"Are you okay, Hon?" Millie asked him, as he looked over the last of the Hellhounds he had been asked to use his new method of Thaumaturgical healing upon. It had been days since the Dennys Massacre, and only those who were in immediate danger for their lives had been healed by Uller and Krieg. Those who had taken wounds that were survivable, if grisly, would have to wait, with delays dependent on how debilitating those wounds were.

"I'll be alright, honey," Moxxie answered her, "I just need to get back to little Bea and it'll all be fine."

Millie gave him an askance look, but didn't question him as he swept his arm in a circle, opening a portal directly to Blitz's now personally abandoned apartment, and to his relatives who had taken up dwelling in it no doubt in violation of his renter's agreement. Tilla glanced over at the sound of the gate burning into being, from where she was standing over her children doing homework on the kitchen table. She had Bea asleep in her arms. She blanched as before either of the Wrathlings could move to that part of Imp City, Wayland crawled through the portal and began shuffling as though on a journey to far away places. Moxxie gave a laugh and plucked him up.

"Fnegh!" Wayland complained, flailing his little limbs as the two of them carried him back to his mother.

"Thank you. It seems like he wants to be everywhere except where I want him to be," Tilla said, as the couple with babe-in-arms crossed the folded space into the apartment and let the gate die behind them.

"Not a problem. Thanks for looking out for Beatrice," Millie said, exchanging one infant for another. Beatrice gave a yawn, reached out with one arm to poke at Millie's face, then promptly fell back asleep. "Y'all didn't have any trouble with her, did ya?"

"No, she's a delight," Tilla said. "And she's getting so big! She'll be bigger than Wayland soon!"

"But certainly not stronger," Victoria said from the kitchen table. "I think Wayland wants to be an athlete!"

"He's exhausting," August agreed. "He never stops!"

"Well, whatever the case may be, he's got a fair bit of growing to do before he can even go to school, let alone decide his future," Tilla said. She seemed so sublimely delighted to be able to say that about her children. That they were all, at last, free to be whatever they wanted to be, no longer trapped within the confines of the paradigm of Ruut Nuckelavee. Doubly so, now that Ruut was so dead that she could never come back, and the entire Family Nuckelavee so depleted and destroyed that its bloodline was actively being picked apart by the other powerful families of Clan Cruac like a carcass dropped before a wake of vultures.

And then there was that moment of distaste, as though Tilla thought of something she was not happy to entertain, before she forced it out of mind. But Moxxie had seen it. "How are the neighbors?" Moxxie asked. Bart Mitvic seemed a decent enough fellow. Though he superficially resembled Striker to a shocking degree, he couldn't have been more dissimilar in personality, all soft corners to Striker's hard edges. A lifetime of compromise and people-pleasing as survival strategy would do that, Moxxie supposed. The bitter sting on Tilla's face was brief, but also notable.

"They're settling in. Nobody even questioned that 'Desdemona' got remarried this soon," she said. "Maybe they figure that he was her lover when Raleigh was still alive, and she was just capitalizing on his death to smoothly move on."

"That's good to hear," Moxxie said, as Millie rocked Beatrice somewhat unnecessarily in her arms. He turned a glance to Tilla, then to his wife. With a practiced motion that was increasingly growing rote to Moxxie, he opened a portal back to their home in Pentagram City, gave his wife a kiss on her cheek, and guided her through. She, blissful in that moment, didn't question that he didn't follow after her. Moxxie then turned to Tilla. "Alright. What is it that you've heard that you don't want Millie to know?"

"What?" Tilla asked, as Wayland continued to squirm and be difficult.

"Is him talking about that letter you tored up?" August said.

"Use your words better, August," Tilla said. August still had a thickness of his accent that even Victoria was doing well to kill, and notably it had a very different sound to it. As though somehow between the two full-siblings there existed some impossible regional dialectical divide. Moxxie knew that he could press hard, but instead, he ofted to simply lift his brow in an authoritative arch. And Tilla, confronted by that mighty and overwhelming eyebrow, did not last long before she sighed and crumbled, tilting her head toward the garbage can. "It's just some Cruac bullshit. I figure it was safe to ignore, since we're in, well… Pride Ring."

"Let me be the judge of that," Moxxie said, opening the bin and finding shreds of paper wedge in amongst food waste. Moxxie just grabbed the top-most of those slivers, then worked a Wyrd of dis-breaking on it, causing the rest of them to flutter up from the garbage, shed their effluent, and connect at the ripping points as though they hadn't been torn.

Moxxie's brow furrowed as he began to read what was writ in small, compact script across the sheet in utilitarian cursive. It was a request for parlay, being sent by the Family Drevisté, held to be the well-accepted penultimate family of the Clan Cruac, asking for discussion of ceasefire between the Family Drevisté and the Family Miller. And it kept its wording very close to the chest, as though afraid of putting the wrong word in front of the wrong set of eyes.

Oh, Moxxie could definitely see how this would have set off Millie. But he also saw that Krieg's mother had tried to bury this in the garbage so nobody sensible would have dug for it. Tilla wasn't hiding this from Millie, exactly. She was hiding this from somebody who lived here. Tilla was hiding this from Krieg. "Why didn't you want Krieg seeing this?" Moxxie asked.

"How did… right. Because you're just that smart," Tilla said. She sighed, and Wayland gave a growling face, but stopped fighting to be free of his mother. "I'm trying to keep Krieg out of dynastic politics. It won't do her any good, and it'll drag her right back into old, perverted and backwards ways of thinking."

"They're going to send another letter, and then another," Moxxie pointed out the failing in Tilla's protectiveness. "She's going to find out. And if I know Krieg at all, she's gonna get involved, if only for the sake of her own pride."

"...yeah," Tilla agreed. Krieg was many things, but humble and retiring were not amongst them.

Moxxie saw the look of tension on Tilla's face, and tweezed his eyes for a moment. "How about this; I go with Krieg to this parlay. If they try to do something stupid, we kill them all, just like we did in Sietch Cruac."

"Would you, please?" Tilla asked.

"Of course," Moxxie said. "I don't want to be hindered in doing work here in Hell because of a blood-feud against the Families of Lust any more than you want that for Krieg. In fact, we can do this tonight, and get it out of our hair so we won't need to concern ourselves with it again, one way or the other."

"Keep my daughter safe," Tilla began.

"Krieg is very adept at keeping herself safe," Moxxie said. He then swept his arm again, and marched from the Miller apartment to the office opposite his own which Krieg used as her home base. There was a burnt smell in the office, and the air had a faint hazy quality of lingering oily smoke that somehow didn't trip the fire alarms or fire suppression systems. Possibly because the alarms were dead and the fire suppression system was an illusion made of useless copper pipes that didn't actually connect to anything since the last fire, let alone water. Krieg and Uller were sitting in the board-room, with the windows open, letting the smoke gradually filter out, dragged into the sky by the wind.

"Oh, have you found a Hellhound requiring a more intricate touch?" Krieg asked, her voice muffled by the fact that she (and indeed Uller) were wearing gas masks. Which gave Moxxie a moment of concern, but when he spun up his mind and took a conscious inventory of the state of his body, he didn't find any real change in the integrity of it. Maybe he'd come when the worst was passed.

"No. Something has come up," he said, producing the letter and handing it to Krieg. She scowled as she read it. "I think we should go. At worst, we bury a few more Lustling imps. But at best, we might be able to walk through Lust Ring without being constantly ambushed."

"That… is a valid point," Krieg said.

"Wait, you're considering walking into the lion's den to talk with these people that we just a few weeks ago spent a lot of time and energy massacring," Uller clarified.

