War.
Things were picking up in the house of Stolas Goetia. With Stella refusing to cut short her 'vacation', it meant that all twenty six legions of the estranged royals were now at the beck and call of Stolas alone, through their shared leadership in Ambrosius Severus Agrippa, the Legatus Damnatio. Octavia knew that there was a great tide swirling, threatening to grab her with its uncaring grasp and dash her against the rocks of the harsh realities that her parents had tried their utmost to hide from her. And damn it all, she was not a child, and would not die confused and afraid. Aware and afraid she could live with. The other she could not.
"Ambrosius," she said, catching the aquiline Sinner as he took what looked to be his first rest in days, just outside of the Garden of Death, which was packed with the deadliest flora that Earth and Hell had to offer, brilliant in display, and impeccably lethal. "You... you knew this was coming, didnt' you?"
"I did, Domina," Agrippa said. "Please forgive, but I have a duty to attend to..."
"No, no more of this. I'm tired of being shuffled off into a closet whenever people think I'm too young or too stupid to understand what is being said around me," Octavia declared, the crest of her feathers pushing her beanie off of her head and making her seem physically larger than she was. She took a moment to relax her scalp, let the feathers fall, but there was only so far her strigine form could be tamped down, now that her bile was up. "Do you not serve my family?"
"I do, Domina," Agippa said.
"Then do your duty as Master of the Ludus and for Satan's sake teach," Octavia said, grabbing the shorter but stockier, eagle-like Damned by his shoulders. "What has changed? Why is the entire house panicking? Why have all my tutors cancelled my lessons for the foreseeable future? I want some answers!"
"Did you not hear Lucifer's Pronouncement?" Agrippa said, gently taking her hands off of him and taking a step back. He was very up-tight about some things, this one. For all he was Mum's doxy when she wanted to spite Dad, he obviously considered any contact with Octavia to be beyond the pale.
"He does those every other week!" she snapped.
"Not the likes of this one, Domina," Agrippa said. "Caesar Lucifer has declared unilaterally an end to all of the internecine conflict amongst the Ars Goetia. And though the chaos of having that many white peaces going into effect, regardless of the states of the wars in question, he expects the courses of those many, many armies to turn on the point of a spear and face the new enemy."
"Who did he piss off this time? Is one of the Deadly Sins in rebellion? Did Satan finally declare independence?" the last question she delivered with a smirk.
"Heaven, my Domina," Agrippa said, a particularly dark look on his face. "Caesar Lucifer intends to invade Heaven."
"But... that's impossible. The walls," she began.
"Have been sent crumbling down," Agrippa said. She stared at him, baffled. The walls of Heaven couldn't just... come down. That wasn't how things worked. "Lucifer has declared a Mustering of the Legions and a raising of his bannermen. Any hand, be it imp, fiend, or even Sinner, who joins Lucifer's Legions will be given permission to fight in the van of a conquest for Heaven."
Octavia stared at him, just for a moment wondering if Agrippa was delivering some sort of incredibly deadpan joke. But if there were a billion ways to describe Ambrosius Severus Agrippa, not a single one of them was 'humorous'. 'Dry', sure, but not droll by any measure. Octavia took a step back, leaning against a wall and pressing her luminous red eyes shut, tweezing the bridge of her beak in the process. If Agrippa was saying these things, then he believed them to be true.
"What do we do?"
"We have little option, I'm afraid," Agrippa said, more comfortable now that there was an appropriate distance between the two of them. "I will lead twenty six legions. And I will oversee the massacre of one hundred fifty six thousand soldiers."
"You can't think that it's that hopeless, can you?" Octavia demanded.
"Most of the soldiers under my command are drilled, and drilled well," Agrippa conceded, "But they have not spilled the blood of foes in many years. And the rest, they are only passably drilled, and their blood-lust concerns me. If one in twenty survives the first week, I will consider it a sign from Jupiter, and the other slaughtered gods of Rome. If more do? It will be a miracle."
"No. I don't accept this," she said. "There's something that can be done."
"Their arms are already the likes of which I barely understand," Agrippa said. "My hands are shaped to blade and spear and bow, not to the rifle or the artillery piece. There is little I can do to teach them, little I can do to moderate them, or coach them to prudence. They will leap forward away from their maniples and die, cut down, by a rain of steel and lead."
"And if you take away their guns, and force them to fight your way?" Octavia asked.
"Neither of my masters would countenance such a thing," Agrippa waved it away.
"If the angels fight anything like Exorcists do," Octavia said, "then they have ways to ignore bullets and bombs, but not, as you put it, the blade and the spear and the bow."
"...and retraining would put them out of the forlorn hope," Agrippa said. But he gave his head a shake. "I am sorry, Domina. Though a pleasant thought, it can only be that, a thought. Any lackadaise by the banners will be seen by Lucifer as betrayal. And Caesar Lucifer does not tolerate betrayal."
