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.

28. Antithesis

The rambling of the barker formed something more like mumble-rap than commerce, but nevertheless the people around the scar-striped imp at the lectern treated him as though he were doing something of value, so in effect he was. As he rampaged through phonemes at a rate that it would take a far better mind than most to catch what he was actually saying, people would raise panels, and he'd point them out, before shifting his avalanche of vocalizations.

Then, a lull, as he looked around. No paddles raised. "Sold!" he declared, "to 121!"

"What the hell did he just say?" Maelstrom asked.

"First time at an auction?" she asked.

"Supposedly not, but I wasn't actually... you know... a person... the first time," Maelstrom said uncomfortably.

"You were always a person. That kind of talk is what those assholes use to justify holding our leash," Tex countered from Loona's other side.

"I ate food from a dog-dish until I was nearly eight," Maelstrom said.

"And how many meals did Birch throw onto the floor once you had a grasp of Satan's English? It's just assholes being assholes. It doesn't reflect on you at all," Tex said with a shake of his head. The lot on the block was shifted, as the corpulent Devourer had a swarm of Drones pick up the diadem which had been at auction hefted to her round, hairless brow. It sat there amongst two others, none of them matching or fashionable.

"A'ight, we're moving to Meat for a bit, cast your eyes to Ring Three!" the barker said, as a cage was wheeled in, with an exhausted and heavily pregnant Hellhound was pushed onto the block. "Good stock on this one, one quarter Blood Hound and a full half of her pups Popped. You'll get a lot of strong workers outta this one!"

"I want them all to die," Tex muttered.

"In due time," Loona said. There was a reason why they'd invited Tex but specifically not Tiffany. Tex had a longer fuse. And she had more chances to dampen it before he blew. And unlike she or Maelstrom, he knew how these auctions actually worked. She raised her paddle.

"Well it looks like we've got a bidder sight unseen! I'm starting One to start, do I hear a half?"

A paddle rose, and the instant after it did, Loona raised her own again.

"Two, do I hear a half?"

A different paddle and just as before, Loona was immediately after it.

"Three, do I got four?"

There was a lull, then a paddle rose. Goddamn it. Loona nevertheless tendered her own bid.

"Five! I got five! Do I got six? Quarterling for six? Half Pops for six? No? Sold to 941 for five thousand Souls," the imp banged a gavel and pointed at Loona.

"That could have been a lot worse," Tex said. He looked around at the crowd. "There aren't any major breeders here today. They would have easily pushed you to ten."

"Then I would have spent eleven," Loona said.

"Loona... you don't exactly have infinite money," Tex counseled, laying a massive hand on her shoulder.

"I know that. But the entire fucking point of Last Chance was to earn enough money to do this. So you keep pointing me at people to bid and I will get them," Loona said.

The next up was a debtor, who was a Sinner, and thus not Loona's interest. But after that came a trio of Hellhound pups, the oldest of which couldn't be fifteen. And when she started bidding, the number kept raising, because she was bidding on all three of them at the same time. Like fuck was she gonna break up what was left of a family if she could help it.

Even bidding on all three of them came up barely twice what she'd paid for the breeder. And the next one on the block, a runt-bitch from a Pedigree lineage, cost more than all four of the previous ones combined.

"I think that guy over there is starting to bid just to make you pay more," Maelstrom said. Loona glanced to him as the block advanced more debtors who were Sinners or Fiends.

"Let him. I came here with two m–" Loona began, only to have Tex rapidly clap his hand over her muzzle.

"Don't ever let people at a slave auction know your upper limit," Tex said. "Maelstrom? Do you feel like having a word with that spiteful asshole for me?"

"How loud do you think I should be?" Maelstrom asked, cracking knuckles that could crack marble.

"Reasonably civil. Don't get thrown out," Tex said. Maelstrom turned a look to Loona, as though she were in charge of him. She shrugged and gave a nod to the snake-like Ophiuchan Consumer, who was likewise bidding up other people's lots whom he had no intention of actually buying.

The money was only a small amount of what Last Chance had under its entire umbrella, but with the rest of the money actually dedicated to keeping that umbrella intact, she made do with whatever she could squeeze out of the machinery of her company. And though the Hellhounds down there on the block still quivered with despair as she purchased them, they would, if they knew better, be rejoicing. Because the moment she had them out of the auction house, she was going to Manumit them on the spot. And the Free Hounds of Dennys would expand yet again, so perfectly legally that she could use Naked Law against assholes who came after them again.

So she sat there, eyes on the block, as more of her people were dragged up to be sold. And she, with whatever might she had gained in Hell, gave them a better option. It wasn't glamorous, but it was righteous. And for the first time since she made that oath in Purgatory, she was actually making good on the emancipation of her brothers and sisters in blood.

"Sooner or later somebody's gonna get pissed off by this," Tex warned as she won the rights to a Halfblood Hound who looked despite the obvious difference in age that he could have been Tiffany's brother.

"Trying to do something good in Hell is bound to. Let them be pissed," Loona said.

Tex gently turned her toward him, turning his head so that she could clearly see the eye that had been gouged and blinded long, long ago. "I hope you're ready for what will come when these assholes lash out. 'Cause it's gonna be bad."

"We killed Nathan Birch. None of these assholes even compare," Loona said.

And most damningly, most problematically, most disastrously, she believed it.

---

Chapter 28

Antithesis

---

If there was one thing that Tilla had in her life that could fill her with shame, it was the very idea of being a bad parent.

So seeing Vee and Epp clinging to 'Schel' and crying made her feel like a true and proper asshole. The knock this morning at the door hadn't been completely unexpected. Sometimes Raleigh or Desdemona would come to ask her to look after their plethora of spawn for a time on such occasions as their work-schedules conflicted. But when a month passed and no calls for help came from either of Tilla's across-the-hall neighbors, she was too busy with other shit. Like the fact that she had Bartolomayo back in her life, and vexingly she didn't have him to herself.

Vee and Epp were young, in that age between toddler and schoolchild, and both of them looked rail thin. As though starving. They were. They'd eaten the last food that the apartment had in it a half week ago and subsisted on cockroaches since. But because they were so young, they didn't know that help was literally across the hall from them. So desperation drove them to hunt anywhere for 'Auntie Till'. Raleigh and Desdemona, along with most of their other children? They were dead. Killed by an Exorcist attack. And nobody even bothered to check their apartment for their remaining kids.

Tilla learned later that they only ever found Raleigh's jawbone and teeth. Desdemona was, if indeed dead, pulverized to paste.

"We've got to do something about this," Bartolomayo said, quietly, from the chair opposite where the teenaged slut was trying to comfort two inconsolable children.

"We can't bring Family Severance into this. Pride imps? They'd disappear into the system and never come out," Tilla said. The recent brush with Hellish bureaucracy had well-and-truly tainted any faith she had in the system of Hellish governance, particularly when it came to family wellbeing.

"I know that," Bart said, rubbing at the corner of his mouth with the heel of his hand. "But they can't survive on their own, obviously."

"I know, damn it I know," Tilla muttered. Her anger at Schel usurping her place in Bartolomayo's bed and his heart needed to be secondary to the immediate problem. And the immediate problem was that she'd been living across the hall from a pair of grieving orphans for almost a month without even realizing it.

The door opened and Krieg came in, hefting a massive bag of potatoes (for an imp, anyway; thirty pounds was about half what an Imp tended to weigh fully grown!) and plunking it into the shaded nook of the pantry, before making a motion with her hand and erecting a thin veil of cool, arid air around it so that they'd last a bit longer. Of the children that Tilla had raised, the first one that she was reasonably sure she did a good job on was Krieg. With the lessons of what had failed her in her raising of Blitz and Barb still fresh in her mind, she was able to correct away from such errors as made a recovering alcoholic famous actress and a... lauded Assassin... Huh. Her own train of thought derailed when she considered that even the children that she by her own metrics failed to raise as well as she should have ended up being spectacular.

But still, she had most of her life dedicated first and foremost to raising children, most of whom were her own. It was clear that Epp and Vee needed a new maternal figure, now that Desdemona was gone.

It wasn't like it was adding more years of motherhood to her; she still had Wayland to bring up.

"Do you children know how to cook those?" Tilla asked of the older one, Vee, who didn't respond to the oldest woman in the room, simply clinging her arms around the heavily pregnant Schel and crying.

"She's, like... four. Of course she doesn't," Bart said.

"She's six, and she ought to," Tilla said.

"Hey, be easy on them. They're having the worst day of their lives right now," Schel said quietly, continuing to rub circles into their backs as they took whatever comfort was offered to them. And again, Tilla was shamed for missing the obvious.

"They're Pride Imps. They grow up faster than we do," Bart said.

"...how much faster?" Schel asked.

"As fast as they need to," Tilla said. "So if we don't bring Family Severance into this, because fuuuck that..."

"Language!" both Schel and Krieg said, the former sincerely while the other did so only as jest.

"We still need to find some way to get these kids looked after," Tilla continued. She slumped in her chair, rubbing at her face with her hands. "I'm not going to let the system snap these children up. Don't you worry about that. But I'm at a loss of how to go from here. If I wanted to adopt them, they'd need to be declared orphan and surrendered to the state. And that's a non-starter in and of itself."

"How bad is it?" Bart asked.

"It's shockingly bad," Tilla said. "Terrible by design."

"Satan preserve us," he muttered.

She tilted her head at him. "Since when were you a Satanist?"

"Since I got dumped into Sietch Kheruk," Bart said, reaching over and laying a hand on Schel's shoulder. Just seeing it inspired a spike of envy in Tilla, at the thought of being replaced by somebody younger and prettier.

"Mother... a word?" Krieg asked, looking thoughtfully at the kitchen.

"What is it?" she asked.

"A private word," Krieg clarified.

Tilla frowned, but rose and followed, through the kitchen and the piles of abandoned cans – Cans which had been licked clean of food by desperate children – and into the pantry, which was once more restocked with fruits, vegetables and meats contained in metal. Once Krieg slid the door closed behind them and pulled the dangling tab for the naked bulb that illuminated the pantry, she turned a cold look at her mother.

"What is your grievance with Dischell Mitvic?" Krieg asked.

"I don't like your tone," Tilla said.

"Tone askew when asking proper questions is to be lauded, not punished. Your own words!" Krieg said, pointing at her mother in the short distance that the pantry allowed the two of them to stand apart. "So please, Mother. Answer me that question."

