[Location: Somewhere in Hell]

Greed broke, sobbing openly, hands clawing the dirt. "M-My Lord—thank you! Thank you—!"

The shadow waved his hand dismissively, as if swatting a fly. "Enough. You'll need your tongue for what comes next."

The ember pulsed once — as if the unseen heart of Hell itself had just skipped a beat.

The shadow's hand lingered midair, fingers curling lazily in the stillness. The movement was almost graceful, almost gentle, but every Satan present felt the weight of an unspoken command crawl into their bones.

"Now," the shadow murmured, "What did they say about the 'merge'?"

"About t-that..." Pride wanted to stand, but a heavy pressure pushed his shoulder downward, almost snapping his spine in half. Pride's knees hit the scorched ground with a dull crack. The pressure wasn't physical—it was conceptual, like a verdict being pronounced by the abyss itself.

The shadow didn't look directly at him. "Speak."

Pride's jaw trembled from anger or humiliation; no one knows. "They… ridiculed us, my Lord," Pride forced out, each word dragging blood from his bitten tongue. "Said the merge was a delusion… such a thought should... should be erased before it festers into another war between ruins," Pride finished, voice breaking.

A silence fell over the gathering like the slow descent of ash after a city burns.

The shadow didn't move. His outline flickered once—then again—as if reality itself couldn't decide what shape he should take. For a moment, the Satans thought they saw something vast beneath that darkness: wings made of glass, veins of molten scripture, eyes that didn't glow but absorbed light.

Then it was gone.

"Another war," the shadow repeated softly, as though tasting the words. "You make it sound as though the last one ever ended."

No one dared answer.

Sloth's voice—usually too sluggish to offend—broke the tension with an unsteady whisper. "The… merge—it failed before. The vessels—"

"—were weak," the shadow interrupted, tone silk over razors. "You think I've forgotten? You think I didn't watch you all tear pieces off one another while I slept?"

Greed flinched; Pride ground his teeth until sparks bled between his fangs.

Wrath, who had been silent until now, let out a low snarl. "Then what is it you want from us now, Lord? You speak of the merge, but without a core, without an anchor, it's—"

"—impossible?"

The shadow's head tilted, and something like a smile passed through the dark. "Funny. They said the same of resurrection once."

The floor trembled.

It wasn't an earthquake. It was Hell breathing.

Every Satan felt the pressure in their marrow, like molten gravity. The sky above—an endless vault of cracked obsidian—shuddered as if a storm was waiting just beyond it.

Pride was the first to realise it. "You mean… the core. You found one."

The shadow said nothing. He didn't need to.

The silence itself was confirmation.

Envy's eyes widened. "But that— that would mean—"

"That she returned?" the shadow murmured. "No, she hasn't. Not yet." His tone dropped, chilling even the flames around them. "But her echo has."

Wrath's jaw locked. "An echo?"

"But she should be long dead. Demon Sleep spares no one. How could there be an echo if the host was annihilated?" Sloth's words stumbled over themselves, half-whispered, half-pleaded.

The shadow's voice came low and smooth. "Because something refused to let her fade. A sliver of intent—preserved, parasitic. Like... burning her soul..."

"BURNING HER SOUL?!"

All seven were on their feet before they even realised it.

The roar that erupted from Wrath wasn't just fury—it was a mix of disbelief, terror, denial, and awe, all tangled into one blistering sound that split the molten air.

"Burning her soul?!" Wrath bellowed again, his eyes flaring blood-red. "That's— blasphemy! Even for her! The Primordial Sin was devoured by time! There shouldn't even be ash left to remember her!"

The shadow didn't reply.

Instead, the world around them began to peel.

The cracked horizon folded in on itself, colours bleeding in reverse as if reality were being rewritten from the marrow out. The obsidian plain beneath their feet warped into a spiral of sigils—each one pulsing like a heartbeat too large for the flesh of the world. The Satans staggered as whispers began to hum through the molten air. Words that weren't words. Echoes that didn't belong to any tongue.

Greed clutched his chest, convulsing. "W-what—what is this…?"

The shadow's voice came through the distortion like a calm ripple across a storm."Hell remembers what it wants to forget."

And then they saw it.

