The Song of Ruin

by James Golen

The Demiurge has revealed himself, and declared a vendetta against God. Hell is in turmoil as Lucifer - now with a mere imp as his Proxy - is surely planning a new war against Heaven, to reclaim the throne he calls his own. And those who are stuck on the battlefield have to find a way to survive. This is a story of how good men die. Book 2 of The Silent God Duology.

14. The Times, They Are A-Changing

Things were starting to settle into a different kind of normal.

That new normal was awful, of course. With Exorcist popping up whenever they felt like it, staying as long as they pleased, and not respecting any of the old unspoken agreements that had once bound their behavior, they were causing a hell of a lot of harm. The old way had those things going specifically after people. Now, they went after infrastructure as well. And that was going to cause increasing problems as things went on.

Dad seemed odd, too, Octavia pondered. The day after Mum returned and the two of them killed a pair of Exorcists – which was an action of note to the Goetia Families, apparently – Dad slunk in as well, looking utterly shaken, right to his core. He simply came into Octavia's bedroom and started talking, rambling, really, about things that he'd never talked about before. Heaven. The Leviathans. That he was something called a 'Hexbreaker'. His own paternity. It had been a bit surprising to learn that unlike every other Goetia that Octavia was aware of, Stolas had a 'father'. And no 'Mother', because he had been still been hand-crafted by God, along with a few 'uncles' and even an 'aunt' that still lived in Heaven; it went a long way to explaining why Paimon sent such extravagant gifts for her on her birthday. She was technically Paimon's granddaughter.

He kept talking until she fell asleep despite having sat there for at least four hours, about all the things that he'd never told her about before. Strange things, dangerous things, disturbing things. Scandalous things. Things that she knew that in Octavia's experience, Dad would have taken to his grave. But now he just spilled them forward like water from a broken pipe. By the time she woke up from her confused slumber, he was gone, and she had briefly thought it a rather strange dream she'd had the night before.

Then he met her at the breakfast table – having created a palatial breakfast spread for her – and asked her if she was disappointed in him.

She still hadn't answered that question, because he immediately apologized. For not being there when the Exorcist came. For not being there before the Exorcist came. For not being there when Octavia was growing up and drifting free of her parents, as though he were even guilty of that. She had a fuck of a lot more memories of she and her father than she had of she and her Mum.

In truth, it was a strange evening, a strange morning, and then a quiet afternoon, as Ambrosius informed her that Mother would be moving out of the palace permanently.

"You seem distracted, my Domina," Ambrosius said, as he continued pace behind her as she did combat exercises in the power-armor that she had claimed as her own. The head section had been left open, so she could see with her own eyes and hear with her own ears; there were going to be few people trying to kill her right now. And if they did come, it wouldn't take long to armor back up; the damned thing was right over there!

"I am distracted," Octavia said, slumping and backing away from the manikin that she was practicing her maneuvers and blows against. She was really going to have to invest in some golems. This just wasn't doing much for her. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do."

"I understand the tension of your choice, my Domina. But you have an able mind. Work it through," Ambrosius said.

Octavia dropped her armor into the cradle that had been built for it, here in the first properly customized room in her ward of the Palace; her sparring room. Of course, to call it a sparring room was a bit reductive and not entirely accurate. It was also a mostly functional if jury-rigged machine-shop and had all of the devices needed to keep that miracle of technology which kept she and her mother alive during the False Purge both repaired and ready for anything. There was just so much work she needed to do to make this place... well... a training room.

"If I go with Mum, I'll be able to learn from the best fighters in Hell," Octavia said. "I'll be able to defend myself against those... those things!" she thrust an arm upward, and Ambrosius nodded. "But then I'd be leaving my Dad all alone. And I don't think his heart could take that. But if I stay here, I lose..."

"...what do you lose, my Domina?" Ambrosius asked, forcing the point. She could tell he was getting impatient with her dithering, her mincing of words. But he was too respectful to outright say such a thing.

"I lose the chance to be the most dangerous Goetia. Like Mum wanted me to be," Octavia said. And by losing that, she lost any chance of being respected by anybody down here. The only courtesy that the Goetia showed her was that of a kindly man too polite to slap a toddler. One day, they would lose that kindness, that patience, and the slap would be terrible indeed.

"And by losing your proximity to your mother you fear you will lose her killer instinct, her eye for the dangerous, and any means of propelling yourself in society. Am I correct?" Ambrosius asked.

"...yes," she said.

"Then you are being foolish," Ambrosius said. Octavia's glowing red eyes narrowed at him, but he was not ruffled in the slightest by her moment of annoyance. "You claim that the only means of building your reputation for competence and capability is to work in the shadow of your mother. That is patently false. You have already shown competence and capability."

"What? That?" she gestured behind her. "That was those Sinners' work, not mine..."

"Who put things in motion? Who hounded them at every lapse of their concentration? Who forced the decade-long development of a hitherto unseen weapon into the span of a mere month?" Agrippa said, taking a step toward her with each point, until he was just out of arm's reach for her. "You did. You did all of these things. And though you discount them as seeing it as others' work, you were a part of it. Your mother is a warrior. Her path is a warrior's path, from its beginning until its end. But you are not a warrior."

"I know..." she bemoaned.

"You play at warrior as a mere aspect of what you are: an innovator and administrator. As was Marius reshaping the armies of Rome, you are going to reshape the way that Hell fights. First on the small scale, individual devices and individual soldiers, and then on the broad."

"They can make only fifty of those things a month. Fifty!" Octavia pointed out. She'd been over the figures out of Glowtown, and unless the population doubled and the amount of infrastructure out there magically matched pace with it in the next month, that was what production of the Blasphemer Powered Armor System was going to be for the foreseeable future.

"Then ensure that those fifty are well placed. And the fifty after them," Agrippa said. "We have nothing but time. And with prudent deployment, we can have the entire Stellar Grenadiers outfitted within a decade."

Octavia, though, let her face fall into her hands. He was trying to see things from his perspective, and to that perspective things were looking optimistic. The notion of luxuriantly armed and armored Praetorian Guards were certainly in his world view. But the problem was that thinking about it on that scale was just not going to help; there were many millions of Legionaries, divided across hundreds of legions divided between many dozens of leaders. And as Mum had said, Heaven was mobilizing its Innocent in a conscript role, which meant that the wars of attrition were absolutely in Heaven's favor.

She needed to break the dynamic of attrition warfare. And to do that, she needed an entire army that could stand in front of bullets and not be cut down.

Octavia took that mind-fuzzed moment to shuffle a few pieces of correspondence that had been left for her on the table beside her bench. She was of course expecting the daily letter from Mum, asking why she wasn't coming to live with her, and not-so-subtly trying to extract her from Dad. The letter she had from Paimon suddenly made sense in the light of Dad's revelation about her third-generation Angel status. But there were others, junk mail and people trying to screw her over, that she flicked into a garbage pail every time she found one. Until she found one that wasn't. It had no return address, but was written by a very crisp and flowing hand. It was sealed with a marker of golden wax, which could only be used by a High King. Of the Seven Rings, five of them now had a High Prince or Princess as their Embodiment, and as such they were permitted silver wax. The lesser 'kings' of the Ars Goetia were lucky that they were allowed bronze. And since the signet of the wax was not the Fruit of Knowledge of Good And Evil... that meant there was only one person in all of Hell this could be from.

"Ambrosius?" she asked, cutting off his musings on possible regalia and livery for her branch of the Goetia house. He had certain romantic streaks to him, that man. He liked those he served to be in utmost dignity. So when she held up the large parchment envelope marked with a golden frog while she shrugged her shoulders in confusion, he quickly rounded and approached.

"That is the Signet of Satan, King of Wrath," Agrippa said. He seemed leery. "It might be best you have that checked for poison. Your parents have done ill by him."

"It's not poisoned," she said, knowing it to be true without really being sure how she knew that. So she broke the seal and opened it. And when she did there came a tearing of the world, uncolor pouring from the page and spilling across the room. Agrippa stepped back in alarm, because that looked very much like the kind of portal that Satan used to move between the layers of Hell. "What is this?"

"Have I thine attention, young mistress of steel and savagery?" the thunder-clap voice of Satan came from the queer halflight. "Wouldst thou wish to speak on the topic of thy path?"

"What are you talking about, and what did you do to my room?"

"Writing is such a limiting form of conversation," Satan demurred as a disembodied voice. She rose, passing her hand through the uncolor that hung in the air near her. Nothing happened. "I send not portals nor means of transit for thou; it would be unseemly to impose thee upon mine schedule."

"How polite," Agrippa said, flatly.

"Tact costs little, and can earn much," Satan agreed, his voice causing the rest of the letters to rattle their way off of the table and fall to the floor. "It has come to my attention that a device has been chartered by thee, one that can vastly increase the capacity of a warrior in the fight. And this interests me greatly."

"You... want to build my armors?" she asked.

"The term for mine desires is 'licensing'," Satan said. "Thou hast but a few hundred Sinners, fiends and imps working in a skunkworks upon that ill-omened Ring of Pride. I have millions. Millions of imps and fiends bound in the unity of Satan to follow what path I offer them. Even were they to hand-make the parts of your strange device and eschew all wise notions of automation, they would still swamp this 'Glowtown' under the weight of wrought metal in a fortnight, and bury it under a mountain in a year. I wish to see Hell adamantine. I want thine armor upon my armies. And I will pay whatever is appropriate to that end."

"...why?" She asked. "What do you gain out of this?"

"A secure Hell, a healthy army, and proof that Satan's way succeeds where the rest of Hell's does not. I am not utterly without pride, Madam Goetia. I have desires also. And those desires, despite their lofty language, were born in a place of pettiness."

"Okay, first of all, the fact that you... how are you even doing this with a letter?"

"Magic," Satan answered crypically.

"God damn you..."

"He tried once. It did not work," Satan said with a droll timbre to his voice.

"Second... I don't own those designs. GLW Heavy Metal does," she said.

"As the founder of their feast, the Naked Law states... what was it said as... intellectual property? That is the term? Yes, yes it is. By law, they worked as mere laborers to your design. And as such, by law, it is yours to allow to other manufacturers. I wish to be that manufacturer."

"And you wish exclusivity, I take it?"

