for her, keeping the shield around her intact even while I was given a brief hour or two to sleep every night.
I was so tired. Even my bones felt like they might crumble if I was pushed the wrong way.
The sand beneath me was soft and warm, luring me into its embrace. Swirls of white ash were mixed into the darkness of it, but before I could let my eyes drift shut, I tried to sit up a little more.
They always kept Lucifer out of my sight. I knew it was deliberate, but that didn’t stop me from trying.
Until we reached Kur, I knew I wouldn’t see him again.
I was too exhausted to search for long. I let myself slump down to the sand, my muscles worn thin, running on nothing but a bite of bread once a day and dirty water.
It felt like my eyes had barely shut when Damuzid jerked me upright by the ropes behind my back, sending sharp lances of pain through my shoulders. I stumbled to regain my footing, my eyelids feeling as heavy as bricks… my hope wearing thin.
It’d been three days.
Three days since I’d been spat out by the Between, right where I needed to be. Everyone should’ve been right behind me.
Three days without a single sign of them.
In the depths of my exhaustion, the fear clenching my chest was almost crippling. What if they’d gotten lost?
What if they’d taken the portals home, thinking we were already there?
I blinked, my eyelids feeling as gritty as the water as Damuzid pushed me into line. I followed Aya obediently, a demon I’d learned like to twist fingers backwards until they felt like they would snap. It’d taken talking back only once to learn that the hard way.
The Irkallan desert was as black as the Starsea, as blasted as the Dis wastelands, but it lacked warmth or beauty.
It was just… endless. The only break in the landscape was the paved road we followed, and enormous bones that jutted from the sand like skyscrapers. Most were in the distance, but one bone, curved like a rib, had been closer to the road.
It had been so large we’d walked in its shadow for nearly five minutes. I couldn’t fathom what had once lived and died out here, and I’d seen terrible monsters in the Between.
Hours passed. When I dropped, my strength gone, Damuzid dragged me over stones until I got back up and stumbled after him. Once or twice he forced me to drink again after he caught a black look from Satan.
“You’re not taking care of his songbird very well,” I rasped. My lips were chapped and dry, even after the water, and my brief laugh came out rusty.
Damuzid’s face darkened. My pants were shredded around my knees and thighs from being dragged on the stone road, and the visible skin was welted purple and etched with red scrapes.
“You’re not safe,” I told him. All I wanted to do was lie down and close my eyes. “No matter what you think. You’re more expendable to him than I am.”
I looked back, an automatic twitch, searching for Lucifer.
Damuzid snarled and dragged me forward, setting a harsh pace until I was too tired to speak again.
The first star appeared on the horizon when I saw something new in this hellscape.
A black statue, half-buried in the sand. I squinted at the woman’s face, surrounded by a lion’s mane. Clawed forearms gripped the edge of her pedestal as the rest of her was slowly swallowed by the sand. There was something about the darkness of the stone that disturbed me, how familiar it was, yet unlike the obsidian of my home.
An involuntary shiver ran down my aching spine. I’d seen her before, on a wall in the succubi temple.
She’d felt like an omen of doom, representing a land so dark the succubi had just washed the walls with ink instead of drawing it: the most basic symbolism there was.
This was a place where all hope came to die.
“Catch up, songbird,” Damuzid said. He pushed me back on course, following the road between two enormous dunes that blocked out the horizon. “Kur calls us home.”
I stumbled out from between them, my legs close to giving out again. I was willing to be dragged if it meant a rest.
Two dark sphinxes looked down at us. They rose high above the dunes, scowling and vicious, each one raising a clawed hand in warning.
Beyond them were seven arching gates. Even with the remnants of sunset