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.

48. Charity

Striker still had an instinct to shoot the Angel walking along ahead of them. The weeks it took to get this deep into Heaven hadn't killed it, even though she hadn't given a lick of reason for him. For that reason, and that reason alone, he ignored what his gut was telling him. Angels killed his kind on sight. Since she hadn't offered even a crumb of contempt toward him, she must have been something other than an Angel, then.

The wings probably helped him in that rationalization. Every Angel he'd ever seen had white wings, except for the Big Man down in Pride, whose were black. And hers were as red as Uller's hide.

Still, the Angels that they had come across up here turned out to be rubes, who saw a halo over a mostly-human face and didn't look any deeper. The haughty bastards didn't even bother doing that magic shit that the Power Armored human warned him about, which would have battered their glamours and might have even revealed them. It seemed as though the mere fact that they were following what appeared to them to be an Angel around was enough to absolve them of any kind of suspicion. Well, that kind of lack of scrutiny would eventually bite them in the ass.

There was little conversation, now, as they approached what Jun-Ho had called 'the Intertram', a sort of public transit system built by Angels long ago, before all of this Rat Tower bullshit began. It seemed pointlessly complex, compared to Hell's own Hellevator. All that needed was a big fucking wire and a motor to coil it. This thing looked like it used a factory's worth of parts to keep that locomotive lunacy running. It wasn't even the first station that they reached. The first, they'd reached mere days after 'Roz' did her weird ass Angel-butterfly thing, only to find that in the time since Jun-Ho had left Heaven, they had shut it down and ripped up the rails.

Likely to prevent the like of what Striker and his group were going to do right now.

This one, though, Jun-Ho had directed them at directly after the failure of the first, ignoring any closer lines as they were, in his words, 'likely to have met the fate of the first', whereas this one was special. They weren't likely to cut the rails on this until they'd lost literally everything else on Cloud One. This was their own Fort Abandon. And, pleasingly to Striker's sensibilities, it was utter rat-shit compared to what Hell had managed to achieve.

The Intertram was barricaded and walled off by palisades of shining Angel Steel, so much of it in fact that a greedier Striker might have been induced to try to pilfer one of those great spines and tuck it away. That had to be hundreds of kilograms of metal that was worth so very much more than gold. But thankfully for Striker's professionalism, his greed wasn't the chiefest amongst his sins. Still, he noted their presence, and made a note that if they happened past them again on their way back, he could steal one then. After all, they'd be a lot lighter for expended resources by then.

The towers immediately surrounding the Intertram Station had been leveled, some of them still uneven piles of rubble with ad-hoc structures precariously perched atop them, these Angels being just unforgivably sloppy in not setting down proper roots. He wagered the seven of them could probably cast this whole affair to the wind if that'd been their intended purpose. While the open space did clear sight-lines, that worked in both directions. Without curtain walls to block lookie-loos, Striker could already see to the stairs leading up to what looked like a much cleaner version of New Sodom's public transit system.

Just like that, he had a rare wave of nostalgia. Riding the trains of that weirdo town that functioned as an exclave of Lust Ring within Wrath. For all his current cowboy aesthetic, he'd been riding subway cars long before he'd ever saddled a horse.

He forced the thoughts away. His childhood was sad and pathetic and he didn't bear thinking about it. Until he'd gotten loose of his mother, there wasn't even a Striker worth talking about. He focused instead on the here and the now, upon the guarded post that they were approaching, leaving behind the meager traffic of this Cloud. The Angels manning the gate itself were stone-faced, but he could see beyond them to the ones behind, and those ones were all looking bored nearly to sleep. One of them glanced at him, and he viscerally felt, down in the seat of his soul where his Remit of Satan lay, that they'd tried to do some shit to him. Likely mind reading, given the luck of this party. Still, there was a reason why he still stuck with Satan. Not only was he the only King whom Striker saw no need to murder, actually bending his neck a bit to him prevented him from having to deal with all kinds of bullshit. Still, Striker opted for caution, and withdrew into the center of his party's clump, allowing the Hellhound to block line-of-sight to that Angel.

"You all need to stop there," the Angel at the gate said. He turned to 'Roz'. "What's the meaning of this?"

"They've asked me to escort them back to Cloud Two. Their building has been lost," Roz said. Jun-Ho hitched slightly when she said that, though. Striker knew that Jun-Ho had prepared the new Angel to say certain things if confronted. And apparently she'd just fucked it up.

He half reached toward where his gun was hidden under the Glamour.

"What was that?" the gate Angel asked. Jun-Ho shot a very clear 'get your shit together look' at her, which was only possible because his glamour had human features and wasn't planes of metal.

"Are you deafened? I said that I'm taking them back up to Cloud Charity," she said. At that, Jun-Ho seemed to relax, just slightly. The Angel at the gate gave a nod. "Why has traffic stopped?"

"The order is that only vouched-for Innocent can use the Intertram. Ever since the first of them found some way up into Cloud Generosity, the higher-ups have been on edge that they may find a way past that wasteland and into our homes."

"How terrible," Roz said flatly, with an equally flat look at the people whom she was 'escorting'. The glance managed to knock loose just a nugget of shame from the gate Angel.

"I don't make the rules, cousin. I must simply enforce them," the gate Angel said. He gave a look back to the one who was staring at Striker. "What do you see?"

"Desperation. Exactly what every other human down here has. Not from him, though," the Angel pointed at Uller. Striker fought very hard not to glare at the young imp for fucking this up, while the Angel continued. "He's fixated on a woman he wants to fornicate with."

"How grotesque," the gate Angel said.

The seer-Angel pointed at Jun-Ho next. "He's frustrated. Wants to get back to his house," he pointed next at Striker, "while that human is bottling up everything. There's a lot in there, but it's stoppered. The rest? Desperation."

Satan's balls, was he fucking this up as well? No. No, obviously not if the seer-Angel's dismissive expression had anything to say on the matter.

"Let them through?" the gate Angel asked.

"We're running the train up in a few minutes anyway. There's space," a cherub, who had the features of a deer, said while holding a ledger daintily between her hooves.

"Fair enough," the gate Angel said, and stepped aside, allowing them all room to move in single file. Jun-Ho had to step carefully, because he was larger than his appearance revealed, but managed to bypass the gate. There was a clearing of the throat from the gate Angel as Striker was passing him by. "Deerie, could you show them the way in. I don't know what century these humans are from. They might have not seen this thing work before…"

"If they're down here, they'd had to use it to get here, don't you worry your pretty head," Deerie, the Cherub, said. "How 'bout you all come this way. It's not gonna be big on comfort, but it'll get ya where ya need to go."

"Thank you," Roz said tersely, almost snubbing the Cherub, which the Cherub barely reacted to. Another bit of Jun-Ho coaching proving out, it seemed. The car was open to them, but they did have to squeeze past a bunch of damaged weapons and machinery to reach the back of the vehicle. Yet at the back, there was plenty of space for all.

They remained silent for a few minutes more, until there was a cheery tone that played on the speakers, of a melodic woman's voice telling all passengers to ensure that no limbs, wings or halos were external to the vehicle. And then a slight lurch as the train began to move.

"It is safe to speak. There are no recording devices in this car save those we've brought," Jun-Ho said in conversational tone.

"Did that feel way too easy?" Uller asked.

"It did," Striker admitted. "Likely they're keeping the actual security on the other side, where it's easier to flatten people comin' out of these things."

"Then we'd better prepare for the worst," 'Roz' said, seated on the bench and looking out the window as the train began to ascend away from the misery of Cloud Probity below.

---

Chapter 48

Charity

---

Rozarin Ahmadi still felt… like herself.

The illness that had wracked her during her time on Cloud Probity was now gone as though it had never been, only leaving behind memories. It felt like being overwhelmed, not by her own body heat, but instead by a strange music. As though the music she was awash in the tide of was changing her, transforming her, bending her into an unfamiliar shape. But if there was one lesson that the False World of the Qliphoth had taught her, it was how to resist alien influences of her mind. It had been a battle, one played out with her laying flat on her back and moaning like a dying leper, a battle between that intruding influence and all that was Rozarin Ahmadi.

A battle between the breaking force, and the unbreaking will.

And in the end, the breaking force was itself broken, as the anvil shatters the hammer. There was no 'changing' of her, no 'bending' of her into a shape that she did not claim. There was only Rozarin. And then she felt a moment of suffocating panic, the pain of ripping skin, and she was awake and returned, her body now…

An Angel.

She had tested the old magic that she'd managed to learn from Cain when Striker wasn't busy glaring at her, to ensure that it all still worked – it did. In fact, most of it worked even better than it had been before. Whether because she had transformed in the way that she had, or perhaps because of some loophole in the nature of Angels themselves, there was no part of her reduced by her metamorphosis. Only increased. She had tested her own strength, finding herself able to knead steel like unset clay. And conversely, she could handle eggs with all the ease and delicacy she could before. She was already missing eggs; they'd been by far the most perishable supplies that Maelstrom brought. Obviously somebody had to explain to the poor Hellhound what 'shelf-stable' meant in terms of food. They'd had to use them first, to keep them from being wasted weight when they went bad.