"My grievance is that she stole my lover!" Tilla hissed.

"Did she?" Krieg asked, raising a finger. "How old is Dischell? And how old is her daughter Deia?"

"What? I don't know. Twenty something, and about two."

"Eight. Teen," Krieg said. Tilla blinked at that. "She and I have birthdays five days apart. And she is one single year older than I. Deia has just reached two years. And I know you are adept at math, because you taught it to me."

"Oh," Tilla said, as her venom started to drain away as she stopped looking at Dischell as the usurper of her man's affections, and just saw her for what she was; another victim of the industrialized rape of the young and female which transpired every day within Clan Cruac under the family Nuckelavee.

"Yes, 'oh' indeed," Krieg said. "That girl – for she may be twice knocked but still is too young to be a 'woman' – is what my future looked like in that fucking clan. Do you have it in your heart to hate your middle daughter?"

"No. No I don't," Tilla said. She rubbed at her face again. "Fuuuuck. Just when I think I'm starting to get the wisdom of age, I find myself being a petty little shit again. And getting this lecture from my own daughter is doubly humiliating."

"The fact that you are willing to even hear this lecture shows what wisdom you have indeed accrued," Kreig said, taking both of Tilla's hands in hers. "I can think of many who would dismiss a child's voice out of sheer reflex, especially when confronted by... well, that."

"Thank you. For not letting me be a little shit," Tilla said.

"We've got enough of those in this family already," Krieg admitted. She then pushed past Tilla and out of the pantry. Before making it two steps away, she turned on her heel. "Oh, it should be five thousand, I don't want a lemon."

"What?" Tilla asked.

"If I'm going to be getting a car, it behooves me that it not be shit," Krieg said gamely as she once again turned and strutted out of the room. Oh that little shit of a spawn. Not just find a valid excuse for why they were in the pantry but put Tilla in the position where she had to say yes or else make an ass of herself.

Clever. Well played.

"Fine. But that's your big purchase for the quarter," Tilla said.

"Mother! What if something comes up?" Krieg asked over her shoulder.

"Then that's what the money you should have been saving for emergencies is for," she said with a smirk on her face. Krieg scowled hard, realizing that she, in her clever play, had boxed herself into a corner for the next two months. She was clever, but Tilla had played that game and more enough to know the dance-steps better than her teenaged-prodigy.

"Yes, mother..." Krieg muttered in defeat and left the apartment.

Tilla looked at the squad of imps that were clustered on the old, leg-broken sofa that took up much of the space facing the inactive TV. Her own apartment was already overfull, full to bursting with her descendants, and the apprentice of her daughter, as well as the often-ignored bed that Blitz essentially abandoned in the modern season for that of the longshanks owl who found some strange reason to love him. Good for him, she reckoned. But since she was already sleeping on half of that bed, it didn't offer more room than they already had.

"So what will..." Tilla began.

"I think we should stay the night. Would y'as all like that?" Schel asked, managing to start talking at the same time as Tilla and keep going when Tilla sputtered out.

"Yub," Vee said.

"Yub?" Bart asked.

"If she doesn't want something she says 'nohb'," Tilla said.

"Is she sick with something? She sounds congested! Now I really need to stay here, and find where all that black-mold is!" Schel demanded, perhaps losing herself to late-pregnancy brain fog again.

"There's no black mold..." Tilla began. But then she stopped. The kids needed somebody to look after them, and Schel was offering. Maybe not the best, but it'd have to do.

Without saying anything more, she went out, leaving the rescued Cruac refugees caring for the orphans of Heaven's massacre.

---

Ordinarily, when an Exorcist slammed into Hell, it immediately started attacking anything living that was within reach. There was always a bit of a connection lag between the Exodus Surge and operator input, so it behooved the Exorcist to already be killing when the operator got into it. This one, though, landed with a rip in the sky, landing not with a slam but with a flare of wings, settling onto the ground. The device was damaged, sparks spraying from its wrecked wings as they closed and folded away in a manner that would have been agonizing for a living creature. And when the face came on, it was not the grinning visage of the Sub-25 Exorcists, but a hard-light projection over smooth, if cracked, plastic.

"Checking structural integrity, test one," the voice came as it grabbed a wheel-less car and lifted it above its head. There was some ominous creaking that came, both from the car being manhandled and the body doing the manhandling. "Diagnostic search pressure points."

"Major structural instability detected. Integrity condition dark red."

The frown on the Exorcist's face looked frustrated at hearing that. "Damn. Birah? You try it."

The face went blank, and the Exorcist with its car still lofted above its head wavered for several long seconds, before the face was replaced with another, this one that of the Spellbinder. He immediately looked around, and set the car down.

"I'd ask what you people did to these things, but we're still waiting for them to get out of their Vigils. Which considering you threw them into a meat-grinder against Lucifer, I'd say that they got off lucky," Birah said.

"You can lambast their folly all you want later. Now we need to get these things working again. We can't have Sahaquiel's best Exorcists sidelined for the entire war when we could be using them," Yael said to him, sounding tinny to Birah, since his perceptions were being filtered through the Control Rig and down into the Exorcist.

"Did we need to do this in Hell?" Birah asked.

"Do you want another massacre to happen up here if it gets loose?" Yael asked. Birah sighed and shook his head. "That's what I thought. Alright. Test two, please?"

Birah nodded, and started to lean far back as though doing a limbo. Immediately, warning drones sounded in the Rig as the Type 26 announced that it was putting pressure on structures already taxed to near destruction. He called it off early.

"Well, the spine's properly hosed, so it'll have to be replaced," Birah said.

It wasn't Birah's first choice to be here, in Exorcist Command and Control, when there was an entire war going on in the lowest Cloud of Heaven. But the fact was, he had perhaps the best sense for fixing that which was both magical and broken in all of the Secondborn, if not Heaven Entire. He had been eclipsed readily by Sahaquiel, of course, but... well... Things were as they were. After resetting the Exorcist he rode into a more sustainable posture, he flexed its hands, noting that one of its fingers fell off when he did that. That probably wasn't good.

"Okay, did you get the readings, Yael?" Birah asked.

There was a silence. Then a crackle.

"Can you hear me now?" Yael asked. Birah said so. "Sorry about that, the transmitter must be a bit bent out of shape. I'm getting spotty telemetry from you. Can you try moving to a different location? Maybe there's interference nearby."

Birah nodded, only now looking around at the surroundings, beyond what those surroundings contained. He was in Pentagram City, obviously, but a fold of it that reminded him all too-clearly of the Rat Towers of the lower Clouds, only with better worksmanship. And if that wasn't the most all-too-loud damnation of what the Angels allowed Heaven to become, Birah could not think of what would surpass it.

There were varied Hellspawn in the streets, so Birah took a calming breath, and then pressed out his magic through the veritable needle-eye that this suit offered compared to his actual presence. The fact that there was a needle's eye to push his magic through showed just how much of a generational leap the Type 26 was over the Type 25. That one had been as much as Mage-dead. With that mere wisp of Birah's heavenly ethers, he contorted the background magic of Hell into a shape that invoked the Glamour on his behalf. As he stood there in his half-broken machine, the visage of that machine shifted and warped, looking no longer a machine to butcher a tide of Hellbound victims, but just another Incubus, if one wearing oddly conservative clothing.

There was no point in trying for a more complicated Glamour, not when this one would do.

When he stepped out into the streets, the rest of Hell's denizens barely even looked at him. He twisted a nub of plastic into a vaguely earbud-like shape and crammed it into the glamour's ear canal, lifting a hand as though he'd just gotten a call. "What about now? How's my telemetry looking?"

"Getting spottier in patches. What's around you? I don't have your visuals," Yael said. He could physically feel Yael flitting around outside the Control Rig that Birah was encased in, likely as the industrious Cherub worked as fast as his small body would allow to fix what he perceived as his problem.

"Cars and people, my man," Birah said, not daring to name Yael while this thing was still in Hell.

"Iron and meat. That shouldn't interfere. What's your street location?" Yael asked.

Birah frowned, but glanced at a nearby streetsign. "Twenty Seventh and Gropec... they actually called that street Gropecunt Lane. You must be joking," Birah said.

"Humans have those, too," Yael said.

"Are you serious?" Birah asked. He felt something tug at his head for a moment, but it was his physical head and not the one down here in Hell.

"Yup. Look up Shrewsbury sometime. Humans get wild, friend. And they don't much care for propriety when they do," Yael said. There was another tug at Birah's physical head. "Blast it all. It's gotta be something on your end. Twenty Seventh and Gropecunt is... let's see. Ah. Okay, that's in a Fold. You're gonna have to go west down Gropecunt until it crosses with Tallywacker Boulevard."

"You're taking the piss," Birah said.

"My hand to God," Yael said.

Birah shook his head and started to walk. The people here all flinched as one as a crash sound came from a few streets over. Some of them pulled weapons, still for a moment if they weren't driving as though waiting signal. When nothing followed that crash, they went back to their tasks. Birah only needed to see it once to know that was them flinching at the thought of an Exorcist landing among them, and then relaxing when it turned out to just be a drunk slamming into a light-post.

If they could see through Birah's glamour, they would have had something much more acute to panic about. But then he'd have to Recall, since he wasn't about to leave another of these critically rare masterpieces of Exorcist construction in the hands of Hell. Yael continued to talk to Birah, but he only paid it half a mind as he passed along the byways of Hell in a way that no Angel had in untold millennia. And he did so only by being incognito. There came a static interference in Birah's physical hearing, the sensation of the body he had up in Heaven fading and leaving him feeling utterly embodied in this mostly broken automaton, so he quickly turned back and retreated until he could hear Yael again.

"I lost you completely there for a minute," Birah said, while an Orgasm of Concubi sauntered toward him. He turned them away with a look that was not so much harsh as it was overrun. One of the Succubi seemed to recognize it, whispering to the one in charge of the Orgasm and causing the encounter he'd have to talk lightly to get out of away from him altogether. Count your blessings, Birah supposed.

"yyyyeah, I got that," Yael said. "I think this is a local maximum, and it's a shitty maximum at that."

"So what? Recall?"

"I don't think it can with the signal this FUBAR'ed," Yael said. "You're gonna have to go through that Minimum and get to somewhere with more stability."

"Stability... are you saying this is Wraithcombe related?" Birah asked.

"You've read Wraithcombe?" Yael asked.

