Sam was fucked.
His secret, his ability to pass through the Pride Wall was now outside of his control and ability to contain. Alastor might be willing to keep mum about Sam's seemingly unique freedom. But the other, that imp? There was no way in all of Hell that the imp was going to stay quiet about this. And when people started to hear that a Sinner could leave Hell, let alone the Ring of Pride, they were going to come for him. Probably rip him to shreds, thinking his flesh could be used in totems to get them out as well. Sam knew it wasn't. He'd thrown some fingernail clippings at the Pride Wall once. They burned before they hit the ground.
And then there was Lucifer. With the coming buzz that Lucifer's Law was being flouted, the big man in the high castle was going to be livid. And if the unspoken implications and half-glimpsed recollections of the man that he could wheedle from Charlie's heart were any indication, Lucifer's lividity was going to be volcanic in scope and intensity. Sam might have an edge in that he was the unexpected, but what good was that edge against the Archangel who had waged a war (even if a losing one) against God?
With myriad paths to ruin converging on him, and no way that he could maneuver away from them, he fell to that most trusted of standbys during such times. He drank deep of Husk's fetid rot-gut.
It tasted like he was eating food that even Razzle and Dazzle thought was a failure, but it burned the whole way down, and numbed his fear. This didn't qualify as liquid courage, because he even now didn't feel it possible to fight his way out of this. Perhaps liquid apathy?
"Careful there, kiddo. You might kill yourself drinkin' like that," Husk said, as he emerged from the back room and took his place tending bar.
"Booze can't kill a Sinner. Angel has tried," Sam said. He wasn't slurring yet, so he wasn't truly drunk. But he did feel less despairing, so maybe this stuff was doing something for him.
"I think everybody tries drinkin' themselves to death at least once, here in Hell," Husk said. He thumped the pillar, and a bottle slid down into his hand. For the life of him, Sam had no idea where those bottles were stored. The room directly above this one was a bathroom with a claw-foot tub. There was nowhere to hide the sheer volume of bottles that Husk went through on a usual day. "Got somethin' on your mind? Got a sort of giving-up look about you."
"I'm probably going to be hunted down and vivisected within the next few days," Sam said, pulling hard from the neck of the bottle. He had to fight the gag-reflex, but down it went.
"Pissed off an Overlord? There's ways around that," Husk said with clear dismissal.
"You'd know?"
"Fuckin' right, I'd know," Husk said. "I've lived through four Death Marks since I came down here. D'you think I would have made it if I just sat down on a stool, drank and bitched? No! I got my shit together and I made a plan."
"Why do you even care? That isn't you," Sam said.
"You don't know sweet fuck all about me, kid," Husk said. He drank deep himself, wiping his muzzle with a wing. "I watched every friend I had, die to gas and grenades over the course of a hundred days. Then, when I get back, my hometown is gone like it never was there at all. My girl drops from lung cancer, despite never smokin' a day in her fuckin' life. So I did what a lot of hopeless assholes done. I went out West. And I settled in a little town in the desert, watched it turn into somethin' great."
"What city? Vegas?" Sam asked, seeing the answer even as he asked the question.
"Yer fuckin' right, Vegas. I went there to build the Hoover Dam," pride swelled in Husk as he remembered. While Sam couldn't see his memories, the recollection of them breathed a whisper of life into his soul, a bit of joy back into the blackened cinder which was his hopes and dreams. For a quiet moment, Husk felt human again.
But the moment faded. "But the point is," he said, pointing at Sam from fairly close by. "you give up, you'll never see how it ends. I didn't deep-throat a thirty eight back in '32. You ain't got any fuckin' excuse after the shit you pulled. You fought an Exorcist to a standstill, Sam. The number a' Sinners that done that since the Purges began is pretty fuckin' slim. As far as I know, the only bastards that did the likes a' what we done in the lobby were the fuckin' V Triarchy."
Husk then leaned in close, a very stern look on his face. "Think about that before you even consider givin' up. You, a coked out faggot, and a burnt-out has-been managed to hold down the might of the angels. If they come for ya', you fight back wit' both fists bloody until they have to crawl over their corpses to reach ya'."
And again, that was a lesson Husk had learned without exaggeration as an expeditionary forces volunteer in the trenches of Verdun. Now that Sam could see the innermost reaches of him, what he saw there was a trench, piled high with corpses. A young man, barely out of his teens, his eyes ten thousand miles away, as another shell bursts and sends mud and rotting bodies flying. He did not flinch. He just drank from a bottle with a broken neck. This was the heart of him. The boy who lost everyone.
"So what's this secret that's got ya' all twisted up? I ask 'cause I don't want it to land on me. Not 'cause I care about it," Husk then continued.
"Well, the secret's gonna be out pretty soon. Might as well say it," Sam said, taking another long pull of rotten liquor. I hit him like a kick in the brain, almost as stark as learning the Logos of one of Alastor's runes, but with a wholly different kind of burn to it. "I," he said. "can leave Pride."