"Let him! What would it cost? One in ten of the soldiers? That's a lot better than nineteen out of twenty!" Octavia pointed out.
"It would also require me," Agrippa said, and Octavia's screed came to a halt. "As their leader, their failures are at my feet. And I would be, by tradition bound to accept responsibilities for the cruel whims of that distant madman. If I were to do as you ask me to do, it would be the last order I ever give."
Octavia stared at him, and then hung her head. "I guess... I guess I really don't have anything to offer after all."
"Quite the contrary," Agrippa said. "You are offering them the chance of glory beyond ignominious death. But that offer will have to wait. The Legions are eternal. There will always be more soldiers. And the ones that follow will have a brighter path before them than the ones that came before. Do not despair, Domina. Your time will come."
He gave her a bow, then returned to his duties. And Octavia watched as he left, feeling cold, weak, and useless.
What was she, if she could do nothing?
Did she even deserve to be an Ars Goetia?
Thoughts of this dark ilk would plague her for some time. And of those who could have dispelled them, nobody even tried.
Chapter 3
If The Fool Would Persist In His Folly
"I don't approve of this," Hepsut said, again, for the seventh time this hour.
"Really? Because I could have sworn that the previous half-hundred times you protested were somehow in jest," Birah noted. Hepsut turned a glare at him, but Birah let it wash over him. Both of them cut their teeth fighting against Lucifer. There was no gulf in experience between them, as there usually was between the Firstborn and the Secondborn. Both had spilled the same amount of blood.
"Azazel is not in charge of the defense of the realm. We are," Hepsut said.
"Azazel is clever. Maybe not as clever as Penemue was, but he's sharp enough to keep working on Cloud Nine despite being an actual Grigori," Birah said. "There was a reason. I know it."
"You'd better hope there was," Hepsut said, as the doors to the Taxiopolis finally opened, and admitted them into the Great Assembly. It was strange how, in the eons since Grand Chorus was brought to ruin by the Heresiarch, the angels had never rebuilt it. Even without God specifically ordering it, Birah presumed that the other Archangels, the more sapient Seraphim and the other high-ranking 'elites' amongst the High would have done something to reclaim a glory stolen to them. Instead, they let it rest in rubble. An unending blight upon Cloud Nine, a symbol of the failure of Angels against vanity and vainglory.
Then, when nobody stepped up to rebuild a place for the Angels to discuss matters, Michael had his personal palace gutted and retrofitted to more-or-less fulfill that need. Strange, how Michael was accounted as one of the Highest of the Archangels, but lived in the comparable equivalent to a shoebox.
The din of voices talking over each other was discordant and unpleasant to Birah's ears. It was not the Angels' way to be in such disharmony. Perhaps because of his innate gift with the theory of magic, perhaps because of his exceptional hearing, or perhaps just because he was a typical 'odd Secondborn', this all struck Birah as so very against the grain of what Angels were supposed to be.
Maybe it was because he hadn't seen Angels at their finest, that he now could not forgive them at their worst.
"And the stragglers begin to file in," Strigoi chided from the sidelines, watching Birah with a delicate brow raised. She was one of those Firstborn who, in the wake of Lucifer's rebellion, actively eschewed the male identity that they had been created with in favor of a female one. It was strange to Birah that there had ever been any kind of prohibition on femininity to begin with, because nearly half of all Secondborn took that form, compared to a vanishingly small minority of the Firstborn.
Again, rules that Birah had no context for. He decided not to spar with Strigoi for now. Let the Firstborn of the Wild Magicks think of that whatever they pleased.
"Don't engage with her," Hepsut said, utterly redundantly.
"I have no intention of it," Birah said. Strigoi looked a bit caught out that Birah didn't rally against them, but at the moment Hepsut was right. They needed to get to the heart of this assembly, to where the Archangels were gathering.
Eventually, the two of them had to tuck in their wings and elbow their way past their brothers, sisters, and cousins until they could reach the edge of the gallery, and see the highest of the Firstborn gathered before them. Metatron was, for a wonder, present, his face as usual devoid of anything approaching an expression, staring with glassy eyes through the crowds as though he were blind to them. Raphael and Raguel were standing closer to where Birah now found himself, they forming an anchor to a bloc that half of the room was aligning behind. The two of them sat at what was supposed to be Mattias The Greater Part's table, but Mattias was not in attendance. Raguel was glaring with incredible heat at the third table that in the arrangement, and the one who stood behind it. At the point of the wedge that this bloc cut into the crowd, the room, and the assembly of the Host, was Michael.
And Michael, the Taxiarch, He Who Treads On The Dragon, Bearer of the Gift of Glory, looked like utter dogshit.