"You know who I am," Birah said. Tobias Wraithcombe had been an English scholar of no real note when he was alive. But with his death, he quickly became one of Penemue's favored 'sounding boards'. His disappearance from Heaven a few months ago could not have been more suspicious. Or inconvenient; Wraithcombe vanished just when Birah came around to talk to him about the threat he was worried about from Outside. "If the Coefficient is high, would that cause the signal loss?"

"It'd have to be really fucking high, mind my demonish, for that to happen," Yael said. "Just keep going the way I told you to. You need to get out of that Fold either way. Maybe the Fold is causing reality to be all screwy. Maybe it's something else. Once you get into West Central, you'll have a better idea."

"Just my luck, as my luck always goes," Birah muttered, and then trudged toward the dead zone, knowing that his sense of his physical body would fade again, and all contact would, at least for a time, be lost. He didn't like leaving his body for any reason, really. Though he was adept at Astral Travel and Dreamwalking, he always had the lingering suspicion that the moment that he left his body helpless, somebody was going to take advantage of it.

It wasn't exactly a non-sensible worry, for he was Secondborn. And though he had been treated about as poorly as most of the rest of the Secondborn by the holier-than-thou Firstborn, the Secondborn would back him pretty much to the hilt if he asked them to. And there were a lot of Secondborn.

It was strange to detect the heat of a Hell's summer sun, and not precisely feel it. Birah knew that amongst other things, the machinery of the Type 26 allowed for Full Haptic Feedback. But that structure was pretty badly blown out on this one. Considering what the FHF had done to its previous pilot, Birah was glad to have only the broken vestiges of the system. The last poor fool who'd ridden this thing was put into what Angels had by way of a coma.

Divorced as he was from his physical body and shunted away from really feeling what the automata was experiencing Birah had time to consider Hell. He'd never actually been down here before. He'd been Created after the Expulsion and hadn't liaised with Hell during the reign of the only good rulership that plane had ever had. This place was a true foreign country to Birah, and yet, despite that, he found himself comparing it to Earth, a land which he had, covertly, walked before. Hell it seemed was ruthlessly capitalistic, which made sense, because Heaven didn't ascribe to such fiduciary stupidity. It was a constant hustle of toil, with the rewards being status quo and the punishment of failure being destitution. In a word, it had been for ten thousand years what the Earth had become in the last two centuries.

There was a brief crackle in Birah's hearing that almost stopped him short, but it proved to be nothing. He was still in the Minimum, so onward he kept walking, past the innumerable other businesses and services that lined the tragically named Gropecunt Lane. Oddly to Birah's understanding of things, the only service not available on it were brothels or prostitutes. There must have been some sort of higher-level irony at play here that he was too Angelic to understand. Or perhaps a bylaw had pushed them somewhere else. All else considered, the Lane was well maintained and stately, and he passed at least three Bespoke Tailors on his way out of this neighborhood.

History was a strange beast, Birah decided. Perhaps the askew name of this street was borne to something lost to modern municipal history, and the name itself stuck around out of institutional inertia. Whatever the case, he saw countless Hellspawn doing their business and living their lives, living at a hustle to earn their keep so that they would not either starve nor lose their roof. In his way, Birah pitied them for that. He wouldn't have wished capitalism on his worst enemy.

He was about to attempt again when a flash in his borrowed vision almost blinded him. He paused, blinking away the image that he'd caught in the corner of his sight. It wasn't bright, exactly. But overpowering in another way. Like an arc-light searing into his Magesight rather than his eyes themselves. What was that? He seldom beheld something that stunned him as this had. The last time was one time when he had looked too close as God undertook His Labors.

And then, in a blink, it vanished into the background of Hell. Oh, this warranted some examination. He turned away from Tallywacker Boulevard and started to navigate the crowds into the numbered streets that at least appeared to mostly run north-south. Such compass dedication was illusory. The Exorcist's internal Pathfinder noted that which direction was 'north' varied wildly as he continued walking in one direction in a straight line, which surely meant that he was walking through another Fold.

All of Hell was a snarl of relative space-time, a clear rough-draft of making objects and locations to be tested before attempting something beautiful and graceful with Heaven, and then something internally logical with the humans' universe. But even still, it beggared Birah's imagination that God would allow something as convoluted and entangled as the spacetime that he was feeling here in Pentagram City. He ran some calculations in his head as he continued in the direction he'd seen that impossible something, and when those numbers resolved, he had realized that through judicious use of folding space, Pentagram City had plunked nearly forty thousand square kilometers of urban sprawl into an eight thousand kilometers-squared footprint. There was five times more city than there should be city here. And that meant that Lucifer would have had to have Folded this place himself to do it.

That raised worrying notions to Birah.

He'd always been told that Lucifer had been a pompous and vainglorious ass who had no business nor cause to rebel, doing it out of spite and jealousy. That there had not truly been a real threat to Heaven or to God by the Archangel Lucifer even at his most petty and wrathful. Birah knew what he saw during the Heresiarchy, though. There was a threat. And a Lucifer who was able to quintuple the size of his city just by folding space was worryingly powerful to Birah. A Lucifer of such power might have even been able to undertake The Labors.

And if Lucifer could match God in undertaking God's Labors... maybe the difference between them was one of degree, rather than kind.

There! Again just for a moment, Birah saw it as he turned a corner. Seeing it the second time stunned him just as the first. He narrowed his Magesight, a feat that felt like squinting his eyes against a glare of sunlight, and redoubled his pace down the street.

"Hey! Watch it asshole!" an amazon of a Hellspawn demanded as he tried to slip past her.

"Then get out of my way!" Birah snapped in his frustration, before realizing that he couldn't afford to get into a fight in a broken automaton.

"How about I feed you your own teeth?" the muscled woman demanded, cracking her knuckles. Birah grumbled at his own impatience, then activated the myomer hypertophy in the one arm that it still worked in, driving a lightning-fast uppercut into her gut. He didn't activate the Purgators, those devices which enunciated a phoneme of God's Actual Name to ruinous effect, and instead let the sheer impact drive the woman to her knees.

"I'm not hungry," Birah said and walked past her. The other two women who he had not been paying attention to clustered in around the fallen... fury? They were called Furies, right? Regardless, they laughed at her and pulled her to her feet.

"That's what you get, dumb bitch," one laughed at their fallen, gut-punched friend.

Birah left the chastened and uproarious Furies behind him as he reached the building that the thing he'd seen would've had to enter. A bank. He took a step toward the doors, but decided against it upon seeing the wards that were laced through the entrances. He was fairly confident in his magical aptitude, but this Exorcist was held together by baling wire and bubble-gum; he didn't know if it still had enough puissance to survive the revelatory Wards over the door which would automatically tear apart any Glamours passing through it.

Identity theft was a crime, after all.

Instead he waited outside. The people around here, despite their privation and toil, struck him with how contented the majority seemed. He had seen such contentment on the faces of humans, once. Centuries ago. Before the Silence. Before the relegation. It was so strange, to be in literal Hell and behold people not blissful but fulfilled, doing their jobs and going about their business.

"The fuck you lookin' at, pretty boy?" a hideous Sinner of some unpleasant description said. That curbed Birah's people-watching and made him reach into his 'pocket', extracting his own dismembered finger and weaving a Glamour over that as well, making it look like a Hellphone, which he rose to his ear. Yeah, he probably should have done that sooner. "That's what I thought. Fuckin' fuck-bois."

If Birah were a more prideful, conceited angel, he would have dropped pretense and Purged the Sinner where he stood for the temerity of saying something like that. But Birah was kinda on a tricky mission right now. He sent another ping to Yael, but received nothing back. In fact, he barely felt the ping going out. He was very truly in the Minimum now.

This war was doing bad things to his brothers, sisters, and cousins. He could recognize that clear as day as he let his gaze now sweep passively across the people in the street. The Angels had to win a thousand battles, back to back to back, without faltering, without tiring. Hell, conversely, could lose a thousand battles, back to back, and still have a fresh army for the thousand and first to try again. The paradigm of the Angel was static, stuck in the old ways, when the only thing that an Angel really had to fear was another Angel. They had no real answer for when they had no idea who the next dangerous target in a given mob might be. And because of that, Cecetus was dead.

He'd not be the last, Birah considered.

"Thank you so much! You have yourself a good day, now," a woman's voice came to Birah's perception, and when he turned, he was glad he turned down the sensitivity of his body's sensors, because if he hadn't, she'd have blinded him.

The power radiating off of the blonde woman was stunning, rippling out away from her as though pushing against the Folds of Pentagram City and bubbling like a carbonated drink. She was smiling and rosy-cheeked, with expressive scarlet eyes and black lips. She could have been any of many different types of Hellspawn, but for one critical element. The power. The sheer, unadulterated potential. She didn't seem to notice him as she walked past, patting a spot on her coat where a wallet was laying, and started to walk westwardly.

And Birah was stunned for a moment longer still, for he had just seen a ghost.

Or more accurately, he saw what should have been a ghost.

A Nephilim.

The Nephilim were wiped out. Millennia ago, by Gabriel's hand, the entire clade of the Grigori's children were killed, dashed as the little ones against the stones, by God's unbreaking decree. Birah was odd for a Secondborn in that he had known all of the Nephilim, had seen their impossible promise first hand one and all. He remembered the faces of every single Nephilim that had ever lived, and had ever died. And this woman was not one of them.

How? How could this impossible thing be real?

The thought spurred him to walk, to follow in the wake that she cut. Some of the Hellspawn gave her a wide berth, as was appropriate to a half-mortal whom was explicitly feared by God. Others gave her derisive, dismissive looks as she slipped past them, granting her spite instead of fear and respect as a Nephilim in the wild was due.

She seemed to be the kind of person who Hell did not fear, not she herself. And the fact that he didn't remember her face... Oh no. Oh, of course, you damned, blighted fool, Birah thought to himself, tilting a jaundiced eye toward the most entangled part of Pentagram City, whereupon Hell's only Archangel sat his Low Throne. Of course she was new, a new Nephilim born in the new age. How had such a thought even escaped Birah? It was common knowledge that he had taken Lilith, God's prototype for the human, for a wife. And like that, Birah understood just how just what all others had missed that he now did not.

Sinners could not have children, as they were made barren by demise and Damnation.

Lilith, though, had been sent to Hell while still alive. And as she was not punished by God for eating of the Fruit, she was never doomed to grow old and die. After all these millennia, Lilith the Firstling was still alive.

