When the call came in from The Bard, Moxxie had to track him down all over again, but this time it only took a half hour because he was still up in Pride Ring. By the pings on the cell-towers, he was in a non-descript plot of land some ways away from Glowtown, about half way between that war-material manufacturing hub and the Private Library of Purson, which sat at the edge of an unnamed cluster of Goetic manses, surrounded by the shacks and hovels of their support staff. Given that he wasn't going to tear himself apart to head there, making a portal was the obvious choice. But since during the time he was distracted Millie had gotten a call from Blitz about some human needing to be killed, that meant that Beatrice was riding a papoose with Moxxie instead.
When Moxxie opened the portal and stepped through it, he was immediately struck by a strange sensation in the air and in the dirt under his hooves. That there was something critically and fundamentally wrong here, but not exactly what. Even as Moxxie opened another portal, this one to Krieg's office, he gave it a bit of thought. It was a field of energy, dissonant and discordant to its surroundings on such a primal and visceral level that it shook the imp's guts to stand in it. This was reality itself rebelling against an imposition of something, gradually and through a sort of tidal resonance building up a wave of ruin to unseat whatever the Ring of Pride found so offensive.
"Aha!" Krieg said on her Hellphone as she bounded out from behind her desk. "We must continue this another time; something much more important has come up."
"Uh, Twee-cherry, is it wise to hang up on your clients like that?" Tilla's voice came through the portal from some part of the room that the portal couldn't see.
"She has weeks before something breaks. This will not take weeks, and may see me recognized as Ur-Crone. I will not be denied my ambitions!" Krieg said, and then before the girl's mother could come up with another retort, Krieg crossed the threshold and joined Moxxie in the wasteland of the Pride Wilds. She, too, scowled upon reaching this side of the gate. And in the instant before the thing closed, Uller slipped out behind her. It was fortunate for him that Thaumetic Gates can't actually 'cut' anything when they close, only when they open. Being stuck in a closing gate was merely uncomfortable and random. Standing where one was opening was a good way to be split in twain.
"You sense it too, don't you?" Moxxie asked.
"I sense two things," Krieg countered. "Intertwined like orchid and tree."
"Wait a second," Uller said holding up a finger as he closed his eyes and breathed the air. "I've felt this before."
"Really? Then defy your place in the chain and teach, o student of mine," Krieg said, fists on her hips.
"It's called Disquiet. It happens when powerful curses 'rub against' each other. It's not harmful if we leave it soon enough, but if we don't…"
"It starts to erode your mind," Moxxie said, quickly weaving a little spell over his daughter to keep her as safe as he knew how to. Uller nodded.
"It usually happens in places where a great regional curse is forced to also endure a great personal curse. Otherwise, curses don't actually abrade each other enough to cause Disquiet. They just put up walls, instead," Uller said.
"And this happens in Envy?" Krieg said.
"A lot of things are forced close together in Envy," Uller noted. And having been there recently, Moxxie could see why. "This Disquiet must have been either growing for some time, or…"
"Or is operating under special circumstances," Moxxie said. Just from the snippet that Uller told him, Moxxie knew exactly what was happening. He'd heard that there were edge-cases of curses interacting with other curses, but having heard it verified it was clear that this Disquiet was wholly the fault of The Bard's mere presence here. There were such terrible curses on him that it likely started percolating up the moment he stopped moving to catch a nap.
"Then we'd best talk to The Bard before we go insane," Moxxie prompted them to get moving. If The Bard had gone through the trouble to leave him a voice-mail (the old man was magical to his root, and didn't seem best adept at modern computer technologies), then it was because he had figured out why their attempt not only failed but caused a carcass to disappear. At least it had been Administrator Scailes' carcass. There were far worse zombies to have out there than somebody personally without might nor magic.
The portal hadn't landed them near anything obvious, but considering that The Bard picked out how to make the Black Blood Glamour almost instantly, Moxxie wouldn't put it past the man to be hiding essentially anywhere, as anything. His eyes were betraying him somewhat, as wisps and ethers of free-flowing magic were everywhere here. That made sense of why The Bard had come to this place in the middle of nowhere; it was a Vis Crux. You could do magic all day here and never run out of gas, because strictly speaking you were never burning what was in your own tank. So Moxxie did the next best thing. He grabbed a bunch of rocks, and started throwing them at random spots, until one of them struck a plate of naked sky and dirt with the thuk of stone against wood.
"He could do well to learn lessons of hospitality," Krieg noted, as Moxxie began to walk toward that invisible structure, a hand out in front of him so he wouldn't brain himself against a wall. He felt it and quickly came to its corner, turning and walking along that angle for a few seconds before the structure itself suddenly appeared as though he had been wearing welding-goggles and finally flipped up the flash-guard.
There was faint music coming from inside the shack, which was all made of stones that were stacked together somehow without mortar that left no gaps for wind to blow in. Probably more magic. Moxxie had been forced to only learn by heart the most relevant Wyrds, charms, spells and hexes that he could use to earn money or save his life while doing so. There were doubtless countless utilities hidden in the blood that he had never explored. The door itself was wood, its frame cut and split logs that were ragged and untreated. Come to think of it, the entire building had the same sort of aesthetic to it. Like it had been hastily put here by somebody who didn't have the patience to do better. Out the front door was a washing basin and a hand-cranked laundry mill. The very portrait of a man projecting 'leave me the fuck alone' to the rest of Hell.
Moxxie knocked on the door. The music paused, holding a note longer than it was supposed to, then finally stopped. There was a wooden shuffle sound, and the door swung inward, showing the ancient imp in his pitch-black hovel. Of course it was unlit. It wasn't like he needed light at this point.
"Good. You come. And you even bring the proud one," The Bard said. He gestured out to an exterior cook-fire, and to the wooden stump-cuts that now served as seats. There were only three for the four of them. Moxxie gave a look to Uller, but the Envy Imp didn't even kvetch; he just plunked himself down with his legs crossed under him in the dirt opposite the dead fire from The Bard. "Before I speak, I presume you've done some thought into the Disappearing Cadaver?"
"Some," Moxxie admitted, "But for some reason I just can't crack this ritual. I have no idea what could have gone wrong," Moxxie said.
"Each time you speak my respect of you increases. Yes, you could not know for certain, because certainty is the province of fools and charlatans," The Bard said. "But even still, you must have theories."
"I had a question, more than a theory," Moxxie said, as the old imp finally lowered himself, slowly, gradually, onto his stump, and started to put more logs into the ashes already there. The Bard gestured for him to offer it. "When you said that every edge case where something weird happened during a Resurrection, I had to think to myself… that isn't actually possible."
"Oh?" The Bard said. Krieg snapped her fingers and pointed at Moxxie, her eyes growing wide.
"You know what I'm talking about, don't you, Krieg?" Moxxie asked.
"Exactly! It is known what happens when Resurrection misfires against fiend and Elder Devil and Sinner and imp alike!" Kreig said.
"But how, then, could anybody have had a chance to use it on one of the Innocent?" Moxxie asked.
"Proper thinking, leading to a proper hypothesis," The Bard said. "Fiends and imps and Hounds? The spell works as expected in their variant forms, barring supernatural interference. Elder Devils tend to have… issues, but issues that if they can be isolated and treated, can be solved. It's never been attempted on an Angel, as far as the record shows."
"And Sinners, being Sinners, if brought back to life, would be subject to Luciferian law," Moxxie said. "They would be subject to True Death rather than be brought back to life."
"Hitherto," The Bard said, flexing his fingers, and having the tiniest Burning Rake that Moxxie ever saw strike out and ignite the wood now stacked in the fire pit. It began to burn once more, "the wyrd has never been used to bring back an Innocent. So it is her status as Innocent which caused the issue."
"She mentioned that Innocent, when they die in Heaven, quickly dissolve into dust," Moxxie said. "That it was strange that the same didn't happen here, even."
"Likely an impediment for Raphael to attempt resurrection. He may not be an imp, that four-winged freak up there, but bringing people back to life is within his reach. Denying him the means would allow for the dead to remain dead, no matter what he desired," The Bard gave a low laugh. "It speaks to the base cruelty of God, to create a son with such a desire, and then bend the rules of His realm to deny those desires from ever coming to pass."
"So what happened to the corpse?" Moxxie asked.
"Do you know what happens when Resurrection is used on an Outsider?" The Bard asked.