So many other changes, she pondered as she looked out and saw the track curling upward. There had been more steeply vertical paths, but they looked like somebody had ripped them from their footing, leaving them dangling like a snake-skin off of a branch. Maybe Heaven wanted to control where exactly this train car would appear when it appeared on Cloud 2, and the easiest way to do that was to shatter all the other connection points. She could feel a discomfort in her own connection from her spine to her new wings. It had taken a bit of experimentation, goaded on by Jun-Ho's comments, to realize that she could actually fold those crimson spars down to the point where they visibly disappeared from her body, leaving only her burning Halo as signifier of her status.

Striker obviously didn't trust her. And he had valid reasons not to, she recognized. He had come up here expecting to be in the company of an imp, a Hellhound, a Betrayed, and three Sinners. When that ratio tilted to include one Angel, he had completely understandable concerns as to the safety of the ongoing mission. Much of the training that Jun-Ho had run them all through was regarding how to avoid Angels altogether, after all.

Rather difficult if she was one.

She had little she could do about Striker's distrust on the granular level, though. She knew that she was going to help Angel Dust reunite with his sister. And likely help Cain reunite with his brother, if circumstances allowed. That her goals were obvious to her but not to the imp, that was just a sad fact of reality that telepathy only existed for a select few, of whom few used it well. She would simply have to showcase that her goals and his aligned. And as a shadow fell over her window, as the next Cloud up finally loomed into view, she knew that it would be a narrow line to toe. It didn't bother her. Her mortal life was one of unending precarity. She was very used to this.

"Charity," Jun-Ho said, leaning down to look through the window, his Glamour standing an awkward distance away because of his actual dimensions. "Less people, more arable land, but by far not enough."

"What should we be expecting?" Striker asked, while he reloaded his now maintained and reassembled revolver.

"From the looks of things, a long walk. If they tore up all the lines leading down to Probity, they likely tore up most of the lines leading up to Kindness as well," Jun-Ho said. He stopped, pondering. "They must be growing increasingly desperate. But for what reason?"

"How 'long of a walk' are you talking about?" Striker asked.

"We will need to go to a… confidante's place. Saul David. One of the Biblical Innocent, from not long after Jesus' death," Jun-Ho said. "He'll have kept his ear to the ground, and would know which Tram station is still operational."

"And if he's Gone Numb?" Angel Dust asked, a grim look on his face.

"Then I will have to cultivate a new confidante, and learn from them. Which would take several days to a week, perhaps," Jun-Ho said.

"Station's coming," Striker said. "Game faces."

Those who had been 'resting' as much as they allowed themselves to on Heavenly infrastructure began to pull themselves back into their roles, of the huddled masses trying to get away from conflict. All but Roz. She had to build up a haughty and arrogant visage of one of Heaven's oppressors. She would have damned fate for this, because it wasn't what she and Cain had prepared for. And beyond that she was not an expert actor.

There was a small lurch, and the train came to a halt just as it had started. The doors hissed open, and the melodic voice announced their arrival at something called Little Elysium, and that there was maintenance ongoing on the track ahead, so to expect delays. Jun-Ho had guessed right. They were ripping up tracks to make it hard to get around.

She was the first out, with Jun-Ho just behind her and Uller behind him, squeezing past the broken war materiel. And out here, true to Striker's expectation, there were far more Angels up here than there had been below, and the defenses were layered to prevent an attacking force from getting out of the train itself.

"Hold there," a massive, muscular Angel asked. He was a gorgeous man, seeming about a decade older than she'd been when she died but one who took immaculate care of himself, with eyes shockingly blue. But there was something shadowed in those eyes. Something she knew to distrust. "What's all this about?"

"I'm returning them to Cloud T– Charity," she corrected herself. Angels called these places by their Throne, not by their number. Then, almost lamely as afterthought she added. "Their building was taken by the Hellspawn."

"What else is new?" the large Angel asked. He turned to another. "Hey! Birah!"

"I'm busy!" the voice of Birah came from around a corner, sounding much less overtly masculine than this one but clearly still male.

"We've got another train of broken shit!"

"Tell that to Yael! I'm not a mechanic, damn it all," Birah said. The Angel himself approached, and as he did, Roz had been giving a glance back to the others, and saw that Uller grew tight like an over-cranked spring to look at this one. Roz didn't see the reason. Unlike the massive, thick-armed Angel who had corralled them out of the train, Birah was much more delicate, his fingers long and his face narrow. Birah was looking at a clip-board, not even paying any attention to them all as he came to a halt in front of the yet-unnamed muscular angel. "I have ten thousand other things I need to get done as of yesterday. If you have something that needs fixing, take it up with those who are tasked with such things."

"You need to get that stick out of your ass, Birah," the big Angel asked.

"And you need to stop wasting my time, Yeqon," Birah said, finally raising his eyes from his clipboard. Then he turned to Roz. The smaller Angel blinked, shock clear in his eyes for just an instant, before it vanished as though it hadn't been there at all. Roz only noticed it because she had been looking at him in that critical moment. If she had been distracted for so much as a blink she would have missed it entirely. "And what about you? Do you have more busy-work to dump onto my lap?"

Roz instantly was uncomfortable by Birah's presence. His eyes, a grey that looked like a cloudy sky, were fixated on her, and with her new, magical sense, she could sense that he was not just scrutinizing her visually, but magically as well.

"I have no business with Birah," she said, opting for a dismissive tone. She could as much as sense that Uller was edging away from the group, pulling Maelstrom along with him as he went. "So long as you don't try to saddle me with your workload, I should say good day."

"Yeqon, don't let them leave," Birah said, his voice so casual but the words leaving her blood cold.

Yeqon, the muscular Angel, turned a confused look to Birah, but when Birah's expression was serious, Yeqon had his wings spread from his back and a mace of living flame burn into being in his hand. Birah then turned to Roz.

"I know the names of all of the Grigori," Birah said, staring her down. "I knew the names of every Nephilim to have been born, and even the name of the single one who was denied that luxury. I know the identities of all of the Thirdborn, those born by Penemue's Gambit. And yet, despite all that… I don't know you."

"I am…" Roz began, but then realized that a human name might be viewed askance.

"A Thirdborn," Yeqon asked. He tightened his grip on his burning mace. "Birah… if she's Thirdborn, why are you…?"

"If there's a Thirdborn that I don't know the name of, why would you think that is?" Birah asked, entirely rhetorically. The other Angels, so basic to Roz's sight that they faded almost literally into the background were now returning to the fore, weapons blazing to life. "She was Awakened since the start of the War. And when, exactly, did our kind stop Judging souls?"

Yeqon clearly still didn't get it, which annoyed Birah.

"She's on Hell's side, you oaf," Birah finally made it clear. There was a dull hum in the background as Angelsong began to sound, the various Angels preparing for war. Roz wasn't about to allow that, though. She launched to kick him in the face, to put him down long enough for her people to flee. But Yeqon, for all he had the social acumen of a sand-pit, was swift enough to catch her launched leg, and heave her off of the ground, smashing her into the side of the Intertram train hard enough to outright derail the thing. And though it hurt, she couldn't feel any of the trademark sensations of ripped muscles or broken bones. She was still stuck in an awkward pose, unable to get her root under her to fight back.

Birah took that moment to wave his hand over Striker and the others. And as he did, their Glamours were all shredded apart, revealing to Heaven what they actually were; a pair of imps, a pair of Sinners, and a man in Power Armor the likes of which one could only purchase in Hell. Of the lot of them, only Maelstrom's Glamour remained standing.

Instantly, an Angel raced down to try to impale Uller and Maelstrom, but Maelstrom managed to do much the same to that Angel as Yeqon had done to Roz, intercepting the heedless rush and hurling him, bodily, into the derailed train; the added impact to the still overbalanced train caused the thing to tip over all the way onto its side. That finally gave Roz the leverage to hurl Yeqon beyond her, to stand, and to unfurl her own scarlet wings.

Yeqon was fast, but Birah was the obvious threat here. Cain instantly lashed out with magic, trying to stall the Angel Mage, but Birah was able to unravel Cain's assaults with contemptuous ease, before twisting and clenching his fist. Roz could see bruises well up around Birah's eyes, as somehow the Angel managed to invoke a Thaumaturgy in calling up the Black Binds to drag Cain to the ground. Roz launched herself, not at Yeqon, who was goading her to attack, but at Birah. If magic would not defeat him, then perhaps simple might would do better.

Birah saw her coming. Another wave of his arm, and his body seemed to… smear, spreading out in all directions as though his being were being spread too far like too little butter over too much bread, so that when she tried to crash into him, she instead passed as a breeze through an open window through him. Still, she wasn't about to let that slide. She had magic of her own. And while he was now collocating into a space larger than his own body, she had ways of attacking an area like that. So she called forth that magic of the Fiends of Wrath, and felt her cold blood run hot as a pillar of flame erupted up from Birah's feet, red and angry.

