Conquest Of The Fallen: Dark Dominions

• TITANS LANDING, SIX MONTHS LATER.

THE CLANGING OF HOLLOW CHAINS echoed in the pit dungeons of the royal castle at Darkwake. In the largest chambers of the sordid prisons, a gods-damned cavern hundred-feet tall and twice that in breadth, lay Israfel. Upon first glance, the Apollyon couldn't be recognized. . .for he was not human.

No. He was Titan.

Ninety feet of scarlet bulk: muscle made of stone, veins running in magma, skin hissing volcanic steam, black smoke pouring out his nostrils, and his huge gilded eyes leaking streams of fire. He was to the entire continent, the captured Red Titan, the Rebel Lord.

His prison was secluded, cut deep into the same mountain the castle was hewn from; cut deep into adamant stone. The chains that held him were of forgers iron, and still spelled by [Hemlock Threads] of the Grand Ashari witches. His great body, laid in those chains still gave off so much heat a band of firetamers had been employed, given the only job of putting out the flames.

Israfel was as a war dragon. Abandoned by his tribe. Lost to the memory of mortals. Bleeding fire and gold. Unable to remember when he was yet human—for human he had been.

He had been this way. . .in this appalling, colossal red flesh for six months.

The tiny door adjacent to where he lay squeaked open. He smelled two women walk in, but didn't turn from his side. He did not care if they thought he was asleep or not. He was a Gargantuan. Merely turning around would vibrate the stone walls.

So he stayed still. And listened to them talk.

One of the women was saying, "you think he's ever gonna change back? He's been like this all through the fall and last winter."

The second voice, the other woman spoke calmer when she replied: "Yes. He has to. I know it's hard to imagine him reverting back to human size now that he's been locked in this form all-season. But this is my nephew we're talking about, Hèla. My darling boy. I AM NOT GIVING UP ON HIM. Never."

Rafel blinked his huge, flaming eyes away, where they couldn't see.

It was Lilith, the second woman. Explore stories on empire

He held his breath through the silence that reigned afterward. A small, pregnant, and awkward quiet. He didn't like it. He wanted them gone; they had put him here. Chained in off in darkness and flame. Who were they to act like they cared? But he did not utter this. He couldn't. He had not said a single word since he was changed.

After a short while, Lilith turned with Hèla and left the cavern. They'd been visiting like this every few days for through the winter, like clockwork. Rafel knew Lilith prayed for a miracle: that her 'darling boy' would revert back to human. But frankly, he didn't care if her did.

Being human afforded emotions. Things he didn't want to think about—like Rosa and Bruna, and how one was beheaded and the other drowned.

No.

He'd rather stay as he was. As the Red Titan, Lord of the Rebels, in his prison of fire, he didn't think, or speak... or do much of anything.

He didn't grieve.

And so he was happy. Let his Auntie be sad all he wanted. She forced his hand to this. Perhaps, the one thing that made Rafel smile these dark days were that he had taken the life of that madman.

Yes!

Before he was stuck in this form, he had killed the Usurper. Murdered the bastard. Tore apart the cunt to shreds. Bathed in the vile blood of him. Yes! Rafel killed the demon King, Thebault de Vríes: First of His Name, Lord of the Nine Realms, god of deception, and Keeper of the [Eternal Flame]. He killed Mephistopheles.

It was this brazen murder that had gifted him the infamous title across the Continent: the Rebel Lord.

Even now, it made him smile again.

As the metallic sounds of latches signalled the exit of his Aunt from his furnace prison, Israfel closed his eyes on more time and relived that night at Corynthia; he ignored the burn of his fire tears as they ran down his stone cheeks. He remembered:

That ominous twilight, six moons past, he had just become the Titan, morphing into this creature of astounding size and strength; and red all over in sulphuric skin and acidic breath.

"My darling boy, what have you done?" Lilith had just said, "what have you done to yourself?"

