I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 460: Lust's Love

The Luqi Family's Manor Castle

Its walls had stood a thousand years, handed down through the Luqi line since ancient days. Outside, a fine drizzle came down without pause, and gusts of wind drove it in through the windows.

The middle-aged man with the brown curls stopped before the woman in the black dress and spoke to her.

"I can set you free."

"But I need you to wipe out the whole Palace Guard Corps for me, and kill that damned lizard person."

"I'm willing to offer up the whole of Moonlight City to you, and to hold that ritual you spoke of. Everything it calls for, I have already prepared."

The woman turned all the way around to face him. At her throat sat a collar of abyssal magic gold, its far end chained to a post.

She was a prisoner.

Intricate ritual formations had been carved into the post, and they drove that power down along the chain and into the woman's body.

Yet she seemed to bear no grudge at all against the man who held her captive. She looked at him with tender eyes instead, and when she spoke her voice was thick with infatuation.

"Set me free?"

"I don't need you to set me free. I stay here because I choose to, and I stay with you because I choose to."

"And I don't need you to offer me Moonlight City either."

"Then offer it to the Abyss's Queen of Fallen Angels, Melde," the man blurted out at once.

Desperation had driven him to call out that forbidden, evil name outright.

It made no difference to him who the sacrifice was offered to. All he wanted was Anu and every last one of the Palace Guard Corps dead, and the last governor's murderer stopped before he ever reached the royal capital.

The woman's smile turned reverent. "The Queen of Fallen Angels has no need of sacrifice. Hers is only to give."

"She bestows the power of the Abyss upon every mortal alike, and brings each one's original sin into the light."

"Every one of us carries original sin. Every one of us carries desire. And those so-called gods do nothing but smother our desires and our very nature."

The woman spread her arms wide, and a tender smile bloomed across her face.

In that moment she seemed less a Fallen High Priest of the Abyss than a saintly woman guiding the mortal world toward the light.

"But in the Abyss there is no need of that. In the Abyss every one of us can find our true self again, and pour out our own nature and desire without restraint."

"Fall into the Abyss, and dwell with original sin."

"Set desire loose. Ugliness alone is the true face of every one of us."

"We need not fear sin. We need not dread the desire in our own hearts, because this is what we have always been."

The woman lowered her head and cupped the man's face in both hands.

"Don't use a terrible word like killing. You haven't killed anyone."

"And they won't die either."

"You're only giving everyone in that city the chance to find their true self, and setting them loose from the shackles of the mortal world."

The man looked into her eyes, and little by little his face melted into infatuation.

He seemed to truly believe her now, and he murmured.

"That's right!"

"That isn't sacrifice. That's deliverance."

"They'll go on existing all the same, only in another shape."

It did not last. He wrenched his head aside, and clarity returned to his eyes.

Fear spread across his face, and he pointed at her in horror. "You're bewitching me again."

From the first time he had fallen under her spell, he had known this underground cell could no longer truly hold her. And yet from that day on he could not keep away. Again and again he came back down here, drawn by something beyond his own control.

The woman only looked back at him, her face still full of love. "All I do is hold your own heart up before you, so you can see what is truly in it."

The man did not dare meet her eyes. He gritted his teeth, and at last made up his mind.

By now, there was no other choice left to him.

And for reasons he could not explain, some part of him had chosen to believe this woman before him, as though he truly loved her.

"I'll let you out. I only hope you'll keep your promise."

The woman gazed at him tenderly. "Of course. I would never hurt you."

She stroked her belly, and said softly.

"Your child is still here in my belly. We're a family!"

The man opened the ritual formation, and the being that had spent all this while imprisoned in darkness was set free.

As she passed along the corridor, the sealing images and carvings on the walls dissolved one after another, as though burning away.

Clatter!

Clatter!

The woman in the black dress walked out of the heavily guarded, hidden shrine chamber, the lengthened chain at her neck clattering along the ground behind her. At the doorway, someone unfastened it for her.

The woman in the black dress had once been a Fallen High Priest of the Abyss Cult, a third-rank ability user of immense power, qualified even to contend for the office of the cult's High Priest.

Only, ever since the God of Original Sin sank into slumber and the Abyss Cult broke apart, the whole cult had turned inward on itself in war.

And in that war, she had been utterly defeated.

By pure chance the Luqi family had seized her and sealed her power away, and they had not killed her. They had kept her instead, a prisoner in secret.

