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.

32. Players, and Plays

It was fortunate that Agrippa hadn't decided on the higher number of wings to earn his 'prize'. The fifty he'd been asked for ended up taking longer than he'd thought, though not nearly as long as perhaps the Caesar of this realm presumed. There was a very simple trick to the game, though: Agrippa was not a warrior, who needed to wade into the melee to tear the wing from his foe personally. He was a soldier. And his mother had not raised a mere soldier, but indeed a general. Every pool of golden blood spilled by his soldiers was, by proxy, one spilled by his hand. He didn't need to be seen killing fifty Angels. He just needed them to be dead. In the end, only one died by his actual presence, and that was because somebody, somewhere and somehow, had managed to get lucky at a time of Agrippa's great misfortune, and then failed to capitalize on it.

He was tired. The skirmishes along the edges of the Occupied Zone of Cloud One were neverending, with the Angels constantly trying to push them out of territory that they had earned with blood and shrapnel. And it wasn't easy, holding that line. He'd not attempted any advancements, along side the dozen or so other Dux Bellorim (all attempts doomed to miserable failure, Agrippa noted), but instead worked to make his theatres absolute meat-grinders into which Heaven would feed troops and would reap nothing. Once in a while, the Angels, frustrated with their lack of progress, would take matters into their own hands, and try to break the lines.

And then, once the Angel's body was riddled with holes or cleft apart, their halo Flared Out, Ambrosius Agrippa would claim that fool's right wing.

The last battle was a slaughter of a wholly other scale, however. One that, had he been a lesser leader of men, would have outright broken his forces and spilled beyond the battle-lines to savage the logsitical network of the entire Hellish front. The ferocity and discipline had been unyielding, and the battle had been theirs to lose. Until they lost it, suddenly and without fanfare, as what had been a Heavenly splitting-maul of Innocent backed by a cadre of Angels suddenly lost cohesion. The Angels raced ahead, the Innocent became bogged down, and the battle-line pinned the Innocent while Agrippa's personally hand-picked Praetorians spent their lives to end five Angels in a single fight.

Fifty four was a good number after all.

The descent from Heaven back to Hell was tense, having to walk through the claustrophobic innards of this ill-planned, ill-provisioned slum that had overtaken what was intended to be a scenic idyll not just on par with but outstripping lost Elysium. The eyes of Innocent drilled onto him. The soldiers of other leaders tried to ignore him as though he weren't there, perhaps believing that his mere presence was denying them some form of glory. More fools they. There was more than enough glory to be had in the triumph against Heaven.

Behind Agrippa came a number of wheeled ice-boxes, each of them holding between eight and ten right wings, depending on the size of the Angel he'd killed, and how much of the wing there had been. Proof of his duty done. He mulled things over. There had been trouble along the battle lines in places that he didn't deal with. As much as he turned his forces into a wood-chipper for the Angel, there were places which were as granite boulders thrown into the mouth of such a device. Places dominated by the use of Innocent, which hosted few if any Angels. And in the last battle, he had finally spotted the man opposite him; in a rare show of cooperation, his 'counterpart' worked together with those wardens of Heaven.

Niccolo Machiavelli.

In a way, Machiavelli was a countryman, separated though he was by sixteen centuries. And Machiavelli, in a way that no other up here seemed to share, knew the value of unorthodox tactics. There would be other battles against the man, Agrippa had realized. Machiavelli, being Innocent, could never be permanently killed. Agrippa lacked that advantage.

Agrippa's dark mullings were curtailed by the approach of Fort Abandon, which grew and became more entrenched – and indeed more ornate – with every passing of Agrippa through its gates. No longer merely a single bunker up against the plummet from Heaven, now Fort Abandon sprawled for kilometers along the edge of Heaven, and even metastasized onto the rubble of a collapsed tower, clearing the rubble and creating a much cleaner, much less aesthetically displeasing structure to store various things needful to such a place. There was even talk of perhaps putting up an airbase for rotary-craft, though such things would be of limited use in the cramped, dangerously close environs of Cloud One.

The gate-guards offered no ceremony as they saw him approach with some of his surviving Praetorians, merely opening the gate without hesitation. Which was exactly what he had asked of them. He was not an egoist. He didn't need all to bow and scrape around him. He just needed them to obey when he had orders worth giving. Within those outer walls which were now pushed right up against the towers there was a stark change. If Agrippa had expected the presence of Hell's forces on Heaven's shores to have 'corrupted' the fluffy cloud upon which the edge comprised, he would have been surprised. The more Fort Abandon built up, the less grey, more white, and indeed more puffy the ground felt, as though every step out-of-doors was done onto comfortable carpets made of freshly bleached wool.

The next layers of guards did as the first did, opening doors for him without fanfare, allowing him through the baileys of the layered structure until he approached the squat Portal Bunker, still the only structure made entirely out of the dislodged blocks of the now defunct Pearly Gates. Now that it wasn't under constant attack, they were even beautifying it. So be it. The army existed in part so that the artist could paint; any nation with soldiers and no artists was a failed state.

"Dux Bellorim Agrippa?" one of the door-guards to the gaping entry into the Portal Bunker asked. Agrippa, who had been lingering in thought, pulled himself back to the here and now. "There has been a message for you; we were not able to deliver it remotely, since we didn't know where you were."

"What message is this?" Agrippa said, gesturing that the ice-boxes filled with his 'trophies' should be sent ahead of him.

"Octavia Goetia is asking for your assistance," the imp said, jogging over to a wall and jumping up to pluck one of the scrolls down. He scanned the top line briefly before nodding and handing it over to Agrippa. Agrippa made no expression, simply taking the scroll and looking to it.

Octavia had been called before Lucifer.

And she needed his help with how to handle that grim Caesar of this realm.

"Your duty is done," Agrippa said, marching past and toward the Hell Portal. The Hellside portion of Fort Abandon, the Palace of Iron, was still in its infancy, vast portions of it under active construction and with only a fraction of a fraction of its total glory put together. Fort Abandon was shaping up much faster, but for a very simple reason: there were dozens of Ars Goetia, Warlords, Dux Bellorim and Aristocrats who had a vested interest in having that chip of Heaven be comfortable. The only ones backing Stella Goetia were Purson and Penemue. He turned to his Praetorian. "Send the wings to Lucifer's palace. And you, open a portal to the palace of Octavia Goetia."

"Yes, Dux Bellorim," the aged Presbyter Mage said with a nod, concentrating then opening a small portal that Agrippa had to stoop to walk through, one which routed 'through' the Hellportal and deposited him at the home of Stolas and Octavia, his Dominus and Domina.

And the red cretin was there, pacing in front of the door, waiting for him.

"...what are you doing here?" Agrippa asked as he marched up to the door.

"Tryin' to get some asshole to open the door 'fore I'm required to kick it down. Why the hell ain't the internal hallways connected to the rest of this casa, anyhow?" Blitz Miller, Voice of Lucifer, demanded. Agrippa didn't tell him that he'd personally bricked up most of them in the wake of the Purge Unending, if only to prevent an Exorcist from being able to stealthily assassinate anybody whom Agrippa owed any fealty or loyalty to. Now the Palace of Flowers was essentially three palaces that shared an interior wall. Agrippa opened the door to Octavia's portion of the manse.

"And why do you require the attention of my Domina?" Agrippa asked, grabbing the imp by the horn so he couldn't dart into the building before answering. The red cretin slapped Agrippa's hand away and glared up at him in pique, more offended than actually violent.

"The guy up top's got his panties in a twist over something, and I'm s'posed to make sure the bitch doesn't run the fuck away."

"Do not refer to my Domina such in my presence," Agrippa said. "She will not run."

"Yeah, well, I'm here instead of talking to a client with a job that actually sounds like it'll be fun. Nobody's happy in this transaction, fucko," the red cretin pointed out. How often it was the case, when Caesar Lucifer intruded onto the affairs of his underlings…

Agrippa didn't need to call for her, nor ask any servant where she would be. At this time of day, it would be in one of two rooms, both of which were next to each other. A glance as he rounded a bend in the marble-paved halls (which still bore an arcing trench cut into the stone, which was being preserved for posterity's sake), he saw into the training room with its Gyrfalcon and its Royal Golems. The training room was silent, which was good news on that front. That meant by exhaustion of options she was in the study opposite it. And when Agrippa opened the door, true to his expectations, there was Octavia Goetia, the youngest Angel in Creation to his understanding.

After all, Agrippa was utterly in the dark as to the nature of the Thirdborn.

She turned to him at the sound of the door being opened, and she looked… not as unwell as he had feared. As though she had in fact gotten a meal and several hours of sleep in the last cycle of day and night, though likely not as much of either as Agrippa would have preferred. She brightened to see her tutor, but that brightness curdled when the red cretin skirted around Agrippa and pulled himself up onto a plushly stuffed chair.

"Ambrosius, what the fuck is he doing here?"

"I presume for much the same reason you called on me," Agrippa said. "Lucifer has called on you. Why?"

