Chapter Text
"First I fought with the fire;
consum'd Inwards, into a deep world within:
A void immense, wild dark & deep,
Where nothing was"
— The Book of Urizen (by William Blake)
The sole pursuit of power was a path calamitous beyond all reckoning. An itinerant discipline whose bearer steeped his hands in the muck of his own blood across several a turbulent field to see the results yield naught save for his own entrails.
Now Vergil bore the consequence of his short-sightedness in full, keeling over to stare at his reflection, pushing his guts back into place to let his body seal the gaping cavity.
The onrushing river water beneath his soles was never enough to douse his ire, but instead fueled it ever higher. His bangs capered low from their position, his respiration faltering into a tempo which betrayed the composed exterior he desired to exhibit.
A single notion of loss came creeping up upon him.
His breath was about to hitch, but he smothered it with a growl.
He witnessed in the same reflection a lost child staring at the holocaust from over atop the knoll. A gorgeous abode reduced to cinders, a pyre for his fears to fester and ignite ever since—
"Enough!"
Vergil punched his reflection to dispel the hallucination, splashing his face and rippling the waters outward with a force which quaked the cavern.
His trembling hands, cleansed of muck, moved briskly to slick his hair back haphazardly. An attempt to retrieve any composure he had left.
"Dante...!"
Vergil veered around, Force Edge brandished in his grasp, knuckles paling and seeping carmine beneath his gloves.
"Is that the best you got?" Dante exhaled, posture upright unlike the other.
There was none of the same grin plastered on his face as he taunted. His pupils flared with a solemn light inconceivable from the typical clownish antics he'd enact.
"Let's finish this, Vergil," Dante declared.
The world had gone silent to them. Crawling still.
No sound invaded their ears.
Vergil primed Force Edge whilst Dante hoisted Rebellion.
Two visages morphed into austerity, one barely containing his rage and the other held in stark anticipation.
They rushed forward.
Two swords swept the air, their trajectory a blur.
They passed each other, and an arc of blood was drawn along a blade's trail.
Vergil's blood.
For the second time he doubled over, staggering. Force Edge tumbled from his hands, his amulet snapping free of its chain.
Within the descending jewel's surface, a faint glimmer of his mother could be seen.
Vergil's eyes widened. In a desperate bid, he reached out to reclaim the object, palms enclosing around it, yanking it closer to his heart.
"No one can have this, Dante..."
He stumbled forward.
"...It's mine. It belongs to a son of Sparda!"
His perception of time returned to normal with the beating waters against his boots.
In the short frame, he plucked Force Edge, continuing to back away to the brink.
His tormented groan immediately elicited Dante's proceeding aid, to which Vergil denied with a swipe of Yamato.
"Leave me!" Vergil heaved. "And go. I'm staying, this place was our father's home."
Dante's argument fell upon deaf ears. Muddled. Whatever he had to deliver was an exercise in futility.
An enormous perforation within reality bled out the hues of a solar-like amber whilst the hole itself was pitch charcoal. It induced a gravitational drag which slowly tore the cavern into whorling scraps of debris, arrayed behind Vergil's haggard bearing like the aureola of a fallen angel.
Vergil let himself fall into the pull.
Dante stretched his hand out, only to find the Yamato in swift rebuke, slicing a shallow wound upon it.
And Vergil plummeted along the sediments gathered at the waterfall's precipice, until his body faded from view.
Down, down, and down...
"Lo, a shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific,
Self-clos'd, all-repelling: what demon
Hath form'd this abominable void,
This soul-shudd'ring vacuum?"
— The Book of Urizen
The atmosphere had changed.
He continued falling.
The acrid malodour of sulfur permeated obstinately. Ethereal winds brushed against his face, the intercosmic gulfs between two worlds having been wholly crossed. Along with it, the unmistakable presence of the Underworld was encroaching upon Vergil.
Although this endless height would serve no more than a mere hassle, his disorientation from the previous bout with Dante had imbued him with uncertainty.
The frail physics given unto the Human Realm bore no distinction to the one which Vergil experienced thereon.
Here, the laws of reality groveled before a greater, loathsome lord.
The entire voidscape around him began metamorphosing, jostling him out of his languid contemplations.
Countless stars flecked the dimension, like eyes penetrating Vergil with their contempt.
And between it all, an eldritch fog coalesced into an existence which forced those millions of stars to bow and flicker low. Three crimson spheres possessed of no corporeal viscera, each their own unvisitable hell sequestered inside.
It could be no one else.
The avatar of the Demon Emperor himself, oozing with all the vitriol and loathing his disembodied self could summon into reality.
Vergil felt the hatred palpable upon his whole being.
"A grudge persisting for two millennia, is it?" Vergil humored in spite of his condition. "So be it. I've always wanted to face the Prince of Darkness myself."
The architect of his suffering, the perpetrator of that day...
Is right before me!
Vergil righted himself into a stance befitting the Yamato's heritage; iaido draw from the waist; his battered body brimming with an energy which limned the selfsame temperament as his father ages ago, albeit... flawed.