"Yes," Moxxie and Krieg said with a nod from each.

"...Can I come?" Uller asked.

"As though I would even allow you to remain behind," Krieg said. "Well? Away us to the Pride Wall! We have some crones to mock!"

Chapter 29

The Costs Of Things

Loona felt like shit. She'd felt consistently like shit the entire time that elapsed from the Massacre at Dennys, up until today. That blood was on her hands.

"Loona? Are you still in there?" Maelstrom's voice came from beyond her door. The apartment that she dwelt in was fixed up from those slave-hunting fucks messing it up; it brought her little comfort. "I'm coming in."

"Wait, you can't do that," Loona muttered to herself, pushing off of the mattress which she had used for the last few days to sulk on and castigate herself. She was well aware that she lurched out of her bedroom with a bad case of bed-head and wearing old, sweat-stained pyjamas, but if Maelstrom was forcing entry, there were only locks leading out to the hall. And when she reached the living room, she witnessed the door not burst off of its hinges, but instead open sedately, with a key protruding from her deadbolt. Since when did he have a key?

"Go away, Maelstrom," Loona said.

"No, I don't think I will," Maelstrom said, pulling the key and moving to the ill-used kitchen table which only had space for about three people.

"Maelstrom. Leave," Loona said, letting her Purgatory-born powers swell. And though Maelstrom half turned to march right back out, he stopped himself, his jaw pulling tight and then he pulled out a chair and sat in it, staring at Loona. He shouldn't have been able to do that. But then again, Maelstrom was supposed to be Brained and reduced to a feral animal. So what should be didn't seem to have a lot of pull in what actually was. She glared at him. "Fine. What do you want?"

"It's Sunday," Maelstrom said.

"Fuck it's been a week?" she asked.

"Yeah. Come on. We're going to Dennys," he said.

"I can't," she said.

"Yeah, this is my 'I don't care' face," Maelstrom said. "The next one through that door is going to be Tiff. And she's a lot less gentle than I intend to be. So come on, talk to some people, and eat some bacon out of a bucket with your fellow Hounds."

"I got people killed…" she began.

"That's war," Maelstrom said. "And it cost the assholes more than it cost us."

"I'm not going to do calculus with Hellhounds' lives," she said.

"Then do something about it," Maelstrom said. He stood, and swung his arm toward the door. Loona knew that if she actually put her mind to it, she could make him leave and stay left. But she just hung her head, and grumbled, shuffling back to her room and pulling on a shirt that wasn't a pyjama shirt, and let her baggy flannel pants be a symbol of her protest against being out in the streets of Hell today.

She allowed herself to be guided out of the apartment against her own complaints, but Tiffany was deaf to her bitching. The procession toward Dennys didn't get nearly that far, however. At the foot of the apartment building that she had spent the last nearly-five years at now was host to another Hellhound, this one shaggy and grey-muzzled, no taller than Loona and weighing perhaps about as much. He looked old. Ancient for a Hellhound, at least, so maybe in late sixties or even seventies. Tiffany leaned back at the interloper on their escort.

"You are Loona Miller, I presume," the elder Hound had a most particular voice, which managed to both be nasal and baritone at the same time, his every word grinding with vocal fry. He shifted his weight, and there was a crunching of a spring shifting, one of his legs being a rather crude prosthetic.

"I am," Loona said.

"Then I must offer my personal apologies for what happened last week," the old hound said, slowly pulling himself, awkwardly for his infirmity, onto one knee with his head bowed. "I had no idea that my former owner would have been so possessive."

"...Wait a minute. You were Lot Six Zero Seven," Loona said, finally recognizing him. He was one of the myriad Hellhounds that she had bought out of bondage during that auction the day of the Massacre. "I didn't see you afterwards…"

"No, you didn't, because I had no trust that your designs for me were any more magnanimous than that fat Sinner's were," the ancient Hellhound said.

"I know that voice," Maelstrom said. He leaned down, looking the old Hound in the eye. "...Do I know you from somewhere?"

"I'm not surprised you can't remember me, though I remember you," the elder Hound said. He tried unsteadily to get up, but Maelstrom offered a hand which the elder Hound took. "I was there when you Popped, looking after the Kennel Dogs. I'm pleased that the New King of the Pits remembers this old mutt."

"Who the fuck are you?" Tiffany asked.

"A layered question," the elder Hound said. "My Legionary Name was Shrapnel. But my mother named me Mordecai. I answer to either."

"So… why are you apologizing, again?" Loona asked.

"I heard through the gossip of mages that there was a shooting at the place I was supposed to meet you. That the fat Sinner in his limitless cruelty and unending stupidity lashed out trying to reclaim me and ended up getting blameless Hounds bled out on the floor. That was not my intention. I just wanted my hand back."

"What?" Loona asked.

"You can explain on the way," Tiffany said, using her body to shepherd the three of them toward her van, which she would need to ride in the back of because of her immensity. Maelstrom took the wheel, and left Loona in the passenger, and Mordecai in the jump-seat in front of Tiff.

"Okay, spill," Loona said.

"To understand what happened last week, you must understand Fat Dino and his particular brand of cruelty. I was a member of the Crow's Dogs, a slave-soldier of Naberius just like you were, Maelstrom. But there was an agreement between Naberius and the Sinner Dino. Naberius may be an honest Goetia, but he's also an incredibly petty one. Any time one of Naberius' leaders got 'uppity', they would be leased to Dino for Dino to unleash his full sadism on, to bring them to heel. Naberius didn't care who. Sinner, fiend, Hound, or imp. If you got 'upjumped' in the Old Crow's eyes, then he would send you to Dino to break."

"And then you got uppity," Loona said.

"I don't see any particular uppitiness that he would have objected to, but I was nevertheless loaned to Dino. And he tried his usual tricks to shake my morale. As though he were at all more terrible than a month in the Forever War," Mordecai gave a grinding chuckle and shook his head. "He grew more extreme in his attempts. Beatings, torture, rape, whatever he presumed would finally bear me low. By this point, I was more spiteful than anything. I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction, even if I died."

"Yikes," Tiffany said.

"Indeed, yikes," Mordecai said, but shrugged. "I might be old, but I'm tougher than I look. So he tried to cut off my hand and pantomime a selling of me, to 'show me how little I was worth in the eyes of Hell'."

"Oh," Loona said". "Is that why your sale lot started bids at a penny?"

"Exactly. Dino expected that nobody would even pay a penny for a crippled old Hound. And then you immediately bid. And then he had to bid back, because he can't afford to lose his charge to you. And eventually, you outbid what he had in his pocket," Mordecai said with a hard edge of satisfaction on his face.

"So he did this because he was stuck between your charity and Naberius' wrath," Maelstrom said.

"And if he cut off your hand…" Loona said.

"I called in some of the few favors I have with the Presbyter's Union to regenerate it," Mordecai said with a wave of his regrown limb. "Had I known that Dino would have reacted so violently and so immediately, I feel I ought to have warned you. But…"

"But instead, he flipped his shit and shot up my people," Loona said, not pointing out that only by naked miracle was Maelstrom still here with them all.

"Yes," Mordecai said. "Which means I owe a debt, and have to atone. How many lives did my paranoia cost?"

"That's not how I operate," Loona said. "Slavers keep a tally of lives lost to lives spent. We are free. And since that auction, so are you."

"...Then my need to atone is deeper still," Mordecai said, and he fell silent, a pensive look on his face. Loona turned to Maelstrom.

"What's your connection to him?" she asked.