"I could want nothing less than I want that. Exclusivity degrades innovation. If only one hand may make a tool, that tool will be made to the exact same weight and measure, never changing, never growing finer but for advancement of technique," Satan gave a harrumph, then was silent for a moment. "May I speak in confidence?"

"I'm still confused how you're speaking at all!" Octavia said to the cloying halflight.

"Magic, Madam Goetia. Magic. I know that thou hast little trust toward mine ends. There is little love lost between I, and thy forebearers. But I conceive of no valid reason why such bad blood ought spill from one set of veins to 'nother. Thou needest foundation, thou needest means. Thou art young. Very young. A child trying desperately to take her feet in a place where many wish to shove her over. Allow me to upon my name promise that I bear thee no ill will for thy mother's nor father's depredations. That this be not a means to strike at them through you. Do you accept this?"

"I'm getting very concerned about the kinds of promises and vows you're making. They make no sense!"

"I am King. I can do as I will," she could practically hear Satan shrug despite his voice being thoroughly disembodied. "This is my accord with thee; permission and schematic to craft thy design. In exchange, a percentage shall be given over directly to thy possession, with another percentage set aside for purchase by thee should thou need more in urgency. If this be amenable, then come unto my palace at a time of your discretion."

"We can't hash this out now?" she asked.

"You are talking to a letter scribed by Satan's hand, not unto Satan himself," Satan said. Oh.

"Fine. The sooner we get this started the better," Octavia said. Agrippa raised a hand, but she gave him a forestalling look.

"Divine. I shall await thee. Good day, young Goetia," Satan said. And at those words, the cloying halflight died and the uncolor faded away until the room was as it had been before. She then turned to Ambrosius.

"I'm guessing you're going to tell me that you can't trust him," she said.

"You can trust him some small scintilla more than most in Hell, but that is not a difficult bar to vault," Ambrosius said with a begrudging nod. "I am more concerned as to whom you will take with you to defend you. I cannot join you, for obvious reasons. And your parents would not allow you within 50 stadia of him. Though I would admit it would be very against Satan's character to bait you into ambush, it doesn't mean it's inconceivable. And he has good reason to despise your parents."

Octavia stared at the Gyrfalcon that was standing open, waiting for her, as she pondered. Satan did hate Stolas and Stella, and the rest of the Goetia Families... but he had never been anything but polite to her.

It was a judgment call she had to make. Who could she hire to protect her while she did this risky, potentially dangerous thing?

The answer came to her with a soul-destroying groan.

"My Domina?" Ambrosius asked.

"I know who to hire to guard me," she said, the words hurting viscerally to say as she said them.

Because if she went behind her Dad, she could get the Proxy of Lucifer and his merry band of lunatics to do just about anything.

---

Act 2: The Price Of A Throne

Chapter 14

The Times, They Are A-Changing

---

"Alright, now that the mincin' faggot's here, let's get down to brass tacks," Henroin said as Angel Dust came in through the back – as was tradition with him it seemed. Arackniss was sitting at Henroin's right hand, a spot that Lester Saluzzo had held not that long ago. And there he was standing in a corner, all used up and thrown away now that Arackniss could break concrete with his bare hands. The whole crew was gathered up, and Angel Dust's dusty-old tarantula of a father was tapping his finger on a briefcase that had been set on a table near the head of the room.

"I'm telling you, Mister Veloce, it's working like it's s'posed to!" the little fish-man of a Sinner that Dad had brought in to do all of his technical support said. Angel Dust knew that he'd seen the little angler-fish Sinner before, and might have even been personally introduced, but that moment was lost in a haze of cocaine and methamphetamine, long ago in Angel Dust's past. While his memory was a lot better now than once it was, there were still large, gaping wounds in it where he'd tried to essentially chemically erase himself for the sake of his own sanity.

"If it's 's'posed to' work, then why the fuck ain't it workin'?" Henroin demanded, pounding the table with one of his big, beefy fists.

"Yo, there, eaaasy there Pop. What's the problem?" Angel Dust asked.

"There's been a development," Henroin grunted out. "An' I know, that when we started this business of ours, we did it on certain understandings. That some things were the ways that they weres."

"Things have changed, Don Veloce," Bruno Fabiani, the Consiglieri, said. "And the folks out here, they're startin' to think that there's a need for some... recalculation."

"And I'm telling you that I ain't 'recalculating', shit," Henroin said. He gave his head a shake. "You're only puttin' voice to what the rest 'a yous jackals are probably thinkin'. That maybe it's time for Veloce to step down and let one'a yous sit in his chair? Do you think that, Buddy?" he asked, turning and leaning down into a mobster's face, glaring with his many eyes at the mobster who, though having to lean back to not impact face to face with his boss, did not shrink nearly as far as he would have last year.

"Come on, Pa, this ain't the time," Arackniss said, barring his path forward with one arm. "He's just sayin' shit. Let 'em talk. That means they'll just be outta' breath when they get their shit pushed in."

"I'm still a bit in the dark regardin' what's goin' on here?" Angel Dust pointed out.

"The Phone ain't workin' proper, like," Arackniss said.

"The Phone... fuck me, does that mean somethin's happened to Molly?" Angel Dust asked. There was an audible bone-crunch as the tightness of Henroin's fist cracked his knuckles for him at the mention of the only member of their entire extended family that didn't get sent to Hell. Arackniss, conversely, growled and stormed toward the table with the briefcase on it.

"That's just the fuckin' point, bro! We don't got the first fuckin' idea! We ain't been able to connect a call for a fuckin' week!" he outright shouted.

"So find who fuckin' touched it last and string him from the fuckin' rafters. This shit ain't hard," Angel Dust said.

"The last person who used it was me," Henroin said, glaring and ignoring the nattering of the hens around him. "And then it just don't work no more. I din't break shit."

Angel Dust gave that a minute's thought, of piping up that maybe the problem was on the other end. After all, he'd flapped gums with Rachel lots in the last little bit. She was entirely loose with the state of shit up there, and from the way she described it, Angel Dust was actually a bit anxious; if Molly was goin' through that kinda shit up there, Angel Dust might have to do the brave and stupid thing and go rescue her.

Shouting started again, as various mafiosos engaged and entangled in Henroin Veloce's web began to shout and blame each other, or make demands to fix The Phone, or to outright take it away from Pop. Angel Dust could only shake his head, backing away from the ruckus that overtook the criminals, gravitating slowly toward where his smaller – but much stronger – brother was hanging his head in dismay. "Is it always like this?"

"These days, seems fuckin' like," Arackniss said. He gestured away from where Henroin was now roaring down at a squid-headed Sinner over some point of business that Angel Dust didn't care enough to try to eavesdrop on. "Hate to say it, and this is physically goddamned painful to admit, but I think Pa is losin' his grip on shit. Ain't gonna be too long before it all unravels if he can't get his shit togetha'."

"Good riddance," Angel Dust said with a scoff and a flick of the hand. "If he can't hold onto what I built for 'im, that's his fuckin' problem, not mine. And it don't gotta be yours, neither."

"I know. I know," Arackniss muttered, sounding outright angry at the admission. "Pa isn't keepin' up with the way things are no more. Frankly, I'm startin' to think he never did in the foyst place."

"How long's the Family been goin' down hill, bro? Tell me honestly," Angel Dust said.

"Since you left back when," Arackniss admitted.

"Wow, you said that without even callin' me a fairy. I musta' got you on a bad day!" Angel Dust laughed.

"Fuck you, bro," Arackniss said, giving Angel Dust a shove that damned near knocked him over. The smaller, grey spider gave an aggravated hiss, then kept walking. "Hell's changin' on us. Fuck knows it's gotten 'round to changin' us, too. Look at you. You managed to not spread yer ass for the whole Family in the five minutes since you got here!"

"And you ain't a fuckin limp-dick what gets slapped around by Vermin Sinners no more. You're fuckin' right we've changed," Angel Dust said. And then he paused. "...I have changed."

"Yeah. And Pa hasn't," Arackniss said as he finally reached the back door and pushed it open. He then recoiled slightly. "The fuck you doin' here, toots?"

"Nice to see you too, half-hand," Cherri Bomb said, where she'd posted up opposite the back door to the venue.

"Was you gonna blow this place up with me inside? Bro, I'm disappointed," Arackniss said with a shake of his head.

"I weren't blowin' up shit. She's just here 'cause I didn't wanna walk through this bullshit," Angel dust kicked some of the filthy grey slush away from his boots, "all by my onesie."

"Yeah, and I needed to get out of that shit-pit that my old haunt turned into," Cherri said. Apparently she'd 'accidentally' blown up her 'headquarters' with a satchel charge a little while ago. And that was very unlike her, because she could literally create bombs as an act of will. Now, with all of her usual stores of influence and value reduced to ash and slag, she was pounding slushy pavement again like a fuckin' mook. Honestly, Angel Dust felt bad for her. He knew how degrading it was to walk like that after bein' on top for any length of time. "So what was the big problem?"

"You know that fancy phone my Pop's got?" Angel asked.

"The one that goes..." she pointed vaguely upward.

"Yeah..." Angel Dust couldn't keep the dread off of his face, and Cherri picked up on that.

"You think something's happened to Molly?" Cherri said.

"It shouldn't. I mean, she's in fuckin' Heaven! Ain't supposed to have bad shit happen to people up there!"

"And yet you got that look on your face," Cherri said.

And at this point, Angel Dust knew that if he kept not telling her, she was gonna dig on her own, and that would make things worse. So he strained for a moment to find a way to tell it gently.

When that failed, he just tried to get it out of his throat in any shape at all.

"I've talked to some folk what come from up there. 'Side's my sister, I mean," Angel Dust said.

"When?" Arackniss asked. "The only dame you ever called up on that bakelite bitch was Molly."

"I mean I got somebody else what came from up there. Somebody down here," he pointed down at the alley they were trudging through.

"Why would somebody from Heaven come to Hell?" Cherri asked.

"Weren't willin'ly, I can tell you that much," Angel Dust said. Again, he considered whether to flap his lips. Were he A Year Ago Angel Dust, he'd have done it without hesitation. But A Year Ago Angel Dust would have been blitzed out of his branch twenty four hours a day, and didn't have much in the way of good judgment. Not to say that Now Angel Dust had much more. But he had enough to at least give it a thought, before considering that these were the people he killed Valentino with. These bitches, he could trust. "There's this bitch back where I work at the hotel. Fell out'a Heaven kicked by Gabriel or some shit. I didn't dig too deep. But the fact is, this chick's the real deal. An Innocent. Down. Here," he pointed at the ground with four of his arms.