One reason was their hunger to make use of her formidable strength. The other was their wish to breed from this powerful woman an heir of extraordinary bloodline, flawed though such an heir might be. Nothing could hold back the people of this era in their longing for power.

The woman walked slowly toward the entrance, out into the great hall of the main keep beyond.

Paintings hung along the way, one after another, and the story of the Luqi family's first ancestor ran painted across the walls.

It was a story from the age of King Alpens, when Suinhor had only just been founded amid blood and fire.

In those days the snake people had not yet taken family names. The age of the Fire Guardians had only just ended. King Alpens had only lately founded his kingdom, accepted the fealty of the Oath-Takers, and granted them fiefs in the four directions to open up new lands. Those were the very first generation of nobles.

The paintings showed the beast-herding tribes of the north sweeping south with their people, Prince Smerkel leading a great army to intercept them, and the Luqi family's ancestor marching out to war alongside him.

The Luqi family's forebear had held Moonlight City to the death, holding the enemy host in place at the cost of his own life, and that sacrifice was what let Prince Smerkel break the beast-herding tribes and win a glorious victory.

It was a family with a long and storied history, one steeped in glory.

Even the poem Divine Blessing kept a record of the Luqi family's forebear.

Luqi had been sacrificed to win that victory, and nightmares plagued Smerkel ever after. Then came a chance encounter with a divine being. With God Iva's help, King Smerkel saw into Luqi's dream, and at last the nightmares let him go.

And so the story of Luqi and Prince Smerkel was sung ever after, carried down through that ancient poem, the Divine Blessing.

Only now, his own descendants had betrayed that former glory.

Everyone in the hall had been waiting in anxious suspense, and now they saw the woman in black step out. The ouroboros emblem on her clothing was enough on its own to make every pair of eyes in the room contract at once.

"What is that...?"

Then the crowd cried out as one in alarm, "She's from the Abyss Cult!"

Someone else took the measure of her power. "A high third-rank ability user?"

Fear took hold of them all, and every eye turned at once to the head of the Luqi family. They already knew what he meant to do.

Only, none of them had imagined that the method he claimed to have prepared would turn out to be this.

Having come this far, the head of the Luqi family no longer bothered hiding anything at all. His manner turned hard, and he put the question to everyone gathered there.

"Afraid of what?"

"If we don't move now, we're the ones who die next."

"Why do you think Morabi sent that lizard person monster here? A vicious brute with no regard for noble courtesy, and the moment he arrived he killed so many people."

"Because from the very start, Morabi sent him here to kill us."

"Do we sit here and wait to die, or do we fight back with everything we have?"

"Are we going to stand here dithering even now?"

Savagery beyond measure came over the head of the Luqi family's face, and ruthlessness stood plain in his eyes.

"Summon the power of an Abyss King and wipe the whole Palace Guard Corps out of existence, that damned lizard person along with them."

"Once it's done, we lay every bit of it on the Abyss Cult. We'll be nothing but the heroes who put down the rebellion."

Someone else asked, "And if someone comes to investigate?"

The head of the Luqi family answered, "King Morabi can dig as hard as he likes, he'll never trace it back to us. It will all be the work of rioting rabble, all of it the Abyss Cult's hand moving in the shadows."

"And once he's failed here he won't have the strength to spare on us either, because he will have failed."

"He'll need to prove he still has the strength to rule this kingdom, and after this there'll be no end of challengers rising to test his throne."

"And we'll take back everything that belongs to us. We'll take back the whole of Moonlight Province."

"Our enemy is no god, still less a temple. He's nothing but a mortal."

"A mortal king, and nothing more."

"What is there in that to fear?"

"And what if a god takes notice?" someone else asked.

A trace of urgency showed in the head of the Luqi family now, and his voice turned savage.

"Who do you think you are? The Evil God of Original Sin?"

"To hell with the gods."

The head of the Luqi family produced a sworn oath document. With the Fallen High Priest's power and presence at his back, and with the pressure Anu himself had brought to bear, he forced every last person in the room to press a bloody handprint onto it.

"Every one of you, swear it. Keep this secret."

Once everyone had signed, a single man carried the document away, out beyond the manor's walls entirely. No one but the head of the Luqi family himself knew where the thing would be hidden.

By this point, the head of the Luqi family's plan could already be counted more than half a success.

Once the strength of the Palace Guard Corps was wiped away, he would be free to seize the whole of Moonlight Province and become its true master.