It was a fundamental part of Angel's nature that their exterior mirrored their interior, that their flesh followed their souls, in a perverse reflection of what occurred amongst the Damned. Michael looked sallow and drawn, somehow both gaunt and puffy in places, with heavy bags under his eyes, and his usually clean and smooth cheeks bearing what looked to be a month of beard. His once shining, golden hair, had faded to the color of dry straw, and was thinning out massively, leaving him with a visible bald spot.
His Song was out of tune.
That was the only explanation that made sense. And it was not a happy thought to entertain.
"We will have order here," Gabriel's voice exploded through the room, overrunning and stampeding over the conversations and arguments which had been proceeding in the background, and dragging all eyes to the floor of this would-be-parliament. Unlike Michael, Gabriel showed no signs of Dissonance, no weakness, no frailty. He was built powerfully, tall and lithe like a successful wolf, his face alabaster and smooth, eyes bright blue, and his hair falling to his shoulders in lazy curls of gold. At least, for a change, he'd put on a shirt. A shirt which he had of course refused to fasten any buttons on. Take what compromises you can get. "Brothers. Sisters... cousins," he flicked a glance toward Birah in particular, and even in that split second, he could feel the disdain that the Might of God held for him. "We have been hard at work for the last two weeks, haven't we? I imagine that some of us haven't had this sort of exercise since we first built Heaven. Isn't that right, Metatron?"
Metatron sat in his seat, almost perfectly at the midpoint between the factions of Michael and of Gabriel. He didn't say a word. He didn't move a hair. He just stared into infinity.
"But the brunt of the work is over. And I've got to say, I'm not impressed," Gabriel continued, his honeyed words gaining an arsenic-like lace of derision through them. "Sure, you've put your backs into putting a patch onto a problem. But not a single one of you has actually tried to deal with the source of that problem. Sahaquiel! I call you to stand before your brethren and explain yourself!"
There was a murmur that broke out amongst those gathered. Damn it, at this rate, there was no way they'd be able to tell the Archangels what they'd seen...
Gabriel turned a glance toward Michael. "Unless you object, of course, brother..." Gabriel said.
"No. I do not object. I have questions of my own for the Ingenuity of God," Michael said, his voice audibly different than it had been once, more nasal and fried. Gabriel gave a broad and superficially genial smile, but it was the smile of a predator who knew their prey had a broken leg. Gabriel pointed to the metal-bracketed, twitchy angel at his side.
"Baraqiel? If you would be so kind," Gabriel said. Baraqiel flexed his hands for a moment, before reaching up. With a wrenching motion, he slammed downward, and a bolt of lightning bridged the roof to the floor. As the assembled Angels blinked away the flash and let the ringing of the thunderclap settle from their ears, Sahaquiel was now standing at the heart of the gathering, looking rather surprised and confused to find himself here. Upon seeing Gabriel, Sahaquiel's wings flared. "Not so fast, 'brother'," Gabriel said. "We have some questions for you."
"I have many things I would ask of you as well," Sahaquiel said. He was an odd one, for a Firstborn. His hair was an iridescent blue, like a hummingbird's coat, and his wings were not feathered but the prismatic and colorful spans of a butterfly. His halo was not pure white, but a shade closer to green. "Such as why you have ransacked my home."
"Your questions can wait until mine have answers," Gabriel said, rounding the table that had been set up on his side of the room, and approaching the Ingenuity of God. "Is it true, 'brother', that the Great Walls and the Pearly Gates are constructions of your device?"
"Everybody here knows that to be the case, Gabriel. What garden path are you trying to lead me down?"'
"I will ask the questions, Sahaquiel," Gabriel said, looming over the builder of Heaven's defenses. "Did you not, upon their completion, state that there was no force under God that could shake them down."
"Again, everybody here knows that I made that statement, not in pride but in certainty. And I stand by that statement to this day. Whatever power brought low the defenses of Heaven, it was not a thing Under God," Sahaquiel said, peevishly.
"I see. And what happened to the Horn of Jericho?" Gabriel taunted.
"I don't know, and it wouldn't matter," Sahaquiel said. "The Horn could not have done this."
"Really? A device crafted not by our Angelic kin, but by God Himself, and you claim to know what it was capable of?" Gabriel taunted.
"The Horn was not made by God. Ask Azazel. He could tell you exactly the same as I as to its attributes."
"I'm not going to bring the filthy Grigori into this," Gabriel said with distaste that actually cracked his otherwise utterly affable facade. "They would tell any lie to save their own hides, including verifying what lies you tell. They are beneath belief."
"And yet you as much as implicate them in every misdeed from Lucifer's Rebellion to the Silence of G–" Sahaquiel countered, only to have Gabriel physically swell, gaining an entire foot of height and likely another hundred pounds of muscle.
