The Last Bastion

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A soundless detonation rocked the world. The altar cracked along fresh wounds, the chest searing Shane’s palm with pain so pure it trilled every nerve. Blood thundered behind his eyes. Cultists screamed, their chanting now a single shuddering word—Bastion, Bastion, Bastion—swallowed under the pit’s umbral breath.

Azazel appeared, not in one shape but in all at once: a lord sevenfold and veiled in radiance, a star-spitting mouth surging from the rift, a man with a flayed wolf’s face in a tide of wings. Eyes incarnadined the dark. Everywhere Shane looked, a grin split the world—teeth piled upon teeth, patient and ancient and hungry. Shadows writhed, unmoored by reason, scraping at the survivors with claws of memory and hate.

A heatwave of voice, older than language, battered Shane:

"You come to barter bone for ash, little wall? You are the last link in a broke chain—a meal, not a threat. Your city is already mine."

The chamber twisted. Rails became meat, stone sweating with veins; the tunnel’s dead wagons pulsed with larvae. The moon—though buried overhead—bled directly down the altar, staining everything in nightmare red.

Mara crawled forward, lips cracked, bandaged hand streaming blood over her own glyphs. "You wanted a Bastion, bastard? Take me. I bleed in his stead."

Azazel’s laughter was a cyclone. Wings unfurled, blotting out torchlight. Mara carved sigils into her arm, the language of sacrifice. The demon’s gaze, dozenfold, turned—all pupils vertical, spiral-flecked, drinking her agony.

Shane screamed, "Don’t!"

But Mara reached for him, smearing blood down his face. Her voice—shaky, defiant—caught above the horror: "No hope without pain. Buy the world another dawn."

Demons burst from the altar’s shadow: tendon-webbed panthers, faces a tapestry of human suffering. Firefighters fell first; the librarian was torn in half, her body scattering pages already blackened. Callahan stumbled, intoning Latin—hands raised in desperate benediction—even as claws tore his ribs open, showing Shane every wound of every failed guardian before.

Azazel howled, gathering together:

"You bleed so prettily, guardian. Is it love or pride that ruins you? Give me your marrow. Give me your name. End this farce."

Shane dragged himself up, blood burning fresh glyphs over knuckle and jaw. He pressed the chest to the altar. It pulsed in answer, opening not with hinges but with meat and memory. Inside, bone fragments gleamed: a child’s finger, a woman’s tooth, a saint’s vertebra—his ancestors, the last residue of human defiance. The chest hungered for sacrifice.

A bladed tentacle snatched Shane, whipping him from ground to altar apex. The world slipped, gravity sideways, reality flensed away. Shane saw every life he’d failed to save, the faces of Sonia, Eric, his wife; he heard their deaths asked for on repeat.

Azazel’s voice pressed in, venomous:

"You are broken. Let the gate open. Let every city become like this. Let hope die."

The void yawned beneath, cold as the moment after final breath.

But Shane’s bloodline moved in him now, old violence and older love. Visions seethed behind his eyes:

• The woman from his dreams gouging glyphs into her thigh on the battlefield, screaming back dragons.
• Callahan as a younger man, drawing a last ward with his own arteries, praying over a newborn Bastion.
• Mara, terrified as a child, finding her first demon and not running.

Burning, Shane bit his tongue, spitting blood onto the altar. He spoke names—Eric, Sonia, Mara. Father. Mother. City. The words blazed, spiderwebbing out from him, burning through the meat of the world.

Azazel roared, wrapping Shane in darkness so thick it crushed the heart. Teeth grazed his soul, memories flayed to raw nerve as the demon tried to strip him of everything that made him stand. Shane wept, but he clung to pain, weaponized it, brandished it like the last blade.

He howled back—voice torn, animal: "There’s no such thing as a final wall. I don’t die so you can feast—I die so you go hungry."

Mara, below—dangling between worlds—clawed her way to the altar, blood smearing every glyph she could reach, every mark an act of love and refusal. Azazel’s attention fractured, rage spinning ceilings with eyes.

Mara looked up at Shane. Her face was ruined, beautiful, already half-dead. "There’s always another dawn, Shane. My sister taught me that. Now burn for me."

She thrust her fingers into the altar’s wound. Light exploded. Azazel shrieked, thrown back by the violence of her sacrifice. Shane, vision tunneling, used all the pain, shame, failure—the only coin ever honest in this world—and poured it into the altar with his blood. The sigil on his arm boiled, searing straight to the marrow.

He locked eyes with Mara—a moment that felt eternal.

Then he pressed the bone-shard from the chest into his own palm, ground it into open flesh, let blood spill down to the altar. The world tilted, edgewise to oblivion. All possible avenues of hope, rage, love—streamed, tangled, knotted, and broke.

He cried the words Callahan muttered in his sleep, the oldest litany: Let what was made undone be made undone. Blood closes what blood opens. Bastion, sealed.

The pit yawned, dripped black fire. Demons bellowed. Reality screamed, pulling at the seams of Shane’s body and soul. But within the maelstrom, the wound closed: slowly, inexorably. Azazel shattered in a storm of wings and coal, his shrieks devouring the last of the light.

Mara’s body slumped; Shane caught her. The altar cooled beneath them—just stone now, cold, old, silent. Shane’s hands shook so hard he could hardly feel the weight of her beside him. The chest sealed itself, gleaming faintly, ugly as a scar that saved a life.

He looked at Mara. Her pulse was a thready flutter, her gaze somewhere distant. “Did… did we do it?”

Shane squeezed her hand. “We bought a dawn.”

She choked on a laugh, tears and blood mingling. “Tell them… tell them it mattered. Make sure they remember.” Her breath ebbed into silence; her eyes dulled, but the ghost of a smile lingered—a last rebellion against despair.

The chamber stank of silence. It was over. He was alone, surrounded by the dead he could not save, the world stitched just enough to limp onward. Hell’s mouth closed, but the wound remained—a city pocked with death, a Bastion broken, but not erased.

At the altar, Shane covered Mara with the last of his coat. He stood—not strong, not sure, but standing. Somewhere above, in the hemorrhaged sky, the moon began to drain white again. Screams decayed into sobbing, into hush.

Shane gathered the chest, Mara’s empty hand, and what hope he had left.

He walked out into the ruin, the last guardian for a world still balanced on the edge of damnation—but, for now, saved.

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