Things were going well, in Octavia's corner of Heaven.
Suspiciously well.
Months had passed since the onset of her pilot project, and the harvest was pulled in so quickly and so efficiently that she literally scoured the numbers and reports to find out who was trying to blow smoke up her ass. To her surprise, she found noone. And then she started to see the great hoppers be Portaled up, filled to their brims with grain, pulses and vegetables, which the humans dragged to the gates of Fort Abandon with nothing but their own lunatic impulse, and began to parcel it out into massive totes which would be carried through the rat's nest of Cloud Probity.
It took half as long to hand out the food as it did to undertake the entire harvest.
That was just sloppy, in her opinion. So when she started her second program, this one hiring equally as many to harvest the various rices of Lust and the other, less critically neglected fields of Wrath, this time she had an end-of-term protocol being lined up, so that they wouldn't be blocking a gate for two goddamned weeks.
Summer fled into fall, and the other harvests were beginning, which she sent out teams of volunteering humans to deal with as well. Harvest aides were snapped up eagerly in Wrath, but with a certain degree of suspicion in the greenhouses of Greed, and though Beelzebub had rubber-stamped their entry into Gluttony, the Aristocracy outright rejected and ousted them, causing the first major, expected pratfall of the program. And it happened months after she thought it would, and not for the reasons she thought.
Of course, now she had another problem. Lust.
Succubi and Incubi kept trying to sneak the humans out of their work camps. At first Octavia had intended to storm down there with Ambrosius and her entire half-built Legion at her back to stomp out what she had expected to be an igniting enslavement crisis. Only when her agent came back, the truth had been rather… unexpected. They weren't being enslaved. The Lust Fiends were just fucking them to within an inch of their lives, and begging them stay in their homes.
So yeah. Concubi could meaningfully feed off of an Innocent, and the Innocent would be fine. Which meant a lot of Concubi were guilt-free gorging for the first time in their lives, a state to which the Innocent had very few complaints.
Yet another issue she was going to have to watch out for in the coming years. A population explosion in fucking Lust of all places.
But with that problem filed away as an 'I'll have to deal with it later' concern, she had to go back to her initial plan. And it was as tenuous as it was ambitious. Penemue had been as good as her word, not just providing Octavia information but outright drowning her in it. Production numbers, schedules, import and export figures, factory efficiencies; all of it clay that she would have to make bricks out of, so that she could build a city with them. And considering the uselessness of the people around here, she was going to have to built that city almost entirely by her fucking self.
At least Ambrosius was there, a constant and steady shadow, a firm bedrock by which she could establish her footing. Even Dad paled before the dire necessity of that.
Dad was up here, oddly. As Octavia sat in her now well decorated offices and tried to figure out a way to convince several thousand head-up-ass fiends and Goetia to allow Innocent into Hellish factories, Stolas was at this moment not far away. A petty and childish part of her wished that it was because he'd finally gotten sick of the Red Dickhead and showed him the garbage-pile. But that petty and childish part of her was obviously enough the ignorant and stupid part of her at the same time. Whatever she thought about the Proxy of Lucifer, that little bastard made Dad happy.
"Octavia? Have you had dinner? The hour is growing quite late," Dad said, leaning around the edge of the doorframe to look at her.
"Really? What time is it?" she asked. When she finally found a time-piece, she groaned.
"Alright. That's enough. You are leaving that chair and you are taking care of yourself," Stolas declared, striding into the room. He didn't need a whole lot of expended effort to pull her out of her seat and guide her out of her administrative tower and toward the bunker-dwelling that she'd coopted from another would-have-been administrator, gutted, and then refurbished into a living area. Notably, it had a full kitchen, staffed by her family's cooks. "I wish I could order you to not work yourself to the brink of collapse, but I know under whose orders you've been saddled. So I can only say 'I'm sorry I couldn't prevent this'."
"This wasn't your job to prevent," Octavia said as Dad guided her through the utilitarian bunker home and toward its small dining room. She wasn't about to eat in the mess-hall with the common soldiers. They were vulgar beings, those soldiers, and only about two thirds of their food and drink actually made it into their mouths. It made her wish she could replace them all with her personal legions. Her legions were going to be professionals, damn it! Dad gently pushed her toward her chair, and took the next seat a corner of the table away from her, so he could be as close as possible to her rather than across the length of the table as apparently was supposed to be 'proper'. "Dad, I need to know something."
"What is it, Via?" Stolas asked, brightening.
"I know you can't actually give me your Legions, that there's a law about that. But do you think I can… I don't know… rent some of your veterans for a few months?"
"You want my veterans? Why?" Stolas asked. Then as she purged her breath and began to ready herself an explanation, she could practically see the lightbulb ignite in the place of Dad's halo. "Oh, you want them to train your nascent Legions! That's a superb idea. Why didn't that thought occur to me sooner?"
"I think we're all getting run to the fraying point," Octavia said.
"I'll make sure it happens. How are your legions coming along?" Dad asked.
"Well, I've got one mostly up to strength. Mostly," Octavia said. It had turned out that there was a lot more to running a Legion than throwing money at it and telling them to 'be a cohesive fighting force'. There were vast graphs and tables of information, enormous databases of weapons and defensive gear and ammunition and even food. Of course Hell had to be so balkanized that not all Fiends could eat the same foods. And while Octavia was admittedly starting to get a handle on that with her own Starfire Legion, she knew that the other eleven she was bade to make wouldn't be as simple as copying what succeeded on her flagship Legion and repeating it eleven times.
At least her Starfire Legion could punch well above its weight. While numbering twenty five thousand, only four of that were actual front-line fighters, clad in Blasphemers. All the rest of them were there to make those four-thousand really, really, really fucking effective.
"I'm sensing a very severe 'but' in that, my dear," Dad said.
"How long did it take you to build your legions?" she asked.
"The first time? A matter of days," Stolas said, and the frazzled, put-out look which crept onto Octavia's face immediately had him waving her thoughts away, "but that was a different time. I wasn't having to train anybody. We were all furious, spited soldiers of the Holy Host, now throwing our backing behind King Lucifer. My Infernal Legions? Those took years. And there were a lot of… pitfalls… that your mother and I fell into before we settled on their current shape and structure."
"So I'm not being a time-wasting shitter with my guys," Octavia said.
"Via, language!" Dad said, scandalized, while the cooks delivered food that had been magically kept piping hot, long after it was supposed to have been served.
"Thanks, dad," she said. "What about Ambrosius? Who was your Legatus before him?"
Ambrosius, who had been silently standing guard at the door, offered nothing, allowing Dad to speak. "That's a complicated question. My first Legatus was one of my fellow Rebels, a Firstborn angel named Ceciro. He was a good soldier, and a friend, but… Hell quickly sunk its claws into him. The freedom from duty that the Rings represented infected him. And by the end of his service, he was a walking tribute to profligacy and decadence," Dad looked distant and sad for a moment. "It is a monumental feat of excess for an Angel to die from an overdose of mortal drugs. And Ceciro ended as monumentally as he had fought on the fields of Heaven."
"And then?" she asked.
"Various fiends. Usually Devourers at first, but eventually Mutants and Consumers. There was only one Sinner in charge of my legions before able Ambrosius. She was a good soldier, Bitha. Pity she had no head for inter-legionary politics. It was by her example that I chose to raise Ambrosius through the ranks and into leadership."
"And he's been with you ever since," Octavia said.
"If you find competence, invest in it," Stolas said sagely. "You could do far worse than Sinners to lead a legion of Hell, and in Ambrosius' case, I dare say you could do little better."
"High praise, my Dominus," Ambrosius said from the door.
"Yes, well; never alienate your military leaders. They all have swords and know how to use them," Dad finished with a patrician laugh. Ambrosius didn't join him, though did crack a smirk. Obviously, in this at least, her father and her surrogate-father were sharing the same kind of sense-of-humor. "So how is your mission coming?"
Octavia puffed out a breath, and then picked up her fork. "That's gonna take a lot of talking to answer, and I don't want my food to get cold."
Chapter 37
Gadreel of Deathblows
Fort Abandon was slowly spreading like a metastatic cancer, or perhaps an aggressive moss, along the edge of Cloud Probity, reaching with idiot pseudopods toward the great Rat Towers which abutted the edge and formed a warren into which the forces of Heaven and Hell still fought to this day. It was already many dozens of times larger than it had been at the beginning of the year, and though the growth had slowed to a degree, it was clear that this tumor had still larger yet to grow.
There was a change in the air. Gadreel could feel it in the bricks under her fingertips and bare feet, could smell it in the loss-of-foulness in the breeze. The cloud-bank all around Heaven, which once played host to the Pearly Gates and the great wall that held out most of all intruders from entry into Heaven, was an ugly and surly grey, beaten down and grisly like cold, cold rain about to fall. But not there. Not in Fort Abandon and those its influence touched.
There, where Hell had dominion, the cloud-bank was white.
White and pure as Heaven once was, in the ages before the Silence. Pure and vibrant as it was during the days when God was Mighty and Righteous. And the only variable that changed from the rest of Heaven that was serving as a very ad-hoc 'control group' was that Hell was in charge.