"From this moment on we live and die together, all of us. Not one of us has a way back."

At last they all went down below ground.

A ritual had already been laid out down there, one that drew on a thousand years of the Luqi family's accumulated wealth and swallowed who knew how many extraordinary materials.

The sacrificial offerings alone included seven hearts torn from peak-tier vengeance fire corpses, three brains taken from rotted wing demons, a huge quantity of cores left behind by stone demons, and every manner of other precious offering besides.

Most important of all, there was even the core of an extinguished great fire demon, seized from who knew where.

And there at the ritual's very center stood the woman, taking its power into herself.

The ritual began.

Hidden within the night and the fine rain, an invisible pillar of brownish-black light shot up into the sky.

Her consciousness, imprisoned for so many years, at last connected once more with that realm deep within the Dream Realm, and she returned to the homeland she had longed for.

Finally, she saw the swamp transform into the world of the Abyss, terrible black mud surging forward in waves that blotted out sky and earth alike.

And at the very end of the Abyss, within a temple both sacred and crumbling, a tall, eight-winged fallen angel turned her gaze toward the mortal world.

One of her wings was white. The other was black.

She alone was the true embodiment of desire itself, the King of the Original Sin of Lust.

A flush of color rose across the woman's face, as though even she could not resist the allure of the King of Lust.

"Great Queen of Fallen Angels."

Inside the ritual formation, the power within the woman's body swelled without end.

Wisps of black smoke rose endlessly from the ritual formation and poured into the woman's body.

What it truly poured into was the embryo within the woman's womb.

Her belly began to swell, faintly at first, then without end.

Black markings spread outward with her belly at their center, crawling over her whole body, up along her neck and tail, all the way to her back.

The whole ritual formation began to lift free of the ground and hang suspended in the air. Extraordinary materials and sacrificial offerings shattered by the score, turning into black markings that stamped themselves onto the woman's skin.

At first glance it looked as though some strange totem or tattoo had been branded across her entire body.

And yet it did nothing at all to diminish her beauty, nor the air of desire and forbidden allure she gave off.

In this moment, she herself was the ritual.

Thud thud!

Thud thud!

A sound like some great drum being struck rolled in from every direction, and space itself seemed to shudder with it.

Everyone present felt a wave of nameless dread, as though something unspeakably terrible were about to descend upon the mortal world.

The moment it appeared would be the moment disaster arrived.

At that moment the head of the Luqi family looked at the woman inside the ritual formation, threw a fearful glance at her belly, and asked.

"What else needs doing?"

He knew full well the ritual demanded the child in her belly as its price. It was his own child too, and still he felt not the slightest trace of pity, only a faint twinge of regret.

The Luqi family had meant, at first, for this child to be born and raised into a powerful ability user.

But circumstances had changed. With Anu and the Palace Guard Corps bearing down on them in force, the Luqi family's plans had naturally shifted along with them.

When the man asked what more needed doing, what he truly meant was to urge her to act, and to act now.

The woman looked at the head of the Luqi family, and said.

"Darling, there's no need for any of that now. Leave the rest to me."

The woman reached a hand out toward him, that same look of infatuation still on her face.

"I love you!"

"I have offered myself up to Lady Melde, and offered our child to the Abyss."

"But you are the one thing I could never give up. How could I leave you behind, all alone in the mortal world?"

The woman raised her hand. Out of the ground there suddenly welled coil after coil of strange black mud, gathering together as though alive, surging straight toward the head of the Luqi family.

"Come. Then we can be together forever."

"Offer yourself to the Great Queen of Fallen Angels, Melde. Offer yourself to the eternal Abyss."

At that, terror shocked the head of the Luqi family half out of his mind. He had known the woman before him was mad, but he had never imagined she could be mad to this degree.

He was willing to pay any price to wipe out the Palace Guard Corps and the lizard person Anu, but that price had never been meant to include himself.

The head of the Luqi family watched the black mud come surging at him, turned, and fled.

"You madwoman, you madwoman..."

"I don't want to die..."

"I am the head of the Luqi family. I am the master of Moonlight Province. I refuse to..."

The woman told him, "Not death. Only to dwell with the Abyss."

He made it no more than a few steps before the black mud swallowed him whole.

"You madwoman!"

"I want..."

Mmmph~

The terrible black mud coiled around him, then poured in through his eyes, his nostrils, his ears, his mouth, flooding into his body and choking off the curses in his throat.

