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break (n.): a brief rest, as from work
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Being foremost among demons meant Mazikeen had responsibilities beyond physical torturing.
Still including that, of course. She'd never have stood for it otherwise. But there was administrative crap she had to put up with. Underlings to oversee. Disputes to quash. At least overseeing a realm primarily comprised of and manifested as the contents of its occupants' minds meant there were few logistical concerns.
And, of course, there was the task of managing Hell's ruler himself. A job which, particularly in the last few centuries, had taken up greater and greater chunks of her time - and rendered her standard methods of jollying him out of his pissy moods less and less effective.
Though she did try.
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"Lucifer."
A flicker of his attention.
"I'm setting up the program for this serial date-rapist we just got in, wanted your read on it." Hell's standard procedure of allowing someone's own guilty conscience to dictate their torments worked without much supervision in most cases, but a decent percentage of arrivals simply didn't have remorse or shame as part of their makeup.
Maze was always good at spotting those. Like recognized like.
And at such times, it fell to her, or one of the demons under her supervision, to design a punishment personally. She could (and occasionally did) do it in her sleep by now, but Lucifer was capable of some quite creative insights - and moreover, he needed the distraction.
"I couldn't decide," she went on, "between putting him into a large-angry-cellmate scenario right away, while he's still sane, or letting him spend a few millennia terrified and confused on a bad roofie trip first. Whaddya think?"
No emotion - not a tinge of amusement or even anger - colored his reply. "I don't care, Maze. Do what you will."
It was infuriating. It was baffling. And, eventually, worrying.
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When she sought him out again some time later, he was behind one of the doors. That in itself wasn't unusual; he'd never been any more interested in a purely hands-off approach to his job than she was.
When Maze reached out and grasped the handle, she took a moment to flick through the impressions it offered her of the sinner behind it. A woman who'd borne three children, poisoned them one at a time to draw attention and sympathy. Two had died before she was caught, the third went blind from toxic overexposure.
Even behind bars, she'd managed to seduce a guard, get herself pregnant again, and commenced sneaking gulps of whatever cleaning products she could get her hands on, determined to wring all the medical mileage possible out of this one before it could be born and taken away from her. But she'd misjudged, eventually, and destroyed herself as well as the child within her.
Now she was here. And when Maze pushed her door open, she saw the woman strapped to an operating table, Lucifer, having assumed his physical form and garbed it in a doctor's white coat, looming over her. "Now, ma'am," he assured her pleasantly. "I appreciate your insight, surely you've spent more time in hospital than actual physicians do, but in my opinion anesthesia is quite unnecessary for this procedure."
He turned to a stainless-steel cart larger in surface area than the one on which the now-shrieking woman lay, piled high with variegated implements of torture.
Not all of them, Maze noted, were sourced from the imagination of his 'patient'. She spotted a few favorites from his personal toyboxes - plus some of hers, which he hadn't asked to borrow, but whatever.
As he made the next cut with a twisted rusty knife, the woman's terrified eyes fell on Maze, and she began babbling pleas for rescue.
It always took them a few subjective decades to get over expecting that.
Lucifer followed her gaze, and he smiled broadly. He hadn't included a mask in his costume, and gouts of spurting blood had stained his teeth red. "Ah, Mazikeen, brilliant timing! I could use a nurse. Care to assist?"
After a moment, she shrugged and took up station on the other side of the table. Held open the flap of skin he'd just parted while he sawed pieces of it away and blithely assured the woman that if he took her apart thoroughly enough, they'd get to the root of exactly what was wrong with her.
Tried to convince herself that what she saw in his eyes was no different from the same old righteous glee in a just torment.
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The next splinter of Hell she tracked him down in wasn't the sort that lent to their manifesting themselves. The occupant had provoked a shoot-out with the police and holed up in an decrepit apartment building, determined to rack up as many kills as possible before going down in a blaze of glory. Instead, he'd ended up stepping backwards into an old elevator shaft, plunging through utter darkness and terror for what had felt like eternity before finding his death at the bottom.
Here, it was an eternity; he'd been falling through nothingness since he arrived, no sight or sensation, no sound but his own ceaseless screaming.
Lucifer looked to Maze; they knew each other well enough that she could read his face whether or not he was wearing one. "He died on impact," he remarked conversationally. "Never felt the pain he was so terrified of as he fell. I keep contemplating allowing him to finish the job here; surely I could muster up some lava or spikes to cushion his landing. Perhaps I will someday, if he gets bored. But so far, the longer he's falling, the more it's shredding his soul to pieces. Fascinating."
Then he was gone, leaving Maze alone in the incoherent aftermath of a fall that had never truly ended.
