“I’m begging,” she hissed, through the pain of his foot in her spine. “Kill me. End this. I can’t stand to see you, you, take a shadow and make of it a form. Pygmalion did better than you!” Hot tears spilled out of her eyes, unnoticed. “Take the darkness and pretend it’s light, what a fool you are. At least I admit my follies; I’ve never pretended Tony was anything less than what he is. Or more.”
Growling at the pain, she forced herself over enough to snatch at the heel pressing down, and dumped fire into it. She was going to die now, whatever he did; nothing she did now could change that outcome. Maybe, she could at least leave some mark behind to show for it.
Fire, and fire, and more fire, all his anger into searing heat and crackling flames through her hands.
Liesmith huffed out an acid laugh at the woman’s seething request, “Well aren’t you dramatic. I’ve said this before: what I do with Anthony is none of your business.”
A flick of a wrist, a surge of a command and his magical clone promptly shifted shape in a mercilessly heavy block of granite. A paperweight for a paper tiger, it was wonderfully fitting.
“The fact that you think Anthony is a mere shadow or an inanimate product of obsessive workmanship, as your obtuse little reference implies… speaks volumes of you and of how little you know of true darkness.”
Out of the corner of Summer’s eye a dark centipede-like creature scuttled down from the ceiling and it was followed by a surging tide of black oil. The forms of terrible things solidified then dissipated in the falling and rising waves. It completely coated the ceiling, the wall and settled upon the floor.
A hundred sharp little legs crawled over the mortal woman’s neck like a scarf of needles.
“Allow me to relieve of you of your ignorance,” he smiled kindly.
The weight on her body altered, changed, and she swallowed another painful laugh. Oh, yes, because stone was impervious to fire. This rock sucked up her heat and demanded more. She gave gladly — she was so obviously going to die, anyway; what worry burns from molten rock?
And then the darkness was alive, and it fucking chittered. She shrieked, revolted, every cell in her body trying to squirm away. “True darkness,” she spat, catching the end of his statement. “Light.” She couldn’t get the thought to come out coherently, but it should have been obvious — darkness and light were opposed, and if he had the darkness, she had the light, and he kept feeding hers.
Abandoning the rock, she drew back all the fire she’d been spraying, and all the emotions she’d been converting. Drew, and drew, and held, and held, hers and his and anyone else’s she could reach.
And let it all go, concentrating solely on the shift from emotion to fire and nothing else, immolating herself in the centre of an enormous bonfire that grew and grew and burned white hot.