"No connection," Maelstrom said. "Just… that voice. That voice is one of the earliest things I remember."

"And?" Loona asked. Maelstrom turned a glance to her, then sighed.

"If he needs to atone, let him," Maelstrom offered. "Better he's standing with us, than kneeling for them."

"Truer words were seldom spoken," Loona answered.

Moxxie was not happy with the venue for this meeting. Though Notamafia Town was still specifically over the horizon, and all the bullshit that he had suffered because of his upbringing after Mama's deeply suspicious and obviously criminal death still lingered in the imp's mind. He didn't need to use the Elevator to get here, anymore. Portalling from Pride to any Ring above the bottom of the stack was essentially painless, and only jumping from Pride into the odd 'interference' that Envy manifested, or else directly into Sloth actually caused his body to break from the strain of it. And even then, his body was less fragile than once it had been.

The town was called Tyrian Hook, one of the ancient enclaves of the Leviathans in Greed, one that had been wiped out untold eons ago, but the land still bore the scars of it. Whereas history said that there was a shielded bay leading out to the sea (which, this being Greed and lacking almost any sort of environmental protections, was essentially a body of dilute battery acid with traces of most carcinogens and a few outright poisons), the war had upended the entire region, upthrusting the town which once boasted harbor and fishery into something like a mountain-top settlement writ small. The last few millenia had been built around trying to get Tyrian Hook back to some form of functioning.

It was not a town that accommodated any sort of easy transit, since the paths were too narrow for cars in most cases, and the once-canals which allowed gondolas or barges were now dry and naked to the sky. If you wanted to get anywhere in Tyrian Hook these days, you either teleported or you walked. The population, obviously, had dwindled to the scant few hundred from the tens of thousands who once used this place, in the age before rampant pollution and overfishing made Greed essentially a Ring-sized toxic waste dump.

For that reason, there were disused buildings aplenty in Tyrian Hook, though most of them were collapsing, because they couldn't contend with their foundations being violently and sometimes randomly transfigured. Of those that were still structurally sound, many crumbled because they were obsolete in this new, no-longer-seaside existence. And of those remaining yet, most of them simply were allowed to rot because there weren't enough people to justify keeping them upkept. But there was a building tucked away at the bottom of a defile that the new geography of Tyrian Hook had created, one that, in the oldest days, would have required walking along the bottom of a canal to reach. This building was a very particular cafe, which catered to a very particular clientele.

Moxxie could sense the imps waiting for him even before seeing them. They had a few basic magical wards up, mostly basic Mage Armor. He wagered that the strongest one in that room was two orders of magnitude weaker than he was, thus that even Uller might be on the same level as them. After a moment, standing in the wind-blown grit which was toxic to most things which were not imps, he turned to the youths with him. "No signs of a trap. But I expect if there were, they'd be smart enough to hide them."

"Who knows? Maybe they're so piss-scared of Krieg that they're willing to talk in good faith?" Uller said, from where he had one of his wings up to keep the grit out of his eyes.

"They had better be," Krieg said and moved brashly through the doors.

Moxxie rolled his eyes at the impetuousness of youth, and followed, with Uller a pace behind him.

"Behold, you bitter hags of a dead philosophy! I am here!" Krieg declared, which caused a Mutant barista to give the most blatant 'what the fuck is happening?' face that Moxxie had seen in a long time. The 'hags' in question were all seated at one table far from the windows. One of them was in her early middle age, the others perhaps not much older than Moxxie himself, and some nearly the age of Krieg. All of them were women. None of them had the clan-mark of Nuckelavee tattooed onto their brow – though one of the she-imps had her black hair obscuring one eye, so it was less clear in her case.

"Who the fuck are you?" one of the younger women asked. The one with the eye-concealing 'do looked Krieg up and down. She was shocking familiar, but Moxxie couldn't quite place where he'd seen her before.

"You're barely older than my eldest shitling. What gall have you to walk in here as though we ought know your name?" the unimpressed she-imp added.

"Trin, Vera, shut the fuck up," the eldest of the women demanded. She turned a hard look at Krieg. "I know you. It was your hand which penned the Final Insult of Ruut. You, a banished dull-blood, and a meager slave climbed the tower of Nuckelavee and slew her in her seat of power. That is her audacity, Vera. You should know the name of Krieg Miller."

Vera scowled. "I didn't come here to deal with her."

"The rest of us, did," the eldest of the women said.

Moxxie glanced across the tables quite conspicuously, making it clear that he expected another face to be here, which he was not seeing. "I was aware that I was going to be talking with representatives of the Drevisté family. And I don't see Aydra."

At that, Vera's scowl transformed into a rather mean-spirited grin. "Aydra had an… accident."

"You are so emboldened as to slay a crone in the lee of my violence. This pleases me greatly. Soon all of the old whores and bitches of the ossified generation will be lost to the past," Krieg said.

"And I'm inclined to help her do that. If Aydra is suddenly dead through I'm sure no fault of your own, who is it that I'm talking to now?" Moxxie said flatly.

"You may call me Gehenna," the oldest of the Drevisté gathered here declared. Seriously, where had he seen Vera before?

"Or I can just call you Meris, which is your actual name," Krieg said, a shit-eating grin on her face. "Hello Meris."

"Krieg, please," Moxxie said, and though Krieg shot a stink-eye at him, she relented, which cemented in their eyes that Moxxie was the reasonable one. And that if they said something which propelled him out of the doors of this establishment, they'd have to deal with her. "I have a lot of lingering anger at the Families of Cruac. And the only reason I've brought who I brought was because if I so much as mentioned this to my wife, she would kill you all where you sit. My anger is an ember, compared to hers which is the sun. So tell me why it was a good idea to interrupt my business with," he gestured around, "this."

In a way, he hated cribbing from Crimson to set the tone of this conversation. But true to the man's philosophy and outlook on the world, there were some people who would only be made to be civil if you held a gun to their head the entire time. And frankly Moxxie had very little patience left with the Cruac as a whole.

The one with the hair before her eye adjusted it, waiting for Meris to start talking, and when she failed, scowled at her. In the moment the hair shifted, he confirmed that she had a box of black ink divided diagonally; one half filled, the other scarred white, showing her as part of the House Of The Mean. Frankly, they were all showcasing their marks more proudly than they did recently. And the recent tacit admission of the murder of one of their own crones meant…

"We have been led astray for an entire generation by a blind, foolish old bitch," Vera was the one who spoke, which drew a mildly strangled noise from Meris. Obviously these women had not discussed who was going to be doing most of the talking, because all five of them (including the two who hadn't introduced themselves and hadn't said a word thus far) turned to stare at her in alarm. "Aydra thought that Drevisté could ascend to primacy by being a weak reflection of Nuckelavee, as though emulation ever resulted in becoming a forerunner at anything. We will be correcting that course."

"Vera, let me…"

"Talk? Then go ahead? Try to lay out as concisely our place as I have just done!" the prideful, younger woman pointed out. She stared Meris down, and the older woman flinched first. Still, she kept going. "Drevisté, as of this day, renounces all enmities impressed upon us by the soon-to-be-extinct Family of Nuckelavee, and disavows all of its practices in the husbanding of the blood. Those awful shits that came out of me will not be subject to what I was. And we refuse to be dragged into a war by any line of mothers against one who's so clearly proven that she can clear the board of us if she puts her efforts in."

"A non-aggression with the Miller Family," Krieg said with a smirk.

"Not my primary intention, but a welcome secondary one. I am here to placate the wrath of Rough Family," Vera said. Was it on the Human World? How could he have seen her on the Human World? She then turned to one of the quiet ones. "Gelica: produce it!"

