26.12

On her command, Draven transported them to his living quarters, inside Nevehna's Magic Guild. The room was decorated with artfully displayed ancient artifacts - most were magical toys collected in his travels, and all radiated dark magic. There were a several sculptures of Sephiroth that Zyrdicia knew were millennia old. Even the art on the room's burgundy-colored walls contained abstract renditions of demons.

"Obsess much?" Zyrdicia asked, staring at one of the sculptures.

"It's genetically encoded," he smiled wryly.

She stared hard at him and said, "Do you worship them?"

"No. At least not in the old sense."

"Is there another sense?"

"What you experienced tonight is the religion of the future, I think."

"That was fun," she smiled. "I had no idea this was going on. But why are they called Sephiroth Three? There were five men on stage. Three isn't a significant number in Tenaebran magic."

"It's the number of the Twilight Trinity."

"The what?"

"Zyr, Azriok, and you, uniting all magic in you in the end." He said this matter-of-factly, as though the concept were common knowledge.

"Twilight Trinity. Fuck. Who made that up?"

"The idea is about as old as you are. When the Old Priests were still running Lyr, they considered it heretical and killed anyone who spoke of it. In recent years, the Trinity has become fairly mainstream."

"Is there's an unauthorized priesthood promoting it?"

"No. Twilight worshipers mostly gather at events like the one you experienced tonight." He looked down at the floor and murmured, "Your display there tonight will have a profound effect on its popularity now. It will be perceived as an endorsement."

Ignoring the mention of her new Sephiroth friend, she asked, "Why haven't I seen this Trinity worship in Lyr?"

"Lyr has become a city of decadent uselessness. It's unfashionable to be a publicly declared follower of the Trinity in Lyr."

Draven was silent for a long moment. He took both of her hands in his own and brought them to his lips. He breathed, "What you displayed tonight was magnificent."

Zyrdicia's lips twisted. She said, "You take this crap way too seriously. What Andi and I did was blasphemy. It's a game."

"It wasn't blasphemy," he said gravely. "You are supposed to absorb their power. It's your destiny I don't know whether to fall in love with you or worship you now."

She jerked her hands from his grasp then and took a step back, away from him. His familiarity with the cosmology of her world deeply unnerved her. The idea of the Twilight Trinity unnerved her, too. Philip had never said anything about it to her.

"I'm sorry if I've angered you by talking about it," Draven said gently, his tone apologetic. "I won't bring it up again," he said quietly, his gaze suggesting he understood far too much of that part of her world. He smiled mischievously and added, "But when you decide you want a priesthood again, I'm so there."

"Fifty years later, and you still want to be my damned apprentice," she teased. "I have more grown up uses for you now."

"I've learned a few things in those fifty years," he grinned slyly. He made a twirling motion with one finger, and a streak of light shot out from it, snaked around her and pulled her gently toward him.

She let herself fall against him, and as soon as they touched a sensual wave of alien magic washed over her. When her lips touched his, the erotic magic flowing between intensified. The magic arced from him into her at every point where their skin touched, then raced back into him again. He held her in this soft magical embrace. They kissed for a long time, savoring the sensation.

Clothes eventually vanished, courtesy of more of his magic. The additional skin contact ignited the magic further and her own energy joined it. She sensed him gasping for breath, barely able to contain the amount of magical energy flowing back and forth between them without his matter exploding. He should have been afraid for his life, but she sensed no fear at all in him. In an instant, he surprised her by adapting to the amount of magical energy, altering the magical flow, and changing its motion from a simple arc to a swirling pattern, and the change evoked a delighted gasp from her. She felt him smile at her reaction within their kiss.

"Let me in your mind," she whispered between kisses. "You'll like the feeling of me there."

He stopped kissing her, pressing his forehead against hers and staring into her eyes. He shook his head, denying her. His arms tightened around her and they both levitated off the ground. Their bodies rotated in the air weightlessly, freed of the nuisance of gravity.

He shifted the flow of magic again causing it to throb this time, evoking another gasp from her. This time she realized he was harnessing a bit of her own energy to amplify the erotic magic without any need for her to will it. "So clever," she whispered.

Above Draven, she saw the air shimmer. A shadow flowed into his back. His eyes rolled momentarily into the back of his head. His entire body convulsed. "Finally!" she breathed, rolling atop the convulsing body. "I was afraid you were going to leave me to romp with a useless mortal."

A moment later, Draven's eyes rolled back into focus, but there was no hint of him in them. They were entirely black now. Every hint of the brown that had been there a moment ago was gone. So were the whites of his eyes. Instead, there were large pools of darkness where human eyes had been. Draven no longer resided in his body - his consciousness had been evicted by another.

Recognizing the entity now inside Draven, she bit her own tongue until she tasted blood. Then she kissed him furiously and pounded her psyche against him with all her might. It connected with the entity inside Draven. She tasted Andireon's magical blood in her mouth, being channeled from somewhere inside the mortal frame the dark angel was inhabiting. She had no further conscious awareness of herself as a separate entity. As her body joined with her possessed partner's, the Zyrian part of her soul fused with its missing piece, locking with that piece like two parts of a diabolic jigsaw puzzle. The rhythm of their bodies became the motion of that fused piece of soul - moving in and out, back and forth between them. For an impossibly short instant, they were complementary parts completing a single entity. The sense of togetherness and completeness was perfect, and far beyond anything her mortal mind could have ever imagined.