"Isn't he just glorious?" Hèla commented in the dusk, standing on a broken Yulic pillar from the Citadel's collapse. Lilith turned to fire her a look, and the goddess of war bent her head and cleared her throat; she hadn't read the room. Lilith stood among the ruins of the school tower. "No! He's a monster. And I do not tread that word lightly."

"But you love monsters?" Giselle implied.

Ravenna's mother, the Seraph: [Gold Saint] Yuriel lowered the faerie to the ground but left her wings up. Lilith glanced from the women back to her roaring nephew who was tearing a horrendous yell at the clouds; he was so gigantic his heads touched with them. She said, looking up at his frightening might, "I love my nephew more.

I don't want him to be this—whatever this is."

At that moment, Aya Naamah and Corazón pushed up too from a fallen boulder and stared speechless at what their lord had become. He was stone and fire, and tens of feet. The King too, broke up from under the stone ruins, sending a fresh spray of dust and thickening blood in a scattered arc as he leaped out from the bricks in a burst of residual mana: an ability of [Kangaroo Devil] most of the Fallen shared.

He ascended in the air, floating there and carrying Ravenna's [Kronos Bubble] by tentacles of green shadows unfurling out of his shoulders. She was still inside it. Unable to break it, he settled with confining the bubble to himself.

The sickly emerald [shadow arms] kept Ravenna and her bubble glued to himself as the demon king levitated in the air. He climbed up to Rafel's height, the dozens of aerial feet it took the reach the huge, fiery pupils of the Red Titan which he'd become. It was a one-on-one contact which everyone down below in the ruins of the Citadel raised their eyes to watch.

Most of the resistance was dead—and professor Ivy lay under a bed of large stones, crumbled in from the tower's fall. She wasn't moving.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

Fresh agony entered like cold waves into Rafel's head as he spotted the Doctor witch and her plant tendrils unmoving around her; the vines twitched and went still.

Dead... She was dead.

Just like Rosamunde and Brunhilda.

In his mind, Rafel saw the slash of Hèla's talon as it took Bruna's head, and the spiked heel of Lilith's leg over Rosa's neck as she held her in the water fountain to drown. And his anger increased tenfold.

The bulbous inflamed veins on his volcanic body pulsed and streamed with hellfire, and his massive arms reached up into the skies as he jammed his fist into the unending stretch. "GRRRRHHH!" He let out furiously. His voice sent clouds skittering and scattered the nimbi in white fluffs.

The flying figure of the King entered his peripheral vision. The Red Titan stopped growling at the sky.

His eyes were like twin Suns up there, larger than life, as he blinked once at the bastard.

"YOU?" The Titan's voice was like many crashing waters.

Mephistopheles halted in his flight and just hung in the air; he sent his best, conquering smile. "Yes, me, Apollyon. Or whatever you are now, I guess. It must have hurt a lot to watch those two pesky bitches die, eh? My, my! How that one's head rolled off the tip of Hèla's claw. I should buy her a drink when we get to the taverns."

Clearly, the demon King was unafraid in the face of a fiery Titan.

Meph chuckled. "Ohh, did you expect me to be scared? Ha! By this?!" He ran a dismissive hand over all of Rafel's new, scarlet bulk. The Usurper told him, floating in the air between Rafel's two, flaming eyes: "I have faced many foes to get to where I am. Did you think I became the god of deception and [corruption runes] without my fair share of battles.

I have fucked fiends in death-duels. And I have fisted giants.

You as a Titan pose no threat. I shall—"

Rafel's mammoth arm cut of his next words with a great swipe at his head. The entire swooping arm closed over Mephistopheles, cleaving in his entire body. And the King went tumbling out of the dusk sky. For a man who loved to hear himself talk, he didn't do much listening.

SKRREEEE!

Rafel's mighty punch fell out the heavens with a force of [fire palm]. The flaming whirlwind sent the King out of breath; he shot out of the clouds like a projectile and slammed hard into the earth: a body bullet.