Gelica started, then pulled from a magic sack something which was both familiar and not, to Moxxie. It was one of Millie's axes, specifically the one that she had abandoned in the bowels of the Temple To The Seething Black and not collected as they departed. And though it was the same weapon, there was something obviously changed about it.

"As a show of good faith, between the families of Drevisté and Rough, we return Zahm to its rightful owner," Gelica said, not looking at him as though afraid to hold his gaze.

Zahm. It took him a moment to leaf through the Enochian dialect and the gutter pidgin of the Lust Imps of most ancient Hell, only to realize his failure in translation. He was trying to figure out whether it was intended to mean 'lunacy', 'frenzy', 'fury', 'hate', or 'Nemesis', when the simplest answer was that, to these women, this axe was a representative of all five. Millie certainly hadn't named this weapon. It was bought at a three-for-two sale at Rav Mart, for Satan's sake! But when he lifted it from the table, it seemed to tremble in his hands. He felt his blood-pressure rising, his adrenaline beginning to flow, as an almost divine rage burgeoned within his heart.

He set the weapon down, taking a moment to try to understand it. This was a mass-produced weapon of murder. It had been made in a batch of a thousand, unremarkable in any regard, bundled together and dumped in an oversized sale bucket for violent people in a superstore owned by a particularly business-savvy Dragon Sinner. The only reason Millie even had it was because she had to replace the one they lost when the DHORKS captured he and Blitz a seeming lifetime ago. And even then, this particular axe was a freebie.

Then he recalled the Sword of the Dragonslayer, a weapon in the Human World which briefly made its way to Hell during the 14th through 16th centuries, before being smuggled back to Earth. It was an unsightly weapon, only usable by monstrously strong humans, and had been nothing more than steel when it came to Hell. But nearly two hundred years killing in the Bleeding Pits in the hands of the Champion Bardobar and those of his bloodline had… changed it. Even though there was no magic consciously installed into that sword, it was now innately magical of its own right, like how iron, once treated by magnetism, can become magnetic.

And the same had happened with Zahm.

Millie had created a magical weapon just by being sufficiently angry while using it.

Oh, she was going to be tickled black when he told her about this. He forced the wistful smile to not appear on his face, and slid Zahm aside.

"I will take the intended goodwill of this gesture into consideration," Moxxie said. The youngest of the women seemed to breathe a sigh of relief at his words. The older women grew even more tense. It was telling the divide that experience with Hell could give to a person.

"If you seek non-aggression against Rough and Miller," Krieg took up the tempo, "then it must be matched with non-aggression on your behalf. A vow, made before Naked Law, that no daughter or son or implanted relation of the family Drevisté brings violence, ruin, covetousness and despair upon the works of the children of Tilla Miller."

"Who is this Tilla Miller?" one of the younger women asked, finally breaking her silence. She earned a swat from Vera for her trouble.

"The Mother of this one, I can only presume," Meris said.

"And Mother to the Proxy of Lucifer, as well," Uller pointed out, causing Vera and Meris to wince.

"Indeed," Krieg said. "My mother is the wellspring from which the Miller Brood flows. And should any attempts be made at stoppering that flow by any hand which you control, I will see it as a breach of our armistice, and I will bring ruin to you just as I have the Nuckelavee."

Vera turned a wan look to Meris, who nodded. "You need not impress so heavily on us the peril of interfering with your family business. We have no intention of setting foot in the Ring of The Smiling Beast. So long as your bravery and audacity sees you safe in that impossible wasteland, you shall see not so much as a shadow of us," Meris said.

"I have another condition," Krieg added. The women turned to her. "I am to be recognized as Ur-Crone."

Vera had a barked laugh escape her throat, and only managed to catch about half of the second that followed it. Vera schooled herself, then shook her head. "You are a child. And though you have killed Nuckelavee in her seat of power, it takes much more to be declared Ur-Crone."

Meris nodded. "You would need to showcase a supremacy of magic that no other amongst the Clans of Cruac can match. Though you stand as far as I am aware as the Archcrone of your new lineage, it is beyond the pale to declare you for a position we have no proof you deserve."

Krieg looked furious for a moment at that, but Uller laid a hand on her shoulder and whispered something into her ear. Her rage ebbed and a brightness came to her grin as she faced the women again. "Alright. So if you are so intent to see me showcase my mastery of the magic of the imps, how about I provide proof? What Thaumaturgy would I need to undertake to showcase my rightfulness in the position of Ur-Crone?"

The women turned a look at each other. The younger were aghast at Krieg's audacity. Meris seemed dismissive of Krieg's confidence. Only the two in the middle of the pack seemed to be making a calculation that wagered on Krieg. Vera bugged the hell out of Moxxie. He was sure he had seen her in the Human World. But how could he have? She would have been cloistered in her Sietch, both as a matron before the Nuckelavee Purge, and afterwards as a result of apparently having to murder her own Archcrone. So weird. He was going to have to upgrade his brain and give himself a photographic memory if things like this kept happening.

"If you would be Ur-Crone, you will have to showcase the greatest Thaumaturgy ever devised by impish hands," Trin said, having not needed to confer vocally to come to the decision. "You must showcase that you are apt and able to resurrect the dead. And even then, it would but but one test of many. There is a reason why Ruut never had the audacity to claim that title."

Krieg nodded for a moment. Then she frowned. "Just a moment," she said, forcing a grin onto her face, then turned to face Moxxie, leaning in close and whispering just under her breath.

"Uller is not to the task in assisting me, not yet," Krieg pointed out. Uller gave a resigned shrug. The young man knew his limitations well, though those limitations were far more generous than he had once thought they were. But Moxxie didn't have a good answer for her either.

"I read the Codex, but I'm not sure if I could do it either. So I know you can't," Moxxie whispered back.

"Posh," Krieg said. "Who else would be skilled enough?"

"...well, the only Thaumaturge capable of it who we haven't killed is The Bard," Moxxie said.

"Excellent!" Krieg said, with full voice and clapping her hands in excitement. "I agree to your terms, though I will need to track down the assistant required for the ritual to be successful. Do any of you know where I might find The Bard?"

The halls of Lucifer's palace were busy, as they often were, now with a war on and the politics of Hell gaining an entire new avenue through which to pursue glory, prestige, and rank. Such things were not beneath Agrippa's attention, not truly, for any time you stop looking at any such tiny thing, you give it a chance to strike and envenom you. It was a wise man who continued to give attention to those things most people ignored. But such wise men, though safe, achieved little.

The dim buzz of the hall called to mind myriad conversation, without actually having any words able to reach his ears. He knew that there was magic afoot that kept conversations between the King of All Hell and the petitioner before him from falling to any ears but those two sets, save for those times when Lilith would join him and lounge at his side as he did the business of sitting the Low Throne.

Finally, the crossed halbards of the twin crimes against reality that against Agrippa's protestations still served in the Caesar's royal guard parted, allowing him to enter the space before the throne. Though there were a few of the Ars Goetia watching from their high seats, none of them seemed to be too invested in events. And now that Agrippa was in the court itself, the conversations snapped to clarity. And if he had any expectation of finding them interesting, he would have been disappointed. Stoicism was his life's-blood, here in Hell. It kept his sanity when nothing else would.

He swept down to a kneel before the King Above Kings, looking not at the golden and glorious Archangel of Hell, but at the reflection that was seated in a black stone set into the floor. He knew the protocol for presenting a formal petition to Lucifer when he wasn't feeling… lax. So he did everything exactly as was to be expected. If there was a weakness in his request, it would not be any of the things surrounding the request itself.

