Desmond froze.

Yes. It was certainly like back then. Everything was the same. If he looked back, though he dared not look back, he would see the blue fire spreading throughout the city. Consuming everything. He knew he would see it.

But he didn't need to see it.

He didn't need to see it because he could hear the roar of the flames. And the sounds of people being consumed by the fire.

People who were not dead, but should be. So that the suffering would end. He had said it a thousand times. And he would not tire of saying it, because it was true. Burning was one of the worst ways to die. He had seen it with his own eyes… too many times.

Too many times.

And all that suffering, all of it had started….

Started in…

——

“Desmond?” Abigail called out to her boy.

But he didn't answer. His eyes were wide open, and he was staring at nothing. As if…

As if he was in a very different place than this. But not as if he was escaping the surrounding horror, the tremendous pain and the long, bloody struggle that awaited them if they wanted to escape.

No, quite the contrary.

He was sinking.

He was drowning within his own being.

Abigail knew it, but what could she do to pull him out? She reached out to her little boy, put her hands on his shoulders. She shook him.

Furthermore, she shook him, shook him and called out to him again and again.

But there was no response.

Or a reaction.

Not a tiny spark of recognition lit up the darkness of his sunken, dark eyes. He was locked inside himself. And perhaps it was only his responsibility to find the way out.

——

In a city like any other city, on a day like any other day. Which should have been just like any other.

But their progress was interrupted when the wrath of hell fell upon them.

Death. A huge spider that spat blue fire, that enveloped all the flies it caught in its enormous webs, and then made them burn alive. With no chance of escape.

The blue fire consumed everything. The spider, with its legs, made the world tremble.

It crushed everything.

No one could escape.

Most of them were not mages. They had no way to defend themselves. But even mages, even the police, had never faced anything on that scale in all likelihood. Even if there were some who had gone to war, there weren't enough of them to turn the tables. That's for sure.

People more capable than him, with more possibilities, died.

But he survived that day.

Why? Quite simply. He was just a boy, so he had not survived under his own power. A woman had pulled him from the ruins.

She had dragged him from his doom and brought him to salvation.

Of all the people she had been able to save, she had chosen him. And it had been by sheer luck. For her purposes, she could have rescued anyone. Yet she had chosen him in the end.

A miracle.

How else could it be described?

That's right, it had been a miracle.

But… Even miracles were cruel, unfair. For not all people were similarly blessed. Abigail had dragged him, half-conscious, with a beam through his chest, through the ruins of the city.

And everywhere he had seen and heard them. Those who had not been blessed. Those who had not been so lucky.

Begging for help.

Others had accepted their fate and simply cursed the living, those who still had a chance to escape.

Still others, of course, were not conscious enough to ask or curse. Or anything.

Those were simply suffering.

Their fate had been like that of those lost souls. It had been to die under the rubble of what they had called home, accompanied by those who had been their family, reduced to mere scraps of flesh.

That was how his life would have ended had Abigail not come along and changed that.

Changed his destiny.

There were many things that make Abigail a goddess, and that was one of them. She hadn't saved him like anyone else in the right place, at the right time, with a lot of luck, could have done.

She had literally rewritten his destiny. He felt it in his bones.

But that fate-defying miracle had benefited him alone. So many others had died miserable deaths.

So many others, who wanted salvation just as badly if not more than he did, had been left empty-handed.

And he could hear them.

They were pleading for his help. For salvation, whatever form it would take.

Life or death, which was the end of the pain. They were in such a horrible situation that life and death were the same to them.

But I could not grant them either of those things.

He was but a child. Besides, a metal rod had pierced his chest. He was in no condition to help himself. Had it not been for Abigail, he would have died helplessly.

In the end, he had died, anyway. Only he had lived again.

But…

But that was no excuse. He had been dragged through that hell, ignoring the voices calling for help. Even after… for so long, he'd been ignoring them. Burying them deep inside him, never to be found again.

He had told himself that he had left that behind.

That none of it, even his dead family, mattered to him now. Because he was a new him.

But that was a lie. Of course it was. It couldn't be anything other than a lie he needed to keep living.

He had never forgotten them.

He could never forget. They had asked him until they died for what he couldn't give them. But at least, in the future, if he became strong… At least he could prevent many people from suffering the same cruel fate… At least he could….

What was he saying?

He felt guilty. The voices kept repeating themselves, and the road never seemed to end. Every time he heard the voices, he felt like he was being stabbed in the heart….

But he wasn't some kind of saint.

He had wanted to leave it all behind. It wasn't a lie.

He had wanted to banish it all from his memory, to some remote darkness, so that he could be happy as if he had more right to life and happiness than those who had died that day.

He had no such right.

He had no right to be happy.

That's why everything was so hard. That's why when he won something, it always slipped through his trembling fingers.

The world put obstacles in his way because he was a mistake that should be erased.

He should be dead. He deserved to be dead. But…

But, still, I want to be happy.

——

"Desmond?"

At the sound of his name, his name coming from her lips, Desmond came back from that faraway place called the past.

He immediately got the feeling that that wasn't the first time she had called him, though. Not by a long shot. That he had been… too long locked inside himself. Unable to move.

He didn't know how long it had been.

But nothing had changed.

Yes… Nothing had changed. His surroundings were a ruinous hell, painted blue and red. It didn't look like a world where humans could exist, let alone survive.

"I'm sorry."