"I wasn't aware it had ever been done," Moxxie said.
"A few times, it has. The original King Mammon, not the current one we have now; he was one of them," the Bard noted.
"There was another Mammon?" Uller asked.
"The current 'Prince' Mammon, whatever he is, named himself after the longest-ruling King of Greed. Who was assassinated. And had his heir cast down by Seber Open-Hand, the Paradox Queen. King Mammon was an Outsider?" Moxxie relayed, then asked, to each of their targets.
"Indeed; some sort of reality-bending thing that could change history to suit his desires. When his underlings used the Clan Cruac Crones to bring his cadaver back to life… it simply vanished," The Bard said.
"But Miss Scailes isn't an Outsider," Moxxie pointed out.
"Perhaps not. But there is much about the condition of being Innocent that we have no knowledge of," The Bard said.
"Enough of this rambling! Did you really call us out here into this nowhere wasteland to discuss a strange peccadillo of one particular Impish spell?" Krieg demanded.
"No, and you're right to lasso me before I get lost completely in the reeds," The Bard said with a nod in her general direction. "I called you here, because with the discoveries I made, I've regained my confidence that I perform the ritual properly, even with no real remains to anchor it."
"You're saying…" Moxxie began.
"If you all would permit? I will attempt to resurrect and bring forth Saffron Knolastname," The Bard declared.
Chapter 31
Heedless Ambitions
Birah was in a bit of a bind.
One one hand, he had his duty to The Father to alert the Host to the presence of the Host's designated enemies. On the other, he had his own personal duty to ensure that the good in the person is never snuffed out by the heedless excess of others. As far as lines-to-toe went, this one was far fuzzier and more crooked than he liked to countenance. But if he didn't stand somewhere, then he could never claim to stand for anything ever again. Sometimes you had to pick which hill you died on.
Of course, just because Birah was engaged in something which, in a catastrophic reading of its merits, could be considered minor treason against the Angels, it didn't mean he was going to be dumb about it.
He didn't know who, if anybody, he could trust in Heaven. Hepsut was a name that he wanted to add to his safe-list, but Hepsut was a simple man in many ways. He didn't burden himself with nuance that might distract him from what needed doing. During catastrophe, it made him a singleminded and indefatigable workhorse, someone who would continue without complaint and without cease until the task was finished and all that could be made safe, was safe. But now? Now things were becoming complicated. Birah didn't know how much grey Hepsut allowed into his world between the blacks and the whites.
Yael was a craftsman first and a warrior a distant tenth, but he, too had his loyalties. And though he hadn't said as much out loud, it was clear that Yael was growing sick of the stagnation and inaction of Michael in the face of what Heaven had become. He may not be a Gabrielite in truth, like Forfax, but he was certainly beginning to sympathize with them. Many of the other Secondborn were just keeping their heads down, not wanting to bring down the paranoid wrath of the Firstborn onto themselves. It wouldn't save them, Birah reckoned. It hadn't saved Penemue, it hadn't saved Kafziel, and it wouldn't save Birah. One day, they would say the wrong innocuous thing, and then they would be as doomed and as marginalized as the Grigori.
So bereft of allies as Birah found himself to be, of those he could trust just being around, that he had to find a spot in the Human World to collect himself. It was a tiny town, sea-side and sprawling rather than built up. When the wind blew just wrong, the stink of rotting seaweed would be carried into the window that overlooked the harbor and marina in one direction, and then a small, dedicated park up against the breakwater in the other. It was unremarkable, understated, and thoroughly out of the way.
The only way Birah might have had more privacy would be if he'd ranged out and built a complex around one of the other stars in this broad and expanding universe of theirs. And even then, such a construct may have drawn more eyes to a place that ought have been empty than simply slipping into the abandoned shell of another human life that such a place as this left behind, to allow for a hermit-crab analogue.
In that tiny apartment with a walk-up and no air conditioning, here in the heat of summer, he arranged his thoughts. It was a foregone conclusion that he couldn't release the majority of his interview with Charlie to anybody whatsoever. Any sliver of it reaching the ears of the Gabrielite Faction would result in Gabriel coming to that Hotel, and knocking it down with all of the ease of a man kicking over a sand-castle. And yet, at the same time, he felt strangely unwilling to simply destroy the recordings. Like it would be ruining proof of something good arising from something terrible. He could only shake his head. Frankly, if this news reached the Michelines, it would have likely ended in the same result, just in a longer time-frame. Michael would not have publicly countenanced a Nephilim any more than Gabriel did. God's decree, in the end, was God's decree. It was to be obeyed.
That left only one name in the sea of the Archangels that was beyond impeachment.
Raguel, the Godfriend.
Even looking at the least flattering and most prejudiced portrayals of Raguel's character, it painted him without exception to be a person who would, given a chance to spare an undeserving soul, take such an opportunity in the name of being kind.
But for all Raguel's obvious sympathy for Birah's case, he wasn't sure how to bring the Archangel Of Justice into this cabal of one that Birah had created. How does one approach an Archangel and tell them to begin conspiring against his brothers? It was not an easy thing to imagine.
There was a flutter of wings, and Birah slapped his laptop closed. He turned, and found Hepsut sharing the room with him, staring, blinking, at the wall which hung a wrought-iron something-or-other which the previous tenant had left here when Birah paid in cash to dwell under this roof. Hepsut finally turned, his chiseled features a portrait of masculine focus. "I thought I felt you down here. What is going on, brother? You haven't been well since Baraqiel's disappearance. People are becoming concerned."
Birah hung his head, glad at least that Hepsut had immediately fumbled out a worthy excuse for Birah's secrecy. "Baraqiel is not missing, brother," Birah said, as though forcing himself to be calm instead of revealing his relief. "He is gone. The Demiurge Desyncretized him. He is the Other God that he once was."
"It wasn't your fault. You did all you could," Hepsut said, stooping down so that he didn't tower over where Birah was seated. Even at a squat the much taller late-Firstborn still essentially looked Birah in the eye.
"I know that. I do," Birah said. If Hepsut was going to keep extending rope to him, then by God he was going to keep climbing it. "But if the Demiurge could do that to one of Gabriel's people… imagine what he could do to us."
"You make it sound like that's an especially hard thing," Hepsut said. "Gabriel's faction are at least doing something. I see more of them down on Probity fighting against the hordes of Hell than most I do of those do-nothings who hide in the middle of the Taxiopolis."
"And how is the front line?" Birah managed not to inject envy and scorn into his words, but it was a close thing. Michael had even yet forbidden Birah from taking his place alongside his brothers and cousins repelling the forces of Hell. And not even all of Hell, as he had learned. The vast majority of Hell's populace was continuing on as though the War For Heaven wasn't even happening. The only people on the back-foot, and fighting an existential war, were the Angels themselves.
"That changes by the hour," Hepsut sighed, leaning his back against a bookshelf which creaked in protest over weight being applied in a direction it hadn't been designed for. "I grow worried about Gadreel. There's something wrong with her eyes, of late."
"What exactly?" Birah asked. Death's Chosen had always been… respected… for her ability to kill, but given her status as Grigori and her inscrutable mien, she was very seldom trusted. After all, who in their right mind would trust somebody so effortlessly lethal as Gadreel at their backs, where she could kill anything less than an Archangel in a single, elegant blow?
"It's hard to say. Just that I've looked into her eyes when she was fighting against Stella of Iron, and I've looked into her eyes this morning. And there is a change, there. I think she is breaking," Hepsut said.
"You think…"
"She will die, suddenly, inexplicably, and to a much-lesser opponent," Hepsut said. "And she will do it soon. She's checked out. She no longer cares. With The Prophecy gone, she is free to pursue suicide, so that's exactly what she will do."
"You really think she would throw her life away?" Birah asked. Because that wasn't his personal impression of Gadreel in the slightest.
"Despair has a look, Birah," Hepsut said simply.
That didn't line up with Birah's estimation at all. Gadreel was motivated first and foremost by hatred, and that hatred was directed not at Hell, as far as Birah could determine. It was directed wholly at Gabriel. The man did bludgeon her unborn-Nephilim child to death with his boots and left her to miscarry on the floor. Only if Gabriel had taken additional steps to cow and break her would that even enter as a possibility, and Birah doubted that Gabriel even gave Gadreel any thought whatsoever these days.
"Do you remember," Birah pulled the topic away, "during the last War? The battle On The River Respite?"