Gadreel watched, as she often did. She was a patient thing, alike to a spider in personality. Her eyes watched the overt goings-on of Fort Abandon from her awkward nook in one of the Rat towers right up against the Edge of Heaven, one well within the sphere of Hell's military influence. An Angel like her ought not have been able to to get this close, to penetrate this far into Hell's flesh. But here Gadreel nevertheless stood.
The plan was simple. Get to the one in charge, and then let things take their natural course. She was not called the Grigori of Deathblows for no good reason; she amongst her kind was the ultimate master of finality, of endings. Upon the dark, dark skin of her back was tattooed the luminescent Sigil of The Horseman Death, under whom she had refined her craft from merely extraordinary, to being utterly without peer. Ten thousand years of practice, and the tutelage of that elemental beast in the dark side of Heaven had made her a dangerous thing. And because of that tutalage, here she stood.
She was an odd looking woman. Though she cleaved more to a 'mundane' and human-like form than some of the Secondborn, it was the small details that betrayed her. She was undoubtedly female, but she lacked any real overt signs of fecundity, narrow hipped and narrow-chested, her face having a distinctly predatory aspect to it with a hawkish nose and glowing silver-on-silver eyes living under brows which constantly seemed to glare. Her skin was a dark hue, a brown that borrowed some tint of cobalt blue, so dark was it. It didn't matter to her. Her appearance was something she seldom put thought into in the modern age.
There had been a time when she put thought and effort into beauty. Those times were gone.
Gadreel paused from her observation, half-turning toward the cranny that she had shimmied through to get here. There were voices of the Innocent out there, talking loudly to each other in their newly-reunited tongue. "Look I don't care if it's dangerous or not; it's food. The worst it can do is kill me," one of them said.
"You don't know what kind of poisons Hell has," another, a woman answered him.
"I don't see you going out and bringing in food, Irene. Just let us fucking eat!" a third voice shouted.
"You're selling your souls to the devil for a cup of water and a bowl of soup!" Irene shouted back.
"I didn't sell my soul for shit," the first cut in. "If Garth says the food is good, I'm gonna eat it. And if you don't wanna eat yours, I'll eat yours too!"
"You're helping the enemy!" Irene screamed.
"As opposed to what? The guys who shoved us in this sty and starved us for two decades? Why in the sweet fuck should I favor them over the ones who give us clean water and food?"
Gadreel shook her head, and reached out with her slightly-too-long arms, finding a fingerhold and swinging herself out of the crevasse, swinging for an instant in the naked air, visible to anybody who would care to look, but she was also a canny eye for the perspectives of others; it didn't matter how blatant you were being, if nobody was watching.
She landed on a newly-refurbished air-conditioning unit, and used that to pop up a level, contorting her body nearly-impossibly into a corkscrew that ended with her landing soft as a snowflake onto a balcony which had its entire leading edge overtaken with small planters with mostly-degraded soil trying desperately to grow a few berries and a sprig of herbs. Gadreel was quiet for a moment, taking in her new soundscape. There was whistling coming from the apartment attached to this balcony, but the whistling was idle and formless, just somebody killing time. The argument continued downstairs. It was now beneath Gadreel both literally and figuratively.
As metastatic as the mass of Fort Abandon was, there was a certain organic security to it. There was no way in which was perfectly without defense. On the far side of the structure there were less overlapping fields of view and security and manpower, but the sheer distance from that side of the structure to the command section introduced unacceptable failure-points. Too many places where something that could go wrong, inevitably would. Gadreel knew not to tempt fate. Even with Destiny unmade, fate still held the Angel close, and was not kind to those who tried to defy it casually.
The centerline was right-out. While Gadreel knew the way to kill those mechanized soldiers before any single one of them could raise a fuss, they were being prudent in always moving in groups of three, if not four. Even the ones at the outermost gates never pared down to moving solo. While she was confident in her ability to kill one, the amount of time it would take, even though it would be mere moments, would be more than enough time for even the most stunned of comrades to raise an alarm.
And an alarmed base would make her task rather impossible.
There was the option of allowing her momentarily-suppressed Halo to ignite, and try to brute-force a Transit into that structure, but though she had only a marginal mind for magic at best, she knew that a sane and sensible military leader would put in defenses against such 'scry-and-die' practices, if not outright traps making them more hazardous to the inflictor than to the victim. And even then, the most lax of commanders would still have put up alarms for such an attempt. Which would leave her in the same state as before.
The only option left was the nearer gate to this, which was fiendishly well designed, if one could allow the assassin-angel a play-on-words. There was no way she could kill her way through it swiftly enough to bypass alarm, lockdown, and failure of her task. So she would have to improvise. Come up with something that the builders of this sprawling mess of defense and invasion couldn't have expected.
There was a buzz at her waistline, too slow to be audible and at the lower edge of one's tactile acuity. She paused in her ponderings, and pulled the smart-phone from her waterproof (or more accurately blood-spray-proof) pocket at the small of her back. Another message from Hepsut? No. Not Hepsut this time. This time the message was from Michael himself. That got her to glance to Fort Abandon, to the door leading into the apartment, and then crouch down with her back tucked into a corner and read it.
'The others are worrying about you,' said Michael's message.
Gadreel rolled her eyes. 'Then they are wasting their time. I know what I'm doing,' she sent back.
'Oh you're actually paying attention. I thought that you'd Gone Numb like a human or soemthing' Michael's answer came back quickly, with the spelling mistake included. How very unlike him. 'There's word that you're throwing yourself into suicide missions. Please. Just come back. Let's talk in person.'
Gadreel gave a quiet chuckle, her thumbs speaking for her. 'I fail to see how they're suicide missions, considering I've come back alive from every single one of them. That falls to your people's failure-at-estimation, not my mental state.'
'Gadreel, please,' Michael texted.
'I can't talk now. I have a task. It must be seen through,' Gadreel sent to him.
'No amount of blood you spill will give your son back to you,' Michael replied. 'Just come back. For a day. For an hour even. I'm worried about you.'
Gadreel didn't even bother answering that one. She put her smartphone away. If Michael had truly cared, he would have stopped Gabriel from kicking her son to death while he was still growing inside of her.
But that was the past. And though she unlike every other Grigori could, theoretically, find some way to save her child, it wouldn't be done now that all reality was Time Locked.
She turned her attention to the last entry sight within her vision. This one bore some consideration. It was a much shorter path from the outside to the core of the superstructure, where her objective lay. There were less checkpoints, and less soldiers visibly wandering the baileys between the walls. The problem was the walls themselves. Ordinarily, military doctrine said that the oldest walls tended to be the strongest. Hell of course flipped that on its head in critical ways. While true, chain-link fence wouldn't even slow her down, it also would make it painfully obvious as she approached, and the concrete bulwarks behind them were dotted with surveillance cameras. To go through there with anything less than perfect body motion was to invite notice, alarm, and a melee.
And yet, it was still her best option.
If perfect was what she needed to be, then perfect is what she would be.
The birth of an Angel in Hell was an event worthy of celebration for the masses.
Charlie knew that she could have well begged off, stayed at the Hotel and helped people, but Dad had insisted that the entire family show face to the second Angel to be born in all Creation, as opposed to made.
The celebration gala was… nostalgic, for Charlie. It called to mind the many, many parties that her parents and she had attended at her various milestones, as Daddy demanded that everybody be as proud as he was of what Charlie was achieving, as though nobody else in Hell ever would or could. Now, though, that Charlie was grown, she wondered how much of it was Dad being proud of her, and how much of it was Dad being proud that he'd made something glorious? It wasn't a question she could answer.
There were old, familiar faces in the party. Of course that miserable hag Helsa Von Eldritch was in attendance, being the deeply poisonous social butterfly who's every word and flick of her hair boiled Charlie's blood with old, familiar anger. She knew that she had little grounds to hold a grudge against an Aristocrat who had a rank so much lower than her own. For all her usual magnanimity, there were some hurts that simply could not be let go.
And where Helsa riled her with her very being, her twin brother Seviathan just made things awkward. How do you talk to the guy whom you 'slummed with' and lost your virginity to a hundred and seventy years back? A part of her wished that he hadn't shown up at all. That none of the family had. In fact, she wished that it had been just the Ars Goetia and her parents. That way, at least, there wouldn't be a bunch of social-climbing aristocrats constantly trying to dig money out of her as though she were a living gold-seam.
Oh, yes, it had become very well known that she was now a trillionaire. Dad had looked somewhat bemused when he finally admitted that he was aware of that. Dad's money had been earned through conquest and exploitation. Charlie's, conversely, was a windfall by a supremely generous donor who believed in her ideology. That she would have that much money without 'earning' it in Dad's eyes was something he didn't seem to understand. Still, he didn't try to take it from her, which, as King of All Hell, he could probably devise an excuse to do so. No, he just considered it an oddity, and let it drift past.