"And she didn't immediately off herself? Impressive," Cherri said.

"Funny thing 'bout that," Angel said. "She actually prefoys it down here! Says there's some famine or shit goin' on up topside."

"Molly's goin' hungry?" Arackniss asked.

"Don't gimme that shit, Molly didn't wanna eat even when she was alive," Angel Dust pointed out.

"Fuck, I could practically spit through 'er, when she was still livin'," Arackniss admitted.

"And she didn't complain none the whole time we had The Phone, while that famine's been goin' on for two decades now. I think she barely even noticed," Angel Dust said. He gave his head a shake. "But that ain't my point. I got one Innocent who said she'd plant her flag down here in a heartbeat. Why wouldn't Molly do likewise? After all, she's got her whole fuckin' family down 'ere!"

"Would Heaven even allow that? Just let Innocent leave?" Cherri seemed baffled by the prospect of it.

"Prob'ly not," Arackniss said. "So we'd need to 'kidnap' her."

"Which would mean we'd need to have a way into Heaven, and as a group of three dead idiots, I'm seeing a distinct fucking lack of that kind of mobility here," Cherri pointed out the obvious problem.

"Oh fuck me, that's a good point. How would we even get up there?" Arackniss asked. Angel Dust gave that a ponder, pacing to and fro at the mouth of the alley that they had stopped before exiting.

There was a way. He just had to suss it out. And as he paced, he caught a glimpse of buckled armor amongst the garbage nearby. It looked to be a plate harness, the kind that the knights of Italy had used way the fuck back in the olden times. And it was so mangled and crumpled that it was useless save for scrap.

Thinking of that, got him thinking of the Condottieri, for some fuckin' reason. 'Parently Pop's whole bloodline, the Ragnie Family, got its start as mercenary soldiers way the fuck back when, only turning to crime when The Great War put the boot in.

And just like that, he had the start of an idea.

"...I got me a question 'bout shit," Angel Dust said. Arackniss gave a shrug, so Cherri stepped up and asked.

"Shoot," she said.

"What's the goin' rate for Mercenaries to those fuckin' Legions, these days?" he asked. "'Cause I think the three of us just might be 'hooking up' for a job topside."

---

The sitting room in the Happy Hotel had been much refurbished, now that the Exorcists had been expelled and the military under the roof had cracked down. And with Cain offering to help serve in the defense of the edifice, he had the clout to require that certain parts of the structure be brought up to scratch with priority over others. This one, for example, made him feel entirely at home, a sort of quiet and self-assured pomposity that wasn't gaudy or gauche. Everything stately and in its place, cleaned to the point where the floor nearly acted as a mirror, and the wood gleamed in the light of the fireplace nearby.

"I must admit that I have some difficulty recalling our interactions in the past, Mister Satsuma," Cain admitted as he poured the man a cup of tea. "Although I am somewhat pleasantly surprised that you sought me out rather than I having do to the same to you."

"I thought it would only be proper," Keiji Satsuma was an old fashioned man, his body mostly humanoid, but his face had a sort of lacquer texture to it, displaying a bright blue visage of an Oni, tusks jutting up from his lower jaw. He was a kind of Sinner that, in Cain's experience, you just didn't run into anymore, now that he had awakened from his stupor. It seemed that whole Aspects were just fading out of existence with the passage of time and the churn of Hellish History. And that made him feel slightly sad, in an esoteric way. "After all, it has been made abundantly clear that those who you have sought out, and refused your overtures, have had unpleasant endings."

"There have been no endings, as yet," Cain said with a chuckle as he poured himself a cup of tea, next. "Merely reminders of who is Terror Incarnate. It does me little good from an advertising perspective to leave no witnesses, does it?"

"I suppose it does not," Satsuma said.

"So what have you brought for me?" Cain asked, taking a sip and sitting back in the luxuriantly plush chair that had been moved from the lobby and into the sitting room. Other chairs would be requisitioned for the lobby; these ones obviously belonged in a room like this one.

"I have brought you... this," he said, pulling from a swirl of twisting cloud and extracting a flat box. He held it toward Cain for a moment, then pulled the top from it, revealing a sort of dress-uniform that looked that it would have been very much in vogue during the time of Imperial Russia, tasteful and refined and bearing with it just the slightest edge of deadly dangerousness. Cain leaned back, his face pulled into confusion.

"I'm sorry, but what is this?"

"It was yours once. You wore it during the Day Of Rage, in 1701," Satsuma said.

"I'm sorry, I'm not denying that this was mine; I'm saying that I had written off all of the clothing I had owned in that time to the inevitable depredations of time. Clothing does not hold well to archaeology, mister Satsuma."

"Unless it is cared for meticulously, that is certainly so," Satsuma said with a nod and a thoughtful look.

"So why are you bringing this back now? I would not have come looking for it," Cain pointed out the obvious.

"Was I to know that?" Satsuma asked.

"I suppose not. But even still... you've replaced this entire seam," Cain was distracted as he saw one of the primary stitches at the jacket's armpit had thread made this century, instead of when it was made many, many years ago.

"I have not had the easiest time, since the end of the Pride War," Satsuma admitted. "I fought alongside Erasmus Von Brutte, against Jingo. I was called a traitor by many for going to war against my Sinner kin. And though I survived when so many didn't, their memories were not dulled by the horrors of the arrival of the Radio Demon into Hell. I nearly lost heart."

Satsuma stared at the box for a moment, lost in his thoughts, no doubt. But when he turned those mask-eyes to Cain once more, there was a touch more resolve in them.

"When I found this, it was in poor shape. But to have it, it gave me a connection to Terror Incarnate. A piece of his calamitous violence and his unbreaking will. I wore it on those days I needed strength more than anything else. Call me a sentimental fool, if you must, but I tried to do honor by the symbol that I found."

Cain found himself taken aback. "Satsuma, you honor me greatly," he finally said. He tapped the buckle on his belt. "This was given to me by Lilith, after our first century together. It was the first time she made something with her hands in metal. As may be evidenced by the roughness of the etching in the bronze, it was showcase that she was created with the human drive to make, to craft, to build."

He turned his head, and tapped the ring that held his hair back.

"This was a gift by Elucis Vak, Old Queen of Lust, as reward for the decades of study I put forth that allowed her to bear a child. She named her Caine. Then Asmodeus killed both of them and consigned that clade of Fiend into extinction," Cain said. Then he held up his right hand, and tapped the silver ring on his middle finger with his thumb. "This was given to me by King Zagan, called also Abraxas Carmine, Lord Of Warforge, founder of Carmine Crafting, when I found a way to make a metal that could hold an enchantment forever, and made his entire business possible. In it is a spell that, if I were to invoke it, would earn me an immediate Major Boon that Zagan must uphold. This," he tapped the brooch on his vest. "was given to me by an unknown Sinner from the earliest days of Man's durance in Hell. She said it brought out my eyes. I didn't learn her name before she vanished from perdition."

Finally, Cain reached out and picked up the clothing, feeling a still familiar weight to it. He was smiling despite himself, tears in his eyes. "And today, I have been given a gift as weighty as any of those. I do not accept this as a return of my old property, Satsuma. I consider this a gift all of its own. And I am deeply grateful for it."

"I am thankful that I could do you this pleasure," Satsuma nodded his head.

"Please, my friend, the pleasure is all mine," Cain said, quickly wiping away what tears had shed. "Now, tell me what has happened during the Pride War and the times since. I wish to know everything."

"That is a tale long in the telling," Satsuma warned.

"We are Damned. We have all the time in the world," Cain said.

---

Moving usually took a lot of work. There was the packing of everything one had into boxes, having to shift those boxes up and down annoying flights of stairs, then into a moving truck, out into wherever they were to be set, and then hauled out and put into their new place. A simple thing to explain in theory. A ball-ache in practice. But Moxxie didn't have that difficulty, not anymore; ever since he mastered the Thaumetic Portal, all of that just... went away.

He didn't need Millie to put her hoof down on that she wanted more space. That was just obviously so, and Moxxie could pick that up without the conversation needing to be said. This apartment had always been a stop-gap, a waystation toward something else. Before the last madcap year, Moxxie had held that it was a motel-stay on the journey to homelessness. But things had taken a turn. Now IMP was legitimately making its members not just secure and comfortable, but moderately wealthy. And Blitz, the one signing cheques and sitting in the big chair, had even more money than they did, since he also earned percentages of Krieg's magical store, and what Loona was doing with the human medicines.

So with portals connecting their old place to the new, moving was just essentially moving things from their place in one room, across maybe a dozen steps, then putting it down in the new. And what a new home it was.

The damage still needed to be fixed, but for Moxxie, that was less than child's play. This house used to belong to Nathan Birch, Proxy of Lucifer, granted to the Proxy of Lucifer by the King Of All Hell himself as payment for service. But Lucifer didn't seem eager to offer much in the way of support to Blitz. Millie may not have noticed, but Moxxie definitely did, that Lucifer was just waiting for Blitz to get himself killed on something. It didn't help that the only reason that Blitz's current Remit – the power granted him by the Power of Lucifer – could protect him at all was because he was so pig-ignorant of so many of the more esoteric ways that an imp could die here in Hell. And even still, the two of them weren't on the deed to this place. Though nobody would ever buy this edifice, as everybody in Hell knew that it was essentially radioactive property. So while the building was 'officially' the home to Blitz Miller, Proxy of Lucifer, in practice it belonged to his 'servants' Moxxie and Millie to do with however they pleased.

Moving took about a half hour, and ended when Moxxie gave a final look to the apartment that had been the roof over their head, the shelter for their hopes, and the cozy hearth of their hearts for almost three years. It was a bit bittersweet, leave this part behind. But all transitions were. "Ready to say goodbye, sweetie?" Moxxie asked.

"We've got five bathrooms!" Millie said as she entered the room, a broad, beaming grin on her face. "I ain't never had more than one'a them before!"

"Yeah, I know. If it weren't so haunted, it'd be great," Moxxie said.

