A vice around his neck, Sandalphon could only watch in abject terror as hope was torn from underneath him. Gasping, thrashing against his captor, periphery went black as he clambered for his sword. This was no dream — somehow, defying all logic, Belial had freed himself from the shackles that bound him and his keeper to purgatory. The fallen angel undoubtedly did not think himself above underhanded tactics, but approaching the reigning primarch in his sleep? Playing to lovelorn desperation, raw and bleeding as it were?
( No, no, no — don’t take him from me again! )
“ Belial, ” he rasped, strength waning with every panicked strike. He couldn’t lose now — not to this critical oversight. Spontaneity trumped reason when Etemenanki fell, and while the rift’s integrity wasn’t grounds for immediate concern, he had failed to consider Belial condemning himself alongside Lucilius. It didn’t matter now. One final blow to his assailant’s side, and Sandalphon went limp. Whatever hell awaited him, atonement was absolute.
In the beats in between, Lucilius is left wanting -- an absence of his now halved power leaving room for a different kind of ache he did not think himself capable of. As he lets himself lay in the emptiness -- he closes his eyes and breathes out in steady intervals. Belial’s presence flickers -- filling the space between distortion and reality, yet never quite beyond either. With the brief respite, Lucilius soaks in the chaos of their hellscape, and begins to count before he threatens to snuff himself out again.
He’d done this in the beginning, when the vacancy had begun gnawing at his thoughts in a much more aggressive stir than the numbing sense of eroding it had inflicted him with moments prior; it was different each time, always evolving and taking different forms to swathe him in its forlorn embrace. A beast in its own right, and not at all like the ones Lucilius contrived with his own hands. At the very least, he could admire its lawlessness.
The sea of stars glimmer like they were wailing -- as though feeling his willing agony underneath him. The wound, too, continues to promise a mending that cannot complete itself. Even still, Lucilius rests. He rests, he rests, he rests...
...1,854... 1,855... 1,856...
A faded bellow of despair -- the cackle of triumphant cunning. Lucilius wakes -- senses Belial before he watches the fizzle of his form re-appearing. To both his displeasure and delight, he also senses the spare -- a struggle of his aura resisting the pull between dimensions. Then, the final wrest, and the spare is snared in their trap. Lucilius remains where he rests -- weakened. And with weakness, does he close his eyes once more when Belial and Sandalphon finally appear within the dimensional rift. He breathes out in a slow, almost dying-like breath. Then, in a low timbre, Lucilius rasps above the tense silence.
“One thousand, eight hundred, and seventy-one seconds.”
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