Little by little, the curly-haired man changed into a monstrous snake demon, until not a trace of his human shape was left.

The woman drew out the collar of abyssal magic gold that had bound her all those years and fastened it at last around his neck. Then she led him, walking, out toward the entrance.

Stripped of all wisdom, left with nothing but mad desire, the snake demon followed on her leash like nothing more than a pet.

"This... this... this..." Everyone else in the hall was terrified out of their wits.

"Spare us! We're willing to submit to you!" They took her for someone who meant to kill them too, or turn them all into monsters as well, and one after another they threw themselves flat to the ground in terror.

"Don't kill me!" They shook from head to foot, and some of them collapsed outright, too terrified to so much as move.

But the woman never laid a hand on the other nobles gathered in the hall. She held their signed confession over them now, and the Abyss Cult would find a use for them in time.

The only one she had ever wanted was the head of the Luqi family.

That man she claimed to "love so deeply."

That, indeed, was how a follower of Lust loved.

She walked out of the castle alone, and the moment she stepped past its threshold, the rain in the sky changed.

It turned into a filthy black rain, and overhead black clouds gathered without end, spreading wider with every moment.

---

Meanwhile, elsewhere, Anu had only just confirmed that the prisoner brought in truly was the garrison legion commander he had been searching for. He was already arranging for a party of lizard people to set out at once for the capital, the City of Fire Protection, with the man in tow.

And just then the rain outside began to fall harder and harder.

Splash splash splash~

The downpour came in sheets, grating on everyone's nerves all the more.

Anu seemed to sense something. Uneasy, he walked outside to look.

Outside lay pitch black, but by the lamp fire he could make out the wet stains pooling on the ground.

"Black rain?"

Anu put out his hand. A single drop of rain landed on the back of it, and at once a smear of filth spread outward from the spot, creeping rapidly across his skin.

Anu's face changed at once. "A corrupting force born of mythical Spirituality."

What a beast knight inherited was Kurmis the Feathered Serpent's own power, and it was acutely sensitive to any force that corrupted Spirituality.

The longsword at his waist reacted in that same instant, a tongue of flame racing up along his arm.

Sizzle!

In a moment it had burned that black power away to nothing.

Anu looked up at the sky, and all at once a story came back to him, one Kurmis had told him about black rain.

Anu rushed to the rear at once. Two lizard people were in the corridor there, just swinging up onto their wind lizard dragons, ready to leave Moonlight City for the City of Fire Protection, and he shouted at them.

"Stop! You cannot go out there!"

Baffled, the lizard people climbed down at once all the same.

"What's wrong?"

"Chief Anu, what's happened?"

Anu offered no explanation. He gave the order at once, every soul in the governor's mansion to be gathered into the great hall, and no one to run loose.

"Everyone, come here. No one moves."

"There is something wrong with the rain outside. You must not let so much as a drop of it touch you."

As for Anu himself, he made straight for where his magical beast companion waited.

As he ran down the corridor he kept his eyes lifted toward the distance, as though searching for where all of this had truly come from.

He could see black clouds gathering without end, the storm falling harder by the moment, and the very air thick with a stench of rot and corruption.

Hiss!

Whimper~

And already, across the city, people had begun turning into snake demons, and their hisses and whimpers rose and fell in the distance, tangled together with screams of pure terror.

Seeing it, Anu was more certain than ever. This was Abyss Black Rain.

"The Evil God of Original Sin?"

"No. Impossible."

"He has already fallen into slumber, grievously wounded by the punishment of a Great God."

Saying that name aloud sent something shuddering through Anu's heart.

Anu had heard the story of the Avel from Kurmis's own mouth, how the Abyss was first born, when the Gate of Mythology fell from the sky.

Abyss Black Rain had blanketed the whole world, scouring away mountain peaks that had once towered into the clouds. Fenbuk, whose name among the winged people meant the Mountain That Could Not Be Crossed, had in the end become a bottomless abyss and nothing more.

What a terrible sight that must have been.

Had the hero Yafuan not sealed the Abyss away deep within the Dream Realm, the Avel of the New World would never have existed at all.

And yet this black rain now could barely even blanket the whole of Moonlight City. Nothing about it carried that same power, the power of a doomsday descending.

Anu guessed the truth at once. "The King of the Black Mud Abyss. The eight-winged Fallen Angel, Melde."