Husk just stared at him.
"If yer' gonna bullshit me, I ain't gonna talk to you no more," Husk said.
"How often have you known me to lie to you?" Sam asked.
"Admittedly not fuckin' often," Husk said. He continued to stare at Sam, and after a long, long pause, his eyes widened. "Well I'll be fucked. You can leave Pride Ring."
"And you believe me now, because?" Sam asked.
"I'm a fuckin' good liar, kid. It takes a liar to know a liar. And what you just said wasn't one. An' since I know you're a fucktonne less bugshit than Niffty, it's not that you just 'believe' you can get through the Wall, it's that you 'can'. Explains a lot, really. Why the Goat was willin' to take on all a' Hell to keep you alive for one. Why he bothers with you in the first place for another," Husk said plunking himself back onto his stool and drinking.
"You don't seem to surprised," Sam said.
"Kid, you shouldn't be in Hell in the first place," Husk said.
"The Archangel Michael said otherwise," Sam said. "And yes, I did remember my Judgment. Wasn't just a coma dream."
"I ain't talkin' about how you didn't do enough bad shit to land in the bad place," Husk said. "What I'm sayin' is that even though you didn't do enough good shit to go to the good place, you still shouldn't'a landed down here with me."
"Why's that?"
"Where were you born?" Husk asked from the side of his mouth while drinking, an impressive feat of ventriloquism.
"I don't see why that's..."
"Spill it, Sam," Husk said, after finishing his long quaff.
"Fredericton," Sam said.
"New Brunswick? Canada?" Husk prompted.
"How many other Frederictons are there?"
"A few," Husk took a pull, and then leaned in. "Y'see, ever since 'bout 1650-somethin', a certain kinda folk stopped landin' in Hell. Wanna guess who?"
"Sixteen sixty's about when God went silent. Huh," Sam muttered into the bottle.
"Say what now?"
"Hm? Oh. Apparently God's been sitting on His ass doing nothing for three centuries," Sam said.
"Well if that's true, it'd explain a few things," Husk gave a bitter laugh. "No, somebody upstairs decided to stop sendin' Acadians to Hell. And those that kicked 'em out ended up getting the same treatment. To this day, there ain't s'posed to be a single Canadian in Hell."
"Well, I know at least one who came to Hell when I killed him," Sam said.
"Thought you never hurt nobody?" Husk said.
"I killed him two days ago," Sam said.
"You can leave Hell, too?" Husk asked.
"'Parently," Sam said.
"Lucifer's gonna be shitting kittens at that one," Husk said. But then shrugged. "And I'm guessin' that the dumbass you offed has something to do with my missing Mark3 A2 that I kept under the couch cushion?"
"Yeah. I plated it in Seraphic Steel, etched it with Binding Runes, and shoved it into a psychopath's innards, and then killed him with it inside," Sam said.
"And it did what?"
"Because of the magic, it went through the Judgment with him, he landed on the Lodestone I marked him with, and blew him up within seconds of him landing in Hell."
"So you used magic to pull him to Hell."
"I guess. Where was he supposed to go?" Sam asked.
"Heck. Where all Canadian Sinners go."
"You're shitting me," Sam said.
"My paw to God," Husk said.
"Heck. Really," he said.
"Yup. Some kinda pocket-dimension wedged up against Envy and Wrath. Don't know more than that, other than that it doesn't get Purged as often as we do."
"There's a lot less Canadians than there are Everybody Else-ians," Sam said. Okay, maybe he was a little bit drunk.
"That there are. Now stop being a whiny bitch and fight for yer fuckin' life," Husk demanded.
"When you put it that way, what choice do I even have?" Sam asked.
"Fuckin' none. Just like the rest of us doomed assholes," Husk said, and clanked his bottle against Sam's in a toast.
Chapter 17
Despair Is The Great Enemy
Moxie felt a snap in his brain as it remembered who it was and that it was still inside of his skull. He blinked his eyes open, despite the sticky feeling of them against his eyelids. He shifted around, bewildered at his current circumstance, because he had no idea where he was, or how he had gotten here. And more pressingly by a half was that he wasn't wearing pants.
"Millie?" Moxie asked at a croak. He released a dry, wheezing cough, and picked his face off of what it was laying on. A pillow. On the floor, behind his desk at I.M.P. Why was he here?
"Yeah, Mox?" Millie leaned around the edge of the desk. Her smile looked entirely too amused.
"How did I get here? And why am I in the office without pants?" He asked, letting out dry coughs as he did.
"I tried to bring ya' home," Millie said, "but you insisted that you start reading at once. Said something about the 'words flowing away if you din't capture 'em'," Millie said.
"Did I really say that?"
Millie pulled out her hellphone, and hit a button. There was a recording of Moxie's utterly poleaxed face shown there. "Y'don unnerstan, pretty lady. I gats'ta. I gats'ta read 'em now. 'Cause they'll walk away. Walk on their bellies. Gotta drink 'em while they're still solid!"
