They left the cafeteria without a backward glance. No one stood to stop them, no one warned them they couldn’t blow off the rest of their classes. Walking beside monsters that made the world ripple in pained sympathy had its perks. Umbrae Lunae or human, the same truth was woven through society, the strong made the rules and the weak followed.

The harem spread out as they left the school, but not so far that they couldn't react to an internal threat. No matter how they felt about Cesare, they were professional beyond letting personal feelings get in the way of protecting their goddess. They locked onto Viktor as soon as he appeared on the walkway.

Nzinga stepped forward, blocking the man, lips twisting into a snarl, body swelling in challenge, black and tawny stripped hair rustled in unseen winds. The harem flowed into the opening she'd left, tightening their circle, intensifying their focus on angles. Trust was the cornerstone of every protection team. They trusted Nzinga would handle the threat, and Nzinga trusted their vigilance against what they didn’t know.

Giving the werehyena a lazy smile, the man slowed to a confidant prowl, blatantly accepting the challenge blazing from the massive black woman. With a detonation of power, the grass flattened, an inky tendril of power tearing through the air. Quick as thought, it snapped out in a whip crack of supersonic speed.

Viktor wasn’t a legend for nothing, insolence turned to action as he dove to the side. It would have saved him if he was facing anything but a goddess, but against the vengeance of a horror that burned cities, erasing races of man, and devoured souls, it was doomed. He was a thousand years too young to get away from her. The tendril caught him in midair. With an explosion that boomed across the campus, his body flipped through the air, hitting the ground head over ass, breaking bones loud in the terror soaked space. Fetching up against a tree with a shattering impact, Viktor groaned in pain trying and failing to get up.

Malevolent and unstoppable, heated hate saturated the air. Grass burned and ashed around Lady Kali in an ever expanding aura, eyes of Ebon Flame licked her hair, dense tears of spiteful fire dripping down her face, scarring the earth with their baneful nature. Dancing strands of black hair rose and fell on currents of tortured air. Tendrils of smoke twisted around her, clothing succumbing to scorching heat.

Her harem scattered in naked horror at the revealed face of their Mistress. It gripped the guts and tore at the foundations of the soul, an overwhelming power that promised only agonizing death. She was madness with no hope of grace. Their fear overwhelmed shallow words of devotion; it drove them whimpering away from her corona of unholy glory.

Stepping away, Anastasia's face was stamped with awe. Lady Kali loved her daughter, but nothing was truly safe from the Mother of Destruction. She was the end of things, annihilation given form. Primal and true, she was a force of nature that swept aside life with the casualness of a hurricane.

Crouched down Alexandra held her place through sheer bloody minded insanity, lips peeled back from long, murderous fangs, eyes hard diamonds of determination. Unwilling to be beaten by anything, even the revealed power of something that could turn her to ash with an absent thought. Death was sure and certain, but dishonor lasted forever.

Eldritch power moved unseen and unfelt around Elizabeth, a pressure in along the soul, madness birthed in voids of cruelty, elder to stars, a bulwark against Lady Kali’s hateful power. This was Elizabeth’s place of power; here she was supreme. She wouldn't interfere with the goddess unless it was vital, a clash between them would be terrible beyond the school’s ability to survive. Stepping back, she kept a close eye on the spiteful majesty of the Dark Mother.

Lady Kali had stepped away from Cesare before she’d made the attack, but she was still closer to him than anyone else. The Ebon Flame was a thing of darkness, a baneful force that wished death upon all things. Both an entity and an energy, a thing of emotion stripped of reason, a rabid abomination that knew only tormented need. Lady Kali embodied its every violating touch, a stain on the world, a skim of hate that knew no bounds, corruption eating gleefully at the strings of existence.

Its presence drowned his mind in terror, conjuring images of his body burned, drenched in acid, frozen, and weeping ice tears, cooked alive as muscles twitched in lightnings mad dance. Woven through it was a wanton, gluttonous need to see him suffer, to lap up his agony with greedy, fleshy lips. It craved his pain, the taste of his flesh along its tongues of flame, the sweet sound of his screams as it devoured him. Its caress was defilement given form, the touch of a grinning uncle, a too sweet adult, a perversion of lust.

Grass ashed under his feet, the circle of destruction stretching away from him in leaps and bounds. Skin reddened under the scorching wave that blasted from Lady Kali. Sweat gushed from his pores, soaking his clothes in seconds, molding fabric to his form. Stripping the air of moisture, it dried out the throat, each breath a sandpaper struggle.

Stepping forward, Lady Kali didn't seem to care that her harem had fled. They ran in fear of her unleashed soul, ants worth less than the time it took to step on them. Grimacing in pain, Cesare kept step with the thing that had been a woman a bare few seconds before, he didn’t know if she realized or even cared that he walked beside her.

