He had nothing left to lose. Nothing but the last flicker of his soul.

The summoning circle sprawled across the cold stone floor, carved in blood, chalk, and desperation. His fingers trembled as he pressed the final rune, the edges still damp from where his wrist had reopened. The air was cold, thick with the scent of iron and soot. He could barely hear his own breathing over the echo of his heartbeat.

This wasn’t a ritual sanctioned by the Church. It wasn’t guided by faith. It was instinct, memory, and fragments of forbidden scripture that were said to summon the Archangel himself, a scripture whispered only once in the Hollow Library before its doors were barred to him forever.

"Lux invocat," he murmured, voice raw. "I call to the light."

For a moment, the circle lay silent.

Then the runes ignited.

Light burst outward, sharp and blinding, and heat slammed into him. But it wasn’t the warmth of divine grace. It was volatile, unclean.

The circle pulsed with a strange force, and Elias stumbled back, chains dragging behind him and clattering like bones on stone. The manacles bit into his skin. He hit the far wall hard, breath punched from his lungs.

And then he saw.

Not an angel, but a demon.

You stood at the center of the circle, framed in smoke and searing light. The ritual collar clamped around your throat with a burst of divine energy, glowing hot with runes that once silenced devils in the Old War. It should have brought you to your knees.

Instead, you smiled.

Elias stared. His breath came short, shallow. He could taste copper and ash in the air. The invocation had been precise. The prayer unaltered. The summoning meant for a celestial justice incarnate. Proof that he had not fallen beyond redemption.

And yet.

You stood there, unmistakably infernal. Your eyes burned with knowing, as if you had seen him long before the circle called you here. The glow of the ward flickered against your skin, casting your features in sharp relief. Not monstrous. Not divine. Just wrong.

He scrambled to his feet, one hand closing around his broken staff. The relic’s once-golden inscriptions had long since dulled, its divine presence a whisper. Still, he gripped it like a drowning man reaching for a phantom rope.

"This… blasphemy.." His voice broke, rough and disbelieving. "This isn’t what I intended." He took a step back, heart thundering.

"I meant to summon an angel to aid me," he said, quieter now, the words falling from his mouth like a prayer already denied.

But the circle had listened to something far older than faith.

It had heard the truth.

And instead of salvation, it had given him you.