"Why did you have a recording of that?" Moxie asked as Millie handed him a cup of milk, which he promptly guzzled.
"Oh, I got lotsa fun things you said while we were in that library," she said with a warm smile, before leaning in and giving Moxie a peck on the cheek.
"That was... I don't want to ever have to do that again," Moxie said. The walls were still shifting slightly to his eyes. As though they couldn't decide on concrete dimensions. He knew from experience that the sensation would pass in a couple minutes, given his impish physiology, but still. "So what did we bring out? I barely remember what happened in there.
"We got a bunch of weird books that look like diaries," she said, opening one and showing it to Moxie. The page on the left was written in a flowing script which could only be Purson's. The page on the right, conversely, was in strictly utilitarian block letters, as though the page had been subjected to a printing press. "But you told us to leave after grabbing a weird stack of paper."
Moxie blinked at the books he'd gathered, then to the stack of paper. There was something about that paper that called to him even now, as his madness was ebbing away. He picked the thing up and started to leaf through it. Again, it was in Purson's flowing script. It was a discussion on dimensional matters, of covenants and bindings. Then, he reached a piece of marginalia near the bottom of a page.
"Provisional title: Treatise On The 37 Oaths To The Nine Circles, Twofold, by Alastor the Radio Demon, 1984," Moxie read.
"What does the Radio Demon have to do with this?" Millie asked, tucking in close to read over his shoulder.
Moxie continued to read, and when he did, even from the first few pages, he knew exactly why drugged-him grabbed this thing. "This... this is about creating your own Remit. A remit of yourself, drawn from yourself. Something that can't be withdrawn, something that can't be circumvented, only overpowered."
"Is that why the Radio Demon is so strong?" Millie asked, grabbing Moxie's arm as she did so.
"It has to be. He landed in hell and in a decade destroyed all three primary factions of the Pride War single-handedly. If he built his own Remit before coming to Hell, that explains everything that he was able to do from the day that he Fell."
"So how does this help us?"
"This... Millie, this is a step by step instruction manual on how to do it," Moxie said, his heart beginning to pound as he found arcane details scribed out in exacting detail. "The things that the Radio Demon did to make himself powerful, we could do the same things ourselves! I mean, Alastor is completely immune to Birch's compelling voice! Which means that at least some part of the protection that swearing the 37 Oaths gives would allow us to do the same!"
"So we've just gotta figure out what part of the Oaths does that, and then do it," she said with a happy nod.
"I don't think it'll be that simple, sweetie," Moxie said, as he continued to read. "It's looking like the whole covenant is interwoven in such a way that if you don't do all of it, you don't get any of it. I think that's why Alastor is so unique. He came to Hell with the 37 Oaths sworn in full."
"Then we'll do all of 'em. How hard could it be?" Millie asked.
"Pretty involved, actually," Moxie said. It needed such things as human sacrifices, bindings of virtue and vice, and the power of Death Itself.
"We'll do it anyway," Millie said. "I know you can do this, hun. I love you."
"This... actually looks like it's missing some things," Moxie's brief enthusiasm began to gutter. "I don't think Alastor told Purson everything he knew. Or maybe Purson didn't write down everything that Alastor told him. Because I know there's parts here that aren't... explained properly."
"As if they think you'll know more about this stuff than you actually do?"
"Exactly!" Moxie said. He then sighed and leaned his chin onto his hand. He then flinched and switched hands, because he'd accidentally put weight on his gun-shot arm. "This is a start. It's a really, really good start. But if we want to fill in the blanks, we're going to need to talk to some thaumaturges."
"Back to Wrath, then?" she asked.
"No. Not Wrath," Moxie said, recalling distinctly how little his fellow imps in Wrath cared about anything magical. No, in Wrath, the alpha and the omega of your worth was how big of a beast you could strangle to death with your bare hands. But there were imps everywhere in Hell, and each ring had their own clade of them. And of those, one group stood out. "I think we need to go back to Lust."
"Mox... are you sure you wanna do that again? You remember what happened last time..." she said, giving his shoulders a comforting squeeze.
"Our anniversary was fine, once you got past... well, Blitz" Moxie swallowed the dismay, remembering what happened last time. The fact was, before this, he would have rejected Lust out of hand, as it was a foul, backwards, humid and deeply unpleasant place, one that the elevator could get you there in a couple minutes, but driving there took hours. Now, though? Now Moxie was willing to overlook all manner of annoyance. "If we can find any secrets of thaumaturgy anywhere in Hell, it'll be in Lust."
"Should we tell the boss?"
"I don't think he'll be exactly eager to..."
"Goin' back to my old stompin' grounds! Just fuckin' TRY to stop me!" Blitz barged in from the armory, practically lighting the room with his post-coital afterglow. And exactly as Moxie didn't want to deal with, Blitz was stark naked.
"Where did you come from?"