"Oh, haunting's not a thing!" Millie said, giving him a gentle swat as she walked past and started to move appliances around. Their entire apartment – their entire married lives! – fit into just one of this dead old tyrant's rooms. It brought a very cold-blooded pleasure to Moxxie's heart that he was living here, now. It pleased him in a way that could only be tied to his Satanic upbringing to see cruelty answered by rage, violence, death, and ruin.

"Ordinarily no. This house isn't ordinary, Millie," Moxxie said, opting not to go into detail because he both knew she didn't care and that she wouldn't grasp the depths of what he meant. He knew that in terms of raw intellect, he outshone her as a candle was outshone by the morning sun. But when it came to wonderous, beautiful violence, she outshone him the way an atom bomb did a spark.

Just the thought of her covered in blood, gore, and broken teeth made Moxxie so happy that he married her. It made him dream of the family that they'd have. And made him wonder if they would grow up here, in this at-the-moment thoroughly haunted house.

His fantasy was interrupted by a thudding at the front doors of the manor, which had the two imps share a confused look. There was no way that anybody in the neighborhood could have known that the two of them were moving today. Moxxie had even done an assay of the place to ensure that the magic that detected intruders wouldn't go off – and it wouldn't, because the staff of many of these homes were imps and imps by and large were considered 'beneath notice'. So whosoever could be at the door was for the moment a mystery. "I'll get it," Moxxie said.

"Sure thing, hon," Millie said, but it was clear that she was already getting into carnage mode, should the need for such things arise. Moxxie moved though the wood panelled, partially exploded, bullet riddled hallway to the front doors of the manor house, and when he pulled on the cord intended for imps like himself to open the entirely awkward sized doors of this place, it opened to reveal an Ars Goetia that Moxxie had met quite a while ago.

"...Octavia Goetia? What are you doing here?" Moxxie asked.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded in turn, turning a glance to the aquiline Sinner next to her. It was clear how they'd gotten past the gate into the property; there wasn't one anymore. And though the gardens were still dead and the driveway had four sets of thick black tire-marks leading out into the street, the winter snow did a little to erase the pandemonium which had transpired here so close to Halloween.

"We live here now," Moxxie said, somewhat confident that the daughter of Moxxie's employer's lover wasn't going to start a cliquey shit-show over 'impropriety'.

"This is supposed to be the Proxy's house. It's where the Proxy lives," she pointed out, pointing at the ground at her feet.

"Blitz doesn't want to leave his family, Imp City is an hour away, and we can portal whenever and wherever we please," Moxxie said. He then realized the tone he was giving to a demon royal, and he gave his head a shake. "I apologize, your grace, but if you're looking for Blitz, you'll have to do it in Imp City."

"God fucking damn it," she snapped, turning away and displaying a temper which didn't seem likely to stem from her sanguine father.

"A thought, my Domina," the eagle-headed Sinner offered.

"What is it, Ambrosius?" she asked, tweezing her beak.

"Need we involve the red cr... the Proxy himself in this?" he corrected himself before saying something untowards. "Have you not had business with these imps in the past for this same cause?"

"I have. And they weren't utterly incompetent," she said, as though realizing something.

"Your grace?" Moxxie asked. Octavia, though, rose up to her full, nine-and-a-half foot height.

"You said you can produce portals. Do you have access to a Grimoire?" she asked.

"I don't need one anymore. Unless I'm going to the Human World at least," Moxxie said.

"That simplifies things greatly," Octavia said. "I require your services for a journey to Wrath Ring, and protection of my person. I'm willing to pay, with bonuses if emergency extraction becomes necessary."

"I need to talk to..."

"You don't need to talk to anybody. I'm offering this to you, imp, because you have the skills I require," she countered.

"Millie?" Moxxie asked, and true to his expectation of her she was a half second away from him. "Do you feel like taking a trip back down to Wrath?"

"I could be convinced," Millie asked, her arms crossed before her chest and her hips cocked in a quite sassy way.

"Show some decorum, imp," the eagle Sinner said.

"You came to us. You pay our price," Moxxie said evenly. Octavia just grumbled something under her voice, that even though it was only partially voiced sounded to the order of 'fucking luck they're starting to find' but since the rest of it didn't leave her throat Moxxie's now supernatural hearing couldn't reach into her mind and extract it. So whatever she meant by that was for the moment lost to him. She finally sighed, and named a number. And it was a very, very good number. "Well?" Moxxie asked.

"Who's tryin' to kill y'all?" Millie asked the right question.

"Nobody will get a chance to kill us. At the first sign of trouble, you portal us back. I expect your paranoia to be tighter than a piano wire for this," the Sinner named 'Ambrosius' said. Millie turned a querulous look to her husband. And Moxxie nodded. They'd already moved. Their day was pretty much packed in. So why not make even more precious lucre while they had the chance? Every Soul earned now was one that they could put toward their future together. And besides, the only thing that Moxxie had planned to do for the rest of the day was to start exorcising the literal and figurative ghosts of this house.

"When do we leave?" Moxxie asked.

"If you can make portals, we can leave now," Octavia said.

"Millie? The good knife?" Moxxie asked, as his wife gave a nod and pelted spritely back to her rack of killing implements in the other room, while he himself made a small portal and pulled the Blessing Tip rifle through it, looping it to his back. The aquiline Sinner recoiled slightly at the sight of that weapon, suspicion rife on his expression. Fitting enough, Moxxie had stolen this thing from another assassin who may well have been working for somebody where they were going. It didn't take Millie long to return, looking completely unchanged, but probably having a few knives, a sword, and a battle axe hidden rather impossibly on her person.

"Godspeed, Octavia. And if you do not return in half a day, I will have the Stellar Grenadiers storm Wrath Ring to recover you," the Sinner said.

"Thank you, Ambrosius," Octavia said.

"So where am I creating the portal to?" Moxxie asked.

"The Royal Palace of Satan," Octavia said, while Ambrosius took a few steps back.

Moxxie should have asked for more money.

---

There was enormous irony in Raguel's life, that all before him could hold no secrets. The irony was in that, for all he could see, he was forced to hide so many of them. As one of the eldest thinking beings in creation, little younger than the Seraphim themselves, he had been present when God created the Cherubim. He had seen the alarm, the concern on God's face when He beheld what the Cherubim Undivided were capable of. And it was Raguel's word that saw the Cherubim divided instead of expunged. It was by Raguel's word, that each Cherubim was severed into ten million pieces, with every piece coming to life as a Cherub. All except for two; one who wandered into The Moment and was frozen outside of time, and the other, Mattias, whom was only divided into half so many. And Mattias' division was not an even one. It was not lightly that Mattias' title was 'The Greater Part', because what held presidency over the Taxiopolis was indeed minutely more than half of an entire Cherubim.

The secrets that God forced upon Raguel continued to pile high. Some he was told outright. Others he learned on his own. Such as why the Cherubim were fearsome to God. Not for any single power they had – which they had many, and of terrific scope – but instead because unlike the rest of the firstborn children of God, they were innately fecund while the rest of the angels were innately barren. That same gift then passed on to their divided parts; cherubs were the only clade of Angel that could reproduce with the ease of a human.

That then led to a new secret, the fear of the Nephilim. And that was one Raguel had not all the moving parts of. Only that God feared them more than Cherubim, and no compromise that Raguel offered was given even a first consideration, let alone a second. For sins unspoken, they would die. And Raguel, coward he had been, did nothing.

And now? Now Angels were coupling with Angels and producing children, just as humans did. Stolas Goetia was not the first 'child of an Angel', considering Paimon and his odd request. No, that honor went to Octavia. And she wasn't the only of pure Angel blood in the Pit, now that one grew within Penemue.

Raguel couldn't understand why Penemue still spoke to him. She had to know he was bound by honor to report her whereabouts, and the depth of her betrayal.

But honor died when he saw a woman who had committed no sin but abetting loving parents try to save their slaughtered children, now looking for comfort from a lover she had been separated from for dozens of millennia. He would not offer her secret. And nobody would even think to ask it of him. So in that very narrow way, he could not be said to lie.

Of course, there were lies of omission, and then there was Cloud Eight Point Nine.

The whole place was hot and wet, and the smell was only manageable because the people here took care of basic sanitation. The walls were barren concrete in the one spot in Cloud Nine one could even Transit to this location, and even then, it required both a tune-key and a mind-state free of duress. He had spared no figurative expense in making 8.9 hard to get to. Because that was all of the defense he could offer them.

He walked through claustrophobic passages, and the people here side-stepped to let him through. Though yes, he was stomping down a narrow path in heavy armor, they did it not out of fear or simply not to get plowed through, but because these people owed something.

"Back again so soon?" Kafziel asked, sitting as he did near the entrance to the warren of passages that were closer to God than any but the Host themselves. He was disgraced, his wings torn from his withered back, but it was not because he had fought for Lucifer. No Kafziel had just tried to save somebody who was in pain. And that earned him the same fate as mindful traitors and knowing collaborators. Raguel had only heard about Kafziel's punishment after it was already begun. And he could only intervene in the last moment, to prevent him from being thrown bodily into Hell for what was not his fault.

"How fare things down here?" Raguel asked. Kafziel gave an awkward shrug, motioning past into the structure itself. His own room was somewhere in there, but once the slave-soldiers and his own un-Angelic 'children' started to appear in numbers, he quickly found himself swamped in people. That was a state that he simply could not abide, so the swiftest of God's angels now sat a vigil at the door, as close to solitude as this durance would allow.

"It's getting tense," Kafziel said. "Food is running low. And unlike the Innocent, those Hellhounds and imps actually do need to eat."

"I notice you did not mention the fiends," Raguel said.

"I was there beside you when we drove the Leviathans out of Heaven. To see their kind in the flesh is... disquieting," Kafziel said.

"The Mutants are indeed that. But I will not see them starved because of our discomfort," Raguel said.

"That's between you and the stockpile," Kafziel said, turning his sunken eyes back to the path that Raguel had approached through once more. Just to look at the shattered form of The Haste of God filled Raguel with a sense of choking, impotent outrage. That one so glorious could be made so low, in a matter of minutes while Raguel's attention was elsewhere. How many more injustices on this level had been committed in his long, long, billions of years of existence? How many times had his attention lapsed, and cruelty blossomed? "You won't get anything done standing here, brother. I have the door."

"Right. If you ever need anything; anything at all," Raguel said.