There was a pop, and Birah returned to a solid body, followed by a loud finger-snap. The flames parted, and Birah, robes not even smoking, emerged from the hellfire. In his hands were a set of striking sticks, the kind used in musical performances. She knew what was coming. Instead of trying to flail and launch a magic that Birah would undo, she instead took a low stance, sweeping her wings up in front of her and rooting her feet, so that when Birah struck his claves together and from them launched a shockwave of stunning force she was not unready. If Roz had done anything other than root herself against it, it would have struck her like a train and dashed her into the ground, likely sweeping her along with its force until it cratered her into the nearest wall. As it was, she only just managed to have it part along the bulwark of her wings and her solid posture.

She couldn't afford to let him do that again. Even thought he others were now busy fighting for their lives, the vast majority of the Angels up here seemed locked and stunned by the audacity of Hellspawn reaching Cloud 2, which meant that most of the resistance was being weathered by Roz herself. And she could take it. With the instants ticking past fatally, she ripped up a chunk of concrete from the damaged floor and hurled it at Birah, hoping to at least disrupt him long enough that she could close on him again. But Yeqon dashed that hope by bursting the chunk with his mace, and interposing himself in front of Birah. Still, that cut off line-of-sight to that Angelic wizard, so she finally dared do what she hadn't until now; she reached out with her own magic, and she scythed at the thaumaturgical Black Binds holding Cain down, so that he could join the fray and help the others.

Doing so took exactly long enough for Yeqon to launch himself at her and swing that mace in a horrid, baseball swing aiming for her chest in a bid to pulp her ribs. She was only just barely able to cushion the impact with her forearm, and she felt the bones there creak, the hit still launching her rolling along the side of the overturned train until she remembered that she had wings now, and could flare them to parachute herself. Instinct screamed at her as she came to a halt, and she twisted a wing out of the way and leaned aside, just barely managing to dodge out of the way of a whistling sword-blade that another Angel had used to ambush her from behind. And thanks to her unusual angle, she could continue to twist her momentum to launch a brutal kick into the gut of the ambusher as she did.

She felt metal crumple under her shin, the Angel's plate deforming and digging into the Angel's belly, before he was sent rocketing away in a streak, crashing into and through one of the barricades which made it hard to get out of the killbox she was standing in. She had to flap her wings hard, driving her downward against the windows of the train, because Yeqon was racing at her, mace swinging; she shattered her way through the windows and avoided the bludgeoning, and the instant her feet hit the shattered glass below, she pushed off, using her entire body as a spear to tackle the Angel and cause him to fly spiraling away with his vector so poisoned by her impulse.

Roz gave a look back, to the others. Striker was a portrait of focus, but that focus was paying him dividends, because of the three angels mobbing he, Cain, and Jun-Ho, his attacker could not land a hit on him, as though Striker had prepared specifically to counter the Angel to the point of rote repetition. Cain and Jun-Ho weren't so fortunate. Cain's attacker may have been less skilled, but Cain had to sacrifice hits to get counterattacks. And Jun-Ho may have matched the Angel he was grappled with, strength for strength, but it was clear that Cain would be put out of the fight if the Angel got in any way lucky.

Another glance, to the Hellspawn. Uller and Maelstrom were retreating, cocooned under the protective aegis of a storm of high-velocity lead; with Angel Dust abandoning subtlety, he used all six of his arms to fire at anything which dared to approach. While the Angels were well armored, they were obviously not as impervious as an Exorcist was. And though three had mobilized against their squad as well, one of them was already dead, his face punched concave and his Halo flared out, leaving Maelstrom's fists and face covered in golden blood.

There was magic lashing out at her, a mixture of human magicks that she had learned from Cain. He said that he'd invented that combination to end fights quickly, by shutting off his opponents sensory organs that he may physically disassemble them. Birah managed to converge on the exact same tactic that Cain had, down to the same defense that Cain had taught her being effective at preventing herself from being rendered deaf and blind. Birah, unlike the others, who were pressing in, was content to stand back, glaring with a hand generally held out toward her as though using it as a focus, while more spells began to launch. Spells that turned friction of the air to that of tar. Spells that made air abrade anything which passed through it as though one were walking through a sand-blaster. Spells that added heat to magic and hyperoxygenated them, intended to punish any attempt of using magic of her own against him by making it explode her in flame if she tried.

So she heaved with mere physical might, tearing herself out of the tar-air, ignoring the pain of it ripping at her skin, and flopped down on the far side of the train from Birah. She gave her head a shake. That hurt like a bastard, but she still more or less felt alright. So she quickly grabbed the metal of the car that she was flat up against, and with a massive heave, launched it out and away from her. Directly to where she was fairly sure Birah would ascend to to regain line-of-sight on her.

There was an abrupt pause in the magical onslaught she was weathering as, lost to the noise of conflict, Birah had to Transit away to avoid getting splattered by a hand-launched train; the rest of the train, that which didn't decouple entirely from the car she had 'yeeted', flailed onto the train-platform like a snapped rope. She hoped that she didn't hit any of her allies with it. She hoped that she did hit one of her opponents.

No pause to collect herself; instantly she was attacked from both the fore and behind. Yeqon was swinging for her face, while another, which she had glimpsed only in the flashing reflections of a car being launched into the air showed another Angel trying to spit her from behind. She launched herself off her feet, a flop the likes of which was used by pole-vaulters to surmount the rail that put her parallel the ground above the thrusting sword, but below the mace, as both managed to miss her. She swung her wings out, one of them outright 'grabbing' Yeqon and hurling him through the door of the decoupled next-car in the train, while the other left her able to grab the ambushing angel behind her by the back of his neck, and slam him down.

And when she dropped, she could see that there were the two rails that ran the Intertram, and then a third one, which her talks with Addam had explained to her were the source of the electricity that the engine of this train used to function.

She slammed the chest of the Angel down onto the third-rail, allowing his armor to fry him while only causing her hand to spasm painfully. She held him there for as much time as she dared, which wasn't much, then kicked off. The Angel wasn't dead, because his Halo still burned, but he was obviously not going to be a problem for a bit. Her wings flapped, and she looked to her comrades. She only just managed to spot Cain as his left arm was cut off, but in so losing it he managed to have a War Sign that the Elder Devils invented crash to its completion. There was a horrifying bass thud in the air, the air going violet as a beam of unspeakable force smashed the Angel who had disarmed him was sent flying into the distance, the beam outright shredding the defenses of this place. Then, with a look of pain and focus on his face, he hurled himself so that for just a moment, he was touching his stump to Jun-Ho's back and his remaining hand to Striker's shoulder.

There was a loud metal bang, and the three of them vanished.

If she were a betting woman, she would have guessed that Birah would be returning right about… now. She pulled from the air the ambient misery of Heaven and congealed it, and turned as quickly as she dared. There were other Angels converging on her, but she didn't fear them nearly as much as she did an accomplished mage, for that was the far bigger threat to her. True to her predictions, there was a fluttering lost to the din of combat and Birah reappeared. The instant he did, he turned to her and raised up a clenched fist. The air around her snapped into horrifying cold, colder than anything she'd ever experienced outside the walk-in-freezer of the Hotel. And though she could see frost growing on the surface of her skin, she was still able to launch her Pain Elemental.

Birah slapped it aside as it approached her, and it dissolved into useless grey smoke.

Well that wasn't good.

There was a sound of flame erupting, and from the corner of Roz's eye, she could see Maelstrom grabbing Uller as he stumbled, and dragging himself, the imp, and Angel Dust through a portal that snapped shut again an instant after they were through it. That left her alone, against eighteen Angels.

Well.

Not ideal.

There was an impact that struck her aside, as a section of the wall, propelled by Yeqon, hit her in the side. And she had to twist for all she was worth to avoid two other Angels mobbing and stabbing at her. A sweep of her wing managed to get her past them, but she then had to block an incoming blade with her hand – a hand which split open to leak golden blood – which managed to stop the blade from carving her arm off, but it was a close thing. She front-kicked that Angel to send him streaking away, only to have a punishing blow hit her in the back of the head, sending her flopping onto the platform.

She gave her head a shake, and then thrust her wings down, popping her off the platform before a dozen golden crossbow quarrels peppered her. She needed a way out of here. She couldn't possibly hope to solo all of these Angels at once.

But as Yeqon raced toward her, his mace swinging in brutal arcs, she saw vanishingly few options. Stay and die. Flee and die. Fight and die. Surrender and die. Of those options, only one of them appealed to her pride. And none of them appealed to her sense of self-preservation. Still, a resigned part of her noted, she had managed to buy the others time to escape. That had to be worth something.

Yeqon's blow was going to hurt to block. She could tell that much already. But still, she started to get her arms up, to shield herself.

