novelraw Chapter 488: Submit: A God Asked To Kneel
Chapter 488: Submit: A God Asked To Kneel
The first thing Aerenyx noticed every time he walked into the medical wing of Hope Sanctuary was the smell.
It wasn’t blood. Not rot. Not even sickness in the usual sense. Those were all smells he was used to... to the point where they offered comfort even as the humans shrunk away in disgust and fear.
No, this smell was something older and more invasive, a cloying wrongness that clung to the air the way incense did in places where too many prayers had gone unanswered. It curled along the back of his tongue and settled there, sour and persistent, no matter how carefully he kept his expression neutral.
A Sin had passed through here recently.
And he wasn’t talking about the sins that clung to the humans like a second skin.
There were seven Lords of Hell, if you didn’t count Lucifer the King, and at least one of the Seven was currently inside of the building with him.
However, since the Seven Deadly Sins couldn’t do anything by themselves, that meant that the other six were hiding somewhere in this god-forsaken ’Sanctuary’.
Clearly, they weren’t rampaging or hunting. This one seemed to be just... existing. Wearing human skin badly, like a costume that didn’t quite fit around the eyes.
Aerenyx didn’t bother trying to identify which one. It hardly mattered. Demons had been fighting to take over the world for only a few thousand years. They mush have been so happy when the world fell and they were able to crawl out of cracks.
The very nature of humans now was practically an invitation for them to take over and expand.
He kept his head down as ordered, his hands visible, and his posture cooperative. If the nobles back home in the Unseelie Court could see him now... he bit back the growl threatening to come out of his throat.
Taking in a deep breath, he pushed his true nature back and tried to channel Elias.
Elias knew how to look harmless. He had learned that skill long before Aerenyx ever stepped into his body. Shoulders relaxed. Gaze attentive but not challenging. The kind of presence humans read as competent but submissive.
It made his teeth ache.
"Medical oversight," the clerk said, tapping the clipboard with the end of his pen. "You’ll assist where needed. Intake checks. Triage. Monitoring. No independent decisions."
Aerenyx nodded once.
"Yes, sir," the clerk sneered and Aerenyx bit the inside of his cheek so hard that he could taste the death and disease threatening to come out of him.
"Yes, sir," he repeated. The words tasted like rust.
The clerk didn’t look at him when he spoke again. "You’ll also be rotated into training support when manpower is low. You’re not command. You’re not authority. You do what you’re told."
Another nod.
Another small erosion.
The med center sat closer to the inner blocks than Waste Reclamation, but not by much. It was cleaner, brighter, and filled with the particular kind of desperation that came from people who still believed survival meant salvation. Beds lined the walls in neat rows. Charts hung from clips at the foot of each one. Guards stood at intervals, watching the patients more closely than the staff.
That told Aerenyx everything he needed to know.
This wasn’t healing.
This was inventory management.
He moved through the space slowly, deliberately, cataloguing without staring.
Fevers were untreated because they weren’t severe enough yet. Wounds were cleaned but not properly dressed. Pain was managed only to the point where it didn’t interrupt productivity. The healer assigned to him—a thin woman with hollow eyes and trembling hands—gave instructions in a flat monotone, clearly reciting protocol rather than thinking.
"Don’t touch unless directed," she said. "Don’t interfere if security intervenes. We’re not here to save everyone."
Aerenyx inclined his head. "Understood."
He could feel the Sin again as he worked, drifting somewhere just beyond the walls of the med center. Watching. Amused. Feeding, in its own way, off the system humans had built to punish weakness while pretending it was order.
Disgusting.
In another world, he would have burned the place to the ground and salted the ashes out of spite. In this one, he adjusted a blanket, checked a pulse, and recorded a temperature that no one would act on.
Fae did not serve humans. Unseelie Fae definitely didn’t.
It wasn’t a law written anywhere. It didn’t need to be. It was simply how the world was meant to function. Humans were not built to hold authority over beings older than their languages, and every time they tried, the result was collapse, blood, or both.
Hope Sanctuary had skipped straight to the middle.
Aerenyx followed orders for the same reason the three other men did.
Sera wanted them to. She needed to be here, and he needed to be close to her.
It really was just that simple.
And once he could convince her that the other three males weren’t needed, that he was enough, then he could take her and leave.
A guard snapped his fingers at him halfway through the day. "Hey. You. Move faster."
Aerenyx turned even as he forced an ’Elias smile’ on his face. "Of course."
The guard didn’t see the thing behind the smile, the way power coiled and stilled rather than flaring. He didn’t see the effort it took not to remind the human exactly how fragile his body really was.
Later, during a lull that wasn’t actually a lull but was labeled as one, the healer leaned closer and whispered, "You’re good at this."
Aerenyx looked at her.
"Good at pretending," she corrected herself quickly. "At not... caring too much."
He considered lying.
Instead, he said, "Caring isn’t the same as acting."
She flinched.
Good. Let it unsettle her. Let the truth scrape a little.
By the end of the shift, he was bone-tired in a way that had nothing to do with physical exhaustion. This place gnawed at identity. It demanded submission not through force, but through repetition, through normalization, through making the unacceptable routine.
That was why it would fall.
Not today. Not tomorrow. But inevitably.
As he was dismissed, Aerenyx caught another brush of that Sin, closer now, lingering near intake. He turned his face away, nostrils flaring slightly in distaste.
Demons were disgusting, no matter what meat sack they wore.
He stepped back into the fading light of Hope Sanctuary, already counting the hours until Sera returned to Commune C.
He would wait.
He would kneel.
But only until she said otherwise.
And when that moment came, the gods would remember how to stand, and heaven help those who didn’t submit.