"I know, brother. I know," Kafziel said, quietly, his stooped form sagging forward for a moment. Raguel wished that Kafziel could even find it in his heart to blame him, to hate him for what a lapse in concentration had done. But Raguel could See Within the Haste of God. And there was nothing of its sort in the broken Angel.

Raguel opened the door into the stairway down. It had originally been closed, but needs of ventilation and sheer want of space in at least one spot had opened the descent into something of a cave-vista, hundreds of people milling about in the most open region that 8.9 had to offer. They were not shouting, as yet, but their voices had an edge to them. So without ceremony, Raguel hupped his way over the railing and descended with wings flared to ground level, a gentle fall of several storeys.

"What is the meaning of this?" Raguel demanded as he came upon the humans and the Hellhounds at loggerheads.

"You eat every single day! Some of us haven't eaten in years!" the woman, Qiao, said.

"We need to eat or we fucking die!" the Hellhound snapped back.

"People, please end this now," Raguel said in his most authoritative voice. "Qiao, you know the risks of procuring more food. If we are discovered, then this place is lost to all of us."

"So you're taking the side of these Hellspawn over innocent human lives?" Andrew, who stood beside the Innocent with her Gapped Halo, then demanded.

"I do not take any sides," Raguel said, glaring at the human who had tried and failed to live a superlatively just life, merely managing an adequately just one. "If you know the way to secret food from the mouths of my brothers and sisters without their knowledge, I am happy to hear it. Otherwise the schedule must continue as I have proscribed it."

"The more of them," Andrew thrust a finger toward the Hellhound, who growled in the back of his throat in response, "you let in here, the less food that all of the rest of us get. You made us a promise, Raguel. You promised us a relief from the Great Starvation."

Raguel merely nodded, because that was indeed a promise he had made. A promise he made before the New War For Heaven. A promise made when he still believed that the famine of Heaven would be solved, somehow. Anyhow. But reality was not so kind.

"Why are you idiots stealing food from angels?" an imp piped up, from where it – she? It was an imp from the Ring of Pride, and as such had little in the way of sexual dimorphism – was smoking and watching the whole thing unfold.

"Because the Angels are the ones who have food, even if they have no actual need of it," Raguel said.

"That's askin' for orange rinds when there's a fucking tree next door; you people eat what? About a tonne of food amongst all of ya's, cherubs included, each day?" the imp asked, tilting her head slightly.

"One for the Angels, ten for the cherubs," Raguel asked. Raguel felt it just as wasteful for the Cherubs to eat as it was for Angels, but eat they did anyway. And they did outnumber Angels by a couple orders of magnitude.

"And right there, there's your problem," the imp said, pointing that cigarette at him. Behind the imp, a pair of hellhounds waved the smoke away and glared another who was likewise going to light up into reconsidering. There was only so much air, and smoke was an unpleasant 'guest' in such environs. "You're fixated on tiny solutions to a tiny problem. I know from first hand experience you can skim no more than 10% off of anything you're stealing from before people will notice it immediately. That number goes down to two, if you want it to stay hidden forever."

"And the difference is more obvious when the quantities are smaller," Qiao said, grasping the imp's point.

"Exactly. So why are we even trying to skim that sack of crap? Let 'em keep all of their food. There's plenty 'a grub out there for the enterprising and the smart. Think about it!" she gestured broadly at both the hellspawn and the Innocent. "Everybody on both gat-damned sides is ignoring the obvious solution that's sittin' right in front of them!"

Qiao shook her head. "I'm obviously behind your thoughts on this one..." she said. The imp took another puff and pointed up at Raguel.

"You there; you keep comin' in here covered in marble dust. Where d'you get your blocks?" she asked.

"I fail to see..." Raguel began.

"Answer me, ring-top, it's important," the she imp said. Raguel dared to Look Within on her, but the information he got from the imp was muddled and disjointed, not the crisp outlay of information he could get from most anything else in Creation. Such it was with imps. With a scowl hidden behind his featureless ballistic faceplate he answered.

"From within caves untapped in the Human World, where such stone vanishing would not be missed," Raguel said.

"Exactly!" the imp said. The only thing that Raguel realistically learned from her, that didn't require some Angelic equivalent of hard liquor to comb through and stomach, was that her name was Chancy. At this point, Qiao snapped her fingers.

"You want to rob Earth of food?" she asked.

"Who said anything about robbing?" Chancy said. "It's obvious none of ya's ever worked with a fence before, cause there's all kinds a' shit we can offload down there, and buy up vittles on the level."

Raguel glared at her. He tried again to See Within, but the confusion and opacity continued. He was fairly certain that he would need the power and mindset of the Demiurge to make anything useful out of the likes of the imps. "If you swear to me, upon your life, that you will not cause harm either to your fellow denizens or those dwelling untampered-with in the Human World, I can allow this in theory."

"Excellent. I've already got up a list a' shit I saw when us poor bastards were getting dumped into Cloud One, and..." Chancy said, flapping a long list out of her pocket.

"But know this," Raguel continued. "If you use this to attempt to escape me, to cause havoc in the Human World, or do anything which betrays the spirit of the plan that you have laid out, I will not hesitate to butcher you on the spot, and kick your incinerated carcass into the Pit where your kind belong."

"Oh, so cold. I thought I was starting to get you to warm up to me," Chancy said with a lopsided grin.

It almost made Raguel shudder with revulsion. But not quite. He had more composure than that. He turned and walked away, leaving Chancy to start talking both to her hellspawn comrades and a few of the humans who were no longer screaming at them.

"Are you seriously going to entertain this?" Kafziel asked, having managed to take a place at Raguel's side in a blink of an eye to a blink of an eye. Crippled as he was, he was still the Haste of God.

"Do you have anything to add?" Raguel asked.

"Only that I would never have expected this behavior from you," Kafziel said.

"You do not know me," Raguel said.

"I know you better than many," Kafziel said. "Otherwise you would not have me holding the door."

"And if somebody were to come back in, as we have this conversation?" Raguel asked, continuing to walk toward the reason why he'd built 8.9 in the first place.

"Bold of you to presume I can't check the door every half second," Kafziel said, some whisper of his former brashness appearing. "Bolder of you if you think I'm choosing not to."

"I will do as I must, as I always have. I will make the decisions which eat as acid into my soul that others may live lives sheltered by justice and kept safe from ruin," Raguel said. "Until another can make those same decisions, until another can know the things I have been forced to know, I shall do so alone."

"...so it's really that strained between you and Michael, then," Kafziel said. "Shame."

"...He has not grown," Raguel said quietly. Shamefully.

"Some would say the same of you. And me," Kafziel said.

"Those would be blind and foolish both," Raguel said. He opened a bulkhead door, one that by its weight and the magic of its locks could open to his hand alone. He felt more than saw the many, many devices of security and ruin shut down with his presence and mindset. It required both. He had built this place so that he could not unwillingly open it. And within, past a corner and inside a containment bunker, was a floating dollop of some glowing silver-white something. He stared at it for a moment, how it rotated and bobbed, freed of any constraints, in the center of that chamber. "Still no change. We have that much luck at least."

"One day, you're going to have to tell me what that is," Kafziel said.

"One day, you may become wise enough to understand. Pity today is not that day," Raguel said.

"That imp was right. You can be a bastard, sometimes," Kafziel pointed out.

"And another day breaks in Heaven," Raguel muttered with a nod. Things were not right by a quarter, let alone a half. But he still had a duty. And he would see it through no matter the pain it brought him.

---

Not having to deal with the Red Dickhead made this a lot easier. She knew for a fact that he'd say something stupid and scuttle this whole thing before she even had a chance to say 'Hello'. The littler ones at least had some prudence and tact. Well, to be frank, one of them was looking at the splendour of the courtyard of the Palatium Iracundia as if she were a tourist, snapping pictures with her Hellphone at the various interesting bits of art and architecture, while the other was sweating artillery shells. Had he gone and made a personal enemy of Satan? Well, that would be on his head if he had. And she didn't have to pay him if he got himself killed.

According to the man-imp, he'd tried to portal directly into the building, only to have the mouth of the portal 'deflect' in a way he couldn't explain, dumping them here. Well, he certainly tried to explain it, even as he sweated his own body-weight every half-hour. She didn't need his technical explanation – which though accurate was needlessly verbose – to know that there was a Power present here, both in the flesh and by his deeds, and the Power demanded that certain things take place in certain ways. One did not just 'pop in' on the King of Wrath. So they walked up the 'garden', which was a grandiose term for a moderately artistic growing of the many native plants of Wrath, Betrayal, and Despair. Of those latter two, these might be the only instances of that flora left in all Creation that weren't in Dad's garden.

When they finally emerged from the Hellish Joshua trees and were before doors, those doors swung open without obvious mechanism. That finally got the little one to stop his magical-theory ramble, and swallow hard. There was a procession of six robed figures, scarlet against the rosy marble of the floors, that approached with hoods pulled low. When the first of them reached her, he pulled that hood back to reveal the sharp red features of a Litigator Demon. "You have been expected, Octavia Goetia," he said, and then with a practiced half-bow – for the Adopted Children of Satan were by canon-law Princes and Princesses of Wrath, and more than equal to the likes of her – he gestured that the others were to escort her inside.

Octavia ignored what the imps said, their voices pitched low. It was obvious that both had their eyes out, so that would suffice for the moment. And within, she was reminded of the last and only time that she'd ever been in this place. This was not like the Palace of Flowers up in Pride, nor the Low Throne in High Central. This was something older. The architecture was subtly but obviously different, alien in certain ways to her. Most of the palace she'd frequented since her hatching had seen thousands upon thousands of years. This place, though? This place had seen the passage of billions.

More than a sense of magic, she had a sense of the sheer style of this place. And that style, in her opinion, was one of unapologetic spite. It sacrificed pomposity for structural integrity. It sacrificed grand opulence for resilience. This was a palace that felt in strange and tiny ways as though she were trying to storm a fortress that had been arrayed and manned against her, and from every nook and cranny she could imagine murder in waiting. It was probably just her being paranoid, though. The servants and minor dignitaries of Wrath that bustled around in the various paths and passages made no sign of feeling it, of the overbearing weight of it. It didn't cease, though. She was a foreigner here. She was an intrusive speck in the body of something with a robust and zealous immunity.

