As one, my sisters and I leap, our hair skimming against the top of the dark dome as we close the distance and land all around him with a thud. In an instant, he’s surrounded from all three sides, and his face is panicked and feral. Good.
Before we can so much as lift our scythes, a fourth body plummets impossibly through our dome, landing directly behind Morax between Delta and Medley.
I know who it is the moment my wide eyes land on her.
Long purple hair and eyes the color of grapes glare at Morax. Her body is encased in shining armor, a sword in one hand and a familiar scythe in the other, and massive purple wings glow ethereally behind her.
My mother.
The Ophidian’s eyes flare with horror as all four of us hold our scythes out above his head, caging him in. The top of my scythe kisses the bottom of Delta’s scythe, and her scythe overlaps with our mother’s, and so it goes until Medley’s scythe touches mine. We form a circle around Morax with our weapons, the tip of each arched blade pointed in.
We move in perfect synchronicity, as though our bones themselves know this ritual in and out. Without knowing how, my mouth opens up and an ancient language pours out of it, perfectly in time with my sisters and mother. The words rumble out of my throat and drift off my tongue, the entire circle saying the exact same thing at the exact same time.
The words spill out of us and seem to sink into our linked scythes, making the weapons glow and vibrate with anticipation. Even though my mind doesn’t know what we’re saying, my soul and my blood knows exactly what we’re doing.
We aren’t scything Morax. We aren’t resetting him so that he can start again.
We are annihilating him. We’re wiping him off the face of every realm for all of eternity. His soul will never be reborn. He will never come back.
This is his end. We are his undoing.
He tries to raise his hands over his head as if that will protect him, but wide, terrified, furious eyes are locked onto mine.
“Balance always wins,” I hear myself say, repeating Lucifer’s words like a judge slamming down a gavel.
“NO!” Morax screams, his horror bouncing around the protective darkness all around us. I close my eyes and breathe it in. It’s his turn to scream and beg. His desperate cries blare all around me, his deafening pleas ringing in my ears.
But it’s not enough to save him. It was never enough to save me.
Our words reach a crescendo, and I can feel what’s next in every fiber of my being. The last ancient phrase tips off my tongue, and the four of us push our glowing scythes in on him at the same exact time, righteous retribution lighting our faces.
As soon as our curved blades puncture him, there’s a flare of purple light that rips through the Ophidian. Morax doesn’t turn to ash on contact. He doesn’t bleed as the sharp edges cut into his body. Instead, he screams in all-consuming pain as his soul is shredded, and then...our Annuli powers decimate him.
His body, his spirit, even his scream gets sucked out of existence. One second he’s there, and in the next, the Ophidian is completely and utterly gone.
An aftershock of power ripples out of our circle, our dome disappearing as the power goes shooting out, and every single demon that Morax has ever controlled collapses to the ground, the stain of his compulsion completely obliterated.
Gasping, heart pounding, sweat dripping down my back, I blink and take in the four scythes touching in the middle of our circle. We’re standing in the middle of a singed crater of our own making, our scythes’ power slowly dimming until the blades no longer glow.
Four gazes come up to share a look, and then my mother’s eyes land on me. I see so much in her purple gaze, a hundred silent things are spoken as the battle rages beyond, the Sins and Lucifer finishing what Morax began, as demons fall to their knees in surrender.
A tear falls from Nefta’s eye, her gaze swimming with love and sorrow and apology. Her pride beams through her as she lets out a sigh. “You did it,” she tells us, those three words carrying so much weight and emotion.
“We did it,” I correct, and then I let my scythe disappear so that I can grab my sisters’ hands