Chapter 189: What I Had Been Calling Fine

Seraphel

Somewhere in there, morning happened.

I know because my alarm went off and I ignored it, and then sunlight moved across the desk, and at some point my roommate Mark came in, dropped his bag, said something to me, and left again.

I went to class. I do not entirely know why. Habit, maybe. The part of my brain that still thought tuition mattered.

Financial Accounting at nine. I sat in the third row and did not hear a single word. The professor’s voice was just a noise happening somewhere in front of me while I thought about black blood running down Luceriel’s face and whether Azriel was still breathing.

Statistics at eleven. I opened my laptop, opened the books instead of the lecture slides, and read through the entire session with the screen tilted away from the girl beside me.

Business Ethics at two. I did not go. I sat on a bench outside the building and read on my phone until the battery died, then went back to my room, plugged it in, and kept reading.

That was my life before. That exact schedule. Three classes, a part-time shift at the campus bookstore on weekends, instant noodles, and NovelPhoenixs until three in the morning because they were the only thing that made the days feel like anything at all.

I used to think I was fine. I used to think being alone was simply how I was built.

Then I spent months being held every night by someone who woke before me just to watch me sleep, and I came back here, and I finally understood what I had been calling fine.

I would have taken the demon king. I would have taken the war, the exhaustion, the terror, all of it, over one more semester of this.

And yet I still could not understand why I remained in this world, because by the third day I had stopped tracking time entirely.

I know I ate at some point, because there was an empty noodle cup on the desk I did not remember buying. I know Mark stopped trying to talk to me, because at some point I noticed his bed had been made for what must have been a while, and the last thing he said to me was something about a family thing and being back Sunday.

I did not know what day it was. I did not care.

I read until the words stopped looking like words, because I needed to understand why I was still here and how we could possibly get rid of Draca.

And somewhere in the middle of the fifth book, buried in an appendix about the sealing of the Demon King that I had skipped so thoroughly I had not known it existed, I found it.

I read it once. Then again. Then eleven more times, until I had it memorized well enough to recite.

Draca could not be killed, not the way we had been trying, and that was precisely why Castiel had sealed him away instead. He was the Demon King, after all, and with power on that scale there had never been any simple way to bind him. But wearing Kaevian’s body changed everything, because his soul was no longer held inside that borrowed flesh by its own strength.

It was anchored, spread across the seven lords like weight distributed over seven pillars, and that was what they had been all along.

Their own bodies had been sealed away centuries ago, which meant they had returned in the bodies of the dead, exactly as Draca had, and that limited every one of them. If even one lord fell, the rest would weaken with him.

Break one of them and the whole structure sagged. Break two and it began to fail outright.

As for Draca himself, the borrowed body was already dying. Kaevian’s corpse could never contain the power that had been poured into it. I had seen the proof during the fight, watching him rely on the serpent instead of striking directly, and Azriel had been right about it without ever understanding why.

If we weakened him enough, if Castiel’s divine light destroyed Kaevian’s body while his anchors were already failing, his soul would have nowhere left to hold on to. It would be dragged out of that corpse with nothing to catch it, exposed and vulnerable in the open, and in that state he could be sealed all over again, the same way Castiel had done it the first time.

The light itself filled several long paragraphs, explained in more detail than anything else in the appendix.

The God of Divinity had given everything he had to stop the Demon King, and in the end it was his divine light that trapped him.

I sat back in my chair and stared at the ceiling for a long, long time.

I had been throwing that light like a slingshot, flinging it at him and hoping something would stick, and of course it had never killed him, because it was never going to work that way. It had to be driven directly into him, pressed into the very core of what he was, and it had to be given rather than thrown.

And the version that would actually kill him would cost everything the person holding it had.

I closed the laptop.

"Oh goodness," I sighed, wondering how differently all of this might have gone if I had simply read this part when I had the chance.

I opened the laptop again and started searching through the other books, trying to work out who the true antagonist of each one was meant to be. In *The Book of Lust*, it had always been Elysium, not Kaevian and Eiren, which meant a great deal had already shifted away from the original plot the moment Seraphel became a main character.

In Luceriel’s book, the antagonist remained the same. But something else was missing entirely, something that should have happened near the very beginning of the story.

The wedding.

"If I can get back, if that actually happens, then maybe I can convince him and Pazuzu to finally marry," I said, sighing again and running a hand through my hair. "I have truly ruined this story." I closed the laptop once more and lowered my head onto the desk. "And I miss Azriel so much it hurts."