"How could I forget?" Hepsut asked. "It cost me an arm that took a lengthy Vigil to restore."
"The battlefield afterwards. Scattered with the corpses of Angels, and the few Innocent that were up here back then. Back before we let their bodies fade to help preserve their sanity," Birah said. "Do you remember the sound of it?"
Hepsut shrugged. "I was taken to enter Vigil not long after the victory cry had raised. I don't remember much of the aftermath," he said rather tersely.
"...The sounds of pain were louder than wind," Birah said. They hadn't let him onto the battleground when the battle was up, but they'd loosed him onto it to try to reclaim the Plate of God. He failed, then, because Lucifer had already thrown it into the Abyss by that point. "No matter where I went, suffering was there. Both from ours, and from theirs."
"They earned that. To defy God is to defy sanity," Hepsut said.
"Did Carmilla deserve it?" Birah asked.
"She seduced Zagan. It was only a matter of time before she gave him a Nephilim," Hepsut said. So it was obvious to Birah at least that Hepsut was still bitter that she'd proven herself a better dancer than him. It still didn't warrant murder by Gabriel and damnation by God.
"...did Adam deserve it?" Birah asked. Hepsut hesitated. "Did God's First Man deserve to have his home become the centerpoint of a battle that butchered his daughters and son and wife? It was from their example that we even learned that Innocent return from death, and the strain of it did cruel things to Adam's mind."
"Adam is fine. He has been serving Heaven ably for more than some of your cousin's entire lives," Hepsut pointed out.
But not the way that Adam had been intended to. Adam was intended to prove a point. Birah had never learned what that point was. And then when the Battle on the River Respite happened, something broke in Adam. Never given to deep thought or belief in nuance, Adam threw his lot in with anybody whosoever could give him vengeance. He had fought for months straight under Michael and Gabriel's direction before even bothering to check his family's bodies (which by that point had been supplanted by that same family Returned as though it had never been lost).
"Have you looked into Adam's eyes? Into any of the Ophanim's eyes?" Birah asked, quietly, turning in his seat so he could look up and out the window that hung over the waterfront of this small Earthly town.
"...why?" Hepsut asked.
"Have you seen any despair in them?" Birah asked.
Hepsut looked away.
Oh no. Oh no, he couldn't talk to Hepsut either. This just confirmed it. Not that he had been intending to, for the risk was great and he wasn't going to drag somebody heedless into his cabal of grim conspiracy against their volition if he could avoid it, but this just proved that the same madness that had overtaken Adam and turned him into the Sword Of The Ophanim, Scourge of the Unclean, it had its roots in Hepsut, too. The same black-and-white thinking. The same heedless insanity.
When had the two Angels grown so different?
"I just need some time," Birah said, staring stolidly out the window and refusing to let Hepsut enter any more than his peripheral vision. "Time to think. There may be some way to recover from this, to reclaim what was lost, but I can't do it in Heaven. Heaven has become too loud, too factionalized. At least here, here I can ponder. Maybe even come to an answer."
"Well, for all of our sakes, I hope you find what you're looking for. But I don't think that there's anything to find. We worry about you, Birah," Hepsut said, standing at the edge of Birah's vision.
"Please. Your cadre barely thinks of me at all," Birah pointed out. And Hepsut was quiet for a time.
"...you are not wrong," he said. There was another fluttering, as Hesput Transited away. Birah didn't open his laptop, though. He stood, and looked out the window in front of him, to the humans ignorantly walking their dogs and strolling down the wooden-boarded path that hugged the nearby seafront, connecting an old and historic cropping of old buildings to that small park in the distance. These humans lived lives in utter ignorance that the afterlife was coming unraveled at its seams. For them, ignorance was a shield that would keep them from misery and torment. What could humans even do against the likes of Lucifer?
And then, as a bolt of realization, he understood what he had been overlooking. So fixated was he on who he couldn't trust, he didn't think about those whom habit told him he shouldn't. If his fundamental axioms were being called into question, then he might as well start from base principals. He had discarded the Grigori as people whom he could confide in simply because they were Grigori, and thus beneath belief. But who else could it be but the Grigori, to speak to about the prospect of a Nephilim in Creation.
Birah knew exactly where to find one. One who would no doubt be sympathetic even to an ignominious Secondborn like him. Birah picked up and unplugged the laptop, pushing it into a Stasis Pocket, before focusing his will on the Forges of Azazel. There was a fluttering of large wings, and then the room was empty.
Outside of a shack in the middle of nowhere, in the heart of a swirling miasma of Disquiet and colliding curses, infused by the effervescent power of a Vis Crux, four imps were gathered around a ritual circle, or else at the center of it. In a way, this recalled strongly the sensation of being in that tiny shard of Purgatory that hadn't fallen into the Abyss, a few months and a lifetime ago, before he swore the 37 Oaths and become what he now was. In fact, he was fairly certain in hindsight that doing that feat of impossible magic would have been so much easier if it had been done here. If only Mister Scailes had known about this spot, perhaps.
The shack was dark, and the smell in the air was one of strange flowers and herbs, all drifting above an acrid lace of ambergris. The sour note at the bottom of the odor gave weight to it, made the whole thing seem to settle at waist height in a thin grey haze. The wind was dead, now, the power of it sapped by the magicks taking place here.
Moxxie was again stripped of essentially all of his clothes, because, per The Bard's instruction, there was a chance that Saffron would return to the world by pulling herself out of him. Clothing in such a case would not only be ruined, but also stood a small but non-zero chance of interfering with the spell to such an extent that it outright failed. And Moxxie wasn't about to allow this spell, of all those which he had ever learned or heard of, to fail. To fail this spell was to render it impossible to ever perform it again. And Saffron deserved better than Annihilation.
Uller was holding Beatrice, who was watching the whole affair with big, shining red eyes, fussy and gently kicking from her place trapped in the papoose which the young Envy imp had been saddled with now that Moxxie was here, doing this, in this place. The youth stood back, most of his attention on Krieg, who in turn had most of her attention on The Bard. And the ritual had halted, for a moment, as The Bard ran his fingers along the raised letters of a book that he'd produced from the shelves of his shack.
"Is this wise, to spend so much time in the lurch?" Krieg asked.
"Wiser than proceeding before I check how to deal with these small perturbations? I should think so," The Bard said. "I must admit, I am somewhat relieved to see that people of your ilk still live in Hell. I had thought that Ruut would have stamped them out for at least another generation more. That I wouldn't live long enough to see another true Ur-Crone."
"Given all of your knowledge of Thaumaturgy, I'm surprised you didn't try to take that title yourself," Krieg said.
"Impossible," The Bard said.
"Why?" she asked.
"I have a penis," The Bard said. Krieg gave an 'oh, of course' look on her face. "Still, it's good to know the future of our Art is in good hands while I can still help to shape it."
"Why, are you ill with something?" Uller asked from the sidelines.
"No. Just old," The Bard said. "I've got no more than eleven years left in me. I intend to spend them the way I've spent the last fifty; doing what I can for who I can. My pride would allow no less."
"How could you possibly know a date for your death? Imps are outside the grasp of fate!" Krieg noted.
"Outside of destiny, yes. Not fate. Fate is merely a statistical calculation, a properly attuned viewing of the present used to determine the most likely outcome of events-in-motion," The Bard said. "A little while ago, I used a favor with Balam to use his corrupted magic to interface with the Seraph of Divination, Eistibus. And I spent a few hours refining a prediction to determine, amongst other things, when I could expect to die."
"Again, destiny is toothless to us," Krieg said.
"Eistibus is older than The Prophecy," The Bard said. "And doesn't function by the same methods. At its heart, Eistibus is an analytical engine, using the present to estimate the future. And based on the present I offered it back at the turn of the millennium, Eistibus said I would with highest certainty die in the year 2034. That's fair. I've been around a long time. I don't have any fear of being forgotten, and my works will be spoken of until somebody better usurps them. My life hasn't been happy, but it has been satisfying. I could ask for nothing more."
"I doubt I would have such aplomb at an approaching expiration date," Krieg noted.
"You're young. You don't know what it feels like to be old. You'll understand when you do," The Bard said. He then gave a nod. "Right, right, yes."
"Well?" Krieg said. The Bard motioned her to one spot opposite him on the ritual circle. Moxxie immediately felt his skin grow cold as Krieg flipped a page over and started to speak in argot Enochian from the most ancient days, taking those stolen phonemes of the True Words of God and binding them to impish will.
