There is a moment after every storm when the wind holds its breath.
Samael's world—if it could be called that—had gone quiet. Not healed. Not stilled. Just quiet. The dragon's fire no longer seared him. The wings no longer thrashed. The spectral Lethifold that had become Shroud now slept against his soul like a folded shadow. He could feel it pulsing within him—not beside him, not tethered—but part of him, its hunger now his own.
But that was not the end.
The man—Ekrizdis—stood at the far edge of the ritual circle. His limbs trembled, his breath was ragged, but his eyes… they blazed. Not with pride. Not even triumph. But with finality. The kind of resolve that only comes from those who have torn themselves open to feed a dream.
He reached down to the chain—Gleipnir.
It lay across the floor like a sleeping serpent, black as void, its surface slick with residual magic. It had been forged long ago, during the first months of madness—when Samael's body was only a husk, and the ritual had only begun. Bound in goblin-wrought silver, cooled in the blood of sacrificed beasts, it had waited. Waited to be filled.
Now the vessel stood ready.
But not yet whole.
Before the man reached for the chain, he brought forth one final relic—a crystal phial veined with starlight, filled with a silver substance so radiant it dimmed the torches in the chamber. It did not glow. It simply was—absolute purity given liquid form.
The marrow of a unicorn.
Ekrizdis did not speak at first. His hands trembled—not from fatigue, but from reverence. This was no weapon's blood. No stolen flame. This was the opposite of everything else Samael had been given.
"To seal the binding, your flesh must endure what time cannot," he whispered. "And for that… we borrow from the sacred."
He spoke no incantation. Only a plea. The vial uncorked itself, and the marrow lifted like mist, threading through the boy's veins—replacing the roots of his being. Into the hollow of his bones it poured, where once lifeless husks lay.
Samael felt the moment it entered him.
Not as fire. Not as torment.
But as stillness.
It was the only part of the ritual that did not hurt. It simply was—like an answer to a question he hadn't known he was asking.
And he understood, dimly: this was not a gift of strength.
It was a sentence of continuance.
His flesh would not rot. His body would not fade. No disease would take him. No age would wither him. No poison could silence him.
He would heal, endlessly. And therefore—he would endure, endlessly.
Ekrizdis let the empty vial fall. It shattered at his feet like a final prayer denied.
Then he approached the altar one final time. He knelt beside the boy's form—still too small for the might it carried. With slow, reverent hands, he placed Gleipnir around the left wrist.
The chain shivered.
And in the deep, something answered.
Shade.
The power Samael had felt coiling within him since the rituals began—the weight beneath the raven-beak mark on his arm—rose now like a tide at moonrise. It was not a spell. It was not a creature. It was a law, awakened in the folds of his fragmented soul. Born of silence, grief, shadow, and the echo of things left unsaid.
It reached toward the chain.
And the chain reached back.
For one instant, all awareness returned. Samael—the soul, the fragment, the witness—saw everything.
He saw his life on Earth:
A name.
A sister's voice.
A teacher's disappointment.
The moment of dying.
He saw what he had become:
An angel. A weapon. A myth still unwritten.
And he understood what Ekrizdis had done.
The rituals had not simply forged a body. They had not merely shaped power into form. They had created a vessel for consumption. Shade would devour, absorb, assimilate—and Gleipnir would bind and hold what it consumed. Not just spells or energy. But memories. Souls. Magic itself.
Samael would not only fight death.
He would inherit all that came before it.
He should have wept.
Instead, he watched—detached, almost serene—as Shade bled from the raven-beak on his arm, coiling like smoke around the wrist where the chain lay. It did not wrap Gleipnir.
It merged with it.
The chain turned blacker still—so dark it stopped reflecting light. Runes appeared across its links, glowing momentarily with red-gold fire, then fading to cold steel. The chain hummed—not a noise, but a vibration felt in the bones of the world.
Ekrizdis spoke the final word.
It was not in any tongue known to men.
It was a name.
"Samael."
Not just a label. Not a call.
A binding.
The name echoed in the soul.
And in that moment, the Earth-born soul—the young man ripped from another world, who once laughed under neon skies—knew it was over.
He had not won.
He had not even survived.
He had become.
His name—the one that was his before—slipped away.
No rage. No defiance.
Just a quiet forgetting.
And Samael—true, complete, awakened—remained.
The chain snapped tight around his wrist.
The runes across the chamber extinguished.
Ekrizdis stepped back, swaying on his feet.
"You are finished," he whispered.
He was wrong.
Samael was begun.
The boy on the altar did not rise. His body, perfect now, ceased movement entirely. The dragon's heart slowed until it beat once per hour. The silver eyes closed, not in sleep, but in sealing. The wings folded flat against his back. The chain coiled like a serpent content.
And the soul?
It went quiet.
Not empty.
Just… waiting.
Ekrizdis did not survive long after that. His body, drained by the rituals, decayed even as his mind unraveled. He died alone, muttering apologies to a ghost of a woman who never answered. Azkaban fell into disuse, then rose again as a prison. The world moved on.
Centuries passed.
The boy did not age.
He did not hunger.
He did not need.
He simply was.
A relic in a tomb of sea-salt stone, waiting not for destiny—but for a ripple in the weave of magic strong enough to call him back.
That ripple would come.
But not today.
Today, beneath stone older than empires, in silence more absolute than death, Samael slept.
The Angel of Death had not yet spread his wings.
But the world would tremble when he did.