And living humans were so fertile that they would make Nephilim as they did, which cause the entire problem with God and the massacre by Gabriel in the first place.

Birah's mind whirled with the notion of what Lucifer would do with the power of a Nephilim at his beck. Any daughter of his would be a weapon of incredible power against the armies of Heaven. In fact, it was probable that the entire reason that Heaven was faltering as badly as it was right now was because of this Nephilim's involvement. He had to find out more; this trumped the wellbeing of this Exorcist frame handily. The information he learned as to the nature of the New Nephilim could well turn the tide of the New War For Heaven.

He had to know more. What she was doing. What schemes Lucifer had concocted with her. Compared to the fate of what a Nephilim free in Creation could do, Birah's mechanical shell was utterly expendable.

---

With Sunday begrudgingly admitting entrance and the drunks starting to rouse from their booth-bound comas, the goings-on of Dennys became a bit more animated when a stream of Hellhounds came in. The imps behind the counter, who had at this point become used to the nascent tradition of Sundays being 'a fuckload of Hellhounds' day, had already cooked up a bunch of pigs, so that when the pack of Hell's sapient dogs started to fill booths and tables and park themselves next to still torpid drunks, they only had to wait minutes to have a five gallon bucket of cooked pig products plunked onto their tables, instead of the half-hour it had been back last year when the 'tradition' began.

Was this the future of the Hellhound Race, Maelstrom pondered, as he sat two spots away from Loona, where she had her back to the exterior wall in their muted booth? Well, say muted; the ensorcelled cloth that could be drawn that killed the transit of noise from without to within and vice versa was currently thrown wide open, allowing all of the raucous noise of Hellhounds being Hellhounds to reach the booth and those who sat within it.

"This is a big day," Loona said, smiling privately to herself as she watched newly manumitted Hellhounds taking tables, unsure of themselves yet but willing to entertain a free bucket of dead cooked pig and a roof over their heads. That had been one of the big stumbling blocks of Loona's plan, which all including Maelstrom realized after the auction's end; for all they had bought and freed a lot of would-have-been slaves, they had then provided no other services – even shelter – to them once they were out. "We keep doing this for a few years, there won't be many enslaved Hounds left."

"That's not how it works," Tex said with a slow shake of his head. Both he and Tiff were between Maelstrom and Loona, but that left Maelstrom able to leave the booth without climbing over someone. He'd accept that. The other side of the booth housed four, Maelstrom's brother, his brother's mate, and Cookie among them. Cookie was only now starting to look less like a hunted animal and more like a confident person. She still had her triggers, those things which drove a shard of panic into the base of her brain, but whatever they were, she was showing a lot of toughness in ignoring them, of moving past them. Maelstrom was proud of her.

It was like looking at himself from the outside.

"Everybody!" Loona announced, standing on the booth's seat with her ears brushing the drop-ceiling overhead. "Let's raise a cup of whatever we've got to this! To Hounds without masters! To Hounds without fear!"

The old timers, like Maelstrom, raised their glasses to her toast, but the newbies were still afraid. Their fear wasn't a thing so easy to kill. To them, this must have seemed like a shocking, surprising fantasy, one that a sharp poke would awaken them from. It had taken months to shake that feeling for Maelstrom. And it would take months likely for them as well.

"I'll get another pitcher," Maelstrom offered, as the sweet drinks that had been provided by the gallon were already vanishing down Houndish throats. The revelry was pleasant, but even Maelstrom could pick up that for most of them, it was fragile. And at a glance to Loona, he could tell she was far more acutely aware of it than he was, certainly. That was the one big problem with forging uncharted paths; you necessarily encountered hitherto never-seen pitfalls. And faith seemed to be the biggest pitfall that these new Hounds of Dennys were encountering.

He wagered about one in five of them, once their bellies were full, were just going to start running until they found a nice place to hide for a week, not trusting that emancipation from their slavery was real, honest, or genuine. Fearing, perhaps, that whatever slavery that they had been rescued from, was only a prelude to worse to be found at the hand of one of their own.

It was sad, but Hell was not kind to Hellhounds as a rule. They had valid reason to be afraid, in literally every circumstance except this one. And they had no valid reason to yet believe that this circumstance varied from those. "Two more jugs, the dark one and the darker one!" Maelstrom spoke loudly over the hubbub of the Hellhounds making a weekly congregation to Dennys and exchanging loud stories with those whom they had not seen in seven nights.

"They're called Coke and Rootbeer, son," the grey-haired imp maven said, snapping her fingers and having a pair of her obvious children run and start to fetch the beverages for him. "On the tab?"

Maelstrom gave a nod, but before he could speak, he felt something hard prod into his back. Instantly, the world fell away, at the knowledge there was a gunbarrel against his back-ribs. The imp maven didn't seem to notice. And though Maelstrom tightened his fists until their knuckles popped, he didn't move, until a tall, lanky Sinner with snake-like features leaned around him.

"Walk out the front door, then toward the van on the right. Nice and careful," the snake, appropriately, hissed into his ear.

"How about I don't?" Maelstrom asked.

"Then I see how much you like taking lead with your sodie-pop," the snake laughed quietly. He looked to the booth, but the angle of it precluded vision by anybody but Cookie, and Cookie wasn't either perceptive enough or combative enough to help him right now. So he tilted his neck to one side until it emitted a pop, and puffed out a breath. Fine. Let's see where this goes.

The snake didn't seem to draw any attention from the other patrons of Dennys, which was a strange thing, because he was pretty sure that tentative or not, the older-timers of the Free Hounds would have absolutely wrecked shit if they saw one of theirs being goose-walked out of a building with a gun at his back. Maybe there was magic involved. He always had a hard time around magic. He preferred the kinds of problems that fists could solve.

The parking lot was, as usual, sparsely parked owing that the entire thing was on a slight angle. It had always struck Maelstrom as odd, this restaurant. It was as though the entire thing had fallen out of the sky and landed in this lot, not obeying any city ordinances or zoning laws when it did. And then, nobody bothered to remove it afterwards. Such a strange place. And he was being brought to where two panel vans were parked, backed into their spots, with an empty spot between them. The vans would block view from the inside of the Dennys for whatever unpleasantness that this bastard had in mind for Maelstrom. It would come down to timing, he reckoned. The right move at the right time, before they had him out of sight. He didn't want to die, not anymore. But if he had to die, he was going to cause as much ruckus as he could, to cause that entire building to avenge him, red in tooth and claw.

And just when he rounded the front of the van, he had his moment. The gun drifted away from shooting him in the liver, to a place where if the snake fired it'd graze him, hurting like a bastard, but not actually meaningfully harming him. With movement born from years of desperation and furious action, he grabbed the gun, allowing it to burn his fingers with its shot, before sweeping hard and wide, grabbing the off-balance snake by his neck as he stumbled, and then with a massive heave, to spin him so hard into the side of the engine-block that not only did the van shift fairly significantly, but the snake's spine doubled on itself to a crunch of pulverizing bone. And when he dropped the briefly paraplegic Sinner, raising his fists, it was to see four mafioso types in smart suits wielding machine guns.

"Easy there, bub," the fifth mafioso type said, sitting as he was in a collapsing chair. Maelstrom might have been fast on his feet, but he wasn't faster than a hail of bullets. So he stayed right where he was, standing over the snake whom he'd folded in the wrong direction. The fifth one was fat, grey-skinned with long fingers and eyes which were white on black. "Guess yer the jumpy type, ain't ya?"

"What do you want?" Maelstrom asked. The four goons with the mafioso were professionals. Any time one of them had so much as a quiver of distraction, the other three tightened their grips to compensate. There would be no fortuitous moments of escape when all happened to be distracted, he wagered.

"The brass on this one, talkin' with a tone like that," the fat mobster laughed. He pointed an unsettlingly long finger at Maelstrom. "You're gonna go back in there, an' you're gonna march out my property."

"I'm not stealing anything for you," Maelstrom said.

"Look, mutt. I get to decide whether you live or die for the next ten seconds. How 'bout you stop puffin yer chest before I send some lead into it?" the fat mobster said, by his tone his patience fraying. He sat forward slightly. "In that buildin', there's a dog I own, an old fuck wit' one hand. I want it out here, double time."

"There's no owned Hounds in that building, I assure you," Maelstrom said. The second guy on the right seemed to be less on-the-ball than the others. Maybe if he could time it right, he could dive behind the body of the snake before he got shot to shit. The snake Sinner would provide very little protection, but it was a damned sight better than the nothing that he had right now.

"That's where you're wrong, dog," the fat mobster said. "I don't care what the shitheel with his gavel said. That dog is mine. It was mine 'fore I sent it up. And just 'cause some otha' asshole come along and swoop it don't mean that it ain't still mine."

Maelstrom stared at the mobster, biting the instinct to tell him that no, that was exactly what it meant, and that the 'dog' in question was owned very briefly by Loona Miller before she destroyed all chattel fetters that had bound them. But these were the kind of people who shot glib Hounds.

"I can't just walk in there and snatch up a Hound from that place. The others would stop me," Maelstrom said.

"So you use that brain yous dogs are so fuckin' proud of and come up wit' an excuse," the fat mobster said. "Lie to the idiots in there. Lie like your life is at at stake, 'cause I fuggin' guarantee you that it is!"

"I just had a thought, Dino," one of the gunmen by the fat mobster said.

"Wha'sat, Mark?" Dino, the fat mobster, asked.

"What's to say he don't just go back in there and raise a fuss? Thinkin' he'd be able to get out in the carnage?" Mark asked.

"That's a good point, Mark," Dino said. He shifted and got to his feet. "Boys, hold you guns behind ya's, and escort him to the door. And if he don't bring out my property, rattle the whole fuckin' restaurant. Capiche?"

"Sounds good, boss," Mark said, and gestured with his machine gun for Maelstrom to start walking. Maelstrom wracked his brain, trying to find some way to save them, but just like with Drapetomane, these people didn't see him or the Hounds of Dennys to be anything but acceptable collateral damage for them. Maelstrom swung wide around a couple of cars to enter a different door than the one he'd been marched out of, this one on the other side of the front of the building. So that this time, when he came in, he was, for a moment, given clear line of sight to the booth.

And arriving like a miracle he hadn't the faith to ask for, he caught Loona's eye as he returned to the din of the raucous Hounds. And within a second, there was a visceral snap sensation inside Maelstrom's mind, as something connected to it.

