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Gregory Edgeworth—Father—had ruined everything.
If he had only made a different choice—refused the call, actually killed the bastard, or had thought ahead to what might happen if he were to fail—then Miles wouldn’t have had to live like this. Wouldn’t have had his fleshed pulled and corrupted and rotten until humanity and goodness were a distant memory.
If Father had made a different choice, Miles wouldn’t have lost everything when he died.
It had been a long time since the darkness in his lightless and dismal cell was anything but a comfort, ages since it had obscured his vision, so when Franziska visited him that day—the whip hanging lose at her belt smacking against the key in her hand, her lip trembling—he had known something was different.
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It was done. After all the aching years of loneliness and pain, Manfred Von Karma was nothing but a pile of ashes smoldering in a shitty box. It was done, and Miles was free. He could do anything—maybe even go seek them out—absolutely anything he wanted. He should have elated at his freedom, but all he felt was an emptiness. Was this it?
Miles knelt down into his former master's coffin and lowered his black clawed hand to sift through the acrid ashes. He didn’t know where the blade—his father’s blade—had broken off, but as large as the Demon Lord had loomed in Miles life, there was only so many ashes a body could make.
After only seconds he found it, his claw brushed against the metal and then his arm was on fire, shooting lahar paths of pain up his arm and through his back. The skin on his hand blackened and blistered as he wrapped his fingers around the blade tip. It was Holy, blessed and brilliant—he was something wrong. He twisted and blackened in the light of all that was Good. How dare he imagine he might seek them out? How dare he desire to live in the same world as his friends.
He would never be the Hero his father had been, even if he was the one that killed the Demon Lord in the end. Miles raised the blade fragment to his face and held it there. He watched his flesh burn and melt and didn’t look away.
He stood there until the room wasn’t dark and musty anymore. One second was comfortable dim and then everything was white. He dropped the fragment to the ground, and though it clattered against the stone he could not hear it. The chanting of both one and many voices suffusing the air around Miles reached a crescendo and then was silent—silent in the way of a winter night after a fresh blanket of snow.
Miles blinked and saw an Angel in front of him, all bright and formless and Many. He blinked again and it was gone. But it also wasn’t. It was the light itself.
YOU HAVE BROKEN THE HEAVENLY DECREE
The words that were not words came from everywhere and nowhere.
You Will Be Punished For It
Miles cried and screamed, he screamed as the light faded and blackness darker than even he could see through ripped through him, breaking him apart pieces by piece and building something new—something that both was and wasn’t him. He screamed long after it faded, whatever that darkness had made him healed the damage to his vocal chords as it happened, so he keep going. The air was infinite, the pain worse than anything The Demon Lord had done to him. He collapsed on the ground, still screaming, still crying.
He would never be free.
The Demon Lord only stopped screaming when Franziska pulled him into a hug and stroked his hair, tracing her fingers along the pattern of emerging horns from what seemed like another life.