Then there was a flash of crimson light, and a wall of armor was in front of her, vivid and red like blood dyed cotton, the back of an armor panoply made of sharp angles and aggressive planes. There was a gong of impact, and the armored figure swept Yeqon's mace-arm aside with a heater-shield, before front-kicking the Angel away. There was a great sweep of her wings, wings utterly devoid of feathers, like those of a bat.

Or a dragon.

There was an ice-like shattering sound as the dragon-knight swept that shield up and darted between Roz and a barrage of golden, holy quarrels, then tilted that shield so that it could outright halt an attempt by Yeqon on his return to sweep it away. The dragon-knight flipped in the air, grabbing Yeqon by his face with a gauntleted hand and hurling him like a vengeance into the ruin of the train once more. Roz sensed another blade racing toward her from behind, as the Angels weren't above ambush. But while Roz turned to ward the sword coming for her, the dragon-knight instantly was there, no noise of teleportation, simply blocking the path of the blade with its shield. And for just a moment, Roz could see that on the arm strapped to that shield, there was no hand.

Birah rose up again, and this time made a gathering gesture, before casting his arm in a broad sweep. From it came ruinous crash as a dozen lightning bolts all manifested out of the naked air and raced toward the pair of enigmatic allies. The six that had targeted the dragon-knight all missed utterly, because the dragon-knight had chosen to intercept all six that were bound for Rozarin, somehow for just an instant being in six places at once, before it resolved into one body.

The other Angels took that as a sign to abandon any restraint they still had left in them. Yeqon erupted from the ruined train to a tearing of metal, and all remaining Angels simply mobbed them, sixteen combatants launching in without mercy or pause. Roz managed to hurl one of them past her and into another, to duck and spin in the air to deliver a kick to the back of his head. But the dragon-knight was supreme, outright ignoring attacks bound for itself, and instead dedicating itself utterly into preventing anything from reaching harm from getting to Roz, again multiplying itself out until there were ten of itself, each of them blocking an Angel from closing on them. Until, finally, there was crackling in the air, as Birah brought to bear an Anchor, to lock the two in place so that such trickery would be disallowed.

"That's our cue to leave," the dragon-knight said with a woman's voice, one voice shockingly familiar.

The dragon-knight resolved into one of herself, and on the far side of her head from Rozarin there flared into being a circular pane of brilliant light. With her gauntleted hand she grabbed Roz's shoulder. Then, without so much as a sound, before Birah could finish Anchoring this section of Cloud 2, both of them were gone.

---

Maelstrom was holding Uller up, as the imp carefully rebuilt one of his eyes that had outright burst under the backlash of daring to portal here in Heaven. That had gone very badly, very quickly. And though Maelstrom had managed to kill one Angel and maim another, there were simply too many coming at him too fast for him to stop them all. He knew that Uller had made the right choice to scatter. But now that meant he was stuck in Heaven with only a fraction of their total resources, food for maybe a week or two, in hostile and unfamiliar territory.

"Is he gonna live?" Angel Dust asked, tying one of his arms into a sling so that it wouldn't bother him while it Regenerated. Uller's portal had taken them into the inside of an empty warehouse, one musty and ill maintained, that seemed more rust and decay than actual substance. Still, it was dark, it was private, and it gave them a place to take a breath.

"I'll live… but we need to start moving," Uller said.

"Wh… why?" Angel Dust asked.

"D'you remember the skinny Angel, the one with the grey eyes?" Uller asked.

"Oh, yeah, the wizard guy. What about him?" Angel Dust asked.

"That was Birah the Spellbinder," Uller said. Angel Dust shrugged. Maelstrom likewise didn't see the importance. "Birah is one of the extremely few Angels mentioned in the Codex Cruac in Alabaster as 'capable of performing thaumaturgy'. Which means he's as dangerous a mage as the Angels have ever produced. He'll be able to trace the portal's destination. Which means we have to move before he does."

"He's not wrong," Maelstrom said, puffing out a breath. "Where are we, by the way?"

"I dropped us into Scatterpoint 2AC," Uller said. Maelstrom motioned to provide more information, even as the imp began to hobble toward the closed doors of this sad, vacant food-warehouse. "Jun-Ho provided a bunch of places that we are to run to on all of the lower clouds. The fact that I got us inside the warehouse means that his prep was good. And he had rendezvous points as well."

"So we head toward one of those," Angel Dust said.

"One in particular. Two Beta," Uller said. He tried to open the door, but there was a lock, well above his current ability to reach. Maelstrom undid the lock for the young man. Opening the door revealed that this building edged the Rat Towers and looked upon fields of weak looking potatoes, their greens meager as though they were growing as much as they could in soil which gave them very little. "And we should go there fast, because we haven't got enough food to reach there, let alone stay for any length of time, before we start to starve."

"Are you sure we can just… you know…" Angel Dust motioned out. Because his human disguise occasionally glitched, damaged by whatever that Birah angel had done to tear it off.

"We have to. I'm not starving to death in Heaven," Uller said. They began to walk through the rows of spuds, moving toward the approaching wall of sloppily built towers on the far side of what the fields could offer. About half way across the field, Angel Dust grumbled for a moment, pulling Maelstrom's attention to him.

"What is it?" Maelstrom asked.

"It's just… am I the only one relieved that we actually got spotted? 'Cause I was startin' to think this whole fuckin' thing was a trap with how smooth it was goin'," Angel Dust said.

"Getting things to 'go smooth', is the ideal," Maelstrom said.

"Not the way things go for me," Angel Dust grumbled.

"Then you're not putting enough preparation into it," Uller offered.

"Bite me, pipsqueak," Angel Dust snapped.

"But to be fair to you, we did get almost-suspiciously far before somebody noticed us," Maelstrom admitted. He gave a shrug. "It's good to be good, but it's great to be lucky."

"I guess," Angel Dust said. He was silent for a time, as they crossed the rest of the field and moved to the towers on its far side.

"Are you feeling better?" Maelstrom asked the imp, next.

"Portalling is insanely draining. I barely have any ethers to fix my own body," Uller grumbled.

"That's not what I meant. Are you feeling better about… your thing," Maelstrom kept what was spoken about in confidence and private, in confidence and private.

Uller turned to him, and then gave a slightly pained laugh. "You know, I think I am. I've survived an ambush by Angels, and got away with everybody I could reach. Even she can't claim that."

"She can't claim what?" Angel Dust nosed in.

"I wasn't talking to you," Maelstrom said.

"Yeah, well, we's travelin' together and I'm bored, so spill the tea," Angel Dust said.

"I really don't…" Uller began.

"He's scoring points against his girlfriend to prove who's 'the better wizard'," Maelstrom gave the least flattering and thus most-acceptable-to-a-Sinner version of things. Uller turned a look of dismay to Maelstrom for a moment, as they entered the ruts that ran between buildings, and the daylight instantly died to shadow and filth.

"The same one who told my bro 'Fuck no' a couple years back?" Angel Dust asked.

"I presume so," Maelstrom said.

"Well, he's soytenly a fuck-tonne braver, that's for sure," Angel Dust said with a laugh.

"I'm not trying to eclipse my girlfriend," Uller began.

"Aren't you though?" Maelstrom teased. Uller stared daggers at him. Well, let him. Maelstrom was at least honest with himself that he needed to have at least one victory that Loona hadn't yet matched to see himself as within her league. And Loona had not, as yet, tangled directly with Angels. In fact, just by pounding one of their faces in with his bare fists, he already had all of the victory that deep-down he felt he needed. Everything else that happened from now on was just bottom-bucket-bacon, deeply satisfying, deeply rich, and saturated with heart-stopping deliciousness.

"I miss when you were a nervous wreck," Uller muttered.

"I'm just being honest with myself. What about you, friend? Do you have somebody to go home to?"

"What? You think I wanna tie myself down?" Angel Dust asked with scandalous tone. "The only person I'm 'goin' home with', is my sistah, and that's to get her outta all 'a this shit!" he gestured aggressively around him, as they crossed another 'intersection', and finally reached a point where there were actual Innocent walking the 'streets'. Angel Dust didn't need prompting to clam up about their Hellish provenance, which meant he was learning. "I don't need nobody down there waitin'. Now does that mean I ain't gonna fuck a guy when I get back? Noooo~o!"

Maelstrom rolled his eyes, as they passed by some emaciated Innocent, people who didn't give them a second glance as they passed them by. Then, a grim thought occurred to him. "Uller?" he asked. The imp in his newly-built Glamour, one showing him actually looking ill atop starving as was appropriate for his state. "Do you think everybody else got out?"

"The Old Man and Jun-Ho? Absolutely," Uller said. "They're mages. They have ways. Striker… only if he was with them. Roz, though. Roz I don't know about. Angels who use… that kind of magic… alright let me start from the beginning; people who aren't like me use that magic, it injures them," Uller said, choosing his words carefully as they now had to navigate through glassy-eyed Innocent to get to an area of lower traffic. "When people like Roz use that magic, it outright poisons them. If Birah's willing to use Black Binds on The Old Man, then that means he's invented some way to ignore the poisonous side-effect of that magic on Angelic physiology."

"And Roz don't know that," Angel Dust mused.