As they passed a particular arch, the oppressive air shifted. If Octavia were the sort to anthropomorphize an intangible feeling, she would have claimed it 'did so smugly'. As though having gotten a few dozen paces look at her, decided that she was beneath concern. And honestly, that annoyed Octavia. She was an Ars Goetia! She was an Angel Goddamnit! But such ire fell to the recognition of a very simple fact. She may be an Angel, but Satan was Satan.

The red robed Children of Satan continued to escort her, and she saw that the little imp had a pensive look. "Have you noticed something, old man?" she asked. It was somewhat petty to call a man not even twice her age 'old', considering how young she was, but she needed to keep her composure, and Mum had always taught her that the fastest way higher was to climb on somebody lower.

"Satan is literally everywhere right now," the imp man said.

"We're in the house that he built by hand untold years ago. Of course you can feel him everywhere," Octavia said.

"That's not what I mean, Lady Octavia," he said, gesticulating as he did to make concrete an abstract point. "What I mean is that Satan, the person, the source of the magic that he uses... is every direction right now."

"Which means?" Octavia asked, only half caring.

"We've just passed a magical event-horizon. There is no magical path that leads out from where we are now. All ethers are aligned toward Satan; I couldn't portal us out of here even if I had Blitz's Grimoire!"

"Then we'd better hope Satan is feeling convivial," Octavia said.

"I have no idea what any of that means," the she-imp at 'Moxxie's side pointed out.

"You're in good company. I understood about a quarter of it," Octavia said. Finally the procession of Satan's adopted offspring bore her into a formal room, via a door that would have allowed entrance to a titan. This wasn't like the previous time she'd been here. The last time she'd been in this palace, it'd been a trip to a ballroom, a lot of boring waiting, and then back out again. Even despite the vaulting ceilings and titanic doors, she still had a lingering sense of claustrophobia set in. That she was being impinged upon.

Then the door finally opened, it revealed Satan sitting at a desk that was flush against the sill of a window, and as he leaned forward over whatever it was he scrutinized his horns went through that window such that they would have shattered it were it closed. He seemed lost in thought for a while, as his 'children' for the most spread out to various places in the room, leaving only the Litigator at Octavia's side. "I present the Marchioness Octavia Goetia. Behold, Satan, Paradox King, Thronebreaker, Pontifex Vermiculii, and Embodiment of Wrath."

At the stage-play projected announcement of Octavia's presence, Satan turned from the paperwork on his table and took them in. When he did, his eyes flit lower than where Octavia was standing, taking in the imps as well. And for reasons she didn't quite grasp, he smiled at their presence. Just for a moment. But then he rose to his full, overbearing height.

Today, Satan wore workman's clothes that would be seen the like on the bodies of the workers in Glowtown, only scaled for this gargantuan being that stood before them. A seeming tennis-court's worth of rugged denim, brass fixtures, and leather gloves that looked to take an entire cow each were a pointed declaration to whomever saw the Old King of Wrath that he was not an indolent noble. He had worked to build Wrath both then, and now. "Welcome back into my home, Octavia Goetia. I trust there hath been little wanting for thee in thy time here?" he said

"Your children were very prompt," Octavia said.

"And your choice of escort leaves nothing to be desired. Very prudent indeed," Satan said with a nod. Millie gave a somewhat embarrassed giggle at that, and Moxxie was outright blushing. What the hell had these two done to earn the eye of The Final Satan? Octavia decided it probably wasn't worth the time and effort to find out, so she put it aside. "Thou hast come to forge accord with Satan regarding thine works?"

"I have," she said. "I thought you knew already?"

"How would I know?" Satan asked. "I merely sent thee a letter."

Moxxie raised a finger, his mouth opening. "But you could easily..."

He was silenced when a humorless look beamed down from the Old King Of Wrath at him.

"I guessed that this was just pageantry. What do you actually want, Satan?" Octavia asked of him.

"Such phrasing denies that pageantry has place or power," Satan said with a waft of his hand. "I wished to gain a more thorough weighting of thee, in the wake of thine recent awakening."

"What are you talking about?" Octavia asked.

"Thou conceal it well, but not so well as I shall be blind to it," Satan said. He walked over to a water-cooler the imps could have used as a jacuzzi, and poured himself what was to him a thimble's-worth of water. He held it toward her. When she just stared at it, he shrugged and sipped it down himself. "For ten and seven years, thou hath struggled under a lack of identity and directionless drifting. It is a hard path for an Angel, this I know; many, when divorced from that which gives them meaning, that which they were created to endeavor to, it breaks them. But thou hath what no other Angel before you hast. Thou hath no talents whatosever."

"...so you brought me here to insult me," Octavia said flatly. And Satan looked legitimately surprised by that.

"Thou grasp it not, child! Bereft of talent giveth thee choice! Surely thou hath noticed the stagnation of they parents and thy uncles, seen and heard of their long-past deeds and discerned that they have grown not a whit since their early days? Surely thou hast," he said, with unusual intensity.

"I will admit, they do seem to like doing nothing a lot," Octavia said, but when she looked down, Moxxie was staring up at her with confusion and alarm. "Oh what now?"

"Satan, are you saying that..." Moxxie asked.

"She is free in a way that no Angel ever hath been free. Free of restrictions, free of specializations. Octavia is what God would wish an Angel to be, if God were not so crippled by His paranoia and fears," Satan said, returning to his desk but spinning the chair so that he could sit in it facing them. Even seated he was still far taller than Octavia.

"You make it sound like God wanted Angels to be like humans," Moxxie said.

"It was within His power. And yet He did not. It was by the fair accident of thy birth that thou be free. But such unexpected delights lead me astray from the purpose of this visit. Conviviality must fall before the weight of progress, even prospective progress. Thine designs. I desire them. And I am willing to offer a heady price for them."

"How much?" she asked, crossing her arms before her chest and shifting her weight onto one foot.

"What are mere numbers to those such as we?" Satan asked, spreading his arms wide. "I could quote ten thousand figures at thee, and it would do little but murk the waters that we swim in. No. I shall not offer mere numbers, for they are paltry. I shall offer something that thou wouldst find much more enticing."

"Oh really. Like what?" Octavia asked.

"Respect," Satan said with a shrewd smile on his terrifying face. She stared at him for a moment, as he stepped backward once and then sat on the top-edge of a bookshelf the way others would a stool. "I need not the Godfriend's Gift to see that of the many things thou lack, it is Respect that ranks chief and highest amongst them. And this I can offer."

"And you don't care what my parents did to you in the last war?" she pointed out.

"Is thy name Stolas?" Satan asked.

"No," she pointed out the obvious.

"Is it Stella, then?" Satan then prodded.

"You know what my name is. You've used it before in this conversation!" she pointed down as she answered him.

"Exactly the case, Octavia Goetia. Thou be not thy mother, nor thy father. Thou art Octavia Goetia. I do hold that the sins of the parent must not be pas't to the child. Such thinking caused untold and unneeded strife in the age of the Elder Devil's decline. I shall not allow it to flourish here. Not amongst prospective business partners, certainly."

"Respect doesn't exactly buy me materials or design hours," Octavia said.

"False. Respect can buy what mere Souls never could. Couldst thou walk into the offices of King Zagan and demand audience?" Satan asked. "No. But Satan could. Couldst thou take aside the Legatiaand the Dux Bellorim of the Goetia of Wrath and turn them to your paradigm without a word of complaint? No. But Satan could."

"So you're offering to open doors for me. That's a start, but it can't be an ends," Octavia said. "What do you want out of this? I know what you're offering, and I know what I'm offering can't nearly be worth that much. Not to you. You've got an entire Ring under your thumb. I have to hire idiots to do my design work!"

"What I want today is what I wanted an eon ago when thy parents arrived in Hell, what I wanted a million years ago, what I wanted when I expunged the Leviathans, and what I have wanted since the day I realized for the sake of mine sanity and the good of the realm that I must cast down my Rotten King and ascend the Throne of Broken Lives," Satan said, his usual enthusiasm quieted. "I want my kingdom to be strong, to be healthy, and to grow. I want Wrath to be the Ring Triumphant, to usurp Pride in glory and renown. I want my people to be safe," he said. Then he puffed out a breath. As though lost in thought, he pondered, then turned to look at her once more. "And what thou offer be but a part indeed of what I need, a fraction of the whole required to make Wrath truly splendid. But all wholes are mere conglomerations of fractions. And thy fraction is not so insignificant as thou heed."

"...alright. Fine," Octavia said. If he was playing her, there was obviously no way that she had at her disposal to verbally fence her way out of it. She was a blink to a blink to a blink, compared to Satan. And when she looked to her imps, they had become silent, overwhelmed and overawed by the presence of Wrath Incarnate. Again she considered herself fortunate she hadn't brought the red dickhead. She could live with her 'escorts' staying out of her way and being not particularly useful. She probably would have died when 'Blitzø' shot his mouth off one too many times. "The particulars will be worked out, then. So we just... what? Shake on it?" she asked.

"I would not dishonor you so," Satan said, extending a hand toward her that could half-conceal her in its grasp. That gloved hand stopped short of her, though, a demonstration of the failure of the custom. "But I indeed do have other points to discuss. Variations on thine armor for differing situations. The prospect of scion technologies born from what lessons the Blasphemer teacheth. For such things, I would speak over a light dinner, which is being produced anon. Andreas, wouldst thou guide her to the dining room of this wing?"

"Of course, Father," 'Andreas' said, bowing from his place at Octavia's side. As she turned to follow him, the imps offered deep bows of their own, and then tracked to follow her out, only to have a cannon-shot of a finger-snap cause all to pause. Satan, still seated atop the bookshelf, idly pointed at the imps.

"I have further business with thee and thy bride. Unfinished from an earlier conversation, thou might say," Satan said.

"Y-your grace? I thought we..." Moxxie began.

"Thou indeed did think," Satan said, with a patronising smile. He then gestured toward Octavia. "Do not linger on their account. This is of no concern of thine. A'sides, I have impinged and left thee standing long enough that a comfortable chair would sound siren-sweet, yes?" Satan asked.

"...I suppose so," Octavia said. She turned a glance to the imps, then back up to Satan. He didn't exactly seem 'angry', so whatever was going to transpire when she left probably wouldn't be lethal. So she just gave the married-couple a very slight shrug, then departed at Andreas' side, to await dinner and discussions of fine print.