"I don't know!" Octavia said, fastening her attention on Agrippa and ignoring that the red cretin was sitting in her presence – as was probably the best for her sanity. "I just get one of his letters telling me that I'm to come to his palace today and I have no idea why! I haven't done anything that would piss him off!"

"The tempers of our grim Caesar are capricious things on the best of days," Agrippa muttered.

"Yeah, Lucifer's a fickle bitch alright," the red cretin agreed, looking unhappy at the thought.

"Cease," Agrippa said. The imp raised the impudent digit at him. Agrippa didn't react. "If you cannot recall what has raised his ire, then there is a chance, however a small one, that there is no ire involved. Save, of course, for the ire that would be raised for dithering in the face of one of his summons."

"Oh, he don't like that," the imp said with a nod.

"So calm. Regain your bearing. Remember the litany against fear. In the end, only you will remain," Agrippa said. It had been a strange but fascinating book that he'd picked up in a market several decades ago, so filled with the esotericism of the Selucids and the Zoroastrians. And a strange fixation on drugs and worms. But that litany, present in its opening chapters, seemed to perfectly embody the stoic idea. Once Octavia seemed to have shed the worst of her nerves, she puffed out a breath and stood as tall as she had in her, which put her a fair bit above Agrippa's eye-line.

"Alright. I'm calm. So if he's not angry at me… why would he even call me? I don't have any legions, I don't have any land or holdings. The only thing I have are IP rights and those are being licensed to anybody who can turn a wrench or string a circuit…"

"It is not our place to question why Hell's Caesar wishes for you, at this juncture. It is ours, sadly, to obey," Agrippa said. She was dressed well enough for a meeting, though not enough to impress onlookers. He doubted she cared about that, though. "Given your state of dress, we should probably leave at once, rather than tarry any longer and risk increasing the Caesar's wrath.

She nodded. Then she looked to the imp.

"Oh shit that's me," the red cretin said. He pulled out the grimoire that he had, in a roundabout way, usurped from Agrippa's Dominus, and created a portal directly into the palace of the King of All Hell. "Y'all go make yourself known, and Imma go kill some humans. Have fun now!"

"What does my father see in him?" Octavia muttered as she passed with Agrippa through the portal into the seat of Lucifer's power.

"That is between your father and Amor, I'm afraid," Agrippa could only shake his head.

---

Chapter 32

Players, and plays

---

The Chapel of Satan in Imp City was much as it always was, a place of chanting, introspection, and giving thanks for the benefits of living according to that opaque code-of-conduct that they called Good Standing. The whole thing fell somewhere between a religion and a philosophy, and kept going back and forth as though it couldn't decide which it wanted to be. But since Mayberry was quietly reading the 'holy text' in the building, nobody bothered her, leaving her to wait for the Pontiff, or whatever they called who ran these places, to make him(or her)self known. She felt… different, than she had the first time she came to the chapel.

It was probably because there was a section of her which was, through magical means, being rendered alive, as opposed to dead and Damned.

The sliding of wood across wood pulled Mayberry's attention to the approaching, red robed figure. It was the succubus, the Daughter of Satan who as far as Mayberry could tell, never actually seemed to sleep or eat. Though other priests were what the book called 'lay clergy', those chosen to do works for the faith, none of them were by canon-law adoptive children of Satan and thus her half-siblings. She, Satan's chosen and adopted daughter, was the constant around which all worship and sacrament rotated. Much the same way that Wrath did around Satan, Mayberry supposed.

"Again you return to the place of supplication, and again the Final Satan will ask what has brought you, Boon-seeker, to his attention?" the rasping voice of the succubus intoned.

"I need to speak with Satan, whenever it is possible," she said.

"As you are a Sinner, that is a tall ask for your ilk. You would make powerful enemies crossing the Pride Wall," the Daughter of Satan said.

"There are other ways to speak to Satan," she said, closing the Biblical Iracundia and turning her back to it. "And I need to speak to him as to the nature of the last boon that I have."

"So instead of something paltry and simple like wealth, you have something involved, which requires the conscious effort of Our Father to create? Perhaps that will be beyond his desires to give."

"He will give it to me," Mayberry said. The red robed succubus stared for a long moment, then offered a dry, dry chuckle.

"Perhaps he will. Your audacity and your status as a known-bearer of Boons has granted you much more forbearance than your kind usually earn. I will ask if he is willing," she said, making the sign of the Five Point Star with her hands and sliding her eyes closed.

Simply put, this had to work, because she found that she didn't have a lot of options. While she was certainly capable of violence, that violence as it turned out was only best used to brutalize single assholes who had done something to awaken her now considerable wrath. In the state she was in, that kind of force wasn't very useful in such things as protection of self or others.

"I should be unsurprised that thou call upon me again so soon," Mayberry blinked, and the red-robed form of the Succubus seemed to… retract, somehow, and in its place there was the visage of Satan, sitting in a fine but not ostentatious chair, seemingly at a dinner table. "And thou art fortunate in thine timing. Had thou been any earlier, my answer to thee would have been altogether more curt. How fares the unborn?"

The first boon she had asked of Satan had been a doozy; for some way to finally have the child that Jerold always put off until the day he cheated on her with a skank. Despite being dead, Damned, and rendered infertile by it, she still had the maternal clock ticking in her head. And given the choice between asking an impossible favor and losing her mind over never-achievable baby-fever, she took the former option.

Satan's response had been twofold; one, an introduction to an imp who had, by his observation, found a way to undo the infertility of the Damned if even on a temporary basis. That ritual would need to be used on Mayberry repeatedly during the entire pregnancy; if ever it faded while the child was still growing, it would immediately miscarry. That a child-imp would come up with that kind of magic seemed a bit strange. But Satan never mentioned anything odd about this particular imp, so Mayberry just chalked it up to her own myopia here in Hell; she tended to keep her eyes to her business and her hands to herself. For that reason, she had very few people down here trying to kill her. And most of the people who wanted to, well, she was now very handy with a chainsaw.

"Gestating, just like it was the last time I was here," Mayberry said. Satan gave what seemed a pleased nod. The ancient and terrifying demon nevertheless managed to be very… human, in a lot of ways. Often bridging the Uncanny Valley from the far side without ever falling into the pit. It was a strange sensation.

"So pleasing, that the seed managed to take," Satan said with a nod. The second half of Mayberry's first boon had come in the form of a nearly imperceptible speck, which Satan was able to provide. According to Satan, it had been the only viable human semen in all of Satan's vast reach of Hell. How and why Satan got his hands on that droplet was not elaborated on wholly, other than that it had 'arrived in his care after passing through several interested hands'. It certainly wasn't one of Krieg's test-subjects, though; by the way he was talking, he'd had that spunk for months before the imp even invented that spell. Whatever the case, it had fulfilled its biological purpose now. "Thou seem somewhat unwell. Has the sorcery over you become taxing?"

"Yes, but that's not the point," Mayberry said. Pregnancy was never easy. If it had been, it wouldn't have killed so many women throughout Earth's history. "I've finally decided what my second boon will be…"

"Peace, peace woman," the image of Satan waved his hand placatingly. "There will be time enough for that. It pleases me greatly that this project sees forward stride. Thou shalt be mother to something new, unseen in Hell. Take respite in that. Breathe deep of the change that though wrought. Then, with eyes clear, continue."

She narrowed her eyes at Satan, but the Elder Devil merely reached out of sight and produced a handkerchief, wiping the corners of his mouth while she at least appeared to do as he asked. "My eyes are clear. Will you hear me now?"

"Very well. Haste, thy name is human, even amongst the dead," Satan gave a door-rattling sigh. "Speak of this boon you would ask of the Final Satan."

"When my boy is born, I need to know that he will be taken care of," Mayberry said. Satan frowned slightly at that.

"Fearest thou reprisal for the 'crime' of his birth?" Satan asked.

"I'm not sure what's going to happen when he's born!" Mayberry declared. "And I know that if I'm around, I can fight for him, but… well… what if I'm not?"

Her ongoing condition had brought to mind Eddie Luutmann, and the harsh lesson that boy's strange death had imparted. All it would take is a mother's momentary inattention, and then the child's corpse would be dumped onto the street on live camera.

"So thou art made to shudder by the thought of those blades in the dark, not of cruel volition but of simple circumstance. I understand," the projected image of Satan nodded, looking melancholy into the distance somewhere beyond the room they were in and beyond Mayberry. "I fear I understand better than thou may yet believe."

"Which is why I want to know what you can do to protect him, if something goes wrong. If I… I don't even know…" the words failed her. What if the anger which brought her here began to grow sloppy, and its precision against her transgressors became wild?

What if she, in her spates of rage, raised a hand to her own boy?