Even as they worked, and the ritual oils that they laid out began to rise, they didn't do so as abruptly as they had under the experiment in Pentagram City. No, this time, they did it slowly, rising up in smears reaching skyward from the lines that they were anchored to, gently pushed out of the way of unseen something as though the flows of power were pushing them away even as they were drawn up, splitting rivulets into tree-like structures of honey-gold and transmission-fluid red. Even then, the clarity snapped into Moxxie's mind, and no longer was it opaque magicality; he understood that The Bard had changed the ritual specifically to slow it, to ensure that the ethers of the Vis Crux would feed the Wyrd in such a way that they wouldn't overpower nor starve the magic as it went. It was exactly what The Bard called it. An Art.
Thaumaturgy wasn't scientific, or at least it wasn't entirely. Unlike those things which came to Moxxie as easily as breathing, Resurrection was something far older and far more abstract, something requiring not rote-repetition but an ability to react to minute realities and difficulties with individual castings. The masters of Resurrection were akin to masters of jazz-music, those who knew the rules as though they were etched upon their hearts, just so that they could break them in the proper ways when needed.
Krieg was joined by The Bard, who began to speak in tones that shook the world as though listening to The Sermon Of Year's Death in the Great Cathedral of Satan, those chopped up and reformed pieces of God's Uttered Word now pushing reality into strange knots, where Moxxie for a moment looked down and saw clouds beneath him, and looked up to see stone. Where he felt his heart stop beating, only for his brain to beat and circulate the blood in its place. Where he felt his blood harden into a wire, still for an instant and stretched through his entire body as an antenna that was attuned to listen to one very specific and particular something.
And now, Moxxie knew what that something was.
An echo.
He had learned in the moment of his small-apotheosis in Purgatory's remnant that all of the magic that had been bound around him was, at its heart, the creation of a song. A song which, at that time, was combining into the Songs of Moxxie and Millie Rough, and of Loona Miller. A song which, once it was a part of him, had become so fundamental to himself that he couldn't imagine being without it again. With that understanding, he saw that all reality was music, also. A slow, sad song of a realm at war at the words of a grasping madman. A sharp, painful song of ambition and greed. A lonely song uplifted into restrained joy, of life returning to one thought dead. And under all of it, the song of reality, a song which had been put into effect the same day that Moxxie and Millie and Loona debuted their new powers against that shit-stain Nathan Birch, a song of defiance and melancholy and purpose. A song of ruin and rebuilding.
The dead weren't truly gone, in such a world as this. Their parts were still etched into the music of reality, and their deaths left them merely as echoes, attenuating away until they fade into the noise. But if you had sharp enough ears, clean enough recordings, and a clever enough method, couldn't the echo be amplified back into the sound that once made it? Couldn't the fading remnant lost to memory be restored to exactly what it had been?
That was Resurrection. The ultimate expression of Change And Unchange.
To reach into the crackling noise of Creation, to grab ahold of an echo of somebody dead, and to Unchange it, to amplify it, to pare away those parts of it muddled by chaos and replace that which was lost until it was indistinguishable to the source of the Echo itself. It was Rough's Method taken to its illogical extreme, to rewind not just injury and mind, but to undo the unraveling of the soul. That was why Resurrection was so difficult. That was why it required several Casters. Piecing the dead back together required more than one set of hands, metaphorically.
Even as these revelations dawned on Moxxie, as he felt his understanding of Resurrection start to blossom (though obviously not to the inherent extent of Krieg or the practiced extent of The Bard), he felt something tearing in him. The pain was incredible, blinding in intensity, and pulled an anguished scream from his throat as he felt his body being torqued apart without kindness or mercy. This was what The Bard meant that Resurrecting Moxxie's mother would 'have difficulties'. Without a solid, independent piece for which the rebuilding to begin, it would have to start by separating from Moxxie.
He didn't quite flop onto his chest, but it was a close thing, his tail planted into the dirt and anchoring him as even in his blinded, agonized state, he felt something begin to slide off of him, a weight parting from him. He forced his eyes open, he forced his mind to perceive; what he saw there was a circulatory system, being ripped out of his own skin even while his own remained inside. That tube-way of veins and arteries and heart were ripe with black blood, pulsing in the vaguest pantomime of an impish form. The soul had to come first. And imps souls were made of their blood. The instant the last capillary of the alien pulminary pulled free of him, the pain stopped destroying him, and now merely ached mightily, as he felt his skin start to pull together under the force of his own will and his own ethers.
If he hadn't been what he was now, that would have disfigured him, maybe crippled him for life. And even then, it would have been worth it to Moxxie. But that was not how things were, now.
As Moxxie stopped his screaming and pulled in ragged breaths, the lattice of bloodwork began to ossify in places, marrow extruding and hardening into bone. Bone which mounted muscle. Muscle which sheathed around swelling organs and visceral mass, a skull now playing host to a brain. Straight black horns extending from their mounts in the skull.
The magic of the area was drained, now, the Vis-Crux already tapped out, and now the two Thaumaturges had to dig into their own personal wellsprings, but the rite did continue. The body began to twitch, the muscle firing and contracting, even as scarlet flesh began to sheath it. And every single whit of it drove pinions into Moxxie's heart, seeing that impossible figure being reconstituted out of essentially nothing.
She was naked except for one shoe, oddly, because the ritual couldn't magic up an entire outfit, but she was the same tall, graceful Wrathling that Crimson had dragged down with his Greedling bloodline and ambitions. She finally pulled in a breath, as desperate and ragged as Moxxie's had been, then turned onto her side and vomited up foul, stinking and acrid water, the likes of which could be found aplenty in the fetid seas of Greed.
Krieg and The Bard continued their movements, continued saying words, and there was a final jerk as Saffron's body grew rigid for a moment. Then, when the pair of thaumaturges grew silent, Saffron's eyes opened.
She was blinking fast, sputtering and trying to get the last dregs of the water that had drowned her out of her lungs. And wasn't that unfair? That magic could put water in her lungs but not clothes on her body? Unless she had been dumped naked into the brine? She did have raw black chafes around her lower-legs and hooves. Maybe they'd hadn't even shot her when they threw her in.
"Momma?" Moxxie asked, his voice hitching, ragged from the screams he'd given.
Saffron's eye went wide, and then her head turned to him. And the shock on her face was absolute. Of all the things she had expected to see, obviously Moxxie was not one of them.
He reached to her, to help her up. Because of his particular blind-spot in this, he didn't see how her tail quickly lashed out, snatching up one of Krieg's ritual daggers, and then with a snarl and a shout, she slammed it up to its hilt into Moxxie's chest.
Moxxie's brain misfired at that, falling back with the knife gashing open his heart, while Saffron spade-slapped Krieg and sprinted past the edge of the shack in the middle of nowhere, her resurrection obviously giving he all the energy she needed to flee. The Bard, who had been in a position to stop her, did absolutely nothing to prevent her egress. He simply blinked after her, then turned vaguely in Moxxie's direction.
"You should have told me you hadn't parted on good terms," The Bard said.
Moxxie, though, focused on taking the hilt of the knife and backing it, slowly and painfully, out of the wound, fixing his innards as it went so that removing this wouldn't kill him outright. Finally, he had it out, but it took all of the ethers he had in him, and the wound wasn't even completely healed. It still oozed a fair amount of black blood, though at least now not to the pulse of his heartbeat. If he was going to need to do any more magic in the next hour or so, he was shit-outta-luck.
"You brought her back broken, you old fool!" Krieg snapped.
"She is completely intact. She even has the dissonant note that all Resurrected have," The Bard said somewhat peevishly. He gestured toward the rocky wasteland. "Well? You have working eyes; where is she running?"
"What?" Uller asked.
"The part that they don't tell you about after the Resurrection is that there is a period of… readjustment that needs to take place. And if they don't have it, they slowly turn into something that, frankly, would have been kinder to leave dead. So go find the woman. I'm too old to be charging around through the rocks, and you're not. My job here isn't done," The Bard said, sitting down at the side of the fire once more. Moxxie was pulled to his feet, and he hobbled over to where he'd left his clothes; he pulled on the important parts, leaving his jacket and whatnot behind. "Would you mind explaining, then, why a sane mother would stab her son in the heart?"