The ground withered, sickening under the weight of the caustic thing she channeled. Gray ash covered the earth in a bed of death for annihilation to walk on. Black, glittering tears ran in veins of ebony down her face, dense with hate, they hit the earth, sizzling as they pitted the ground. Tongues of flame boiled from her eyes, caressing her forehead and running up into her hair. Air pressurized around her, a weight that compressed the chest, tightened the heart, strangled the throat.

They left everyone behind. No one, not even her daughter, could bear to be inside the umbra of Lady Kali’s aura. It wasn’t just the Ebon Flame; it was so much worse than that. It was trust. Her daughter didn’t trust her life to the beating heart of hates daughter. Lady Kali herself would be the first to admit she was a murderous thing, fully capable of killing those she loved. Cities had burned under her power, children dying by thousands, her own daughters flaming into incandescent ash under the ravenous need of her flame.

Viktor made it to his knees, it was just enough to face Lady Kali face to face. With only five feet separating them, Lady Kali stopped. A serpent of pink tongue licked across her lips, hardened nipples standing proud under her shirt, arousal, twisted, depraved, and wanton, deforming her face.

Cesare smiled tight and cruel at the broken arm twisted back on itself, blood blooms rising from lumps of broken ribs, shards of white ripping through Viktor’s face from a shattered jaw. Clear eyed and ready, without a hint of fear, the man was still a warrior that had long ago made his peace with death.

“I hunted your kind in the forests of Pangea, roasting their succulent flesh over my fire as the lamentations of their kin rose to the stars. Yet, you presumed to let what's mine die. Did you think your cock would buy your life? You were nothing more than an entertaining piece of self-masturbation, you filled a need, like a thousand others have before you.” Black eyes flared in time with her words, a cadence of immolation.

“Cesare would kill for me, die for me. Even now, I burn the meat of his body and cook his fat, I tear at his soul and fill his mind with horrors, yet he refuses to turn from me. My daughter fears me, my harem holds me in naked terror, he alone braves the flame to embrace me.” She stopped, voice thickening with emotion. “I would devour your flesh with my flame and fuck him over your screaming body if he asked. Remember this day Silvestre, you live only because he does.”

Viktor staggered to his feet, body coated in a skim of ash and blood. At a stumbling walk, he wasted no time in getting himself away from ground zero. Maybe he’d forgotten what she was, that he bedded a horror of monstrous power. It was easy to forget what lurked under the surface of playful mischief, to see the leviathan that writhed under pale flesh.

Facing Cesare, she let him take in her terrible magnificence. Black, glittering flames had consumed her eyes, fire raging from them, burning tongues reaching into her hair. Black drops of hate made manifest slid down her face in trails of stygian corruption. Silky, ebony hair danced in the iridescent heat waves that radiated off her. She was a thunderstorm drowning you in waves of sound and lightning, a hurricane as it lands winds tearing flesh from bone, that was her beauty.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, falling into pits of diseased flame, that had been her eyes. “Elemental, lightning as it lances down, lava as it boils from the earth, a grass fire consuming the plains, your beauty sears the soul.” Cesare croaked from chapped and bleeding lips.

Reaching for his face, she gave him all the time in the world to pull away. Her fingers were brands of silk, skin puckering and burning under her touch. Possessive as it was loving, needy, wanton, and dangerous, the raw emotions thrummed from trembling fingers. “No one in all my years has suffered my caress when the Ebon Flame is upon me. You have no idea of its hunger for your death, it tears and claws, screaming and howling, in starving need for your flesh. You're a fool to let me touch you. A fool to trust the Mother of Destruction.”

Pushing into her scorching caress. his lips pulled back in a rictus of pained pleasure. “I don’t trust the Mother of Destruction.” Her hand stopped in shock at the words. “I trust Kali the woman.”

Kali’s hand stilled along his face, words no louder than the whimpers of a dying babe slipping from her lips. “You're too good for an ancient abomination like me. But I am too selfish to let you go.”

Tension pulled her tight, flaming eyes dying with a gutter of petulant anger. The aura of power that had pried at his mind with fat, insane fingers disappearing with the flames, taking the burning heat with it.

Cold air swept in, ripping the sickly fever off Cesare’s body. Cool air soothed burnt flesh chilling sweat soaked clothes. Red as new skin, his arms and face felt hot and tight, slick burns running across his face from where her fingers had caressed. Kali was infinitely capable of burning him into ash out of nothing more than irritation.

He didn’t understand her any more than he did a storm front. But understanding was of the mind, meaningless in the tides between man and woman. He trusted her as much as he could trust anyone. That fact overwhelmed the danger. Someday she'd betray him in a storm of fire and crisping flesh, but that day wasn’t today.