---

There was literally no amount of money that Moxxie should have accepted to be standing here right now. For the second time in his life, he found himself a tag-along in the presence of Satan, the being whom his mother whole-heartedly worshipped and tried to have Moxxie worship likewise. The whole 'Chaz' thing put forth the notion that maybe Crimson wasn't quite as devout as she was, in that respect. Still, it was a deeply worrying feeling to be here, of all places. While the first time, Moxxie had been less than a paramecium in the ocean of Hell's People Of Note, he had a sinking sensation that this time, he was something far more visible, and every bit as vulnerable.

"Um... what do you want with us, Lord Satan?" Moxxie finally said. Well, squeaked; the words emerged from his mouth as though he'd just come through a second puberty, voice cracking like glass when he did.

"How very unusual," Satan said. He stood, his full height monumental compared to Moxxie and Millie, and he snapped his fingers again. The entire room vanished like a bubble of reality had burst – literally, that was the sort of sensation that Moxxie was able to see with his augmented sight as it happened – and left them standing in the Cathedral of Worms, some hundreds of miles away. Instantly, the two imps had their hands fly to their ears, trying to suffocate an interminable drone that made their bones dance and their skin shiver. Millie seemed especially crippled by the sensation that bloomed though them, falling to one knee with her eyes pressed shut.

There was a resonance in this room, incredibly powerful and incredibly alien. Much as iron-filings would obey the lines of magnetic fields, he could see with his magical eyes the same sort of fields everywhere here, belting out in bold and pressurized wavelengths that crushed the mind and overwhelmed the magical heart. And at the very center of that maelstrom of magic, resonance, and frequency was the Altar Of Worms, one only two Shards Of Ruin left in Hell, now that the Stone Of Farewell had fallen into the Abyss.

He could not describe what he saw when he looked upon the Altar. In the same moment, his eyes beheld a tetragonal prism of faded green stone, but his eyes also showed him more. On the far side of that was a sphere, which nested fractals coruscating the trademark halflight that this piece of a more high and more strange reality had dragged down into Moxxie's. It beamed inverse colors that combined with more normal light to create impossible shadows. Its surface was hard, or soft, or smooth, or rough, or fluid or gaseous depending on how deeply and in which region he looked, and he could see around the corners of it in ways impossible in Euclidean Space to what ought to be hiding on the far side of it.

To be in its presence was to be reminded of what Moxxie had seen in that last moment of his empowerment that much of IMP had partaken in, in the bones of Purgatory. That reality was so much larger than mere Creation, and that Creation was still ten thousand orders of magnitude greater than Moxxie.

"Apologies. I see that this is doing thou ill," Satan said, twisting his claw and having the overwhelming presence of the Altar of Worms withdraw to the sound of grinding stone, until the sheer impossibility of it no longer baffled Moxxie's senses. Now it was merely a rock that was larger than its footprint could possibly allow, demanding hundreds of thousands of degrees of rotation to see its whole surface before returning to the place where one began.

Millie let out a low groan, but Moxxie helped her back to her feet. She likely had a headache. Moxxie certainly did. "That was..." Moxxie said.

"I forget that thou art now of a more rarified vintage than last we spoke. More sensitive to the mysteries of the High than before," Satan said. As he walked, his workman's clothes vanished, replaced by a simple, dark red robe, as he moved to the Altar of Worms and laid his hand gently on its surface. "Did thou see the deeper angles of the Altar, the crevasses whence the halflight leaks? Saw thou the layers of it, the intricacies of it? Saw thou the cords and wires and tubes of it?"

"I saw... more," Moxxie admitted, because there was little to be gained in lying to Satan right now.

"And thou, she-imp?"

"My head hurts," Millie complained.

"Ah. She is of more grounded view. Still very useful in the broader perspective," Satan said, though the note of disappointment in his voice was distant and muted. He gave his head a shake. "I have met none who could look upon this Altar and know its nature a fraction so well as I. Thou stand now in august company."

"Thank you, Your Grace," Moxxie said, unsure of what else he was expected to say.

"Thou hath sought augmentation of self. Invasive augmentation of self, even," Satan said. "It hath given thee vision. So with that vision, I ask of thee this: What see thee, between the Altar and I?"

Moxxie was momentarily baffled by the question. Surely Satan would know all there was to know? But therein lay the answer, the same one that Alastor had intimated to Moxxie during the swearing of the 37 Oaths; it was possible to be too close to view a thing. Some things could only be seen from the outside.

When Moxxie actually opened his whole senses, instead of the pin-prick he'd forced himself to see through to save the sanctity of his sanity from moments ago, he could sense something visceral, familiar, and at the far edge of his ability to explain. He had sensed since the Oaths that he was a changed Imp, just as Millie was. Loona was a changed Hellhound, but that was its own issue, to be dealt with by she alone; no, what Moxxie had felt was that there was a sort of metaphysical 'note' that was playing within the imps' souls. It was amplifying every day, growing minutely louder, its resonance refining away from noise and into clarity, but until it resolved Moxxie couldn't confidently speak as to its nature. And here and now, Moxxie could feel a similar note in the Cathedral.

It was writ large by the Altar itself, a pure expression of an alien tone and frequency, as though music from another world, beholden to alien laws and played by alien pipes. That same tone was writ small in Satan himself, and that spoke confusion to Moxxie, because he'd never in his life expected that Satan would ever be classified as something else writ small. But still, that was what he sensed. The tone of that 'note' was not harsh and dissonant, as Moxxie's was to the Radio Demon, nor even syncopated as it was to Loona; the Altar's, and Satan's, note was its own entity, demanding its own song, to which their own were unnecessary but allowable. He tried to explain that. He feared he didn't have words enough to do it, but he tried anyway.

"The resonance is weak but the amplitude robust enough," Satan said, scrutinizing them. "Differing paths thou hast taken, obviously. A subtler one with she, and a more gross one with thee."

What? How was using Thaumaturgy more 'gross' than being able to lift a car? But the answer came essentially instantly; that Satan's English was a very dense thing, and that Satan himself still tended to reach toward older versions of dialect, likely out of sheer habit. Gross did not mean disgusting in those older dialects. It meant overt. Obvious. Or perhaps intensive.

At that, Moxxie could see why Satan would call Moxxie's path 'overt'. He had replaced his own eyeballs and stitched a new organ into his visceral mass.

"Take care not to become too eager down the path thou walk. It placeth thee closer to annihilation than thou may wish," Satan said in an off-hand manner. Then he stooped down, extracting a small, crystal charm of some kind, one that spun inside a globe of faintly rosy glass, holding it first above Millie's head, in front of her chest and behind her back, then to the side of her left and right shoulders. "Three, and not two. As he said..." The device slowed its spin at each location, to the exact same degree. Millie offered a squeak and Moxxie took a protective step forward despite himself when Satan pinched her upper body between two fingers, lifting her a meter off of the floor and holding the orb under her; it slowed to the same degree as before. "Fascinating; no connection through to the Realms Outside. Hold this."

Moxxie didn't have a chance to question it when a metallically green bar of some sort was manifested and placed into his grasp. It felt heavy and warm, but otherwise just looked like an orphaned automotive part. Satan stared at him for an uncomfortable minute. "Um... what's going on?"

"Feelest thou any change?" Satan asked.

"Not really. What is this?"

"No weakness? No confusion?" Satan asked.

"No," Moxxie said. It was obvious that Satan was using such tools as this to perform some sort of differential diagnosis, to determine something that he was keeping mum about. Satan than reached out delicately with his clawed fingers and tugged gently on Moxxie's pale hair. He let out a yelp at the pinch, but didn't actually speak out against it, because what could he even do against Satan?

"...Cough, then spit," Satan ordered. Moxxie, confusion writ on his face, forced a cough and then spat on the floor, allowing clear spittle to fall there. "No blood. Thou art rendered immune, then."

"Immune to what?" Moxxie asked. Satan, who was pondering and teasing the sprig of fur that formed a beard at the bottom of his chin, turned a look at him.

"This substance is ruinous to the flesh and form of imps. But thou art immune to its effects in entirety," he said, extracting the rod from Moxxie's grasp. He shook his head. "Enough of this; perhaps words will offer what tools cannot. Didst thou see, in the moment of thy augmentation, the Realms Outside?"

"I don't know if they were the Realms Outside, your grace... I saw something though," Moxxie admitted.

"I did," Millie raised her hand, somewhat timidly. She was not a timid sort, but the presence and proximity of Satan had that effect on the sternest of people. And what she said was surprising to Moxxie, because she'd never mentioned it before. "I saw something I don't even know how to explain. I mean... s'like I'm tryin' to explain color to the blind, or the taste of somethin' to somebody who ain't got a tongue."

"Sawest' thou The Stack?" Satan asked.

"I don't know... maybe?" she asked, obviously wracking her brain to come up with an answer that she couldn't understand then, and couldn't understand now.

"How many layers below?"

"Two," she said instantly, then looked confused even moreso.

"Two layers below. We are two layers above Prime. Fantastic, this explains much," Satan said, manifesting a ledger and making some notes in it for a few minutes. "Three... three, two... negative one? Fascinating."

"Why didn't you tell me about this?" Moxxie asked her quietly as Satan made his frantic jottings.

"Hon, it's like tryin' to remember a dream," Millie said. "'Sides, you got enough on your plate I didn't want to add no more to it."

"I could handle it. You don't need to keep these things to yourself for my sake, sweetie. You make me strong, remember?" he prompted. And at that, the confusion and concern on her face melted away, looking upon him with those wonderful crimson eyes.

"And you make me calm, Mox-mox," she said, cupping his cheek with her hand. And when she did, just for an instant, Moxxie could see a distant, wistful smile on Satan's face. After a few more moments in silence, Satan put the ledger back whence it came – wherever that may be – and turned to them once more.

"I have a requirement of thee, that I will ask in the future," Satan said sternly, his voice the fatherly tone of somebody who was doing something that one wouldn't enjoy but for one's own benefit. "There will come a day when Satan demands your presence. You will come. You will share answers to all questions Satan asks. You will oversee a ritual that others perform with your knowledge. Then, and only then, will the price of my Grace be repaid in full."

