The guards' grip on Lucien's arms bruised, their purple spreading against his white flesh. They dragged him through winding passages that seemed to breathe with ill intent, deeper into the very core of Vaeloth's fortress. The walls oozed moisture that stank of copper and rot.
"Does it please you?" Tyrion growled, keeping step with him with a wintry smile. "To watch your little show run Kaelen high? He may never redeem his shadows."
Lucien kept his eyes straight ahead, not giving Tyrion the pleasure of his remorse. But the vision of Kaelen—the lone demon to have shown him a glimmer of kindness—clung like poison.
They arrived at a circular door that was carved with writhing forms stuck in perpetual suffering. It creaked open by itself, and they entered a room beyond sanity. The ceiling bulged impossibly upwards, disappearing into shifting shadows. In the very center of the floor smoldered a sigil—a maze of intersecting circles and runes that pulsed with nauseating red light.
"The Chamber of Sin," Vaeloth announced, falling back behind them. His voice carried an eerie holiness. "Where we break those who defy our laws. Where traitors are. reshaped."
The guards forced Lucien to his knees at the edge of the sigil. The ground beneath him was hot, like something burning flowed beneath the surface.
"Leave us," Vaeloth commanded. The guards left without question, the door shutting behind them like a coffin.
There was silence between them, heavy with anticipation.
"You still believe your light protects you," Vaeloth growled, circling Lucien like a wolf. "That your faith keeps you safe from corruption." His fingers grazed Lucien's shoulder, the contact almost imperceptible and yet causing shivers to run the length of his spine. "How adorable."
Lucien tilted his chin up. "My light is not a weapon. It's truth."
"Truth?" Vaeloth laughed, the sound echoing through the chamber. "Then let's try your truth." He snapped his fingers, and the sigil on the ground flared brighter. "Enter the circle, priest."
Lucien didn't stir, stubborn.
Vaeloth's expression darkened. "I said, enter the circle." His power rolled off him in waves, beating against Lucien's resistance.
"I won't."
The Demon King's eyes contracted to slits of fire. "Then I'll make you." With a flash of ferocity, he seized Lucien by the throat and bodily dragged him onto the sigil.
The moment Lucien's knees touched the design, pain exploded through him. The sigil responded to his contact, strands of power twisting up his legs and around his frame like living snakes. He tried to summon up his holy light in a defensive gesture, acting on pure reflex—and immediately regretted it.
The sigil warped his energy, corrupting the pure white light into something else—heat that seared through his veins like liquid metal. Lucien screamed, the noise torn from his throat before he could stop it.
Vaeloth knelt at his feet, just outside the rim of the sigil. "Your god's fire warms you, doesn't it? Like forgiveness." His voice was a smooth caress. "This room doesn't just hurt, Lucien. It *alters*. Pain is pleasure. Light is darkness. Faith is." He smiled. "Something entirely different."
The sigil pulsed again, forcing another wave of distorted sensation into Lucien. It wasn't pain, anymore—at least, not exactly. It was worse than that, something that seared his skin with heat that wasn't entirely unpleasant.
"Stop," Lucien gasped.
"I can't," Vaeloth replied, nearly reluctantly. "The sigil responds to struggle. The more you fight, the more it. accommodates. The only way to end this is to surrender."
Lucien shut his eyes, fighting to focus amidst the whirling dizziness. Unbidden, memory burst up in him—his first day at the temple, small and scared and alone. He had been seven years old, plague-scoured and without, clinging to the one thing he had left behind: faith.
*"Why do you pray so fervently?*" the old High Priest had barked, finding him on knees in the chapel late into the night.
*"Because it's all I have," young Lucien had answered truthfully.*
*The High Priest had smiled, resting a creased hand on his head. "No, child. It's all you need."*
That memory had sustained him through years of solitude, through darkness when doubt crept in like frost. But now, with the power of the sigil coursing through him, defiling even the memory's innocence, Lucien felt something break within him.
"You're recalling something," Vaeloth told him, his voice distant behind the fog. "Something sacred? Something that centers you?"
Lucien's eyes snapped open. The Demon King was inside the sigil, squatting at his feet, close enough for Lucien to see the glints of gold in his red eyes.
"Go away," Lucien snarled.
Vaeloth's fingers closed on his chin. "I'm not in your head. Not yet. Your thoughts are written on your face, priest. You're an open book to me." His thumb caressed Lucien's lower lip. "Every page waiting to be. rewritten."
A second throb from the sigil, this one more intense. Lucien's back arced back of its own accord, a sound half-way between agony and rapture leaving his lips.
"Beautiful," Vaeloth breathed. "Already you begin to transform. Your light persists, but observe—" He indicated where Lucien's holy glow now throbbed with threads of red, such as the sigil's sheen. "It takes on new colors."
"No," Lucien gasped, horrified by the sight.
"Yes," Vaeloth said. He crept closer, his hot breath washing over Lucien's ear. "This is only the beginning. By the time I finish with you, you'll be pleading for corruption. You'll need it like air."
The sigil flashed again, and this time Lucien could not suppress his reaction. His frame trembled, the opposing emotions of agony and ecstasy driving sensible thought from his head.
"Your god speaks not," Vaeloth continued, relentless. "Hasn't since you arrived. Does he even perceive you now? Or has his devoted servant left behind to darkness?"
Something had broken within Lucien at that moment—not his faith, but the receptacle that held it. Faith erupted, exposed and screaming, freed now from ritual and dogma.
"Divine Light," he cried out, the words tumbling from his mouth in a prayer he'd never spoken before. Not for salvation or liberty, but something blasphemous in its audacity. "Give me the strength to live. Not to flee—to *remain*."
The sigil reacted wildly to his prayer, loops of power clenching around him like chains. Lucien felt consciousness fading, darkness spreading at the edge of his vision.
The last thing he saw before he fell was Vaeloth's face—surprise mixed with something that might possibly be respect.
"Interesting," breathed the Demon King, catching Lucien's falling form before it crashed to the ground. "Very interesting indeed."
END OF CHAPTER 5