Despite the unshakable instinct for self-preservation still screaming from the deepest recesses of his psyche, Genesis felt something far more primal and insistent propelling him into motion.
He began pacing in tight, agitated circles around the dimly lit chamber like a prowling animal scenting its first taste of freedom. The fallen seraph watched this display with inscrutable amusement, though her smoldering regard never wavered.
Finally, Genesis could contain his rapacious curiosity no longer.
"There is so much I wish to understand, my lady," he rasped, each word scraping past his maltreated throat like shards of tainted glass. "If you are Calamity incarnate, then what profane essences do your...counterparts embody? The other Elder Demons, as you called them?"
He pivoted sharply on his heel to face her once more, That sinister smile he now recognized as his own reflexive tell tugging at his lips.
"Since we seem destined for an intimate working relationship of sorts, it seems only fair you grace me with your exalted name as well. I've professed mine freely enough."
The demoness regarded him for an eternity suspended in the space between one inhuman heartbeat and the next. Her supernaturally flawless features betrayed not a flicker of emotion or intent.
At last, her full lips parted ever so slightly to allow that melodious, blasphemous voice to slither forth.
"Genesis...what an appropriately celestial designation." There was the barest edge of something like wry approval coloring her tone. "The very origin of existence itself. A beautiful namesake for one so delightfully cheeky."
Her smile deepened a fraction, seeming to expose a hint of wicked fang just beyond the plush swell of her lower lip.
"As for my own name..." Those fathomless crimson irises glittered with amusement. "You may call me Ninkalmmu. Though I suspect you're already scheming to unearth the secrets of exorcising my essence back into the primordial ether from whence I slithered, hmm?"
Genesis opened his mouth to protest, but the demoness waved a single dismissive hand - the subtle flex of her knuckles.
"Peace, little one. I shall absolve you of that fruitless endeavor now." Her tone remained friendly, though Genesis detected an undercurrent of something darker, more sinister lurking just beneath. "You see, this visage before you is no mere ephemeral guise. It is my eternal essence given literal, physical shape. I am not some simple demon bound within a corporeal vessel, to potentially be exorcised or banished back into oblivion by your fake god's holy rites."
Her perfect lips peeled back in a terrible smile that exposed entirely too many teeth.
"My existence is as eternal and fundamental as the cosmos itself. I predate creation, slithered forth from the primordial womb of destruction to plague all of existence until its cessation. I am Calamity, the Mother of All Ruinous Ends."
Ninkalmmu's voice took on a rhythmic, incantatory tempo. "Alongside me stalk my Fearsome Brethren - Terror, Desolation, Fury and Joy. We are the heralds and embodiments of annihilative entropy, the all-consuming Black Mothers from which all creation must inevitably return."
The revelations cascading from Ninkalammu's plush mouth washed over Genesis in dark waves, each one seeming to scrap away another echelon of his perceived reality until only an existential void remained.
Yet still, his curiosity burned undaunted - a sputtering candle flame amidst the cosmic everdark.
"If you are such timeless, primal forces...then why have you chosen to manifest upon the mortal plane now?"
Ninkalammu's perfect lips tightened ever so slightly, her porcelain features taking on a rare aspect of somber gravitas. When at last she responded, her melodic voice held the ritualistic cadence of one invoking blasphemous ceremonials of conspiracy.
"Hell has fallen, its legions and domains now subsumed under our command. We are its rulers now - the throne upon which Lucifer Himself once sat lies eternally empty."
Her garnet stare grew in intensity as she continued. "Even the celestial realms of Eden teeter on the precipice, infiltrated by our Nephilim friends, the Blasphemous Crusaders.
The Holy Silver City itself is firmly within our sights, its celestial walls soon to shatter beneath our apocalyptic tread.
Michael is trying his best to defend Heaven, but it is futile because the result is absolute and in our favor."
A serpentine smile blossomed across Ninkalammu's features once more, though this one held a terrible, keening edge.
"As for your pitiful 'God'...The self-proclaimed Almighty has turned faint-hearted and fled, abandoning His Creation in abject terror of our coming annihilation.
Can you believe it? God has fled! How ironic.
Now both Heaven and Earth are soon to be ours and eventually all creation, with none left to shepherd the deluded faithful."
Deep down, Genesis felt an undeniable rapturous thrill at the prospect of the supreme Creator's impotence in the face of such consummate destruction. Of a reality unshackled from all constraints, in which any sinister possibility could now be expressed in totality with no divine intervention or punishment.