"Just got the thirsty owl to pass out," Blitz strutted in, idly tossing the grimoire onto their desk. "An' then I had to go and dump a human back into the Living World. You've gotta try some of that livin' puss, Mox!"
"I'm happily married, sir," Moxie said flatly.
"Then ask your bitch nicely!" Blitz said, continuing to strut past and into his office. "So I've managed to butter up Stolas enough that he's lettin' me use some of his ho's old dusty weapons. Figure that's gotta be a kick in the pants for us on the whole 'killing Birch' thing we're after."
"I don't imagine Duchess Stella's going to be too happy about that, sir," Moxie said.
"Didn't ask her. Asked him. And actually didn't ask him, just bitched about Birch and he offered! I like that man," he said. And no sooner did he finish that sentence than he emerged from his office fully dressed. That was honestly a rather impressive turnaround.
"Uh, boss," Millie asked.
"Yeah Mills?" he asked, straightening his red skull brooch that he was pretty much never seen without.
"Why were you havin' sex with a human?" she asked.
"Wanted to show somethin' special for Stolas. He was looped up about something. I figured he could use some extra strength relief," Blitz said. "I'mma call my daughter and tell her we ain't in today, then we're going on a field trip to FUCKIN' LUUUUUUUST!"
"Satan preserve us," Moxie muttered under his breath. At least one of them was having fun right now.
As Striker came to a halt at the gates of the edifice, it was obvious one person in the yard was having a lot more fun than all the others.
Slowly, painfully, he pulled himself off of Bombproof and looped the reins over a fence post. Bombproof shot him a reproachful glare, then flicked his head, causing the reins to flip off of the post and dangle down. With a look of withering contempt, the Hellhorse then let out an equine 'harrumph' and began to saunter toward something it could kill and eat.
Striker pushed the gates to the Killgrave Orphanage and Home For The Young And Violent, and looked upon what, to most, would be an incredibly unlikely scene. There he was, Wrath Incarnate, standing so tall over the imps that the greatest of them by stature – Striker himself – barely made it to his knee. And his attentions were turned entirely to a barbeque. The great, black body of Satan currently only bore cargo shorts, and an apron that read 'Life is short, eat red meat'. In his hands were a pair of tongs, and a rundlet of frothy beer.
Unlike their elders, none of the young imps here seemed to be any the wiser that they should be terrified at the presence of one of the Deadly Sins in their midst. Probably because these kids, and people like Striker in a more general sense, knew exactly how not-in-danger they were from the Elder Devil who was humming under his breath as he flipped burgers the size of children's heads with tongs that made them look puny and took massive sips from his cask of locally brewed beer.
This would have been simpler if Satan were at the Altar of Worms. Or his own private palace. Or just about anywhere but at his passion projects. But the Remit told Striker that Satan was doing his grill-thing today, so here it drew him.
"B̵̄͜ụ̸̚ń̷͜," the Elder Devil said. A child with a clipped, spadeless tail held up a plate as wide as his torso, with a bun on it. The Deadly Sin of Wrath then tonged a slab of meat onto it, before ruffling the imp's hair and sending him on his way. There was, as always when he was engaged in this kind of thing, a quiet, sublime smile on the face of the oldest being left alive in Creation, for whom only God Himself was older. "N̷̨̈ĕ̵͕x̴̯̾t̵͇̅?̵̗̌"
Satan's words pushed against reality, rippling it as he spoke. Thus it was for somebody created by God directly. In Striker's respectable experience, the only things which spoke with such weight, were his employer, and things like Archangels.
And then a burning white Sinner did it as well.
"I think I could do with a bite. A small one," Striker said. Satan turned from the grill, his eyes narrowing to see one of his Guns intruding on his personal time. Then, they moved to his arm, which was notably short by one hand, then back up to his face, which was notably short by one eye.
"İ̵͕ ̷͕̽s̷̭̚u̵̳̕p̷͎͊p̷̳̕o̴̫̓s̴̯̔e̴͓̓ ̸̠̈t̴͓̆h̷̻̔o̵̘̓u̵̥͝ ̶̫̊c̷̤̑o̵̘̓u̵̥͝ľ̷̜d̶͎̋.̴̪̚ ̵̨͂H̸̞͋ă̸̙v̵͚̋ȩ̵̍ ̵͙̄a̸̩̚ ̴͚̋s̵̫̃e̶̪̍a̴̩͝t̴͚̉.̴̩̔ ̵͈̋N̷̨̈o̶̚ͅt̷̩̽ ̶͓͝g̷̬̀o̷̞͑ĭ̵̯n̵͉͛g̸̩̊ ̶̬̂t̶̨͂ò̶̖ ̶̦̇ḋ̵̠i̶̓͜e̵̮̽ ̷̞̇i̴̥͝n̵͇͋ ̴̯̄t̴͓̆h̷̻̔e̵̥̚ ̵̮͂n̵̩̚e̶͚̒x̵̡̐t̵͍̔ ̷̳̃f̸̣̏ẹ̷̽w̴̻̽ ̴̯̀m̸̘̔ḯ̷̪ṇ̵̒u̷̧̎t̸̛̬ẹ̸̑ś̶͚,̵̥̂ ̶̳̍ȃ̸̹r̷̜̍t t̴͓̆h̷̻̔ò̶̖u?̵̪̓" Satan asked.
