Before Earth.
Before gates.
Before the world learned to fear monsters.
There was a child who should never have been born.
The sky was not a sky.
It was a fracture—layers of burning crimson and blinding white tearing into one another, screaming without sound. Laws collapsed here. Time bent inward. Space shuddered like a wounded beast.
At the center of the storm, a man stood with blood dripping from his hands.
Abaddon, Demon of the Abyss.
His form was barely contained by reality—blackened armor fused to flesh, horns cracked and bleeding, eyes glowing like collapsed stars. Every breath he took tore the ground apart. Corpses lay around him, angelic and demonic alike, reduced to ash or shadows etched into nothingness.
He did not look at them.
In his arms, wrapped in trembling light, was a newborn child.
The child was quiet.
That terrified him more than the armies.
Behind Abaddon, a woman knelt, wings torn and stained silver-red. Her radiance was dim, but it refused to go out, like a candle stubbornly burning in a storm.
Elisabeth, Angel of Hope.
She pressed one shaking hand against her chest, feeling the absence where her grace had once flowed freely. Every breath hurt. Every moment bled time they did not have.
"They're coming," she said softly.
Abaddon knew.
He could feel them—the convergence of judgment and annihilation. Heaven and Hell, united not by mercy, but by law. Ancient laws that did not forgive. Laws that did not forget.
A demon and an angel had loved.
That alone was enough to doom worlds.
Abaddon snarled, black flames coiling around his feet. "Let them come. I'll tear this place apart."
Elisabeth looked up at him, and for a moment, the storm seemed to quiet.
"No," she said.
He froze.
Not because she was weak.
Not because he doubted her.
But because she was right.
They could not win.
Even Abaddon, feared across the Abyss, knew the truth. The forces moving against them were not soldiers. They were verdicts. Concepts given form. Executioners older than creation.
And the child—
The child stirred.
Tiny fingers curled around Abaddon's clawed thumb.
Something inside the demon cracked.
"They'll kill him," Abaddon growled. "Over my corpse."
"They will kill us," Elisabeth corrected gently. "And if he stays… they will erase him."
She struggled to her feet, wings flickering with fading light. Each step left a glow on the fractured ground.
"There is another way."
Abaddon turned to her sharply. "No."
She met his gaze without fear.
"We seal it," she said. "All of it."
The demon laughed—a harsh, broken sound. "You want to chain the Abyss and Heaven inside a child?"
"I want him to live."
Silence fell.
Far away, something noticed them.
The child opened his eyes.
They were neither crimson nor gold.
They were blue.
Clear. Unknowing. Human.
Elisabeth's breath hitched.
Abaddon stared at his son as if seeing something impossible. Not power. Not destiny.
Choice.
"They will hunt him," Abaddon said slowly.
"They will hunt what they fear," Elisabeth replied. "And they fear what they cannot control."
She reached out, placing her palm over the child's chest. Light flowed from her, warm and gentle, wrapping around the infant like a promise.
"I will give him hope," she whispered. "Even if the world takes everything else."
Abaddon clenched his jaw.
Then he did the unthinkable.
He knelt.
Black fire poured from his body, not raging, but obeying. It condensed, folded inward, compressing into something dense and terrible. The Abyss screamed as its king tore a piece of himself free.
"I will give him strength," Abaddon said. "Enough to survive any hell."
The two forces collided.
Light and darkness intertwined, resisting, rejecting, then—slowly—settling.
Elisabeth began to chant. Not a prayer. A vow.
Runes etched themselves into the air, burning with forbidden meaning.
A seal.
No.
Two seals.
One to bind the Abyss.
One to restrain the Heavens.
And one final thing—etched deeper than power.
Fate.
The storm roared back to life.
The executioners arrived.
Figures of blinding judgment and endless shadow stepped through the rift, their presence crushing reality flat. Spears of law. Blades of erasure. Voices that spoke only endings
"Elisabeth," Abaddon said, urgency bleeding into his voice. "Now."
Tears streamed down her face as she took the child from him.
She kissed Kai's forehead.
"Live freely," she whispered. "Even if the world hates you."
She opened a rift—not upward, not downward, but away.
A small, fragile path to a quiet blue planet that knew nothing of angels or demons.
Earth.
As the rift began to close, Abaddon wrapped one arm around Elisabeth, shielding her as divine light and abyssal darkness crashed down upon them.
He looked at his son one last time.
"Be better than us," he said.
The rift snapped shut.
Silence followed.
Then judgment fell.
The storm collapsed into nothing.
Heaven declared the sin erased.
Hell declared the anomaly destroyed.
And somewhere far beyond their reach, a child cried for the first time.
In the void left behind, something unseen shifted.
Something ancient.
Something that watched flows of fate and called them systems.
It observed the sealed ripples, the broken laws, the impossible balance.
And it smiled.
"An interesting variable," it murmured.
Far away, on a quiet night in a human city, a baby boy with black hair and blue eyes took his first breath.
The world did not notice.
Yet