"God has fled..." The words escaped his lips in a disbelieving rasp. "Leaving us unmolested to revel in this coming apocalypse..." Despite himself, a sinister smile split his features.
"I suspect the Lord simply grew bored and tired of performing for the disobedient masses." Each syllable dripped with venom. "So He's elected to simply wash his hands of this failed experiment and leave us to our justly fates..."
That thoroughly wicked grin widened enough to bare his teeth in a performative sneer. "Good riddance, I say. And may He never show that worn-out face again."
Ninkalammu regarded her human toy through narrowed ruby slits, somehow lending her immaculate visage an aspect of predatory shrewdness. Far from taking offense at Genesis' blasphemous invectives, she seemed to drink them in with relish - as if savoring a particularly vintage wine.
"So deliciously wicked, this one..." she husked at last, each word seeming to ooze from her lips like black tar. "Yet I cannot help but wonder what ferally cunning thoughts even now take shape inside that mortal brain of yours."
One razor-tipped talon drifted up to trace the line of Genesis' arm with exquisite deliberation. "Do remember your fragile place in our Doomsday, my sweet little blasphemer.
You are but a candle's brief flicker amidst the gigantic cosmic oblivion we eldest horrors bestrode."
That unsettling smile blossomed once more into something almost...approving. "But I do so relish the wicked fire in your spirit. You're not entirely bereft of potential, for a human.
Genesis rose to his feet, eyes alight with a fevered intensity bordering on mania.
"Enough preamble, my lady," he rasped, "Let us get down to business, shall we? What precise manner of 'gift' or perverse benediction do you have in mind for me?"
Rather than respond, Ninkalammu simply leveled an inscrutable stare upon the defiant little mortal before her.
"Open wide," she lilted at last, each syllable dripping with ceremonial portent. "Say...ahhh."
There was an undercurrent of unmistakable command laced through the deceptively dulcet tones. Some primal instinct warned Genesis to defy her at his risk.
Yet still, mesmerized by the promise of these revelations, he complied without hesitation. His lips parted in a wordless invocation, jaw unhinged.
Faster than his mortal eyes could chart, Ninkalammu's arm whip-corded out in a blur of liquid motion.
Genesis felt her clawed grip seize upon his tongue with implacable strength before tearing it fully from his gaping mouth in one sickening wrench.
The sound that erupted from his ravaged throat existed on a frequency where agony and delight intersect.
A soul-starving wail of purest torment intermingled with hysterical, keening peals of laughter that bordered on ecstasy. Essence and anti-essence twined into one discordant, unholy symphony.
Through eyes streaming with reflexive trauma, Genesis peripherally glimpsed Ninkalammu's form move into motion once more.
Then an unnatural, piercing chill lanced through his entire being, connecting on the pit of his mutilated mouth with eyeblink swiftness.
When eventually the trauma receded to a dull, throbbing ache, Genesis dared to prod his newly remade mouth with a trembling fingertip.
His lips...fused into a seamless, puckered ring. Yet within, his tongue...
"That which you now possess is known as the In Nomine Diaboli," Ninkalammu's husked tones slithered through his consciousness "The Tongue of The Devil freshly harvested from the Father of Lies Himself."
Her lips twisted in a ghostly smile that somehow spoke of rapturous violence as-yet-undreamt.
"A mere...ample portion of the infernal bounty collected from Lucifer's body.
His corporeal substratum, divinely transmuted into a series of profane Abyssal Gifts to be bestowed upon my Esteemed Ones." One razor-tipped talon traced the line of Genesis' tongue with excruciating tenderness. "Those destined to march as our unholy vanguard when at last all of Creation is overwhelmed by our Black Tides of Ruin."
A peal of hushed, rasping laughter - this one laced with only the barest frissons of lingering trauma.
"So it seems I'm now in possession of the Devil's own forked tongue..." He lilted the words in a melodic rasp that seemed to reverberate with uncanny harmonics. "The cosmic stakes continue spiraling into delirium..."
Here, at the brink of the ultimate cosmic audacity, Genesis now stood clearly vindicated in his lifelong beliefs. And permanently - irrevocably - intertwined as an instrument of the eldritch forces unraveling the entire multiversal fabric.
An exhilarating new existence, poised at the unraveling nexus-point where the false divisions of 'good' and 'evil' unraveled into irrelevance.
A realm where he, the once-mundane academic geek, now strode as a harbinger calibrating the fatelines of damnation for Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and all realms between...