"What was that? I kinda lost ya, boss," Striker said. Between the blows to the head and the various other violence he'd sustained, Striker still had a distracting ringing in his ears after that fight. Satan cleared his throat, and then tried at a whisper.
"S̴o̵m̸e̶b̷o̶d̶y̶ ̴t̸r̶i̷e̵d̷ ̵t̶o̷ ̷k̸i̶l̴l̵ ̷t̵h̶o̷u̵̥͝,̶ ̷I̵ ̶s̴e̷e̵.̴ ̶F̴a̷i̶r̶ ̶f̴i̵g̷h̶t̵?̵" he whispered, still shaking the cosmos as he did.
"Eh, I thought it was an unfair fight in my favor. Turns out it wasn't," Striker said. Satan just nodded, and continued to hand out burgers. One of them was shoved at Striker. There was no way he was going to be able to eat this much in one sitting, the way his guts were right now. Though honestly, in all his life, he'd never taken a beating so bad as the one he'd taken today. Maybe upset guts were a small price to pay for surviving something that by all rights should have burnt him to dust. "I need to talk, somewhere anklebiters can't listen in."
"I̷ ̷s̸e̷e̷,̵" Satan muttered, then moved to one of the red-robed priests that flanked his 'vacation time'. "E̴m̷i̸l̴e̶e̴s̷i̶a̸?̵ ̸C̴o̵u̸l̶d̷ ̴t̷h̵o̶u̶ ̷k̸e̷e̶p̸ ̴h̶a̴n̶d̵i̸n̸g̶ ̴o̴u̷t̷ ̶b̴u̴r̸g̷e̵r̷s̵ ̵f̴o̶r̷ ̷m̴e̶?̴ ̴I̸ ̷n̸e̸e̶d̸ ̴t̷o̴ ̸t̴a̸k̴e̶ ̶a̴ ̶c̶a̴l̴l̴.̶"
"Of course, Father," the robed Fiend said with a bow. Satan nodded, and then returned to Striker. With one massive, clawed hand, he reached out as though grasping a knob. There was a flair of unlight, an uncolor most easily described as purple but not, that slowly shifted to a more greenless hue until a rip appeared, showing the inside of the Grand Cathedral of Wrath. Satan stepped through that breach first, Striker right on his hooves as he did.
The Grand Cathedral was the most ornate, most awe-inspiring piece of architecture in the Ring of Wrath, greater by a noticeable degree than even Wrath Incarnate's personal palace. The roof vaulted away so high, held aloft by columns and buttresses of rosy marble and bracketed by bloodgold, that there were days that a small cloud could form between the pews and the scenes of Hell's Advent that were painstakingly painted on the ceiling. There, The First War, where Satan rose from a rancher of no great importance to become Wrath Incarnate by striking down so many of his fellow Elder Devils. The Defiance War, where Satan served as one of the three foundations of Hell's Great Alliance, eventually forming a union of all nine (or eight, by that war's end) rings of Hell to drive the Leviathans that God had set upon them into the arms of extinction. If memory served, only their half-blood and derived offspring remained. Even the one calling himself Leviathan was more Fiend than Abomination.
Reaching down the walls came The War Against The Usurper, Satan and Hell's Great Alliance banding together to resist the ingress of Lucifer and his fallen Angels. In those images, you could track the progress of the war, as each of the Deadly Sins, as each of the Old Kings were struck down by Lucifer or one of his followers, as lords of Hell betrayed their own and joined Lucifer's side in exchange for power, prestige, and the broken thrones of the now dead Old Kings. Until all that was left was Satan, standing in the yard of this very cathedral, his army ready to die for him.
Then, the Treaty.
Satan, bending the knee to Lucifer, becoming the last of the Old Kings to still rule in all of Hell. Satan, remaining Wrath Incarnate, because there was none who could take that mantle from him after untold eons of time where it had rested heavy on his broad, black shoulders.
From where Striker walked, the Altar of Worms formed the last 'image' in the pictorial history of the Ring Unbroken. It was unassuming, if you didn't know what it was. An awkward block of stone, seemingly rough and a sort of mouldering orange-red. Its angles didn't seem right, as though you could measure each of them and they wouldn't add up correctly. Fitting. They wouldn't. Satan twisted his hand in the air again. There was a grinding sound, as the Altar of Worms shifted its orientation, color changing as it did, no longer rough in appearance but instead almost oily slick and grey-green.
"So what is this that thou needstmine attention undivided for?" Satan asked, his words now fitting properly into the space where they were uttered. He looked singularly impatient, so Striker ensured he didn't fuck about.
