The Song of Ruin

by James Golen

The Demiurge has revealed himself, and declared a vendetta against God. Hell is in turmoil as Lucifer - now with a mere imp as his Proxy - is surely planning a new war against Heaven, to reclaim the throne he calls his own. And those who are stuck on the battlefield have to find a way to survive. This is a story of how good men die. Book 2 of The Demiurge Duology.

47. Probity

Ordinarily, when a group of scattered miscreants, Sinners, and fiends would approach the offices of Ambrosius Agrippa down here in the Fortress of Iron, where he handled such things as required his physical presence in Hell, he would see them shuffled into the bureaucracy until that bureaucracy either spat them back out or found something to do with them. But that machine of bookkeepers and paper had been long choked, with more passing both up and down through the Heaven Portal with every passing month.

It could be expected. Octavia was a diligent soul, and because of that diligence, she was reaping rewards in additional trade and military traffic. It had been months since there had been so much as a complaint from the natives of Heaven, once it became clear that when she was tearing down those teetering and ramshackle towers, she was putting up actual living space in its place. It was strictly utilitarian, lacking in any frills, and dare he say any personality, but it was clean, it was sturdy, and more than that it was under Hell's control. The Heavenly who lived in such dwellings were being conditioned with their every morning and evening to see Hell as something which was of-benefit to them.

Soon enough, they would begin working for Hell's direct benefit, instead of indirect. Far sooner than Ambrosius had thought.

But such happy thoughts were wafted away by the realities of having to do his particular job as one of several dozen Dux Bellorim for all the many millions of soldiers across the fields of Hell, most of which were now on rotations fighting in Heaven. And one such reality was having to deal with auxiliaries.

"If memory serves," Ambrosius said, leaning across his desk to look down at the imp who stood at the fore of the group, consisting of an actual luminary of Hell's history, a pair of Sinners, one whom he knew well and one whom he did not, the Hellhound that worked for The Red Cretin as an assassin, another imp whom illicited no recognition from Agrippa, and finally a tall figure, covered head-to-toe in what was clearly a custom-created Blasphemer power armor. "...some of you have been here before." He could tell from the heft of the machine that it was initially the model with the integrated autocannon in one arm, but its exterior appearance was different, less garish and boxy, as though this were an attempt to give the design some elegance. Well, if it worked, so be it.

He would nevertheless have to ask that pilot where he'd bought that, though; Agrippa needed to lock down all of the makers of that panoply that he could. Logistics were hard enough when new technology required new factories. Imagine how hard it was when those factories themselves needed new factories to make the machinery that filled them.

"And we did our job," the imp at the fore said. He was a Betrayal clade, taller than most of his ilk, wearing clothes which superficially called to mind the rough leathers of a cattleman. But it was clear that those outer layers hid a protective inner core that would keep blades and bullets at least somewhat at bay. This imp was no fool. "Got our money, and even managed to get outta Heaven alive."

"Some of you," Ambrosius said with a nod. "After attracting the attention of an Archangel."

"So you know we can survive pretty much anything," the imp said with a grin that showed a gap where a tooth no doubt had been knocked out at some point.

"Only two of those who had are now here," Ambrosius said. "I have little time for posturing, imp. Make your proffer clear, and I will either say yea or nay."

"We're going deep into Heaven," the imp said. "Deepest reconnaissance that Hell has done since, well… ever. Gonna scout the state of Clouds 2 and 3. Maybe even four, if we have the resources and things turn out our way."

"And you are offering your mercenary reconnaissance to whomever will pay for it," Agrippa said.

He looked to the others. Ordinarily, he would have had such an offer thrown bodily out of the building he was sitting in, because Hell abounded with confident fools. But the presence of two people in particular aborted that notion.

Cain, the first human damned by God, one who had been in Hell longer even than the grim Caesar who now ruled it. The mere presence of Cain in any endeavor essentially guaranteed that there was a wellspring of competence which could turn near any folly into a probability. While Agrippa did not consider Cain even close to being a friend – he was too free with his pleasures by a half for Agrippa to associate with the likes of him – he nevertheless understood Cain. Cain, like all old Sinners, had nothing but time on his hands, and the innate human drive to be a better version of themselves. Cain, the better terror. Agrippa, the better commander.

The other who altered the mathematics of the situation was the Hellhound. While Agrippa was not ordinarily a follower of sport, the presence of the Bleeding Pits and the propensity for the Hellish to televise what transpired within them sated a certain yen that he felt from time to time in the viewership of blood-sport. Rome was echoed through the ages in its gladiator games, and though in truth they were far more rigorously policed and refereed, and far less likely to result in fatality, than modern retellings of the thing would imply, there was still something primal and visceral about watching people fight with their very flesh and blood on the line.

And Maelstrom was very much a gladiator of the modern day. All the way to being a soldier-turned-slave-turned pit-fighter. Many were stories of men of Rome who fell from grace returning to grace through theatrics in the sands. While the excesses of Later Rome still disgusted Agrippa, it was not the Colosseum that irked him. It was what happened outside it that bothered him. And Maelstrom was free of such poison. Just a simple man – or Hellhound, as case may be – who went into the pits, and fought with no weapons but his hands and teeth for the right to be allowed back out again. It was savage. It was cruel. It was bloody. And it endeared Maelstrom to Agrippa greatly, for somebody to have such courage and resolve to do it bare-handed and unarmored.

So Agrippa gave it thought. Those two alone gave him consideration. Striker, imp though he was, had proven he could survive Heaven, even if he did so at the expense of those around him. But those around him would, in this case, be those who were arrayed on the other side of Agrippa's desk. So in a word, few people that Agrippa actually cared about. And then there were the others, the tall, red woman, and the power armored… fiend? Sinner? It was impossible to tell which, the armor being what it was. He almost forgot that there was another imp involved, but there he was as well.

But still, his eyes fell back on the Spider-Sinner, whom had also survived the previous adventure into Heaven, but clearly he had been changed by it. Agrippa's eyes narrowed, but the spider refused to blanch or flinch. He had some backbone, at least. But backbone didn't mean much in the face of opponents of competence. He didn't know this 'Angel Dust' much beyond his previous actions and a few murmurings of his reputation as a sex worker.

To throw them out would likely have them try to go over his head and sneak into Octavia's office, he realized. Striker at least had proven that he was a terrifically sneaky individual.

With that realization in place, he grumbled a few words to himself, more at the aggravation of the imposition of them on today which otherwise had been a pleasant experience of mindless paperwork, demanding that he make a judgement call. And if nothing else, he could spare his Domina at least some small portion of this group's potential aggravation.

"Very well," Agrippa said. "Provided you return with actionable intelligence regarding the layout, troop disposition, defenses and terrain of Heaven on those clouds which Hell has not yet breached, I will be willing to pay for all information that you return with, at prices commensurate to the difficulty of obtaining it."

"So information about Cloud 3 is gonna be worth more than the shit we get on our way outta Cloud 1. Got it," Striker said.

"Exactly so. Prepare yourself for the journey and…" Agrippa began.

"Not necessary," Striker said. The armor-pilot clomped his way out of the door, then hefted a massive tote that likely had hundreds of kilograms of supplies in it. So they had come here prepared, and were merely looking for 'permission'. Very well then.

"Then you can go at once. Do nothing to damage the defense of Fort Abandon and bring no shame upon the warriors of Hell, and beyond that: Good Hunting," Agrippa said, and he flipped his ledger book with a crack that cut the sky like a whip. He'd likely see at least some of them again. He just wondered how successful they'd end up being.

---

Chapter 47

Probity

---

To finally be doing this, after the years of preparation since his gargantuan fuck up, was practically orgasmic. But he didn't let the relief, that he was finally gonna go up and save Molly from what Heaven had become, so much as register on his face. He had to be in control. That he got outta control last time is why Cherri was gone. If he'd waited… if he'd done as he was s'posed to.

No. No time for lashing himself.

The Heaven Portal was less ragged than it had been the last time Angel Dust went through it. That time, when the bunker was still under constant attack, the thing felt like it grabbed him by the front of his chest and yanked him through onto the fields of Heaven. This time, it was more like he was gently sliding down a greased but gradual slope, while something pointedly held his balance firm. And reaching Heaven revealed that the bunker that he'd been in here two years back was now split open, not by violence, but by workers just opening the area up. There was no need for that redoubt anymore. Even the mobster Angel Dust knew that. So they shifted that shit and moved it.

Striker gave a low whistle, and jerked his head toward one of the gates that lead out of the entryway that was heavily guarded from airborne intrusion. The whole squad followed as the imp cleared the rip-tide of traffic that was constantly moving up and down through that portal, moving into the more placid flows of the fortress that hadn't been here last time Angel Dust braved Heaven. Hell, come to think of it, they were even now passing through the 'courtyard' where they'd waited out an artillery barrage before making a sprint for the buildings, which even still towered like termite-mounds toward the sky.

"A surprising amount of new construction," Jun-Ho said, his voice muffled by the armor he was wearing. "I'm surprised your kind saw fit to actually rebuild Rat Towers into something a little less grim."

"Please, it is only being prudent," Cain said, waving a hand toward the great, grey towers that peeked out blue, glassy eyes all up and down its Edge-side facing. "The mud-towers that Heaven had to construct were necessarily inefficient, space-wise, because so much of the size of the structure was surrendered just to keep it going upward. With concrete and reinforcing steel, you could pack five times the number into the same footprint."

"That still is millions getting spent on the Heavenly. I can only imagine that Hell's accountants are grinding their teeth at that," Jun-Ho pointed out.

"Or maybe there is a game in motion that we haven't yet read all the rules to," Cain answered.

"Would you two ladies stop yer squawking?" Striker demanded of them.

"No," Cain said.

"I have no intention," Jun-Ho agreed.

"Satan-fuckin'-damn it," Striker muttered, rubbing at his hairline. Angel Dust gave a laugh at the imp's discomfort. For all he was a dangerous little cuss, even he was for the moment outshone by some of the humans.

"So where are we gonna post up for the magic?" the other imp, the younger one, asked.

"Somewhere out in the OZ," Striker said. He then turned, walking backward and pointing at Angel Dust, Roz, and Uller. "Y'all went and bought what I told you to, right? Because if you didn't, we're turning around and goin' back right fuckin' now!"

"Don't worry 'bout me, babe," Angel Dust said, tugging at the fine, golden chain that hung around his neck. Within it was the Human Disguise that Striker had demanded he buy, so likely the same was demanded of the red-bitch and the other imp.

"I bought one, and even if it fails, I can build another out of my magic," Uller said.

"Ditto," Roz raised a thumbs-up.

"Good. So let's stop kvetching and move our shit!" Striker said.

It had been an odd thing, getting a Human Disguise. After all, he was human. Well, a former human. But Striker had been entirely right that most of this trip was going through territory where any denizen of Hell would be killed on sight, and then had Angels dropped onto their carcasses before they got a chance to grow cold. Looking human was a lynchpin of their survival strategy. The weird bee-thing that he bought this from had been baffled by his need, though, constantly trying to either have him by other magical shit which he didn't need, or else asking him to leave if he was 'wasting time'. It wasn't until he threw some money at her and told her to leave him alone while he fucked with stuff that he was let be.

Because like fuck was he gonna go around as just some schlub. No. Angel Dust was gorgeous, and his Human Disguise had to be – as in was physically required to be – as gorgeous as he was. So he had been in there for a good hour, first figuring out the controls to that weird mirror thing, then the rest of it just getting his Human Disguise looking perfect.

And his perfect specimen?

Himself, back in '45.

Sure, he could have just had his most recent previous face, but that face was already showing the signs of his at that point lethal drug-habit. So he picked a point where he was still at his prettiest, but not before he'd quite fallen over the edge that would see him OD'ed and dead early in '47. It was tall, six foot two and a bit, which meant that he would appear shorter than he now was, but had his midnight black eyes, those eyebrows which he honestly missed in his current form, the cleft on his chin and the perpetual stubble that made him look all the more dangerous to the boys out there. He even kept the chest-hair, because at this point, he was well used to being fuzzy. Without it, he'd have felt as though he'd abandoned a part of himself.