The star of this party was of course Penemue, who despite being only a day out from her birthing was bright like a summer's day. Not that she was smiling or carrying on loudly; that wasn't how Penemue rolled. Though her expressions were guarded, you could tell in her eyes alone that she was beside herself with glee. The child in her arms was the talk of Hell. Tabris Goetia, the Song of Freedom. He took aspects from both parents, having his mother's parchment complexion, but the hair that he already had in abundance was akin to living ink, just like his father. Whenever he was awake and his eyes were open, those eyes were the same shifting inky hue as his hair.
"Are you not enjoying yourself, my dear?" Mom asked, as much as appearing next to Charlie out of the swirl of the party.
"No, I'm enjoying myself," Charlie said, turning away from Penemue and Tabris, and to face her mother. Lilith was, as she usually did, wearing a scandalous dress in rich purples and reds which flaunted every physical beauty that she had; as the prototype for humanity that predated even Adam and Eve, she had many of them. "I'm just thinking I should be at work right now."
"Please. You're spending too much time on that little game of yours already. This," she gestured around at the loud, cheerful gathering that she'd been shanghaied into, "is where somebody of your lineage belongs."
"It's not a game, Mom. It works. I've Redeemed Sinners," Charlie stressed.
"I'm sure you have," Mom said, patting Charlie's cheek. She pulled in a breath in a gentle gasp, looking past her. "And do my eyes deceive me, or is that my ex? Cain! Cain darling! I didn't expect to see you here!"
"The newly minted father would have it no other way," Cain said. When she turned, she beheld that the ordinarily fantastically dressed Terror Incarnate was today going absolutely full-bore, managing to be better coutured than any man here except for Dad. His clothing was immaculate, perfectly cut and sewn to such a degree that she was fairly certain that Cain'd had to be sewn into that outfit. "And Charlotte, it's so good to see you in more casual climes. Did you know, sweet Lilith, that this woman puts in hundred-hour weeks most of the time? She certainly has her father's drive, doesn't she?"
"I suppose she does at that. It's been too long since you've graced one of my parties, Cain. Why ever did you stop?" Mom asked, as though she were at all ignorant of why.
"Oh, things got a bit dull for me. I needed a change of scenery that only skipping a few centuries in delirium could provide," Cain said. He turned, his green-on-green eyes locking on Dad where he was surrounded by the Deadly Sins Mammon and Leviathan, and a whole other cadre of his boot-licks and syncophants. She wished he could be free of those parasites. It'd leave him in so much a better mood. "I trust that your darling husband doesn't object to our speaking. Ordinarily whenever you spot me in one of these little to-dos, you immediately start walking the opposite direction."
"Times have changed, dear Cain. Times have changed," Mom said.
"Truer words seldom spoken," Cain said. "What do you think of that? Angels bearing Angels only in the surly confines of Hell?"
"What?" Charlie asked.
"Surely you must have considered how odd a phenomenon it is that the only place the Children of God's Word can bear their own offspring is as far as possible from His sight," Cain offered.
"I did," she said, as though she'd given thought to it before this moment. She actually paused to do as she'd claimed. "And it does seem a bit… convenient, doesn't it?"
"Indeed. Almost as though there was some critical restraint-mechanism that is present diffuse throughout Heaven that Hell lacks, and allows the Angel to rise beyond its construction," Cain mused.
"Oh, we're going to be having a fair few more Hellborn Angels, aren't we?" Lilith pursued Cain's point.
"Sooner rather than later," Cain nodded. "Octavia and Tabris will likely be but the first of a flood. And forgive a bit of a digression, but… I was led to believe that the Princess of Gluttony would be here."
"Oh, right, Beelzebub," Lilith sighed. "She canceled at the last minute, leaving a bunch of her caterers somewhat in the lurch. Oh well. The food is still good. It's simply a pity that there won't be quite the serving-sizes that we all would have preferred."
"Now why would she do that?" Cain asked.
"It's not my place to try to guess what goes on in that insect's brain. She's an unnatural thing, and too free with her attentions toward the small and base," Lilith gave an off-hand gesture toward the imps who were providing bottles of wine and spirits to any who asked for them, "by three quarters. One day, her indiscretions are going to result in a scandal that even she can't fuck her way out of."
"So harsh. I didn't know you had some grievance with Beelzebub," Cain noted.
"Grievance? Please. I have better things to dedicate my time to pursuing," she said, with a sultry look toward the King of All Hell. Charlie rolled her eyes and moved away from her mother, navigating through the partying crowds of Aristocrats and Ars Goetia.
She wished that Vaggie were here. Vaggie could have made this whole event bearable.
But having the Princess of All Hell show up with a paltry Sinner hanging off of her arm? That simply was not done. At least Vaggie finally seemed to be calming down, and getting comfortable in her sixth year in Hell. Charlie knew that she'd essentially been faced with nothing but the worst of Hell since she landed here. A bit of comfort and the occasional smile on Vaggie's face did Charlie's heart good.
This could have been something other than a waste of time, if there were any of the people up here that would see things her way. If there were any in the highest echelons of Hellish power who wished help. But there weren't. In her particular ambition, Charlie was alone. Alone, except for one.
"You have a grim look in your eyes, madam," Cain said, sliding in at her side and subtly cutting a path for the two of them away from the knot of the highest of the high, away from the clustering around the new mother of Creation's youngest Angel. "I'm guessing perhaps it's because they so thoroughly deride your successes without even bothering to verify them?"
"It's more than that. When I offer them proof, they refuse to look beyond the most superficial…" she waggled her hands, "superficialities of it."
"And here in my naivete I thought that Wages of Sin would be a hard thing to dismiss," Cain said.
"I thought so too! It's not like there's any of this anywhere else in Creation!" Charlie pointed out.
"...anymore, perhaps..." Cain mumbled.
"What was that?"
"Errant thought," Cain said with a small cough to clear his throat. "I was thinking, perhaps, that you've been casting your line with the wrong lure for what you want. The mighty and powerful are so exactly because they have embedded themselves into a personally beneficial status quo, which sees wealth and power drawn gravitationally upward toward them in exchange for the mentally and physically exhausting task of their mere existence. Many of those Aristocratic families who did earn places in the current dizzying heights of power did so so very long ago that it's not even within family-mythos how tiring it is to swing the pickaxe to breach the walls that they now have sealed up behind themselves."
"And you do?" she asked.
"Of course. I've been amongst their number for longer than your esteemed father has been in Hell. I recall the fatigue of spending years drilling through the defenses of a stagnant system so that I may have what I deem to be my due. And I've of late been getting a refresher on it, because I've had to do much the same all over again in the modern day," Cain said, lifting a champagne flute from a passing tray. He took a sip then nodded. "They will not act against their own perceived best interests, and no amount of evidence will shake them of that myopia. I'm sorry, my dear. That is the state of Hell in the Luciferean Age."
"There has to be something…" she muttered.
"Oh, there is," Cain said, taking another sip. "It merely falls into finding somebody who's perceived best interests align, however tenuously and briefly, with your own. Instead of using the evidence as proof of redemption, what if the evidence was an ends-of-itself?"
"Purson," Charlie said, thumping her palm with a fist. Cain offered a proud grin. "You wanted me to come up with that on my own, didn't you?"
"In many ways, you remind me of my children; Mari was by far the most brilliant of Eve's daughters, and our daughter Edea was every bit as bright as she. Thank you, Charlotte, for reminding me of someone I've lost," Cain said, his eyes growing a bit sad as he spoke.
"Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring you down," Charlie said, laying a hand on his arm. When she did, Cain glanced up, his spike of melancholy fading.
"One learns to value the sweetness in the bittersweet when one has little other option. And those years were very sweet indeed," Cain said. "Yes, Purson would be willing to hear you out over the Wages. Zagan would as well, but he would make weapons of it, and I know that you don't approve of that sort of thing."
"Which is correct," Charlie said.
"Beyond they? I can think of a few. The Hexbreaker's Union would fall over themselves to have them, but they would thereafter exclude you entirely from consideration. Well, not quite. As said, Purson wouldn't. And I believe neither would Stolas," Cain gave a shrug. "But he seems much distracted with his impish lover now that he's divorced. I can't say that I saw that event coming; he and Stella had been a good pair for so very long."
"Things change," she said. And she noticed that Cain was using his personal aura of menace to gently part their way through the crowds toward where a number of the Ars Goetia, including such avian luminaries as Naberius, Raum, and Andrealphus, were offering congratulation and chit-chat with the new father, Purson.
"And Hell is all the better for it," Cain said with a smile. "Greetings, King of Lore! We haven't had much chance to speak; always darting off after one thing or another…"
"To call you a busy man would be akin to describing our High King as 'merely a bit self-centered'," Purson said, turning to face Cain, to a strangled noise coming out of Naberius' throat at being so curtly dismissed from active conversation. "Gentlemen, have you all reunited with Cain since his time in torpor?"
"Oh I'm sure we'll all catch up in due time," Andrealphus said. "And I would relay such regards from my darling sister if she cared enough to send them, which I will be frank in saying that she's not. What are you doing here, old-man? We were having a conversation."
"We are still having a conversation. It merely isn't the one you wanted," Cain said.