"YOU SHALL NOT SPEAK THE FATHER'S NAME, TRAITOR!" Gabriel roared.
"We have not indicted him of treason, Brother," Michael cut in, and Gabriel rounded to him, his glare almost ballistic in force. "Do not press down paths you have no place walking."
"I decide which path I take," Gabriel declared. He then seemed to ebb as quickly as he had expanded. He turned his attention to the Archangel who was trapped in open floor at the center of the room, with the eyes of the Michelins and the Gabrielites on him in equal measure. "It is a fact that the Horn of Jericho was lost to our proxies in the Mortal World. And immediately thereafter, the walls, which you built and put assurances would last until the end of days, came tumbling down. That leads to one of two possibilities. You were either incompetent, and left a weakness in your wall that any ambitious hand could exploit, or you were malevolent, and left that weakness with purpose."
"Or perhaps a third option: that something impossible has happened," Sahaquiel posited.
"I'm not in the business of impossible, 'brother'," Gabriel said. "I am in the business of the Might of Heaven. And by your hands, either through incompetence or hostile action, you have left Heaven vulnerable, to a degree it has never been before. Is there any who disagrees?"
Gabriel cast his arms wide, and there was a murmuring of 'no's from his side of the chamber. He then swept it further, to where Michael's cadre sat, and made a pleading motion. Michael stared at Gabriel for a long time, and then shook his head.
"I don't disagree that his works have failed," Michael said. "But as our old saying goes, I will not stack intention atop assumption. I will not say whether he is a fool, nor will I say he is a traitor. But I will say that he is a failure."
Sahaquiel looked genuinely hurt by Michael's words. But then again, so too did Michael.
"Where were you when the walls fell?" Michael asked.
"Where else? I was preparing for this year's Purge, as I do every year at this time," Sahaquiel said.
"And others can testify to that?" Michael asked.
"The entire department," Sahaquiel said.
"Who are subservient to him and whom he can coerce obedience. They are not to be trusted," Gabriel said. He thrust a finger at him. "What Angel in good standing can vouch for you? Does one even exist?"
Silence answered, as many glances were shared, wondering if any of them could rightly be called 'in good standing' these days.
"So it is unanimous. This failure can only be laid at the feet of the man who stacked the stones to begin with," Gabriel said. "And thus, the sentencing can begin."
"You will not end well, Gabriel," Sahaquiel said. All eyes turned to him. "You think you have power, that you are in control. You are not. The walls fell not by my failure but by something outside of our sight. And in your blindness, that same will be the ruin of you."
"I will not live afraid of what might be," Gabriel said with a laugh. "And I will not throw my life away chasing after what may never be. I demand the Highest Censure be given to Sahaquiel."
Birah gasped at that. The last person to receive the Highest Censure had been Lucifer himself. He turned a look to Hepsut, but his Firstborn comrade had a deeply sad, very distant look on his face. "He can't do that, can he? Not to another Archangel," Birah said.
"Who will stop him?" Hepsut asked simply, and sadly.
"Ṇ̸̡͛̀̐̔̃̚Ỏ̸͔͖̹͉̹̹̮̮͒̀̾̓͗͑̈́̍,̶̠͎͖̜͋̊̐́̓̅͒̓̃͂̀͝" Michael announced. The eyes swung to him. "I will not break the Halo of my brother, not over a failure. I will not tear the wings from his underlings. What you ask is excessive to the point of cruelty, and unfit for the transgression. I will not stand for it. Will any of you?"
He, too, swept his arm to the Michelines behind him, past where Raphael, Raguel, and those trying to be neutral, were sitting, and to the Gabrielites. There was a discomfited murmuring at this. Because most of the angels in Gabriel's cadre were Firstborn. They remembered just how bad the War For Heaven was. Gabriel looked a bit annoyed that even his own weren't clamouring to support him, but after that moment of annoyance plastered a genial smile on his face. It was saccharine, bright, and utterly empty in the eyes.
"Very well. I rescind my recommendation. What would you offer?"
"The Price Of Three Generations," Michael said. "He will be stripped of his memories, and live through three successive lifetimes of Man upon the mortal world, amidst the least and the meagerest of them. If nothing else, it will teach him humility in his claims, and thoroughness in his endeavors."
"An Archangel living as a human? Don't be ludicrous," Raphael scoffed.
"I agree," Raguel answered. "Though I consider this entire proceeding a farce and unjust to its core, I cannot deny that one hundred eighty years amongst the humans will be informative to our Brother."
"This was perfectly just, Raguel. You speak out of turn," Gabriel said.
"You know as little about Justice as you do about tact," Raguel said.
"I can be perfectly tactful... to those who deserve such treatment," Gabriel chided. "Good that you are willing to see justice done."