It had been a strange sensation, looking into a mirror and seeing his deadface, that him that existed before damnation and Hell and Valentino. That him that had been fearless and immortal.

Bittersweet. That was the word for it.

Some of the others in the squad were chatting idly amongst themselves, ensuring that they had what they needed, that nothing had been left behind. That their courage was screwed in to the sticking place. The imp and the Hellhound seemed to be egging each other forward, as though both of them were still torn on actually doing this, now that their feet were actually stomping ground in Heaven.

Fort Abandon itself was a confusing mash of structures, most of which were obviously organic in their placement because there were quite a few times where the path that they were walking had obviously had to demolish a pair of building-corners that had been established too close for the road's comfort. Whoever was laying the roads obviously had a better head for how this was supposed to go than the person who built those barracks and bunkers. He found himself glancing from the road to those incongruent towers amongst the Rats. Huh. Maybe it was the same hand that wrought this, that wrought them over there. It seemed to have the same rigid desire for efficiency.

"Up there, P.O.N.R," Striker said, pointing ahead of them at a court-yard that was off from the road, and not far from the gates that opened onto open Cloud, with the road itself reaching beyond and toward the Rat Towers on that part of Heaven that was outside of Fort Abandon proper. So that was their point of no return. If they were gonna turn back, it would be from there, or not at all.

None of that applied to Angel Dust, though. His thoughtful, wistful smile hardened into a scowl. His point of no return was on his back, watching Cherri Bomb's head explode. There was no turning back from him. Even if he had to go through this naked. But if he didn't, then he had a much better chance of succeeding.

Weird how his brain and his heart were telling him such different things. It was like doing math wrong in two different ways and getting the same, right answer both times.

Confusing, even.

Staying out of the way of the bustle of Fort Abandon was less a courtesy and more a survival strategy. Because a lot of these motherfuckers looked like they were willing to shoot anybody who got in their way, provenance be damned. Still, it didn't take long to reach that small clearing that had, like most things, appeared organically with the build-up of Fort Abandon because it was the shared entry-area of three buildings. Striker pulled out his phone, and dialed the number that the eagle down in Hell gave them, and sauntered away to give the sitch. That left the rest of them to mill like a bunch of goons.

Cain was the first to break their silence. "When I heard the state of Heaven, I must admit to some degree I didn't wish to believe it. But my eyes are a far harder thing to ignore," said Cain.

"I imagine most people not from Heaven would say exactly the same," Jun-Ho answered. He then tensed his armored fingers as though attempting to enter a standing, meditative pose. He didn't need to 'try' long, before there was a rippling, and the armor plates began to fade from view, replaced by a tall, if gaunt, human form. In its way, it was lucky that Jun-Ho was a manlet. Because he wasn't even close to six feet tall, when inside that power-armor of his, he was still within tolerances for what a human could be expected to stand when the thing was on. The last thing to appear was his gapped halo, flickering into being above the glamour's head, if a touch closer than it did on Jun-Ho. The others started to take that as their cue to suit up, and there were other flashes and swirls of light as their Human Disguises activated.

"This place feels… strange," Roz said, even as her imp-red skin was hidden under an illusion of dark, dusky complexion.

"Heaven does have a certain strangeness to it, I will admit," Cain said. "I feel as though some magics are farther away, and others far closer."

"You may be more right than you think," Jun-Ho said, with a pensive look on his face. Jun-Ho had chosen a face that could have been any second-gen asian immigrant to America, somebody raised on beef and cheese and who shot up taller than either of their parents. Maelstrom looked like some nervous, sensitive black guy, one who was breathing deep with a concerned look on his face.

"It's going to be hard tracking anybody through all this filth," he said. "Between the human sweat and that weird burning smell, it might be a while…"

"You'll figure it out," Uller said, cutting him off. His own disguise almost looked Slavic, a spark-plug of a man that may have had a human teenager's stature but shared few of a teenager's features, his hair pale and short, and his face covered in stubble. "How large is the Occupied Zone now, do you think?"

"Last I checked, it was out to 400 kilometers from the Fort," Jun-Ho supplied, pointing toward the center of Cloud One. "Which means it'll be at least seven days before we even get to the Neutral Zone, let alone to the hostile areas beyond it."

Uller just stared at him. "You do realize I can make portals, right?"

Jun-Ho's brow rose. "I thought you said that was beyond your current capabilities?"

"No, I said it wasn't something I was comfortable with. But it's a lot more comfortable than walking for a week just to get out of friendly territory," Uller said.

"Alright, ya bunch of animals, I just yabbed with the brass," Striker said, returning to the conversations taking place. "And they're gonna take stock of our disguises so they know not to shoot us if they see us near the Neutral Zone. Suit up!"

Of course, his order was a bit late, considering everybody but him at this point was suited up, including Angel Dust in his own previous visage. Striker was the last to snap his fingers, and have a human persona appear, being a ragged but sun-hardened looking rider. Not even a cowboy, but one 'a them that the Mexicans had. What were they called? Vaquero! That was it. He looked like a hard-done-by vaquero.

"Well, if you wish to attempt a portal to the edge of friendly territory, then by all means do," Cain said. Like Angel Dust, it seemed that his own appearance was based on the one he'd had in life, and in fact was so similar to the one he wore in Hell that for a moment Angel Dust didn't notice it. The only changes were that his eyes had the white bits again, and that his horns had been replaced by a false gapped-halo.

Uller gave a nod, then focused, as the others waited. This wasn't like last-time, where the wizard had lost his shit and couldn't do his magic because there were too many artillery shells exploding around him. This kid seemed to have a grasp on things, and just took his time as to minimize the room for fucking-up that could exist. Finally, he swung his arm in a broad arc, first time to a spark of light, and then, after a growl, a second swing and a portal flared into being. Through the mouth of that portal there was a building that had fairly grim cracks in its foundation. But since Angel Dust wasn't here to deal with Heaven's infrastructure, he just stepped through, a step and a half behind Jun-Ho, who had the armor to take being shot a few times in case things were dicey.

Instantly the reek of the area hit Angel Dust in the face. He had thought the outer buildings of Heaven were rank the first time. Here in the heart, it was clearly much worse. There was no breeze to pull the stench away, and no free space to dump what little waste the Innocent produced. If Rachel was talking truthful, then it was fortunate that the Innocent didn't shit. Otherwise Heaven'd be buried in it.

The others joined him, and looked out at the region they were in, similar to where they'd left in an 'organic' vacuole where two paths between buildings met, and one of the buildings, being off-set from any sort of grid, formed a gap that they just never got around to building in. Right now the gap was being used by soldiers, some of whom were sleeping, leaned against the cracked foundations of the building despite the gunfire and shelling noise. Other soldiers were dismounted from armor like Jun-Ho's trying to get it fixed and back in action without having to trek for a fucking week back to Fort Abandon.

"Sweet shit on a shingle," a fairly burly looking imp expounded in a voice that could have come from Kentucky. "They told me a bunch 'a you yahoos was comin'. Didn't think they meant 'in less than five minutes'."

"I don't waste time," Uller said. He was standing kinda weird, Angel thought. But he didn't know the guy well enough to really tell so he let the imp be. Uller pointed in a sweep. "Which way into the heart of Cloud One?"

The Wrathian imp picked a direction and gestured with his rifle in it. "Hope you weren't plannin' on breaking a battle line with only the couple 'a y'all. Even with these buckets," he threw a rock at one of the dismounted armors, "we're having a hell of a time."

"Let our business by our business, old-timer," Striker said. "We're not here to get in the way of your fighting," the Wrathian gave a barked laugh then sat back. Striker glanced in the direction that led onward, which at the moment was straight through a building. "Jun-Ho? Drones?"

Jun-Ho nodded. There was a whirring sound, and then a set of four drones seemed to appear out of his glamoured body and fly upward and in the cardinal directions offered, only getting about twenty yards out before there was a shimmer and they became invisible. Jun-Ho just stood there, his assumed face tense as though with concentration.

"We're gonna need to go through some buildings to bypass the line," Jun-Ho eventually said. "And even then, it'll require a bit of showmanship and acting."

"Then it'll be on the drama-nerds," Striker said with a dismissive motion. The buzzing sound of the drones grew louder, as though closer, until they shut off entirely, and Jun-Ho began to walk, climbing up the ramshackle stairs to the building ahead of them. He was comfortable taking point, but Angel Dust's pride demanded that he be next. And the inside of the building was exactly like what he'd been in two years back. Grungy, stinky, and cramped. They had to pass single-file through the hallway, ignoring the stairs because there was no impetus to go up, and head toward the sound of gunfire.

Already, Angel Dust had made it four hundred times farther into Heaven in a matter of minutes than he had in the entire catastrophic hour he'd had last time. This was what a solid plan would net you, he lashed himself with. This is what it could have been last time, if he'd just not fucked up.

Still, there was no time to lambast himself. The building opened to another set of ground-born paths, and these ones had soldiers flinch at their appearance, before one of the older hands grabbed the green-horn and shout that Angel Dust's people were Hell's in disguise, and after that, there was little trouble as the group wormed its way through the trenches.

The entire time, repeating like a broken record in Angel Dust's mind was 'I'm coming Molly. This time I'm gonna save you'. And this time, he had everything he needed to make that promise come true.

---

Rozarin wondered if everybody else felt the pressure of this place the way she did. It was like being deep under water, like she'd dived way, way down to the bottom of a very deep pond. Only the pressure wasn't pressing inward on her skin. For some strange reason, it was pressing out. But the others all wore faces which were masks of furious determination. And she hadn't fought as long as she had as hard as she had in her mortal life to 'bitch out' now due to some atmospheric discomfort.

The scenes that greeted her up here in Heaven were everything which Rachel had described and worse. Perhaps it was a function of her spending the overwhelming majority of her time trying to do her work on Cloud 2, which may have been a different flavor of bad than Cloud 1 was, or maybe she was attempting in her own muted, damaged way to be polite about her circumstances, but this? This was bad. She had read, once, about Kawloon City near Hong Kong. Something about lacking the ability grow tall buildings because of a nearby airport, requiring the buildings in the district to metastasize and spread in density as opposed to spread.

Cloud 1 had Kowloon beat, obviously.

And that was despite clearly inferior materials. Roz knew a mud-brick construction when she saw one. A lot of her childhood had been spent in such buildings. And these were not only shoddy mud-brick, but poorly-maintained shoddy mud-brick that was being required to do something that it was structurally advised not to. How many of these buildings collapsed on any given day under their own desperate but poor worksmanship, trapping people within?

To walk these boggy paths between the buildings of the lowest Cloud of Hell, Roz for the first time actually considered herself to be lucky to have been dumped into Hell, even it if did require her to have a few truly unpleasant hours with that Pig Sinner in order to see her to its better parts.

The two newcomers to the group, those she knew least, were obviously the pulled-trigger of Striker's operation, the last piece needed that, once had, could begin the entire process. As two of the three beings actually born in Hell in this group, that meant they had to be exceptional specimens. But despite that tautology, she still had a feeling that both of them were young. Or at least, young in years. Not young in mileage; from the way that the Hellhound acted, it was clear that he had fought and killed far grislier things than a rampaging Turk.

"Eyes wide, pupil," Cain cut in on her contemplations. "We're in enemy territory, now."

The line between the Occupied Zone and the Neutral Zone was a fuzzy one, one you didn't realize you were in in this part of the battle line until the gunfire stopped being in front of you, and started coming from to your sides. And, then, finally to their backs. Cain was right to chastise her. Distraction now could lead to them being killed in a way that Sinners couldn't recover from. Of course, it helped that the lot of them, with their current disguises, looked like a bunch of refugees trying to get out of the line of fire.

She didn't suspect that the ruse would hold up forever, though. To do that would be to depend on luck. And Rozarin had had it pounded into her head not just by her mortal life but by her tutelage under Cain that any man who depended upon luck for success was a fool, and a fool destined for a very humiliating fall at that. So she stopped looking at her fellow mercenaries and started to press her attentions outward. To the sad buildings, no doubt filled by miserable, starving people. And then from them, to the gaps between them. There was an almost droning comparative silence ahead of them. One that filled her with alarm.