"Know this," Satan said, raising a finger from his knee. "That whosoever attempts to bring harm to thine child, does so upon price of blood against the Final Satan and all of mine many children. Shouldst thou vanish sudden from Hell, thy son shall be taken and raised a prince within my manse, given the greatest of education, taught all of the skills and powers available to him. Thou asketh of The Final Satan a scholarship and protection for thy child? Y̷͖̩̎̊͝͝O̴̝̾͝U̴̯͇͠ ̶̩̣̟͓̿̉̍̋̽̚S̴̩̮͓̜͕͎̄̽͑͊͘͘H̵̪̞͓̮͉̃̕A̴̺͓̦͍͐L̴̡̘̲̞͛̆̑̆ͅL̶̠̰̔̆́͗͌ ̴͍͈͖̂̏͠H̷̰͚̻̘͋͋̿̓̌͝Ȁ̸̞͜V̶̗̓͌͆̑E̶̳̫͈̾͊̓ ̵͙͎̟̅̕͜Ǐ̸̞͓͌̚͝T̷̼̻̜̹̀͑̀."

"Thank you, Lord Satan," she said, bowing her head in respect.

"Thy boons hath been spent. Live by Good Standing, raise thy child well and in accordance to the strictures of the Progress of Hell, and thou may yet find thyself bearing more. Until such time, good day."

Then, the image of Satan folded away, leaving his Daughter chanting quietly under her breath with her fingers laced into the Five Point Star before her. After a few seconds more, the Succubus finally seemed to recognize that her adoptive father had departed, and she straightened to her full height.

"The Room of Airs has others seeking Benediction," the succubus said without malice but likewise without patience. "Get the fuck out."

Mayberry didn't fight the Succubus' command. She'd gotten what she could have wanted to. Now, she just needed to stay 'alive' long enough for her son to be born. Not that Hell would make it easy.

Nothing was ever easy. Not even killing the blond whore up on Earth turned out simply. At least she got it for half price.

---

Octavia smelled blood as she approached the hall that she was intended to speak to Lucifer in, and the stink of it kept drawing her nervous glance toward Agrippa, who approached with his back straight and not so much as a twitch that they were obviously heading toward something grisly. Any conversations between the two of them faded to grim silence not long after getting into the palace, which reached skyward in avaricious vainglory, its towers like clutching claws raking to tear down the sky. There was nothing to say – or perhaps, nothing to safely say – here in the place where Lucifer's power was at its zenith.

She tried to take calming breaths, to emulate Agrippa's stone-faced resolve, but every exhale released with a faint but nervous hoot. She had no idea how the Sinner, how the former human, had such willpower, when she, an actual fucking angel, wanted to crawl back into an egg. Maybe that was just something that thousands of years of life would give her. Only not, because Dad didn't show half of Agrippa's self-restraint.

Whatever the case, the doors were pushed open, and revealed the chamber that Lucifer had chosen for this audience was currently awash with blood scarlet and golden, with a trail gold leading out the side door, while the sources of the red lay, Truly Dead and Purified, on the floor. Lucifer was running a rag along the scourge that shone with blistering purity, ignoring how his finger burnt and sent up a curl of smoke every time it came close to the lash.

"Finally you show up," Lucifer said, his grin wide and his voice sounding at least a bit pleased. "You're late. I would have preferred all of you be here at the same time, so that I don't need to make my point fucking twice, but… well… Hell is a messy place these days," he finally coiled the lash and threw it to Lilith, who was wearing skin-tight red leather a short distance away. She looked very pleased at the prospect of holding a lash to the dead and the failed.

"The task you have entrusted to me is completed, Caesar of Hell," Ambrosius said, falling to a knee in the blood.

"Yes, I had word that people from your legions came in here with some freezers," Lucifer's smile grew smaller but more cruel, more embodying pettiness. "To think all it took to thin the ranks of Heaven was to send somebody with a working brain. I simply must clone you, my able Dux Bellorim. It would be incredibly handy to have you in two places at once."

"Impossible, I'm afraid," Lilith said. "Or at least it is by the Old Magic."

"Well darn," Lucifer snapped his fingers in a show of comic dismay. He stood, and it was clear that he had made a throne out of the corpses of Purified Sinners, who must have done something to displease him. "It's just as well that you showed up when you did. I need some competence in the room with me for a change. After all, these worms…"

Lucifer glared at both the corpses and the blood-trail that had left the room.

"Your grace, perhaps it is best to keep to the schedule," Lilith said demurely. Lucifer snapped his fingers and pointed at her.

"You're right as usual, my delicious little lollipop," Lucifer said. He kicked the pile of carcasses over and had an actual throne appear in the space they vacated – a construct of Lucifer's Angelsong. "Simply put, I have been being fairly… let's call it lax… with the degree to which I've been administering the newly restored territories on Cloud Probity. Simply allowing anybody who has the ambition to slither into Heaven and try to set up and keep the place ticking over. In my defense, that sort of thing usually works out in the end," he gave a shrug that would have belonged on a befuddled dad in a crappy sit-com. "Of course, not this time, as it turns out."

"Have they been acting in corruption?" Agrippa asked, as the pause grew long. Lucifer turned a mildly patronizing look at him.

"Yes, Sinner, they have been tremendously corrupt. Everybody's 'corrupt'. I don't even know why they bother having a word for it, it's so universal," Lucifer complained. He kicked one leg over the other and sat back, waggling his foot where it was braced against his knee. "No, the problem is not that they're corrupt. It's that their corruption got too ambitious and too damaging. It's not what they did which angers me so, Sinner. It's what they failed to do. And what they failed to do was keep my piece of my stolen homeland under control."

Lucifer pointed at Octavia. She almost recoiled as though he'd shot her.

"You, child. How do you stop a riot by people who you can't kill, and will always rise up and do it again in a day no matter how hard you clamp down?" he demanded.

"You… ah… remove the need for them to riot?" she asked. Lucifer blinked at her. Oh, shit. He was asking for an actual answer. She quickly wracked her brain trying to expand that. And for once, all the shitty lessons her tutors taught her came to mind, always serving as object lessons in what was wrong with Hellish administration, of 'what not to do'. "I mean, if they're going to rebel like clockwork, the only option is to make them feel like they don't need to. Even if that means giving them something. And once they stop rioting… maybe make them work for us somehow? Get them invested in Hell, so that the don't want to rebel in the long term as well as in the short?"

Lucifer turned to Agrippa. "What have you been teaching this one?"

"All that I can," Agrippa said.

"Well, teach her faster," Lucifer said. He sat back in his chair, scrutinizing her. She felt utterly naked under his gaze, more vulnerable than a child in the Bleeding Pits. "What do you think, sweetie?" Lucifer asked over his shoulder.

"It would be a charming thing to not have our ammunition stores being blown up every third day," Lilith said. "And given the state of their privation… such placation could probably be bought at rock-bottom prices."

"Exactly what I was thinking," Lucifer said. Or maybe even lied. It was so hard to tell with the only Archangel in Hell. Octavia didn't move so much as a feather, lest that straw break the figurative camel's back. "Exactly. What I. Was thinking," he repeated. He stood, and the throne vanished. He pointed at her, nodding slightly to himself, his eyes narrowed. "I think this is what we need."

"I'm… sorry?" Octavia asked. "I don't understand."

"A new perspective on things. Somebody not entrenched in old, failed ideas. Somebody who isn't either a shitty human," Lucifer said, not even pausing in his cadence to kick a Sinner's corpse so hard that it ruptured sending gore and bone-fragments scattering away in a fan, "or one of my old followers who are so set in their ways about Old Heaven that they can't see the New."

"And when she fails, no harm done. Well, no meaningful harm," Lilith said.

"Exactly, pet, exactly," Lucifer said. He smiled, a proud and victorious smile, as though some esoteric victory had just been handed to him. "It's about time that you start earning all that wealth and privilege that you were born to, Goetia; I have a job for you."

"Do you wish my…" Agrippa began.

"Shut the fuck up, this isn't about you," Lucifer said, thrusting a finger at Ambrosius, which struck the Aquiline Sinner like a haymaker into the gut. Ambrosius stumbled back, but didn't fall over, nor utter a word. "So you, Octavia Goetia, Firstborn of Hell, Song of Dusk, I'm going to give you a little task to prove that you're worth the blood that flows in your veins and the wings still attached to your back. One to which, I do hope you understand, failure is not an acceptable option."

He strode up to her, his footfalls crisp and sharp, sounding like hob-nails on marble not muffled in the slightest when they trod through gore or pools of blood. She found herself flinching back from him to the point where she wasn't even taller than him. The only honor that she brought to this whole affair was that she didn't wet herself like a terrified infant.

"Fort Abandon needs an administrator, someone formally in place by my directive, with the authority to claim and hold all of the lands of the lowest Cloud of my homeland. And that is going to be you. Whatever little games and schemes you've got going on down here, well, I hope they refrigerate well, because you're going to be too busy to play around with those other shitlings, for now and until at least we create a new, higher foothold up on Cloud Charity."

"They'd never listen to me. I'm still…"

"You are an Ars Goetia and you are being placed there on my direct order. Anybody who resists you in the pursuit of my ends in Cloud Probity is resisting me by proxy," Lucifer said in a very no-nonsense tone. "I don't care if your being there ruffles feathers. You birdish fucks have enough of them that they can afford to be ruffled from time to time. Why are there so many birds these days amongst the Ars Goetia, my sweet?"