Andrealphus bristled, the temperature of this part of the room plummeting as the ice which was his birthright as The Frost of God began to manifest around him. "And of course you would be daring enough to speak so out of turn here, where you are reasonably sure that none of us have the Steel of Angels to end you with."
"Even if you had, you still wouldn't be able to," Cain said easily, a most patronizing smile on his face. Raum outright laughed at that.
"Let it go, Andri; there's no need to turn this into an Angel Versus Human dick-measuring contest!" Raum said.
"I suppose you're right," Andrealphus said, allowing the cold which cloaked him to dissipate. "It is beneath our dignity to be ruffled by the riff-raff."
"And if you say those words in the mirror long enough, you may even begin to believe them," Cain said with a cruel spike of mischief in his eyes. The Frost of God scowled, but didn't respond to his barb. "And to the man of the hour, I can only offer my sincerest congratulations, and a warning, from one father to another; whatever privation, hardship and lack you've ever faced in your life hitherto will pale in comparison to what comes next."
"If you try to frighten me with the enormity of raising a first-born son, you'll find you can only fail," Purson said with good humor. "And Charlotte, you are a bonfire against the blizzard as usual. I have seen little of you at these sorts of events of late. And heard rumors as to the why."
Naberius rolled his eyes. "Well, rumor is a strange seed that needs no grounding in reality to grow a tall, if crooked, tree," the Old Crow pointed out.
"Exactly why I speak now. To dispel rumor, and to crush out that strange seed before it can grow into something inconvenient," Purson said. "This… hotel… of yours."
"Yes?" she asked.
"There are reports of Innocent in that place. And more than a few. Have you staked your claim over their ilk?" Charlie made to shake her head in dismissal of that notion, but a sharp look from the corner of Cain's eye told her that she dare not. So she gave it just a thought as she plucked a champagne flute of her own from a decorative table and smelled the fizzy bubbling of the carbonated wine. So saying 'no' was dangerous? Very well then.
"Yes," she said. "If you find any of them, I expect you to bring them to me, unharmed, and unmolested," she hoped that she had even a fraction of the clout to make that kind of statement stick, and knew that she'd need more than that fraction to make it stick with the likes of the Ars Goetia. "They are of use to me," she added, as an afterthought.
"I wonder what 'use' that would be, considering that it's said that at least four of the damned things are wandering around your premises," Naberius said. He was trying to gouge for information; Charlie might be a bit out of the courts of social combat, but she knew to call a spade a spade, and to dig with it.
"My business with them is my business," she said coolly.
"I suppose it's for the best. I don't think that your esteemed father would allow Heavenly spies to wander around freely," Andrealphus said, a smug look on his face. "And if they're all gathered up under your roof, then there's not a lot of real harm they can do, now is there?"
"Don't be sharp, cousin," Purson said lightly. Andrealphus shot the new father a look, but relented. "And beyond that, there is word of actual success, but given the state of Hell in the current age, it's hard to say what is true, and what rests with lies."
"Oh, there are ways of proving things. Could I borrow you for a minute?" Charlie said with coy tone.
Purson lofted his brows, turning to his fellow Ars Goetia and giving them a look. "Well, should my King's heir ask it of me, who am I to refuse? Lead on, young mistress."
Cain fell back, a few paces behind where Charlotte and Purson left the main party room and entered into one of the sitting rooms of his palace. Like every other surface of every other room of Purson's castle, it was stockpiled thick with books on an infinitude of subjects, lacking decorative molding or paneling in exchange for the spines of untold tomes. This room was a slightly different one, with crystal-glass as a ceiling and reaching down a wall, allowing the evening sun to illuminate them as opposed to the moody lighting of the otherwise somewhat crypt-like Palace of Lore.
"Should I presume he's not simply being unforgivably impertinent in this?" Purson asked of Cain, as he lowered himself down at a writing desk, but with his chair turned toward the guest-chair which Charlie was now seating herself at. Cain remained standing, at her side.
"No, he's a part of this, too," Charlie said. She leaned forward, her fingers steepled. "I know that it's a hard pill to swallow that little old me managed to do what only a Shard of Ruin could do before. But I'm not making those claims willy nilly. Would you like to see the proof?"
"Given we are now in private, I see no reason not," Purson said. She smiled, and extracted the small bag containing about forty kilograms of Wages despite only resting in her palm.
Purson was still, staring at them as she placed them on the table.
His eyes drifted back up to hers. Then down to the bag.
Slowly, he raised a hand, and snapped his fingers. There was a rattling metal bang, as a bulkhead slammed shut over the door they'd entered from, and protective plating clanged into place over the conservatory glass, plunging them for only a moment into darkness before the surgical-white lighting of the pyre-lights awoke and left them sitting shadowless in a bunker.
"Where," Purson said with extreme suspicion, "did you find that?"
"Aren't you missing a party for one of your friends right now?" Octavia asked during a lull in her explanation of what she was trying to accomplish up here.
"Oh, don't concern yourself with that. Consider it returning a favor; Purson took weeks to even realize you were born; why should I better his response to my happy day?" Dad said, which just struck her as a bit petty.
"I just figured that you'd be dragging the red d… that Proxy of yours to the event," she said. She'd pretty thoroughly taken over the bunker where she did most of her work, so that one could only tell it wasn't her native stomping grounds because of its awkward size. Stolas kept having to weave to not knock his head on things, and Stolas' daughter was only spared that by the fact that she wasn't done growing yet.
"Oh, Blitzie's got his own life. I don't want to impose upon him," Dad said with a wistful look on his face. Like just thinking about that weirdo imp was making him happy. "Besides; he very much enjoys pursuing his own affairs. When he's satisfied with them, he can always come back to me."
Octavia offered a laugh, leaning at the 'window' which was a foot-thick wedge of bullet-proof glass stuck into the concrete that overlooked a bailey. "You're starting to sound like a kept man, Dad."
"I suppose I do. Well, there are far worse ways to earn access to a Grimoire and the means to pursue my duties," Dad didn't even sound the least bit resentful at that fact. That once he held the Grimoire, and the imp was dancing to his tune, only to have their places unceremoniously reversed. "So what is to keep them from rebelling, again?"
"Their own best interest," Octavia said. "They know rebelling against me is biting the hand that literally feeds them." The schedules for the rest of the harvests were ongoing. A few dozens of thousands of Innocent had prevented a harvest-failure, but there were still too few hands on the harvester and too many on the gun. Wrath didn't enjoy being Hell's breadbasket, exactly. It merely did it because Gluttony couldn't keep up the pace that apparently once-in-a-forever-ago it had. Given that she'd run some agricultural assays on the 'sun-gullies' of Heaven, she actually found a shockingly familiar issue at play.
Heaven's soils were almost as depleted as Gluttony's were famed for being.
Of course, Heaven had barely made it two centuries of intensive agriculture before field collapse, whereas Gluttony had been overfarmed for millennia before the soil gave up. And despite the famed toxicity of Gluttony's dirt, the tests that Octavia's minions had performed at her direct order had showed far from the stated dust and mud. While there were still vast tracts of Gluttony utterly lost to agriculture, she was finding pockets of it that were just about arable again.
It seemed that everywhere that Octavia deigned to stick her beak, she found more secrets that Hell was trying to hide. Not just from her, though; from everybody. If word got out that Gluttony's soil was recovering, that would threaten Wrath's status as the source of most of Hell's food, and the security against the so-called 'fuck-fuck games' that such indispensability provided them. It would be a lowering of the caché of Wrath to the benefit of Gluttony. And given Satan's opinion of Beelzebub, that shit was not going to fly.
Frankly, Octavia wouldn't have been surprised if Satan were quietly dumping toxic waste onto those 'nearly recovered' patches as he discovered them. For all Satan was the great anomaly of Hell's leadership, the big guy was, by his own admission, a deeply petty Elder Devil.
"If the humans see us as the middle-men toward their own renewed prosperity and comfort, they'll work for us willingly. If we can offer them luxuries, they'll do it tirelessly. And if we can do more, they'll do it fanatically," Octavia said. Lucifer had dropped her up here in a spate of cruelty and curiosity, to see what flavor of fuck-up she'd be when given some actual authority. She instead was thankful that she got a problem that actually had a great many different solutions, and that she could try them all out.
Some of them didn't, or wouldn't work. But propping up the agricultural sector of Hell was only the first part. "And once we've proved that we're not going anywhere, that the benefit we bring isn't going to simply go away, they'll want to invest in it. They'll work in our factories to make the luxuries they'll also get to enjoy. And one day, they might even fight for us."
Dad shook his head slowly. "Oh you sweet, sweet child. The Innocent will never fight on behalf of Hell. There is too much acrimony there. Too much bad blood. God Himself wouldn't allow it."
"And where is God?" Octavia asked, gesturing to the bailey where a bunch of impish electricians were running wires to a massive wifi pylon that would finally – finally – bring Fort Abandon into the twenty first century with accessible internet and a freedom from those fucking roaming-fees that only the idiots were still falling for. "I don't see anything down there that God would allow. If God really was going to kick us out of Heaven, He'd have done it by now. I think that he can't. I think that he's grown weak, or maybe that he just doesn't care."