"Cain, something is wrong with this path," she said, intuition breaking through her headache.

"Trap?" he asked. She gave a more-than-half-believing nod. She didn't have any evidence, other than her gut and the instincts attached to it were singing to her. But still Cain nodded as though she had said something on-the-face-of-it obviously correct. "Striker! This way leads to a killbox."

Striker, in his humanish form, turned back, then pointed to the building that abutted the somehow deadly, utterly empty path that they were walking. "Then we'd best cut through, now shouldn't we?"

That was one of the perks of having her teacher in the mystic ways be one of the most famous Damned to have ever lived. If she raised her concerns in his voice, they were listened to. So the group, not even grumbling, retreated to one of the entrances, and left the perpetually shadowed gullies that ran between the structures, and into the tumor itself.

Instantly, the party had to go back to single-file, with Jun-Ho having to unhitch his pack from his back and carry it behind him so there would be room. The hallway was utterly claustrophobic, lit only by harshly buzzing, but barely functioning florescent lights that washed the unpleasant brown of the unpainted walls with a sickly white light. It made all of the mercenaries look ill just being under it.

The air was heavy, sitting like soup in her lungs, which for a moment seemed to abate that outward pressure against her skin as though the abyssal pressure of all of this structure and impingement upon her had equalized her. It didn't make it comfortable. Just a different sort of uncomfortable. It seemed Uller was the only one like her who felt it. He paused longer than the others, bracing himself against a wall, before following.

There was a door that opened ahead of them. Jun-Ho looked the Innocent who peeked her head out in the eye and gave his head a shake. Seeing the lot of them coming, and taking at-face-value that Jun-Ho was an Innocent (which he was, technically, though he was also technically in a glamoured power-armor), she slid her door closed and simply let them go on without disruption.

As they reached a 'corner' of the building where the path they were on took an abrupt right turn, Roz suddenly felt some sort of magic near her. She couldn't determine what it was, only that there was a lot of it in a small area. "Mage-mines," Cain muttered.

"They mined Heaven? Fuck me, that's reckless," Angel Dust muttered.

"It's somewhat more complicated than that, but for the sake of things, yes, yes they did," Cain said. The path then took them directly into what appeared to be a very ad-hoc living area, with only a flimsy door separating it from the hallway. Jun-Ho was the first through. There were a trio of practically skeletal looking Innocent on the other side.

Jun-Ho, though, looked skeletal himself in his glamour, so he was able to miss not a beat and give them a rising whistle. Three heads with sunken eyes turned to him.

"Heaven or Hell, take your pick, but you can't stay here," Jun-Ho said.

"Who's breaching?" the quavering voice of one of the withered Innocent asked.

"Does it matter?" Jun-Ho asked. One of them burst into tears at that, but the other began to console it. The one who spoke rose, pulling the others with him (her?) and pulling them through another door that ran apparently toward the center of the building. That let the others continue along the outer skin of the structure, and away from the Mage Mines.

"Might wanna be a bit less enthusiastic jumping in with lies," Striker pointed out, although not particularly harshly.

"Lying is one of my many areas of specialty," Jun-Ho said with a grin, before putting his half-tonne pack of food – which was hidden under a glamour as a shape like a man-curled fetal, as though they were carrying somebody Numb with them – back into position on his back and returned to taking point.

Striker didn't argue that. He was a practical mercenary, to his core.

The next path was wider, so that Jun-Ho was able to walk normally and they could have, if they needed to, walked staggered. But with the reduction of claustrophobic pressure, her skin began to ache again, and a faint headache began to work its way into her eyes. At least, unlike the last path, there was some sliver of light ahead. With the sun beginning to set, it had aligned along the mad, gridless construction of the Rat Towers in Heaven, allowing a knife of red sunlight to stab down most of the length of a Rat Tower without, reflecting its light into the hall they were now approaching the exit of.

It was a touch easier to breathe, once they were out in the street, but that led to other problems. To one side, Roz could see the retreating forms of Innocent, carrying basic rifles in their fists. To the other, she could see a Cherub who was hovering above an intersection, looking in the rough direction of Fort Abandon despite the four hundred kilometers splitting them.

Given the choice, it was obvious that Striker pointed toward the Innocent.

They didn't speak, because they didn't need to. And they weren't even the last people to leave the building. By the time they'd gotten 'a block' away, another knot of Innocent had made their way out of the same door, getting away from the approaching battle-front.

"Humans up front. Can't afford to fuck this one," Striker ordered, falling back in their formation along with the hellhound and the other imp. Cain now moved alongside Jun-Ho, while Roz was walking abreast of Angel Dust.

"Got yer guns ready if they rabbit on us?" Angel Dust asked, turning toward her, then blinking. "Yer, ah… yer thing is fucky."

"My thing?" she asked flatly.

"Ahmadi, shore up your Glamour. I'm not getting fingered 'cause you got sloppy," Striker hissed ruthlessly from behind her. She gave herself a look, but saw no flickering or missing spots. Still, she focused for a moment on the magic which underpinned the 'Human Disguise', and gave it a hard-reboot. It turned off for about as long as it takes a man to blink, then was back on in full. While the spell wasn't exactly a computer system, and didn't obey the same basic laws of usership, sometimes turning something off then back on again did the trick. "Better," Striker muttered.

"Ahoy there! What are you doing out of the buildings?" an Innocent ahead of them called out, looking like he shared a frame with the false-image that Jun-Ho projected, somebody who was natural to a massive body, but starvation had brought to wither. Still, his beard lay over his bony chest like a coppery flag, and his hair was wild and long, and his hands despite their boniness were steady on the massive axe that he held in one hand, and the heavy, bulletproof shield that hung in his other.

"They're coming, and we don't wanna be here when they arrive!" Jun-Ho answered back.

"It's safer inside!" a call came back from the withered giant's back, but the hulking redhead scoffed.

"Don't mind him, he's a coward," the large one said. He gestured with his ax. "There's a sun-gully that way. Best get through it before they close the entire district."

"Thank you," Jun-Ho said with a half-bow. Uller bumped into Roz, almost looking dazed. With a tsk at him, he gave his head a shake and got his shit together.

"Don't give none 'a that. Now git!" he said with a laugh. Then he turned to those Innocent who clutched old, obviously poorly constructed (if at least well maintained) rifles and stayed close to the ground. "Now who's gonna run from the forces of Hell come to eat and rape yer wives and sons? On yer feet ye yellow bastards!"

The Innocent then all followed the large Irishman's commands, sparing little attention at all to the group. A lucky break, but there was still far to go. The path past the knot of innocent quickly ran them into another intersection, this one in the early steps of being barricaded, mostly with rubble that had fallen from other nearby building. This one, though, had a Cherub overseeing it, directing the Innocent below as they tried to move stone into protective places.

"You! All of you stop!" the Cherub shouted, cutting through the sound of combat that lingered behind them. Ahmadi glanced to the others, who did as the Cherub asked, and took her place at one side of this path between the buildings. The sun-gully, which was in fact just a tract of land that they hadn't overbuilt to the point of lunacy, was visible far beyond him.

If they could get back there, they'd likely be past the battle-line. And then moving through Cloud One would just be a matter of stealth and prudence. Still, she leaned against the wall, and rubbed at her head, trying to nurse the headache to a lesser form.

The Cherub, though, swooped closer, looking at them all for a moment. Despite looking like an adorable puppy with little angel-wings, it was also wearing a little suit of functional armor, and had in its hand a crossbow of white wood and shining metal, upon which its spar was loaded with a bolt of glowing golden light. "Why are you moving through a battlefield?" the Cherub asked her, its voice shockingly deep and resonant, not at all befitting an adorable brown puppy with bright, questing eyes.

"We're trying to…" Jun-Ho began, but the Cherub shot him a look.

"I didn't ask you the question. I asked her," the Cherub shut him down.

"The forces of Hell are right there," Ahmadi said, her voice strained even to her own hearing. Damn this headache. She pointed behind her, somewhat belatedly, at the path that they'd taken to get here. "And I've already been in one collapsed building. I've no desire to be trapped under another."

The Cherub stared at her, those eyes which otherwise would have been adorable seeming to penetrate through her own and see into the recesses of her brain. She felt distinctly uncomfortable under such scrutiny. As though it were delving into places that she dared not allow it, but had no facility to stop him if he did.

"Truth," the Cherub said. He then turned to Angel Dust. "How many are there?"

"I don't fuckin' know! I wasn't payin' attention, just moving with these guys," Angel Dust said.

"Lie," the Cherub said, hefting the crossbow so now it was vaguely pointed toward them, though more at their feet than at their bodies. Not a threat to their lives, but a warning that more dissembling will not be tolerated.

"What? That's not lies. Do you think I spend all my days countin' fuckin' Hellspawn?"

"You should clean your language. Heaven may be in jeopardy, but such expletives reflect poorly on you," the Cherub said. "How many Hellspawn?"

Angel Dust gave a glance to Roz, who made it very clear with her expression that he should be very fucking careful how he answered it.

"I dunno, like… six of 'em?" he asked.

"Truth," the puppy Cherub said, "But only partially. What else about them?"

"They, ah… had a human with 'em. Like, one the Innocent, I mean. I think he's a traitah' or something," Angel Dust said. Shut the fuck up, Angel Dust! What the fuck are you doing?

"Truth entire," the Cherub said, and his grip on his crossbow relaxed. Wait… oh, oh, now Roz saw what he was doing. "Where?"

"Last time I laid eyes on the lot of them demon-fucks was a ways that way," he pointed back toward Fort Abandon.

The Cherub nodded, then held out a hand. There opened a pane of silver light, and another face appeared in silhouette. "There's a special force attempting to move through the battle line, lead by one of the Corrupted. Find out who the traitor is."

"Noted. How is your position?" came the voice on the other side.

"Fortifying. It will be half an hour at least until things are acceptable. I will second the refugees to help the effort–"

Rozarin suddenly found herself staring upward, with a new pain in her arm as though she'd fallen onto a rock. It stung. And her headache was even worse, now. Angel Dust and the Cherub were both staring down at her.

"– fallin' over dead! Do you think she's gonna be any help to you movin' shit?" Angel Dust demanded of the Cherub.

"Obviously not. She seems quite unwell. Take her out of the combat area at once, lest she spread whatever infirmity she has," the Puppy said.

"Who's taking her?" Striker asked. There was a moment of hesitation amongst the dead, because each of them had a pack of dozens of kilograms on their hidden by a glamour back. To heft Roz was to also take on that burden up. Maelstrom was the one to break that pregnant pause, and despite her trying to wave him off and get to her feet, she was picked up like a bride.

"We'll get her out of the fighting," Maelstrom said.

"See that you do. And you should bathe more frequently. The lot of you stink," the Puppy said.

"With what water?" Maelstrom asked, tones flat.

The Cherub offered no response except for an angry glare. It was obvious he didn't like being called on his shit, especially when the caller was right.

"Lemme down. I can walk," Roz said.

But what actually came out of her mouth was:

"l'dow… cnwaaaak."

And the pain of her headache was quickly growing blinding, the thunder of it starting to pound in her ears such that she couldn't hear the fighting, and her limbs growing weak and noodley. The others offered her no answer to her slurred nonsense. They just took her onward, deeper into Heaven.

---

Once things calmed down with Blitz, things were good in Hell.

Stolas had finally reached his footing, reclaimed his balance, and found happiness again. It was a shame he couldn't have had such luxury while still wedded to Stella, but that marriage was doomed by his own laxity long ago, and it could not be retread to a different end now. He had to embrace a new normal, a new status quo, which nevertheless enticed, enthralled, and enthused him.

Blitzie had spent the night, as he did most nights now, and even though they hadn't actually fucked it was every bit as good as though they had. They'd just sat on the big chaise-lounge, with Blitz tucked up next to him, and ate junk-food and take-out while watching television. No arguments. No conversation, even. Just relishing in the comfort of the other's presence. Eventually the two outright fell asleep there, so comfortable and cozy had been their arrangement. It wasn't like that mad scrabble after that Greed incident which cost the poor dear one of his legs, such that they'd had to put on a cybernetic replacement; those terrified nights and long dreads until Blitz essentially just woke up, decided 'fuck this, I've spent too much time in this hospital already' and returned to Stolas' palace.

