[Drazniich]

Belial rode a few paces behind the party, an archaic manuscript in his hands. The cover was stone, with a series of silver glyphs decending down the front. Each page sent a scene in black fire above the book, twisting and turning as it played out an epic love story.

She was a child, and I was a child...

He slowly reached his hand through the images. They flitted around his fingers, escaping his touch. It played on. There was an angel, he flaming wings outstretched as she cradled someone in her arms. There was a sword embedded in his ribs, and flames pulsed down the handle. He turned the page again.

Now, she drew the blade out, turning towards something unseen. A massive demonic visage decended towards her, and she screamed defiant silently as its hand came to sweep her away. The dying figure at her feet raised himself up slowly, pointing a crooked finger at the monster. A great gout of flames torrented towards its face, but the angel was taken up with it.

Bleeding and crying, the figure lay, as a single rose fell down from above. He picked it up gently. While the rest of the story was in black fire, this, somehow, was in gold.

Belial slammed the book shut.

"So many, so long, so fast." He sighed. Malice looked back.

"Years?" he said simply. Belial nodded.

"TIme may fly, and make fools of us all, but what can unbreak the hardest of hearts? Can a shattered diamond ever hold beauty again?" Belial mused. "Some small portion of the world belives that nothing ever really goes away. That they just go somewhere else."

Malice nodded.

"However, the things that come from where all the others go, where do they go when they die?" Belial looked off into the sunset. "Feelings are not lines of silver connecting us, they are internal, nothing more."

Malice cracked his knuckles. Magus rode back. "Tell me a story." Magus said simply.

Belial raised an eyebrow as he lit a ciggarette. "What kind of story?"

"A story. Any story. SOmething to pass the time." Magus answered.

Belial sighed, thinking back to all the tales he knew. "A demon scorned can rock the foundations of the earth, and no one better example exists than this one. Ages and ages ago..."

Belial spoke the story, but it began to replay in his mind again...

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There he was, armored and armed. In his hands, the black sledgehammer he'd annhilated many a city with. His wings of stone were spread, and he was pacing foward across a battlefield. With every step, a small patch of grass burned into cinders, till the wind was carrying ashes like snowflakes. The sky faded from a brilliant blue to a dull crimson. LIghtning arced across clouds of gray, the earth rumbling slightly. He wasn't walking, he was foretelling. His stride carried him with all the sureness of a glacier, there was no stopping nor swaying him.

He was drawing towards a rift in reality, one through which his opponent had stepped. It was no mortal or immortal. It was a mockery of both, a clockwork messiah. Its vents gouted steam with its every move, and pistons clicked, shuffled and whirred upon its back. Standing a full twelve feet tall, created of brass and steel, its arms a strange combobulation of various projectile weaponry, from a five barrled cannon to a large, crystaline structured elemental weapon. Jutting out from below the massive full arms were smaller, lithe arms, carrying dangerously sharp blades that whirled into motion. About his feet were the bodies of many a foe, demon and angel alike, but one was still moving. His legs had been snapped off at the knees, and his chest was blasted open, but the dark ether inside him was somewhat intact. Belial was drawing slowly closer.

The clockwork monster looked slowly down at the wounded angel. It said nothing, though capable of speech when needed. Instead, it just leveled the cannon at the angel's head.

Shivering with pain, the angel spat a mouthfull of blood directly into the barrel that began to glow.

Belial winced as he watched his only friend's head explode in a cloud of gore. But it was too late for that now. Cast with a hard heart, fate had taken everything from him. Now, he'd strike back, first this thing, then fate itself.

The machine started lumbering forward, the steam venting rhythmically huffing. It raised both arms, aiming for Belial.

He kept approaching. The weapons both lept into life, barraging the demon with a withering hail of fire. Belial didn't even flinch as his wings were ripped to shreds, shrapnel embedding in the ground below. He kept walking.

The machine stopped approaching, and seemed almost puzzled.

"You took them." Belial said calmly. The machine brought the massive cannon atop its back to bear, firing a shell the size of a human.

Belial swept it away with a wave of his arm. "You killed them. You, who cannot feel victory, loss, or success. You killed them all."

It slowly began to revese direction, firing again. Another shell thudded into the earth. It was swallowed up as the ground began to fissure. Flames erupted almost a mile high from each crack.

The machine tensed up, waiting to pounce. Belial was only ten feet away now. His hands were gripped tight enough to dent the handle on his nigh indestructable weapon. Before attempting to close the gap, the machine fired its crystal elemental arm at Belial.

THe beam ceased to exist upon hitting th hammer head. THe machine lowered its self, pressure building till the vents screeched. It lept.

Twelve someodd tons of screaming death attempted to crush the demon bodily. Belial gripped his hammer directly below the head and brought it up square into the monsters chest, stopping it dead. Cracks formed.

"Your protecting magic failed you." Belial said coldly. He snap kick the thing back a few feet. Striking a stance, he raised his hammer. "No soul."

He brought it down with a clap of thunder. It sent the monster reeling. He raised his weapon again, this time, coming around to smash it on the shoulder. The cannon fell off, brass melting from the sheer force of the weapon.

Cogs popped out. The twin bladed arms aimed towards Belial's chest, but he spun his hammer around and ripped them off. The machine's head was level with Belial's.

"Emotions I have none." It intoned, its voice just the right series of tiny bells being struck. "Emotions are the force of destiny. But you do not carry any in your heart, cold one."

Belial gritted his teeth, thinking of the thirty brothers and sisters he'd lost that day. "No, I carry mine in my fist."

He headbutted the thing, then lept up a few feet to bring the full force of his weapon down upon the clockwork messiah's forhead. It fell, its mechanisms ceasing, to the earth.

-----------------------

Belial paused. "Thirty friends that day. Thirty faces that comeback to me everytime I feel pain. Eons and eons of loss. Tell me what makes us evil. Instinct? A wicked heart? Or simply time?"