Stolas outright laughed at that, delight in his eyes. "Oh, you sound so much like your mother when she joined Lucifer. Maybe God has become impotent. But there are far more Angels than we up here, and most of them don't take kindly to our presence here."
"Fuck 'em," Octavia said. And again Dad chuckled.
"Language, Via! We raised you better than that," he said, obviously meaning none of it. She started to walk again, and Dad kept up with her. "You know, if you desperately need to balance your books, you could have simply asked me to help. I have more than enough pennies floating around that I could make up…"
"I know, Dad, and I appreciate the offer. But I think there is actually an answer here," Octavia said, reaching back and giving his hand a squeeze. "And I don't think I'd be able to live with myself if I took the simple path of using your money to cover my failures when I could actually come up with a sustainable, affordable, and possibly war-altering path by fiddling around with a few numbers and ideas."
"I always knew that you had a special light to you, my precious little starfire," Dad said. "And to think, I even got a chance to see it ignite."
"Oh, don't start with that. I don't need reminding that you're supposed to be dead right now," Octavia groused.
"Very well, I won't, then," Dad said.
Octavia almost walked past the next 'window' in the bunker without a thought, but instantly something twigged her as wrong. She backed up, looking through the glass-like material at the gate that was just at the edge of the close-in horizon that Fort Abandon produced. There was a single soldier in a Blasphemer standing in a watch-post.
They were never supposed to be alone for any reason.
Octavia pulled her Hellphone and quick-dialed Ambrosius.
"What is it, my Domina?" Ambrosius answered after half of one ring.
"Who is assigned to watch-post C19 North?" She asked, cutting all preamble, watching as the lone soldier continued to pace around staring out of the superstructure in the same direction she was, leaving her staring at the back of its heavily-armored head.
"That would be… Yes. Katrina Schlatt, Sinner, and Bingus Katz, Consumer. C19 North doesn't have room for three."
"Figures. A human and an idiot. Could you transfer me to the router and to their tower?"
"At once, my Domina," Ambrosius said. There was a click, then three loud beeps as her phone took over the speaker at the back of the watch post.
"Where the fuck is the other one?" Octavia demanded. In the distance she could see the one power-armored figure flinch in surprise, glancing back toward the speaker. "The standing orders are to never separate for any reason when you're on task. Which one are you?"
"Schlatt, Ma'am," the woman's response was tinny. "Bing's just looking after a…"
"Katz isn't 'just' doing anything. He's breaking a standing order. Get him back up there now," Octavia said.
"But what about that thing he said he saw?" Schlatt asked.
"Call it in to the Sweepers; that's not your job," Octavia said. She shook her head and cut the call. For God's sake could these soldiers not stay at their posts for one fucking hour without her having to loom over their shoulders?
"Via… are you alright?" Dad asked, leaning down and placing a hand gently on her shoulder.
"I'm just frustrated by the levels of incompetence that surround me," she muttered. And Dad smiled at that.
"That is nine-tenths of leadership, my dear," he said. "It's why I chose master Agrippa to lead my legions. So that I wouldn't be constantly tearing my feathers out at the constant ineptitude that military organizations invariably embody. I was always more happy delegating such things."
"I still don't even have a Legatus picked out. Just a couple of guys who pick up the slack on a rotating basis," Octavia muttered.
"Well, ordinarily, I would offer Agrippa, but between my own and your mother's legions, and your ongoing tutelage on top of it, I think he's already pulled very fine as it is," Dad said.
"Well, for the sake of not plucking myself for dinner, I guess I'd better figure something out," Octavia muttered.
"You don't need to push yourself to such lunatic extremes. The work you're doing here is already extraordinary, which is exactly what I would have expected out of you," Dad said. "But if there is one credo with which I have been made very cognizant from the martial classes, it is that 'sometimes perfect isn't good enough, but often good enough is just perfect'."
"Find a working solution now and fix it later rather than keep stringing an on-going problem along," Octavia caught his meaning. The stairs they were descending ended, leaving them on the ground floor, and she saw a pair of imps sitting there. Both men. "And what's this about?"
"Hey there, boss," the buffer of the two imps said, standing and giving a salute not to her, but to her father. "I was wonderin' if we could discuss something with you."
"And why should I? Who are you?" Dad said, instantly defaulting to a haughty tone.
"Wait, I know that voice," Octavia said. "You're Bophades, with the Armored Corps of the Stellar Grenadiers."
"That's right!" Bophades said. He reached back and laid a hand on the other man's shoulder. "Me and Lig were wondering if we could get let outta our contract, seen's as we've already done a full tour and…"
"Out of the question," Dad said. "If I were to allow even such decorated imps as yourselves leave my service, it would presage a flood."
Bophades gave a smirk. "Ya see, that's the thing. Me and Lig don't wanna leave the Legions entirely; we wanna join hers."
"What?" Octavia asked. "Why?"
"You wanna tell it or should I?" Lig said.
"Go for it," Bophades said.
"Ya see. Me and Deez, we've got a good thing going," Lig said.
"Okay. Why do I need to know that?" Octavia asked.
"Because we were just havin' a fling 'cause imps tend to die in Legions," Lig said. "Didn't wanna get too attached if one of us was just gonna get offed in the Forever War or in Heaven or some shit. But now, 'cause of that armor you gave us… We got to thinkin' that we might even survive to the end of our second tours."
"And you want to leave my father's legion to join my own, because…?" she asked.
"Because you've got all the best shit! Everybody's saying it. While other Legions might get a couple dozen of those bastards, you've got fuckin' thousands! And I think we'll do a lot better with a thousand hard bastards at our side than just twelve or twenty," Deez offered. Octavia was about to dismiss him, but then realized something.
"Dad?" she said. Stolas, who was now looking somewhat wistfully at the imps, turned to her with a 'hrm?'. "This is exactly what I was talking about! If that loophole actually exists, I can use it for them!"
"It would be scrutinized if there were any real number of them, Via," Dad said. Tradition said that soldiers of an Infernal Legion were soldiers of that specific Infernal Legion until their death or manumission. But Octavia had heard of quite a few instances of… pushing that envelope. "But the number that would cause alarm would be in the thousands, not so few as to be counted on one hand. But for these two? A pair of imps?"
"Yes," she said, opening a hand toward the imps. "It's like they said. I've got thousands of untrained Power Armor troops. And I'm going to need people with familiarity and battle-experience to train them. There's only 30 soldiers in all of Hell that I can reach that have that kind of expertise. These two killed an Angel in that armor. I need that."
"Well, I'll see to it at once," Stolas said. Bophades and Lig immediately shared a high-five, then a deep hug, while the two Goetia left them behind. "If I didn't know any better, I would have accused of Stella stepping out to Sahaquiel to make you. That was very unusual thinking."
"All of the problems I need to solve these days need to be run at sideways," Octavia said. She was quiet for a short while as they left the halls and entered into the courtyard (or bailey, depending on who you asked) that settled between the buildings. She was vaguely walking toward the Router, so that she could more properly chew-out Katz when he returned to post. But that path allowed her to breathe the air of Heaven.
It felt different than Hell. Like it was more… dead. Like there was a weird static that tingled her throat with every inhale.
"I'm glad that you're finally happy," Octavia said, after that short walk and short pause.
"What do you mean?" Dad asked.
"I'm not blind. I know you weren't happy the entire time you were with Mum. Or at least the entire time I can remember. And though I think that imp is just a stupid red dickhead who's just stupid enough to drag you down with him when he finally gambles and loses… he makes you happy."
Dad smiled, warm and distant. "Yes. Yes he does. Happier than I knew I could be."
"If you could have changed things, to have him instead of Mum around even when I was a chick…" she began, but he placed is hand on her shoulder.
"I'm not going to regret what was, nor expend effort postulating on what-could-have-been. We are happy now. I am happy with him. And I am ecstatic with you," Dad said. Then he leaned a bit closer. "And you'll know that happiness too, some day."
"What?" Octavia asked.
"I can see it in your eyes," Dad said. "That 'wanting', to understand why others had something that you were always denied. I saw that look in my own mirror for no few centuries. But you're young, and when you add this success to the mountain of them that I can forsee you accumulating, you will have your pick of all of the finest suitors of all of Hell."
"Yeah. The best pick of a shitty brood," Octavia said.
"There lies the greatest trick of them all," Dad said, leaning closer, just a few words meant only between father and daughter. "If you become spectacular enough, then you can do whatever the fuck you want, and nobody will be able to stop you."
"Is that what you did?" she asked.
"That's what my Blitzie did," Dad said proudly. She made a gagging noise. "Oh don't knock it 'till you've tried it."
"You've seen these before?" Charlie asked, hope rising in her chest.
"Please answer the question, your grace," Purson said, his tones at odds with his words. Though his words were asking, his tone was demanding.
"It's what's left over when somebody becomes Redeemed," she said. Purson stared at her. "You don't believe me, do you?"
"Remain here," he said, and rose from his chair, striding toward a wall and then… oozing through it. That left Cain and Charlie all alone in the now eerily lit study, surrounded on all sides by bulkheads.
