper did not bother to raise his sword. He stepped aside, grabbed the creature by its tiny, spiked horns, and tore until the head came loose with a sound like splintering bone and cracking glass.
"Is this enough, Leah?" he roared, holding the severed head as frost poured from its open neck.
He had wandered this hellscape for what felt like years, slaughtering his way down, layer by layer, in a pilgrimage of blood. Here, in the deepest pit, ice coated everything—walls, ground, even the air seemed to freeze around him in delicate, deadly flakes.
"And soon," he whispered, staring at the frozen walls, "they will be stained with the blood of the filth who stole you from me."
His body lurched forward on its own, the vessel moving while the mind sank deeper into madness.
"I'm getting ahead of myself, aren't I, Leah?" He turned as if she stood behind him—paused—then trembled violently. "Leah…? Where are you?"
Fresh tears of blood welled in his eyes, sizzling as they touched the cold.
"Oh… that's right," he murmured, voice splintering. "They took you. And now I must take everything from them."
His smile grew slowly, painfully, splitting the dried blood on his cheeks.
A faint sound—a scuttling—caught his attention.
"Found you," he whispered.
He crouched before a tiny crevice where infant-sized demons trembled. One dared stab him. Its dagger snapped against his skin. The Reaper crushed its skull beneath his fist, then stomped the others into pulp one by one. Their tiny screams were swallowed by the endless ice.
He did not care. He only cared that they died.
"All demons must die," he repeated in a low chant. "All demons must suffer. All demons must pay. Then she will return to me."
Most demons hid. None escaped.
He was slaughtering another small one when a booming voice thundered across the cavern. He paused—only a heartbeat—before shattering the creature's skull.
The demon lord towered over him, a monstrous colossus formed from centuries of hatred. It rumbled something in its ancient tongue. The Reaper ignored the words, listening instead to the hollow echo of his own heartbeat.
When the lord continued speaking, the Reaper laughed—a laugh that did not belong to any living thing. It ricocheted off the ice, cracked the walls, made the demon lord recoil.
Panicking, the demon swung his colossal sword. The weapon crashed down, shattering frost and bone alike—but when the dust cleared, the Reaper stood holding the blade in one blood-slick hand.
The demon lord stared, trembling.
The Reaper lifted his head. His eyes were bottomless black pits. The demon lord felt fear for the first time in his existence.
"Where is your master, weakling?"
"M-master…?" the lord stammered.
"The demon lord. The high lord. Whatever title your filth clings to."
The demon lord froze. No mortal should know that name. No creature of the material realm should even remember it.
Unless…
"Who… who are you?" he whispered.
The Reaper smiled slowly.
"I am the one known as the Reaper."
The demon lord understood then. The ancient brothers had sent their harbinger. The end of demonkind had come—by the hands of the thing they once created.
When the demon lord failed to answer, the Reaper drove his fist into the creature's gut. The impact launched the massive demon upward, through the ceiling, through the layers of Hell—until he tore open a gash in the very fabric of realms.
The Reaper looked up through the shattered tear.
On the other side lay the material world.
He smiled, a terrible, eager grin.
And stepped forward.