Abigail put up her hands, looked at him warmly, in a way that…. No one looked at him like that. Not even Christina or Amy. No one had ever looked at him like that. Only her.

"It's all right, my little boy. But we have to get out of here. Okay?"

A pause. Desmond nodded his head.

They resumed their march through that reddish"blue hell.

Yes…

Nothing had changed.

He could still hear them. The vibration of those voices, the ghosts of his past. They refused to do it. They did it because… because, in reality, they could not. After all, they knew they were missing a partner.

He should have died with them.

That's why… he could almost see them. Everywhere.

In every shadow. In and under the rubble.

Stretching out their arms, opening mouths whose darkness had no end. To grab him. To drag him to hell, cursing until his last breath. No matter how hard he ran, no matter how much he fooled himself. He….

Something had grabbed him.

Not something, someone. He felt a hand around his ankle.

He shivered.

It couldn't be, he thought, it couldn't be.

And of course it could be. There was no tormented soul out of hell, ready to drag him down with them. He looked down. It was nothing but… a thing. He told himself it wasn't a human being.

By force it had to be. After all, Abigail and he were the only human beings for miles around.

Yet…

What?

She was a middle-aged woman. Soon she would be nothing more than a piece of meat. She was covered in blood.

Her head caved in, probably from being hit by a large debris.

She didn't have much time left in this world. She couldn't even be said to be fully conscious. Her eyes were staring into nothingness. As, he imagined, his eyes had looked while trapped…. Before. When he had been trapped before.

She didn't curse him.

She didn't want to be saved, either.

What she did do was spread a bundle in her arms, tucked in a blanket that looked like a shroud. Red.

Red wasn't the natural color, of course. It was red with blood.

What she wanted to save was a little boy. She was pleading with him for just that, even though her dying body couldn't ask for help with words. Unfortunately, the woman was too far gone. She was unaware that the bundle in her arms had left this world a little before her.

Desmond swallowed hard.

My mother. If my mother… He didn't finish the thought. Better for his sanity, not to have been able to finish it. Better for everyone.

He turned his back on the woman and her little boy.

Feeling sick, feeling like throwing up.

What little strength she managed to muster in her dying body wasn't enough to hold him down, of course. He slipped away easily. But not intact. Because he heard her hand fall languidly to the floor. He heard… something… rolling on the floor, and…

Bury it. Bury it.

There's no point in punishing yourself, in making yourself suffer, for people like this. So close your heart.

“Desmond," Abigail said. But that's all. What was that, a show of support? Or had she wanted to say something, but didn't know how to go on? Or maybe she had decided it would be better not to say it. Whatever it was.

"I'm fine.”

Except that the fact he felt the need to affirm it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that no, he wasn't fine, not by a long shot. Not at all.

"Let's move on. Please.”

And they did. Without looking back, without looking… in general. Desmond did his best to block out the wave of sounds around him, that tried to crush him. He struggled mostly to avoid the awakening of memories.

The worst thing of all. He couldn't let something like this overcome him.

As they ran through the devastation, with all his might, Desmond tried to take flight again. But the wings didn't respond to his commands. They were like two pieces of wood. Useless.

He had harbored the secret hope that his regeneration would take care of the problem, whatever it was.

But no.

He suspected that the issue was not the wings, that nothing was wrong with them. That the problem was something else. Whose fix was beyond his reach. One way or another, if he couldn't depend on his wings, it was as if they weren't there.

Nor to waste any more time thinking about them.

The mess they had left behind them had bought them time. However, it was only a matter of time before the dogs of the Empire resumed the chase. They were in the heart of the enemy Empire. However many enemies they killed, more would come out. Again and again.

“We have to…” Abigail began to say.

Bad timing, for she was interrupted by the shaking of the world. He wondered if it had started all over again.

The cataclysm brought about by his 'change', one more item on the long list of things he didn't want to think about.

Wrong, again.

The spider.

Abigail had mortally wounded the war machine, destroying the heart that fed it. But not killing it. Before its battery ran out, it had a limited time within which to operate.

Time enough, it seemed, to find them. And maybe even to kill them.

The spider was visible above the buildings. It wasn't far away. That is, far enough away that they had only heard it recently.

But not so far away that he felt safe.

Meaning, to a person, that could be a great distance. But for the spider, buildings and other obstacles, well, they weren't obstacles. It could simply take the shortest path, a straight line, obliterating everything in its path.

“We have to get out of here,” Abigail finished, looking at the same thing he was. The creature's terrifying approach.

It was still terrifying, even though he had apparently made a mistake. For it was circling the buildings instead of simply running through them. But not because it wasn't capable of doing that, of course.

But because he was willing to bet that intentional collateral damage wasn't in its programming.

That was something.

But not much. Anyway, they'll have it on them soon enough. And they had nowhere to hide.

Abigail grabbed his forearm and tugged on it, switching their roles. Desmond let go without protest. Whatever idea she'd had would be better than his. Shit, one could even say he was wandering aimlessly.

It didn't take him very far.

She stopped and crouched down….

In front of a manhole cover. Desmond removed it. No need to ask to get the hint.

“Okay.”

He couldn't say it was a good idea, exactly. But it was better than nothing. That's for sure. At least they could travel up to a point a safer way (by which he didn't mean safe at all, just somewhat safer). It would give them time. To lick their wounds, to prepare for battle.

Maybe... maybe for Abigail to get his wings working again. Or to get what the fuck was up with that sorted out.

They descended into the sewer, closing the lid behind them.