"I think things are turning out rather well," Cain said gamely after a rather long pause.
"We just got ditched," Charlie muttered.
"Ah, but the look of urgency on Purson's face. Did you not see it?" Cain asked. She gave her head a shake. "Were he not an Angel, and immune to the travails of aging, I'd have said that your display just took a decade off of his life."
"Well, it certainly didn't earn me any favors," Charlie said.
"You might be surprised," Cain said. Whatever next thing he was about to say was cut off when there was a metal clunk, and a section of the wall swung into the room. Emerging from a stairwell on its far side was Purson, who was carrying now a cylinder of stone with him, his gait slow and awkward. He set the thing down next to the table, leaning it against the wall. The shelves that the top of the cylinder rested against crunched in under its mass. Now that it was close and illuminated properly, it was a seeming core-sample of rock that had been extracted from some location with faintly orange-red rock that had intrusions of faintly silvery stone throughout it.
"What is this?" Charlie asked.
Purson didn't answer with words. He snapped his fingers, and a flame ignited in a lantern that hung next to the desk. Another snap and the pyre-lights dimmed, so that the lantern would overpower them. And the instant that the pyre-lights no longer dominated, the stone core radiated with moody and melancholy hues of an inverse rainbow.
The entire core of stone, that which under the merciless pyre-light appeared to be orange-red, was in fact the depressed and sullen brown of the Wages.
No wonder Purson took so long and struggled so much to bring this here. That thing had to have weighed so many tonnes.
"Where did you find this?" Charlie asked.
"Wait, I know that stone," Cain interrupted her, leaning close and running his fingers along the silvery 'intrusions'. "This is Benevolith. Purson, is this a sample from Purgatory?"
"It is indeed. From the very mountain that housed the Stone of Farewell," Purson said.
"Why were there Wages in Purgatory? And why did you keep their existence secret?"
"It is no secret; I didn't know what they were, only that they represented a threat to Purgatory. I was trying to devise ways to extract these 'Wages' from the stone even up to the moment that Purgatory was torn free of Hell and fell into the Abyss," said the King of Lore.
"So I'm doing exactly what the Stone of Farewell always did; I'm letting the Sinners let go of their Wages and ascend," Charlie said with a smile.
"You have given me an answer I had given up searching for," Purson said. "Oft have I lain awake at night, wondering what this dread substance was, whence it came, and why it so hobbled Purgatory. All things come to the light in the end. Purgatory fell because it grew too heavy for Hell to bear, under the weight of countless petatonnes of these Wages, from the billions of humans who had succeeded in atonement. The Fall of Purgatory was something that was inevitable as soon as the Stone of Farewell ascended its first soul."
"Then God should have done something to stop it," Charlie said.
"God's… not doing so great," a new voice entered the room. Purson flicked his eyes past where Charlie was sitting, and Cain outright flinched away, his fists tightening into a defensive stance. But before Charlie could turn to face the source of that voice, there were a pair of hands on her shoulders, keeping her facing Purson. "Listen. I need you to promise me something. Can you do that for me, Charlie?"
"I don't like making promises that I don't know that I can keep. Who are you?" Charlie tried to crane her neck around, but for some reason she couldn't see what was directly behind her.
"All you have to promise me is that you won't freak out," the new voice said.
"...fine?" Charlie said.
"Charlie…" the disappointed tone was so familiar.
"I won't freak out! Now let me turn around, because this is very weird!" Charlie said. The hands released, and Charlie stood from her chair and turned.
There was a human standing there, one that Cain was regarding with more than mild alarm. She was so ordinary looking, not particularly tall, with auburn hair. Well, she did have three green eyes, so that was odd, and she did have that circular pane back-lighting her head. But an instant after registering that, Charlie suddenly put all the parts together.
"Wendy?"
And the human smiled at that. "Yeah, been a while hasn't it, Charlie?"
"But how? Why are you in Hell? You got out!" Charlie said, and glomped onto Wendy before giving the woman a chance to answer. Wendy was a bit shocked to be suddenly hugged, but accepted it after a moment, returning the hug with warmth, before finally wafting free of Charlie's grasp somehow and now re-situating herself over yonder. Cain turned to track her, confusion and a trace of unease still in his eyes.
"Yeah, I got out. But then I came back. What can I say? Hell is my old-familiar at this point," Wendy said.
"Charlotte, could you introduce us?" Cain asked, not daring to take his eyes off of her, as though she were some horrifying threat as opposed to an old, surprising friend.
"Oh, do you remember how I always talked about Wendy Wasted back from before you woke up?"
"This is she?" Cain asked. She answered with a cheerful 'yep!'. He pointed at her. "A Sinner became that."
"What are you so alarmed about? It's just Wendy," Charlie said, having no idea that, because of her Nephilim biology, she was incapable of seeing the mind-bending paradoxes and straining against reality that Wendy manifested with every breath and movement of her body. She merely saw the body and thought it the whole.
"I shall have to take your word on that," Cain said.
"Forgive me, your grace; I was unaware that you had previous association with Gloria," Purson said.
"Gloria?" Charlie asked. She turned to Wendy. "I thought you had given up on your Deadname."
"New form, new life, new name. Most people call me Gloria Mundi, now," Wendy said.
That got a nervous laugh out of Cain. "So passes the glory of the world," he said.
"I like this one. If I'd know that Cain was a scholar, I'd have gotten Sam to drag him into the Hotel that Summer. He seems like a hoot."
"I assure you, I am a barrel of laughs," Cain said, only now moving from being alarmed and ready to fight, to merely being on guard.
"I bet," Wendy said. She pointed at the core. "And Purson, why didn't you tell me you had those things? I think we can use them."
"I failed to understand their importance," Purson admitted. "It does somewhat strain the easy understanding of metaphysics that the raw, crystalized sin of two and a half billion Sinners could be deposited and infused into stone. And as it stands, that is about all of it that we have, save for the piffle that Charlie has brought us."
"Actually, I've got a couple tonnes of it back at the Hotel," Charlie piped up. Wendy brightened at that.
"That's great news. I think that's one of the stumbling blocks we've had, materials-wise," Wendy said.
"You haven't answered my question," Charlie said, crossing her arms and staring down at Wendy. "Why are you back in Hell?"
"Oh, I'm trying to save the world," Wendy said with an off hand gesture.
"You're saving the world? What world?" Charlie asked.
"Earth. What other world… right, you've lived your entire life in Hell," Wendy said.
"What calamity exactly are you trying to ward?" Cain asked.
"Trying to make it a deadly hazard to be a billionaire, and deconstruct carbon-positivity so that Earth doesn't bake its biosphere into extinction over the next fifty years," Wendy said. "You know. Basic stuff."
"Well look at you. From a woman about to give up entirely to someone wanting to save the world," Charlie said proudly.
"Yeah, well, you tend to rub off on people, as it turns out," Wendy said. Charlie's eyes flared wide for a moment.
"Wendy!"
"Yes?" she asked.
"Have you seen Sam up there?" Charlie asked, excitement clear in her words. With Purson and Cain effectively left out of this shard of the conversation, the two men could only offer a baffled shrug to each other. But Wendy's expression grew a bit grim at the question Charlie had posed.
"I've seen something like him," Wendy said.
"And what does that mean?" Charlie asked.
"I mean that Sam isn't just Sam anymore. There's something else in there. Something… I don't know how to describe it, other than 'alien', and 'utterly fucking furious'."
"Is Sam in trouble?"
"Well, yeah. He is the Demiurge," Wendy said.
"I apologize to interject but… you have conversed with the Demiurge?" Purson cut in.
"A couple of times. He tried to pull some fate-bullshit on me so that we wouldn't talk again, but I just blew through that," Wendy said.
"Sam couldn't do that," Charlie said.
"You're right, in that Sam can't," Wendy said with a sad nod. He looked from the Nephilim to the Hexbreaker General who shared the room with her. "I've figured out what's wrong with Sam, Charlie. It's that he's two people. He's Yaldabaoth, the Son of Chaos. And he's the Demiurge. But only one of those is actually him."
"A persona layered over his actual being," Purson said. Wendy snapped her fingers and pointed at him, for he'd apparently made her point. "So which is he?"
"Sam is Sam. Everything else is alien fury," Wendy said. She then shrugged. "I mean, he might still qualify as Yaldabaoth even without the Demiurge bits, but I didn't look that closely last time I saw him. He's getting worse as time goes on. I don't know how much longer until the Demiurge part of him has taken over utterly."
"Thus your time limit," Purson said.
"Actually, my time limit doesn't have anything to do with Sam, and everything to do with a human child," Wendy said. She turned to Charlie. "Yeah. I'm not technically time-traveling, so that Angelic what-the-hell won't be able to stop me, but what I'm about to do is going to cause blow-back unless I take extraordinary measures to complete it. Thus why I need to use the Paradox Engine that Purson is making."
"Is that why I haven't heard from you in a couple of months?" Charlie asked.
"Indeed. And it may be years until my job is done," Purson said.