"This was not justice," Raguel said, stepping from behind the desk that he and Raphael shared. He stood at Sahaquiel's side, a mountain of armor beside the unguarded prism, glaring through his featureless ballistic face-plate at the Might of God. "Were I the one who were rendering judgement instead of this mob, my 'punishment' would be to set him to rebuild what has been torn down. Only you would not accept such a task. You would move against him. I will not be party to the lynching of my brother, nor will I allow you to manufacture your justification that you may consider yourself virtuous for doing it."
"You tread perilously close to offense, Raguel."
"We are standing in offense even now!" Raguel shouted. "What you have brought forth? What all of you," he swept his gaze amongst all those gathered, "have allowed to fester and swell in the realm of Heaven? It is an affront to God's will! It is an insult to God's Design! And it casts aspersions upon the very name of Angels themselves!"
"That is enough, Raguel," Michael said. "You are breaching decorum."
"To the Pit with decorum!" Raguel snapped. "Our walls are down. If Lucifer were to know of our defenselessness, he would gather for war, and we aren't –"
"Do not speak that name in my presence," Michael bit out coldly, glaring at Raguel as acidically as he ever had to Gabriel. Raguel fell silent. Sahaquiel stared at the others, now judged and sentenced.
"Two in five of you will die in the coming decades," Sahaquiel said, almost sadly. "I hope it is the worst of you. But I fear it will not be."
"And you leave with a threat," Gabriel said.
"Not a threat. Ask Eistibus. They will tell you exactly the same," Sahaquiel said. "Enough of this. I would rather spend a century starving and in pain than spend another moment staring at this farce."
"So be it," Gabriel said. He snapped his fingers, and there was a crash, something akin to a massive bell falling at terminal velocity onto a surface so hard that it made the bell shatter. And in the wake of that noise, Sahaquiel was dragged down, through the floor to a tearing and splat of golden blood, leaving his halo hovering where once he had stood. Slowly, gradually, it went dim, and faded from view. "Now. With that matter out of the way, let us recess. And when we return, I will ask that Exorcist Command and Control be moved to my purview."
"We will decide that at a later time, Gabriel," Michael said. Gabriel smirked, and backed away into his cadre of cronies. Michael grumbled, quite unlike himself, and dropped himself into his seat, looking as though he were an ancient, weary human instead of the Taxiarch of Heaven.
"Come on, we've got to spread word," Birah said with due urgency to Hepsut who was looking quite unhappily at what had transpired.
"What is Gabriel's goal in this?" Hepsut asked.
"We don't have time to wonder, we have to move!" Birah stressed. With the groups beginning to disperse for the moment, Birah was able to elbow his way through the crowd, but came to a halt when he tried to broach the cluster that was Michael's cadre. They didn't seem willing to allow a finger, let alone a shoulder. So Birah bit off a profanity under his breath and skirted the entire group, a process of arduous minutes pressing shoulders with other Angels whom he had had very little interaction with in the Eon since his creation. Finally, he broke free into a region of relative sparsity. And that region lead to the desk at which both Raphael and Raguel sat.
"Raguel, may we speak with you?" Birah asked, having guessed at Raphael's care of this matter and judged it non-existent. The heavily armored archangel turned to them, his burning eyes glaring through the holes in his mask. Birah found himself taken aback by the intensity of them, and felt himself being weighed and measured.
Just like he had by the stranger at the wall.
"We will speak in private," Raguel said, turning from the desk and grasping both Hepsut and Birah by their arms. There was a flap of his four great wings, and the venues of Cloud Nine disappeared, replaced... by the ruins of the wall. This section seemed unpeopled, nobody working to clean or clear it. Considering the barest crescent of a moon overhead and the dim illumination of the stars, no great wonder nobody was working. It was a good way to get hurt. When Raguel released them, he took a step back, lacing his fingers before him and having his palms rest on the pommel of his blazing sword that materialized under them. "Your panic has earned you consideration. Speak of what you are so concerned with."
"Why... here?"
"Do you see any Archangels, or any agents of Gabriel?" Raguel asked, tones very, very dry.
"I suppose not," Hepsut said. "A half day ago, we were working to unseat the ruins of the wall. And when we did, we beheld someone. An Angel. An Archangel, in fact."
"An Archangel we had never seen before," Birah clarified. When he said that, Raguel turned to him, glaring intensely.
"How many eyes beyond those in his face?" Raguel asked, obviously off-put.
"Sixteen. Four to each wing," Hepsut said.
"Samael," Raguel said.
"What is... Who is Samael? I have never heard of there being an Archangel Samael," Hepsut said, his suspicion clear on his face.
"Because this time last month, Samael did not exist," Raguel said, sweeping his gaze out across the ruins of the walls of Heaven.
"God has finally ended his Silence?" Hepsut asked, hope clouding his words.