"So they could have an excuse to grow new wings, your grace," Lilith answered him.

"So they could grow new wings," Lucifer echoed. He turned a snapping-sharp eye at her. "I don't give an iota of a shit about their opinions on this. As long as they obey my directives. You have no excuse to not succeed. And if they get in your way, FUCKING DEAL WITH THEM," the last words were a demanding roar. Octavia, battered down by the sheer power that Lucifer embodied, could only nod mutely. "Fantastic. So to make this all official, let's get all of this bullshit out of the way. Alright, so it starts wiiiith right. Rank. For the duration of your administration of Fort Abandon, you will be considered a Non-Hereditary Duchess. Don't think you can laze around and have that authority pass to your offspring."

"Of course not, your grace," she said, her voice shuddering.

"Excellent. Now, with that out of the way, I also give you the Permanent Right to raise a single Hellish Legion in my name, and a temporary requirement that you raise another eleven along-side it. If you manage to not fuck things up, I'll even let you keep the dozen of them. Oh, and you're paying for them. My purse is closed to you."

"She has her father's wealth to leech from. She'll be fine," Lilith cooed.

"That's true, the Prince of Flowers is a rich motherfucker, isn't he? Even post-divorce," Lucifer shrugged. "Well, the last thing ties to that pretty neatly. Fort Abandon and Cloud Probity has been nothing for this entire war but an enormous money-sink. Something that I keep throwing cash and lives at and availing me fucking nothing. The price of your ascension is a responsibility. I want you to find a way to make that fiscal black-hole break even."

There was a silence. "Break even, your grace?" Octavia asked.

"Produce as much money as it costs. Don't you teach her anything about fucking finances, Sinner?" Lucifer snapped.

"I was asking… how… I'm supposed to…" Octavia said, gently moving to block Lucifer's ire from Ambrosius. Since Lucifer was in her eyeline again, he just faced her flush.

"I don't care. I don't give a plague-rat's dick how exactly you stem the flood of money that's flying out of my realm and into the fucking Abyss. I just expect you to do it. I don't care if you do it by selling the Innocent to Asmodeus for Hellspawn to fuck. Just make that money-pit start to fucking earn!"

"I will, your grace," she said, having no idea how she could possibly do it. As she looked up, freezers were being pushed into the room, and Lucifer put on a demented if delighted grin. Without waiting for any say-so, he ripped the lid off of one and began to throw out wings, each of them frozen solid and slathered in golden blood. Octavia turned a glance to her teacher, who merely raised one finger, promising to answer her unspoken question in a more opportune setting. Once Lucifer had dug to the bottom of all of the freezers, gave a loud laugh, then turned to Ambrosius.

"You absolute madman, you actually went and did it. And you gave me four more besides. You know what? Fuck it. As far as the law is concerned, you were born here. Go have a vacation in Sloth," he said. Lilith cleared her throat. And when Lucifer glanced to her, he seemed to realize the folly. "Of course, not right now, with the war being what it is. I still need you killing those traitorous dogs up in Heaven for me."

"If there is nothing else, we shall depart to our duties, Caesar of Hell," Ambrosius said.

"Very well, go be useful somewhere. That goes for the both of you," Lucifer said, dismissing them with an offhand wave. Octavia needed no further urging to bow, retreat until her back hit the door, then open it and slide out. She sucked in a breath she didn't know she was holding, and felt flop-sweat through her feathers.

"That was…" Octavia began.

"That could have gone a lot worse, though not perfectly," Ambrosius said, not breaking his Patrician calm for an instant. "Still, we both got what we wanted out of him and now we can do as we must."

"Wanted?" Octavia asked with a strangulated tone. "Who said I wanted any of that!"

"You did, through your actions as opposed to your words," Ambrosius said, and began to walk slowly. She followed, because any excuse to get away from Lucifer was a welcome one. "I shall arrange for what personal effects you will most require be sent to Fort Abandon; we can discuss this in greater depth, there."

Even Ambrosius was using her as a piece in their game. The only boon that Octavia felt was that she was certain that the old Sinner would be much more likely to maintain Octavia than other players. She muttered incoherently under her voice. Some day, and some day soon, she was going to have to find a way to get off of the board, and sit at its edge, as a player.

---

The hotel was a great, grotesque thing, overgrown to the succubus' more agrarian sensibilities. But it was home to one of the few actual friends she had left, so within she went.

Truly Delicious had expected something… less, based on Angel Dust's description of this place. Not that he was disparaging of it. Just that he always described it as being more ad-hoc and being held together by baling wire. But here it was, not just a building but in fact a gated community built around that swollen tumor of a building, with military checkpoints manned by what looked like Golems. And within, there were those people that Angel had told her about, with their gapped haloes, those poor bastards thrown out of Heaven.

And through it all, the general hubbub of a center for comfort and respite, something that she'd had very little experience with. Not long after her failed surgery, she'd essentially resigned herself to slow starvation and isolated living, but the Border Towns had more than enough room to house a misfit like her. Being back in a place like this? It was bittersweet. She could still, if she looked with her eyes squinted just so, echos of her parents' big (if second-hand) estate house they earned by videotaping their various fornications.

"Howdy," she said, to the sphinx-Sinner at the front desk. He turned a surly eye toward her, and suddenly she felt a great deal more at home. "I'm told there's a spider living under this roof."

"Might be. Why? You a bounty hunter?" the androsphinx asked, seeming to outright intuit that she wanted a shot of bourbon and pouring her one.

"That's not my tempo," she said, opening her coat a bit to reveal her badge-of office that was pinned right to the scant tab of fabric covering her voluptuous breast. Today was fucking hot, but at least it was also raining so that she wasn't a pile of sweat and BO.

"A Reeve. Don't see too many of your kind here in the city," the androsphinx said. "Most of them realize the futility of tryin' to impose the law in a shithole like this."

"I hear Sallos has some, trifling, success," she said, and drained the shot. "Name's Truly."

"Husk," he said, not extending a hand but instead refilling the shot. "So what the fuck do you want with Angel Dust?"

"I'm surprising him," she said. Husk narrowed his eyes at her.

"Right. You're that weirdo he keeps wanderin' out to visit. How in the sweet fuck did you meet him, anyway?"

"Talked him out of marching through the Pride Wall," she said with a deserved note of pride.

"Ah. Must'a been back in spring," Husk said with a nod, obviously having pieces to an unseen puzzle slide into place. "He got you roped into his second whack at the suicide mission?"

"This is the first I'm hearing about a 'second suicide mission'," Truly pointed out. "What has he been doing?"

"I ain't tellin' his secrets. It's bad for business," Husk gave his head a shake.

"Exactly. If you're going to ask for the particulars, perhaps you should find a more appropriate source," a new voice cut in, this one a human with almond-shaped eyes and a Gapped Halo above his head. He was smiling in perhaps the most disarming way possible; so disarming that it almost made her on-edge. "Greetings, you may call me Jun-Ho."

"Truly," she said.

"Truly what?" Jun-Ho took her hand and held it as though about to kiss the knuckles as opposed to give it a shake as she'd intended.

"Truly Delicious," she said. He suddenly broke into a grin.

"Oh, this must be one of the seductresses! You never told me they had this particular… bearing," Jun-Ho said.

"Give it a break. She's got a brain issue," Husk said. She turned a look at him. "Only Aces have that scar on their heads."

Jun-Ho shrugged and released her hand. "Very well, if this one is unwilling, there are more than enough in the rest of Hell for when I have some time to myself," he said.

"So never, then," Husk said.

"I'm not that much of a workoholic," Jun-Ho said. He straightened his ornate clothes. "But I digress. The mission is not an elaborate suicide, no matter what my counterpart from Hell claims. There's a very real possibility of success and victory."

"He says that about anything with a likelihood higher than zero," Husk groused.

"Anything not impossible is inevitable," Jun-Ho countered. He turned to her, and motioned her toward a sitting room. "So why have you come? Are you trying to join him on his little adventure?"

"Until today, I hadn't even known that there was an adventure," Truly admitted. "Just that he fucked up in a bad way, and that something's keeping him going."

"Hrm. It's not like Angel Dust to be so… private. But then, I barely knew him at all before his first attempt to reach Heaven through violence. He's being much more careful with his second attempt. Delegating as he'd ought to the first time around. Ah, here's one of them now. Rozarin!" Jun-Ho said.

Roz was a very tall Sinner, red skinned with horns a snarl that started from her brow and reached back and spiked somewhere between the likes of a stag and an elk, nearly seeming to form a crown. Roz gave a double-take at Truly, no doubt confused as to what somebody dressed like her was doing in here. Well, fuck you, red Sinner; she was a succubus and she had sensitive skin. Better to wear little and then throw a coat over top of it to keep the weather at bay.

"Angel? Where are you?" the human with his halo asked. And Angel Dust finally showed up; he'd been half leaned into an alcove out of sight, which now that Truly looked at it was host to a bunch of human food which honestly looked scrumptious. "Ah. Didn't recognize you from the back."