"But at least we know one thing your previous attempts were missing: Ballast," Wendy said. She moved over to the stone core, not by walking, but instead almost by drifting as though she were carried on a breeze. She ran her hand along the wages embedded in stone, watching how her skin flaked and fell from her fingertips as she did, until the tips and pads of her fingers were raw and pink. She didn't seem like she was in pain, though. "That damned thing kept shaking itself apart when you start it up. Well, if Sladestone isn't heavy enough to stabilize it, then we'll use fucking Wages."
"I was thinking much the same. Doubly so if it can be refined into an alloy. I shall have to play out tests," Purson said. He glanced to Charlie. "You said you had several tonnes of this material, yes?"
"I do," she said.
"I would have it, if you are offering," Purson said.
"I will, under one condition," Charlie said.
"Name it, and we shall see," Purson said, expression growing guarded.
"I want your help in the Purgatory Project," she said.
"The Hotel and its surrounds," Purson qualified. She nodded. "Why? What has the King of Lore to offer you?"
"Frankly, at this point, respectability," Charlie said with a sigh. Purson gave a begrudging nod.
"Aye. They have offered you little respect, and especially so in light of your clear successes," Purson said. He tweezed the bridge of his nose briefly. "I do not know what help I can offer. Purson, King of Lore is not known for social causes, merely intellectual ones. I would be told to 'stay in my lane'.
"By who?" she asked.
"Your father, for one," Purson said.
"He wouldn't…" Charlie began.
"He would," all three of the people sharing the room with her said as one.
"So… You're not going to help me," Charlie said.
"...I think I shall. But your condition breeds a condition of my own," Purson said.
"Really? What is it?" Charlie asked.
"Eject the Radio Demon from that place and forbid him from ever returning," Purson said.
"Wh-what?" Charlie asked.
"Alastor the Beast That Grins is at best a nuisance and at worst a threat to all that I have built, including my works of knowledge, my power in Hell, and most critical of all, he is a threat to my son," Purson said without subtlety. "If I am to offer my service to your endeavor, I will not allow any fraction of it to spill over to the Radio Demon's benefit. So long as he boards under your roof, I can offer you nothing but knowledge. And even then, it will be knowledge pruned so that the likes of he can gain nothing from it."
"Come on. He's not that bad…" Charlie said.
"Ohhhh~h yes he is," Wendy said.
"A more foul and debased creature I've never met," Purson added at the same time.
"That 'man' is a danger to all he comes into contact with, yourself included," Cain said, managing to form a chorus with the others.
"I can't just throw out clients," she said, the excuse growing ever more hollow in her ears every time she offered it.
"Bullshit. You can and you should," Wendy said. "Not everybody wishes to be saved. Some people just want to watch Hell grow worse."
"And they often are the most powerful of men," Cain said with a sad nod.
"...I need to think about it," Charlie offered, feeling like an utter heel for even allowing the words to slip her lips. Was this going to be the shape of her 'Purgatory Project'? To slowly give up her beliefs one-by-one until there was nothing of her left but compromise? And not compromise in the negotiation sense, but rather in the engineering sense?
"Then I shall be patient. And given that I waited an eon for my bride to be returned to me, I have proven I can be quite patient indeed," Purson said, settling back down into his chair. "It will take more than you believe to make this… Purgatory-in-Hell, a functional reality. I will give some thought as to what exactly."
"Thank you, Purson," Charlie said. Even with things as hobbled as they were, it was more than she'd walked in here with, and thus she'd evaded her worst-case scenario (whereby she'd not only be laughed at but mocked for her schemes by a now hostile and dismissive Purson). If only he hadn't made that stipulation.
"Look, Purson. I'll put these away. I've got more to talk to Charlie about," Wendy said. Purson nodded, then watched as Wendy touched each of Charlie's bag of Wages and the core-sample, each one vanishing without so much as a blip under her raw fingertip. When they were gone, Purson snapped his fingers once more, and the bulkheads and plating rattled out of the way, allowing the evening sun to pour into the study once again, painting the books and gathered humans, ex-humans, half-humans and non-humans in scarlet hues, as though Alastor had extended a mocking hand toward them for just a moment before the lights came up again and washed out the scarlet with white.
Purson gave a nod, and left the room, leaving the denizens of the Hotel, past and present, in the study.
"I can't believe you're here," Charlie said.
"Yeah, well," Wendy said with a mild shrug. "It turns out there's a lot that needs doing in Creation. And now I can actually do something about those problems."
Charlie tried to ignore the next question that she was about to ask, but it came out of her anyway, because to be Charlie was suffering. "Is it true what they say about Heaven?"
"In the Lower Clouds? Absolutely," Wendy said with a sad nod. "Farms fit to feed about 5 million people trying to feed twelve hundred times that many? Fact. Higher population density than Kowloon City? Fact. People shutting off their brains and giving up so as not to have to deal with Heaven's misery? Sadly, that is a fact."
"...Am I a bad person for having sent you there?" Charlie asked.
"No. Not even a little bit," Wendy said with a clean shake of her head. "You didn't 'send me to Heaven', Charlie. You made it so I could be free of Hell. And that's worth a lot."
"I just… if Heaven is so bad, why would anybody want to go there? Is my Purgatory Project just a complete non-starter? Why would anybody want Redemption if that's all that's waiting for them?"
"So they can see their parents and siblings and lovers again," Cain cut in. "So they can see those whom their Damnation separated them from, and hold them close for the first time in centuries. You ask what benefit there is to leaving Hell behind in exchange for a miserable Heaven? It is and has always been the people. Why do you think I so often ascended the steps of Atonement to the zenith of the Stone of Farewell? I would give all I have, all of my power, all of my knowledge, all of my wealth, just for a chance to embrace my brother one more time. To tell him… I'm sorry."
Wendy nodded with a sad look on her face. "Cain's got it. Hell for the cuisine. Heaven for the company."
Charlie was quiet for a moment, mulling that over. "Are you okay? Considering I just launched you at that… whatever you're doing?"
"I'll be okay when the Earth isn't cooking itself to death to the mocking laughter of oligarchs and short sighted fools," Wendy said. "So I'm a long fucking way from okay."
It was an unpleasant duty, to chew out soldiers constantly. But if Octavia didn't keep taking the soldiers responsible for the security and protection of Fort Abandon to task for their own foolishness and stupidity, then something far worse than that stupidity would have a chance to bloom in the wake of their laxity.
Of course, one problem led to another.
"No, I saw somebody that shouldn't have been there," Katz had said, trying to earn a respite from her annoyance.
"It's Fort Abandon! I can barely keep anybody where they're supposed to be!" Octavia'd answered.
"No, you don't understand, Governor; it wasn't a soldier or an Innocent. It was somebody else. I just saw them for a moment, and I thought that if…" Katz continued to try to undig himself from his hole.
"That if your job was to watch Schlatt's back and prevent somebody from sneaking up and murdering her silently, you'd wander off after a half-glimpsed possible threat without informing anybody else?" Octavia excoriated. Even in his mountain of armor, Katz had wilted at that. "I have an entire section of security dedicated to doing what you took it upon yourself to do; and instead of calling for them to look into it, as I INSTRUCTED YOU TO, you decided to fuck off into the shadows after it yourself. For… let me guess? The personal glory of hunting down the sneak yourself?"
Katz had only offered humiliated murmurings at that, since she'd managed to not only outline his failure but color it in with his intention as well. Just what she needed. Military adventurism inside her own fucking firebase. Bad enough that people were clamoring to expand the Occupied Zone with no real plan as to how they would hold the land that they took. But to see such lack-of-thought in the people supposed to keep Fort Abandon secure from the Angels was just saddening.
Octavia was grinding her teeth as she returned to her personal bunker in the Fort. The dressing-down had taken longer than she'd expected, because Katz and Schlatt had turned out to be fucking up in a couple of other ways as well, ways that she could pick out in an instant once she was standing in front of them. Schlatt had not been dismounting and having her armor serviced, so it was showing seizure and socket-wear, despite being essentially new. You weren't supposed to sleep in the fucking thing, no matter how protected it made you feel.
"Two hundred seventy five thousand. Just two hundred seventy five thousand," Octavia reminded herself of the number of soldiers she had to pull up out of nothing so she could tick off at least one of Lucifer's fucking requirements to her success. Considering that her Starfire Legion was shockingly green and unblooded, it may as well have been asking her to grab herself by her boot-laces and lift herself into the sky.
At least the Innocent were beginning to behave. It was amazing how much less ornery the former-humans became once they were fed and had clean water to drink. Her teachers in the past had always said that there was a very fuzzy line from where the dreaded and derided 'charity' ends and 'bread and circus' begins. But the thing was, Octavia had no idea if she was toeing that line, but in the same breath it didn't matter if she was. For the price of roughly 78,000 Souls in food and copper pipes, she had reduced the millions-a-week 'cost' of the riots damaging and sabotaging Fort Abandon to essentially zero. There were still myriad other costs that she had to zero out with income, but at least the rabble-rousing had stopped. Take the victories you can get.