Stolas had laid there, having awakened, for an hour, just looking at his incredible imp. At the impossibility of him. At the audacity of him. At the snuggliness of him. But that hour he spent just relishing in peak-coziness came to an end when Blitzie's phone went off and dragged him out of slumber, as Stolas' new distant-relation Gadreel informed him of an extermination job she had finagled and thought he would wish to be apprised of. Which he was. Because Blitz had big dreams, and such lofty dreams required lofty monies.

He could have bought those dreams for Blitz, if only Blitz had asked for them. Stolas' fortunes were only modestly reduced in his divorce, and because he was not required to continue paying it now that it was finalized they were quickly restoring to their previous levels, simply because of the amount of seed-crop that he'd had to develop, replicate, and sell. Octavia's plans were clever ones, in that there was nobody who could gainsay her for putting more food in the ground and then pulling it up without having to pay any money to do it. A well fed Hell was a content Hell. And a Heaven fed at all was a Heaven loyal. Now that Stolas was thinking on it, part of what he so dearly loved in Octavia was the same thing that he so dearly loved in Blitz. They were so driven. Neither one of them would countenance for an instant another spending wealth to 'shortcut' their personal desires.

Blitz wanted to be powerful, influential, and wealthy, and he wanted to have earned every bent penny and bloody-soaked Soul of it. Octavia wanted a feasible solution to an impossible problem. And both of them, sheer impossibility incarnate in their two differing ways, were both making their steady headways toward their ends.

Still, there was a vague melancholy in the house of the Prince of Flowers. It was so quiet, now, whenever Blitzie wasn't around. No longer could he expect to hear the muffled, tinny noise of Octavia's music playing at hearing-damaging volumes as she went around her now-walled-separate section of the palace. No more echos of Stella's imperious voice demanding things be made exactly so and brooking no failing. It was just Stolas and the help.

He wasn't lonely, per se. Far from it. In fact, he was far, far lonelier in 2022, at the ragged end of his marriage, when both his wife and his daughter were still living here, than he could ever have claimed to be now three years later. But it still felt… empty.

So he did as he did now, given such expanses of time and no interruptions; he played with his flowers.

Angiosperms were incredibly valuable for a reason. Flowers enabled metered fertilization of plants, and enabled complicated seed-bearing opportunities, as opposed to just casting their naked seeds willy-nilly and hoping for the best. There was a valid reason why people didn't grow pine trees for food. Fruits were just so much more important, from a botanical perspective.

That in turn made them valuable from a financial perspective.

For all he had been intended by Paimon and God to be an Angel of the Night Sky, of Prophecy and Divination, this was what he wanted to do. And thus it was why he had wealth when many other of his Goetia brethren, frankly, had to beg and squeal to Lucifer to ensure that they lived in luxury, having no means of their own that they'd cultivated.

It must have looked an odd thing, a longshanks owl, looming over a botanical laboratory running magical simulations on generations of successive plants and replants, trying to see if he could make something useful out of Olea avaritia albedo. So far, all that any attempts at creating a native, hellish olive had come to were somewhat less poisonous, olive-shaped white lozenges. So they would have to keep carefully growing those temperamental Olea europaea in their greenhouses. There was a way to tame these damned (literally) fruits. And now he would find it.

Even as the simulations marched on, fed by his magic and his understanding of plant life and the rules that they must obey, he heard a rapping at the laboratory door. He sighed and turned from the table, allowing the simulation to break. He obviously wasn't getting anywhere with that modification if he'd had to plant it for twelve generations already. He could start a new modification in a moment. "Who is there?"

"It is I, my Dominus," his Legatus said. Well, he was more than merely Stolas' Legatus Damnatio. Stolas knew that he'd worked a treat when he managed to find Ambrosius Agrippa, and in a flash of insight that until recently he'd been rather lacking in, recognized him for the up-and-coming phenom on military matters that Agrippa was.

"Enter," he bade. The door opened, and the eagle Sinner approached with his back straight and his eyes sharp. Or to put it another way, as he almost always did. The Sinner closed the door behind it, even going so far as to turn the lock so that another trying to impose on them would have to either batter the door down, or find another way past it. "What is it, Ambrosius?"

"May I speak candidly, my Dominus?" Agrippa asked. "Speak not in the capacity of your Legatus Damnatio, but instead in the capacity of one who has served your family for fourteen centuries?"

Stolas was a bit confused by this, but gave a nod. "You may. What troubles you, Agrippa?"

"I have become concerned as to the emotional wellbeing of Octavia," Agrippa said.

"What?" Stolas asked, instantly concerned.

"It is my opinion that she is burying herself alive in her tasks as the Governess of Fort Abandon in some small part because she feels otherwise neglected and unmoored," Agrippa continued.

"But I visit her all the time!" Stolas complained.

"You have been in my Domina's presence twice in the last four months, my Dominus," Agrippa said, his sharp eyes now growing hard. And there was just a moment of outrage, that this was an act of temerity and gall, to imply that Stolas was being neglectful in his duties as parent.

But that failed and faltered before the part of Stolas which was realistic. And the fact was… he had been. What Agrippa had said was nothing but truth. During the entire summer and autumn of this year, he had visited her twice.

He found himself sitting back onto his tall stool despite himself, a dread settling into his belly at the shame of it. Of somehow ending up making exactly the mistake with his daughter that had driven away his wife.

"What time you do spend with her, she considers 'suffocating'," Agrippa continued, while Stolas had a small mental meltdown. "Which would be sensible if my Dominus were trying to 'force in quality time' into too short of a visit," he took a few steps closer, his head drawing back. "However…"

"However?" Stolas asked.

"It is my belief that you are not solely to blame for the imbalance in my Domina's current emotional life. You are an aspect of it, and I ask, as one long in long patronage to your family, that you rectify what section of it you do bear responsibility. But likewise, you are not the only one who has so seldom visited her. Stella, for example, dwells not in a distant Palace in the Pridely hinterlands, but literally a ten minute walk through the Heaven Portal away," Agrippa began to pace, gesturing broadly with his hands. "And yet she, too, does not impart her time and calming presence to Octavia. And given my recent withdrawal from her Legionary affairs due to my new duties, I have no place at her ear any longer. While you hold little regard for her, obviously, you still have the political platform to stand on while making such a demand."

"I fear she will not listen to me regarding any sort of alteration of her schedule," Stolas pointed out.

"She will because she must," Agrippa said with stern voice. "We do this not for the sake of our own comfort, but for the benefit of Octavia Goetia, so that she may attain glory through her successes rather than failure and ignominy."

Stolas nodded. Now that it was dragged before his eyes, he could see his own shameful failing as a father, of not giving his beloved starfire the due attention that she required. He knew well the sting of abandonment and neglect. Despite Paimon raising such a stink to have Stolas created, he served almost no role that Stolas would regard as 'fatherly'. All of the lessons that Stolas had learned on how to raise his daughter he'd had to learn through fumbling error and grievous trial. In its way, Stolas was at least glad that there was another man willing to take up some section of his failed burden, in Agrippa. Stolas would once have been envious of Agrippa's place in Octavia's confidence, in the age before Blitzie and his own returning general happiness. But now, he saw that Agrippa was merely trying to buttress his own failings long enough that he may remedy them.

So remedy them, he shall.

"I was not being rhetorical or defeatist, master Agrippa," Stolas said, beckoning with his magic and summoning from distant wardrobes a proper get-up for the occasion. One that would be stark, stern, and without pomp. Something that spoke to hard edges and harder opinions. It would take a minute or so to reach him, so Stolas continued. "She will allow any words I say to pass through one ear and out the other. Considering the lengths she went to ratify our divorce, that is her privilege. So I need to have somebody whom she still actually values the opinions of."

"...myself," Agrippa noted. His expression grew grim. "She may be less than willing to hear me. I have not been… in her company for some time."

"I am not asking you to seduce and calm my now former-wife," Stolas said. It hadn't bothered him that she'd taken a lover as the marriage dissolved, because he was too checked-out to care. And even if he hadn't have been, it was clear that Stella and Agrippa simply had a lot more common ground to talk about than Stella had with Stolas. "I am asking you to speak the words that she will not hear from me."

"I have not eschewed a duty to this family yet, in my centuries of service. However unpleasant," Agrippa said.

"When have I ever given you unpleasant duties?" Stolas chided, as the pants drifted through the door and he started to dress himself for the conversation that he was going to need to have.

"When you were flagrantly having affairs with the lowliest of the low with no regard for decorum or the standing of your house, you refused to allow me to hurl the miscreant into the midden," Agrippa said evenly.

"You wanted to throw my Blitzie into the garbage?" Stolas demanded.

"I had believed that doing so would save you from the dishonor you might otherwise bring upon your family name and house," Agrippa said. While Stolas fumed for a moment, with the benefit of hindsight and years passed since the incident – wow, it really had been years since Blitzie had become the Proxy of Lucifer, hadn't it? – he was able to see that Agrippa did not treat it as a personal thing. He was loyal to the house, and the house above all. And as such, he had a responsibility to protect all parts of it. Including its reputation.

A reputation which Stolas had gleefully dragged through the mud by 'slumming' and having a committed, romantic relationship with an imp, that dangling link on the Chain of Being.

"Things have changed," Stolas began, and Agrippa immediately nodded.

"Indeed they have. Now it is in my best interest to broadcast the same liaisons which I had previously needed to stifle. After all, the caché of the Voice of Lucifer is something which now repairs reputation that association with the same person years hence once damaged. Times change, even in Hell," Agrippa said, and the shirt and boots finally drifted into the room. Stolas could sense that his coat was coming from the direction he'd be leaving through, so as soon as he donned what he had, he gave a stern nod.

"Then we must go. And remind Stella that, despite our sweet girl growing up, she is still our daughter, and deserves to have our shadows darken her door."

"Lead on, my Dominus," Agrippa said, with a crisp bow and an arm swept toward the exit.

---

They hadn't gotten very far before the sun started setting, and the dark in Heaven was utterly suffocating. Rather than have to blindly grope their way through the pitch-back gullies of the Warren, they found a building that was willing to at least open a room for them. Angel Dust saw how things were going here in Heaven. More and more people 'Going Numb', as Rachel put it. Giving up and giving in, in other words. That there were as many people taking that path meant that, once they were pulled out of their 'rooms', there were often vacancies in the buildings that nobody even thought to realize. Now, though, with the battle close, people were doing roll-call. Finding people checked out from reality.

Maelstrom had needed little effort to implore one of the few people who didn't look starved to a skeleton to find a room for the clearly unwell woman he was carrying. The dead guy with the gapped Halo had them walk up quite a few sets of stairs, finally reaching a room which was… well… kinda grim. His room back at the Hotel was bigger, and cleaner, and comfier. Then again, his room back at the Hotel had Nuggz, which gave him ample reason to come back. Truly would be looking after him, now, while Angel Dust was away, but it still bothered him, thinking of that lovely chonker rooting around Angel's bed on nights, but there being no spider-Sinner to crawl up next to.

"The water's only running for another half hour," the un-starved guy said.

"Yeah, I get that," Angel Dust said. The others had barricaded themselves into the room and were either talking over each other trying to figure out what to do with Roz, or what to do with the mission. Angel Dust needed a breather. Honestly, he needed a smoke, too. But for all Angel Dust was a deeply impulsive man, even he knew that having ciggies in Heaven would be the most suspicious fucking thing ever. So he let his nicotine withdrawals grind at him. He'd smoke when he could, once he had Molly safe and back in Hell. He turned to the guy, a short guy who had an Italian sort of look to him. "Tell me something… I only ever saw people who look like… well…" he gestured to his own form. His somewhat redundant Human Disguise had to be modified just before leaving to make it emaciated, and give it that Gapped Halo. The dead guy gave a nod.

"When'd you die?"

"Why d'ya ask?" Angel Dust asked.