"No, unless The Old Man informed her on matters of magical miscellany from the Codex," he said, pausing as they had to flatten against a wall to let a knot of people with badly eroded, wooden tools pass the direction the Hellspawn were coming from, "she wouldn't learn about that until she tried it. And… well…"

"And she's not in a good place where she can afford to learn that lesson," Maelstrom muttered.

"This moping and bawling won't do her any good," Angel Dust decided, and there was just a fraction of a flicker where Maelstrom saw, only for an instant, Angel Dust's actual form, before his Glamour restored itself and made him look like a starving human again. Maelstrom winced, but Angel Dust continued talking despite him. "She's either tough enough that she don't need our help, or she's already dead. We just got a place to go and days to get there."

"Angel, your Disguise," Uller said with low tone.

"What about it?" Angel Dust asked. There was another flicker, not as blatant as the first, but Maelstrom found himself glancing above the Glamour's head for a moment to where Angel Dust's eyes actually were, as opposed to where they were projected onto the magical manikin. Maelstrom gave his head a shake.

"It's shorting. When we bunker down for the night, I'll need to take it down and fix it," Uller said.

"You can do that?" Angel Dust asked, and Uller gave a curt nod. He frowned. "Why's mine the only one fuckin' up? Why ain't yous twos'?"

"I built mine myself, and it's fueled by my personal magic," Uller said.

"I paid extra for the shielding option so it wouldn't get disrupted," Maelstrom said. Uller turned a deeply confused look at him. "I work in the Human World! I don't want a random blip to let people see what I really am!"

"Not judging," Uller said with a warding gesture, as they entered into a section which actually had sunlight reaching the bottom. Faint steam rose from the pools of water standing and stagnant here, as the sun fought to evaporate them before the sweep of the ball of plasma in the sky would be interrupted again by the irregular wall that was the Rat Towers. Here, there was a different kind of warehouse, one that had signs of wood torn down from it and splintered on the ground. As they walked past it, toward their far-distant destination.

Though the sign was shattered, it clearly said Vox Populi, Vox Dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God.

He trailed the others for a moment, looking into the darkened warehouse, and saw how it was arranged not to hold goods but instead people. A covert auditorium. One mashed and mangled, as though ransacked. His instincts pinged at him and he glanced up and behind, and saw just for a moment a human's face pulling back out from watching through a window. His eyes narrowed. He didn't know what to make of this, but what he didn't know would likely do its best to kill him. He dropped the broken signage and followed after the two men who each held a portion of his all important food. He had no intention of starving here. He had a legend to go home to.

---

The dark of night was soothing to Striker, a balm against easy viewing now that they were creeping along like snakes in the grass. He would have known that things would go bad in a big way. But even still, he'd made it to Cloud 2. That was already farther than any imp thus far in all of Creation's history had made it. The only downside to that achievement was that it meant he'd only barely made it half way to his actual goal.

Heaven was quite unlike Hell in that it actually went to sleep, as a society, not long after the sun was down. With less-than-ample sources of electrical power, and way too many fucking people to spread it thin across, added to the complete lack of food for most people to eat, it made it clear to the ambitious imp that these dead humans more or less just took the darkness as an excuse to get a three course meal of sleep, dreams, and snoring.

It made their job easier. With Jun-Ho again leading the way, they carved their way through Charity, heading toward Jun-Ho's vaunted rendezvous point. He knew that the kid, the hound, and the whore made it out. He wasn't sure that the Angel was so lucky. But to her credit, she certainly bought them the time that they needed to make good their escapes. According to Cain, he didn't even sense an Angel trip his ward at their teleport-point until nearly an hour after they'd left the area. Maybe she wasn't such a narc after all.

He didn't linger on such thoughts, merely pausing as Jun-Ho waved them aside, and into the stoop of a building. He obviously saw something that the others hadn't. Which wouldn't do, because Striker splashed cash on this replacement eye for a goddamned reason. He narrowed his perception through the eye he wasn't born with, and through it he could see the somehow both-dim-and-overbright forms in the distance. Angels. They were only visible briefly, though, before their signature faded, passing behind a distant building.

"They lookin' for us?" Striker asked.

"We must behave as though they are," the Betrayed in his power armor said. And that right there was a prudent opinion to hold and one that showed that he, unlike most people Striker had to deal with, was a fucking professional. "Give me a moment. I need to think of a new route."

"What? Don't know this place like the back of your hand?" Striker asked, half teasing, as he grabbed a calorically dense biscuit from his pocket and began to gnaw on it.

"Heaven, as I'm sure you'll now attest, is rather large," Jun-Ho said rather neutrally. Striker turned to Cain, who had a worried look on his face, glancing back whence they came.

"Think they're following us as well?" Striker asked.

"I'm concerned about Rozarin," Cain admitted. His Glamour showed one arm dangling useless at his side, concealing the fact that in reality that limb was missing entirely, having to slowly regrow itself. It was probably lucky for Cain that the Angel had used that burning metal and not Angel Steel to make that cut. Otherwise Cain would have been down a primary hand for the rest of his eternal damnation.

"She did alright," Striker admitted with appropriate begrudgingness.

"She only has aptitude at Least Teleportation," Cain continued. "Which only can move one to within line-of-sight. It would not be able to save her from The Spellbinder. He could track her 'till the end of Heaven."

"The who?" Striker asked, washing the biscuit down with unpleasantly warm, but at least actually clean, water.

"The frail-seeming Angel amongst the beacons of might. I have not seen Birah since I was alive. And he was a terrific sorcerer even in those distant days," Cain said. "Against his skill, Roz has no recourse."

"...then take comfort in that she probably went down swinging," Striker said.

"I would prefer that she not 'go down' at all," Cain said, but nodded regardless. "But if her sacrifice, in the end, sees me to my brother, I will live with it. And I will remember her always in helping me achieve it."

"We're going to have to stop sooner rather than later," Jun-Ho intruded.

"Why?" Striker demanded.

"My gear has batteries, and they can't recharge all the way unless they're under sunlight for at least a few hours of the day. The solar scoops don't work at night, obviously, and only sort of work in the shadow. Considering the amount of my comrades' food that I'm carrying, I wouldn't want to have to leave it behind," the Innocent pointed out, once again being a voice for reason in the troupe.

"You need to fix some broken bits, I'm guessing," Striker said.

"That, too," Jun-Ho admitted. He'd taken a direct hit by an Angel during their flight from the tram-station, and though the armor didn't shatter entirely, it was clear that it was a damaged piece of kit. And damaged kit slowed soldiers down, when it didn't outright stop them.

And still, it vexed Striker, to have to give up the protective cover of the night. During the day, the Angels could spot them pretty much from any distance if the line of sight allowed. The darkness imparted a veil that even they couldn't penetrate easily. Sure, there were likely a few who could, like that guy Forfax that Cain talked about, but the fact that he could specifically name those who could see through darkness and couldn't even count those who could not told Striker that it was a rare gift amongst their kind.

A few Angels could see in the darkness, whereas an entire clade of imp figured that out, to the tune of hundreds of millions of the fuckers.

Another brick in the arising supremacy of the imp over the Chain of Being. They'd quietly developed strengths that exploited other species' weaknesses for eons. And now, at last, there were people – people like Striker – who were using them to their utmost.

While Striker's own night-vision wasn't spectacular with his living eye, the metal one made up the difference. So when he let out an alarmed hiss and dragged the two humans, be they Innocent or decidedly not, down another path perpendicular to their intended direction, they offered no complaint and heeded him without question.

There had been an Angel flying slowly toward them, surveilling the ground that ran between the tumors of the Rat Towers of Cloud 2.

"Did we turn the corner soon enough?" Cain asked, his tone returned to focus.

"I don't intend to give 'em a chance to find out," Striker muttered, taking another turn as soon as it was able, and then snarling when he saw another Angel, hovering overhead, attentions on the lowly. But this one, unlike the previous one, was heading in the same direction they were.

"I've got him on scope," Jun-Ho said, raising his arm.

"Don't be a daft bastard," Striker said. As much as he despised the living embodiments of haughtiness that the Angels were from Halo to foot-sole, he also knew that they weren't complete idiots. To fire at one would call others. He looked around, and found a comparatively squat building that had its doors left open, faint orange light leaking out into the street. If the Angels were scouring the streets, Hell's best interest was not to be in them. And if Jun-Ho was as hard up as he said… well. Time was on their side more than it was on their misplaced companions.

Striker was the first through the door, and he immediately heard something he didn't expect to hear from this section of heaven. A hammer being cocked back.

He stopped, looking with his metal eye against the glare; it was immune to fry-in the way his living eye wasn't, so he could see that standing before the lights so that he was cast in shadow was a human-like form, halo reduced to a guttering line above his head. And he clearly had a gun.

Striker wasn't having any of that. With lightning speed, his augmetic arm stripped his secondary iron from its holster and fired the first bullet in its cylinder, which he had rather hopefully loaded with a Silent Night. The gun bucked in his hand silently, and there was a spark and a metal clang as the bullet hit the gun of the other guy, causing him to recoil back and yelp with alarm.