"And there is my newest Dux Bellorim," Lucifer said with jovial tone. "You were right about him, Lily; he is an ambitious one. If he wasn't so good at what he does, I'd give that shitty job to him, just to see what he makes of it!"

"I agree. It would be a terrible waste to saddle him to a dais instead of the freedom of a battlefield," Lilith said, sprawling close to Lucifer and trailing the backs of her fingers down one of his cheeks. Lucifer turned a spicy look at his consort, one that promised that if she kept that up, there would be carnal retribution, that both of them would enjoy and the rest of the onlookers would have to simply tolerate. At least he seemed to be in a better mood than most days.

"King of Kings, who sits the Low Throne, Ambrosius Severus Agrippa, Dux Bellorim of the Heavenly Invasion force asks for special dispensation," Agrippa said.

"Special dispensation?" Lucifer snapped his eyes at the eagle-Sinner. "You're already a Dux Bellorim. What the fuck kind of 'special dispensation' could you even need?"

"I presume you are kept to-date on the technological upgrades that have been trickling into your Hellish Legions, in a shamefully piecemeal and ad-hoc fashion?" Agrippa prompted.

"You've already invented the gun. Offense has triumphed over defense," Lucifer waved the thought away.

"Ah, but don't you recall those strange little metal-men when Princess Stella bought you Fort Abandon?" Lilith chimed in.

"Those things, hrm?" Lucifer said.

"Yes, my sweet. Not golems. Soldiers in armor," Lilith said in a cloying way.

That got Lucifer to look at Agrippa once more, as though the point had finally pierced his apathy. "Have you got something that will swing things the other way? An answer to the Michael's pissant Exorcist?"

"Not yet on that level, but certainly a device which pulls the balance-point between attack and defense more in defense's favor. A single soldier in such armor as that is worth a hundred, if not a thousand without it," Agrippa said.

"Then get me more of them," Lucifer ordered.

"That is why I ask of you special dispensation," Agrippa said. Only now did he raise his head and look Lucifer in the eye, because that was the part of the petition that they had reached. To continue hanging his head would be seen as weak and furtive. Now that the point had been raised and vouched for, it could proceed at strength. "While some small number of these devices are produced within the Ring of Pride, which is within my reach and oversight, the overwhelming majority of the factories which have sprung up claiming to produce such things did so in the Ring of Wrath."

"Who in the fuck told Satan he could make my armors?" Lucifer demanded.

"I do not know, my Caesar," Agrippa lied with bald face. "But when I inspected a suit that came from Wrath, I found it not at all lacking compared to the panoplies produced in Pride. If I am to muster the infrastructure of Wrath to provide war materiel to my army, I must be able to intervene personally and physically demand it of them. It is too easy for them to dismiss a Sinner while Satan sits far closer to them in his ancient palace. I am much harder to ignore when I am a spear-head away."

Lucifer turned a look to his wife, who had a sultry look on her face, and seemed to have a silent conversation with her compacted into a single look, before he turned back to Agrippa. "While what you say is likely true, as Wrath is a willful and rebellious Ring at the best of times, and unwilling to heed righteous authority because of that towering red-robed jackass…"

"Decorum, my sweet," Lilith cut in. Lucifer continued despite her.

"...constantly overruling me as though he hadn't bent the knee to me, it doesn't negate the fact that you, Sinner, are literally asking with naked audacity to my face to flout my directive that no Sinner shall ever depart the Ring of Pride," Lucifer pointed out, his humor dark. "And if I do that for even one of you, then suddenly every single asshole up here will want to take vacations across the Pride Wall, and I don't want to have to deal with that ball-ache. You'll have to find a way to solve your problem on your own."

And there, Agrippa had an answer that he had not spoken to ask. He had not trespassed the Pride Wall because Lucifer allowed it. Lucifer was in ignorance of it. Learning that alone made this entire mad endeavor a success in the old soldier's eyes. But there was still more to be gleaned from this. Just because you had won a fight didn't mean you could sheathe your blade and plant your spear; there was still a war to win. And he knew that it was a foolish man who depended upon the grace of now-exterminated gods to win through luck what a more prudent one could earn through deliberation.

"Perhaps it was indeed too much to ask as a matter of duty," Agrippa gave a nod and a gesture as though setting a thing aside, but paused. "But perhaps the specialty of the dispensation can be… narrowed. Make the price of asking for such a boon so high that only those who are at the apex of aptitude can even dare to ask it, and only those most fortunate amongst them have the craft to achieve it."

Lucifer, who had been turning away from Agrippa returned his attention to the Sinner. "Are you saying that are offering to partake a Trial of Extremity to earn this gift you ask of me?"

"Indeed, my Caesar," Agrippa said. He straightened his back and gave the King of All Hell a firm nod. "If I can bring you the right-wings of fifty angels, slain by my actions, would that warrant new consideration?"

"You would remove fifty Angels, not cherubs or humans, but actual Angels from the war?" Lucifer said around a laugh. He clapped his hands together to a sound like a gunshot in the halls. "This! This is the audacity that I ask of my followers! If you want my largess, you'd better to something fucking impressive to earn it! Very well, my newest Dux Bellorim; if you can bring me the right-wings of fifty angels, I will name you in the eyes of Naked Law a fiend, and the Pride Wall shall stand as thin as air for you."

"I will begin at once," Agrippa bobbed his head, but Lucifer made a tutting noise.

"However, I want to be perfectly clear; they have to be fresh wings. No digging through graves and the rubble of old battles to make up the difference. I want them still stinking of Michael's self-righteousness when you hand them to me," Lucifer said, his eyes hard and burning into Agrippa's own.

"It shall be done," Agrippa said, before backing up two steps, then turning crisply on his heel to the side and walking away from the petitioner's area. In truth he had considered naming a higher number and doing exactly that, but prudence was the watchword of the Senate for a reason. He noted the time on his Hellphone (which he only owned because Octavia demanded it of him), and committed it to memory; any Angel who died in battle against him from this minute onward was now fair game, and would be reaped as a bounty for Agrippa's freedom from Pride. It still didn't explain how he could already do what he was asking so high a price to be able to do. Maybe time would unveil that mystery. Maybe it would not. But either way, he had a duty. By the screen of his Hellphone, he could tell that there was already an ongoing skirmish up on the outskirts of Fort Abandon's zone of control. Crushing that alone would earn him a half dozen wings.

He strode out of the petitioner's chamber, as the newest one in front of Lucifer began to speak, their words contorted by the magic keeping them between Lucifer's ears and their own. That was the lot of a Sinner these days, in Hell, and Agrippa in particular had a certain degree of pride tied to victory in this war.

It wouldn't do to disappoint Octavia, after all. She needed those armors for the fighters in her legion every bit as much as Agrippa said. There was so much that could be left unsaid that was nevertheless true.

Ordinarily, finding The Bard would have been a task months in the doing, having to scour Hell, Ring by Ring, from Sloth upward, to find where the old Wonderworker was planted in the current day. It would have required making costly promises to knowledgeable but petty people, and calling in favors for far less then they were strictly worth to people who's wherewithal wasn't up to the task.

It would have taken a hundred people to do, just to ensure they hadn't missed a spot in their combing, an entire intelligence agency just to nail down the Ring, and then equally as many again to flip over stones until they found where the old hermit had chosen to briefly hang his metaphorical hat. Because while The Bard was in many less political circles the most famous imp alive, he'd managed to become so without that most critical facet of legend-building: Extroversion.