She strode into her bunker, having finally broken free of her own head, and moved toward her office where Dad should be waiting. There were many 'failings' of Stolas Goetia, but he wasn't one to skip off without saying goodbye first.
And true to her expectation, there was Dad, staring at the portrait of the two of them when she was still a chick. But there was something odd about his posture. He wasn't standing as though wistful or sad. Rather, he was standing as though alarmed.
"Dad? What's going on?" she asked, passing through the doors to her office. Those doors swung closed, and revealed behind them was another figure. "What the f…"
"Via, be calm," Dad said sharply, fear clear in his voice. He was asking her to be what he couldn't be himself. She turned and backed toward her father, away from the unexpected figure. It had a human shape, with very dark skin somewhere between brown and cobalt blue, eyes that were like faintly glowing mercury, and hair that was tied into a tight and intricate braid of the same hue, a braid that left the sides of her head shaved. Her ears were prominent, her nose moreso, and her lips thin.
"Well, this is deeply unexpected," the intruder said. Why wasn't Dad just frying this woman? He had magic enough to end a world if he wanted to.
"Gadreel, leave my daughter out of this," Stolas said, gently placing a hand on Octavia's shoulder and pulling her backward so that he eclipsed this 'Gadreel' and sheltered Octavia in his shadow.
"Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck are you doing here? How did you even get in here?" Octavia demanded from her father's protective shadow.
"I am Gadreel of Deathblows, I am Gadreel of Deathblows, and… I am Gadreel of Deathblows," Gadreel said, as she seemed to think that explained everything. "Peace, Stolas. I am not here to usurp Cecutus's place as your murderer."
"Cecutus tried. Cecutus failed," Dad said. The instant that Gadreel moved, Octavia suddenly understood why Stolas was so afraid of her; just the mere action of taking a step out of the lee of the doors was enough to tell Octavia that in the time that it took Dad to start weaving a spell, Gadreel could launch herself at him from any point in the room and if her title was any indicator, kill him in a single stroke.
"Cecutus was not Gadreel," Gadreel offered. She paused, looking up at the pair of owl demons. "Your defenses are significant. I don't think anybody but I could have gotten here without raising hue and cry. It's a challenge that I haven't faced in many years. Thank you for that."
Octavia allowed Gadreel's words to mask her moving to Dad's other side, and to idly reach out and push a section of the wall. There was no click. She tried pushing it again. Gadreel caught the second push.
"Oh, I disabled all of those," Gadreel said. "Couldn't have you interrupting me, after all."
"I will not allow you to harm my daughter," Dad said with heated tone, his feathers darkening and gaining a glowing red mien. Gadreel held up a hand.
"If I had intended to harm your daughter, I could have done so days ago. Peace, Stolas. Explain instead why the 'government' of this invasion of Heaven is being run by a child."
"I'm not going to tell you anything!" Dad said.
"I should have recalled that Stolas had a mulish streak to him," Gadreel said with resignation. She turned to Octavia. "What about you? Would you mind explaining this to me?"
Octavia narrowed her eyes. "So you're not here to kill Dad… and you're not here to kill me…" she said. She rounded her father, so that now he was in her shadow. "So why are you here?"
Gadreel's brows lifted. "Alright. I think I can see why this particular child was given this task. It's because she asks the right questions," Gadreel offered a distant laugh. "I don't suppose you are aware of the Provisions Of Internecine Warfare?"
"Why would I teach her about a treaty that Heaven refused to ever abide by?" Dad asked.
"I suppose that's your right. Well, allow me to educate," Gadreel said, taking one of the chairs and turning it so that she could sit down, facing the pair of Goetia before her. Even seated and they standing, Octavia could perceive such radiating threat from this woman that she knew that she wouldn't stand a chance if Gadreel decided to end them. "The Provisions list that in the event of a conflict by which a member of the Choral Host is incapacitated and captured, they are expected to attempt escape under most circumstances, but to accept and ask for the rights of Surrender In Good Order from the leader of the opposing force if and only if they believe that doing so will prevent needless loss of life in the conflict."
"… Are you surrendering?" Octavia asked, a befuddled look on her face.
"I am defecting," Gadreel said. Her eyes took on a deeply angry set. "I can stand no longer taking orders from the man who murdered my son. I can face the profligacy and failure of the Sons of Heaven not one more day. And if Lucifer will have me, I would chose Hell over my old 'comrades' company."
"Lucifer will not trust that this is genuine. He will think you're simply trying to get into a position to cause harm in Hell," Dad said.
"With the information I have, he'll believe me," Gadreel said. Octavia made a 'get on with it' motion, and Gadreel continued. "While most of Gabriel's forces are trying to push back against the CPOZ, he's not completely brain-dead. He knows that the longer he leaves Hell unmolested, the worse the war is going to get for his side. So he's gathered a large cadre of his best soldiers, and will be sending forth a full surge of Exorcists – every single one that they can have charged by the deployment date – as support, led by Adam himself."
"When?" Octavia asked.
"It's already begun. The soldiers are moving even now," Gadreel said. "An amassing of the Host some five million in number, sent to bypass Pride and attack directly into Greed Ring where your defenses are weaker."
"Michael wouldn't dare, it's too foolhardy," Dad said.
"Michael signed off on the plan weeks ago. Said that 'the only way to break Hell's resolve is to destroy their infrastructure', and I can't say that he's wrong in believing that. Stolas, you can take your hand away from that weapon. I have no intention of harming either you, nor the impossible daughter you've managed to make."
"You've got a funny way of showing it, killing your way into my base to surrender to me," Octavia straightened her back so that at the lack of all other things she was at least taller than the Grigori before her.
"Do you really care about the lives of a few Sinners who will Regenerate eventually anyway?" Gadreel asked, pulling out a bloody knife which didn't have the distinct sheen of Seraphic Steel. "I've got times, dates, locations, and schedules. And I'm willing to offer all of it in exchange for amnesty and security from Michael's weakness and Gabriel's cruelty."
Octavia turned to her father. "This sounds way too good to be true," she said to her father.
Dad, though, stared at the Grigori for a long moment, before he spoke. His voice was soft when he did. "What were you intending to name him?"
Gadreel snapped her gaze to Dad, her lips pursing as though she were either stifling outrage or a pang of sorrow.
"Daniel," she said.
Dad just nodded, as though that question and answer pair did anything to clarify things.
Then he turned to Octavia. "We should bring Gadreel to Lucifer at once. I don't intend to have my palace ransacked twice in as many years."
"What, just like that?" Octavia asked.
Dad laid a hand on her shoulder. "I severely doubt that Gadreel will be the last Grigori who takes the opportunity of this war to join the proper side."
"Well fine, then," Octavia said. "But if you try something clever…"
Gadreel couldn't contain her chuckle. "She's adorable, Stolas," Gadreel said. "But yes, I get your point. If I play precious with this, you'll have your father kill me. It's still a better outcome than I would have gotten in Heaven."
Octavia's teeth were grinding. One way or another, Governorship of Fort Abandon was going to be the death of her. She could fucking guarantee it.
"The greatest mistake that Gabriel made in the Second War For Heaven was believing that he could break Hell with ease. Ironic, that he suffered the exact same failure-of-vision which Hell had suffered at the onset of the war, whereby they saw a million of their finest soldiers massacred relentlessly on the outskirts of Heaven for no benefit whatsoever. What monumental arrogance Gabriel possessed to believe that he could perform a five-million warrior march from Pride to Sloth and burn all that lay before them all as he did so was the pinnacle of folly, one that the history books will put down beside the humiliating defeats of Teutoburg Forest, Cannae, or the entire Second Russo-Ukrainian War.
And that Michael, who was a canny and level-headed soldier allowed such a failure to besmirch his record? Shameful. And Michael likely would agree, if he was still around to do so. Not to say that the March To The Abyss was completely toothless, of course; for all Heaven had mighty warriors and Heaven was not fortified for defense-in-depth, it nevertheless managed to burn enormous tracts of Greed and Pride, with its foremost front edging all the way through Wrath and up to the border of Lust. Five million Heavenly warriors spilled the blood of five times their number, and set to torch a hundred towns and cities, and equally as many factories disgorging military materiel.
Of course, of those twenty five million that heaven massacred, only four were actually arrayed in defense of Hell. I do not hold a high opinion of rapine, burning and slaughter. And to have such atrocities performed by Angels and Cherubs? Unconscionable. I took no part in that military misadventure, and for very good reason: I knew that it would see the likes of me killed along with most of the other soldiers, and there was no defense available, either martially or ethically, for the operation that came to Hell. That I could recover from death is immaterial. A sane man avoids a deathblow, Miss Killjoy.
If I had to describe The Harrying of Hell in a single word, that word would be 'Pointless'. And if I were given a few more to add to it, those words would be "and wasteful, just like the entire Second War For Heaven."
We are not animals, Miss Killjoy. I am a soldier. I don't enjoy killing. And I had thought that an Angel would be my moral superior in that regard. The autumn of 2023 proved me sadly, sadly wrong."
-Niccolo Machiavelli, Brevet Supreme Commander of the Choral Host