He was about to pull in close and fan the hammer, dropping him, but from his left, he heard the clear sound of a gun-safety being released. And he turned, to see a shotgun pointed at him. Pump action, but clearly hand-made from whatever was available. The barrel was really short. Likely only held three shells at a time. At this distance, he might get lucky and it wouldn't have enough umph to get through his spellwoven jacket. But luck was not a resource old killers like him liked to depend upon.

"Easy there, partner," Striker said, as the other two, who had been about to follow blithely after him, instead took up places outside the entrance doors. "No need to do something we'll all regret."

"You're fast, little man," the shotgunner said with an accent like that dumb clown in charge of Greed. He approached closer, making it so that not even luck would save Striker if his finger got twitchy. His halo ignited, and… for just a moment, Striker thought a Hellhound had gotten up here. Only the details betrayed it. Whatever this Innocent was, he was clearly no Hound. "Never met a cunt who could out-draw my mate over there."

"I try to be. Why is it you've got a gun in Heaven, friend?" Striker asked. He didn't know what the others were doing, but given they were sensible people, it was likely getting ready to ambush this guy from another direction.

"Some cunts need to be taught a lesson, don't they, Lester?" the shotgunner asked.

"Fuckin' right they do," the other said, picking his gun back up, quickly checking it to make sure it wasn't non-functional, then pointing it at Striker again. Now that the light was on him, he, too had an animal appearance, with short snout and blunted ears and muscles thick and corded, all under a gapped halo. "Might want to fuck right off with ya! We don't like the notion of cunts sliding in here in the dark!"

The shotgunner prove to be at least half-professional, in that he stopped his approach three meters away, more than far enough to keep even a truly shocking lunge from grabbing his iron while still giving him time to ventilate any who was stupid enough to try. "Which side are you on, wee-man?"

"What are you talking about?" Striker asked. There was a way out of this. He just had to find it.

"Gabriel's or Michael's?" the shotgunner asked.

"Mate, just had a brainwave," Lester said.

"Whuzzit?" the shotgunner asked.

"You saw it, din't'cha? That flick?" Lester said, staring over his gun at Striker.

Oh for fuck's sake.

There was a snap, and Striker quickdrew his other gun with his other hand, pointing it at the shotgunner. Both of them bit off profanities at his lightning-fast movement. "Let's all just be sensible now. Ain't no reason tonight needs to end red."

"I just saw it, Lester," the shotgunner said.

"I fuckin' told you so! Those were fuckin' horns!"

Of course his Glamour chose now to fuck up.

"You're here from Hell, en't ya, ya li'l cunt?" Lester asked.

"Fuck you," Striker said.

The two humans gave a look to each other.

Then the shotgunner lowered his weapon. "What in the sweet fuck you doin' way the fuck up here, ye daft bint?" the shotgunner asked. "You gonna move all that shit yer doin' down on One up here, next?"

Striker looked between the two of them, eyes narrowed. They were legitimately relieved to see he was a demon. From Hell. In Heaven. Well that certainly didn't fucking add up by his mathematical system. Only when Lester's gun got slid into a sloppily hand-made holster did Striker ease the hammers down on his guns. And from behind him approached Cain and Jun-Ho, wary as cats in a dog-kennel.

"Might as well let that disguise down, mate. Ain't but the five of us here," Lester said.

"And I'm supposed to trust you when you're standing in the perfect place to shoot us all?"

"D'ya think we're fuckin' mental?" the shotgunner asked. He shrugged his shotgun toward Jun-Ho. "I can feel the floor shake every time that one steps. He's gotta be a fuckin' ute under that mask 'a his!"

"A what?" Cain asked.

"Don't ask me, I can barely understand what they're saying through those accents," Jun-Ho offered. Great. So the imp was going to have to play translator, because by some quirk of an impish brain he knew that 'ute' meant 'truck'. The shotgunner slung his iron over his shoulder, which finally got Striker to put away exactly one of his guns. The other he kept out. In case they got squirrelly.

"You've got problems with the Angels," Striker posited.

"Right cunts, a lot of 'em!" Lester spat onto the floor, which in Striker's opinion was a proper opinion to hold of their kind. "And won't be our Drama for much longer. If you can get up here, then we can get down there."

"If you had wanted to go down, why didn't you just go down before the war?" Cain asked.

"What? And not visit Tommy's Ma? Not fuckin' likely," Lester said, gesturing to the shotgunner who now at last had a name. "Just by the time we got 'round to comin' back, all the platforms were fucked."

"Proper fucked," Tommy added.

"That's unfortunate," Jun-Ho said. He then gestured around them. "So what is… this?"

"Fuck if we know. It's abandoned and it's quiet and the fuck-heads can't see us from up top. It's a place to sleep," Tommy said. He pointed to Striker with his elbow. "Do demons need to eat?"

"What?" Cain asked.

"Simple as, do demons need to eat?" Tommy asked again.

"Why are you asking?" Striker asked.

"Don't know if you've noticed, but it's a bit peckish up here. Ain't eaten in a month or two," Lester said. "I'd give a man a reach-round for a bikkie."

"Les, don't be gross," Tommy said, as though this was something the two of them had to do a lot, both in life and in death.

"...I will," Jun-Ho said, causing Striker to glance back at him. "On one condition."

"Well?" Lester asked, tucking his thumbs behind the suspenders that were holding his ratty pants up.

"Saul David. Do you know the name?" Jun-Ho asked.

"Oh fuck, the farmer-man! Yeah, he's why we et this year!" Tommy gave a laugh.

"So he was still with us in the last month," Jun-Ho said.

"Yeah, he's a fuckin' beast! Best kind, too! You want us to bring you 'round him?" Lester asked.

"That would depend. Is he still based out of the farming estate in Upper Syracuse?" Jun-Ho said.

"Was last we saw him," Tommy said.

"Then that's all we require," Jun-Ho said. He gave a look to Striker. As though he were giving the imp permission to kill them. Well, say less, human.

Cain, though, interrupted Striker's ability to turn them into a past-tense by asking his own question. "Another question for you," the old Sinner said. "Have you seen anybody in your travels who looks like this."

At 'this', Cain let his own Glamour fall, and his Sinner visage appear. Tommy shrugged, but Lester frowned, then looked up at the ceiling as though thinking hard.

"Yes or no?"

"Oh absolutely yes. Cute little Sheila, 'bout so tall? Sunnies thick as my thumb. Those things," he gestured at Cain, but Striker couldn't see what he was intending. "Yeah. There's a couple 'a them in this shit-hole. Keep together mostly. Why're y'asking?"

"Could you take me to them?" Cain asked, stepping between Striker and the Innocent.

"...why would we? That's opposite where we wanna go," Lester said.

"If you can bring me to them, I will get you out of this Cloud if I have to braid a rope out of my own hair," Cain said.

"Well fuckin' roiyty, then!" Tommy said enthusiastically. "Got y'self a deal!"

Cain turned to Striker, and gave him a solemn nod. So this was where Cain got off? That was deeply fucking inconvenient. Couldn't he have waited to learn about his own shit for when Striker had already completed his own goals? Deeply inconsiderate, that fucking Sinner.

"You want us to go now?" Lester asked.

"No. Tonight the Angels are out. We can move with the daylight safer than we can in the dark," Cain said. Striker fumed at the sudden loss of one of the better wizards he'd gotten to work with. But he could do nothing about it right now. He was deep in the guts of enemy territory. Temper tantrums weren't just unprofessional, they were deeply unwise.

Cain sauntered toward the 'Australians' and ensconced with them in a corner of the room, whereas Jun-Ho stayed by Striker's side.

"He warned us all. Even I'm taken aback how soon it happened," Jun-Ho muttered.

"You'd better not flake on me next," Striker demanded, thumping the Innocent's metal groin with his fist as he did.

"I have to go as far as you do, if not further, to meet my ends. We will part when you turn around to go back, and not before," Jun-Ho said, his words alike to a vow. Well, if he was offering a vow, then Striker would take it.

This whole mission got turned onto its side pretty damned fast. But given his track record with missions-inside-of-Heaven, it was a good sign that it was merely on its side, and not upside down and on fire, like it had been last time.

They'd rendezvous with the other Hellspawn in a few days. If the Angel managed to not die, they'd meet with her, too. And then they would go on further, to lands no imp had ever stood or were likely to ever stand again.

Striker would stake his claim on becoming a legend amongst his people, and build the reputation for his species being, at last, the scions of legend itself. With God, Satan, and Evil Itself as his witness, he would see the end to the age of the imp as the dangling link on the Chain of Creation.

---

The scene around her blinked into being a room, obviously built into a Rat Tower by its dilapidated and barely-maintained appearance. There was a window on one wall, that had a view of about ten meters before seeing a canyon of tower-wall beyond it, the neighboring Rat Tower preventing any sort of scenic vista.