Moxxie looked at him for a moment when the end-goal manifested in his mind in a spate of inspiration. "You want to do to others what we did to ourselves, don't you?" Moxxie asked. Satan nodded, flicking a somewhat unkind smile to a direction no doubt intended to indicate some malign other.

"If the prototype thou hath crafted be the tool I wish, I would use it, yes. To do as the College of Satans had always intended; to craft a more perfect Creation, and to right the wrongs of a slapdash God. I trust not that any other set of hands in Hell, save perhaps one or two, would create anything but cataclysm. Satan's way hath endured thus far; Satan's way must endure in the future. And thy twistings of the nature of thy being are integral to this. But enough of this. We leave a young woman hungry and impatient. Thou wilt be fed."

"That sounds nice," Millie said. Satan obviously had a longer game than most, but considering the sheer perspective that he had, if he hadn't, that would have been far more shocking to Moxxie. At least Moxxie and Millie were only to be researchers in whatever goal that Satan had in mind, and not test-subjects. Imps had a low enough lot already. So Satan twisted his claw, and Moxxie and Millie found themselves falling into seats at a grand table, Octavia Goetia already waiting for them.

"Was that something I need to be worried about?" Octavia asked.

"No. I don't think it'll matter to you at all," Moxxie answered honestly.

---

The nightmare fled as all do, slowly and leaving Maelstrom panting on the floor next to his sofa, his weight on the balls of his feet even before consciousness had actually and properly returned to him. As he marshalled his heartbeat to a survivable level and drank in the tiny apartment the at he, his brother, and his brother's mate were living in, the banality of it suffocated the last dying embers of the terrors that hunted him in sleep. This was real. That was fantasy. Fantasy died.

It was an improvement, he thought to himself, as he rotated an arm that felt a little tender after the multiple punches to the head that it'd launched with full lunatic power into an Exorcist of all goddamned things. The nightmares used to be daily. Now he was only having night terrors every other week. A glance to the clock on the stove told him it was the tiny hours of the morning, and the fact that he could hear two chainsaws vying for mating rights in the bedroom told him that Reg and Lissa were completely asleep. With a moment of thought, he discarded the notion of going back to bed. He was awake now. Honestly he didn't need very much sleep anymore.

Pulling on some thick clothing over his short fur would do much to keep him from the chill of this strange Pride Winter. He'd never seen its like in all of his life, at least. Even as he exited the apartment and entered the slushy streets, he couldn't help but wonder if this should have been a warning that things were off of the rails. It wasn't like Lucifer to let the mercury dip this low. Of course, he was a slave-soldier turned 'valet' turned assassin. What did he know about Lucifer's thought processes?

The cold suited his temperament, this night. He could see, through the jealously clutching forest of apartment flats, the orb of Heaven's Gate. Once still in the heavens against the whirling backdrop of stars, the Gate was now cracked open, stars visible through the rent in it. He often wondered what Heaven was like. Was it like the propaganda said, a place of mindless and involuntary worship of a slaver-God? Or was it as the 'idealists' of Hell had claimed, a place free of pain and suffering? Well, to Maelstrom's thinking, the only thing that would make Heaven something truly separate from Hell was to have fewer assholes. Such as the one trying to steal his wallet right now.

Maelstrom was a little annoyed as the pride imp darted away, wallet clenched in his hand, for the two feet he could before the chain holding the wallet in place snapped taut, and Maelstrom was able to just reach over, grab the imp's arm, and hoist him up. "Drop it," he demanded. The runty Pride Imp immediately reached for a back pocket, and by the way he was flinching Maelstrom knew exactly what he (or perhaps she; it was hard to tell with Pride Imps) was going to do next. So by the time the can of pepper-spray was pointed at Maelstrom, he'd planted his other thumb on the nozzle, so that when the imp panic-sprayed, all he/she managed to achieve was create a cloud centered on where his/her own head was.

As the hacking and gasping began, Maelstrom dropped the imp and put his wallet back into his pocket. "It didn't even have any money in it," Maelstrom said, nudging the imp more safely onto the sidewalk and out of likely path of car-accidents, and started walking again. Loona once said in sarcasm that 'Hell was other people'. In that regard, it seemed that Hell wasn't going to be changing any time soon.

There was something sedate about Imp City at night. Unlike Pentagram City which never truly slept, there came a point in the wee hours of the morning where Imp City just said 'fuck it', and turned out the lights. That left things quiet and peaceful, or at least as quiet and peaceful as Hell in an urban area could ever be. And it gave Maelstrom a chance to think. It was obvious that the people at IMP were running out of patience for him, doing Hell-bound jobs for them so that they could go to the Human World without him. The problem was that he really had no excuse to linger here. He possessed the glamour to blend in with the humans. He certainly had nothing to fear in terms of violence by the humans. But still, his reluctance remained.

There was one fortunate thing about him, in that he was not a prideful sort. He knew why he was reluctant. Because he felt that a slave-soldier like him walking the Human World would be exactly one bridge two far, and that Heaven Itself would open up to punish his transgression. But he had every bit of proof required even for a superstitious one as him that such a thing simply would not happen. The Heavens were opening up all the time, disgorging Exorcists. Hell, he could see one descending right now over the industrial zone on the other side of the river! No, there would come no fated punishment for his temerity. He was just afraid. Afraid of doing the new thing, after so many things he'd been forced into had been so terrible.

"It doesn't do me any good to be afraid. There's only so much work here, after all," he said to himself. Only so much work he could stomach, at least. As soon as people caught wind of his little butchery of Champion Helmitt, offers for Championhood and demands that he kill deeply entrenched enemies of the aristocrats and Ars Goetia followed. Because he was an absolute ghost on 'social media' and only had twelve numbers on his Hellphone, they hadn't found him yet. But every time Loona or Tex or Tiffany ran into him, they would laugh as another outrageous aristocratic demand was put out for his time and attention, as though they had the right to dictate what jobs he would do and how much he would be paid for them.

Working for the dead in the spite of the living turned out to be exactly what Blitz had always claimed it to be; pure. There was no jockeying for position or privilege. There was only the bile of wroth being vented by the furious against somebody who had wronged them, a task that the likes of IMP was hired to fulfill and then forget. The purity of it wasn't exactly ethical, but what was, down here in Hell? Still, had to take the bad with the good, or there was simply no good to be had.

He let his mind drift to other topics as he trudged through snow and slush. Now that Loona actually based her own little start-up business out of a warehouse and not IMP's former van, she wasn't run half as ragged for her 'second job'. She just hired a couple of the Free Hounds of Dennys to perform basic security for the spot and all was golden. It was stunning to Maelstrom that a bitch as young as she was could be running a racket that seemed as stratospheric in growth as this one seemed to be. Of course, that was just another piece of evidence in the heap that Loona Miller was special, and had big things in her future.

Reggie having stable work did wonders for his mindset. He didn't like being a layabout ever since his initial maiming, and liked it even less so once he'd gotten a decent replacement for his arm. Just being able to provide for the family finances seemed to pull any 'poison' he had in him out like a bezoar on a snakebite. And the same was true of the other Free Hounds.

That was something that seemed so pitifully small, these days; the number of Free Hounds up here in Pride. It was the way of things that the Hellhound should have a leash on their neck and a cruel hand holding it. But Hellhounds could be so much more than that. Hell, even Maelstrom was proof of that. Much of his time after work was spent buried in books that he was only now starting to gain the reading comprehension to grok, trying to pick up all of the basic education that had been denied to him by dint of his upbringing. There were whole avenues of mathematics and science that he was still dully rebounding off of, but it felt uplifting to know that he wasn't just a chainsaw on legs, to be unleashed to deadly effect. That he had a mind, which could swell and grow.

Just as exercise felt good for the body, his reading felt good for his mind. Every lesson which sunk in was another blatant defiance of all the cruel and greedy fucks who had set Maelstrom down the path he'd had to walk.

As he was walking, he caught a glimpse of something which arrested his transit, just before moving past a bus-stop which had one of its wind-breaking glass panels shattered and not replaced, leaving snow to pile in onto the bench but not sweep straight past it. On the back of the structure was a poster, one that had been put up very recently, by the fact that it wasn't peeling and coming off under the insistent pull of water.

An advertisement for the Happy Hotel, demesne of Charlotte Magne the Lady Morningstar, promising a place to rehabilitate the worst excesses of the Sinner, and now, in bold text beneath it, offering protection from Exorcist attack within its venue. Maelstrom raised a brow at that. His time in that building with Charlie did not paint her as the sort for this kind of realpolitik. So somebody else was starting to handle her media presence? That could only be good. For all her shockingly good nature, Charlie was not an adept saleswoman. And the notion of Redemption was a damned hard sell for people who had come to accept their own damnation, so offering the seeming impossibility of safety from the Exorcist as well?

Seemed to Maelstrom that things were changing over there in Pentagram City. Maybe even for the better.

---

"There were some who called that 'The Winter Of Discontent', and to drive home exactly how unexpected it was, you need to understand the weather that Pride had shown until then; winters were transitive things. Passing in a week, for, as I would guess, Lucifer did not enjoy the cold. Having been to Heaven, I can attest that I would not enjoy the chill after a lifetime in such environs, but change is vital for the development of a whole person. A lesson that Lucifer refused to heed, to his cost.

By the time the Winter was in force, things began to shift in the calculus of Hell's forces. You no doubt have done reports on Octavia The Ingenious; don't be so modest. Your paymasters saw which way the wind was blowing and forced a 'puff piece' on my mistress. The Angel Of Innovation turned out to be a more accurate title for her than even you could know. Between Octavia's good-grace with Satan, the expanded Iron Legions augmented with new Helltech, and an indomitable redoubt from which Hell could assail forth, this was the year of Hell's initiative.

The grumblings grew louder of course, amongst those who stood to benefit the most from things remaining exactly as they were. Which I suppose is why there was not so much as a peep out of Belphegor... but I digress. No, we were speaking on the topic of that strange year. With things in the state that they had attained, it was inevitable that equilibrium would be lost in one direction or another, and we had worked very hard that it fall our way. Heaven, conversely, stuck in its ways as it was, offered little meaningful resistance. I still hold that had we pressed with vigor, we could have occupied all of Cloud One by the next Purge-Day. Hrm. Even now I still refer to the changing of the year as Purge Day, even as it stopped being relevant decades ago."

-Ambrosius Severus Agrippa, Dux Bellorum Infernis