"Because there haven't been any of more of my kind for about three centuries," the dead guy said. He then stepped toward Angel Dust. And though Angel Dust was all for random men getting up close and personal with him, this guy took it a step too far – literally – by walking first into, and then through Angel Dust and the wall he was leaning against. Angel Dust blinked, confusion having monopoly on his face and in his mind. Was this guy a ghost?

And yes, that was a legitimate thought of his, as he didn't understand that ghosts in Heaven was a laughable concept.

The maybe-ghost walked back out of him, returning to his place leaning against the far wall of the hallway a short distance out. "The difference between you and me? I had to fight to get here. You were good enough to get in the first time."

"Wait, you're a Penitent?" Angel Dust asked. "I thought they looked like all the rest of us?"

"The dumb ones do," the Penitent said. He shrugged. "Intangibility has its edge-case perks. Including outright preventing starvation. Still, you've got an edge to you. Like you've done your time in the vanguard. If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were a Penitent yourself."

Angel Dust waved that away. "I found somethin' worth fighting for. Once you've got that, even Heaven can't drag me down."

"It's good that you've got fire in you. I've seen enough Go Numb," the Penitent said. He reached up and pointed at a pipe which ran rather conspicuously along the ceiling of the hall. "Remember. Half an hour till the water turns off."

Angel Dust nodded, and the Penitent walked away, his footfalls silent.

Honestly, that guy was a mensch. And a lot of the people that they'd seen in this building had been mensches, too. It was weird.

He opened the door, and the room beyond, despite people visibly talking, was utterly silent. He stepped through that threshold, and entered the bubble of magic that Cain had put up, the conversations that had been muted now reaching him. He slid the door closed.

"...afford to get slowed down like this. If somebody drags ass, they get left behind. That was the agreement," Striker said.

"And I am telling you that she is not ill," Cain countered. "I have spells that can detect almost any infirmity of the body. Despite the fact that she is running a boiling fever, there is no pestilence in her. This is not 'dragging ass', Master Striker. This is enemy action, and we'd be fools to launch out heedless in its face."

"Still on this, then?" Angel Dust asked. He'd stepped out to get clear of this, standing out there for God-only-knows how long while he pondered things and cleared his head. And now he comes back in and they're still bitching on it? Damn it all…

"It's kind of a pressing concern," Jun-Ho said, seated as he was against the inner wall. Likely because if he'd tried to lean on the exterior wall in that suit of his the damned thing would give way and it was a fair bit of a drop to the ground.

"And I realize that you are demanding haste, but I promise you, doing so would come at our cost," Cain said.

"And who's to say that they, whoever the fuck they is, ain't just closin' in on us while we're sitting here with our fists up our asses?" Angel Dust asked.

"Gross," Maelstrom muttered.

"Try it some time, y'might surprise yourself," Angel Dust chirped in his direction. "Look. Night's still night, and I ain't walkin' out there in the dark. If she clears up by morning, all's good, we go on like nothin' happened. That sound good?"

"...Fine," Striker said. "We'll answer it in the morning," the imp said.

But then the other imp raised his hand from where he was sitting next to the door. "Could you block the door for a bit," he said, toward Maelstrom. The Hellhound didn't question. He just moved next to Angel Dust and physically prevented anybody from being able to open the door and peep at them. "If you're leaving tomorrow with only the healthy… you'd be leaving me, too."

"The fuck are you on 'bout?" Striker muttered, frustration clear in his dry, grinding voice. Uller chose to answer with action. He dismissed his Glamour.

The imp looked at least half dead.

His red skin was bloated and blackened in places, one of his eyes having the golden part overtaken by black so that it looked rather like Angel Dust's own odd-eye, while the other was merely bloodshot with creepily large veins. His lips were stained with black, as though he'd been trying to hold blood in his mouth for long enough for it to crust. There were black trickles down from where his nose was, and where his ears faded into his horns.

"The fuck happened to you?" Angel Dust asked.

"Remember that portal I made?" Uller asked. He worked his jaw for a second, then spat onto the floor next to him. An oblong clot of black blood quivered amongst grey sputum like a grim, black slug. "Angels have a thing they can do to make that… damaging… to the caster. Did it to Moxxie. Did it to me."

"Why didn't you say something?" Striker demanded.

"Enemy territory," Uller muttered.

Striker looked like he wanted snap something, but caught himself. He turned, and his expression was clearly one of furious contemplation. Then he turned back and gave the younger imp a begrudging nod. "Alright. So that might have been smarter than dumb. And you didn't tell us for the last two hours because?"

"We've been here an hour?" Uller asked. Oh fucking hell, he'd passed out and nobody noticed. He gave his head a wounded-animal shake. "Look. That portal emptied my ethers, and did this on top of it. We can't use thaumaturgical portals up here. Not unless you're willing to carry me around like a sack."

"You hardly weigh anything," Maelstrom noted.

"I'm not waiting here a week for you to be able to stand again. We're already on the clock," Striker pointed out, his finger thrust toward the massive pack holding food and supplies that Jun-Ho had unlimbered from his back and set down. The food within was – mostly – all the kind of stuff that could be eaten using only a Heatstone, which was, as far as Angel Dust could tell, just some sort of rock that could if fed with blood heat up and cook things on top of it like a wee little stove. The food wasn't for him. As a dead man, starvation was unpleasant but only an inconvenience to him. It wouldn't have appealed to his palate anyway, he decided.

"Won't take a week. I know Rough's Method. Might take me a day. But not a week," Uller said.

Striker was clearly furious with the circumstances. And Angel Dust could sympathize with him, 100%. Any moment spent here on their backs was another moment that Molly was locked in a shithole like this with no food and no safety, and more important than that, no family.

But losing one wizard was what sent the last trip into a tailspin.

And what prudence he'd managed to build simply wouldn't allow him to try pressing on having lost two of them.

"We wait. The little guy gets his day to recover. After that," Angel Dust stressed, staring at the impish killer before him. "...after that, we can decide what to do with Roz."

"...for the record, I think this is a dumb idea," Striker noted.

"The record notes," Cain said. "Should calamity fall that we may have avoided, you shall have all rights to 'I-told-you-so's."

"If 'calamity falls', I'm not gonna be anywhere fuckin' near you idiots," Striker pointed out. He then stomped over to a corner of the room, pulled a bedroll out of a pocket that was way too small to contain it, unfurled it onto the floor, and laid down on it fully clothed, facing the wall.

Cain turned to Angel Dust. "Thank you for seeing reason."

"I don't have enough wizards that I can afford to fuckin' leave 'em behind," Angel Dust said. "'Cause let's be honest, bub; if we left tomorrow mornin', would you be goin' with us, or stayin' here wit' her?"

Cain gave a chuckle. "Now, I suppose, I won't need to find out either," he said. He waved his hand, and there was a brief shimmer in a column around Striker's chosen sleeping area, no doubt giving him some quiet in which to sleep. "I have heard disparaging things about your level of prudence, Angel Dust."

"Oh yeah? From who?"

"From many people who care about your wellbeing and see you making mistakes," Cain said. "And I should have been more accurate, in saying 'your utter lack of prudence'. But you seem to have gained something of an evened keel of late. Would this be because of Charlotte? Or perhaps your friend, Truly?"

Angel Dust frowned at the man. The fuck was he on about? He was just facing the facts about the way things were right now. "Look, I'm same as I ever was," Angel Dust said.

"No, you're obviously not," Maelstrom said.

"You are a paragon of restraint compared to how you were a year ago," Jun-Ho added.

"Fuck off, the both 'a ya's," Angel Dust said.

"Regardless, those things have been said, and I'm glad that you're putting them to lie," Cain said. He gave a distant, unhappy smile. "All of us are capable of growing. It just takes the will to grasp on, and to hold for dear life."

"You call it growin', I call it doin' right by my sistah," Angel Dust said.

"And doing it the right way," Cain said with a nod. He looked to the small window that had been built into the wall. There was a curtain down in front of it, which he flipped up to glance out at the 'sun-gully' which was planted with rows and rows and rows of potatoes, their greens only just starting to peek above the grey and listless dirt. Only part of the field was visible, lit by streaks of light from other buildings facing the sun-gully. Where their lights did not fall, the darkness of night was bulletproof. "Things are calmed for now. Rest while you can. Jun-Ho? Will you take first watch?"

"I'll take all the watches. I don't need to sleep," Jun-Ho said.

"Such a marvelous gift, that," Cain said. Angel Dust turned away from them, flopping out his sleeping bag and just laying atop it. It wasn't cold enough to bother going in, and this way it offered just a touch more padding. Though Uller and Maelstrom, and Cain and Jun-Ho each carried on quiet conversations for some time trying to shake the nerves of finally being in Heaven, Angel Dust merely felt…

A calm.

A tranquility.

A purpose.

He was exactly where he needed to be. Heaven at last. Action at last. Despite the fact that he'd spent his last fifty years on luxurious beds, somehow he fell asleep faster on this wafer-thin non-mattress laying on the floor, and slept more soundly than he had in half a century of damnation.

---

The morning came, and Uller still felt like shit.

While his ethers were restored, it was a ponderous thing, and thus he had to spend the entire period in the red of dawn fixing those most important things damaged by his portalling attempt so he didn't die of organ failure. It was such an insidious thing, that angel-spell. He hadn't seen it the first time because Moxxie's warning had failed to take into account that Uller did not have the Eyes of Birah shoved into his eye-sockets, and thus could not actually see angel-magic. The simplest (although reductive) way to describe it was akin to a magical guillotine. It slammed down an edge that cut into the magic at a critical instant, so that the portal could only spark into being by ravaging the body for the magic inherent in impish flesh, to make up for the shortfall introduced.

And it was doubly insidious, because it happened so quickly and in such a blind-spot that no thaumaturge alive would be able to react in that fraction of a fraction of a second between when it tried using the magic you were provided, and when it snapped and began raking the structure of your body instead.

It was a vain and petty thing, to be so proud that he knew a thing that even Krieg didn't, the method by which Angels could make so difficult the placement of portals. He'd heard mutterings from the Presbyters that their own portals were likewise hampered, and only their borderline cowardly ways prevented them from ripping themselves apart as an imp would. Perhaps other fiends could 'sense' the 'guillotine' in a way that imps simply couldn't, and their cowardice saved their bodies because of it. And he knew that he could solve that 'guillotine problem' with a bit of calculation. So the rest of his time was him jotting out tables of math so that, some day, he'd not have to deal with this shit again.

After a bit of thought, and time he spent slowly using Rough's Method to fix his innards so they weren't quite so scrambled, he realized that no, it wasn't vain and petty. It simply was. Now that he was here, actually sitting on his tail in the Realm of Heaven, far from any safety that could be had in Fort Abandon, he suddenly felt…

Well… like a man.

Not the scared boy that got caught and tormented by the crones, nor the scared boy who begged for a magnanimous witch to teach him. He was in charge of his own fate. He knew things that Krieg didn't, because that was how things worked. He would know things she didn't. She would know things he didn't. And then, when they brought their knowledge together, both would be greater for it. It pulled a wistful smile onto his face, even thinking about that. The spite-filled voice in his heart had already shut up. And if it remained silent when he got back, he was going to marry that woman. On the spot if he could manage it.

If nothing else, he'd be able to sleep more soundly in that bed of hers knowing that nobody would 'discover' him. He often had to wake up a solid hour before Krieg, if only to ensure that if her siblings ever got adventurous and tried to visit first thing in the morning, they wouldn't discover the two of them wrapped 'round each other in sleep. And besides; Vicky and August deserved to have more good-role-models regarding adult relationships. It had taken Tilla a frightfully long time to get over herself and just join Bart and Dessie's throuple, after all.

Finally, as he sat there thinking, he realized that the venom wasn't entirely drained from his heart; the mere concept of sharing Krieg with somebody else was acidic to his thinking, bitter and acrid and foul, something that he simply could not abide. And by the same token, he likewise didn't see it as feasible that he'd ever find anybody even a hundredth so enthralling as Krieg, so all other she-imps in Hell may as well be lumps of wood by comparison.

"Huh," he said.

"Huh what?" Maelstrom asked.

"I suddenly understand monogamy," Uller said.