"What's going on, you're holy fuck you're panicking. Short version, please?"

The thought was in Maelstrom's head, but he could hear Loona's voice in it. So he tried to do something faster than explaining. He just focused on three pictures. The five mobsters with guns. The particulars of the newly emancipated Hound they were after. And then an imagining of the mobsters laying waste to all those Hellhounds gathered here under withering tide of high velocity lead.

"That's bad. How long do you have?"

The lump in Maelstrom's throat seemed to answer that question for him, so he felt a growl of outrage building in Loona even through their mental connection.

"I'll make it work. When I say 'now', grab anybody near you and hit the deck."

It wasn't the best plan, but considering the miniscule time-frame he had to work with, he'd have to find a way to do it. To save these people, from the likes of those assholes out there. As Maelstrom watched, though, he saw a couple of the Hounds near the window grow rigid, as though suddenly hearing something inside their heads. And then a few more as he continued toward his 'target'.

He had to trust that she was doing the right thing. And she was at this point trusting that he would do the right thing as well. The connection between Loona and Maelstrom was still there, but she was obviously busy informing others. So Maelstrom came to a halt at the table lacking the target, who were all Hounds that had been bought so very recently and then freed from bondage. Not one of them had only one hand. None of them in the building did, upon second sweep. Which meant this shooting was going to happen.

"What do you want, friend?" the oldest of the Hounds had asked. They'd bought him for twenty Souls, because that was all he was worth to people who considered Hellhounds only good for as long as their bodies held out.

"Do not look to the front window. Keep all of your eyes on me," Maelstrom said. One of the young ones nevertheless did jerk his head toward the glass, only to have his littermate swat his head and drag his attention back to the table he was standing at. "There are five guys with guns who are about to light this place up."

"What? Why?" the old Hound asked.

"Because they're assholes," Maelstrom simplified, because explaining the whole thing may have even been beyond him.

"But... what do we do?" the pup at his side asked.

"We hit the deck and we crawl for the back doors through the k–" Maelstrom began.

"NOW!" Loona screamed as she charged out of her booth. And in unison, every Hellhound who'd looked shocked and confused a moment ago pushed their fellows down and upended their tables toward the front windows. Maelstrom did likewise, even thought at put him on the wrong side of its protection, and a fraction of a second after the banging of tables against floors sounded, there was a roar of automatic gunfire that shattered the front window and streaked through the air. Instantly, Maelstrom felt one arm burn as a bullet skimmed painfully along his hide, the next bullet slamming into the table next to him. One of the pups wasn't diving for cover! Get down you little idiot!

Shocked and confused by the pandemonium surrounding him, the pup just stood, his arms hugged tight around him, eyes wide and mouth agape. Damn it all, Maelstrom thought, as he dug in a foot to launch himself to the child, so that if he would not get down Maelstrom would knock him down.

But before he managed to explode into motion, there was a blinding, terrifying pain in his head.

Then, there was a rising horror, as he felt the Pop that gave him thought being undone.

Then Maelstrom's mind shut off.

And something far, far older woke up.

---

Birah had left the Minimum some time ago, and though he had received pings from Yael to reestablish his feeds, he was fixated not on fixing an ultimately expendable machine, but on discovering the reason that Hell had its own Nephilim walking around.

She was heading into a section of town that was under actual quarantine, its streets bearing increasingly permanent seeming checkpoints and the urban equivalent of earthworks. Considering the damaged equipment dumped outside the path that he was walking, it seemed like these people'd had to destroy some pretty significant ordnance. He paused at the corner of the block before the checkpoint, narrowing his vision. Was that an Exorcist in that scrap heap? It was! It was a Type 6, which was twenty iterations out of date, and looked to have been blasted to chunks with a cannon. That they didn't immediately take the device to Lucifer to have his Traitor Knights dissect and discover its secrets meant that they probably had much more choice scrap since the Purge Unending began.

"What a damned waste," Birah muttered. There were a scant few dozens of thousands of Exorcists of any description, and if Heaven were losing them fast enough that the bones of one of those terrifying devices could be left to rust in the sun, they were going to run out of them long before Hell ran out of fighters.

Then it'd be back to the way of the 1700's. And Birah doubted many angels would like to go back to putting their actual necks on the line in the name of population control.

Come to think of it... why weren't there more people around?

Birah shelved that errant thought, and continued after the Nephilim once the traffic lights allowed him to. She was talking to the soldier at the checkpoint now built into the sidewalk. He gave earnest nods at her words, but with Birah's directional microphone broken he could only guess as to the subject of their discussion. Beyond that checkpoint, the major landmark was a building that looked like it had another building merged indelicately with it, and then had the two structures nailed into place using a cargo ship. At the very top of the building there was a sign, one that had a magic on it. He could tell that it was a magic to prevent a specific person from seeing what it actually was. And what exactly was a Hazbin Hotel, anyway?

Whatever the case, the road lead to that building, with the military presence mounting as they approached what seemed to be the side of the structure. A parking lot nearby played host to military vehicles, and a barracks structure was set into an empty lot across from it. What was her role in all of this? Was she involved in Lucifer getting those insufferable heavy soldiers in their seemingly adamantine armor? He did see a few of them in the streets beyond, their movement seeming to be like casual jogging, but traveling almost as fast as a car when they did.

No other way through it but to do it; Birah steeled himself, as his approach brought him to the Nephilim's side.

"What's your business with the Hotel?" the soldier asked as soon as he finished saying his piece to the Nephilim.

"I... have an appointment... what is that?" Birah asked, tilting his head at the strange heavy soldiers.

"Appointment with who?" the soldier asked. Birah, though, forceably ignored the Nephilim; if he could get inside, he could likely learn more by osmosis than he could by attempting to interrogate a mature, doubtlessly paranoid Nephilim. He called on his magic as the Spellbinder, invoking a stolen power that belonged truly to the Things From Outside, and using it, he conjured up true knowledge out of nothing.

"I'm here to talk to Charlotte," he said, knowing in that moment that there was somebody named Charlotte inside to talk to, and that somebody looking vaguely like him would be expected to talk to her.

"It's not Charlotte, it's Charlie," the Nephilim said. She extended a hand with a big grin. "I'm Charlie!"

Birah was stunned for a moment.

"Did you seriously not see her there, civilian? Satan's nut-hairs, no wonder so many of you die when the Exorcists appear," the soldier laughed.

"Riiight," Birah took her offered hand. Okay, this was going entirely off of plan. And it made him leery of using that particular skill From Outside ever again without testing it first. He took a handshake's worth of time to come up with a plan, and though it was a longer handshake than most, he had something when it finished. It probably wasn't good, but it was something. "I'm here because my co-author wanted to interview you personally, but as with most of his kind he is hard pressed to leave Sloth."

"Oh you work with Descar Kirkish?" she asked.

"I should be so lucky," he said. He knew a trip-up when he heard one. "You've probably not heard of Amadeus Vaught, but he's got an interest in you."

"Vaught... Vaught... Roth, do you know any Vaught's?" the hilariously undertitled 'Charlie' asked.

"I don't go down further than my homestead, ma'am," 'Roth' said. That was fortunate. It was a gamble to match an odd but not unheard of first name with a very common surname for the fiends of Envy. It was telling that even in Heaven people heard of Kari Vaught, a Selachimorph fiend, who had fought as a general to exterminate the Leviathans infesting Hell. To claim descent from her was akin to a human claiming descent from Temujin. Depending on where you lived, it could be a statistical inevitability.

"Well, I don't have a lot of time, but if you're willing to follow me around I'll answer what I can," Charlie said. She had him off balance instantly. He had expected cold, ruthless, sanguinary and cruel. Not chipper, cheerful, and brighter than the sunny day that they were currently living in.

"So, I must admit, I was somewhat unprepared for this," Birah offered by way of disarming.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Mister Vaught didn't leave me the most... cogent of notes as to what I was going to be interviewing you about. He has a fairly esoteric taste in things," Birah said. Lies were not easy for Angels, but the last three centuries had made Birah pretty good at them, able to fabricate with the best of these Hellspawn. Considering they didn't bat an eye at his say-nothing 'answer', he might have even been better.

"I'm just glad that people are starting to actually care about the Purgatory Project," she said.

"I'm sorry... Purgatory Project?" he echoed.

She gestured to the militarized neighborhood that they were walking through on their way to that strange hotel. "This! All of this!" she said.

"These soldiers?"

"Well, not exactly the soldiers," she said with a bit of a shamed-faced look. "But they have their place. I can't exactly offer the services of the Happy Hotel if it's constantly getting attacked by Exorcists, now can I?"

Happy Hotel? The sign clearly said Hazbin. But then, that magic was probably keyed to her. What a cruel prank, to not let her see things as they were.

"The Purgatory Project is a partnership, you see, between Heaven and Hell. Or at least, the part of Heaven that is willing to work with me," Charlie then gamefully said. "Have any of the Betrayed managed to get past the Pride Wall yet? I ask because there's a lot of them turning up lately, and they're obviously not Sinners, so..."

"Again, I hate to interrupt you... Betrayed?" Birah asked. This was altogether very strange.

"Oh, Innocents that got thrown out of Heaven by Gabriel. Rachel was the first. But she certainly wasn't the last," Charlie said. Dear God on his Throne... that was actually happening? Gabriel was throwing the Just and the Worthy into perdition? No bloody wonder Hell was attacking with such hitherto unrestrained aggression, plunging its claws, sharp and bloody, into the flesh of Heaven. "In fact, I see one of them over there. Hey Addam! Can I borrow you for a second?"

Addam, as it turned out, was riding a garage-creeper, and scooted out from under an IFV that had a wheel removed and was up on jacks. When he stood, Birah could not restrain his gawking at the presence of one with a Gapped Halo here in Hell. Addam wiped some grease off of his hands onto a length of rag and stood before Birah, tall enough to look him in the eye and utterly unafraid to. "He's wearing a lot more clothing than most of his kind. What's he doing here, Charlie?"

"He's interviewing me about the Purgatory Project!" she said enthusiastically. Addam gave a chuckle at her glee and rolled his eyes a bit. He leaned in toward Birah, and spoke in low, conspiratorial tones.

"Don't let her get too carried away. We're still a hundredth of a hundredth of the way to where we need to be," he said.

"I heard that!" Charlie said, her happiness not dimming. "The fact that we're moving in the right direction is what matters!"

"And you serve her... why?" Birah asked.