"You'd be about the foyst to say that to me, toots," Angel Dust said. He then brightened when he turned and spotted Truly. "Hey there girlfriend! What'cha doin' way the fuck in the city on a day like this?"

"I figured it was finally time for me to visit you. I've got my deputy sober and competent enough –at the same time, no less – that Black Tooth can survive at least a day without me," Truly said, as Angel Dust quickly popped over to pull her into a brief hug. He was good people, that Angel Dust. She gestured to the group of them. "So what exactly is this about a suicide mission I'm just now hearing about?"

"Ain't gonna be a suicide mission, not this time," Angel got a stubborn look on his face. "Last time, I fucked up, and it cost my bestie her life. And even I ain't stupid enough to make that same mistake twice."

"Well, we're still in the planning stage," Rozarin pointed out, holding up a tablet that showed a bunch of military looking stuff which flew well over Truly's head. "The last thing we need is to go into Heaven in the middle of an all-hands-on-deck offensive and run into one of the Archangels."

"Again," Angel Dust muttered. Sweet unholy shit, he'd actually run up on an Archangel? For real? Not just drunken rambling? Well, that certainly put the level of his previous SNAFU into perspective.

"I'm not actually getting in the way of something, am I?" she asked.

"Hell naw. Right now we're just spit-ballin' shit. We're still way, way off from doin' this for realsies," Angel Dust said. He looked to the others. "Where the fuck is that imp, anyway?"

"Haven't heard from him," Rozarin said. "But that's kind of what he told us to expect for the next month or so."

"What the fuck is he even doin' at a time like this? Is there some sort of 'peak season' for offin' motherfuckers?" Angel Dust asked.

"Could be a lot of things," Truly pointed out. "He might not even be assassin-ing."

"He didn't strike me as the type," Rozarin muttered. Angel Dust gave his head a shake, then began to usher Truly from the room.

"Let's leave that bullshit in its box for a while," he said once they were back out in the lobby. "So seriously. You didn't come all the way into the city for li'l ole me. What's got you making that long fuckin' drive?"

"This is the first time I've been in PC," she said with a shrug. "Guess I wanted to see what all this Luciferean fuss was about."

"Yeah, well, we don't exactly march to the big-guy's drum down here at the Hotel," Angel gave a slow shake of his head. "That ain't the way that Charlie operates."

"And frankly I wanted to make sure that you weren't just putting on a tough-guy mask when you came to visit," she continued. Angel turned a confused look at her. "The kind of 180 you did isn't exactly common. Uncommon enough, in fact, that it started to raise doubts."

"Pshaw, I'm fine!" Angel said, waving her notion away.

"No. You're not," Truly said. He pulled a face at her. "You can lie to this 'Charlie' woman, you can lie to yourself, but you can't lie to me. You're still going to Heaven because you don't care which result you get. Either you succeed, and you can kill the guilt of your friend in saving that sister of yours – what was her name?" he provided it, with leery tone. "...or you die up there in trying, and you join her. And that kind of thinking isn't healthy."

"When'd you become the arbiter of 'healthy thinking'?" Angel Dust snapped.

"I have to drink my self most of the way into a stupor to eat. I know very, very well what healthy is simply by the hole its absence leaves in my life," Truly said.

"Well, fuck me, that was almost poetical," Angel Dust muttered.

"I have my moments," Truly said. She also had stacks of truly cringe-inducing notebooks where she'd practiced it in her adolescence that she was pretty sure her parents still broke out from time to time when they were in need of a good laugh. She loved her folks, but sometimes they were assholes. "So how about you show me around a bit. Be that good friend that you claim you aren't."

"You know, if I didn't know any better, I'd'a thunk you were tryin' to get close to me for something, the way you're acting," Angel Dust said, hitting the elevator call button with his elbow.

"I am getting close to you for something. I don't have many male friends. It's refreshing to find them where I can," she said.

"See, that's the weird part, most 'a my friends from way back was dames. I'm friends with women, but I fuck men," Angel Dust said as the elevator opened.

"No judgement here," she said. "Just a bit envious that it's that easy for you."

Angel Dust's eyes narrowed, as he suddenly seemed to have been struck by a thought as he thumbed a floor and had the lift begin to ascend. "You know… maybe there's something that can be done for that."

"I've had radical, experimental surgery that carved up a crescent of my brain. There's not a lot more that can be done," Truly said.

"You ever tried magic?" he asked.

"I don't trust mages. They always cost more than you think they're going to, and never give you exactly what you ask," she said. Lust ring had no shortage of charlatans in Crystal Palace.

"Well, 'parently there's some people next town over that might be useful. Do that 'miracle surgery' bullshit. I don't know much about it, 'cause I didn't see a reason to ask, but hey; they probably don't call it 'miracle' surgery for nothing."

"Don't give me hope that you can't answer on, Angel Dust," Truly said with a very flat tone. There'd been no shortage of people offering spectacular cures for her condition. And every single one had left her poorer and disappointed.

"That's the easy part. Just don't get your hopes up, and talk to 'em like they can't do shit," Angel Dust said, leaving the lift as it reached his floor and opening the door to his room. Instantly, Truly's nose twitched. Was that the smell of…

And true to her expectations, a half-grown hell-hog waddled up to her, and began to poke at her calves with its flat nose, grunting all the while. She found herself overtaken by a grin and squatted down to play with the hog's floppy ears and pudgy face. "Well helloooo you handsome little devil!" she said with a sing-song tone.

"No tour 'a Pentagram City's complete without an introduction to Fat Nuggets. Nuggz? This is Truly," said Angel Dust in an oddly warm tone.

The pig alone made the trip to the city worth it.

---

The former estate of the Proxy of Lucifer was growing more lively by the week. Now restored to something greater than it had been under that ghastly Nathan Birch, the edifice went from strength to strength, first accepting a babe into its embrace, and now, apparently, that babe's resurrected grandmother.

There was something… offputting, about Saffron Knolastname, though.

Millie had done everything that a reasonable person would have done to ensure that the newly-returned mother-in-law would be able to land on her hooves. But no matter what Millie did to try to welcome Saffron in, she found herself gently and politely rebuffed.

Of course, the day of her arrival back into Hell had been a loud one; upon being introduced to the house, she took on a surly air, one that Moxxie, bless his heart, tried to ignore, but eventually, boiled to the surface to the extent that to ignore it was to ignore a gun-barrel to your eye with a bullet already firing down its length.

"Where is the shrine?" Saffron had said.

"The… shrine?" Moxxie'd answered.

"Yes, the shrine to Satan," she pressured.

"We… ah… don't have one," he'd admitted.

She'd flinched as though somebody had struck her. "You don't have a shrine giving reverence to Our Father Of Wrath? Am I hearing you properly?"

"No, I don't. Mum, why are…" Moxxie tried to deescalate, but Saffron was apparently not having it.

"I raised you better than that, Moxxie! I raised you to give proper reverence to the Father Of Wrath and all of the Good And Glory that he embodies! How long has it been since you've even been to church?" Saffron seemed properly incensed as she'd asked.

"A few months," Moxxie said, his own face settling into stubbornness which could only have been passed as a hereditary marker from mother to son. "And I've been to Satan's palace about as often as I have in the last year."

"So you haven't gone at all," Saffron's eyes seemed to burn yellow.

"Um… we kinda talked to Satan a little while ago," Millie tried to keep that conversation from spiralling.

"Oh really. So one of you at least is still a proper Satanist," Saffron had said, glaring at her son.

"Actually, I'm not much'a anything, faith-wise."

"You're raising my granddaughter to be an APOSTATE?" Saffron shouted.

"Hey! You keep it down!" Millie demanded, covering Bea's little ears.

"You don't have a say in this; your apostasy was forced on you by negligent parents," Saffron had said, which instantly curdled any goodwill that Millie had for the woman. "But I raised you better than this!"

The argument continued for a long time, with Moxxie growing less conciliatory and more sharp with every exchange. Slowly, as the two of them began shouting back and forth at each other, Millie felt a chill settle into her blood, as a side of Moxxie she'd only ever seen once before emerged, something angry and prideful, maybe even conceited. Millie had always known that Mox wasn't big on religion. But to see just how 'not big', to have it dragged naked into the daylight and thrown against its opposite in his mother…

It scared her a little.

The argument didn't have a winner. Millie finally pulled Moxxie away from his steadfast mother and tried to get him to cool off. And for just a moment, she saw an expression on his face that didn't belong to him, because it had been stolen right from the visage of his father. But when he turned that sharp, furious, and maybe even a little cruel look to Millie, the Moxxie she loved overwhelmed that shard of Crimson that, whether he wanted to admit it or not, he carried with him, and he softened with shame.

The next few days were deathly quiet, with Saffron taking one of the guest bedrooms and refusing to eat with them, or spend time with her son. She occasionally tried – awkwardly – to endear herself to Beatrice, but it was obvious that she knew that she'd armed a landmine and then stomped on it here.