"Do you remember that task I told you about a month or so back? About how the Radio Demon was lookin' for a way out of Pride?"
"I presume thou hast made some significant headway, considering thou be not dead," Satan noted.
"It was a lie. Lucifer's Proxy brought me in so that he could settle a personal grudge against the Radio Demon," Striker said, painfully lowering himself into a pew. "Now, I don't know if Lucifer's in on it or not, but if he ain't..."
"Thou wish to see Birch punished," Satan said with a satisfied smile, showing many, sharp teeth. "And as this is a matter between Proxies, thou needst my permission to strike at him."
"I do," Striker said.
"You have it," Satan said with a gesture. Another grinding, and the Altar of Worms shifted again, a cascade of impossible light playing along its now wavy surface. "Find a Dealmaker and invoke his penalty. I will relish aside thou as the pain befalls him of it." Then he paused. "But if the Radio Demon cross not the walls between Rings, then who does?"
Striker considered, but even the hesitation itself was noted, and Striker was again reminded of just how much older Satan was than Striker. Satan was already beyond ancient when the first angels were made. And the oldest angels were themselves ancient when the entire universe containing the Human World was put into motion, so it put things into perspective. Satan had seen the rise and fall of Hellish empires. Striker might be the greatest imp in Hell... but Satan was Satan.
"Does thou hold reason against revealing the ring-walker? Has this one done thou woe, or done weal?"
"I don't know exactly what it is that can walk the Rings," Striker admitted, the one place and to the one person in all of Hell that he could admit a weakness. "It looked like an Elemental, a Sinner, but..."
He clutched the stump of his left arm. Felt how off of balance he felt with its absence.
"Had he a Gift?" Satan asked.
"I don't follow," Striker said. Satan pointed to the Altar, and Striker involuntarily flinched when he did. That block held bad memories for him. But Striker was not a weakling, and he was not a coward. So he got out of the pew, walked down the nave, and placed is one remaining hand on the Altar of Worms. It writhed under his palm, giving truth to the name that its discoverer bestowed upon it, long before learning what a Shard of Ruin was truly capable of.
Then, there was a strange pain.
It wasn't like being cut, or burnt, or bludgeoned, but it nevertheless hurt. It hurt in esoteric ways. It hurt in his identity. It hurt in his ambitions. It hurt in his memories, in his distractions, in his sex drive and his superiority complex.
As he watched, stone rotated into view, as the Altar of Worms changed. Imaged in moving rock was the white flame beast, painstakingly rendered in every shade almost as accurate to the hue as flesh was. To portray the past was the very least, the very pettiest of the things this Altar of Worms could do, but for the moment, it was what was required. Satan leaned in. "His heart. Did thou rupture this being's heart?"
Striker nodded, unable to speak as the strange pain continued to tear through him. The image warped and ground, until it showed a moving image rendered in rock, showing the moments up to and following the moonsilver-round exploding the contents of the white flame beast's chest out of its back. Satan raised a claw, and the replay stopped, then reversed, so very slowly. The flames which erupted from the hole drew back in, as though sucked into the wound. Then, for just a fraction of an instant, the hole could be seen through, a portal from the front of its body to its back.
The flames in that fraction of an instant were still there. They were at the very bottom of the wound.
"I see," Satan said. He snapped his fingers and Striker's hand recoiled from the Altar of Worms, leaving the image standing there, with white flames a microsecond from bursting out of red, ragged meat. "Their desperation has grown high. Know thou how angels are made, my agent?"
"Figure God makes 'em to order," Striker said, flexing his hand. The pain was subsiding, but the injury to his superiority complex might have been terminal. Because standing here, next to the Last Old King, he was painfully reminded that no matter how great of an imp he was, there were some mountains that he would never, ever be able to scale.
"Once, He did," Satan nodded, glaring at the stone incarnation of the white flame beast, the monster which could go by the name of Samuel. "But things have changed. What I say, by thine vow upon the Altar of Worms, shall not leave this room. God hath retired. And Angels are growing desperate."
"I don't understand," Striker said.
"Lucifer must not learn what I tell you now, for he will in his folly bring ruin to Hell by it," Satan said sternly. "I know not if the fall of Purgatory into the Abyss broke the will of God, or if the breaking of His will drop't Purgatory, but the result is the same. He has fallen into torpor, insensate. The angels, now face a slow, grinding extinction. Or so they thought. Until brilliant Penemue spake and gave the notion. A path to new angels. A path that God would consider blasphemous. Even evil. And they jumped upon it in their desperation," Satan nodded with a grim smile. How Satan even learned this was well outside of Striker's paygrade. But then again, Satan also had the Altar of Worms at his command. What he couldn't do was probably a shorter list to make."A portion of the angel was sever'd, and thrust into the soul of a newborn human. Such a mortal would lead a superlative life in the Living World. They would lead and found movements. They would change the course of the world, bend the path of history. And when they died, they would be reaped not as a mortal into Heaven, but emerge from that mortal chrysalis as a newly minted Angel, one who had never heard the voice of God. One outside of His plan. Just as you are."
