The cave settled into silence, broken only by the faint crackle of wind at its mouth. Olivia drifted into exhausted sleep, her head pressed to Azrael's chest, listening to the fragile rhythm of his heart.
But somewhere deeper, far beyond the cave, beyond the snow and blood, Azrael's consciousness stirred.
His eyes opened to a sky unlike any he had ever known. It was blindingly white, an endless canvas where countless black stars hung suspended like holes burned into the heavens.
Among them, six shone brighter than the rest, glowing with a strange, commanding luster. They seemed alive—watching, waiting.
Beneath him stretched vast plains of grass, endless and still. Each time his bare feet touched the ground, serenity seeped into his bones, filling his soul with a peace he hadn't felt in years.
The wind was warm, carrying whispers he couldn't quite understand, and the horizon stretched on into infinity.
Azrael stood there for a long moment, breathless, the weight of battle and poison stripped away. His chest rose, steady and whole, his body unscarred.
Confusion pricked at him. This wasn't the battlefield. It wasn't the cave. It wasn't anywhere he recognized.
His throat tightened. He swallowed, glancing out at the boundless expanse, then finally found his voice.
"… Hello?"
The single word echoed across the plains, swallowed by infinity.
And the world seemed to listen. As immediately after the words left his mouth, he felt a sensation of cold cover his eyes like hands that have never known the touch of warmth.
"You're finally here My beloved"
The voice was soft so soft it seemed to brush against his skin rather than pass through his ears.
Yet beneath that gentleness pulsed something deeper, a yearning that clung to each word like chains dragging through water.
It was not just heard; it was felt, sinking into his chest as if it already belonged there.
Azrael's body reacted before his mind could catch up. His muscles tensed, instincts screaming, and he threw himself forward in a desperate leap.
But this place was wrong. Distance bent, gravity twisted.
His jump, meant to carry him a few strides, hurled him skyward, the ground shrinking beneath his feet.
For an instant it seemed he had cleared the whole horizon, soaring across an endless field.
Then he landed and realized he had moved no more than a fraction of what he intended.
What should have been the span of a battlefield had brought him barely a quarter's length. And worse still, when his feet struck the grass, the voice was closer than before
The grass stilled. The warmth of the wind faded, leaving a hush that pressed against his chest.
Then the voice came again smooth as silk, but heavy with that same buried hunger.
"Now, now, darling…that isn't any way to react when you hear your wife's voice, now is it?"
Azrael's heart lurched. His breath caught in his throat, and a shiver raced through his unscarred body.
Wife?
The word wrapped around him like a snare, tightening before he could even resist.
He staggered a step back, his mind clawing for reason, for memory but nothing answered. Only the endless white sky and those six burning stars above, their light pulsing as though amused.
And with every word, the voice seemed to fold the distance between them, close enough now that he swore he felt a breath against his ear.,
Something brushed against his ear, cool and intimate, like lips that had never known warmth.
"The way you jumped…if I wasn't your wonderful wife, I'd almost think you to be afraid of me."
The whisper was a caress and a taunt, slipping beneath his skin, coiling through his veins like a poison that somehow felt sweet. His breath hitched.
His body moved before thought could form he hurled himself away, desperate, every instinct screaming danger.
Again, the world betrayed him.
His leap stretched impossibly far. The horizon tilted, the plains falling away until it seemed he soared across the edge of infinity itself.
The grass blurred into an ocean of green, the sky swelling larger and larger until it drowned his vision. For a heartbeat, he thought he'd escaped.
Then his boots struck earth. The impact rippled like stone dropped into water, grass bending outward in waves.
He blinked. and realized with a sick twist in his gut that he had barely moved at all. A quarter of what he'd aimed for, no more.
And the voice was still with him. Closer. Clinging to him like a shadow he couldn't outrun.
Azrael spun, chest heaving. Something was there. Watching.
It wore the vague suggestion of a woman's form, but nothing about it held still. Its body writhed with shifting hues, bleeding one into the next as though painted by a frantic hand. Red, then blue, then black, then white.
Colors he knew, and others he didn't have names for, all tearing across its body in restless waves.
Her arm gleamed a stark, unnatural blue while her leg shimmered molten yellow.
Her chest flickered from emerald green to pale ivory to shadow-black in the span of a breath. It was like staring at a living canvas that refused to decide what it wanted to be. yet through the chaos, the shape of a woman remained. The curve of hips.
The arch of shoulders. The tilt of a head that was both alluring and monstrous.