"… I mean… yeah?" Maelstrom obviously didn't understand. He was 'cooking' as much as they dared to cook in this building. Though they had no shortage of staples for the three living beings in this mission, they hadn't dared cook any meat, nor any vegetable that produced an aroma. While that ward that Cain put up would prevent noise, odor was a much trickier thing to ward while still allowing air to circulate sufficient for seven beings to continue breathing.

"No, I mean… I think I grasp why Moxxie and Millie are so utterly infatuated with each other," he said.

"Because each of them is exactly what they ever could have dared to want, in another," Maelstrom said. He shrugged, continuing to cook the oatmeal slowly on the heatstone. It'd be a grim meal, but unlike these dead people, Uller at least had a stomach that required food to work.

"You sound like you've given this thought," Uller said. He scowled at himself, finding his magical stores depleted already, and only the most critical injuries he'd sustained remedied. At this rate, if he were to heal naturally, it'd take him weeks to be able to continue, whereas before his workings he might have remained crippled for life. It would take another run of Rough's Method to get him up.

"I have a lot of time to think about a lot of things. And now that I have the freedom to do it, I find myself thinking," Maelstrom said. He glanced over to Jun-Ho, who was seeming to meditate, outside of his armor for the moment and clad only in his body-suit. Then to Cain, who was idly scratching at a chunk of brick that had fallen from the wall with a folding knife, and carving it into a small cat, while his eyes remained on the doors. Striker was out, as was Angel Dust. Doing some sighting from the upper levels, maybe. And Roz was unchanged. She still squirmed in her silent pillar, mouth moving as though speaking deliriously. She was still so hot to the touch that Uller wagered that if the heatstone broke, they might be able to cook breakfast on her belly.

"And your thoughts?" Uller asked of the Hellhound.

"My thoughts are that if you find yourself in possession of something too impossibly good to bet true, you'd have to be an especial sort of moron to dare let it slip away," Maelstrom said. Likely thinking of Loona when he said it.

"Does this make us fools, going all this way, on this dangerous trek, so that we can hold close things that are already in our grasp?" Uller asked.

"They're not in our grasp yet. Not until we get back to Hell," Maelstrom said. And that was true. He dumped some brown-sugar into the oatmeal, attempting to at least make it palatable, before doling a bowl to each of the people who actually needed to eat, and leaving a third for Striker to claim when he returned. Even though it was just oatmeal, it still hurt to eat.

"Love is such a powerful thing," Cain opined as Uller arduously put cooked oats and brown sugar into his now no-longer-perforated stomach. The Sinner continued to scrape away at the brick, the head of the cat he was whittling coming into focus. "It drives us towards such impossible ends with a verve that even fate itself can only occasionally resist. And that couples and reinforces when it is love that is driven by one's pride."

"I didn't ask you about this," Uller said.

"Then allow me, as somebody who's lived far, far longer than you have, to offer some advice," Cain said. "Love and pride are not a spectrum in your mind. You do not lose love by indulging pride. If you did, then I would expect that Lilith would still be engaging in liaisons with me every other day. No, it is possible to love and be prideful at the same time."

"Do you intrude on everybody's conversations or just mine?" Uller asked.

"And there is the pride," Cain said. He gave a smile that Uller was sure wasn't entirely kind. "You are young, so I'll allow some snippiness in the face of wisdom. And I only intrude when I can sense that somebody is approaching the wrong ends in thinking when they would be much happier had they not. I may not be a 'good' man, but I like to think that I am a better one than most down there," he gestured toward Hell with his knife. "So please. Take this in the spirit that it is given when I say that this task alone will not stifle the anger in your heart. You will find the bile building up again. And you will seek another task to re-proof yourself against."

"So… I'm just going to be an envious shit for the rest of my life, then?" Uller asked.

Cain blinked at him. "Why would you jump to that assumption? No. What you are going to be is a striving person. Somebody who, despite having all the comfort in the world, still adventures, because the call is in your bones now. You will not be a dragon, asleep atop the hoard of wealth and comforts that your talents – such as they are," he cut off Uller before he could interrupt him, "– rightfully earn you. You will be the man who dares venture. Just as I was."

Uller stared at the human, and found he didn't want to disagree with that. Maybe his own thinking a half hour ago was blinkered, like he hadn't known a part of himself well enough to gauge. And for all Cain was being quite rude in interjecting into the conversation that Uller was having with Maelstrom, he wasn't wrong either. The ancient Sinner had seen hundreds upon hundreds of Uller's lifetime's worth of experiences.

Cain, First of the Damned, knew things.

And given that he likely wasn't lying, being that they were all in this mission together, it would probably be smart to listen to those things. Especially when they, more or less, lined up with his own musings.

So that would be his fate? To return to Krieg for a time, only to feel wanderlust pull him away on some new adventure, before returning in victory or defeat, glory or shame? For all his at-this-point accepted provenance as one of the many descendants of The Bard, he held no illusions that his own life would be as spectacular as his great grandfather. There would be less magnificent successes. But by the same token, that meant that as he got stronger, there would be magnificent success.

One trip into the guts of Heaven already threatened to purge Uller's bile enough that he could wed Krieg Miller in peace. Who even knew what the next adventure would allow?

He focused on his magic, putting the bowl aside, and found it still lacking. "Cain, tell me something," Uller said.

"Hrm?" Cain hummed, staring once more at the door, as he nicked a 'shine' into the cat's carved, lazy eyes.

"How fast is your magic rebuilding itself?" Uller asked. Cain paused with his knife, likely checking himself.

"How bizarre," he said. "I feel… like they're off-balance for the first time I've ever felt them."

"Off balance, how?" Uller asked.

"One wellspring is recharging much more slowly than the others. Significantly, in fact. Jun-Ho? A moment?" Cain turned from Uller to Jun-Ho. The other human remained meditating, until Cain picked up a flake of rock and flicked it at Jun-Ho's face. When it struck, the other Betrayed blinked his attentions back to the now.

"What is it?" he asked, looking a bit nonplussed.

"How fares your magical wellspring?" he asked.

"Essentially full. Why?" Jun-Ho asked.

"The lesser Magicks are made stronger by the presence of Hell," Uller said. He hadn't stuck around in Heaven after performing his tests to see how long it took to restore before. But up here, his Thaumaturgical birthright was refilling at a rate a mere fraction of how quickly it did in Hell. "While the Angelic magicks are unchanged."

"And that would explain my wellsprings. Different powers coming from different sources, having different…" Cain began, but was called to quiet when the door slid open and Striker appeared back in. "Have you seen anything of value?"

"How's the wizard?" Striker asked, jerking his head toward Uller.

"I can answer that myself. I still need a few hours to heal before I can get back to the mission," Uller said. Striker was the kind who brooked no shit and accepted no excuses.

"And the woman?" Striker asked, his attention still on Cain. It was clear that few were the people that Striker actually respected to any degree amongst this cadre. But as far as clear 'good companions to have' go, Cain was hard to better.

"A frustration without end," Cain muttered, setting down his about half-carved brick-cat. "Her fever has reached such a pitch that it would have killed a mortal human twice over, and still I can sense no pestilence in her to evict. If there was one, I could cure her of it in one way or another, and she would be on her feet in an hour or two. But there is nothing! It makes no sense!"

"Maybe she tripped a curse somewhere," Maelstrom offered.

"Don't be stupid. If there were a curse layin' out there like a landmine, why's she the only one who took it?" Striker growled. He paced with stomping boots the length of the room a few times, his impatience fighting with the anger on his face. Anger won that fight. He pointed at Uller. "When the wizard's able to keep up, we move. With or without her."

"...I suppose that will have to do," Cain said with a sigh.

"So," Uller gave a look around the people in the room, "where's the spider?"

All gave glances, then Striker growled anew as though this were another problem that only he trusted enough to solve.

"Y'all stay here. I'm gonna go wrangle the queer before he does something to blow our cover," Striker snarled before passing through the door and back into the building.

Maelstrom gave a nervous glance toward Uller. Uller narrowed his eyes. "Do you know something?"

"What?" Maelstrom asked.

"You've got that look," Uller said.

"No, no," Maelstrom said. "I'm just surprised nobody said 'that's not the only thing he'd be blowing'."

Uller gave a laugh, which didn't hurt now as much as it would have an hour ago. "Ohhhh. You'll be a man some day, Maelstrom."

"...fuck you," the Hellhound said, voice small.

Fourteen hours more to rest. Then deeper into Heaven.

The first adventure of what would likely mark the cycle of his life. Well, so long as it kept him coming home happily to Krieg, he would do just about anything. Even adventure like some half-baked fool of a Sinner putz.

---

The knocking at Stella's doors pulled her out of her mood, the first change she'd had in the unrelenting grimness that she'd felt in… well, she wasn't sure exactly how long she'd been sitting here at this window, watching as the workers below scurried like ants trying to build the colony to her specifications. Since the sun hadn't risen and set, it hadn't been an entire day. But beyond that, she had no clocks within herself to know how long she'd sat there.

So the 'alarm bell' of the rapping of the doors was something useful to her. It anchored her in the now.

She rose from the chair which stared out over her assembling palace, not even able to simply shout for somebody to allow them in because she dismissed everybody from her immediate service some time ago. Whether that time was hours or days ago was something of a blur to her. While Angels did enjoy to eat, they weren't required to, and as only the most debauched (a selection of which Stella took no part) produced waste, she could have sat in that chair for a decade, staring and breathing and not even sleeping. The call to stillness was growing stronger. Like a rock slowing its roll when it reached the bottom of a hill, perhaps her own inertia was, at long last, coming to its end.

The doors to this chamber were ornate, but that was only skin deep. Though they looked resplendent in gold and Moonsilver, those were mere inlays and tracings and gildings, whereas the doors themselves were bunker-thick, and first designed to withstand brutal assault, and any thought to aesthetics an only somewhat-close second. But despite the fact that each of the double doors, each displaying a shallowly etched figure of an armored Angel striking down an Exorcist mirrored from each other, was a thing of quite a few tonnes, they were easy to open. Purson had seen to it that as long as the Palace wasn't on lockdown, they would 'levitate magnetically' or some such nonsense.

She was rather surprised by the first figure that she saw through the aperture she opened. Mostly because it had been nearly a year since Ambrosius had spoken to her longer than to deliver a Legionary Report. The other, though, turned her surprise into dismay.

"What are you doing here, Stolas?" Stella demanded.

"He is here because I wished him to be, my Domina," Agrippa spoke for the fool she was now divorced from. He offered a short bow, then stared up and into her eyes again. "May we enter?"

"Why?" she demanded, blocking the way in with her body so that they couldn't try to even slip past her on the pretext of ambiguous answers.

"We are here regarding the wellbeing of Octavia, my Domina," Agrippa said.

That hit like a slap to the face from Lucifer himself, rousing her from her solipsism in a way few other things even could. She stepped forward toward them. "What has happened to her?" she demanded, her voice growing heated.

"There is no grim event which transpired, Stella. It is that we have been neglecting her. All of us have," Stolas finally opened his gob.

"So you can speak after all," Stella said. She flicked a hand toward the hall which led outside and to the Heaven Portal. "If you're that lonely, then go visit her. I won't even charge you for the transit."

"That is not the problem," Ambrosius said. "The problem is that both of you have put her aside to pursue your own agendas to the extent that she has seen you seldom in recent months. Octavia may show diligence and competence in the many endeavors she pursues, but she is still quite young, having only seen a fifth of a century."

"All fledglings ought leave the nest eventually," Stella began.

"She was not fledged from the nest," Stolas said. "She was dumped from it by Lucifer. And she's having to learn how to fly from the dirt. And we have done nothing but watch her from our comfortable branches as she struggles."

"I've heard no complaints from her," Stella said.

"And when has Octavia ever complained? About anything?" Stolas asked. He gave a look toward Agrippa who gave a tight-lipped nod.

"Octavia has learned, through means unclear, that complaint is wasted time and breath, to the extent that she only bothers to do so while also doing something else she considers 'of worth'," Ambrosius said. "And those things she does not complain about are likely those things which are most damaging to her psyche, for there is no action worthy enough to undertake while complaining about them. She is straining. And she has learned that no help will be there for her save perhaps sage advice, so has stopped asking for it."