"I don't 'serve' Charlie. I work where there's work to be done," Addam said. He cracked a smirk. "I haven't been bored for more than a quarter hour since I landed here. Even if I weren't exiled here, I'd be hard pressed to find somewhere better to live."

"In Hell, though," Birah stressed. He wasn't in any material or magical bondage that Birah could sense. Brainwashed, maybe?

"Yes, in Hell. Where people appreciate another set of hands and there's food on the plates," All turned as somebody on the far side of the IFV called Addam's name. "Look, I can chat later when we're not down two Hesters. You'd think those Exorcists are getting smarter, aiming for the drive instead of the turret-bearing since we stopped using the autoloaders."

They had been, because that was the new standing order. Addam departed, and Birah watched after him. Then when he turned back, he actually started, because there was another woman standing right beside Charlie whom neither of them had seen coming. She was short, had orange hair that refused the call of gravity or styling products, and also had a Gapped Halo. It took all of Birah's composure to not gape openly at her, because it was a face belonging to someone he'd been briefed on, but never expected to see here.

Rachel Scailes.

"When did you get here?" Charlie asked.

"Immaterial. We need to talk about Dresden," she said.

"What does he want now?" Charlie's good humor drained away, and she sounded distinctly annoyed.

"It's not what he wants, it's what he's done," Scailes said. "Niffty's cleaning the room and clearing out the rubble, but the fact is, regardless of whether he is in the program or not, I can't in good conscience recommend allowing him to stay on the premises any longer. He's a danger to the other clients," when Charlie tried to make a placating gesture, Scailes pointed up at her face with a finger, "and more than that, he's a threat to the structural integrity of the Hotel itself."

"I am not kicking him out of the program," Charlie said.

"Then move his domicile out of the Hotel Proper. There's room in the buildings around us," Scailes said. How was it possible that the most lionized Heavenly social worker was now serving the other side? How?

"I don't own those buildings," Charlie pointed out.

"Said the trillionaire with her own personal Legion of the Damned," Rachel responded flatly. Charlie winced at that, not the expression that Birah would have expected out of the daughter of the Devil Himself. But then, almost nothing about this entire situation was going how he believed it ought.

"I'm sorry, but... what is this?" Birah felt fairly confident in his confusion at seeing people with Halos in Hell who weren't here killing people.

Scailes turned to him, brow furrowed. "Do you think somebody is suppressing news of the existence of the Betrayed? Because he should not be nearly so incredulous," she said.

"You have to admit, this is somewhat bizarre," Birah said. "How did you even get down here?"

"Thrown by Gabriel after he tortured me to death a few times," she said off-handedly. And though Birah's instinct was to reject such aspersions cast against a fellow Angel... that fellow angel was Gabriel. And it was entirely in keeping with his character to act as God's Grim Reaper. "Which you may absolutely report on. Archangels like him deserve to reap the damage to their reputations that their own actions have sowed for them."

"I'll bear that in mind," Birah said.

"Look, I'll think about it..." Charlie began, but Scailes returned her attention to the Nephilim and gave her head a stern shake.

"That's a polite way of saying 'I'll put it off until you're not paying attention and then not do it'. If you want him to remain in the program, you need to get him physically out of the building. I'm not budging on this," Scailes crossed her arms before her chest.

"...fine," Charlie said, looking at least a little bit irate at having been routed by an Innocent. Or a Betrayed, as they were taken to being called down here. Charlie turned to Birah. "As you might have guessed, this is Rachel; she's in charge of the actual rehabilitation program that the Happy Hotel offers."

"What manner of rehabilitation program?" he asked. Because that word could hide a lot of truly depraved things.

"For most, a crash-course on introspection, as well as cognitive therapy, counselling, drug-addiction rehabilitation, and anger management," Scailes rattled off, ticking each off of a finger as she did as the three of them walked toward the doors of the hotel. "Some require more care, others less. Fiona essentially just needed enough time to introspect, and she was heading up."

"Heading up...?" Birah asked, catching her shoulder lightly and pulling her to a halt.

"Yes. We've had one Redemption since I got here, and another shortly before my involvement in the project. Although, with the state of Heaven, in my opinion she'd be better off if she stayed down here," Scailes said.

Impossible.

The only path to redemption was through the Stone of Farewell. With Purgatory and the Stone gone, Hell was doomed to overpopulation. Or at least, that was what other Angels said.

What the propaganda said. The mere existence of Gloria Mundi whispered otherwise.

"What are you, really?" Scailes asked.

"What?" Birah asked, withdrawing his hand.

"I know what flesh feels like on my shoulder. I've had unkind hands placed there before. Yours, though, feels more like plastic," she said, eyes narrowing. Birah had a spike of panic shoot through him, but he forced himself to keep mum and not flinch or give himself away. Then, upon forcing a slightly contrite look on his face, he pulled the hand up and unwound a small section of the glamour he'd woven, allowing the hand to return to its mechanical appearance. And since it vanished up his still glamoured sleeve, it looked like a clever prosthetic.

"Most don't like it when their gigolos have missing limbs," he said. And then realizing the lie he could offer, he doubled down on it. "It's actually new, look at the articulation; I think they based this thing off of the junk of those things," he motioned toward the garbage pit with its destroyed Exorcist near the entrance to the neighborhood, "and I can actually feel through it."

"And you didn't just use Toyborg parts?" Charlie asked.

"I mean... wouldn't you?" he asked. Scailes, he was coming to recognize, was a perceptive one. "I'm sure I'll have plenty of time to talk with Miss Scailes later. There's probably going to be another thing based on her if my nose tells me anything. But today, today I'm here for you, Charlie."

Rachel gave him a narrow-eyed look as she cleaved off of them and headed back into the building. Better to keep her at distance. What must these people have offered her to have her turn her allegiance so completely?

And again, Birah found himself off of his balance. Because what she was doing down here was exactly the same work that she'd been doing back in Heaven. His passing fancy to just grab her and Recall had to be shelved, because if Gabriel had thrown her out, then bringing Scailes back would only serve to put Birah's neck on the block along with hers. And unlike the Innocent, there would be no coming back if that blade ever fell for him. The truth as it appeared to be was that Scailes had not betrayed Heaven. She'd been betrayed by it. Both immediately by her treatment at the hands of Gabriel, and more chronically, by what Heaven had become by the time she reached it.

Still, he couldn't be seen to just stare after that human, especially not with her suspicions as whetted as they currently were. He rewove his glamour and turned to Charlie once again. "So if I can take a guess... you have done all this work in order to get your clients into Heaven, against impossibility itself. Why?"

"What do you mean, why? This is Hell!" she exclaimed, gesturing around her. And she wasn't wrong to do so. "As Princess I have a responsibility to the wellbeing of my people, and without a release valve for the awful treatment of Sinners in this Ring, they're just encouraged to become worse and worse versions of themselves. I have to believe that they can be better!"

Birah was about to ask a follow-up question when he felt a waft of foul and sepulchral power, drifting down from the highest floor of the hotel and spilling out through its waiting, open front doors. A stench of Power From Outside. Of those things which ought-not-be. He turned and started walking parallel the entrance rather than into it. Charlie seemed a bit off put but followed him. "It's becoming clear that I'm woefully underprepared for this interview. I don't even have my usual equipment," Birah demurred. "How about you give me the twenty-second version now, so I'll have something to formulate useful questions to when I go back and get my gear?"

The twenty second version ended up taking a lot longer than that, and gave Birah a half-circuit around the building by the time Charlie finished her enthusiastic screed as to the advancement and betterment of the Damned. And as far as Birah could tell, she was being stone-honest for all of it.

She actually believed that the Damned, those who failed in Judgment... could redeem themselves.

Begging off and finding a quiet alley to Recall took a bit of doing, but he had come this far already. There was no point tipping his hand if he could help it. He opened the comms suite which he'd silenced due to the annoyance of its static, and found a backlog of pings from Yael there. Oh, this might raise questions. So before Birah actually Recalled, he gave a glance around, dropped his glamour, and then leaned back as violently and as far as he could, to the sound of crunching metal and plastic. Then, at last, he Recalled.

There was a visceral thunk as Birah felt his sensorum return to his actual body, laying supine in the Control Rig. Yael was hovering above him, large for a Cherub and seeming older than most of his kind. Yael puffed out a sigh of relief. "Well thank Father for that," Yael said. He held his fingers a hair apart. "I was about this close to calling for Hepsut to go down and retrieve you. What the hell happened down there? Your comms were turned off when you were detected outside of the Minimum."

"I was getting some distracting Ghosting while I moved through it. I didn't want to give away what I was and have the Hellspawn jump on me like hyenas," Birah gave a half truth. Yael gave a distant nod.

"Probably smart. Still," Yael said. He looked over to the Exorcist, which was now dangling in its maintenance cradle. "What's the prognosis over there, Hari?"

Hariel turned a glance to them, already opening the machine to reveal its innards. She was dark like tar, her eyes conversely bright like polished silver, bearing a striking similarity to the Grigori Gadreel, who was by some metrics her 'sister'. "This thing was in bad shape when I tested it. Look at the state of this thing! Did you get hit by a bus while you were down there?"

Birah started to disconnect himself from the Rig and rose, calling his robes to drape him as he did. "I heard a crunch after I lost contact with you," Birah again half-lied. It was the truth, because that had happened. It was a lie because he was clearly the cause of it. "What's damaged?"

"It'd take an Act of God to get any telemetry out of this thing," Hariel shook her head and slapped a tag onto the machine. "Complete rebuild. We'll have to cannibalize the others to fix it."

"Well, we can honestly say we tried," Yael said. He puffed out a breath and then settled down to stand on the ground next to Birah. He shot a glance up at him. "Did you see anything down there that might help us? It's not often our kind get to get a glimpse at the lives of the Hellborn."

"Just the Damned being Damned," Birah said.

If there was one thing he'd had drilled into his head again and again since the Walls of Heaven fell, it was that there was always more to a situation than the first blush revealed. And today he'd seen a new layer of it. That the Great Enemy's daughter was working... for Heaven? That a Nephilim was not rallying banners to usurp the Throne of God but instead fixated on bettering the lives of Sinners was an impossibly baffling notion.

He didn't know who, if anybody, he could talk with this about.

He had a duty to reveal the existence of a living Nephilim to Gabriel, so that he may fulfill the pogrom that God had set into motion.

But at the same time, Birah knew in his heart that doing that would only lead to tragedy and pain.