"Someone is channeling the power of the Black Mud Abyss."

The King of the Black Mud Abyss, Melde, might not be so very much stronger than the other Abyss Kings, but the Black Mud Abyss itself was the foulest and most terrible Abyss of them all.

The Abyss itself, at the very beginning, had been created by the King of the Black Mud Abyss, Melde. She had corrupted a god of Spirituality from the primordial age, and her own root power was the foulest and most fundamental power within the whole Abyss.

Her followers, more often than not, were nothing like the followers of other Abyss Kings, nor like the ceramic figurine, that servant of the God of Original Sin, playing at sacrifice or plundering divine blood.

But wherever she appeared, everyone there would be turned into monsters of the Abyss, fallen into the Abyss race.

This alone was the most terrible thing of all.

Worse than being sacrificed. Worse than being killed. Worse even than having one's divine blood torn away.

One would be lost to the Abyss forever, turned from a snake person or a winged person into a monster beyond all horror. Not even demons themselves were spared it.

Anu reached the edge of the corridor just as a massive wind lizard dragon came flying to meet him, and the two collided head on.

Beneath a blaze of spiritual power, Anu let out a great roar.

"Second Beast Knight Form."

In an instant Anu had transformed into a Dark Scale Giant more than ten meters tall. A sweep of his arm brought a massive dark-flame longsword into his hand, huge soft wings unfurled wide at his back, and flame spread out across his entire body.

He called on the power of the wind, and shot straight up into the sky.

The black rain kept falling without end, but none of it reached him. The flame wreathing his body boiled every drop away before it could draw near.

In his Dark Scale Giant form, Anu hung suspended in midair, his gaze sweeping all around him.

At last he made out a shadow approaching from the distance. The black rain smothering the whole city was radiating outward from that very figure.

As she drew steadily closer, monsters of every kind kept appearing in the space around her.

Anu's eyes fixed on her. "A cultist of the Abyss!"

Without another word, Anu charged straight at her.

He swept a hand through the air, and the sky all around him emptied out in an instant.

Then he flung it out. A massive cannon of compressed air smashed down toward the earth and struck the ground with a violent, thunderous blast.

BOOM!

The blow struck true, but Anu did not so much as pause.

Diving down out of the sky, the Dark Scale Giant repeated the same attack again and again, hammering the same spot over and over.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM~

Blast after blast of compressed air brought the whole street crashing down, and the stone statue at its center toppled over and shattered along with it.

The moment he had closed the distance he drove his dark-flame longsword down toward where his target stood, without a heartbeat's hesitation.

Thunk~

He had felt nothing of it while raining down blasts of compressed air. The instant this strike landed, though, a faint recoil traveled back up his arm, and it was like driving his blade into a solid steel plate. He had not shaken her in the slightest.

Sure enough, a figure walked out from within the lingering shockwaves of the blasts.

She was entirely unharmed.

A chain in her hand led a massive snake demon more than ten meters tall, and her power poured endlessly into its body, refining it into a special seal puppet.

The snake demon's six arms had locked together as one, and that alone was what had blocked Anu's strike a moment before.

Anu's face darkened. He had already expected her to be difficult to deal with, but seeing it with his own eyes still tightened something in his chest, and he began at once to prepare other measures.

She came on, bringing the wind and rain with her, and lifted her head to look at Anu.

There in the darkness, Anu at last made out the faint shape of her.

It was a woman.

The woman saw Anu too, and knew at once who he was.

"The lizard person, Anu?"

"My beloved bid me kill every one of you."

"But I can't quite bear to kill you all. So come with me instead, into the eternal Abyss!"

Her words told Anu at once that this cultist before him was no accident.

Under the Abyss Covenant, a high enough price could summon forth even the Door of Original Sin. But a ritual of that kind was never something laid out in haste.

Someone had wanted him dead for a long while now, and Anu could already guess who.

Anu had always known those people had no bottom line. He had never once imagined they could be this insane.

They were Suinhor's own people, nobles of Moonlight Province, and yet they had conspired with the Abyss to sacrifice their own kin.

Fury boiled up in Anu. This sickened him even more than any Abyss cultist or evil-god sacrifice he had ever encountered.

Anu drew his sword and rose to meet her, throwing himself into battle against the six-armed snake demon on her leash.

"You rats skulking in the dark, even the Evil God of Original Sin was punished by a Great God, and still you will not stop!"