"I didn't know you were a sorcerer, able to peer into the mind of my daughter," Stella said.

"I don't need to be. My duties as Dux Bellorim see me often in Fort Abandon, and from there it is easy to notice those things which she thinks she keeps hidden," Agrippa didn't take her tone askance, which was odd because most people would have. He was always frustratingly calm, that Ambrosius. Show some passion, human! "So; may we enter?"

She glared at the two men, but retreated back into the study and allowed them tacit entry though without saying the words. She wanted to have the wiggle-room to throw them out bodily if they annoyed her. Sometimes what one didn't say was as important as what one did.

"Fine. You're in. So what do you want to do about Octavia?" Stella demanded, having turned her chair to face the two of theirs instead of continuing to look out the window.

"We need to be more active in her life. She is almost an adult…"

"She is fully an adult, and you both refuse to grasp it," Ambrosius interjected with neutral tone.

"Ambrosius, please," Stolas actually had heat in his tone for a change. But Ambrosius didn't allow himself to be ruffled. Stolas turned his attention back to Stella. "...and she's facing challenges that we could help her with, if only she allowed us to be part of them."

"Indeed," Agrippa said. "Her typical day is fourteen hours of work, research, and command, a feat which she repeats day upon day without relent."

"All because Lucifer saddled her with an impossible task," Stolas commiserated.

"Making Heaven profitable," Stella agreed with the lunacy of that ask.

"Perhaps not as impossible as it appears on its face," Agrippa said. Both former-angels turned to him. "While I agree with whole heart that she is pressuring herself well beyond a reasonable breaking point, she is not flailing wildly to no positive effect. She has a concrete goal, and a rubric to test her methods against. And those methods thus far have already reduced the money wasted in the upkeep of Fort Abandon and the Occupied zone to a fifth of what once they were."

"And given the amount of time she was up there, that would just be from claiming low hanging fruit," Stella mused.

"Exactly so, my Domina," Agrippa said. "Trimming away the massive costs of sabotage and rebellion were a start, but incurred other, far lesser costs which themselves will be much harder to offset."

"So she's been curbing waste, but at the expense of spending," Stolas said. "So what can she do to offset the spending?"

"She has nothing up there. No resources, no farmlands. Nothing but useless mouths to feed," Stella muttered.

"Mouths with hands and working brains," Agrippa said. "Hands which could be used to free Hellish manufacturing of consumer-goods."

"Her plan is to have Heaven's ilk work in our factories making toasters and Hellphones?" Stella laughed.

"Indeed. And she need to hear, from voices she trusts, that such a plan is feasible," Agrippa said.

"Do you think it feasible?" Stolas asked.

"I think your child is capable of much that even Lucifer cannot grasp," Agrippa said.

Stella stared at the two of them, each of whom had betrayed her trust in their own way. Stolas through fucking a goddamned imp. Agrippa for siding with the house of Flowers over the house of Iron. And despite what should have been a volcano of rage within her, she felt hollow. Empty of such passion as to evict them sneering from her presence. In her ennui, she actually found herself nodding to the Sinner's words.

"I had thought Octavia less sentimental than that," Stella muttered. But still, she straightened her back and stood imperious before them, even though she felt as though she were made of poorly-fired mud. "It is obvious that both of you consider this to be a matter of some significant importance, and I'm inclined to agree," she said with metered tone.

"Then you should divine an excuse to put yourself before her and say such things," Agrippa said. "My young Domina is the sort to make a vice out of diligence, so a mere 'social call' will be ignored out of hand."

"Really?" Stolas asked, turning to the Sinner. "She hasn't pushed me away."

"Not to your recognition, but certainly to mine," Agrippa countered. Stolas looked hurt, and aghast, at that. The Sinner turned to Stella again. "If I may offer a recommendation, my Domina?"

"Speak," she bade.

"While she has some foundation in logistics, her education on matters military is incomplete, and there is only so much I can teach her. I was a leader of soldiers, born to the panoply and greave of the Principe having spent no time amongst the Hastati," she motioned for him to get to his point. "Given that Octavia is attempting to make efficient and effective the machine of Hellish warfare, your insights as to the realities on the battlefield will be invaluable to her."

Stella nodded. The Sinner had a point.

"I agree. I will arrange a chance to begin imparting my knowledge to her. And… in so doing… remind her that she is not alone in her onerous duty."

"That is all any of us want for her," Stolas said gravely. And Stella could only agree with that sentiment. At this point, that was all that remained binding the three of them together. The best interests not of any of their triplet, but of Octavia above all else.

It would not be for some decades, until the ennui finally passed Stella, that she even bothered to question why Ambrosius Severus Agrippa had shouldered himself into a role of ersatz-father. And by the time she had thought to question it, it was already far to late for the answer to matter.

---

Cain was frustrated.

While the imp was clearly the more able healer of the two of them, given he could restore grisly wounds to perfect health in a matter of moments, Cain had not shirked in the healing arts. Though to be fair, he had once considered it 'beneath him', and in his more misogynist times 'a woman's work', the unrelenting trample of time had crushed such stupid beliefs into dust which would be left in the wake of his passage. He had spent his early time in Hell learning how to destroy things, so frightful was his anger at the notion of damnation. But as the millennia stretched on, he began to yearn for a balance in himself. To learn how to mend what he had first learned to destroy. To mend objects, you needed patience and deft hands. To mend people, you needed timeliness, and a deft heart.

Thus it was that he found himself so vexed. The night had fallen again, and he could feel Striker's patience running low. Soon he would push the issue. And given what Cain knew about Angel Dust, the mere word of 'dallying' would see Angel Dust on the imp-supremacist's side. And given that young Uller seemed to have a drive even to himself, the cadre would quickly find itself dragged into the consensus of abandonment.

It didn't feel right to leave Roz here, sick and perhaps even dying – though death would be a temporary setback for a Sinner like the two of them were – and to press on without. But Cain's word only extended so far in days such as these. If he dug his heels in, he would be left behind as well. And he daren't give up the safety of the mob while the location of the bride and children of Adam remained a mystery.

That was the entire reason he was up here. To find his family.

Still, as he sat beside where Roz was now writhing, her temperature so high that it seemed to have shut down her Glamour whether that was a good idea or not, moaning in blessed silence because of the ward of silence around her, he could only think of family. Of Abel. Of Eve, his mother. Of his brides, who had abandoned him – rightly – when it became clear that to follow him as he walked the mortal Earth in misery for hundreds of years would only be taking on damnation unto themselves for no good effect. He didn't blame Mari or his other sisters for leaving him. Mari was the brightest of all of Eve's children, a bonfire to Eve's candle, who was herself a bonfire to Adam's un-lit coal. Mari and Ayla made the sensible decision to part from him, to take their children and return to the growing tribe of Abel and those he had spawned in the brief interim before Cain fucked everything up and killed him.

They would likely still be together, he mused. Those rejected by the grace of God had a clannish streak to them that few in Cain's experience could match. That same clannish streak was even why Cain himself was here. A driving desire to have those like you around you once more. While the good folk of the Hotel were a balm to the open wound that his missing family left on his soul, no amount of balms could close so grisly a wound as this. He would have to seek out 'surgery' for it. Forgiveness, or damnation, straight from Abel's mouth. Either would set him free, either in joy, or sadness.

Striker had offered no conversation in the evening. He made his dislike of remaining in this room for more than 24 hours known by his sullen silence, of striking up his ward and turning to sleep curled up facing the wall. Jun-Ho had finished the maintenance of his armor, and was meditating in front of it. Uller and Maelstrom were catching what sleep mortals such as they required.

That left Angel Dust.

Who finally, without ceremony, returned from whence he'd spent the entire day hiding.

Angel Dust still had his Glamour up, but there was a certain sensation of quivering anger in it. One that Cain hoped wouldn't be launched prematurely. Such pique had doomed an endeavor of his before, after all. Contrary to Cain's fears, he slid the door closed, and plunked down on his bedroll next to it, rubbing at his face and letting his Glamour break, revealing the spider-Sinner underneath.

"Was your day fruitful?" Cain offered with easy tone.

"What?" Angel Dust asked.

"I've not seen hair nor hide of you since sun-up. Was your day fruitful?" Cain repeated.

"Fuckin… I don't even know," Angel Dust said. He just crossed his legs before him, leaning forward with his chin on the heel of one of his many hands. "D'you know how fuckin' bad it is out there?"

"I do know. I do," Cain said.

"I don't think you fuckin' do," Angel Dust said. He just stared, for a moment, as though trying to form a description that he was ill-suited to put to words. "Have… you ever actually watched somebody give up completely?"

"Yes," Cain said. Both in his earliest, cruelest days, when he would break those who slighted him, to those much more latter days when Hell itself would do the breaking and he could only bear witness to it. "It is so very much like watching somebody die. Only somehow more sad."

"Yeah. Yeah that's a good way 'a putting it," Angel Dust said.

"You beheld somebody Going Numb," Cain discerned. Angel Dust, at a loss for other words to describe it, offered a mute nod. "What do you think of that?"

"I dunno," Angel Dust said, but his face was painted a portrait of disturbed thought, of grim expectation. "What if… what if I ain't heard from Molly 'cause she did like that? Turned her brain off, I mean?"

"Do you believe she would?" Cain asked.

"I don't know! It's been almost a hundred fuckin' years since I was in the same room as 'er, and I ain't talked to her in… fuck, man, two decades? The only reason I know she was up and around back in '21 is 'cause my bro still had The Phone back then," Angel Dust rubbed hard at his face, almost as though he wished he could clench his fists and rip his own skin off, as though that would relieve him in some way that only the clarity of pain could offer. "Molls was always a doll, a good kid. Didn't get in on our rackets, didn't play politics and shit. Just did her own thing. Sang. Made art. Shit like that. Maybe that's why she went up when we went down. She might'a come from shitty seed, but at least her fruit weren't fuckin' poisonous."

"Well since I know little about Molly, tell me something but one thing about her," Cain prompted.

"What's that, old man?" Angel Dust asked.

"Would you consider her 'stubborn'?" Cain asked.

"Like a fuckin' rock, some days," Angel Dust said.

Cain nodded. "Then she has not given up. Having spoken at length with my comrade here, with Rachel Scailes, and the Mubannu family, I can trace that there is one thing which ties them together in avoiding the grim fate of Going Numb. And that, is that they will not cease," he said. Angel Dust tilted his head at the old Sinner. "Those who give up, Numb quickly. Those who resist, Numb eventually. But those who are driven by willpower beyond willpower, they shall persist until the final star has burned out in the sky and all Hell is eroded to dust. Your sister has been up here, without complaint, for most of a century, and didn't even consider it worth relating that she was starving when she spoke to your brother last. Her will is strong enough. She has not Gone Numb yet. I can as much as guarantee it."

"And if you're wrong?" Angel Dust asked.

"Then I can swear you this: with but a word to Charlie, she will turn Hell upside down to find a way to return those Gone Numb to the waking world. And if there is any in all Creation who could, it would be her," Cain said with a nod. And Angel Dust sighed, but nodded. For all Angel Dust was in the doldrums of grim expectation, there were still some constants in the world. And one of them was that reality would implode before Charlie stopped trying to be kind.

There was a thin moan that reached Cain's ear. One that he almost ignored, trying to shore Angel Dust's spirits. But when the second came, he realized it wasn't coming from one of the other rooms that abutted this one, nor from out the window. For one thing, this window was too high up for such calls to enter it. He turned, and looked to Roz. She was squirming and writhing on the floor, in obvious distress and pain.

Her mouth opened, and the moan escaped again. Louder.

Despite the fact that she should have been rendered utterly magically silent.

Cain turned quickly to Jun-Ho, who likewise opened his eyes when he heard the moaning, and took his feet when he beheld that it was visibly coming from Roz. Cain rechecked the Veil of Silence, and saw that it was still utterly intact. It should be functioning. But then, he noted that he couldn't hear the grinding sound of her clothing against the floor, only the moaning. Next roused by the moaning was Uller, who quickly got a look of alarm on his face, and he gave Maelstrom a shove, prompting the Hellhound to rouse almost instantly, with a punch thrown in the vague direction of where he'd been prodded. He blinked, then looked to Roz.