But that was all secondary to the fact that Rozarin had been teleported against her will, despite her own magical protections that should have prevented it, into somebody else's living area. And the area had only a few comforts, but obviously belonged to the Dragon Knight, who now shared the room with her.

"What is this? What's going on?" Roz asked.

"I should ask the same thing about you," the dragon-knight said in return. "I almost didn't recognize you, with that skin that's the color of skin and that nest of horns all gone."

"...why do you sound familiar?" Roz then asked, her eyes narrowing at the comprehensively armored knight, who was now tucking her draconic wings away much the same way that Roz could with her own angelic spans. Her eyes widened. Wait. Could it be? The dragon-knight was already reaching up to undo her helmet when Roz asked, "Are you Fiona?"

The dragon-knight paused to let out a laugh, then tilted the visor of the helm back. It rattled away, as though falling apart, but its fragments clinging to her armor while revealing her head and face. Her hair still had the brick-like coloring, still cut fairly short, and her eyes were still reptilian slits, with fine scales visible around them like freckles of harder tissue. But it was unmistakably Fiona O'Daire.

"I was," Fiona said. "Now I'm not sure if that name really applies to me anymore. Fiona O'Daire was a pirate. I'm… someone else."

"And…" Roz said, gesturing at the woman.

"Yes, apparently armor is a thing I can summon now. Frankly, I've been wandering around up here trying to figure out where to go. It's good you showed up. I'm just embarrassingly lost at this point," Fiona admitted.

"Right. So the Dragon of Connaught becomes the Dragon Knight of Connaught," Roz said.

"Speaking of unexpected transformations, what happened to all your… demon bits?" Fiona asked.

"Apparently I was supposed to be an Angel this whole time," she said with a shrug.

"No kidding," Fiona said, pulling a stool from a corner of the room and setting it upright so she could sit. "Going back to your kind, then?"

"What? No. Fuck these people. They sent me to Hell without even checking, that's the kind of assholes they are," Roz said shaking her head with a gesture. Then she actually saw what she was gesturing at; she went to the window, and leaned out it. And saw, not very far away at all, the Intertram station. "How did you even find us? Were you waiting for us? Why wait this long?

"Frankly you should thank your lucky stars I found you when I did. I caught wind that there was still a running train and got here as quick 's I could manage. Which took longer than I'm proud of," Fiona admitted, rubbing at her cheek.

"So I was saved by sheer, stupid luck?" Roz asked flatly. Fiona could only shrug. Of course. "We should leave. The Angels will be looking for us."

"No, they won't," Fiona said. "Not here at least, not anymore."

"...why not?" Roz asked.

"Apparently another thing I can do is knock things into next-week, as the saying goes," she gave a shrug, and idly flicked away some schmutz on her armor. "Can't go backward yet. Or maybe I just can't go back in time at all. Haven't checked. Regardless, they'll have already combed this place long ago, and it'd take a moron of titanic quality to emerge from hiding in a place they've already checked within line of sight of where that donnybrook went down."

"...are you that moron of titanic quality?"

"You wound me, Roz, you really do," Fiona said with a happy laugh, before unbuckling her shield and letting it rest against her calf. Her right arm still ended a hand short of where by rights it should have, capped with a cup of crimson metal. Her levity did not comfort Roz very much. "I'm glad that you were fighting those bastards because they're bastards, and not because they attacked you before you could 'explain' yourself to them. It'd mean I got into that fight for nothing. I've had enough of that up here, thank ye kindly."

"It's strange to see you here, now of all times. It's been… God, it's been more than a year since you, well…"

"A year? My sense of direction has departed me entirely. The ghost of my Second-Mate must be turning over in his grave. You'd think I'd find a way out of a literal circle in that time, but no. Keep getting turned around," Fiona gave her head a shake. Then she shrugged. "Though I've been distracted. There's some Innocent getting a bit… skewed up here. Have you ever heard of the Cannibal Colony, out the side of PC?"

"Oh God, they're eating people up here?" Roz instantly felt revulsion surge.

"Not… that blatant. I was referring to how fucking mental the lot of them are compared even to the rest of PC. There's some lunatics up here who are starting to declare 'an age of living death'. Not many of them, because for all its faults Heaven's got a lot of good people to outweigh the actions of a crazy few, but still, there's talk."

"Talk of what?"

"Ritual sacrifices, worship of Things From Outside, things that can actually kill an Innocent so that they don't come back. They call it The Final Death. Just rumors that I've heard, but," Fiona said. She gave her head a shake. "Look at me, chatting like a washerwoman when there's a whole thing going on. Who were those Hellspawn you were with? And was that Angel Dust I saw?"

"Yes, yes it was," Roz said. "We're here to get his sister out of Heaven while the getting's good," Roz said leaning now against the wall, for today had taken a very strange turn. "Of course, the getting stopped being good when we got ambushed by the Angels. Are the others even still alive?"

"Don't know. Haven't checked," Fiona said. "I only intervened because you weren't doing that Angel thing where they fuck off."

"Angel thing? Transiting? I don't know how to do that," she said.

"What damned fool kind of Angel does that make you, then?" Fiona said with a chuckle. She stood, and hooked her shield to her back. Now that Roz had a moment to look, Fiona didn't even seem to be carrying a weapon at all. All defense, no offense except for her own sterling physique. If there was a clearer inversion of the stories of the Dragon of Connaught, Roz hadn't been informed of them.

"One who's only been an Angel for about a month, and spent most of that skulking," Roz answered. "So do… do you really want to go back to Hell?"

"Heaven's kind of a shit hole," Fiona said. "It's got hypocrites up where I first appeared, wastelands below that, and then two more Clouds of this bullshite!" she gestured first to her neck, then at Charity around them. "If I knew a way to get to the lower Cloud from here, I'd have been knocking at Charlie's door fuckin' ages ago. I owe that woman that much."

"Well if that isn't just Charlie's own luck. We come up to look for Angel Dust's sister, and come back with a new Angel and a… a whatever you are," Roz said. Fiona grinned, the circular pane of light behind her head glowing warmly. She finally snapped her fingers, remembering what she'd overheard when Charlie was talking to 'Wendy', a former guest of the Happy Hotel who, upon recollection, shared the same circular-pane halo as Fiona. "Redemptor!" she said, the term finally off of the tip of her tongue.

"Redemptor? I suppose that's as good a name as any," Fiona said. She stretched, rolling her shoulders and her neck. "So I guess you'll be heading after Angel Dust then?"

"I mean… I promised him I'd help," Roz said.

"And people like us keep our promises," Fiona said as though that were the most obvious thing in the world. "So where do you think he's scarpered off to?"

"Well… I don't know where he is, but I know where he's likely to be going."

"Got a spot? Spill!" Fiona said with a swashbuckler's grin. As though the mere existence of this new form of herself had released a century's worth of angst. Despite nobody knowing how, she'd done enough good to be released from Hell. That probably did more to sooth her soul than any fight she'd had in her life or afterlife.

She gave the location.

"Oh! The field where Samael fought Hepsut and Geiron a couple years back."

"What?" Roz asked.

"Feck it, I'll show you," Fiona said, clapping her hand onto Roz's shoulder. There was the strangest flicker, as though she were being dropped by a trap-door appearing under her feet, and then she landed on an entranceway to a comparatively short 'Rat Tower', in that it only had six stories, and was broader than it was tall. This one, unlike the other ones who had lost all identity in the name of upward expansion, was still visibly in its bones an agrarian manor house, an estate the likes Cain would sometimes paint landscapes of while wiling away his hours. Instantly, a skinny but not entirely emaciated man gave a clipped yell of surprise, at having two women, one of them clad head to foot in crimson armor, appear suddenly and silently right in front of him.

"Christ the Pantokrator are you trying to give me a heart attack?" the man said, puffing a breath and rubbing at his chest. He scowled for a moment at Roz, then turned to Fiona. "I thought you said you weren't coming back."

"Didn't think I would have to," Fiona said. She gave Roz a light shake, which was a surprising feat because one of the few gifts that Roz knew she had in abundance now was raw strength. That Fiona could waggle her told her that Fiona likely did likewise. "This is Roz. She's one of those Angels we all agree aren't arseholes."

"Another Thirdborn! Well that's good news lacking all else," the stranger said.

"Yes, and she's looking for some people. Who were they again?" Fiona prompted.

"A pair of short men, a pair of tall ones, and two in the middle," she began, giving the Innocent the basic appearances that their glamours would take. The stranger ended that run-down by shrugging. "Nothing, then?"

"I haven't seen any group, or combination of them. But there's a lot of folk who come to this place. May perhaps be that somebody came and went while I was getting food out of the ground last week," the Innocent admitted. He gestured behind him. "Come inside. It's going to rain today, and I won't leave a Thirdborn out to get wet, and bullied by the Firstborn besides."

Inside the estate, the first room that they came to gave Roz a start, when she looked inside and saw an entire room utterly filled, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip with utterly still, seated humans. Saul David gave a sigh when pausing at that door. "What is this?" she asked him.