The woman laughed, and turned to speak to Anu.

She drifted lightly upward, chain still in hand, and alighted on the six-armed snake demon's shoulder.

"My mistress is Melde. I walk forward in obedience to her will."

Even as he fought her fiercely, Anu kept glancing around him.

"And what of the others?"

The woman answered, "If you live through this, none of the others will."

"And if you become part of the Abyss race, then they'll become the Abyss's future followers, walking this same road at your side."

"So what's the point in asking now?"

Anu swung his dark-flame sword, striking again and again at the six-armed snake demon.

"Nothing but lies."

He hacked off two of its arms in quick succession, but the remaining four swung chain and weapon alike at him without pause, and overhead the black mud kept condensing into falling stones that rained down on him from the sky.

Anu meant to sever the remaining four arms as well, but monster after monster kept charging in at him.

He turned his blade aside, cut down another of the monsters, and hurled a blast of compressed air at the bizarre creatures swooping down from above.

Even as he did, the six-armed snake demon snatched up its two severed arms and fitted them back into place.

Hiss!

The snake demon let out a savage hiss, whole and at full strength once more, and threw itself back into the fight against Anu.

Just then someone came bursting out of a house and running toward Anu, one of his own soldiers, meaning to lend him aid.

But before he could even reach Anu's side, the black rain had already corroded him into a monster.

Anu saw it, and his eyes seemed fit to split with rage.

"Everyone, stop where you are! No one is to come outside!"

In the midst of this black rain ritual, any apprentice-rank ability user or ordinary person who stepped outside was nothing but cannon fodder handed straight to the enemy.

Even a lower-rank ability user, one mortals would consider formidable beyond measure, could do nothing to help Anu in a situation like this.

He looked out over the whole city in chaos, new monsters being born on every side, each of those monsters sowing yet more chaos in turn.

Anu's rage burned toward the heavens.

A single voice echoed through his mind, again and again.

"Kill her!"

"Kill her."

"No, wipe out every one of those damned nobles instead. The Luqi, the Fallen Leaf family..."

Anu had never once been this furious before, not even in the great battle to hunt down the ghouls.

And the higher his rage climbed, the more the power of the dark-flame sword in his hand seemed to grow with it, stronger with every passing moment.

Anu attacked the female cultist of the Abyss with everything he had, sparing nothing, holding nothing back.

He was searching for a way to drive her out of Moonlight City. She herself was the vessel carrying the ritual, and there were only two ways to break this black rain.

One was to kill her outright. The other was to drive her out and wait for the power of rituals to run dry.

But she commanded monster after monster to hurl themselves at Anu without end, determined to stay right where she was.

Anu felt the danger of it more keenly still.

"This ritual is still not finished?"

"Does it serve some other purpose?"

Watching her, Anu was struck all at once by the thought that the ritual's true purpose might not be to summon the black rain at all.

Anu's blade moved faster still, hacking at the six-armed snake demon in a frenzy, as though he had fallen into some battle-madness of his own.

With the female cultist's eyes and whole attention fixed on him, Anu suddenly shifted his tactics.

"Disengage!"

Anu and the wind lizard dragon broke apart from their fused state, one being splitting back into two.

This, too, was one of the many combat forms a beast knight could call upon.

The wind lizard dragon locked the six-armed snake demon at once in an iron grip. Anu, restored to his lizard person form and carrying nothing but his matte longsword, became a streak of light and shadow, hurtling toward the snake demon's shoulder.

It all happened in the space of a single spark, and no one had ever seen a beast knight wield this kind of power before. Naturally, the woman had no defense prepared.

A flicker of surprise showed in her eyes, but she had no time to get a single word out.

Anu was already upon her, driving his sword clean through her chest.

"Die!"

The lizard person let out a savage roar, his eyes gone entirely blood red.

The woman looked down at her own chest. A flicker of surprise crossed her face, but there was no trace of panic in it, and no despair.

She only laid a hand over her belly, and lifted her eyes to look once at Anu.

Then she spoke.

"The time has come."

The woman closed her eyes, and in that instant a terrible power descended from beyond the heavens, surging in from another world entirely.

Anu watched a boundless dark domain spread outward from around the woman's corpse, black mud without end welling up from beneath the earth, curling into wave after towering wave.

The woman was dead, but in dying she had given birth to an endless darkness. That, all along, had been her true purpose.

A gate leading to the Black Mud Abyss.

It had opened.