KA-BLAM!

He landed in the midst of the Citadel's rubble, not to far away from where Lilith stood in her medieval pencil heels.

The five digits of Rafel's Titan [Fire Palm] appeared massively in the ground, forming the shape of a five-finger crater in the hard earth. The winds went silent for a beat. Ravenna's [Kronos Bubble] was falling out of the sky. Rafel caught it—in his huge right hand.

She was like a pixie in the hollow of his hand.

But the Red Titan wasn't done yet, and he looked down upon the King, from his measure up in the Corynthian twilight sky, flat-pressed into the earth. If Mephistopheles wasn't an [S Rank] devil, he'd be dead: his bones shattered on impact. On the spot where he lay, in the palm-shaped crater, Meph was like an awkwardly large spider. His limbs were splayed everywhere where he had been mashed into the earth like paste.

"Yikes!" Hèla blinked at the smashed form of the king.

The Red Titan poured his brimming wrath down.

"TITAN ARTS! FURY OF KONG!"

Rafel summoned a rare ancient Hel art: [Gorilla Pound-for-Pound]. He closed his great fists around Ravenna, knowing the [Kronos Bubble] would be impervious; invulnerable. And then he brought those mighty arms down on Mephistopheles. The demon King was just rising from the rubble, his bones cracking as his joints tried to fix up, his healing abilities picking up, when Rafel brought down his first punch.

BOOM!

The Titan hand broke the earth asunder. Those on the ground jumped. The collision of his fist hit like thunder. He flattened the bits of stone about. Stone that was hard as diamond. But not to be compared when matched with [Fury of Kong].

If King Kong had horns and was red, with eyes leaking fire, that would be Israfel at the moment.

BOOM! BOOM! BA-DA BOOM! BAM!

He went to town on Meph. Punching away. Hulk smashing! His wallops hit hard and heavy, and fast. Meph couldn't heal himself quickly enough.

The Red Titan's fists were splashed in blood, and when he paused, the Usurper was as a banana peel on the earth.

Rafel lifted him up with a single finger to his large face. His hot breath scalded Meph's bleeding, broken body. The demon King coughed, about to say something but his mangled lips and snaggletooth couldn't move. Rafel liked it; evil cunts didn't deserve last words. Using both hands, Rafel held Meph apart with his thumbs.

One to his head, the other to his legs.

"GRRRRHHH!!!"

Rafel pulled.

—And the King of Eldoria went splat.

From there things went haywire: Rafel went on to scatter Mephistopheles soul in the void, so he could not resurrect. Lilith beckoned to Giselle and Yuriel when he began a rampage, storming on the earth. And it was only by the united force of the demoness, faerie, and Seraphim that they were able to bind Rafel in hefty chains—and a cross [demonagogue] strapped to his chest.

The crucifix being stabbed into him to restrain his demonic mana from overflowing and blasting them all to smithereens.

Thereafter, the Red Titan was ferried across the ocean on three ships to Titans Landing. The denizens of the Capital fishing on the early morning's coasts saw the frigates arrive in the mist of dawn, like giant spirits in the Cold Sea, bearing high with their banners the great red gargantuan.

In the days that followed the murder of the King, the Titan came to be known as the Rebel Lord. And it stuck.

This was how it had ended six moons before. And now, in the present, Rafel opened his eyes. Still in the flaming Giant form in which he had being brought into captivity, he laid his large head on the cold stone of the cavern dungeon and listened for the slow singing that was certain to come shortly.

And it did.

It was the voice of two women, his fellow prisoners: Corazón Mortimer and Aya Naamah.

Their own dungeons were not too far from his. And their singing was about love and war.

Just last night, gossip from the castle had reached his ears by a spelled firefly smuggled into his cage: Ravenna was alive—and she now was the Crown-queen of the Nine Realms.