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Hell had been chaos at the beginning. No form, no thought, no doors, just a seething cauldron of humanity's burgeoning wickedness. Creating even the semblance of matter from who and what those damned souls had been was a skill that took time for a former angel to learn; when Lucifer crafted Mazikeen, he used the bloodshed from his own impact as a base, gave her a voice from the echoes of his screams as he wrenched twisted bones and wings back into place, and seeded her thoughts with all-consuming fury.
She was of him and by him and thralled to him, then - an extension of his will, a tool he called upon to aid him as they built Hell from haphazard misery into a place where every individual could be tormented as they most deserved. Other demons were needed, in time, but there was plenty of other source material to choose from by then. Maze had only to visit a cell or two, scour a victim's memory for the tyrants or torturers they most feared, and allow things to germinate from there.
But regardless of how it began, any being given the ability to think would eventually develop a sense of self, and Mazikeen was not merely a reflection for long. The fallen Lightbringer was still the lord and master of the darkness he'd created, but even as she learned herself, she learned him, his quirks and his moods. It had startled Lucifer the first time she'd argued with him, defied him, but she hadn't been surprised; she'd known how he would react, just as she knew that in time he'd come to enjoy their disagreements.
She knew him.
Or she had once.
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It was in a slightly older neighborhood, the personal perdition of a colonial witch-hunter, that she found him next. As Maze passed through the man's door, she made a mental note to update his punishment. He'd been spending most of his time since arrival being ducked again and again into a pond, drawn up just long enough to plead his innocence and beg for release before he was drowning again, and it was still effective, but she'd found that it was sometimes interesting to use modern means to harass such souls as his.
A fantasy novel, perhaps, literary poison being read to the innocent ears of a classful of eager children, while he tried vainly to scream his protests loudly enough to blot it out. That would be amusing.
But he wasn't drowning at the moment. Lucifer had dragged him from the pond and held him, fist clenched in his sopping collar. "Why?" he demanded. "Why did you kill so many? What were you after?" Without effort, he wrenched the man off his feet and drew their faces close. "What did you desire?"
Maze jolted. She hadn't seen Lucifer pull this particular trick in a very, very long time. Hell, after all, tended to be much more concerned with what someone desired least.
"I- " he kicked, fighting to ease the pressure on his throat enough to answer. "I wanted to punish them. Punish them all."
"All?" Lucifer's voice dropped to a snarl. "There is no punishing them all. It never ends." Contemptuously, he flung his captive back at the pond, with enough force that the impact might've broken his neck if he were still corporeal. He turned and strode away, stopping short only when he realized that Maze stood between him and the door.
"We have to talk."
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Lucifer's throne room was generally a physical place, especially these days, and once she'd more or less marched him there, he sprawled indolently on his dais. "What is it, Maze? Another petty grievance you need me to sort out?"
"Cut the crap, Lucifer. What I need is for you to tell me what's going on."
Anything else in creation might have quailed before the glare he fixed on her then, but Mazikeen held. Hell surged around them as they locked in silent conflict, borders stretching with every new soul it ensnared, the background roar of screaming always audible, even here.
Many times now, she'd found Lucifer patrolling those borders. There was a particular district of Hell where most of the animal abusers ended up, locked in individual cages but occupying the same vast zoo, so that the constructs who wandered among them, jeering and throwing things and never permitting them rest, could be shared communally. It saved energy.
Lucifer had been prowling like those souls did, frantic as a penned beast, and that was the main reason Maze wasn't surprised when he finally spoke.
"I can't do it anymore, Maze. I need to get out."
They'd die.
She knew it, even as she absorbed his words. God had cast Lucifer down and would never permit him to return; if he tried to lay siege to Heaven, his punishment this time would be not banishment but destruction.
That didn't change the fact that her place was at his side.
"I didn't get up today planning to storm the Silver City, but -"
Lucifer reached out, held her arm. "I'm not talking about that, Maze. Earth."
She reared back as though he'd slapped her. This...this she hadn't been expecting.
Earth? Earth was behind every one of the doors in the hallways beyond, the source of every nightmare she'd ever exploited to torture its former residents, a breeding ground for atrocities that were still capable of surprising even her, now and again. What interest could it possibly hold for him?
Her incredulity must have shown on her face. "It can't all be that," he jerked his chin at the exit to the corridors. "You know, I've been monitoring the new souls, and the one thing they all have in common...they didn't want to leave to come here. There has to be something more. Something they miss. And I don't even know the questions to ask them what it is." He stood, holding her before him. "So I'm going to find out, Maze. I'm going."
In a realm forged by illusory horror, the only bastion of truth Mazikeen had even known was the voice of her creator. But even if Lucifer had been capable of lying, she would have known his fervent declaration was genuine. This wasn't a whim he could be argued out of. And though the idea was more staggering to her than the simple obliteration that faced them if they should approach Heaven, her duty hadn't altered.
She carved a confident smile across her face. (She could lie just fine.) "Then what are we waiting for?"