The Originals

The Smoldering Veins

The forest bled.

Not with blood—but memory. Beneath the roots, under broken stones and collapsed chapels, the land pulsed with echoes of faith too stubborn to die. Belief abandoned, twisted, and scorched beyond recognition still clung to the marrow of the earth like rot.

Asmodeus knelt beside the base of a gnarled tree, its bark blackened and peeling. One hand pressed to the roots, the other hovering above a ruined symbol carved into the trunk—once angelic, now warped beyond meaning.

He closed his eyes.

There—just beneath the surface—he felt them.

Forgotten altars.

Dead hymns.

Charred relics buried in unmarked graves.

When Michael arrived in this world, he hadn't simply brought war. He brought judgment. Temples deemed impure were razed. Shrines to "lesser gods" were turned to dust. Holy sites once touched by generations of belief were wiped clean in the name of purity.

But belief doesn't die clean.

It festers.

It waits.

It remembers.

Asmodeus sank his claws into the soil.

Tendrils of shadow slithered from his fingertips, threading into the dirt like veins. They wound down through bone-littered roots, past cracked stone, until they found what he needed: ash-stained robes, shattered relics, the hollowed remains of sermons silenced too early.

He inhaled deeply.

Power rushed into him—not like fire, but like venom. Slow. Coiling. Purposeful.

It wasn't clean. It wasn't pure.

But it was honest.

His back arched as shadows curled around him, pulsing. His spine cracked. Eyes flared violet. The ache in his bones dulled. His hands stopped trembling.

He was still not whole.

But he was closer.

Over the next week, the Devotee camps began to fracture.

At first, it was small: a prayer tent collapsed in the night. No sign of wind, no broken supports—just gone, flattened like something had breathed in the space it once occupied.

Then caravans went missing. Priests stopped returning. Fluid shipments arrived warped, unstable—exploding into golden mist that caused seizures in those nearby.

Then came the sigils.

Burned into the ground. Circles of void that hummed with whispered voices, heard only in the moments before sleep. Those who stepped inside fell unconscious. Some never woke.

Asmodeus left no messages.

No names.

Only fear.

He never struck the same camp twice.

But there was always one he watched.

The one with the girl.

Sera.

Fenn's sister.

She had been brought to this place less than a week ago, and already the priests whispered about her. Most children rejected the Fluid. Their bodies convulsed. Some died outright. Others went mad.