"And this... Samuel... guy..."
"When thou shot out the heart of this Sinner," Satan said, pointing to the wound, "the flames ought have remained, a shape of a heart floating free of ruined meat. For that is where the gifts of Angels dwell in them, as I have seen. See you a heart, here?" he asked. Striker shook his head. "And yet... and yet a Gift he still has."
"What should we do about him?"
"Why do anything at all?" Satan asked. "I have made no enemy of this 'Samuel', who somehow bears a Gift despite failing in Judgment. As though an Angel, he can cross barriers. He can walk the Living World as only full blood Demons may. And yet," he twisted his hand and the Altar showed a new scene rendered in moving stone, of the white flame beast almost restored to full Samuel-hood storming through the house that Striker had darted through.
The rendition showed the white flame beast single-mindedly fixated on Striker. And he still carefully stepped around all of the terrified imps. And when the mother struck him in the head with a frying pan, the beast turned a look at her, then continued walking without reprisal.
"Its nature is not violent," Satan said. "Furious, but not violent. I have seen very much in my unspeakable years. But this? This is new. I should very much like to see the ends to this."
"And if Lucifer finds him?"
"Lucifer knows not what miracle has been cast into his lap. He will die, stupid, having missed it," Satan said with old disdain. "Thine duties regarding him have ended by bringing him to mine attention. I will ask you to fight him no more. Perhaps if he becomes what I think he may... we may find a critically valuable ally to the goal of independence for Wrath, against Lucifer himself."
"If you say so, Pontifex," Striker said with a nod, not sure what to make of this. Was he literally watching the next Arrival of the Radio Demon happening in real time? Because if he was, he wasn't sure that Hell could handle it.
"So it is. I have only looked upon this being and I already feel a kinship with him. Perhaps some greatness shall result of him," Satan said, then turned his eyes to Striker. "Now. Thou hast not eaten of thine burger. Thou shall wither up and blow away with such temperance. Come. Thou wilt be fed," Satan said.
"I'm fine. I'll just..." Striker began. Then, a massive hand landed on on his shoulder as Satan stooped down toward him, his massive face filling Striker's now monocular vision.
"Thou. Wilt. Be. Fed," Satan said. And thus it was that Striker ended up spending the rest of the day at a barbecue, hosted at an orphanage, as a guest of the Deadly Sin of Wrath.
Sam had given up meditation on his bed. Even after his months in Hell, he still gravitated to his armchair. Habits of the living had become truly entrenched since he died. Most of the time he fell asleep, it was in this chair, not in the big, pillow-infested bed that demanded pride of place in the room. So this time, he came to the chair, and used it for another off-label purpose. He sat in it, and tried to meditate.
Leaning back, the television off, he thought.
He wished he could have simply said that he had no memory of what happened after that imp blew his head off. But he remembered. He remembered the what. He even remembered the how. He felt, deep in his guts, that push came to shove, he could do exactly what he had done in a thoughtless rage, and this time have more control of it.
What he didn't remember was the why.
His outrage at Alastor, being so cavalier with the lives of those under his roof and his brutal, callous indifference to their suffering, it had swelled in him until it almost made Sam sick to his stomach. And then, the crack of a gunshot.
And he didn't think. Somehow, he still perceived, but he didn't think. Everything he did, everything seared into his memory, was pure instinct and reaction, taking the first option on every list that was given to him by the fight between himself and the Radio Demon.
He had tested his assumptions in the shower, turning the water to its coldest setting, and then flexing his abdomen in just the way he had when Alastor set those vampire bugs at him. And the heat that resulted instantly filled the bathroom with steam, melted the shower curtain to a puddle, and warped the shower head so that it now pretty much directly faced the wall. The same technique he'd done in unthinking fury, he could do with a calm head. And he was fairly certain that what he'd just done in the shower was the low end of its capability.
That had been the most worrying thought in Sam's mind as he moved to attempt meditation. True, coming up with a technique to get people to back the fuck off would pay incredible dividends, once Lucifer's horde began to descend on him. But that wasn't what worried Sam. What worried him was how without a goddamned brain, he knew how to do that.
And that wasn't all he was capable of. Teleportation. True teleportation, the likes of which Alastor didn't like to advertise he knew. Shadow-stepping. Skipping. The power of Moth and Edge and Heart. He knew them as though he'd always known them. What was he, Sam thought? Powers From Outside now nestled effortlessly beside powers culled from the unfiltered mana of Hell. They drew from different sources, but just as Alastor could effortlessly drink from two wells, so too could now Sam.