"...Do you think this was a result of Penemue?" Birah asked, with dread clouding his.
"I do not think. I fear," Raguel said. He was silent for a moment. Then, haltingly, he reached up to his own face. There was a metal click, and he pulled away his ballistic mask, before turning to them. And the face that he showed was less angelic than any other Archangel. Though bearing the base symmetry, as all Archangels' were, it was scarred and burned, the nose crooked from being broken and not properly healed. His eyes were blazes of white light, and his hair licked up against the edges of his helm as though living, solid, white flame.
Though unmistakably different, it was starkly similar to the face that this new Archangel, Samael, had shown. A face almost human.
"And I fear that I am, in my folly, the heart of this entire disaster," Raguel finished. He glanced to the wall once more. "What you saw, that Archangel without a name? He has one. It is Samael, The Poison of God. And in a very roundabout way... he is my grandson."
Today'd been just strange enough to shake Husk out of his doldrums. For one thing, having newly Fallen land directly in their back yard was not exactly impossible, but highly unlikely. Husk was a very deep believer in luck, both good and bad. If he hadn't been, he wouldn't have spent his entire post-war life in Las Vegas. After this long either at the tables or in the dens of iniquity that both Earth and Hell had to offer, he had a certain sensation for how luck was going. Much like other Sinners could create bombs out of nothing, or craft technologies which didn't work according to any laws of physics simply because the creator believed that they should work, Husk's own personal, unique quirk of damnation was that he could very often see the flow of luck.
It washed through everything, like a color under the skin of the world, passing through solid objects with contempt and heedless abandon, only to crash against the Hellborn and the Damned and swirl in their wake. He could tell by the color of the flow as it eddied around the people around him whether they were going to win their next hand of cards or throw of the dice, or if they were going to step outside of their house and get brained by a random dropping brick. Never so granular, granted, never so concrete. He knew that Vaggie had a long-standing and incredibly deep streak of bad luck to her. One that never quite crossed neutral, always the worst hounding her actions. Disaster would have plagued her every action if she weren't so meticulous and careful. If the Devil hands you dice, flip your own coin instead.
Angel Dust was more 'normal', for streaks of luck. Some days, it was almost as bad as Vaggie's, and petty misfortunes plagued him. Other days, it shone like fine gold dust held aloft in a sunbeam, and all was right with the spider demon. Charlie, too, had that nearly neutral luck. Some good, some bad. Husk knew from experience that his was much like theirs. Good days and bad. And then there was Alastor, the Radio Demon, the most dangerous Sinner in Hell. Well, the most dangerous Sinner, now that Sam was gone. Alastor had an unbroken streak of good luck that never dipped even as far as neutral from the first moment that Husk saw him, almost forty years ago. And Sam? Good God, Sam was just like him in that. And for nearly the same reason. It was being manipulated. Husk new when something was too good to be true. And the luck following those two sorcerers was exactly that.
Husk pulled the small plastic bag of sand from one of his extradimensional pockets and rolled it along his fingers. He should have known why their luck was so good. One of them had blasphemed against the nature of reality itself. The other was the fucking Demiurge.
So needless to say, when there came a solid platinum chip of luck that fell on the Hotel, Husk noticed it first. It literally dragged him out of a drunken stupor, the feel of this place's luck changing so drastically, and so suddenly. It was like a cold-snap but with fate itself as the metric. And when he came down to his 'post' at the slowly rebuilt bar (which was only being so gradually rebuilt because repairs and maintenance had been Sam's task... before...) it was to Vaggie emerging from the dining area, looking quite beside herself. He didn't care, so didn't ask. But the flow of luck, not just through the hotel, but through himself as well, it was enough that he idly pulled a die made from Seraphic Steel from his magical, intangible pockets, and flipped it into the air like a coin. When it clacked to the table it bounced, bounced again, spun...
And came to a halt balancing perfectly on one of its vertices, showing the highest faces upward.
"Well, that's new," Husk's voice was deep, gravely, and innately unhappy. He picked it up, swiping his paw-like hand along the table top, to make sure it hadn't landed perfectly in a dip. Nothing. He flipped it again. And again, it landed on its vertex. "Hey? Pit-boss."
"What did you call me?" Vaggie asked, but Husk ignored her annoyance for the moment.
"You mind fillin' me in on what I missed this mornin'?" Husk asked.
"Morning? It's three in the afternoon!" Vaggie said.
"Uh huh, and?" Husk said. Vaggie dragged her hands down her still-very-human looking face, dragging down at the one eye she had left and growling in her throat.
"And, we've got a new guest. Maybe," she said.
"Uh huh, and?" Husk pressed once more. Because she wouldn't be in this kind of a state for just another guest.
"And... um... I think it's Sam's mom," she said.