Moxxie was crestfallen. And it was clear that of all the things he'd expected from the apparent miracle of bringing his mother back to life, this was certainly not amongst the predicted outcomes. "Hon, are you gonna be alright?" she finally asked him. She hated when her honey was in pain. And it was clear he was in agony right now.

"This isn't what I thought would happen at all," Moxxie admitted.

"Didn't you always say that she was a big Satanist?" Millie asked.

"Well, yes, but…" Moxxie began.

"And didn't you say that Crimson only put up with it 'cause 'a who her daddy was?" Millie asked.

"I did say that," Moxxie said. Crimson was the worst sort of leech, as it turned out. He hadn't even earned his place at the top of the Knolastname Crime Family. He married into it, by getting hitched to the eldest daughter of Cesar Knolastname after the last of Cesar's sons died under suspicious circumstances, and then just took over when Cesar died of Urinary Acidogesis a couple years later.

"Maybe this is who she was, and she just didn't show it to you 'cause you were little," Millie said, pulling Moxxie close to her on the chair, watching the newest episode of My Worst Angels, which had taken a pretty drastic turn in terms of both story-telling and quality (both improved dramatically). "I know there was lots'a stuff my Momma and Daddy didn't tell me when I was growin' up, because they thought I wasn't ready for it."

"But that she was an actual zealot?" Moxxie asked, disbelief still laced in his voice.

"Maybe she wasn't when she started," Millie said. "Maybe she had to be, because of Crimson."

Moxxie sighed, seeming to wish to melt into her. Beatrice, who was currently snoozing on Millie's other side, gave a burble and shifted, but didn't quite rouse and start crying for attention.

"It' just…" Moxxie finally said. "I don't know. It's like a part of me is saying 'this is unfair'. Blitz got his mother back, and she was exactly what he remembered her being. I get mine back and the first thing she does is stab me in the chest."

"She did what now?" Millie asked, as this was the first she was hearing about this. Even when he gave her the brief explanation, she still wasn't mollified. And when the heck had they even gotten all this magical hullabaloo in place without her noticing? Was that why Moxxie was so distracted the last few days? Now, Millie was aware that she was not the most brilliant of imps. That title went, without the slightest bit of envy, to her husband. But she likewise wasn't stupid. "Mox, are you angry 'cause you didn't get what Blitz did? Or are you angry 'cause you feel you deserve what he got more than he did?"

Moxxie was quiet for a bit, a stunned look on his face, as the thought, however petty and base it was, hadn't gelled in his mind. A new shame flooded his expression. "Wow. I'm a shitty friend," Moxxie admitted.

"Everybody thinks things. Don't let it bother you none," Millie soothed, and Moxxie sighed. "So… what was this about those fuckers down in Lust?"

"Oh, right," Moxxie finally said. He reached into a pocket dimension and extracted the axe she'd lost. "I kept putting it off for the right moment, but they've essentially surrendered and begged us not to kill them. And they wanted me to give you this to prove they were honest about it."

"Why didn't you tell me about them?" Millie tried to keep her tones level, but she had a hard time when Clan Cruac was involved.

"I didn't want to upset you," Moxxie said. When Millie took the axe, for a moment, there was a shift in her entire perspective, as though all of the half-unfocused things at the edges of her vision snapped into clarity, as though she could feel every pulse of the blood through her veins, the delicate draft of breeze through the cavernous manor as it danced along her skin, and even the gentle pressure of her nail-beds pushing out her fingernails. But then she slid the axe behind the couch where it belonged, and the sensation faded.

The clang, though, woke up Bea, who immediately began to fuss.

"I hope you made 'em hurt for that," Millie said, as she tried to figure out which problem ranked highest on Bea's little hierarchy of needs.

"Scaring them half to death by the Radio Demon probably counts," Moxxie offered.

"What's he got to do with this?"

"He was there after Mom got Resurrected," Moxxie obviously was leaving a lot out there.

"...So what are you gonna do about your Momma?" she finally said as she realized that in the absence of other problems, Bea was probably just hungry.

"I don't know. It's like she lives in a completely different world than the one I do," he said. "She has… well… faith. And I don't. I never did. But I don't have to. Maybe some time free of Crimson will get her to calm down. See that I'm not doing this to insult her or… or something."

"None of this is your fault, Mox-mox," she said. "You've already done more than everythin' anyone could'a asked for. And she's just gonna have to either sack up and accept it, or she'll have to find some other way to be part of little Bea's life."

"I'm not going to kick out my own mother," Moxxie said, his stubborn streak showing itself.

"I ain't asking you to," Millie said. "But I don't want you miserable. You deserve better than this."

Moxxie sighed, his expression downcast. Maybe he didn't believe it. So she would have to believe it extra hard for the both of them.

---

Saffron was not a fool, and she was not helpless, and more than that, her willpower was far from empty. She'd heard what she'd heard from the pair of them in their leisure room. Her son was an apostate. After all she had done to raise him better. But at the same time, he hadn't dived into the worst aspects that apostasy always brought out in people, the greed and selfishness and short-sightedness. It made no sense to her.

How could somebody live in Good Standing without the Grace of Satan to guide them?

It was a ludicrous notion.

Still, she was an imp, and a woman besides. With Papa dead and all that he'd built up stolen by that asshole Crimson, she was destitute. But she still had Satan in hear heart and she would find some way forward. That was the acme of the imp, after all. To do what you must, while others do what they will.

She'd been to Pentagram City once when she was young, still an ingenue of a crime family that, she had come to learn, was in stark decline of late. Obviously without proper Wrathling thinking giving it direction, it had been left to go to seed, coasting its way into oblivion on its own inertia. Yet another victim of a lack of Satan in the greater environment of Hell. And Pentagram City was that same weakness of character made manifest. There weren't people trying to victimize her in particular because they were, one and all, too wrapped up in their ongoing victimizations of each other. Damned fools. Didn't they see for an instant what they could have been if they had embraced Good Standing? Obviously not.

Her wanderings no doubt did her son ill, but considering the heartache his apostasy had inflicted on her, maybe turnabout was in some small way fair play. She knew it was a failing of Good Standing to resent one's child. Still, the schadenfreude was there. Here in the streets of Lucifer's folly, she could see nothing but the waste that Satan could sweep away if only he had the authority, and the people to follow him.

Her wanderings had not been blind nor foolish, though. She had been looking for something the entire time. She knew that here, in the Ring of Pride, Lucifer and Satan's mutual enmity was at its peak, and all the more so considering this was the city which Lucifer had raised up with his own hand. There would be no vaulting architecture inviting the supplicants and faithful of King Satan into the bosom of his loving embrace. Lucifer was far too petty an emperor to allow somebody to be better loved than himself. She didn't doubt that he'd deface any edifice dedicated to Satan that he found in 'his' Ring, and likely raze to the ground any within 'his' city. So she had to look for the less obvious signs, the less overt signs of Satanic worship.

The usual symbols were utterly absent. None of the particular, votive five-point stars to be found no matter which direction one looked or where one trekked. The Solium Praefractus likewise was verboten, no images of a throne split and shattered into rubble, with or without the stain of blood of its former king still painting it. The adherents of Satanism (and Saffron was despite all the lack of idols absolutely sure that there were indeed adherents) obviously had to eschew the most popular and famous symbols of his rulership and mastery over Wrath.

Even the symbols that were common of Wrath, such as the Wrath Sun, were rare. Well, she had certainly known that Lucifer and Satan's mutual enmity ran deep, but no so deep as to try to erase each other from their respective realms. Satan at least acknowledged that Pride Ring existed, even if it did so as an object of contempt and pity.

What did catch her eye, though, was a small scratch-carving into the concrete of a bank-building, which displayed a frog.

It was such an innocuous thing, the kind of petty vandalism that bored children would get up to, save for that it was etched into the foot-pad of a currently active building. And from the look of it, it had been left there for quite a while.

Oh now this was bold. To ignore the religious icon, and the Seal of Office, but to etch the personal signet of Satan into stone? Either the vandal was foolish, or the victim was. But still, the frog was facing to the left, so she immediately turned on her hooves and started back whence she came, now looking for more frogs. There was no telling how long she'd have to walk to find another.

Hell had changed, and yet was in the same moment almost the same. She had lost eighteen years to the dreamless blackness of death, and when she returned, there were so many little things that tripped her up, while the similarities caught her at every stumble. May be the case that Moxxie had divorced himself from Crimson's ambitions, but there would always be mafiosos. Maybe not Knolastname Mafia, but the mafia as an institution would endure. Hell, with the rate that Crimson had apparently mismanaged it, it was already eclipsed with the long-degrading Ragnie family. And war was eternal, even though now it was arrayed against Heaven, instead of against the rest of Hell. Satan was, of course, as unchanging as bedrock.

Another frog, still facing the direction she was walking, so she continued to walk. Frankly, she had little reason to despise Mildred. She was a simple soul from Wrath, one given blessedly few difficult thoughts, and strong arms taken up in the bargain. Moxxie seemed truly enamored with her. Even through her bitterness and disappointment, she still nevertheless managed to be glad that he'd managed to find better love in his life, than the disappointment, anguish, and fury that she'd been saddled with in hers.

