Victor continued. "She said, 'No. That can't be the Morningstar. Even after the Fall, Lucifer, the foremost of the Host of Heaven, would be beautiful.'
" 'What is this?' Mephisto grated out.
"It was Joviana's voice, although from my vantage point upon the rock, I could not see her, nor could I comprehend how she came to be in Hades…
"Mephisto repeated himself. 'What? This is no place for such as you! You stink! You reek of the light, of rainwater and fresh air. Get you gone!'
"She corrected him. 'The line is "Get you to Heaven, Beatrice, get you to Heaven; Here's no place for you maids."' The quote, Stephen, since I see you furrowing your brows, is from Much Ado About Nothing. In context, 'you maids' means 'maidens', or virgins."
The sorcerer was biting his lip to keep from smiling. "I can think in iambic pentameter, believe it or not." I told him.
"Oh, I believe it." He assured me. "Someone who can quote Shakespeare to the devil for her own purposes…"
"She had come into view by then," Victor picked up where he had left off, "dragging with her a very unhappy looking demon on a leash. Its face was a mass of dripping tentacles, and it was straining to be free and clawing at the floor, cowering as far away from her as the band around its neck would permit."
"A leash?" asked Doctor Strange.
"Her belt. Mephisto glared at her and demanded, 'What do you want here?'
"'Not you.' she replied. 'This has nothing to do with you. I'm here because of Doom. Once my business with him is finished, I'll be gone.' "
"'Conduct your business and be gone, then!' the fiend snarled.
"She dropped the leash and approached the rock, the hordes of Hell parting to let her pass unmolested. When she reached me, she bowed as formally as if she encountered me in a drawing room. 'My lord.'
"This was not the first time she had astonished me, but the second. The first was at her job interview. 'You?' I wondered, half a question, half an exclamation.
"'You forgot this.' She placed the Rohnert Talisman in my hand.
"'No!' howled Mephisto, but it was already too late. I was free, and I turned the power of the Talisman upon his assembled legions—a few levinbolts sent them gibbering to the recesses of Hell, and I then cast a protective shield between them and ourselves.
"'If this is Hell, I must say I don't think much of it.' Joviana remarked with mild interest. 'Not that I was expecting Tim Burton's imagery, which he mostly stole from German Expressionist cinema anyway, but I was expecting something more along the lines of Hieronymus Bosch. This is really rather dull. A great big fiery cavern, populated by a lot of demons that, to be quite frank, look rather rubbery and fake, like something out of a 'Z' grade movie.' "
This was too much for Doctor Strange, who slapped the table and burst out laughing.
"I must have said more than that!" I protested. "Because—."
"Oh, you did." Victor assured me. "But that is not for public dissemination. Although her critique of Mephisto's interior decoration was, in fact, very funny, I could not appreciate the humor in it at the time, for I could now perceive that she was faintly luminous with an inner light, that she stood before me, but not in the flesh…
"It was with mounting horror that I exclaimed, 'If you are here, then you are dead!'
"'Not if you return and save me,' she replied.
"'But why?' I asked her—and the answer she gave me is not for your ears, Stephen." Victor finished, and took a swallow of ice water.
"What about mine?" I asked him, and to Doctor Strange I said, "Apparently whatever I said must have been fairly overwhelming, because he decided to marry me on the strength of it."
"I will tell you, but not yet." Victor set his glass down with an air of finality.
"When, then?" I raised an eyebrow at him.
"When the wedding band I commissioned for you is finished. When I can put it into your hand, and you can read for yourself what is engraved there, and not until then. I am assured that it will be done the day before the wedding."
"You're going to keep me hanging until then?" I asked. "This is unendurable!"
"You will manage to survive somehow until then." Victor told me. "Our conversation in Hades ended with a scolding. 'What are you doing hanging around here for? You have to get back up there and get me out of the well before my brain cells start dying! Hurry up!'
"I arrived back in the material world, and began the resuscitation process immediately. And there you have it."
