The Devil's Favourite Obsession

”The King,” Rafael muttered under his breath.

”Why do I not see you two on your knees?” The man with silky golden hair tied in a bun in an expensive suit stood before them. His beautiful dark eyes rested on both Rafael and Cassian. He carried an enigmatic aura around him. At six feet five inches tall, with a perfectly sculpted physique and a face that could make the world kneel just for a glimpse, no one anywhere could rival his handsomeness. ”Or do you two need a reminder?”

Cassian, who normally ruled hearts effortlessly, now seemed only a fraction of the man standing before the King. Yet, as he looked at the King, his jaw tightened with determination.

Rafael knelt immediately, while Cassian stood his ground, meeting the King’s fiery gaze head-on.

The desert began to die.

It started at the edges. Far out on the horizon, where the cracked earth met the copper sky, the ground began to darken. The surface blackened in a slow, creeping line, as though an invisible flame was pressing against the underside of the world and the world was beginning to char.

The blackening spread inward.

It moved the way fire moves across paper. Slow and curling at the edge. A thin line of embers glowed orange along the boundary between what had burned and what had not.

The cracks beneath his feet had begun to glow. A dull orange, something molten was rising through the veins of the earth, the way blood rises through veins when the heart beats harder. The glow brightened. The cracks widened.

The desert floor was burning from below.

Then another section collapsed. And another. And another. The desert was falling apart. Piece by piece. Slab by slab.

Ash floated upward from every direction. Black flakes and glowing embers drifted through the air in slow spirals, rising past their faces, catching the red light from below before dissolving into the darkening sky above.

The ground beneath Cassian’s feet held. A single island of cracked earth, no wider than the span of his arms, suspended above the collapsing landscape. The edges glowed. The surface was hot enough to scorch through leather.

A volcano was forming beneath them. Not erupting from below. Revealing itself. As though the desert had been its skin and the skin was now being peeled away strip by strip, burn by burn, until nothing remained but the raw, furious core of something that had been waiting.

The last piece of dessert between Cassian and Rafael crumbled. It curled at the edges like paper held over a candle. The centre browned. The brown turned black. The black glowed orange. And then it fell, slowly, gracefully, like a leaf made of stone, and the lava below consumed it without a sound.

The two of them stood on their shrinking islands of earth, separated by a river of molten fire, and looked upward.

Because that was where the voice had come from.

And whatever was coming had not yet arrived.

But it was close.

The lava pulsed. The ash rose. Sky looked crimson.

And the King, whoever he was, whatever he was, let the silence and change stretch one second longer than comfort allowed.

He descended from the crimson sky. The way smoke descends when it is heavier than air. The way darkness descends when the sun is pulled below the horizon. Slowly and inevitably. Without sound and without effort.

His feet touched the lava.

It did not burn him. Neither did it consume him. The molten surface beneath his boots flattened and hardened into a smooth, black disc of cooled obsidian that spread outward from each step he took, as though the fire itself was retreating from his presence and solidifying in submission.

He walked across the lava the way other men walked across marble floors.

Cassian’s jaw tightened. His fists unclenched at his sides. His shoulders, which had been coiled with the tension of a fight not yet finished, dropped by a fraction.

Rafael wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. His grin was gone. His eyes tracked the King’s approach with the alert stillness of a predator recognising something higher on the chain.

The King stopped between them.

He was tall. Taller than Cassian. Taller than Rafael. His frame was broad and dense, built from something ancient. His skin was bright, carrying the faint, shifting pattern of veins beneath the surface that glowed the same dull orange as the cracks in the earth. As though the lava that flowed beneath this world also flowed beneath his skin.

His face was angular and severe. A wide jaw. High cheekbones that could have been carved from volcanic rock. A mouth that looked as though it had never smiled and had never needed to. His eyes were molten gold. Not a metaphor. His irises were liquid, shifting, burning with a slow, constant heat that made looking into them feel like staring into the core of a furnace.

He looked at Cassian.

Then at Rafael.

Then back at Cassian.

”Pathetic,” the King called both of them pathetic.

The word landed heavier than any punch either of them had thrown, and for a breath neither Cassian nor Rafael moved.

Their bodies remained locked in the aftermath of the fight, shoulders tense, chests rising with restrained violence, yet something far darker than anger began to stir beneath their skin.

It started in their veins.

Thin black lines appeared along their necks first, then spread downward over their collarbones, across their arms, and along the exposed strength of their bodies as though some ancient poison had awakened inside them and was now claiming every inch of flesh for itself.

Then something began to rise from their heads. At first, it looked like a shadow gathering above their skulls, but the shape soon turned solid, drawing upward in a slow and dreadful growth before curving slightly toward the sky. Their human forms seemed to unravel with each passing second. The suits they had worn disappeared from their bodies, replaced by black silk garments that resembled loose trousers, low at the waist and dark as midnight, while their torsos remained bare and marked with those visible black veins. Their hair lengthened as well, falling in smooth, dark waves until it reached their waists, the strands too glossy and unnatural to belong to ordinary men.

Cassian’s eyes changed into narrow slits, the colour burning into a bright yellow surrounded by an orange iris that made his stare look merciless and inhuman. Rafael’s transformation carried a different menace. His eyes also sharpened into slits, but the colour remained a pale, predatory brown, colder and more vicious against the dark veins crawling over his skin. Standing opposite each other in those altered forms, they no longer looked like men who had simply been fighting. They looked like creatures whose true nature had been forced to the surface.