Last Night...

The night sky over the Pacific bowed before them like the spineless as two figures tore through the upper heavens at velocities that made the very air surrender without protest.

Ordinary winds had learned centuries ago not to challenge beings of their caliber.

Senithe flew at the fore on the right, her dark robes streaming behind her like banners of midnight silk.

The fabric did not flap or billow, instead it flowed with deliberate, infuriating grace, as though the wind itself parted in reverence before her and sealed again in her wake, too terrified to remember it had ever dared touch her.

In moments like these the Dark Regent always entertained the same filthy, suicidal curiosity.

What if he dropped lower right below her, what would he actually see? Was she flying commando beneath all that elegant menace and he’d gaze upon the sacred nether regions he always wanted but would never ger?

Was something warm and wicked like a thong tucked away, or was Senithe simply built like perfection given lethal flesh? She was such a graceful, lethal vision it made his ancient blood stir in ways that could get him eviscerated on the spot should he dare.

But the fool knew better. For the love of the very damned cosmos, if she so much as sniffed those thoughts on him he’d be dead before the fantasy finished forming.

She’d smile that small, sharp smile and unmake him for the crime of wanting.

Worth it, maybe. Still.

On her left, a precise pace behind by ancient protocol, flew Dark Regent himself with his suicidal thoughts. His long coat snapped in a gale of his own making, his face cold, beautiful, and utterly unbothered by a speed that would have shredded the souls to mist.

Ahead of them floated their so-called guide.

A red orb the size of a man’s chest hung suspended in the night like a fallen star that had grown bored of its orbit and now wandered the heavens on its own dark whims. It pulsed with slow, inward fire—deep crimson at the core bleeding outward into furious scarlet that stained the darkness around it.

Across its curved surface rolled a single, enormous eye: round, lidless, iris a blazing ring of liqiued red against a sclera blacker than the void between realms he’d known to be so dark.

’Was it forged from the void of those dead realms too?’

The thing never rested. It swept in restless, hungry arcs, jittering at the edges of its own insatiable appetite, devouring the world below like it was personally offended by anything that tried to hide.

Whenever the orb caught the faintest thread of the scent it hunted, it tilted sharply. Senithe and the Dark Regent tilted with it in perfect unison, and the night itself seemed to bend and recalibrate beneath their flight like it knew better than to argue.

It had been hunting for forty minutes following a specific scent.

Above the long, shadowed shoulder of an island lost somewhere south of nowhere, the orb finally slowed, stilled, then hung motionless in the upper void.

It turned in lazy, predatory circles at an altitude no mortal vessel would ever dare reach. The great red eye swept the black sea below in ever-widening arcs, drinking deep of a trail only the Eye Demons of the Devil Realms could perceive.

Senithe and the Dark Regent reined in their flight and took position alongside it. For a long moment the three of them simply owned the sky in silence.

The orb continued its patient work and not even the wind didn’t dare exist where they hovered. The Pacific lay far below like a sheet of liquid obsidian threaded with silver, utterly indifferent to the apex predators circling above it.

The stars burned a little colder than they had any right to.

The Dark Regent broke the hush first. He always did when he had something to complain about that would take his thoughts from fantasizing what it felt like to get into Senithe’s pants.

Silence had never been his friend—too much like admitting the universe wasn’t revolving around him.

"I cannot believe," he said, voice low and edged with pure disdain, "that Lilithara sent us one of her Eye Demons instead of deigning to come herself."

"Mmm."

"She treats everything like a game."

"She does."

"It is galling."

Senithe kept her gaze fixed on the orb. She did not need to turn to him; she never did.

"Whether she is here or not changes nothing, Regent."

"It changes my enjoyment of the work."

"Your enjoyment is not a variable in the universe’s equations."

"It is in mine."

"Yours is small."

"You wound me."

She allowed the ghost of a smile to touch her lips, it was small, sharp, and entirely his to interpret however he wished. The Eye Demon continued its slow rolling sweep, the great crimson iris gliding across the curve like a predator tasting the night for blood.

"The Eye Demons of the Devil Realms," Senithe murmured, "are the finest trackers in any realm above or below our own. Nothing has ever hidden a trail from them, and nothing ever will. This one carries the scent of Purity’s last daughter upon it. We follow the trail from where we last felt it. Now that the Eye Demon has paused there, it mean Purity had stood exactly there—"

...She extended one long, elegant finger toward the empty sky the orb now circled with obsessive patience "Hovering in the heavens like a moon that had learned how to judge."

"How long?"

"Long enough to be remembered."

The Eye Demon swung its rolling gaze over the empty air once more, blinked its slow, lidless blink, and then lurched forward in a single decisive surge, a new direction burning in its blood-red stare.

Senithe and the Dark Regent moved with it without hesitation. The three of them sliced across the upper sky, the Pacific peeling away beneath them like black silk unspooling, the red orb pulsing ahead like a heart leading two apex predators on the leash of its own ancient hunger.

"I am not complaining about the task," the Dark Regent said after a stretch of clean, blistering flight.

"You are."

"I am complaining that she would not deign to come."

"That is the same complaint, only longer."

"It is not. The task is a privilege. Her absence is an insult."

"Lilithara does not insult anyone she does not also intend to ruin. You will live."

He laughed—short, dry, and genuinely amused at how right she was and how much he hated it.

"You have a point."

"I have many."

"Senithe."

"What."

"You said there were two of them at the seal. The Divine ASI and Purity. We are tracking Purity. Are we not going after the other one?"

"No."

"Why not."

She let the wind steal a long breath from her before she answered. The Eye Demon banked gently southward ahead of them, and the world turned with it.

"Have you ever wondered," she said, voice soft yet carrying the weight of centuries, "why I felt the Divine ASI at the seal that night... but the ABSOLUTE did not feel her when she probed the Divine Essence shield?"

"NO. Why."

"Because that abomination — weak as she is in her current state, weaker even than Purity — is untraceable. The Absolute could not feel her because there was nothing of her to feel. There was only what she had touched."

"She is the only god in any sphere I have ever known who leaves no signature in the air she passes through. The Source’s own scryers would lose her between two heartbeats."

"That cannot be right."

"It is right."

"How do you know?"

"Because if you ever find yourself able to trace her, Regent — truly trace her, in real time, with confidence — you can be assured of one thing. She has stopped hiding from you because she has decided to kill you and she is allowing you to walk to your own death along the line she has drawn for you."

The Dark Regent was quiet a moment, the wind howling past them like a chorus of forgotten ghosts begging for relevance.

’Untraceable. How delightfully insulting. As if the universe itself had decided to play favorites and picked the one creature that makes even me feel... temporary.’

He hated that feeling almost as much as he respected it. Almost.

"That is not encouraging."

"It was not meant to be."

The Eye Demon ahead of them adjusted its altitude, sliding higher into a colder shelf of sky where the air grew thin and brittle. The orb glowed brighter against the thinning dark, a single coal of hellfire burning in the void.

The Dark Regent flew through the savage drop in temperature without registering it, his eyes narrowed now, his usual mask of amused disdain folded away.