Doctor Strange was silent for a long moment. "What a remarkable tale." he said slowly. "One which is, in my experience and learning, unique. Joviana, what do you recall of it?"
I told him all that I could remember about my descent into the underworld—the judgment of my soul, the angel who winked, Charon's boat, the sinister forest of suicides, finding Victor, and giving him the Amulet. I was honest about it, telling him I did not know how much of it was real and how much was snippets of movies woven by my oxygen-starved imagination.
"I suspect it was a little of both." Strange sat up in his chair. "Yes, the underworld does reconfigure itself, but it tends to reflect a consensus of belief—an amalgam of the predominant idea of what Hell is—which is why it seemed so clichéd to you. I am inclined to believe that the incident with the angel is the product of your own brain, as I have never heard of such an encounter before this—but I could be wrong. Now, as to how you were able to accomplish these things—I can answer that.
"You got into Hell only because you were convinced that suicides are automatically damned, and because no soul has ever voluntarily gone to Hell. You were not only not one of the damned, you gave up your life to help another, out of unselfish motives, which is a very powerful —why do you wince?" the sorcerer asked me.
"I'm not sure how unselfish my motives were, in all truth." I muttered, thinking of how I had done it because I needed him alive in order to advance my own goal of ridding the world of super heroism.
Doctor Strange misconstrued me. "Did you go down into that freezing water because you were being paid to do it, or promised power, prestige, or some other tangible personal advantage? Those are selfish motivations. Not—not friendship, or concern for what would happen to Latveria, or even being in love and unaware of it.
"The result of your self-sacrifice was that you were temporarily imbued, for the length of your 'death', with powers that you would not have had anywhere but in Hell.
"There are limits to what demons can do—they could only confine Victor because he had a physical body, for example, and they would have been very careful not to kill him—because he is not evil enough to be damned. Killing him would set his soul free to soar to Heaven. They have power over the souls of the damned only—they cannot touch the souls of those who are not. So not only could they not harm you, your presence was searingly painful to them—and that applied to Mephisto just as it did to the smallest imp in Hades. You could have torn any of them apart with your bare hands—literally. They would have re-formed once you were gone, but they would have been diminished, for a time.
"So it is not strictly accurate to say that you have never cast a spell. Your death, as you went about it, constituted a magical rite."
"But—." I sought about for a way to articulate what I wanted to say. This fringed upon my most guarded theories and observations about the nature of the universe. "I knew I would succeed. I knew I'd be coming back to life. I knew that Victor would be able to resuscitate me successfully. I was playing with loaded dice. That negates—or should negate—the effects of my heroic self-sacrifice."
"Faith is a positive quality." Victor said. "I am touched by the depth of yours in me."
"I do believe in you—but I also mean it in another sense."
"Would you care to explain it?" Doctor Strange invited me.
"All right." I took a deep breath. This could be a mistake. This could be a disastrous mistake. I looked at Victor. "This has to do with what you and I said to Magneto yesterday—Can it really be just yesterday?—about how the world as we know it ends about twice a year, and affects little or nothing, and how every single time that Galactus is about to devour the Earth, the heroes rally round and stop him, or maybe the threat is an invasion of the Skrulls, or the Kree, or the Mindless Ones from the Dungeon Dimensions—." The Mindless Ones were Doctor Strange's particular foes.
I took another deep breath. "The world is always, always saved. Against impossible odds. Just in the nick of time. Because just as there are laws of science—and of magic—there are what I call laws of heroics."
TBC….again.
A/N: Thanks, Chantrea! Also, Hi, GothikStrawberry! Wow--30 people trying to buy you drinks--my mind boggles. Do you live in Ireland or just visit?
Thanks to you too, Madripoor Rose! Real life? Who needs real life when you can write--and read? I know it happens to everybody though--even me. The children conversation is going to happen a few chapters from now--after Dr. Strange goes home. Neither Joviana nor Victor--or even I --will forget about it.
Don't worry, Tiktok! You won't have missed anything about what she said unless you've gone on a really, really long vacation...