Moxxie had to give that a moment of thought, but a moment was all it took, paired with a deeply sad realization.
"Crimson killed her personally," Moxxie said. "And I look just like him."
He looked up to the rocks, and to Uller, who handed back the papoose. As soon as he was unburdened by it, he extended his wings and flapped into the air, giving them a much-needed eye in the sky. It didn't take long for him to blow a very shrill whistle, then point.
"I wonder if Mother tried to kill Ruut when she was brought back?" Krieg asked. Moxxie turned a very flat look at her. Then the teenager shrugged. "You know what? I'm going to choose to believe that she did."
Moxxie just growled at the temerity of the universe for dropping this onto his lap, alongside all of the other things that it had deemed him worthy of, and began to slog his way toward the maze of stone-falls and canyons.
The forges of Azazel were always busy. Despite the fact that they were headed and trademarked under the two Grigori Azazel and Zagan, there were other Secondborn and even Firstborn whom took their places as assistants in the many devices that Azazel made as part of his mandate to provide arms and panoply to the Hosts of Heaven. The forge was loud, and hot, and stank of metal and sweat.
Birah appeared in it, looking very much out of place compared to those who chose to spend their time here in the iron-monger's den. He was visibly frail compared even to the meagerest of the people working the metal and engaged in other tasks. But Birah didn't much care about that. He knew that in a battle of brawn against brawn, he'd lose against anybody except for a human. But that wasn't how Birah preferred to fight his battles.
There were a few suspicious looks given to him as he moved through the massive, pandemonious workshop, one that practically played using the rattle of foundry chains and beating of hammer against anvil a song of heedless and merciless industry. There was all sorts of unexpected music to be found in Creation, if one knew how to look for it.
A glance could tell Birah that Azazel was not at one of the many working-areas, not manipulating the tiny pieces of delicate devices nor beating metal roughly into submission and shape. He was not stoking the blasting heat of the Light Forge which would turn such base iron into the metal which could slay the Sinner and even lay open the skin of the Archangel. Seraphic Steel could be made here and nowhere else in all Creation, now that Sahaquiel was lost to Heaven by Gabriel's vainglory.
That Azazel was in none of his usual places meant that there was only one spot that could hold him. There was, at the back corner of the great network of metal-makers, metal-formers, stockpiles and artisan-spaces, a building about the size of a house; considering the building it was nestled in could be compared favorably to human sports-arenas, it was not a large portion of the total whole. It was once the dwelling of Zagan, the second of the two Grigori who masterminded the Armory of Heaven. But Zagan had fallen to the wiles of Carmilla, a human, and began a whirlwind romance with her, just months before Gabriel wiped the Nephilim out. In truth, neither Zagan nor Carmilla had a chance to create a Nephilim, and the daughters Carmilla did have were from a former, human lover.
That was another tidbit that Birah had learned quite by accident during his return trip to the Hotel. That Zagan had joined Lucifer specifically because, one way or another, he would reunite with Carmilla at the end of the rebellion. The two lovers reunited an eon ago, and had been inseparable since. For all Birah wished he could simply damn Zagan for his rebellion… some small part of Birah felt sympathy for him. Was this the same yearning Penemue had felt for Purson? He could not say.
Nobody tried to get in his way as he approached. It only occurred to him as he neared the doors was that the reason nobody seemed to care to stop him was likely due to Yael. That Yael had called in Birah to try to fix those increasingly many damaged Exorcists, including the utterly precious Type 25s and completely irreplaceable Type 26s earned him some consideration, it seemed.
When Birah opened the door to the first room, a living space turned to a prototyping room, if its new garage-door that lead directly to the stockpile was an indication, was at the moment manned by two, one of whom should not have been up here, one for whom this Cloud should be denied to him outright.
"Machiavelli," Birah said, flatly, at the Innocent's back. He turned and gave Birah a minute nod, seemly uncaring as to the fact that, here on Cloud Nine, his people had been forbidden forever. Azazel then turned to him, lofting a brow.
"Not my usual guest. What brings you to my workshop? More orders for parts from Yael, perhaps?" Azazel asked.
"Azazel," Birah kept his tone steady, "why is there a human here on Cloud 9?"
"Because commuting to talk to him about this project would be a hindrance," Azazel said. Birah stared at his darker complected, seemingly-older younger brother. "I'm not the only one who does this. Raguel uses his failed Thirdborn for servants in his personal house. The wording of the Proscription is that Man Shall Not Walk The Streets Which Comforteth Angel. And at no point did Machiavelli walk the streets."
"This seems like a dangerous toeing of the line," Birah said, leaving his opinion on this at exactly that point, and not further. To be frank, he wasn't sure why there was a Proscription over Cloud Nine at all. It wasn't a law, exactly, not something that could be enforced save for by public opinion and shame. But even not-strictly-laws can become unspoken orthodoxy if given enough time, and Heaven had been around for a very, very, very long time. He gave a glance to around the divider that separated one project from another, and almost gave a start at what lay there. It was a lot like what Birah had cobbled together from what parts he could manage, only this one showed the sheen of masterwork as opposed to Birah's clear amateurish taint.
It was a suit with a gap for a wearer, similar in its composition, and in fact styling, to the armor of Raguel the Godfriend, somewhere between a harness of plate and a bomb-suit. This one seemed to close completely, unlike Raguel's, was made of much inferior metals, and was understandably much, much smaller. Almost like it were sized for a human, as opposed to an angel.
"Is this what it looks like?" Birah asked, subconsciously sidling into the scrum of three that were standing before it. "Have we come up with something to check those Hellish panoplies?"
"Check them? No. I'm not so bold as to claim that," Azazel said. "These things are laughable compared to Hell's industry, which is a sentence which I never thought would emit from my throat. Look; no integrated weaponry. Its armor's no better than theirs. And because of material limitations, its gait is slower."
"And yet it flies," Machiavelli said. "You are too harsh on yourself, Azazel. With two hands and a few days work, you have equaled the industry of Hell. It doesn't need to be a perfect match to those Hell Suits. It certainly doesn't need to in-a-moment overwhelm them; that's too much to ask for, even from a Son of God. No, all this has to do, is be exactly what it is. A means to answer the aggression of Hell wherever it comes."
"I suppose you are correct at that," Azazel said, with a somewhat bright tone coming to his face. "I often find I compare myself against brilliant Sahaquiel, of late. And no good could come of that kind of comparison."
"I know that feeling all too well," Birah said, but left the details unsaid. "So how many of these do we have?"
"Including this one? One," Machiavelli said with a sigh. He shook his head. "One weapon or suit will not shift a battle. It took twenty of those Hellish things to lose us the foothold on Cloud One. And ever since, they've been pushing us out, building by building. But I speak of unhappy things. The war is far from over, and there are many battles in my future to turn the tide. Maybe this one suit could tip a balance? I can't say," he shrugged.
"Is the war truly that bad?" Birah asked, his stomach heavy.
"It depends on the theatre," Machiavelli said. "Some have more success in repelling the advance than others."
"Machiavelli is of course claiming responsibility for most of those successes," Azazel said with a lofted brow and a droll expression.
"I'm certainly doing better than the moronic Firstborn!" Machiavelli snapped, before pausing, and turning to Birah. "No offense intended."
"None taken. I'm not a Firstborn," Birah said.
"Right. I have so much trouble keeping track of who is which," Machiavelli intimated to Azazel.
"If they look you in the eye and not down their nose, they're more likely Second than First," Azazel simplified. "There are some exceptions."
"I'm sure," Machiavelli said. He was about to say something else, but there was a buzzing sound that came from one of his pockets. He plucked out a smart-phone and held it up to his ear, quickly pacing away from the pair of angels, "What is it? Have they moved?"
As the human began to pace around the various corners and atria of the Prototyping House, Azazel turned to Birah. "You never did answer my question; what brings you here, Birah?"
"You did," he said. Azazel lofted a brow. "I need to talk about something that… I'm not sure how to broach."
"Did you find something that the Firstborn didn't want you to have, something that through experimentation you have broken or altered and need to fix before they find out?" Azazel asked.
"No. Why did you have so specific a circumstance in mind?" Birah asked.
"My first loyalty is to the Secondborn, followed closely second by my loyalty to God. My loyalty to the rest of the Angels as a whole is something of a more distant third," Azazel said. And Birah just stared at him, not able to hide his shock. "Don't affect such density, Spellbinder, you know many Secondborn think likewise, and Firstborn's loyalty to their fellow Firstborn is hard to refute. I know you've considered such things before."