"If my father could surmount you, I should be able to achieve it too!" Vergil bellowed.
His scream stretched out into the expanse of infinity.
Yamato's steel unveiled when he struck forward.
The Demon Emperor retaliated in the manifestation of cerise stakes. They shot forward to meet the Yamato in innumerable magnitudes, yet Vergil swung wildly enough to invalidate every advance, dragging himself forward with the aerial rave.
Columns, spirals: the pattern of the Demon Emperor's red onslaught ran like tridimensional psychedelic entoptics.
Vergil never yielded even as his thigh, abdomen, shoulder, and arm were dug into deep crimson chasms, his flesh and sinew and cartilage supplanted by those stakes.
He had too drawn upon Force Edge to assist him, but the languor of several battles beforehand was catching up to him, his form intermittently flickering between his Devil Trigger and human state, unable to find consistency.
The situation grew ever dire.
He couldn't discern what were the Demon Emperor's conjurations and what was his own blood gushing through the void.
Then, a phantasmagorical marble hand emerged within the darkness, spinning the wheel of a thousand thunders crackling maniacally with the gesture.
Vergil's ophidian maw seethed with heat.
"There you are!"
He pressed through the assault to see the Demon Emperor's avatar once more, and augmented Force Edge to thrust forward—
Until his Devil Trigger dissipated.
Vergil's eyes widened.
The last gasp of his power was choked out as several stakes impaled him through the ribs, collapsing his lungs and pumping hematic clots up his gullet; pain further succeeded by the immediate surge of spastic lightning fraying his skin in sickly strips, and curdling his boiling blood.
His eyes rolled back. His neck creaked low.
The buzzing of electricity became white noise within his skull. Thorns began wrapping around his body, the Demon Emperor deriding his vain efforts.
Is this it?
He could see the surreal embers off in the horizon of his dying mind fading. Those flames stoked atop the burning wreck of his home that had become his agony and his fury.
Is this all I can muster...?
He grit his teeth, letting the depiction rage more fervently within his mind. The corpse of his mother he couldn't see. A legion of cranial cadavers laid strewn behind him like a bloodied, jagged river.
Not yet...!
He spat. His arm jerked, maiming itself through the brambles and briars.
Rave at close of day...he recited.
Each finger clenched his amulet.
His body spasmed, and with the last vestiges of strength available to him...
Rage, rage against the dying of the light!
...His Devil Trigger burst back to life with fourfold chiropteran wings spanning wide a prodigious breadth.
The brambles squeezing his limbs shattered, the Demon Emperor reeling in bewilderment.
"HAAAAAH!"
Yamato descended onerously atop the three-orbed avatar, burrowing into space and splitting it in half like glass.
Even if the Demon Emperor assumed a form wholly intangible, there was nothing the Yamato couldn't sever.
What followed was unintelligible to him.
Perhaps it was the anguished howl of the Demon Emperor he heard, or the buckling of reality as it could no longer accommodate the hellish wound he had inflicted.
Either way, Vergil blanked out, unable to glean what fruit his efforts had borne.
The last sight was his amulet flailing wildly in the descent.
What was it that his mother always chided him for?
His short fuse whenever Dante's quarrel infringed upon him, dragging him into the vortex of his foolishness? Perhaps. He had always been prone to bellicose affairs when it came to him, after all.
Or was it the needless pursuit of his father's legacy, which had already begun to sprout in youth when he searched for every lauded deed he had accomplished? Possibly. He always forsook his studies to skim those fairytales, much to his mother's chagrin.
Vergil didn't quite remember.
He couldn't remember.
His mind was in a stupor populated with strange vistas, and there was a different darkness encompassing his prone self. Different altogether from the nethermost bowels of the Demon Realm, for when he angled his neck upward, all he could see in the starry night sky was the moon half-consumed by some otherworldly blight. It bore no analogue to what he knew of any realm.
He couldn't elicit a single nerve in his body to act.
All there was to do in his sedated state, bereft of any emotional or motor response, was to rest.
He needed it more than anything else.
His consciousness faded.
What lay by his side as he embraced Yamato was a book. A compendium of poetry.
The wind swept and turned one of its pages.
"But the forehead of Urizen gathering,
And his eyes pale with anguish, his lips
Blue & changing; in tears and bitter"
— The Book of Ahania (by William Blake)
A/N: I've had this draft on the back burner for a long while, written as practice ever since Heaven on a Landslide, and was too ashamed to publish. After a few tweaks, here we go.
I always loved Dante more than Vergil... Until I read Visions of V.
In the Before the Nightmare novel preceding DMC5, it is said that Mundus, who was in a weaker state when Vergil found him in DMC3, could have potentially been surmounted if the Dark Slayer had been in tip-top condition.
I also have been delving a bit deeper into the Book of Urizen and Book of Ahania, both by William Blake which inspired DMC's Urizen, and my goodness the inspirations are glaring.