Oh, why couldn't this war be as simple as the last one, he thought? Why couldn't this just be they the Stewards of Heaven striking down the malign interloper? Because times had changed, that's why. Times had changed and Birah was fearing that he had not kept up with them. Hellish armor, the failure of Exorcists and a Nephilim succeeding where the Stone of Farewell failed, it all pointed to a new age of Creation.

And that left Birah in a cold sweat.

Alone.

And almost as afraid of what his silence would be viewed as, as what would result if he spoke.

---

The din of gunfire was punctuated by screaming, and Loona had already cleared the first few tables and dragged down those too stunned to drop when the lead started flying. He could feel a sting of fear from Maelstrom, over yonder, and she pulsed through her connections to the others to crawl for the back doors.

"Who are these people?" Tiffany said, from where she was outright on her belly.

"Who cares? Just get the ones who can't fight out!" Loona said.

Then she felt her connection to Maelstrom unPop.

Loona was shocked for a moment what that was. But when she looked above the tipped-over table, she saw that Maelstrom was indeed sprawled on the floor on the far side of the central island which provided drinks. His blood was mingling with that of a Hellhound pup, who had been riddled with bullets.

No.

"Maelstrom's been hit!" Loona shouted, and she started to scramble closer to him, having to recoil as a bullet hit her in the shoulder and spun her painfully to the floor. She growled under her breath and focused her new Purgatory Bullshit on taking that wound and making it go away, numbing the pain and forcing the bullet back out of its wound tract. It still didn't close all the way, or stop bleeding, but it was good enough. There was a brief lull as somebody in that enfillade of fire reloaded, and Loona took that to make a break across a couple of upended tables and then closer to where Maelstrom had fallen.

She landed, and looked for her fellow Free Hound.

And saw his hand clawing. The connection between she and Maelstrom was still active. If he was dying, she could feel it. She felt nothing. Nothing at all. No thought. No fear. Just violence.

And when that claw turned and dug into the ground, it did not do so as a hand pushing a body to its feet. It did so as a second set of paws.

Maelstrom lifted himself up, blood dribbling freely from the bullet-hole just above one of his eyes. Eyes that now glowed with malignant light and had no visible pupil. Any of his usual expression of worry, of fear, or of basic personhood, were gone. All there was, was the animal, that through relentless evolution lucked into being a Hound.

And the animal was a lot dumber than a Hound was.

What Maelstrom had become flipped forward onto all fours; despite the fact that he, as a Hellhound, should have been entirely conditioned for bipedal movement, the instant that his higher brain shut off, his body remembered the old ways, and with claws digging into the tiles, he launched himself with a feral howl through what once was the front window of the Dennys, clamped his jaws onto the head of the nearest mafioso, and with a single shake of his shoulders, ripped it, and most of his spine, clean out of his body.

Loona was running already. The mafiosos were not prone to complete panic, the way a lot of low-level thugs were. When they beheld an attack coming at them instead of cowering before them, they only needed a moment to adjust before they stopped shooting at the innocent and changed their aim towards the threat. And when what Maelstrom had become closed his jaws, crushing the skull between them to an explosion of meat, bone shards, and brains, he managed to lope half way to the next before the first bullet hit him.

Loona didn't want to let him die. Not like this. She grabbed a glass carafe of coffee and hurled it ahead of her, shattering it against the side of one mobster's face. The scalding coffee prevented him from riddling what Maelstrom had become with lead. The distraction gave the feral hound enough time to close the distance and tackle the next mobster so hard that they rolled, the mobster taking bullets that were meant for the feral hound. Not by design; by sheer luck. There was no tactic to the feral hound's attacks. It just knew something had hurt it. And it was getting revenge at any cost.

Reggie vaulted the window before Loona could reach it, and leaping tackled the one who wasn't coffee-burned, dragging him to the ground and strangling him. That gave Loona enough time to finally leave the Dennys and hurl herself at the fattest of the assholes who were trying to kill them all. He was the fastest of them despite his corpulence. By the time she was hurtling toward him, he had already gotten his gun between them and plugged a round into her belly. But she ignored the pain, grabbing his thick, jowly neck between her teeth and shaking as hard as her body would allow. She felt the yielding crunch of the bone shifting and then breaking through her gums, and she let the fatass drop, spitting the foul Sinner blood out as she stripped the old submachine gun out of his hands and used it to mag-dump into the one she'd blinded with coffee.

She then fell to a knee, clutching her guts. The pain was intense. And she didn't have enough gas in her tank to force it to be right. She'd survive it though. Maelstrom on the other hand... She looked over to him, and saw him savagely tearing apart the chest-cavity of the one he'd tackled, digging with his hands the way dogs did with their paws, throwing aside bone and viscera, until he could plunge his muzzle into the cavity, tear out the diseased, grey-red heart and crush it betwixt his teeth, even as his body was riddled with bullets. It only took two paws of dig to get there, and once he had the heart down his gullet, he bit the ribcage and hurled the thing with a flick of his head so hard that the body outright exploded and demolished the car it collided into. Any awe she had at Maelstrom's raw power was killed dead by the fact that… well… that wasn't Maelstrom anymore.

A baleful, glowing red eye – its pupil so contracted as to be essentially invisible – turned to Loona then, and the expression on what Maelstom had become's face shifted from atavistic frenzy to pain and fear. A whimper, a long and thin whine emerged from his throat. He tried to lope toward her, but found that his legs dragged behind him uselessly. Blood poured out of his many bullet holes, flooding the street with that shit he really needed to be on the inside of his veins, not the outside. Loona rushed to him, and when she took his head in her hands he finally let out a long whine and collapsed against her. They'd Brained him. Those motherfuckers Brained him.

And that was worse than a death sentence for a Hound. It was something they used to punish whole Slave Lots, if somebody got uppity.

And Loona didn't accept it.

With blood slicking her hands, she tried to dial Fatty. He had magic. He could fix this. But the phone rang. Again. Again.

"Pick up you tub of shit! PICK UP!" Loona shouted.

"Loona is... oh... oh no," Tex said, only now getting out of the bullet storm.

The call went to Moxxie's voice-mail. And Loona could feel a part of herself dying along with the former slave that was quickly expiring with his head in her lap. So she looked at her phone, for any other idea. For any possible miracle.

And she noticed she had Krieg's number.

"I'm so sorry. Is there anything..." Tex began.

"Not now!" Loona asked. Was she crying? She was pretty sure she was crying. But she didn't have time to weep. While the second ring was still ringing, the connection to her second call opened up.

"Blitz-Krieg Magical Solutions. How can we..." came the voice of the imp she needed's mother.

"SEND KRIEG TO DENNY'S RIGHT FUCKING NOW! WE NEED HELP!" Loona screamed.

"Loona? What happened?" Tilla asked.

"JUST SEND HER!" Loona demanded. And then dropped the phone, holding Maelstrom close to her. He didn't deserve to die like this. An animal riddled with bullets by a bunch of assholes. He deserved a happier life after all he'd suffered at his onset. And by fucking God and Satan and all the rest of those shitheads in power she swore she was going to give him that happier life, whether reality wanted her to or not.

It felt like hours before a portal opened, and both Krieg and that winged imp she palled around with came through. Krieg's eyes locked on her instantly, on Maelstrom. "How is he injured?" she asked, ignoring the dying and the dead. Loona looked to the street, and saw old-timey cars starting to form a barricade of the street, a bunch of other fuckers in fancy suits starting to arm up and make a wall.

"They Brained him," Loona said.

"Explain."

"Brain injury that made him feral. Undo it. Undo it now!" Loona demanded.

"Ordinarily I would tell you not to speak to me in such a manner, but this Hound is indeed dying. Uller, use Rough's Method on his chest and spine wounds. I will handle the brain injury myself. It requires a more delicate touch."

"Who are these people?" Tex asked, looking at Krieg and Uller.

"Miracleworkers," Loona answered. And she gave Krieg access to the hole in Maelstrom's head. Very quickly under Krieg's care, the wound pulled together and the bullet was forced back out of its injury, closing as though he'd never been shot in the skull. But his mind was still shadowed and inactive, not even an ember of his personhood still burning, even though she felt some strange, familiar force lingering in the darkness that was once his self. This, Loona could not abide. She only had a dreg of power to call from, after all the tide of it she'd had to dump to warn the others before the massacre. But it might be enough.

So she shared the fact that she had a mind with Maelstrom.

And just like that, there was a loud Pop that she heard through her connection to Birch's former slave. "Wake up," she demanded, as the familiar sensation burst into something akin to psychic bonfire.

And the red eyes of Maelstrom changed as his pupils dilated until they looked like proper Hellhound eyes again. "Ow. Oh fuck. Oh, ow... Oh," Maelstrom said. He blinked a few times at her and Krieg, then down to Uller, who was still carefully fixing the fact that he'd been more ventilated than a sieve a moment ago. "Did," Maelstrom broke off to cough out some blood, "did I get him down? Out of the way?"

"What?" Loona asked.

"The pup. Did I get him out of the line of fire?" Maelstrom asked. He breathed ragged. "I can't – where am I?"

"I think we're about to be shot at," Krieg said, motioning with a hand to to the army of mafiosos which was assembling not far away. The barrier she formed would buy them time, but not enough, she warranted. And if they were coming from other directions too... Well, at least Maelstrom wasn't going to die as an animal. He'd die as a person.

But then another car came to a screeching halt, clipping a mobster as it stopped just short of the barrier. The mobsters all shouted at him, but quieted when the door opened, and a short, dark grey spider Sinner with eight red eyes stepped out. He shot a look across their number, and they loosened the grasp of their guns. Krieg's expression darkened at seeing him.

"Would one 'a yous assholes tell me why the fuck you lit up a waffle house outside 'a our territory and mighta' started a fuckin' war?" the grey spider demanded.

"I dunno, Arackniss. Just got told to come here when Fat Dino started shooting," one of the people over yonder said.

The spider seemed supremely annoyed. "Fuckin' Fat Dino and his bird-bullshit." He pointed at Tex, who very much looked the part of a person of authority on this side of the barrier. "Lemme guess? He was sore 'cause he couldn't buy one 'a yous, so he decided to plug all'y'all instead."

"Yup," Tex said, glaring at the much smaller Sinner.

"And I'm guessing that the one he wanted to buy is now dead amongst the rest of yous?" he asked.

"I..."

"I'm guessing that one is dead," he stressed, glaring hard at Tex.