The Bard was an intensely private person, who nevertheless managed to drift into events of monumental weight and scale, often unleashing dizzying or mind-bendingly subtle magicks to turn ruin into opportunity, then quietly slip away while the adoring crowds were still cheering for the salvation he had dropped into their laps. Rumors about The Bard circulated broadly. That he was a Satanist, despite his Greedling provenance, and thus was one of the Old King's most valued Proxies. That he was some impish messianic figure, who had turned away from his course to live a life in the quiet and in the shadows of louder folk. That he wasn't an imp at all, but rather something from Outside that had shoved itself into a corpse and had animated for decades, behaving in ways that few imps would.

Because of The Bard's unusual habits for a person of his magical potency and personal reputation, it would have been all but impossible for a single hunter to find him, even if they searched for a lifetime.

It took Moxxie an entire morning and afternoon to track him down.

When Moxxie finally went to the tiny clan-hold in the distant, frosty hinterlands of Envy, it was night all of Hell over. He'd had dinner with Millie while he did his cogitating, and while it was somewhat coldhearted to give the love of his life and his first born spawn only a portion of his attention, it was better than giving them all none. So when Millie tucked in to the imp-scaled lounging chair to sleep with Beatrice in her arms (because woe betide any who thought they could physically take something out of Millie's hands without her noticing, at this point) Moxxie instead slammed a mug of coffee to keep him going, and created a portal to this far flung locale, one that likely few denizens of broader-Hell had ever stood, the damage the transit caused to his body be damned.

Envy was by and large dominated by ocean, the roads that connected to the InterRing Highway bridges that by strange quirk needed only cross a single strait before descending toward the lower Ring, whereas the rest of the Ring was lopsided, well away from the entry and egress. But for all its maritime predilection, it was broken up by sheer mountains that thrust as spikes into the sky. The tallest twenty of them physically held up the Ring of Greed above, forming a 'shortcut' for the brave, the stupid, and those traveling illegally from place to place. All you had to do was climb fifty kilometers of lethal rock in essentially anoxic conditions, or survive a fifty kilometer plunge through the same.

Not all mountains were so fatally tall, and most didn't have the burden of holding up a plane of being. And around those lesser mountains, sometimes cultures would be born, first amongst the Selachimorphs who for whatever reason didn't want to deal with submarine living, and then, more prominently, with the Mutants, of whom not all had the talent of amphibianism. And of course, there were imps, as there always were.

The imps of Envy flew, because they had to. Because few would willingly give an imp even so much wood as was required to make a raft, they'd had to adapt their bodies to cross the bodies of dangerous water, an adaption which in the untold generations past had turned into a staple of the entire clade of imps in this Ring. The last few Eons had been kinder to the Envy imps than it had to the Selachimorphs, and the imps just slid right into the places the slowly declining shark-fiends were abdicating. So the towns of Envy tended to all have certain characteristics in common.

They all tended to be built into cliffs overlooking deep-water ports.

They tended to use verticality instead of sprawl.

And they tended to get darker the further from the bay and the cliff-face that you went.

Thus it was that Moxxie found himself in the guts of the mountain called Eastpale, bleeding from his gums from the Portalling damage and trusting his magical eyes to see him through the nearly pitch-black environment that was nevertheless peopled by no shortage of Mutants and imps going about their evening business, which, being as this was Hell, was either going home, going to get drunk, or going to hire a prostitute. This deep into the hill, there was little upstanding culture left to be had.

It gave Moxxie a moment to appreciate Uller's upbringing, if he had cut his proverbial teeth in places such as this one. And it also meant that he had natural black-vision, which nobody had informed Moxxie that Envy imps would have. Moxxie had Magesight, now, which was close enough to serve its purpose, but still it made him wonder how much more of Hell he still had to discover. Perhaps that was why the Radio Demon was so stir-crazy. Moxxie had the freedom to go anywhere, whereas that insanely dangerous Sinner was stuck in what was, shame to say, the most simple of the Rings of Hell.

But ahead, even above the clamor of fiendish and impish voices, there was music. The music was odd, archaic and anachronistic, as though purposefully played using abnormal instruments from a nebulously defined past. The doorway had a sign over it, but this deep into the mountain, people stopped using words, believing (perhaps rightly) that the people who lived this far back and in this degree of darkness would be too illiterate to read, or to stupid to learn. It showed a tankard and a fiddle, both hewn sloppily into the stone over the door.

Inside, there was light, which though dim was practically blinding compared to the darkness outside in the alleys. And though the patrons of this place were raucously getting drunk, it was not at them that Moxxie found his attention drifting. No, it was to the source of the music, which was in this place a pair of imps, one who cycled a cyclodrone with his feet, while the other filled the air with music from a hurdy-gurdy. The dronist was half-drunk, but managed to keep the low drone on the same note without pause or relent, while the other dexterously cranked and clacked the hurdy-gurdy to an upbeat rhythm.

The player with his cranked instrument seemed to look up and catch Moxxie's eye, even across the tavern, but didn't pause in his rendition of this old and out-of-time song. As Moxxie moved slightly aside, he almost doubted himself, for he saw that what he presumed was the light in the old man's eyes was in fact a completely opaque cataract. Nevertheless, he approached.

He stopped before the pair. "You don't make it easy to find you," Moxxie said, his voice raised to cut through the din.

"It doesn't suit me well to be, so of course I don't," The Bard answered, fingering the song without looking in Moxxie's direction. But still, Moxxie could see radiations of magic reaching out from the old man and sliding across Moxxie's body like abandoned cobwebs stirred by a breeze. "That's an interesting growth you have on the bottom of your stomach. Who put it there?"

Moxxie then grasped it. Just as Moxxie had used his Magesight to navigate the near perfect darkness outside the tavern, The Bard had found a way to use Magesight to replace his failed vision in its entirety. "I did, before killing someone unkillable," Moxxie said.

"Many people make those claims when they're standing in front of me. You're going to have to be a bit more specific if you want my interest," The Bard said. Not unkindly, exactly, but with a certain resignation to him, as though he was too ill-tempered to care.

"Have you heard the name Nathan Birch?" Moxxie demanded.

"I know enough about him to stay away from him," The Bard said. Then he paused for a bar in the song, clacking the wood of his instrument a few times to fill the silence and not let the song exactly peter out. "You aren't brazen nor vulgar enough to be Blitz Miller. Who does that make you, then?"

"Moxxie Rough," the Wrathling answered.

"Or Moxxie Knolastname, perhaps?" The Bard asked, obviously pleased to have picked out something to skewer Moxxie with.

"Not anymore. I don't answer to Crimson," Moxxie said.

"Good. Crimson Knolastname is a paltry and petty man, and history will not remember him when he's gone," The Bard said, nodding with approval that Moxxie refused to even share a last name with him. Of course, Moxxie's reasons for adopting his bride's surname were much more personal than that. One did not suffer an attempted bigamous shotgun-gay-wedding to a traitorous liar ex-boyfriend in the name of naked greed without having some sort of response, after all. "I'm not going to sign autographs or make a memento for you. Unless some calamity is already here, leave me to finish my songs."

"I want to hire you. Wait, what do you mean, 'already here'?" Moxxie asked. He narrowed his vision, looking at the deeply magical old imp before him. While there were all the hallmarks that he would have expected of an ancient Wonder-worker, all of the apparel and trinkets brimming with stored power that might be considered apt and proper for such a man to have, there was something else as well. Binding fetishes and ceremonial chains, a cord of rope woven shut around the old man's neck nearly tight against his skin. Items holding something in.

