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Silence answered me, a terrible and absolute silence that rang louder than any scream.

I looked back at the portal, at the shimmering tear that was already stitching itself shut like a wound healing too fast. Nothing was there. No massive shapes emerging from the mist and no glowing ember eyes to offer me the silent comfort I had come to rely on.

Then I saw it: two piles of silver dust rapidly dissolving in the heat of the Hell breeze. The realization hit me like a physical blow. They were celestial beings. Spirits of the upper realms bound to me by angelic magic. While they could walk the earth and endure the cold, they could not exist here. Not in the frequency of Hell.

I scrambled toward the dust with my hands clawing at the stones as I tried to gather the silver grains before they vanished forever. “No,” I whispered, the word scraping my throat raw. “No, come back.”

But the dust slipped through my fingers, lighter than air, and returned to the ether from which it had come.

I had led them here. I had marched them into a furnace without a single thought of their nature. And I had ripped away the only comfort I had left and the only protection I had ever known. I had destroyed them.

Just as I destroyed everything else I touched.

I sat back on my heels and stared at my empty hands. I was truly alone now. Stripped of light. Stripped of guardians.

“Well, well,” a smooth voice said, echoing from the shadows. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

I looked up. The courtyard was lined with demons, creatures of nightmares and shadows who watched me with hungry and curious eyes, but they parted as a woman approached.

Lilith.

She was not a monster in the way I had feared. She was terrifyingly beautiful, a woman woven from night and starlight with skin the color of the moonlight on water and eyes burning with a fire that I had seen in my reflection in my demon form. She wore a gown of living shadows that trailed behind her like smoke, and she moved with a grace that made the air shiver.

My mother.

I stood on trembling legs and tried to straighten my spine to look like the daughter of a queen. “I came home,” I said, my voice thin and wavering in the heavy air.

She stopped a few paces from me and inspected me with a cold and clinical detachment while her gaze swept over my stolen boots, my matted hair, and my pale face. She stepped closer, inhaled, and then frowned. “You are empty.”

“I gave it up.” I lifted my chin in defiance. “I bartered the light to get here. To be like you.”

I expected pride. Acceptance. But she threw her head back and laughed. It was a sound like glass breaking, sharp and cruel. “Like me?” she asked while wiping a tear of mirth from her eye. “Oh, you foolish, broken thing. Do you think I am just darkness? Do you think power comes from emptiness?”

She circled me, her presence a crushing weight that made my knees weak. “The power of the hybrid, the power your father and I bred you for, requires tension.” She leaned in close to my ear. “It requires the friction between the light and the dark. That is what makes it dangerous.” She reached out and touched right over my heart. Her stiff finger burned against my skin. “But you?” She sneered. “You gutted yourself. You have thrown away the fuel and kept only the engine. You are not a weapon, Cassia. You are just a broken demon.”

The words flayed me.

I had sacrificed everything—my tether to Heaven, my grace, and my very soul—to be worthy of this place. To be worthy of her.

“I can serve,” I said, desperation rising like bile in my throat. “I can fight. I have the void.”

“We all have the void. The void is just a hunger,” Lilith said while pulling her hand away as if I was contagious. “It consumes. It does not create. And I have enough hungry mouths to feed.” She turned her back on me. “You are useless to me.”

The sentence was a final judgment that shattered the last of my hope.

“Get her out of my sight.” She reached into the folds of her shadow gown and pulled out a coin. Lucifer’s coin.

My breath hitched. Krevna had one, and the witch in Kraków had one, so how did Lilith have another?

She tossed it into the air. It spun into a blur of dark metal and sliced through the courtyard’s reality. A tear opened, not a portal to the earth but a jagged and unstable rift that screamed with the sound of a thousand winds.

“Go,” she said without looking back. “Find a hole to rot in. You are not welcome in my court.”

A single wind roared from the rift, sucking at me and dragging me across the stones. I clawed at the ground, but I had no strength left, no light to anchor me. Screaming, I was pulled into the tear, cast out by the mother I had destroyed myself to find.

“Wait.”

The sudden word cuts through the memory. I blink as the red sky dissolves into the dim, dusty stillness of the archive. My chest is heaving, the phantom wind still tearing at my clothes.