She almost passed another frog while thinking of her own tempestuous and ill-matched marriage to Crimson. He was a distant and grasping person. He only fucked her to have a child, and then pretty much ignored her in favor of his mistresses. Which was frankly fairly standard Mafia behavior, but it still stung. She was the heir of Knolastname when Papa died. She should be the one keeping lovers, not that meager, petty Crimson. This frog that she had almost trod past in her grim mood wasn't facing the way she was going, but the way she'd come. And when she glanced back, she saw another one barely visible, tiny, etched onto the stone of the office building, pointing down a narrow cleft that ran between two tall structures.

Oh, of course. If you have to hide a church, do so amongst concrete.

She started down the dark, and saw that there were glowing eyes at the far end watching her. She did not fear, though. Satan walked with her, and she was going to His house. The watcher was a Selachimorph with a clipped tail, sitting atop a garbage can that looked like it shouldn't have supported his weight. He pushed off of it and took his towering stature over her. "Can I help you, little darling?"

His words, despite the Envy clade mouth that they emerged from, had a distinctly Wrathian twang.

"I am going home," she declared.

"Perhaps home doesn't want you," the shark-demon scoffed.

"Then I will tear it down and build a new one," she snapped back. The shark-demon grinned wide, and then grabbed the lid of the trash-can he'd been sitting on and rotated it, to the sound of a loud, metal clunk. A second clunk sounded moments later, and a section of the wall slid inward from its seat. The shark-demon pushed it in, then forced it aside.

"The Father welcomes us all," the Selachimorph said with a nod, then sat on his trashcan once more, allowing Saffron to enter the building. Not long after she began to descend, she heard the shark-demon closing the path she'd used to get in, as though she'd never passed.

She skirted under a curtain of black fabric, and the moment that she did, she was greeted by the gut-shaking drone of the Canticles. She puffed out a breath replete with stress that she wasn't even aware that she'd been holding in, as the heat and familiar din of Satanic worship rose up to meet her. She descended, into what looked to be a disused subway station, long bricked up and divorced from public transit. All of the room had been used to create a true enclave of Satan in the midst of this hostile, Luciferean territory.

Though there were only a few people singing the Canticles, their voices were bass enough to shudder the air, and the dark red flames that illuminated the temple-floor did so without smoke. Pews looked to have been carved here on site, for there was no way that they'd have been able to fit down the path she'd entered from. And there were quite a few people here, sitting in those pews and reading in quiet contemplation, or making devotionals to the only King of Hell who actually wanted to raise up his people, instead of endlessly stomping down as did all other false-kings. And there was even a whole row of Rooms of Airs, all of them untended for the moment, overseen by a single Son of Satan, a towering Taurian Consumer who watched all with the stern forbearance of a patient father.

To descend to the floor level was to return home, in some small way. It wasn't quite the same as the cathedrals of Wrath, but it heeded the lessons of Satan: in the lack of all other provisions, move forward out of spite. And this venue may as well have been spite incarnate.

Of course, there was more than a lay observer would see. As somebody who knew Arguments front to back, she could tell that this was a Heterodox Church, intended not specifically for the comfort and succor of the truly faithful, but instead for the education of the faithless. The number of Rooms of Airs was one indicator, as well as the fact that there was no distinctive carving on every fourth pew in the column which would mark it as a Place Of Request. The pews had small, abridged copies of the Biblica Iracundia tucked into shelves at their backs, so that people who came without their own, personal holy text would still be able to keep up with sermons. And most notably of all, there was no Effigy Of The Altar.

She still went to the Place of Request and sat at its end, even though it bore no marks as such. It was not a mark which made this pew special. It was the orthodoxy surrounding it. And the Son of Satan, panning his gaze along the assembled fiends, imps, and even a shockingly double-digit number of Sinners, eventually saw her, sitting at the end of the fourth pew. He rose from his place on the Prestor's Chair, and moved to her as an almost silent avalanche of red fabric.

He sat more than an arm's length away from her, not looking at her, but instead at the rough depiction meant to imply Satan without being so brash as to depict Satan in this Ring. "What has brought you back to our shared home, daughter of Wrath Ring?"

"I seek the comfort of familiar things, and lacking that, the familiarity of old pains," she answered, in call-and-response.

"How long has it been since your last return to the Halls of the Furious Father?" the Son asked.

"Eighteen years, and entirely against my volition," she said.

That, at last, got the Consumer to glance at her. "A cruelty, to be forced to spend one's entire youth imprisoned. I can sense the anger it has ignited in you."

"It's more complicated than that," Saffron admitted. "I was, until recently, dead. And now Hell has changed. The things I thought would be steady are gone. All but Father Satan."

"Hell must change, and even the Father changes," the Son said, which was a shocking admission. "There are thrice as many humans in my hall than I have seen in any year before, all the way to my coming as Missionary to this Ring. The War has… shifted the calculation."

"But Satan is eternal. He cannot…" she began, before catching herself. It was clear, from the slow tilt of the Son's head toward her that if she hadn't stopped herself, he would have. Best keep to the important grievance, then. "I am lost out of time. My son, who I loved so dearly and taught so carefully to be faithful to the Direction and Belief in Good Standing, he's become an apostate."

"He has taken on the profligate ways?" The Son asked.

"He lives in a great mansion that he has not earned," she said.

"According to whom?" the Son asked. She blinked. "Has he earned this domicile through exploitation of the weaker?"

"No, not as far as I can tell," Saffron said.

"Has he stolen the money for it, giving back nothing but empty pockets and hollow bellies?" the Son pressed.

"No. He is an assassin."

"So he pays for what he wills through application of precise violence," the Son said. "It is not against Satan to become mighty or wealthy through the use of violence, provided the violence is just and uplifting. Many are the monsters who must be slain for the Better World to be built. It is not his money which despairs you so."

"...And he has taken up the Witchcrafts of Lust, no doubt having made deals with the Slave Queens of the swamp," she said.

"Dialogues Third, Twenty one, one through thirty," the Son said with a slow shake of his head. She instantly recalled the entire parable, of a demon who stole a knife from his master, and over the course of the parable used it to cut his way to freedom, to carve his tools, to swear a blood oath, and finally to kill the master whom he'd stolen it from. Any power that can be had, can be stolen, and had just as legitimately.

"He doesn't believe in Good Standing anymore," she finally said.

"Does he not?" the Son asked. "Spasms, fourteen, six."

If any man shall do good works and advance Good Standing, he is to be celebrated, no matter how petty his heart.

"But…" Saffron said.

"Spasms, fifty eight, nine through thirteen," The Son snapped.

He is a man of Good Standing any who bears Good Witness to his people. He is a man of Good Standing who increases the wealth of the common. He is a man of Good Standing who inflicts righteous violence against the base and petty. He is a man of Good Standing even if he knows not the words as he does these things. In doing these things, he is a man of Good Standing even if he believes Good Standing a folly.

"How can my son even be considered an imp if he doesn't believe?" she implored of the pontiff. The Consumer sighed, his visage softening.

"I seldom get to speak to real zealots," he said, his voice a low rumble that almost blended into the Canticles. He then shrugged. "Which is exactly what I should have expected when I asked to do my Good Works up here. What is your name, daughter?" she gave it. "Tell me this, Saffron of Wrath; how many true, Blooded Satanists do you believe there to be in all the Pentagram City?"

"Before coming here, I'd have been shocked if it took more than both hands," she admitted.

"But notice I said Blooded, daughter, as I presume that you are," he said. She tilted her chin up, proud to be recognized for it. "For that, in all my time in this city, I have found exactly four. Two of them have Taken The Red. One is dead. And the last I sit beside."

"Then Pride truly is lost."

"To think that is to have the narrowest of narrow views, not just of Pride Ring, but of the faith of Our Father of Fury," he said, almost gently, and she gaped in shock. "I don't blame you. There is a certain insularity of the faith endemic to Wrath Ring that will only do you badly here in Pride. A certain self-satisfaction and heedless surety that will lead to a fall."

"One of you can't be saying these things," she said.

"Ultra-orthodox, then," the Consumer said, leaning a bit back so that the lights reflected on the gold of the three frogs that marched down his robe. "There are many paths into the Grace of Satan. And Satan has made it very clear that faith is not the most important of them."

"Who are you, really?" she demanded, her gaze heating.

"Č̴̨̛̼ͅE̵͎̳̿A̶̬̘͑̈́S̶̙̲͚̀Ë̴̡͕̺̈́̔.̵̮̓͝" he demanded, and all of her outrage fled in an instant, at the merest shadow of Satan's voice being brought into the temple. Many heads turned toward them, but only for a moment, before returning to whatever it was they were doing. The Canticles didn't dip in the slightest. "The most important Advancement of Good Standing is, in Our Father's own words, actions. Not words of faith or oaths of service that never see use. Actions and actions alone are the fuel which Our Father holds dearest. So before you condemn this son of yours who, by the implications of your descriptions of him, is acting In Good Standing, simply because he doesn't profess faith, then it is not he who has failed Satan, Saffron of Wrath. Can you honestly tell me that his actions are not in line with Good Standing? Because if you can, I will recant all I've said, without shame."