And then the eyes.
Azrael's gaze locked on them because they were the only things that held. One burned a deep, unholy crimson, the other shone with the brilliance of molten gold.
They didn't waver, didn't blur like the rest of her but every time he blinked, they had switched.
Left to right. Right to left. Over and over, as though reality itself couldn't contain them.
A shiver ran down his spine. The sight made his pulse quicken, but not from attraction. It was wrong. Beautiful in its wrongness, unbearable to look at for long, yet impossible to tear his eyes from.
The being tilted its head, hair, if it was hair shifting like strands of liquid light. When it spoke, the sound was everywhere at once, pouring into the plains, the sky, and the marrow of his bones.
"There you are…"
Her voice was soft, aching with a longing that didn't belong to strangers. It was the kind of voice lovers used in the dark, heavy with intimacy—but underneath, Azrael heard something else.
Something vast. Something ancient. Something that wanted not him, but all of him.
He staggered back, throat dry, his heart hammering so hard it felt like it would shatter the silence.
The being only smiled. Or at least he thought it did. For a moment, its shifting features bent into a curve that might have been lips.
And with every flicker of color, with every blink of her impossible eyes, she seemed less like a stranger.
And more like someone who had always been waiting for him.
His voice finally tore free, rough and ragged, echoing against the endless plains.
"Who are you? I have no wife. And where the hell am I? What have you done to Olivia?"
The questions came like arrows, one after another, fired before he could think to restrain them.
His hands clenched into fists, his stance braced as though he could fight his way out of this strange, bleeding world.
The woman tilted her head. The motion was slow, liquid, and wrong—like a puppet testing a new string.
"Oh… Liv," she murmured, as if tasting the name. The sound rolled off her tongue like she'd known it for lifetimes.
Colors rippled down her body at the mention of Olivia's name: crimson melting into silver, silver into blue, blue into a soft, bruised violet. Her eyes red and gold flashed once, switching places again.
"Don't worry about her."
The voice was honeyed but sharp, a blade wrapped in silk.
"She's fine."
A pause. The colors deepened.
"Even though I find it absolutely intoxicating how your mind immediately goes to checking on her safety…"
Her tone slid lower, heavy with that buried hunger he'd felt before, and Azrael's stomach turned.
"I can't wait until you're like that with me, darling."
The word "darling" dripped from her lips like molten gold, warm and suffocating. It clung to him, wrapped around his chest until his breath came short.
The grass beneath his feet quivered. The stars above pulsed, slow and rhythmic, like a heart. And through it all, the woman's presence pressed closer not walking, not moving, but simply being nearer with every breath he took.
Azrael staggered, his breath catching in his throat. His hands shook as he looked down and saw his own body flickering, pieces of him vanishing and returning in erratic bursts, like a reflection cracking across fractured glass. Patches of his arms, legs, even the edges of his torso would blur, as if the world itself was unmaking him, pulling him away from reality in jagged pulses.
For the first time, he felt the terrifying fragility of his own existence.
He opened his mouth to call out, but no sound came. The panic in his chest bloomed, dark and suffocating, and his mind raced to find a foothold that wasn't there.
The woman froze, her shifting form momentarily halting as her eyes locked onto him. Then the sound tore from her throat, raw and unbridled.
"No… no, no!!!! You're leaving me already?
Not after I just managed to get here! Not after I forced my way past that disgusting thing blocking me!"
Her scream reverberated through the endless plains, bending the very air around them. It was not just fury, it was despair, longing, possessiveness, an ache so deep it pressed against his chest.
The colors rippling across her body intensified, slashing from fiery crimson to icy blue to molten black in rapid, violent flashes, each pulse synchronized with the jagged stutter of his fading form.
Azrael's vision swam. His instincts screamed to run, to fight, to escape—but his body betrayed him. He felt weightless, tethered to the ground and yet floating, unmoored from the physics of the world.
She stepped forward.
Distance warped around her, bending reality itself. One step stretched across what should have been yards, and in the blink of an eye she was standing directly in front of him, towering over him in impossible intimacy.
Her hands shot out, seizing his face. Her fingers were impossibly cold and impossibly warm at the same time, burning into his skin even as they soothed it.
Her eyes, one molten gold, one deep crimson—locked onto his, blazing into him with unyielding intensity.
Azrael tried to recoil, tried to pull away, but he felt as though invisible threads bound him in place. His chest heaved, mind scrambling as a whirlwind of emotions crashed over him.