"I'm just shocked that one like you would admit that God wasn't your first loyalty," Birah admitted.
"God has been silent and still, dumb and inactive for three centuries. It is hard to be loyal to something which is all take and no give," Azazel said. He narrowed his eyes. "I thought so. You're shaken in your faith. If you weren't, you wouldn't have countenanced my saying of such things. And what bent you drove you to me? A strange choice."
"Are… you in league with the Demiurge?" Birah asked quietly. Azazel just gave a flat look at him.
"Am I in league with the force of nature which seeks to murder our Father and plunge the universe into submission and servitude?" he expanded Birah's question to its fullest. "No. No, Spellbinder, my perceptions are not so broken as to think that's a good idea. I'm working for the good and continuation of Heaven, no matter the personal price, and no matter the size of the fragment I can save. But you surely didn't come here to point accusatory fingers at me and call me a doomseeker. Something else has caught your eye. By all means. Speak," Birah hesitated. Azazel's mouth pulled into a sad, distant smile. "Who would I tell? Who would even believe a Grigori's word against that of a Secondborn In Good Standing?"
Birah puffed out a breath, because Azazel was right about that. In a battle of credibility, even Birah had more than Azazel, which was ridiculous considering the scope of the tasks that either did for the progress of Heaven. And more than that, Birah remembered how dearly Azazel had loved Tauthe. "I was doing reconnaissance in Hell," Birah simplified, "and I saw something that shouldn't exist."
"You wouldn't come to me regarding an Outsider. Forfax is a much more obvious choice," Azazel said. Then his eyes narrowed. "Ah. I see. That's why you wanted me. Because what you saw was a Nephilim."
"...yes," Birah said.
"And you immediately didn't run to Gabriel with this information because you have a working conscience and an understanding of nuance; something that your reconnaissance of this Nephilim provided told you that it was not a danger to Creation as God had mandated," Azazel continued, as Machiavelli finally sat down on a stool, phone to his ear and kneading his brow with his fingers. "Thus you come to somebody whom you know is predisposed to not surrendering you to Gabriel's judgement for withholding such information, because of the history of the people involved."
"...yes," Birah said again. Azazel gestured to a nook out of sight in the farthest corner of the building. Birah followed as his younger yet older-seeming sibling brought him to a place where no sound would likely leak to the rest of Heaven.
"Her name is Charlie, isn't it?" Azazel asked. Birah snapped a glare at him. "You aren't the first person who encountered Lucifer's half-human offspring. And she apparently has a very consistent effect on those who meet her; you find yourself hoping that she's right, and that she'll succeed."
"Who else knows?"
"Gloria Mundi. Michael, of course," Azazel said. Birah leaned back a bit. "And Raguel."
"Raguel knows of the Nephilim?" Birah asked, feeling a bit conflicted by that thought. On one hand, the law was the law. On the other, Raguel was Raguel. "How many other people know?"
"A handful, but all of them are connected through either The Godfriend, or through Gloria Mundi. I'm given to understand Gloria was once sheltered and cared for by Charlie. She holds the woman in high esteem."
"This is very strange," Birah said, rubbing at his head. "I'd thought that…"
"That what? You would need to bear this unthinkable secret in silence and solitude? Creation is a broader place than you seem to think," Azazel said.
"Spoken by a man who never leaves Heaven," Birah said, noting Azazel's reaction. There was no start, no reaction, no concealed truth being dragged into the light. He merely shrugged.
"I'm too busy these days to vacation anywhere distant," Azazel gave a wry smile. "Maybe I should go down to Earth again some day. But not now. Not with Lucifer at the gates. For all I hold a secret that would shake the upper echelons of Heaven's Host, I am still an Angel, and my duty as an Angel is to safeguard the homeland of my brothers and cousins, and to protect the body of God."
"So… what do I do with this?" Birah asked, finally admitting he was at a loss.
"Find the helpers," Azazel said.
"The who?" Birah asked. Another secret society hidden under the surface of Heaven? Wasn't that just rich?
"Those who give of themselves to try to bring the community up," Azazel said, turning away from Birah and looking toward Machiavelli for a moment. "Those who try to better the whole. Those who reach down to pull up. Find the helpers, and you will find those who understand exactly what Charlie is doing, and why. Find them, and you will find those who you can speak to freely regarding this fatally lethal secret. There are far fewer of them these days than there were four centuries ago. The Silence has not been kind to the magnanimous spirit."
"If Gabriel finds out we knew, and didn't tell him…" Birah began. But Azazel turned his sharp, sharp eyes on him, and he fell silent.
"The worst that Gabriel can do is kill me. And if he does, I am certain I will find a way to meet wonderful Tauthe again. There is no part of the Might of God that I fear. One day, you'll find out that about yourself as well."
"...And Michael?"
"What of him?" Azazel asked, shifting to turn full to Birah, rather than staring over a shoulder.
"How can he keep a silence on this, considering God's exact command was to have the Nephilim slain?"
"I can't speak for the Taxiarch's thought processes. Maybe he is privy to some caveat of my daughter's death warrant that we're unaware of. Maybe Raguel has found some leverage over his brother to silence him," Azazel gave a shrug. "Or perhaps, as you have, Michael spoke to Charlie. Looked her in the eye, and saw nothing of her father in them. And that was enough."
Birah glanced down, feeling his thoughts swirl, then looked up to Azazel again. "What is it the Demiurge wants?"
"That question is a bit of a swerve. Why are you asking me?" Azazel asked, cradling his fingers in front of him as he stood.
"Because if we're exchanging lethal secrets, then we might as well empty our sack of them," Birah said. "I didn't lightly charge you with playing nice with the Demiurge. You might be good at hiding your tracks from Forfax, but not from me. You've been in places where Angelsong has created things – permanent things – too often for it to be coincidence. And in the name of this shared conspiracy that we're now apparently a part of, tell me this: What is it that the Demiurge could even offer you?"
Azazel was silent for a while, his face growing melancholy, before it firmed into the unremarkable and expressionless mask, as though hardening into stone, that Birah had seen on so many of the other Grigori. Because they had to. Their only defense against the depredations of their 'brothers' and 'cousins' was not giving them the satisfaction, so they would grow bored and leave them the fuck alone.
"Please, Azazel. I need to know."
"Do you?" Azazel asked. He tilted his head. "Why?"
"So I can save Heaven," Birah said.
"From whom? Lucifer? Or the Demiurge? Or are you so ambitious as to think you can personally save it from both?" Azazel asked.
"Please! Enough chicanery! What does he want?"
Azazel half turned to leave Birah here in the corner of the long reclaimed House of Zagan, but caught himself, his lips pursing just a touch, before he turned back. "Freedom," Azazel finally said, quietly. "Terrible, terrifying freedom."
"Freedom?" Birah echoed. Azazel nodded.
"Freedom," He said sternly. "You would do well with it, I think. Better than most. Better than I would, certainly. Yael's parts are in stockpile four-'E'. Ask for help to move them; they're quite heavy."
Then, Azazel turned and walked toward Machiavelli, who was hanging up his call, and began to speak on military matters. The mysteries of Heaven only grew deeper and more convoluted with every day. And Azazel was right to show Birah his back; now, he could not reveal Azazel's complicity with the Demiurge to anybody without Azazel having a perfect and mutually destructive response. They were trapped in fellowship, bound together by secrets.
He suddenly felt very small, in the vast weave of Heaven.
With a sigh, and a rub of his brow, he left the Prototyping House and started to wrangle some help shifting Yael's repair-parts for the Exorcists back down to Cloud 7. He had a lot of experience feeling small and powerless in Heaven. And it seemed new fact just reinforced how monumentally fucked he was. Ignorance would not be safety, because Birah wasn't an idiot, but it certainly would have been comfortable for as long as it took that ignorance to kill him.
But as he paused before the great bin of parts, he had a thought. Freedom from what?
Azazel's words were not flippant nor casual, because nothing about the man was flippant, or casual. Freedom from what? With his own jaw tightening into a stubborn shape, he gave the order to move the parts, and then as soon as the words were given, he focused his will somewhere else. Earth. Albany, in the North American continent. Somebody was hiding something. But Birah would find it. That was who he was. It was Birah's nature to be curious. And Albany was, if nothing else, a start.