"You think?" Husk said, leaning forward with his paws braced on the bar-top over the precariously perched die.
"She claims she is, at least. But she's... well, she's nothing like what I expected Sam's mother to be. She's almost – um, well – scary," Vaggie admitted.
"And as to why, at least 25 years after she's s'posed to have died, she's finally landing in Hell?" Husk asked.
"Well, that's..." Vaggie began, but the door to the dining room was swung open, and there was a short redhead emerging through it. She had to be five-nothing, maybe five-one if she had really generous socks on, such that even Charlie towered over her. She looked perfectly human, but for one thing. She had an incomplete halo glowing over her head, the notch in it aligned with the bridge of her nose.
And she was a blackhole of luck, that was either so good or so bad that the rest of the flow parted around her as though she weren't there at all.
Honestly, Husk felt fascination swell in his cold, dead shell of a heart. Because this? This was something he'd never seen before, in all his years in Hell.
"Have you ever been in possession of a Shard of Ruin?" Charlie asked, trailing her with clipboard in hand.
"They don't let humans anywhere near those," the redhead said.
"Do you possess a Stand?"
"What? Like Araki Stands? Those are real?" the ginger asked, faced bunched up.
"Yes or no, please,"
"Didn't you die in the nineties?" Vaggie asked.
"Yes, and I read Weekly Shonen Jump. What's your point?" the redhead asked. She gave her head a shake. Fuck me, Husk thought, but didn't she call to mind Elsie. Elsie had been a blonde, admittedly, but had the same uncontrollably curly hair, and had had the same spunk. "Look, I read the rest of them while you were gawping, so my answers are no, no, no, that's a myth, and no."
"Okay. I'll just put those in. And I'm sad about the Stand thing now, because that sounded fun," Charlie said.
"Heaven sounds fun too. Pity how reality shakes out," the redhead with the halo said, glanced above Husk's head, and made a beeline for him. "Is it safe to say that the bar is now open?"
"You could say that," Husk said, blindly reaching behind him to grab a pair of bottles. "What're ya havin'?"
"Screwdriver," she said.
"Come on, at least challenge me," Husk said.
"I have not had alcohol in twenty five years, and I just got out of a dump. I'll move on to the more appetizing drinks once I remind my liver what it's built for," she said.
"Should you really be drinking at this hour?" Charlie asked, holding the clipboard close to her chest.
"Considering that I am actively working to not be Redeemed, I'd say there's no reason I shouldn't," she said. She then looked Husk up and down. "...Vegas?"
"How'd you guess?" Husk queried.
"You have hearts and spades on your fur coloration," she said, tipping half of the screwdriver that Husk poured her back and swishing it in her mouth before swallowing it. Odd. "If one percent of what the Penitent say about Hell is true, you resemble how and why you died, with some leeway for what you've become."
"The fuck is a 'Penitent'?" Husk asked, as he put the vodka back.
"Rachel," she said, offering a hand.
"Husk," he answered. Behind her, Charlie and Vaggie shared a look which spoke volumes, and whatever unsaid conversation they had, Vaggie obviously won it, because Charlie let out a put-upon sigh and wilted, and the grey-pallored Sinner dragged her into the offices.
"So, ah... why you got a halo?" he asked the most obvious question in the room.
"Why are you a cat-bird?" she asked, a brow raised.
"Long fuckin' story, dame," Husk muttered.
"Likewise," she said.
"Mine's a lot more borin' than yours's gotta be. Last time I saw a fucker with one 'a those, I almost got gacked by the Taxiarch and the fuckin'... I don't know what they call Raguel up there, but fuckin' him!" Husk pointed out, a clawed finger pointing at her halo.
"It figures that the Archangels would spend their time terrorizing Hell. They certainly don't do anything useful otherwise," Rachel muttered, sipping at the screwdriver.
"Okay, I might not be the crispest card in the deck, but you're bein' pretty fuckin' squirelly. So come on. Tell your bartender a story. Halo?" he pointed again.
"I'm going to need a lot more of this," she raised her drink, with a very serious look on her face, "before I go into the details, but suffice to say... Heaven is a bit of a pit."
"...Okay, you had my curiosity, but now? Now you got my attention," Husk said.
"I had a feeling you might," she said. And simultaneously Husk knew that he was in, and knew that he had to slam the breaks hard. He paused from mixing a Manhattan and frowned, nay scowled. Just like he was good at following the flow of luck when he put his mind to it, he also knew a femme fatale when I saw one. And he was getting that feeling really fucking clearly right now. "So, Gambler-man. What did you do to get yourself damned here?"
"Stole money from people," Husk said. "'Parently, that's all it takes these days. You?"
"Didn't you hear? I got in," she asked with an impressive deadpan.