Confusion clawed at his thoughts.
Fear ripped through him like fire. And beneath it all, something else stirred—a raw, confusing, undeniable pull toward her. Attraction.
He didn't want to feel it. He couldn't understand it. But every time their eyes met, every pulse of color that danced across her shifting form, that pull twisted tighter around his chest. He wanted to push her away, but the closer she came, the less he could.
Her gaze softened for a fraction of a second, a flicker of vulnerability beneath the chaos. "Stay with me," she whispered, though the words carried the weight of commands and promises both. The air between them trembled with unspoken demands.
Azrael's mind spun.
He tried to separate the panic from the yearning, the terror from the pull in his chest, but they were tangled into one impossible knot. His own heartbeat became deafening, each pulse echoing in his skull.
Every instinct screamed to flee, but something in him—the part that had always recognized strength, dominance, desire hung on her eyes, on the brush of her hands, on the impossible way the world itself bent to her presence.
And as her face hovered mere inches from his, her hands still cradling his cheeks, he realized with a hollow shock that he couldn't tell where fear ended and… fascination began.
But then she let out a long, quivering sigh. "No… it doesn't matter. It's pulling me back too. Sorry, darling. It looks like I can't stay with you after all."
Azrael's flickering form faltered even more violently. He blinked, trying to anchor himself, but his body felt like mist, scattered threads, glitching in and out of existence.
He could see pieces of himself vanish, then return for a heartbeat, then vanish again. Panic flared in his chest. His voice caught, though no sound came.
Was she serious? She had been the one begging him to stay, not the other way around.
He couldn't understand it.
She stepped closer, and though she moved only a single pace, distance bent around her. Her presence filled his senses as though the world itself had collapsed inward. He could feel the heat of her shifting form, the scent of something both alien and intoxicating.
Her eyes, one molten gold, one deep crimson blazed at him with an intensity that made his chest ache.
The colors of her eyes began swapping faster and faster, until they were a whirlwind of fire and light that made it almost impossible to focus.
His mind reeled, unable to distinguish fear from desire, anger from longing.
His heart raced, hammering against his ribs, each beat echoing like a drum in a void.
"Never forget, Azrael. You are mine." Her voice cut through the silence, trembling yet absolute.
He tried to speak, to shout, to grab onto her, but his hands were ghosts. His body was fragments, fading with each pulse of the unseen pull around them.
"No… no, you're not just mine. You're ours. All of us. You belong to us. No one else."
Her hands clutched his face, pressing him into her gaze, holding him as though she could will him to stay.
"I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you."
The words fell like a storm, ten repetitions spilling into him, wrapping around his mind and heart. They were a promise, a plea, a command, and he felt them in every trembling inch of his fading form.
"And I know they will too," she whispered, softer now, yet still impossible to ignore. "I know you're prideful and greedy, so I know you will burn everything to keep them safe.
That's one of the things I love about you, darling. Ohhh… just thinking about it makes me so wet."
Her face came impossibly close to his. Her shifting colors danced across him like fire and water, light and shadow blending.
He couldn't look away, though every glance made him more disoriented. Confusion, fear, and… attraction tangled inside him, a knot he could not unravel.
"So take care of Olivia, ok, darling? She needs you. All of us do. I'll try and break it again to see you, but I don't know how long that will take…"
He felt himself slipping, pieces of him detaching and scattering like dust on the wind. He reached out, but there was nothing solid to grasp. His form dissolved further, fading into the emptiness of the plains.
She dropped to a crouch, her hands clutching her head as though she could physically hold the world together.
She muttered over and over, voice breaking, "I love you. I want you. I love you. I want you. I love you. I want you. I love you. I want you. I love you. I want you."
Her words reverberated through the void, bending the air and the light, folding into him, a final tether before the pull claimed her as well. Her hands slipped from his face. Her eyes, blazing gold and crimson, softened for a fleeting heartbeat, and then she was gone.
The stars pulsed once, then nothing. Silence swallowed the plains. The wind stilled. Every trace of her presence vanished, leaving Azrael gone too—scattered threads of his existence completely pulled back into the void.
And somewhere in the emptiness, just before everything disappeared, he thought he felt her fingers brush against his skin one last time, a ghost of warmth and longing that promised she would not forget.
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Tell me do you guys like longer chapters like this or my shorter chapters more. My chapters are usually 1000 to 1500 words but this one is almost 3000 words so which do you prefer should I have split this one up into two chapters tell me please 🙏