And Saffron was left silent in the pew.

"Consider again the parables of Dialogues Third," the Son said, rising to his feet. "While having Satan in your heart is a beautiful and uplifting thing, it is not the only part of a life according to Good Standing. By his creed, only actions can place you in Grace," He took a step away, but then paused, turning back to her. There was a look of sympathy on his face. Perhaps pity. "You have believed, hard, in a world that must be a certain way. I am proof in flesh that it isn't. The embrace of Satan will always be here for you. But you have heard my words; so get out of that pew."

And with that, he moved away. And Saffron was numb.

---

The haste by which a bunch of Octavia's stuff was shuffled up to Fort Abandon made her head spin, and not in the way that all owls' did. It was almost as though everybody in Hell had known that she was going to be sent up her on a fool's errand even before Lucifer opened his mouth and demanded it so. Her dwelling was spartan and cramped, compared to the vast and vaulting halls of the Palace of Flowers which she still considered her home, sized not for somebody of her stature so she had to slump a bit so as not to bang her head on doorframes. Everything was concrete, unadorned, and barren of any of the signs of luxury or class that had dominated her youth.

She imagined this was very much what prison looked like. And she wasn't far off from the truth.

The basic requirements of her position were already there when she'd been bundled into the building; a bunker, playing host to her meeting room, a small computer server, and then her office without so much as a waiting area in front of it. It was going to be tricky to keep the morons at bay, she realized, with that little insulation from the idiot masses. She was seated at the desk even now. The desk, at least, was nice. A piece which had been left behind by the previous would-be administrator of Cloud Probity, along with the large, well-stuffed chair that she was sitting in. She'd had at least luck enough that the incompetent hadn't been here when they bashed him into a stupor and dragged him to Lucifer for his failures. Bullet-holes were hard to repair in such soft leather.

"I see you're becoming accustomed to your new environs," Ambrosius said from his place at the door to the hall. She just swung her weary eyes to him, and emitted a very, very tired groan.

"I'm never going to recover from this, socially," she muttered.

"You are beginning a task with the preconception that you've already failed. Which is a very sure way to ensure that prophecy fulfills itself," Ambrosius said. He paused, looking at a spot on the wall. With a flick of his hand, he hurled a javelin at a spot on the wall, causing it to rain down grey dust. She just blinked at him, too frazzled to even be shocked. "Forgive me. I thought I saw something."

"Good to know I'm not the only one running threadbare," Octavia muttered. "I'm not just being defeatist, Ambrosius; there's literally no way to do what he's asking me to do! Heaven has no resources to mine! It's got no farmlands!"

"What the grim Caesar of Hell has saddled you with could be turned to opportunity, if only you grant it the same unblinkered vision which has already brought you thus far," Agrippa said.

"Why do I feel like you're trying to drag me toward an answer?" she asked unhappily.

"I am trying to drag you towards an answer. For the life of me, I cannot see what it will be. But I know that if one seeks success, one can often find it, while if one sees only the failure surrounding it, that is all one will ever have," Agrippa said. "The Caesar has made that mistake often enough. I trust you're intelligent enough not to."

Octavia sat back in her chair as far as it would go, almost to the point where it tried to tip over backwards, but the damned thing was magic and wouldn't let her. Maybe there was something that the others hadn't seen. Maybe. But that maybe was a tiny thing. After all, the people who'd come up here before her had run things elsewhere for decades, if not centuries. Given a complete lack of material resources and no means of producing anything of worth, the guys before her had done exactly as Lucifer offered, and started selling Innocent as slaves. Which inflamed the occupied population to no end, obviously, and spelled doom. So that path was an obvious no.

So what did that leave her? She had a massive population under her thumb, even though it was only a fraction of a fraction of Heaven, and no way to use them for anything.

"Ambrosius?" Octavia said from her place, leaned way back in her chair and staring at the concrete ceiling.

"Yes, my Domina?" he asked, having approached to the far side of her desk.

"Why do you always call me 'Domina', or Dad 'Dominus', but you only ever call Lucifer 'Kae-sahr'?"

"Because I despise him," Ambrosius said. That got Octavia to sit forward, the chair offering a squeak as it accommodated her shift in posture. "I am Republican, my Domina. I lived and died for the S.P.Q.R. Mighty and brilliant men and women are to be adored and to be cherished. They are not to be worshiped and enthroned. We fought wars to cast down the Etruscan Kings. And it disgusts me to no end that my descendants allowed kings to return. I call him Caesar because I hold no respect for him, and even less good-regard. He will be sloughed by history as thoroughly as those hedonist-kings that brought my nation to ruin have been."

"...wow. That's not something people would say willingly in Hell," Octavia said.

"We are not in Hell anymore, my Domina," Ambrosius said easily. "And in this place, without any of Lucifer's wide-spread magical eyes, I can speak what has been locked in my heart for some time."

"So… do you respect my Dad, then?" she asked.

"He has been an acceptable master, but not in my experience a great one," Ambrosius said. "Still, the gulf between my regard for him and the Caesar of Hell is so monumental as to stretch from the Pillars of Hercules to the shores of Egypt."

"I bet you like my mother better," Octavia chuckled. She wasn't blind to the fact that, whenever Mum went on her rampages, it was Ambrosius' duty alone to 'calm' her.

"She is more of my sensibility, but she lacks the temperament for greatness," Agrippa said. "She is too easily led by pride and anger. Had she a more patrician calm? Yes, in that case she could have been one of the true greats. But alas, she does not."

"Yeah. Alas."

Ambrosius leaned forward, his hands propping him up off of the desk, staring intensely into her eyes. "In the war against Barca, I had the incredible honor of serving under a truly great leader. I would very much like the opportunity to do so again."

She blinked at that statement, but Agrippa said nothing more as he pushed off of the desk and turned to leave.

So she thought.

She had millions of people that were sitting around doing nothing. She couldn't sell them without incurring far more than their worth in down-the-line damages. And while she wasn't required to feed them, and in fact failing to was not even a deviation from Status Quo, it still seemed… improper.

Millions of sets of hands, doing nothing, while they starved and could not die.

She frowned, an idea just starting to form. Not with any crispness or clarity, certainly not that, but there was an inkling which now that it was born shrieked with infantile life and sucked desperate breath into its barely-formed lungs. A million sets of hands, doing nothing.

What if…

She picked up her Hellphone, and sent a call to one of the newer entries on her memorized numbers, just above Seviathan Von Eldritch. The phone rang a few times, before finally being picked up.

"Octavia?" Penemue's voice came through. "Why is your signal coming from Heaven?"

"I have a job," she said. "And I need information. A lot of it. Can you help me do some really in-depth research?"

There was a pause, no doubt of Penemue giving someone (likely her husband) a querulous glance, then she returned. "I would like nothing more. What do you need?"

---

"If there was one failing of the people involved in the War for Heaven, and in the Second Heresiarchy that followed it, it was what the young call 'gamification'. There were rules, you see. Rules that, if followed, enabled a proper and fair fight. To fight on equal terms with your enemy – or better still, unequal to your enemy's favor – and succeed was to reap a reward cashed in 'glory'. Your enemy, so defeated, would be by honor's sake be bound to restore his own glory, and lash out again at you, pushing the envelope of the rules a little further while still holding to their letters.

That is the cycle of war in Heaven, in my experience. It is a thing of warriors, each gaining prestige through victory, position through dominance…. You are right in that, Killjoy; until very recently, Hell was every bit the same. Even I needed certain coaching to move on from old, outdated ideals of what victory actually meant. A strategic blunder of monumental proportions was already in play at the very moment that Lucifer demanded that we take back his 'lost' throne. Nobody knew what exactly victory was supposed to look like.

A warrior fights until there are no enemies before him. Soldiers, on the other hand, prevent getting killed while completing objectives. I was, and am, a soldier, even with my loftier titles now upon my brow. Warriors entered a war seeing it as ends-of-itself, a means to personal glory and legacy. Soldiers took one look at the War For Heaven, and realized that neither side knew how to win it. It was inevitable that the war would eventually grind itself to a halt. There lacked clarity of vision on both sides on how an exiled, much-hated son of Heaven was going to cast down God and take His throne, or conversely how to wage a war of annihilation on the immaculately hostile terrain that Hell has to offer and make a meaningful and lasting defeat stick, as it were, to a group which breeds as explosively as Hellspawn do.

I saw these things. My counterpart in Heaven, Machiavelli? He saw them, too. I do not hold my lofty position as First And Chief of the Dux Bellorim of All Hell out of luck nor of nepotism. I hold it because I understand the same thing my queen does, and the same thing that any soldier worthy of his commission would: that war is not a game.

We did not play at it. And that, paradoxically enough, is why we won."

-Ambrosius Severus Agrippa, Dux Bellorim Infernis