Her mouth drew wider, and wider. And the corners of her mouth began to rupture.

She screamed.

The Veil of Silence was utterly intact, but the wail ripped through the room like the call of a Ban Sidhe, rousing at last the petulant Striker, who had a gun pointed at her even as he blinked his way back into coherence. What was that?

Cain dispelled the Veil. It wasn't helping anyway. Instantly, he could hear the meaty noise thundering into the space they were living in, as though her heart were beating so hard that it was audible outside of her body. Her skin was quivering and shifting, tracing strange lines as though worms were slithering under its crimson surface. Uller, upon seeing that, hissed in alarm and caused a smoky grey Pain Elemental to gather above a palm. A glare from Cain kept the youth from using it.

"The fuck is going on?" Striker demanded.

Then Roz screamed again. And this time when she did, her skin ruptured not just at her mouth, but around her eyes as well. Her back arched, her clothing ripping, which revealed her bare chest which was literally shaking with the drumbeat of of her heart, but there was a suture running up the center of her entire torso, running from her navel up between her breasts and to the root of her neck, where blood was leaking as the flesh strained to hold itself closed. Cain reached out, laying a hand on her belly, near the bottom of that suture, and tried to will the Partial Healing Miracle of Raphael into Rozarin Ahmadi, to stop this madness from going any further.

Nothing happened.

Not only did nothing happen, it did so very particularly. As though he were trying to heal somebody he had just succeeded in healing.

The partial Miracle told him that there was nothing physically wrong with Rozarin Ahmadi.

His eyes told him otherwise.

There was a third scream, and this one came with the tearing of flesh, a surge of blood spraying the walls and Cain, who was knelt nearby, as Rozarin hinged forward, wide-eyed, to sit upright. But there was something very wrong with that. Because when she did, her head and upper body somehow also remained on the floor.

And through the blood coating Rozarin's face, he could catch just glimpses of dusky hued complexion, very similar to his own.

A new burst of gore, as Roz pulled her arms out of… her arms… and clutched her head, her eyes pressed shut with her shrieks now reduced to furious growling. Her hands tightened around her horns. They began to break and crumble. And finally, the whole nest of them shattered.

The door slid open, as somebody nosy had finally decided to see what was going on, and nobody in the group was trying to stop them. Striker turned to shout at him to go the fuck away, but was instantly slammed with a wing – lifting him from his feet and hurling him into the wall by the door – with fiery red feathers, that now sprouted from Roz's back.

Eyes still pressed shut, she reached up, to those horns that, though separated from their base, still hovered above her head, and she wrenched them apart.

With the shattering of horn, there was a blazing Halo that flickered with angry red fire, which now perched itself above her head like a levitating crown.

Roz then, at long last, opened her eyes. The snake-like slit eyes she'd had before were gone, now replaced with a pair very human, if colored like purest gold catching and casting back sunlight.

There was a moment of confused silence, which was ended by the sound of a hammer being pulled back.

Roz stared at herself, then back behind her, at her own ruptured corpse that she was now sitting up in. She stood, and found she had to rip her own legs out of her old body, to stand, naked but for the gore of her former self, in the room. On her back, a pair of wings of scarlet feathers. Her inhuman features, granted to her by the tacit damnation of her not-even-being-Judged gone and replaced by a build that showcased the peak of female athleticism.

She blinked, looking down at herself, and flicking some rapidly ashifying gore off of herself. There was a loud bang, and with a flick of her hand she interrupted picking the chunk of her own stomach off of her belly to backhand Striker's incoming heart-shot away.

"Do you mind?" she asked.

"What the fuck is this?" Striker demanded, pulling back the hammer again.

"I'm as confused as you are, friend," she said. She then looked to the Innocent in the room, her face bunching up in dismay. "Great. Now we need to leave."

"What are you people?" the Innocent asked. Striker turned his gun toward him.

"Stop," the angel sharing the room with them said. Striker looked like he very much wanted to both shoot this guy, and her, but having fought against angels directly, he knew how tricky a proposition that could be.

"Who are you? Really, I mean?" Striker asked.

Cain answered that by laughing as he finally understood. He took a step forward, ducking around the great red wing that dominated the space of the room. "Gabriel will be utterly furious with himself when he learns this! Striker," he turned to the imp, who was sans Glamour in plain view of the Innocent, but that was a problem they'd solve later, "she was always supposed to be the Thirdborn of Strength, born from the fragment of Gabriel. And now?"

"And now fuck that guy, he sent me to Hell," Rozarin Ahmadi, newly reforged Angel, said.

Striker stared hard at her. But then he relented. Just a little. Just enough that she was fairly sure he wouldn't shoot her in the next thirty seconds.

"You… what was your name?" Roz said.

"H...Heinrich," the Innocent said.

"Could you get me a basin of water? I'm covered in blood, and I don't want to ruin my clothing," she said. Heinrich stared at her confused. "I insist, Heinrich."

Heinrich then darted through the door, nodding vigorously as he did. Cain could see him run to the spigot at the end of the hall and fill a bucket as quickly as the low pressure allowed. Ahmadi turned, looking at her corpse, which was now overrun with Demon Bone Ash, and gave a chuckle. "So… sorry about the delay, Striker. I had no idea this would happen."

"You don't say," Striker said, sliding his gun into its holster with an angry expression. But Roz's brows raised, as an idea occurred to her.

"But look at it this way; now not only do I not need one of those," she pointed at Maelstrom, who still had his Human Disguise up, "but I think I could probably bluff us through checkpoints. I mean… I can feel wings on my back and for some reason I can sense things through the air above my head…"

"Your Halo," Cain offered.

"Which is supremely strange," Roz continued. "But my point is, if I look like what I think I look like…"

"And you are what you are," Striker continued, "then you've suddenly become a living key to the Higher Clouds."

"...that is uncomfortably convenient," Uller said, getting to his feet unsteadily. The boy was obviously still sore, but he was grasping what the room did. The Innocent hurried back, depositing the bucket just inside the room with them, then darted away before anybody could point a gun at him again. Roz took the bucket and essentially up-ended it over her head. Despite the reality that it should have only cleaned some of the gore off, the symbolic gesture nevertheless caused her old corpse to wash off of her in detail. And then she squatted down to pull out, and put on, one of her changes of clothes.

"We're going to have to leave. Tonight," Jun-Ho said what everybody with a lick of sense was thinking. "Before word can spread about… this," he gestured broadly to the events which transpired.

"I don't disagree," Roz said, briefly looking at her feet and probably realizing that she had nothing to put on them. Her Sinner form had digitigrade claws, after all. With her nudity covered and her washed-away gore now turning wholly into ash, she pulled her pack back into its place upon her back. "The sooner we're away from here, the more distance we can put between ourselves and any Angelic counterattack."

"You are an angel, now," Jun-Ho pointed out.

"You know what I mean, Jun-Ho!" she snapped. She turned to Striker and gave him a nod, which the imp only begrudgingly returned. He obviously didn't like nor trust this situation, but acknowledged that she was speaking good sense.

"If we leave now, we still have at least a week's walk to the closest Intertram. And that's presuming it still even works. It has been some time since I've used the system myself," Jun-Ho said.

"Why use the train at all? Can't we just climb?" Angel Dust asked.

"The Intertram is, to my knowledge, the only way to ascend the Clouds in the modern day. Getting down is far easier. We just need to not be afraid of heights," Jun-Ho said. He then backed into his armor, and had it close around him, before igniting the Glamour over and returning its appearance to a tall, emaciated man. Maelstrom was the slowest to get ready, in that he needed another forty seconds to gather his effects, but then, one by one, they stepped out through the halls, leaving the room with behind, with only the ash-coated corpse as signal that any of them had ever been there at all.

Cain watched Roz as he followed her down, and turned a glance back to Striker. There would be trouble, there, if nothing was done and nothing was said. But as much as Cain was delighted to see a novelty in Creation, of a friend being an Angel trapped within a Sinner's body, even he had to wonder at the convenience of this. Why now? Why now of all times? Why not months ago? Was it just being in Heaven which caused this metamorphosis?

He had no answers. And as long as ignorance reigned in this squad, mistrust and calamity would follow shortly in its wake. He had come too far to let his chance to return to his brother to allow that to happen. So he would be patient, and observant. If Roz was still Roz, then she would be integral to Angel Dust's plan.

If Roz was now just another Angel?

Angels could be killed. Not easily, thought. Both for her strength, and the pain it would cause to his heart to have killed someone wearing the face of a friend. He had done that too many times in the past. And the only solace to it, was that it never got easier or less painful.

Jun-Ho led them out into the dark, even as the building came alive with rumor and discussion, half-understood factoids feeding them where no food was available. By the time that the Angels were called in, to investigate, there were a dozen vastly different stories about what transpired here. That demons had snuck in from Hell on some nefarious mission, only to be intercepted and wiped out by an angel with red wings. That the Angel had instead defected from Heaven's army and joined the Hellions, returning with them to their grim prison. That there were two Hellspawn there. That there were a dozen.

The rumor mill destroyed the truth under weight of possible narratives, and the only one who saw anything, only was able to clarify two facts as solid.

There was an Angel with a Halo of flames, whose rings were red like the sky of sunset. And that there was a corpse of some sort of hell-beast flayed open on the ground.

The Angels eventually decided to try to find out more, but by the time they started to search, all the actors in the scene they were pursuing were already well outside of their reach. For all Cloud One was only one ninth of Heaven, that was still a significant amount of land-mass. And they had no reason to think that those involved in such a brazen display would be heading directly into the heart of the realm, instead of going to ground against such scrutiny. They would search, and be too late to find anything worth knowing.

---

"The Thirdborn were the second best thing to come out of the Age of God's Silence. All of the power of an Angel, but all of the mental flexibility of a human. And by far, far more important than that, all of the perspective of a human. Each and every Thirdborn has felt mortal fear, pain, loss, and sadness. They have felt joy and contentment. They have fought battles against temptation and sin, sometimes even faltering to them, but always returning to a better path. Unlike the older Angels, they knew what it felt, from their very earliest moments, what the pain of failure and want could feel like. They weren't blindsided when such temptations struck them, because they had lived an entire lifetime managing them. And because of their human-borne flexibility, they have only the skies above as the limits of their potential.

Indeed not, miss Killjoy. Firstborn consider it a mortal and indelible failure to falter in the face of one's worse demons, something that once a fall has begun, cannot be recovered from no matter the deeds or toils they undertake to right their wrongs. To that I say fie! What is a more powerful statement? That I haven't and wouldn't? Or that I have and shall never again? Redemption is a powerful motivator to those who care about it. And amongst the Thirdborn, I can't say I've ever seen one that hasn't had some mortal frailty that they've grappled with for their mortal lives, and then stood resilient against it in the hereafter. Not simply for the paucity of years but because of the alienhood of their mindset compared to their Firstborn forebearers did not a single Thirdborn join in the madness of the Second Heresiarchy.

And the Thirdborn are now the order of the day. No longer shall there be a single more Firstborn, or one to their template, ever be created. And the Secondborn, whom I consider to be a vast improvement over them even if they lack their precursor's raw might? They are such a rare thing, now that they've begun bearing angels amongst angels in the new age. But the Thirdborn? They are triumphant. And given the vast sweep of time that stands before us, it is only a matter of time before the Thirdborn outnumber the First. And not long after that, that they would outnumber the Secondborn as well.

Sahaquiel is still a century or more divorced from us, but I'm sure that wherever he has been incarnated on the Earth of my birth, he is looking on with a craftsman's pride at the most clever and vital of his creations being so integral to the running of the modern Heavenly State. That occurs an idea to me: Hell doesn't lack for sources of information and your 'day job' is that of a broker of such things. Do you think you could track down Sahaquiel upon the Earth for me? If nothing else, it would allow you the scoop of all scoops.

Wait, Penemue? She created the Thirdborn? Then I retract my praise of Sahaquiel."

– Niccolo Machiavelli, Brevet Supreme Commander of the Heavenly Host