Beatrice was finally awake, and babbling lightly as Moxxie navigated the rocky wasteland that dominated this portion of the Pride Wilds. He wasn't actually looking for his mother himself, because he had Uller for that. The Envy Imp was circling above, pointing always two turns of the gulley ahead of where Moxxie was. Even fresh back to life, Saffron Knolastname was a fighter.
How much had she fought the night that Crimson killed her?
It wasn't a thought he wanted to think about, but simultaneously wasn't a thought he could afford to ignore. After all, her first impulse upon coming back to life was to stab somebody who looked like Crimson. That probably offered a lot of the answer in and of itself.
There was a whistle from above, and Moxxie watched as Uller quickly dove into a 'U' shape in the sky, and pointed one last time, before slowly descending toward the rocks. Saffron had finally backed herself into a dead end, one that she'd take longer to climb than Moxxie would take to reach. So he redoubled his efforts, constantly playing with Bea's little hands as he went to keep the infant spawn happy and unperturbed.
"Just ahead," Uller's voice approached with the youth sliding down the scree of crumbled stone and staggering to a halt near him. He was covered in sweat, because apparently flying was something that took a lot out of you when you hadn't done it in a while. Wasn't breathing too hard, though. He hadn't lost his cardio, at least. Moxxie gestured to the last curve ahead of them.
"You're going to need to make a barrier there; she's going to throw something at us," Moxxie said.
"Why can't you?" Uller asked. Moxxie just shifted the papoose a bit to one side, and showed that there was a black stain smutting his white shirt, the wound in his chest not completely undone, merely made less-than-fatal. "Oh. Outta gas. Alright."
Uller hissed the word of power and flexed a hand, before Moxxie took one, final calming breath, then marched around the corner.
The instant his head was visible for a millisecond, there was a crack of stone crashing against the barrier, which would have caught him right in the temple if the barrier hadn't been there. A small part of him wanted to smile, knowing his Mom had that kind of fight in her. When he finally saw her, he saw that she had wrapped a blanket from The Bard's laundry line around herself, and torn a strip off of it to craft a makeshift sling. A sling which she was even now cycling with a furious look on her face.
"I'm not Crimson," Moxxie said almost immediately, which coincided with Saffron releasing her second sling-bullet. It, too, crashed against the barrier in line with Moxxie's head. "Mom, it's me. Moxxie."
Saffron had already reloaded her sling but though she cycled it in accelerating circles, she didn't launch it again.
"And who would that be?" she finally asked. Her voice was smoky and smooth, accented with a particular strain of Wrathian dialect that spoke of old power, those who had been most close to Satan for time immemorial. She had given that stern glance to the spawn in Moxxie's papoose.
"Mom. Please. Look at my eye. Do you see a scar?" Moxxie pleaded. Saffron frowned, eyes narrowed, but she took a few careful steps forward, looking at his face. Moxxie was ashamed of how much of his father was built into his bone-structure and his visage, how much of his father's voice came out Moxxie's throat. But if there was one thing fairly tell-tale about imps, it was that once they had significant scarring, it quickly made them easy to tell apart. And Crimson had been rather proud of the eye he almost lost, leaving a sweeping arc of white tissue around his right eye. He'd personally carved another arc around his left, to mirror it, out of vanity.
"...No. But scars can be removed," she said. "If you are my sweet boy, if you are… how did you survive that knife?"
"Your aim isn't as good as it used to be," Moxxie lied, showing the wound again. "Ow, by the way."
"...How long has it been?" she asked, finally letting the sling go slack.
"Eighteen years," Moxxie said, not even bothering to hide how hard fourteen of those eighteen had been. Millie had been a step into the light in a lot of ways. So strange that Moxxie's life took a turn for the better by meeting a mouthy lunatic (Blitz) in a prison cell.
"And is Crimson still alive?" she asked.
"Unfortunately," Moxxie said.
Saffron scowled, then looked to the spawn in Moxxie's care. Her look softened into an expression that was burned into Moxxie's memory: warm, baby-focused joy. "I presume this is one of mine?"
"Her name is Beatrice. She was born just a few months ago. And she's been trouble ever since," He didn't mention Cruac, because he knew what was happening right now even as he spoke. Best not poison that well quite yet. Saffron came closer stopping just on the other side of the barrier, turning a last look at him, noting all the ways that he differed from Crimson more than the ones that he mimicked them. The set of Moxxie's knees, back-canted instead of forward. The smooth curve of his tail, not at all like the ragged zig-zag of Crimson's. The freckles. Then she tried to walk forward, to embrace her child, only to have her face rebound off of a nearly invisible barrier.
"Oh, right, sorry," Uller said, dropping the wall separating resurrected mother from suddenly-grown-up son. Saffron rubbed at the impact point for a moment, then tried again, pulling Moxxie into a hug that was nearly two decades overdue. Beatrice let out happy burbles where she was stuck between two embracing imps, and quickly had Saffron break off and lean down to start playing with Bea's questing little hands the same way that Moxxie had.
"So who is that, then?" Saffron asked with a glance toward Uller, between making baby-noises at Beatrice.
"A… confederate, I guess," Moxxie said. "There's a lot that needs to be explained, and right now, we need to go back to The Bard so that you don't come apart at the seams now that you're alive again."
"The Bard? He's real?" she asked.
"Yes; not an easy imp to find, but I found him," Moxxie said, and started to guide his mother out of the canyons. Uller gave a nod, hanging back until they had rounded the canyon bend ahead and then taking to the skies to go directly back to where the Thaumaturges had gathered. And during that way back, Moxxie tried to answer the obvious questions that Saffron asked. The year was 2023, Hell was at war with Heaven, Yaldabaoth's real name was Sam and the Demiurge turned out to have been a human the whole time, and that Moxxie killed living humans for dead humans as an occupation, now.
Some part of him was always recoiling, as though waiting for her scorn, or worse, her disappointment at his choices and path. But she seemed to accept it with a very 'it is what it is' sort of flow. Maybe she was building up her dismay until she'd heard the whole thing?
He wasn't sure. All he knew was that he was so happy right now it was mere chance he wasn't weeping. And the path back to the shack and The Bard was coming into view.
Only now the shack was visible, and there were more imps there.
"Who are those imps?" Saffron asked, pausing at Moxxie's side and looking at the women who were not watching in the two's direction but instead at something the house blocked from view.
"Those are the Crones of the Families Cruac," Moxxie said with a weary sigh. He knew this was coming. Krieg had made it clear what all of this was being done for in the first place. But it didn't make the coming affair any less tiresome. "They're here to test whether the Thaumaturge who helped the Bard has it in her to be an Ur-Crone."
"A what?" Saffron asked. Right. Wrathlings don't care about magic.
"Powerful, politically revered witch," Moxxie simplified. There was a lot more to the cultural caché of being Ur-Crone than that, but for somebody who didn't care about it, that made it clear enough. The last stretch was crossed with one final portal opening, disgorging a familiar face. It was Meris, the Drevisté Arch-Crone De-Facto. Which meant that the others would be including such luminaries as Deruim Balrock, Giselle Engi-Enno, Miriamele DeBrijette, Erin Eckermann, and Vias Voog.
"Are they a danger?" Saffron asked.
"Not to you," Moxxie answered his mother's question. He rounded the building, and a number of eyes turned to face the two of them. The Bard was still sitting exactly where he had plunked himself down a while before. Uller had rejoined Krieg, who stood at one side of the tide of old, powerful magical women, and Moxxie joined the Bard roughly in the middle of them.
"So this is your test case?" Giselle asked. Nobody was standing near her, because she emitted an almost visible haze of body-odor, and her clothes were actively growing moss. "Erin, you have the special eye. What do you see?"
Erin was the youngest-seeming of them, appearing somewhat younger than Meris, but considering the Eckermann brood were renowned for their longevity, she could be anywhere between 35 and 135 years old. And the fact that she was visibly pregnant changed exactly none of that estimation. Eckermann broke from the scrum of her fellow Crones and approached Saffron, stopping two crisp paces away and had her eyes go black as though she were readying a mighty wyrd. Only nothing happened. Just the blackness of the eyes, as she used her own, apparently lesser version of Magesight.