It lasted only until the final moment of their climax. At that moment, the Zyrian soul separated again, ripping itself into two pieces again in a explosion of soul-wrenching agony. The sensation of the joined magical soul tearing was a kind of pain Zyrdicia had never imagined. It was worse than the most agonizing moment of Azriok's soul fusing to her own. Her scream was not one of ecstasy. It was a miserable, terrified howl. Though the pain was over in an instant, the sensation was forever etched in her mind as one of the most agonizing moments of her life.

When it was over, Draven's unconscious body flopped onto the floor, face-down, like a discarded toy. He did not stir. Andireon scrambled out of the body, looking terrified. He backed up until his wings touched a wall, then crouched down, wrapping himself in his black wings. Zyrdicia could see him shaking almost as badly as she was. She was scarcely able to move. There was no part of her body that didn't echo the pain of having a soul ripped apart. She curled into a ball on top of Draven's bed, her arms wrapped around herself.

The emotional pain was unbearable. It was as though all the loneliness in the universe suddenly bore down on her. She wasn't even sure she had the right part of her soul. Everything in her spirit was mixed up, ripped up and battered.

As Zyrdicia stared at Andireon, she realized with dismay that he was silently weeping. And she envied him powerfully for the ability to do that. All around Andireon on the floor, there were enormous, tear-shaped diamonds. Several clung to his wings. She remembered Baal once bringing her a handful of such diamonds and claiming they were Azriok's tears. She had assumed it was a lie then.

It wasn't fair that the dark angels had some way to release the sadness, when she had none. It was yet another of the cosmos's vicious cruelties. The sadness was great enough she wished she were still mortal, so that she could die to end it. That, too, was out of her power. The sight of the bereft Sephiroth caused her throat to tighten. The experience had been as traumatic for the dark angel as it had been for herself.

Thinking out loud, she said in a hoarse voice, "Azriok once told me the key cosmic difference between angels and mortals is that angels are complete entities. But Azriok was wrong."

Andireon opened his wings and looked up at her, fixing her with black, hopeless eyes that contained all the grief of the entire universe. He looked as though he had born witness to every misery ever experienced since the dawn of time.

Everything about the dark angel suddenly made sense to her. She frowned, "Humans never are complete. Azriok said human mating is a symbolic expression of that. But Azriok was wrong about angels being complete entities. Some angels aren't complete. Zyr and Azriok made themselves incomplete by giving up part of their souls. And you were incomplete from the moment of your creation. Your fascination with humanity is born of that kinship."

Andireon stared at her silently with sad eyes that looked like gigantic pools of darkness.

She frowned and whispered, "How could you have let us do this?"

"Kinship," he repeated softly, fixing her with his achingly beautiful eyes. "I wanted to know the experience of feeling completeness."

"So you decided to sew us together just to know what it feels like to be ripped apart?"

"I did not know that would happen," he said earnestly, shaking his head miserably. "I have possessed humans a thousand times during their mating rituals to observe their experience of it. This was not what I expected."

They stared at each other silently, each tormented by a spiritual injury caused by the other and yet desperate for that brief glimmer of togetherness that had occurred right before the calamity. She was suddenly very, very tired. She asked plaintively, "Will you let me fall asleep in your wings?"

He stared at her with an inscrutable expression. She couldn't tell whether he was confused, frightened, or simply overwhelmed. But she knew whatever weird bond they had been developing before was a thousand times stronger now. She couldn't bear the thought of him disappearing now, and taking the part of himself that belonged to her with him.

"Yes," he said, standing up and reaching out a hand to her. He shook out his wings, causing a cascade of jewels to fall onto the carpet.

"I want those," she whispered. He gave her a dark, uncertain look.

She pointed at Draven, sensing his faint heartbeat. She did not want him remembering anything about this. As far as she was concerned, she hadn't experienced anything with him. It was all Andireon. She was unsure whether to kill him, though. Perhaps she and Andireon would someday be brave enough to want to experience the joining of their souls again.

Andireon stared at her. She realized she was streaming her thoughts directly to the Sephiroth without meaning to do so.

He waved his hand absently at the unconscious mortal. "He will remember nothing of this."

She took Andireon to her magical palace in the cloud world - her retreat where it was always night. The dark angel lay next to her on her bed and pulled one of his wings over her, blanketing her inside its soft black feathers. His tears were piled upon the table next to the bed. She wasn't sure yet why she wanted them. She only knew that they were very dear.

As she closed her eyes, she said, "How come there are hardly any stories about you in the demonology histories?"

"I chose to avoid mortal attention."

"Why?"

"You found the bindrune for Baal relatively easily because his footprint among mortals was so massive. He was far more powerful than I am, yet here I am, long after he has ceased to exist."

"Did you ever appear as a god to mortals under a different name, so that they would make sacrifices to you?"

"Sometimes," he admitted. "But far less often than my brethren."

"What kind of kind of deity do you invent for mortals to worship?"

"A god of lust."

Zyrdicia smiled wearily at this. "Fitting that you should be the one to slay Cupid and steal his bow. And what lesser demons do you rule over?"

"Succubi and incubi."

She frowned, thinking about this. According to mortal demonologists, succubi and incubi were supposed to be the only demons who weren't assigned to the control of a Lord of Hell. They were supposedly free to act on their own. Andireon had kept his role in commanding them a secret.

"Andi, will you come with me into my dreamworld?"

"It is already unbearably crowded there," he whispered darkly. "That territory belongs to Azriok."

"Can you take me to a different dreamworld then?"

Andireon was silent then. She felt his presence in her mind, softly urging her to sleep. In her ear, he breathed in his magical, alluring whisper, "Deesh." She smiled and drifted into a peaceful slumber. She dreamt that the moment of the joining of their souls hadn't ended.