Chapter Text
"I didn't know his God,
I didn't know his God.
Which is perhaps the last admission that life has to wring out of us."
- D. H. Lawrence, Fish
The pain is temporary; it fades before everything else does. Something like lightning in every cell, impossibly bright and powerful - celestial indifference exhaling, maybe, or that strange, pesky spark of life, burning out in elation. A heartbeat and the sensation goes. Another, and things become muted. Distant.
Paper beats rock.
Demon beats devil.
Funny, that.
And he finds himself lying on the ground and he's never felt so tired in hundreds and hundreds of years, and there's a spell to complete, and so
he
lets
go.