And when he narrowed his vision further, to look at the minute gaps that such protections inevitably left open, he saw some horrible, twisting chaos there.

"You are cursed," Moxxie said.

"My opinion of you improves," The Bard said.

"Why haven't you removed that curse from yourself? Surely you know how," Moxxie pointed out.

"Because removing the curse from myself, means that it'll go to the next person on the list," The Bard said. "And I find that unacceptable. The being that made that curse was strong beyond impish strength. And by my will, this curse will die with me without infecting another soul. Since you've seen some part of me that isn't the 'legend' which is being stacked up in the towns I leave in my wake, you're more perceptive than most of these illiterate fools. Why have you come to me, now of all times?"

"You have knowledge of the secrets of Resurrection," Moxxie said.

"And you, with your still-low Station Of The Blood cannot access it," The Bard said. He gave his head a brief shake, pausing only for a moment before prodding the cyclodronist with a hoof then moving on to a different, more melancholy song. "I can't bring back your dead. Not alone, at least. I'd need an assistant who is almost as knowledgeable as I, whose blood is exceptionally bright and whose Station strong. And with what I've heard from the rumor mill, you've gone and killed all of those women."

"There is one," Moxxie said. "Krieg Miller."

"The killer of Ruut Nuckelavee?" The Bard asked. Moxxie nodded, then remembered The Bard's blindness and affirmed verbally. "How could a child know the most secret lore that Ruut confined only to her most trusted and geriatric inner-circle?"

"The Codex Cruac in Alabaster," Moxxie said that low, just barely sliding it over the music, so only somebody within a half a meter could have heard something said at all, let alone what the words were. The Bard blinked, not missing a note but obviously off his mark. "It's almost completely intact. If you do this for us, we'll give you a copy of it."

"My granddaughter spend decades searching for that fucking thing. Well bargained and done," The Bard said instantly, not even bothering to haggle. It was probable that Moxxie could have offered far less, but the fact was, he didn't feel like it, and he didn't want to risk driving off the last truly great Wonder-worker of the previous generation. "I warn you now, I'll need some practice to ensure I don't bungle things, so a spare corpse to tinker with would be a good idea. Who exactly do you want me to bring back?"

Moxxie didn't need to think twice, just as The Bard didn't. "Saffron Knolastname," he said.

The Bard stared through him. "From the tone of your voice… a mother, taken from you long before her time. Very well. I will need some part of her corpse to do the ritual."

"How about half of her genes?" Moxxie asked. Her bones were lost, hagfish-eaten, in the toxic bayous of Greed Ring. There was no material trace other than Moxxie that she'd ever lived at all.

"I've never done this using a child as an anchor-point. It introduces confounding variables. More risk of failure," he warned.

"I want my mother back," Moxxie said. "She deserves to know her granddaughter."

The Bard sighed, then nodded. "Then my request for a carcass to practice on has become a requirement. Beyond that, we should probably get moving before the roof caves in on us, or something of that like. Do you know anybody who has a body they might be willing to entertain being brought back to life, if at terrible risk of failure?"

Moxxie was about to admit no, but his instincts drew his hand to a pocket and pulled out his Hellphone, and he quickly flit through his Sinstagram feed, until he saw that weird picture that he'd seen a while back that even then warranted further thought. It showed a human with an incomplete halo, looking with intense expression toward the camera as she prepared to slide a sliver of bone into a reassembled skull, which, by Moxxie's enhanced perceptions, would have resulted in a face identical to the human's own. Which was to say, this was a strange, hell-bound human with a halo who had her own corpse on a shelf in Pride Ring.

The quote tagged to the picture was 'Why does she have to keep fucking around with that creepy thing?', put in place by a Sinner called 'Husk'.

"I think I know exactly who to talk to," Moxxie said.

"So you want my corpse for… what, exactly?" Rachel asked, standing in an office off of the lobby of the Happy Hotel. Seated opposite her desk were a pair of imps. One she was aware of, the same one who had healed Fiona's brain-tumor months before such that she was capable of such cogent thought as to enable her to ascend to Heaven, Redeemed. The other was unknown to her, a comparatively ancient specimen who tapped his fingertips against his thumb as though keeping a tune in an odd time signature the whole time they were talking.

"Most people in Hell, when they make a corpse, it's because they want that person dead. A lot of the people up here are Sinners; the way that they die, whether by Purgator or Seraphic Steel, those can't be restored no matter how much magic you throw at it," Moxxie said. "And a lot of the people who are left when you sift out those two groups are people clinging to hope so desperately that they aren't willing to accept the coin-flip that we can essentially give them. The hope in a miracle is worth more to them than the miracle itself."

"And I, who left a corpse but am still here, am somehow immune to that kind of thinking," Rachel said.

"By Mister Husk's own admission, you keep your own corpse in a freezer in your room," Moxxie said, as though forcing patience.

And he wasn't wrong about that. "So you want to, what? Practice your magic of resurrection on my frozen cadaver?"

"Yes," the elder imp said. "It has been decades since I used this Wyrd. There is certain… rust… that needs to be knocked off.

"And if you succeed, you do realize that I am still a dead woman?" Rachel pointed out. While admittedly she knew little about the minutia of magic, she did have concerns. "I get that you're concerned about failing and – if I'm getting your reasoning right – dooming somebody to a worse oblivion than this is. But what happens if you succeed?"

"Then your carcass will rise up, live for a few seconds, remember that it doesn't have a soul, then die again," The Bard said. Even Moxxie turned a querulous look at the old man for that. "Don't think for a moment that similar feats of death-dodging haven't been attempted in the long history of the Imp, and that most if not all of the edge-cases of Resurrection magic have been put to page for study. When Caicus Karsur grew infirm, he through cruel ritual transferred his blood and mind into another's body. But when that body quickly grew sickly, he called out to try resurrecting his original corpse. Which failed as I have described."

"So I will retain my corpse when you're done with it, either way," Rachel clarified.

"Why, exactly, do you want to keep your corpse, ma'am?" Moxxie asked.

"Personal reasons," she said. A particularly mean-spirited piece of overdue vengeance was sustaining her, even forty years out from when that bastard would have expected to have heard the end of it. And while she knew she didn't have Alastor's particular sense of humor, the notion of having two of her own corpse on Earth amused her in a way he would likely have mirrored.

"Fine," Moxxie said with a grumble. He pulled out his Hellphone and quickly made a call. "Krieg? We're going to need you at… well then as soon as you can come, then. That Hotel in PC, you know the one."

"Krieg? The woman who repaired our wayward dragon's mind?" Rachel asked. It seemed the old faces were just popping up again and again.

"Indeed. Is there a place for us to stay out of the way until she gets here?" Moxxie asked.

"We'd might as well go up to my room," Rachel said. When she got up and left the office, Husk was leaning against the wall next to the door, eyes sharp and apparently more sober than he usually was at this time of day. She didn't even need to motion to him to have the sphinx-Sinner begin to bracket the pair of imps toward the elevator. She wasn't a believer in coincidence, just as much as he wasn't. Husk gave the pair of them a look, each weighty and lengthy as the elevator rose. He scowled hard at the old imp, though, and leaned in toward Rachel.

"That man's a walkin' fuckin' disaster," Husk muttered.

"I won't be here long enough for that to matter for either of you," the elder imp said, as though he'd heard those quietly uttered word's as clear as bell in the morning.

"So why exactly is your luck worse than Vaggie's? I ain't ever seen somebody that fuckin' unlucky," Husk demanded.