The other crones were muttering to each other, mostly offering light insult and barb to each other now that they were gathered in one place as opposed to separated out in their Sietches. These Crones simply didn't have it in them to be civil for more than a minute straight, it seemed. Some of them, having gotten the opening volley of insults and haughtiness out of the way, then started to ask after any dangling bloodlines they might use to shore up. Moxxie just rolled his eyes. Nuckelavee might be on its way into the grave, but Cruac was still Cruac.
"The discord is there, and is tone exactly half of The Bard, and half of the girl," Erin finally said. "The Bard's proffer was true. We are party to a fresh Resurrection."
"It was my proffer, not his!" Krieg snapped.
"That is indeed the case, my counterparts," The Bard said, pointing with a stick toward Krieg. "It is she who looks to prove herself. I've already shown everybody everything I care to show."
"So she would be Ur-Crone, then?" Voog asked. She shook her head. "She grasps for a crown without knowing that the path to it is lined with daggers. Do you even know what tests are required to be named Ur-Crone, girl?"
"This girl has a name, Voog," Krieg snapped back. It was known that Voog was the 'outsider' Family, the one held in least esteem, but likewise subject to the least strictures. In a word, they didn't have a lot of weight to throw around, which meant they were given leave to get away with a lot of shit, akin to how children are chastised for fuck-ups that an adult would be murdered for.
"Indeed. That I can remember it and you can't speaks ill of the lot of you," A distorted voice cut in. All turned to the newcomer, who had joined them without teleporting, without portal, and without a goddamned sound. The Radio Demon towered over everybody, his eyes blazing red in the light of the dying day, his suit a seeming extension of the scarlet sky that reached down and touched the dirt. The instant that all of the Crones (save Krieg) saw him, they all let out blood-curdling shrieks, and began to tear with their hands, attempt to rip open portals to literally anywhere else in Hell that wasn't here.
And The Radio Demon snapped his fingers, and there was a thunk sensation that everybody here could feel in their guts more than hear with their ears. The region was now Darkanchored. Balrock turned from flight to fight in a heartbeat, once the former proved impossible, casting her hand out and having a strange flare of un-light race out and toward the Radio Demon, erasing and annihilating the air and the light within it, until Alastor almost casually swished with his cane, striking that flying something, and causing it to collapse with a deeply unpleasant electric-like noise. The runes floating around The Beast That Grins circularized into dials. No; clock-faces. Those clock-faces showed seconds ticking by, until there was a crisp crack, and then all of the clocks fell still.
And so too, the Crones.
The screams ended, the Crones now trapped in stillness by the Radio Demon's spell. Saffron pulled Moxxie back with her, away from this nightmare made man-shaped. "Monster…" Saffron said.
"Enough, Radio Demon!" The Bard said, standing from his seat and pulling a contract dense with Litigator legalese from a pocket. "Release them or face the consequences."
Alastor blinked, as though in utter shock, the smile on his face going from malevolent to confused, and then to entertained. "What an audacious fellow you are! Have we met at some point in the distant past? I think I would have committed the likes of you to memory!" the Radio Demon said.
"Are you willing to risk the price I hold in my hand?" The Bard stared down the Radio Demon even despite his lack of useful eyes. And the Radio Demon laughed.
"Whatever you think you have, I assure you, it isn't enough to stop me," Alastor said.
"You might be surprised," The Bard said. He held the contract close to his mouth, and then said, "Come Running."
There was a pregnant pause.
"It seems that your audacity is not matched by your effectiven–" Alastor began.
Then there was a loud, metal bang, and a second human joined them here in this clearing. This one was arguably the most famous human in hell, Cain the First of the Damned, standing in a fine suit in blues and greens, his long hair leaking out from under a flat-cap and his beard pleated into a sheet of braids. He turned those pupilless green eyes at the array of imps before him, then to Alastor, then to The Bard.
"I presume you're the one who's called for my protection?" Cain asked. He narrowed his eyes. "Ordinarily, I would ask how you even have that, but each thing in its proper time. I presume also that you want me to protect you from him?"
"I must admit, of all the impediments that I thought could be arrayed against me today, you were not on the list," Alastor said. There was a moment of silence. "You do realize that you actually can't stop me from doing anything I want right now, don't you?"
"Perhaps I can't," Cain said. "But what I can do, is make it extremely painful for you to do it. And that's enough for me."
"You would barely slow me down," Alastor promised.
"Slow you down, just enough for us to kill you," The Bard said, as the contract began to burn away in his hand. "You were not invited here. And I won't see you massacre these women over your own pettiness."
There was a change in Alastor's smile. Though his grin didn't change, there was a slight wrinkling of at the corners of his eyes as an injection of honest mirth entered his expression. As though he found this all genuinely delightful.
"Very well," Alastor stabbed the butt of his microphone-cane into the stone, the breaking sound not just the basalt that the cane stabbed into but also the magicks that bound the Crones to stillness. "As long as they play nice, so shall I. After all, upholding my promise to kill any hag of the Clan Cruac is lower on my to-do list than to examine somebody recently brought back from the dead. And I can make it much, much lower… for a price."
The Crones were picking themselves up, unwilling to even speak. They were huddled together, ignoring the stench of Engi-Enno, and only Balrock and Eckermann even dared look at him. Alastor turned to Moxxie.
"You will show me, in exacting detail, the ritual that resulted in… this," he made an off-hand gesture to Saffron. "In exchange, they are left to leave MY RING, and I'll even consider that lingering debt you owe me to be repaid. Doesn't that sound delightful?"
Moxxie knew exactly what he wanted. And knew exactly how to give it to him in a way that would create a permanent solution to the Radio Demon's ongoing problem. After all, the Damned burned when they were brought back to life.
"Well bargained and done," Moxxie said.
"Excellent. Don't mind me, I'll just be over here aping the furniture!" Alastor said, walking away to the edge of the scrum of imps. Moxxie turned a look to The Bard, and even with his blinded eyes seemed to share a look of common understanding.
"Very well," The Bard said. "We should Adjust her quickly. Because it's clear that that one," he gestured toward Alastor, "identifies on the tax-forms as a Fucking Problem, it's best to get this done and left in our dust."
"You have such a delightful way with words, old timer," Alastor laughed. Saffron, though, leaned in close to Moxxie.
"Is… this always how things happen in Hell these days?" she asked, any confidence in her tone suddenly made ragged.
"It's how it often goes, yes," he said.
But all of this foolishness didn't matter. All that mattered was that Saffron was alive. Moxxie had his Mommy back.
Seriously, fuck you, Crimson.
"There are a great many things that can be said about The Bard, most of which I only learned about him after his demise. He and I were kindred spirits in a great many regards, chief amongst them our fairly unique understanding of the concept of responsibility and power. That brash young imp managed to evade the avaricious clutches of Ruut Nuckelavee – back when there was still a Ruut Nuckelavee to be afraid of – and without any backing from within the formal structures of Clan Cruac, become a mighty Wondeworker based purely on his own research and intellect. And instead of hording that power to make himself a petty little hill that he could rule from, he spent it on dragging the rest of Hell out of the mud.
I would almost claim that he was an adherent of young Charlotte's philosophy regarding Hell, but the truth of the matter was rather more personal; he ran afoul of a curse. A very bad one. And since it would be passed down his bloodline, he performed spells that would tear the curse out of his children and bind it, forever, in himself, so that the curses would die when he did. And doing so, well, it caused Disquiet and the demand for him to never settle down roots lest the more damaging aspects of the disability make themselves known to Hell.
So what does he do, knowing that he can't build up a castle of power for he and his to luxuriate in, because if he did he would bring ruin to them by doing so? He starts doing what young Charlie would categorize as 'altruistic acts'. Giving of himself to the community, because he had nothing better to do. It should come as no surprise that the man was a Philosophical Satanist. I also wouldn't be surprised if Satan Himself had dozens of boons scribed down in those big books of his that The Bard could have cashed in at any time.
Hell is lesser for The Bard's departure from it. The imp was old. And good old men die, while evil ones linger. At least he didn't carry all of his knowledge into the grave with him. If there was no greater kindness that he gave to the Rings of Hell, it was that all that he had learned, all that magical knowledge and all of that philosophy on the value of altruism in a place as debase and petty as the bowels of Hell, all of it he gave to his descendant and great-granddaughter-in-law. And in that, at least, his loss is bittersweet. Truly a legend, of latter-day Hell.
I never did learn how he got ahold of that favor that called for me. At this point, I would want to know just just satisfy my curiosity."
– Cain, First of the Damned and Terror Incarnate