Sam had no illusions that the 'fight' between he and Alastor was more theatrics and experiment than an actual bout. For one thing, Alastor hadn't even tried to go into his Warform. He faced the impossible, incredible power that hid within Sam using only his civilian guise, and his immense and effortless control of more magic than Sam would likely ever learn. At no point in that fight did Alastor try to cause Sam harm. And despite all the savaging that he had inflicted upon the Radio Demon, Sam knew full well that every blow he'd landed might have been unexpected, but it was absolutely allowed by its victim.
The imp's weapon was ruinous in power, a weapon designed from its beginning to its end to destroy the Sinner. The wounds it caused Sam should have killed him, Truly. And despite that, he Regenerated, as all Sinners do. As Sinners shouldn't have been able to. There was something else in him, he realized. Something that didn't make him regenerate more quickly, but infinitely more robustly. The only injury – the ONLY INJURY – which seemed to flout Sam's ability to bounce back from instantly was the one in his side. And that was explicitly caused by the Steel of Angels, the blades that could draw blood from the Archangels if plied to their flesh.
There was something inside Sam. Something that his fury gave voice to. Something that awoke every time he looked upon injustice and said NO. Something that would use him to the ends of Hell in pursuit of something that he hadn't the first clue to. He'd had no brain when he fought Alastor and the imp who served Satan. Whatever thoughts drove that beast of heedless revenge didn't imprint upon the kilogram of fat that regrew between his ears. Only the what. Not the why.
So he cleared his mind as best he was able, and he focused on that anger.
It was his anger. There was no doubt about that. It had been Samuel's vow upon landing in hell that he would never quash his rage again. It still followed his lead as long as he had a mind to think with, as long as he had eyes to see injustice with.
Sam remembered a line from Blood Meridian, uttered by a monster who was surely in Alastor's league, if not quite on his level. 'Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. These anonymous creatures may seem small or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb may devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of Man's knowing. Only nature can enslave Man, and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly the suzerain of the earth'.
What Judge Holden said in arrogance, Sam needed to achieve for simple self preservation. Whatever parts of him were hidden inside his being, Sam would need to dig out, to see, to understand. Because with no mistakes to be made, there was a war coming, and coming for him. He wouldn't cower behind Charlie, let all that she built be laid waste, knowing that it wouldn't even save him. No. He would have to fight against this tide. It would likely kill him, but he would die this second time, here in Hell, with the business of his Life sorted, and striking a blow against cruelty.
Exploring that fire in him butted him against something. Something foreign. His eyes closed, he tilted his head, feeling with his mind's hands and seeing with his mind's eyes the bolus that was within him. It was familiar. Similar. Had sympathy to him. A frown came to Sam's face. Was this the 'graft' that Apoc had given him to save his life?
It rested up against the parts of Sam which were Sam, almost indistinguishable to casual inspection. Perhaps that was why he'd never prodded at it since his wounding. But now that he was looking directly at the thing, he could see how different it was, even while it was 'the same'. It was so utterly hopeless that it had a blackness to it, one that swallowed light. And despite that hopelessness, there was an unbearable fury that went along with it, the right foot to hopelessness's left. The rage of somebody inconsolable, a rage that would know and accept no forgiveness, nor give any out. The rage that accepted personal damnation so long as its fury would be set to the proper target.
Despite it being a part of somebody else, Sam agreed with that sentiment on the most part. There were things down here, just as there were in the Living World, that could not be accepted. The status quo was not merely unacceptable, it was evil, and anybody who propped it up, anybody who abetted it, or rationalized it under anything other than exhaustion was complicit in the evils that such a cruel status quo created. That was the world of God, both for mortals and for the Damned. It was not kind. It was not good. It was at its kindest and best... indifferent. Just like God. That part of him knew this so very well that it was the never-ending font of that graft's fury. A flame like his own, one that refused to go out.
And with the feel of the graft, Sam then started to notice something else. Something uncomfortably familiar. Something that called to mind a mortal childhood. The feeling of hot, sticky summer in an apartment with no air conditioning. That called to mind cold winters on slushy streets in boots with holes in them. It called to mind the feel of finger nails digging across the skin, gouging.
And it called to mind righteousness. Not the sort of self-serving conceit that narcissists made their bread and their butter, but something true. A pursuit of something beyond the pain. A desire of something above discomfort. A helping hand. Reaching down, and pulling up.
Sam's meditation crashed down around him as he realized what he felt there, in the deepest parts of him, his eyes snapping open to see that night had fallen in Hell. He could feel that flame in his guts even now, and now, he had a word to call it.
"Mom?" Sam asked.
"Why should you be happy when all you know is suffering? Why should you be positive when all of Hell seeks your pain? That would be deluded. That would be in defiance of reality. And the greatest sin of all is folly. Find your rage! Find your fury! If something's holding you back, you must destroy it. Even if it means killing a part of yourself, because all you're killing is weakness. Don't give up. Don't give in. No matter how hard they try to bind you, or blind you from reality, remember always that your greatest foe is your slavemaster, and that despair is the Great Enemy, even above Lucifer himself.
-Brother White Flame, Son of Satan