"Then forgive me for asking the most obvious fuckin' thing in Creation, but what's a dame like you doin' in a gin-joint like this bein' that's the case?" Husk asked of her.
"Gabriel is a bastard," she said.
"I can see that," Husk said. And again he reeled himself back in from leaning across the bar. This was a woman who knew how to use people. How in the ever-flying fuck had Sam come outta this dame? "I'm guessin' whatever's up top was a bit of a rude go, for you to be here, now."
"Well, answer me something," Rachel said.
"Shoot."
"How well do you keep your thumb on the pulse of things here in Hell?" she asked.
"As much as I care to," Husk said, which was honestly more than he let on. A lot more.
"So how many people like me have you ever heard of landing in Hell?"
"People who Made It? Well, you'd about be the first," Husk said. The flirty expression went brittle, like a thin mask over her face, and Husk could see the calculation going on behind it. She was a smart one, he could tell at a glance. And very accomplished at using people to her ends. But the tiny twitch of an expression Husk saw there, buried under the calculation and flirtatiousness was... annoyance? Resolve? The two on her face seemed pretty similar.
"So Hell's not seen the likes of me. I figured as much. What about..." then she paused, turning toward the TV which was tuned to the news, showing Katie Killjoy gleefully chest-kicking her interview guest out of camera-shot to announce that King Lucifer was making an announcement.
There was no visual feed, just the audio of Lucifer outright, blatantly, and flagrantly declaring a new War for Heaven, and offering glory and riches to any who fought for him, no matter their provenance. Rachel watched the thing with utter deadpan, not showing any surprise, alarm, or concern. Just noting things. Putting them into their proper boxes. Weighing them according to their meaning. It ended with Lucifer's cry for glorious vengeance against Heaven rattling the news camera and leaving Killjoy looking like she suddenly found herself sitting on a landmine with a faulty trigger.
"Well, I suppose that stands to reason as well," Rachel said, finishing the screwdriver at a pull and starting on the Manhattan. "I wonder who told him that the walls were down."
Husk offered a sigh, because he knew from personal presence who had been responsible for that. He'd been in True South, watching from a rooftop the battle between Sam Scailes and Lucifer. Or rather, the merciless beating that Lucifer was giving Sam Scailes. And then how it in an instant reversed, the instant that Sam Scailes declared himself the Demiurge.
He couldn't hear the words that the two of them said to each other. Being in a different part of the city without a directional microphone tended to do that. But he watched as bit by bit, Sam sloughed the parts of him that were Sam, like cracking through the carapace of a chrysalis. And emerging from that pupa came the Poison of God. He'd always said he'd had angelic bullshit going on. And only in that last few days, when he'd actually put time and thought into it, that he finally understood what the sand in the bag which stolidly refused to go away actually meant.
When Angels Sing, they can create things, images, scenes, even people, who perform the task that the song requires of them, then fade away. Some Angelsong, like that of the Archangels, or more locally available that of Charlie, lasted longer, or was more complex.
Sam created sand and gold and river out of nothing, and when he left, it remained.
If there wasn't better proof that the man was Yaldabaoth, revealed at last, then Husk was owed a place upon the Throne of God.
"Lilith's clever," Husk palmed his thought off. She was there, helpless against the might of the Demiurge, when the Equal To God broke the heavens in his fury. "She probably filled him in on things."
"Angels took great pains to hide their status from Hell. And she just... deduced it?" Rachel asked, her flirty demeanor utterly gone and cold calculation having resurrected in its place.
"When you got all the clues, you've gotta be a moron not to," Husk said. Rachel raised a brow, then turned her back to the TV and back to her Manhattan.
"Alright. So," she took a sip and glanced to the door where the boss and her girlfriend had sequestered themselves. "There's something I'm going to need to know about. And in a degree of accuracy that neither the owner nor her other half seem willing to provide."
"You need some intelligence on somebody?" Husk said. "'Cause that comes with a price."
"I always pay my debts," she promised, and affixed him with a very intense stare. "Now. Tell me everything you know about the dragon that Charlie keeps in room six."
"Pain is not the teacher people make it out to be. There's only one lesson that pain teaches you, and it's how to avoid more of itself. Failure teaches a lot more than that. But in Hell in particular, you're not likely to find people who understand that distinction. To be frank, when the New War For Heaven started, a lot of people up here had lost that distinction as well.
That stupidity with Sahaquiel was only the first step that the Heavenly Host took down a path of folly. What does it say about these supposedly divine and more-perfect-beings that I, a politician and author of modest repute, managed to understand their situation and turn their mediocre defenses against the hordes of Hell more ably than even the Taxiarch, who was created by our Creator God to fulfill that exact role?
I know now what God made Man for. Angels were created to be servants. But Man was made to be master of Mastery itself."
- Niccolo Machiavelli, Brevet Supreme Commander of the Host