A flame. Small. Pinkish-red. Trapped within a black crystal suspended above the spiral. It didn't burn—it consumed. The air around it collapsed, the heat pulling toward it as if it were swallowing entropy itself.

Sloth fell to one knee, his voice breaking. "That… that isn't possible…"

The shadow finally turned toward it, and though no light escaped his silhouette, the faint curve of a smirk passed across where his mouth should have been."Tell me, my dear Sloth," he said softly, "what does impossibility mean to one born from sin itself?"

Pride tried to speak but couldn't. His throat locked. It wasn't reverence—it was fear. Primal, unreasoning fear. The kind one felt before something that shouldn't exist but did.

Wrath stepped forward, his aura tearing open the ground. "If that's truly her...burning her soul… what will she accomplish by this? Why suffer such agony? such... such..."

Wrath's question hung in the molten air, trembling with raw disbelief. The others didn't move. None dared.

The shadow did not answer immediately. Instead, he raised his hand, and the crystal above them shivered like glass dipped in blood. The flame inside flared—once, twice—then screamed.

Not in sound, but in essence.

A vibration tore through every Satan's mind, not as words but as memory—ancient, forbidden, familiar. The sound of the First Sin being born.

"She suffers," the shadow finally said, voice almost tender. "Because she protects."

The Satans stared. The flame twisted within the black crystal, a dying heartbeat made visible. Every pulse sent thin fractures crawling down the crystal's surface.

The fractures spread like veins of light through the darkness, spiderwebbing across the crystal until each pulse sounded like a scream trying to tear free. The Satans, beings who had long since forgotten what awe or despair felt like, found themselves wordless.

Greed's voice finally cracked the silence. "Protects… who?"

The shadow didn't answer. His silhouette flickered, revealing for a heartbeat the outline of something vast—horns that curved like crescents, wings that were neither angelic nor demonic but something older, something primordial.

Wrath took a half step forward, his aura thrashing against the unseen gravity pressing down on them. "You said her echo… if that's Lilith—if that's the Primordial Sin—then what could possibly—"

"—warrant her burning her own soul?" the shadow finished for him, tone light, almost curious. "What indeed."

The crystal cracked with a shrill note that shook the horizon. A wave of heat spread outward, turning the obsidian plain to glass.

Pride's composure fractured along with it. "You're hiding something. There's a reason you've gathered us here. That ember— that isn't her soul, is it? It's a link."

The shadow smiled. "You're learning, little monarch of vanity."

Greed turned pale, trembling. "A link? Then… a tether to what?"

The shadow's eyes—two pits of swallowing black—shifted toward the distant horizon where Hell's sky met a bleeding rift of crimson light. "To something that should not exist. To something that is… on his way to the top."

The word his echoed far longer than sound should have. The Satans felt it sink into the marrow of the world.

Envy's claws scraped her own arms, voice shaking. "You mean— the Prince? To the top? Heh~ he would be lucky to even scrap by imps, as for that maid of his... next time she would be turned into frost dust before she could even blink," Envy hissed, his laughter trembling on the edge of hysteria. "That silver whore and her sleeping prince—ghost stories meant to scare the lesser demons! You can't mean—"

The shadow moved.

He didn't step—he was movement. One blink and he was before Envy; the next, he was gasping, his throat lifted by a hand that wasn't quite solid. His fingers phased through his skin, searing marks of absence rather than touch.

"Careful," the shadow murmured, his tone dripping calm venom. "Mocking ghosts is dangerous when one of them wreaked you all like some forgotten footnote in her sleep."

The words slithered through Envy's skull like molten oil, and he choked, his laughter dying in a strangled wheeze. The other Satans didn't move. None dared to.

The shadow's fingers released him, but the damage remained—black veins of absence crawling up Envy's neck where his essence had been touched and not burned.

"Consider that a reminder," the shadow said softly, brushing phantom dust from his hand. "The silver one still breathes, but she is in no condition to interfere in our matters for now. So... get to the task, I want the symbols of..."

...

After some time, all satans were gone, leaving only the Shadow and the hut surrounded by darkness. As the Shadow's gaze returned to the twelve wings pinned to the hut's wall.

Sigh~

"Little Luci, sometimes I truly wonder, was digging for truth... for knowledge was... ever worth the price you paid?"

***

Stone me, I can take it!

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