Fate and the Defiant Angel (COMPLETED)

Chapter 29- The past fuels the present

Mary sat in the chair, leaning back and staring up at the ceiling. Jagged red rocks stared down and she could clearly imagine one coming loose and impaling her. She smiled at the thought. It was such a comfort to have immortality as a Demon Reaper.

She slowly titled her head up and stared out at the screaming souls and vengeful demons. Mary had perched herself on a cliff to think. It was good to have a motivator in front of her.

She found herself having to rework some aspects of her plan, which was something she was confident in her abilities to do. You had to adapt when you were apart of a species hunted by Death Reapers and constantly having to change bodies.

Mary needed to think about Cassandra Sung.

She had first found out about Cassandra after clawing through the library. She'd been locked down in the deep for a couple years at that point and was getting desperate. Mary had gone through some stages, such as accepting her fate before the next stage happened and she realised that was unacceptable.

The underworld was an odd place. Mary could see the remnants of what in the past would have been considered a kingdom. Sure, everything was underground and gloomy, but it hadn't always. When Mary looked around, she saw intricate murals, grand columns and buildings destroyed. It looked like a siege had happened, an enemy force taking over and not just capturing the city but obliterating it. Chunks of wall were ripped apart; things had been burnt and ceilings collapsed. She'd seen her fair of sieges and destruction.

She'd come across the library when hunting down a rouge soul. When she'd captured the little rascal, she'd walked through the maze of hallways in boredom. It was good to get out and walk around she found, stopped her from completely loosing her mind.

And then she saw it.

Mary didn't know how many times she must have walked past, but one day she actually paid attention. It stopped her dead in her tracks in confusion as she stared at what she could now see was a door. There were a lot of cracks in the actual wall, made from large clubs and angry fists. In front of the stone doors themselves were chipped and shattered, with a giant pile of rubble resting against it. Black ivy had crawled over it as if to further disguise what was behind.

As Mary stared at it she'd come to the conclusion that it was almost too well hidden. The rest of the underworld had a distinct nonchalance associated with it. The demons didn't care, they threw things around and broke things when they wanted to. However, the pile of rubble was to perfectly assembled so that it reached to the top of the door. Someone didn't want it to be found.

She made her way over, staring at the stones and trying to understand how she could possibly make her way in. Mary made her way around, looking for any openings and possibilities for entry. She found it. A large crack in the very corner of the door, where the hinges would have once meet with the wall. That was when she started hitting the wall with her scythe. It wasn't a fast process. It took her about a mouth to finally create a hole big enough for her to shimmy through, and it was certainly worth it. She didn't expect a library, but it was worth it.

Someone had tried to burn it but hadn't done it very well. Mary was quite talented at fire, having burnt a few villages to the ground and people alive before which helped her understand it. It was haphazard, no real effort and most certainly meant to hide something. Mary had done her fair share of hiding things throughout her lifetimes.

The trick was to convince others that everything was useless. You didn't need to completely hide something, you didn't need to bury a treasure deep within a forest or at the bottom of the ocean. You hid your treasures amongst garbage, sometimes even out in the open. If people see a slightly dented cup amongst a mound of clothes and old books, then they are more inclined to believe it to be nothing but a trinket and not solid gold with a few diamonds smuggled in the handle.