"A bit of suffering is good for the soul," the old imp said with a distant, nostalgic smile. Husk turned another, wan expression to Rachel. She sighed and gave her head a shake. If he didn't want to explain, then they had no reason to press him.

The doors clanged open, and the imps manned the sofas that surrounded the elevator doors in this older part of the hotel, where people still treated elevator-exits as sitting areas instead of mere byways. Rachel's door was close, notable for its obviously different lock, but here she waited. The imps didn't speak to each other, and the elder seemed to hold little regard, either positive or negative, toward the younger. Moxxie, conversely, was acting as though he were sitting across from a classical heroic figure, one with the expected glaring and dangerous personality flaws and all.

They all had to wait for almost a half hour before another call came to Moxxie, and the imp opened a portal, allowing a yet younger she-imp to join them. She was getting bigger, now taller than Moxxie, though not as tall as her mother had been. "Ah, now these are familiar environs," Krieg said as she joined them. Through the portal, for just a moment, Rachel saw a Sinner-woman with flame-like hair leaving an office, then the portal snapped closed. "You consent to some strange magics being used upon the carcass in your possession, with all risks associated with it, yes?"

"Sure, why not?" Rachel said. The fact was, the offer had piqued her curiosity. She showed them into her room, then to the freezer which held her corpse, and a few boxes of ice-cream sandwiches stacked atop it because there'd been a sale and her room's fridge wasn't big enough for all of them. "I assume you need it out on the floor or something?"

"If you would be so kind as to help?" the elder imp said. He still hadn't, in the entire time he'd been here, offered his name, and nobody else had named him either. She nodded, and with Husk's help was able to drag her stiff, freezer-burned corpse out of the box and lay it onto the floor, and she placed the mostly-reconstructed head down atop it. With that, Husk lit a cigar and moved to the doors, not wanting to look at the inanimate carcass of his lover in the state it was in. Such a sentimental one, that Husk.

Then, the imps began to do a bunch of magical shit to it. There were lines drawn in strange dusts, oils applied, chanting and words of power and other things that Rachel hadn't the first clue what they meant or how they functioned. Moxxie was standing back, obviously having nothing to do with this, as the eldest and youngest imps in the room began to talk shop on such a level that it left Rachel utterly befuddled.

"So is it going to matter that my corpse is in the condition it is?" Rachel asked.

"Thaumaturgical Resurrection can bring an entire person back using nothing more than a few flecks of dried blood, a shard of bone, or according to legend a particularly vivid memory," Moxxie said. "Your corpse, even like this, is more than enough to do the job."

"So why aren't you helping?" she asked.

Moxxie scowled. "I'm not a dumb imp. I might even be the smartest one currently alive. But even I can't figure out how to make Resurrection work. I think it's got something to do with my blood purity; as though Krieg's blood is filling in gaps that the ritual leaves. There has to be some reason…"

"That seems arbitrary and unfair," Rachel noted.

"Magic often is, unless you force it not to be," Moxxie answered her.

"Then I take it you've never done this before," she asked.

"I've never even seen it done. The only one who has, is The Bard," Moxxie gestured toward the old imp.

"Why do they call him that?" she asked.

"There are as many answers to that as there are hairs on my head," Moxxie said. "I think it's mostly because he found a way to incorporate Music Theory into Thaumaturgy."

"Does that help?" she asked.

"As a mnemonic device? Probably," Moxxie said. Then he leaned back again. "...but it could also be an amplification measure, to form internal harmonics and amplify his own personal Station Of Blood, which might be why he was never snapped up by Nuckelavee for the last sixty years. They couldn't keep up with his theory…"

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Rachel said.

"He's using bullshit to cheat to make his magic stronger than it ought to be," Husk clarified from his place near the doors.

"That's a very reductive way of putting it, but yes," Moxxie said. Then he straightened his back, looking to the ritual. Something important was happening, and he fell silent, observing it.

The magical whatever-the-fuck continued for some time, until finally the two imps, ancient and youthful, shed drops of blood atop the corpse. The instant that the two droplets of black, viscous blood hit the corpse, the entire room swam for Rachel, and she felt the direction of down shift rather dramatically. She knew she stumbled a few steps, and in her now distorted vision the carcass on the floor seemed to smear out in all directions.

Before Rachel could outright fall and brain herself against her workbench, Husk was there, catching her and keeping her steady. There were some muffled and bleary sounds that reached her, the room going dark for a moment. Then she felt a moment of pain, as though something cut her shoulder.

Then a snap, and the nausea began to part, leaving her half-fallen in Husk's arms, green around the metaphorical gills and trying to figure out what had just happened. She looked to her corpse. Only there was no corpse. The two imps who had been attending it were staring, shocked, at the empty bit of floor where Rachel's cadaver had sat moments before.

"That… was unpleasant," Rachel noted.

"What the fuck did your bullshit do to Rach?" Husk asked with heat in his voice.

"It shouldn't have done anything," Krieg said, confusion clear on her face. The Bard looked outright stunned. "Well? What happened here?"

"Something I've never seen before. That's not a teleportation. By the feel of it, our ritual succeeded," The Bard said. "But the result is… Well, I'm not even sure."

Rachel reached up to her shoulder, and when she touched the skin there, found it unparted and not at all bleeding. "Well, this was a waste of time," Krieg muttered.

"No, it was illuminating in a way that I hadn't thought possible," The Bard said. He turned to Rachel. "Thank you for allowing us to perform this experiment. We will take our leave from you, now," he said.

"Wait, just like that?" Krieg asked, as Husk helped Rachel back up to her feet.

"There's nothing more to do here," The Bard said. He turned to Moxxie, next. "I will need to do some research on this, before attempting your resurrection," Moxxie seemed a bit upset at that. "Patience, young man. An attempt deferred is an attempt refined."

"Very well," Moxxie muttered. "Thank you, Miss Scailes. We'll get out of your hair, now."

With that, the trio of imps departed, leaving Rachel and Husk alone in the room.

"This is going to be a problem for me later, isn't it?" Rachel asked. Husk just gave a bitter laugh, then joined her as they went to find Niffty to clean all this up.

"When I was growing up, my mother, when she was at her angriest, would sometimes snap 'sometimes I wish you were a mistake'. And while it was a very hurtful thing to say to a child, you have to understand that my mother was and remains a very angry, deeply hurt woman. I was created with cold blood and with surety of vision, and by the exchange of hitherto unrivaled favors.

And Mom stared down a lot of mistakes raising me. I'm not going to claim that she was a perfect mother by any means. The very fact that she landed down here is proof to the opposite of that. But she tried. She tried, and even at her worst, she would always try to be better with me. She didn't always succeed, but she got better with time. She tried. That was why Satan began to value the Sinner, in the long tail of history. He saw enough of them starting to try.

As for me? Well, what place is there in Hell for a living human? Or something close to human, depending on who you ask? If it wasn't for that whole 'Canada' nonsense, I probably would have been lost in the churn of Hell's great ambition, especially once the War For Heaven grew cold and the Interbellum Period started to stretch, drifting through the Rings until somebody got sick of the look on my face and stabbed me in the gut. Instead, I find my way to sit on a 'throne' which, as far as I'm aware, hadn't even existed in the year I was born. Not bad for something which people didn't even know what to call when they first catalogued me, hrm?

If there's one part of human nature that even you likely haven't forgotten, it is that Man is made greater by their mistakes. You don't often learn something shocking by doing something right. And the bigger the mistake you make, the more illuminating the discovery you can reveal."

– Arthur Mayberry, Disdain Incarnate, President of Heck and the First Cambion.