"...yes," Tex said. The mobster nodded, rubbing at his jaw for a moment, then reached into his coat and grabbing a revolver. But he didn't hold it like somebody wanting to shoot it. Instead, he just pulled it out, dropped it to the floor, and then kicked it under the gap in Krieg's barrier.

"Damned shame none of those idiots survived; they would have had to answer to Henroin for that," the Spider said pointedly, at Tex, flitting eyes down to the revolver then back up at him. Oh. Oh, that was the game he was playing. Tex was stone-faced, and the Spider turned sharply on his heel. "Party's over, goyles; we got betta' shit to do and we ain't earnin' money by standing around with our thumbs up our asses! Move it you fuckin' goombah!"

The Spider shooing them away made the mobsters at the barricade seem confused, but they did as he demanded, stowing guns and getting back into their cars. After a couple of minutes, punctuated by the occasional rattle of another bullet falling out of Maelstrom's healing body and the terrified cries of the wounded, dying, and worse still the surviving in the Dennys, the only mobster left was the Spider. He shot a look back at Tex once more. "Like I said," the mobster said, putting his hat back on. "Damned shame none a' them idiots survived their stupidity."

"Why?" Loona asked.

"Convenience. Why does anybody do anything?" The Spider said. So he'd wanted these people dead, and this was an excuse.

"Did you send them here?"

"I deal in dusts, pills, and liquids, not meat. That ain't my racket. There's six bullets in that thing. Keep one for a rainy day," the last mobster said, and then pulled himself back into his own car. With a leisurely turn which mounted both sidewalks in turn, he drove away. She helped Maelstrom to his feet, and she finally felt her power dying completely, emptying out.

"...goodbye, Maelstrom," she said. And the connection she had with he, and everybody else, shut down as they were starved of otherworldly force. But the bonfire remained.

"Goodbye? We've still got wounded to take care of," Maelstrom said, unsteady because the magic that had healed him hadn't managed to cram all of the blood he'd lost back into him, merely a lot of it. Wait... why wasn't his brain turning back off?

Could... could she force a Hound to Pop?

It was a thought she forcefully pushed aside as she looked at the blood-soaked floor of the Dennys, and the many Hounds who had gathered there for celebration, now celebrating only tragedy. Of the three pups she'd bought from the same litter, one of them was being cradled by his two brothers, clearly dead, near where Maelstrom had fallen when he was Brained. Whatever positive emotions she had for Maelstrom's salvation and her own newly discovered ability, it was drowned out in the blood of a murdered child. Behind her, five gunshots rang out, metered, deliberate, and precise. A minute later, a sixth, as they discovered the paralyzed mobster Maelstrom left in the parking spot.

The first Siege of Dennys had a death toll of three Free Hounds, with thirty wounded.

---

The day was long, and at the end of it, Krieg was perilously drained. She had to ask for Moxxie for help with the portal home, so empty was she of her magical ethers by the time she and Uller had saved those that they could. The mercenary in her wanted to demand a price for her services today. But the pragmatist knew that, by the services she'd rendered, she could ask for something far more dear than gold or Souls if she needed it.

Thus it was that Krieg dropped herself on the wooden chair next to the apartment fridge, while Uller took the first shower. Why the first and not force him to wait for her? Because the water took forever and a day to heat up, and she showered scalding, thank you very much. There wasn't a tonne of blood on her, mostly staining her shirt's sleeves and front, as well as her knee where she'd knelt in pools of it. It was mostly soaked in by now, no longer risking staining all it touched when she waited.

Her siblings weren't here.

Well, Wayland had an excuse, in that he, like Mother, was with the Rough's in Pentagram City. Moxxie and Millie had become rather paranoid parents in the wake of Beatrice's abduction, which stood to reason. If something so dear had been taken from Krieg, she imagined she would be every bit as clutching and possessive of it when returned. No, the ones she was interested in were her half siblings Vicki and August. Where they could be at this time of day baffled. They weren't the wandering type, not without leaving a note at least. And all of Victoria's weapons were still stacked up in her room.

Her musing was waylaid by the shower door opening, and Uller coming out. There was barely any steam coming from the bathroom as he did. "All yours," he said, marching naked to the laundry pile of cast-offs from other tenants of this building that he had claimed and resized to suit him.

"Need you make that march in your altogether?" she bitched as she rolled her eyes and went in to shower.

"Then stop staring at it," he said. Damn him and his pert ass. The shower wasn't nearly as restoring as she'd have hoped. Still, it scoured the blood off of her and gave her time to reflect. Having the Hounds owe her favors – favors equaling their lives in some cases – was yet another asset she wagered she'd likely need in the future as the Ur-crone. And with the course she saw Loona on, she was fairly certain there would be more attempts against the Hounds in the future by other parties, which gave Krieg an avenue to accrue more life-debts. Magic was powerful. But a willing army had its uses, too.

She left the shower, pulling on the robe that Uncle Blitz had abandoned when he essentially moved into Stolas Goetia's manor. And in it, she left, not just the bathroom, but the apartment. Leaving Uller zoning out on the couch watching trashy television, she made to knock at the door across the hallway from her, to find it slightly open.

She pushed it open more, and found the sofa currently occupied by her 'stepfather' Bartolomayo and her two half-siblings, all of whom were asleep watching some kids programming. Also present was Deia, spawn of Mother's rival. And the rival herself was the only one not currently torpid to the call of repetitive songs, flashy colors, and calls to metered and pointed violence against the enemies of Good Standing, as all of Satan's propagandistic children's programming was.

"Shhhh!" came the young mother's urgent shushing. Dischell was standing in the kitchen, which was now properly cleaned of its detritus and might even be sanitary to cook on. She looked a little less fuzzed in the brain than she usually did, the rigors of late-second-half-pregnancy finally relenting somewhat from her. The short, large-bellied woman gestured toward a door which lead into a bedroom. "I just got the kids to go to bed."

"And you fear to wake the rest of them, then?" Krieg asked at an appropriately low tone.

"I... Yes. Yes I did," she said. "Deia is such a fussy child. And Bart can send her dreaming in a trice. It's unfair," the other teenager in the room admitted.

"Hell is seldom fair to the imp," Krieg repeated the truism. "Unless we force it to be."

"I'm just beside myself, trying to find some way to look over those poor babes," Dischell looked to the closed door with the orphans within it. "And I can think of nothing. I'm just as stupid as they always said."

"Remember always that the people who called you stupid are now dead, and even were they not, their opinions are worth less than garbage because garbage at least can be burned for heat," Krieg said, placing a hand on the other girl's shoulder. "Here in Pride, you can be what they said you could never be; not because Pride is special, but because they were idiots."

"That's easy for you to say, wonderworker. You had every gift. I'm just a breeder from a bad house," Dischell's face fell a bit at that. "How will I even take care of Deia?"

"Did you not listen to a word I just said? It is Pride! Even the worst of the Lustling Clanners are better than the best of the Pridelings. You will find a space, even must you carve it to have it," Krieg pointed out.

Schell gave a chuckle at that, her doldrums quickly fading. "Wow. How did you get so wise?"

Krieg almost snapped at her for her sarcasm, but her brain malfunctioned a little when she realized that this poor kid likely wasn't being. "A good mother, and miserable circumstances. Both are very vocal teachers," Krieg said. Then she paused, looking past the elder teenager and to the orphan's room. And in her delicate state of drained and exhausted, an odd thought occurred to her. "Tell me, something, Dischell once of Voog; have you ever in your life been outside of the Sietches before you came to Pride?"

"No. No I haven't. I have seen only a glimmer of all of Hell," she admitted.

And the idea began to swell. "Thus you would be on no registries and have no documents following your existence in any hands save those of Cruac, yes?" Krieg asked.

"That should be so. Why do you ask this?" the older girl asked.

"Because I think I know how you can adopt those children without Family Severance even noticing," Krieg said. "You just need to call yourself Desdemona from now on."

"...why?" Schell asked.

"Desdemona is the mother of those two spawn. But imp driving licences are scaled for Sinners; you could only see the tips of her horns. Horns not too dissimilar to those," she pointed at Schell's. "Thus if you go to the court to... say..." she glanced to Bart, "announce a new matrimony, as a grieving mother and widow... instantly you are installed into Naked Law and all business matters as Desdemona Mitvic."

"Is that legal?"

"Who cares? We're imps!" Krieg pointed out.

Schell gave another glance at the door, then to the combined offspring of she and Tilla, before nodding. "I'll do so. I have no desire to ever return to Lust. Here... Here I can be somebody."

"Even if that somebody happens to be somebody else," Krieg said with a nod.

"...Is it true they have drugs up here that prevent pregnancy?" 'Desdemona' asked.

"At the counter of every druggist," Krieg said.

"This place is Heaven," the other girl said with a grin.

---

"Of course the cruelty of Hell needed to be maintained in order to keep 'order', such as existed in the old days. Your younger viewers likely don't remember what Hell was like under Lucifer. He was not beloved to any real degree down here. Feared, absolutely, but hated accordingly. He clutched all of Hell in a white-knuckle grip, until it cracked and drained betwixt his fingers. And when he died, I imagine very few mourned. His successor suffered all the same brunt of hatred that Lucifer did, but managed to eke out some begrudging respect from those few brain-blessed individuals who actually matter. And our Queen? She is a Queen of All Hell that is beloved.

For people back then, the cruelty was very much intended as message and medium both, to ensure that nobody acted in a way that Lucifer disagreed with. He disagreed most vociferously with Satan about the topic of Good Standing, believing that power was an ends of itself. Well, now Lucifer is dead, his philosophy derelict and Good Standing essentially law of the land in no few Rings. I have heard such events of history called Hegelian Dialectics. Called wrongly, but fuck it, it's close enough to use it for the sake of this interview. Lucifer's world-view clashed with Satan's. Thesis against antithesis. And what resulted, the modern status quo? Something neither thesis nor antithesis, but born of the crucible of the battle between them. A synthesis, powerful enough to replace both.

The Hellhounds were a perfect microcosm. Thesis: Hellhounds are animals and are to be enslaved at best. Antithesis: Hellhounds are people and are free to pursue their own liberties as citizens of Hell. And the battles that raged, of the great Dialectic that ran through those decades – I think you call it the Blood Emancipation now – the Synthesis is a hell of a thing to behold.

-Krieg Miller, Ur-Crone of Clan Cruac-Purgatorii