"We're up to three rooms of this, now," the Innocent said, fatigue coloring his voice. "Once they Go Numb, the only thing left to do is to warehouse them. It's not like killing them will help anybody."

"And why not try…" she began.

"You're new to Heaven, so I'll not sugar-coat this," David said. "We have tried. Everything that we could try. And nothing's worked. So we make them a place where they can face their eternity with at least a bit of dignity and comfort, even if they're not aware enough to appreciate it," the Innocent shook his head slowly. It was clear that he wished there was more that could be done, but if there was, it was clearly beyond his reach.

He pressed on, through the hallways which had been reduced to a third of their native width by partitions set up to make small, somewhat private rooms along its length, only breaking to form claustrophobic corridors where the hallway sported doors. There was still a sort of stark and clean-lined elegance to the place, but obvious decades of poor treatment had began to cause that elegance to crumble. At least, in the lack of elegance, it was still sturdy.

Fiona frowned at a sign they passed under, leading to what was clearly once a leisure room. Vox Populi Vox Dei. Within, unlike the other places of this estate house which had been utterly cannibalized for space to house people, this place was still open and unpartitioned, and in fact arranged almost like a small parliament, with a small desk at the centre of the room with a worn, obviously hand-made gavel atop it, and an equally hand-made set of desks that formed a sweeping hemisphere in the room, adding layers towards the corners until the corner itself was a single desk pointed toward the gavel-bearer.

The desks weren't attended, but had some people at work trying to fix broken furniture. Roz turned to the Innocent guiding them. "What is this, then?" she asked.

"People doing what Angels won't," David said with a sour tone. He continued with them, down the center aisle and then past the gavel-bearer, through a door which lead into one of the tiny, one-room apartments that abounded in heaven. David gestured toward the pile of fraying linens that lay atop the table where somebody had been mending what could be mended. "By all means, rest here. I'll ask after your people. If they've been around, I'll let you know."

They ended up not having been there.

But Fiona noted that because of the way she could travel, it could be the case that even with her week-long dip outside of time, they'd managed to get to the location first. So they waited. They waited, as people filed into the auditorium and in a shockingly fast parliamentary action decided who the current crop of potatoes was going to go to, and who was going to be left in the lurch. It was clear that none of the gathered people were happy about it, but it was still agreed upon. Then, having been there not even an hour, they all left, which neither Fiona nor Roz could really speak on. And David, work-horse that he turned out to be, went to work pulling potatoes out of dirt barely able to grow them.

By the middle of the second week, Fiona popped in while Roz was trying to play around with her new Angelic power – mostly fumbling in the dark, to be frank – and gave her a whistle and a gesture for her to follow. Roz did so, and found Maelstrom, looking very much the worse for wear, leaning on one of the walls, Angel Dust, who looked only somewhat better, was outright cradling Uller.

"Well fuck me, if you ain't a sight for sore eyes!" Angel Dust exclaimed. "Please tell me you didn't lose that food you brung? I'm pretty sure these guys are gonna cack it if they don't get somethin' into 'em really fucking quick."

Fortunately for them, she had. Her own backpack, untouched by their flight, still held dozens of kilograms of uneaten food. And since water here at least was plentiful and relatively clean, it was easy to make the mortals of their group some soup to get them stabilized, and then something heartier to get their bodies working again.

Uller bounced back fast, despite appearing on death's door when she got to him. And apparently they'd all had a fairly 'eventful' trip into the heart of Charity. Having to dodge Angel patrols at all points, even having to go to ground for a day when Birah appeared ahead of them, scouring the region for them. By the end of that second week in this estate house, though her own backpack was running low, they were back to fighting fit. If Jun-Ho didn't get here soon, then they'd all have to abort, simply because if they didn't, these two at least would fucking die before they succeeded.

Of course, with Roz looking outwardly, to try to spot the others coming in, she probably missed some goings-on in the estate house. Like the reunion between the Dragon Knight and Maelstrom. Roz didn't have the context to understand just how bad their shared history was, because to Roz, all that 'Nathan Birch' was, was a nightmare that Hell had gladly awakened from. But for those two, the nightmare was all too real, and clawed at them even into the waking world.

"Y'know," Angel Dust said to her, during a day in the beginning of the third week at the estate house. "I'm pretty sure if they ain't dead, they'll be showin' up whether you're trying to spot them or not."

"I am aware," Roz said.

"...so why are you wastin' your time up here and not chilling down in the rooms where you don't stick out like a sore thumb?" he asked.

"Because I have nothing better to do? Because somebody needs to keep an eye out not just for them but for the Angels? Because you all need to catch up with Fiona?" Roz offered. She gave a shrug. "I have a lot of reasons."

She then spotted Uller down there, standing in the ashy grey soil that they still had the desperation and audacity to attempt to plant in. He was staring oddly at it, kicking clods that crumbled like pressed sand.

"And frankly, I need something to break the boredom. Like this, for example," she said. Then with a flare of her wings, she launched herself off of the 'balcony' that slipshod construction had created, and landed near the imp, still in his Glamour, as he stared almost contemptuously at the dirt under his feet. He glanced up at her when the dust of her landing rattled against his boots. "Is there something I need to be aware of down here?"

"These people don't know how to farm," Uller as much as spat.

"And you do?" Roz asked.

"Human, I was a farmer long before I was a Thaumaturge," he said, then pointed at the dirt. "And this is pathetic. It's basically sand! The only thing you can grow in sand is disappointment. No wonder Heaven is starving. They haven't put any nutrients back into the soil for a hundred years."

"They don't have a choice," Roz said. "It's potatoes or starvation."

"That false-dichotomy is why the soil is so spent," he said, shaking his head in scorn. "You either rotate your soil, or it dies and you get nothing."

"Well, it's too late to do anything about it now," she noted.

"Is it, though?" he asked. He then looked up, panning his gaze at the sky that this sun-gully revealed. Looking at the clouds, to the sun. Then with a look of stubborn ambition on his face, he let his Human Disguise drop. She hissed, about to demand that he put that back up before somebody saw him, but was cut off when his eyes flared with black, his blood thickening as his arms reached wide and his hands clawed. And he hissed as well, but this time it was to a spraying of a thin film of his own black blood from his mouth, as though he'd bitten his own tongue. Where the blood hit the dirt, the dirt bubbled and shifted, twisting and warping.

He continued to chant, blood now oozing from his nail-beds and from his nose, so that his words sprayed a fine mist and his gestures cast down dribbles, as he continued to do… something. Something strange. Something against 'the rules'. But he didn't seem to care. The fields, now benuded of anything that could grow by desperate farmers, began to buck and shift, the grey soil twisting out to the far side of the sun-gulley, churning as though she were standing atop the bucking surface of the surf.

Then, a final word, a word that even though she spoke Enochian didn't translate cleanly, he finished, and the soil surged one more time, outright flipping itself.

The pathetic, dry grey soil was now black and lush.

Uller fell onto his ass, breathing deep for a moment, before wiping the blood away from his nose with the heel of his hand. Roz grabbed him up and quickly folded a wing over him so that he wouldn't be so blatantly visible to everybody within the thirty naked acres that he'd done that incredibly dumb thing in front of.

"For such a smart imp you make some incredibly stupid decisions," Roz hissed at him. "What if somebody saw you? Do you want them to know you're an imp?"

"Doesn't matter," he said.

"What? Did you want them so badly to know that you did all of… that?" she demanded of him. He stared at her for a moment, the yellow of his eyes returning and overtaking the black. There was a sound like wind whistling through a gap in the rocks, and then his Glamour came back up.

"I don't care if they know it was me. I know it was me. And that's all I need," Uller said.

Roz found she didn't have a good answer to that. She turned and deposited him against the rack that held the drag-sledges that they used to get the crop out of the fields once they unearthed it. Uller was breathing deep for a bit, as though that had tired him physically as well as magically. She turned to the soil again, idly pushing some of it over, and saw that his transformation hadn't been skin deep.

"That'll buy them a few more decades with idiot planting practices. But I'm not going to do that for them again. Using my magic up here is… fuuucking unpleasant," Uller said.

"Why, though?" she asked. "If not for your own ego, then why?"

"Who says it wasn't for my ego?" he responded. "I saw a problem. I could do something about the problem. And I would remember that I fixed the problem. What more reason do I need? What more authority do I need?"

Roz gave a chuckle and turned to face him again. "I hope you got this out of your system and don't make a habit of doing blatant and obvious things that will get us spotted by the Angels as we go up. We've already got Angels alert to us enough as it is," she said.

"You worry about your objectives, and you let me worry about mine," he said, which in no way comforted her.

"Ahmadiel!" David's voice came from somewhere in the building. "Ahmadiel you should come at once!"

Uller blinked, then glanced at her. "There's another Angel here?"

"That's me. Apparently. Though I tell him not to use it," Roz said with a roll of her eyes. She moved away from the rejuvenated fields and into the structure, and didn't have to go far before she reached Saul David, but also two more. Striker looked quite pleased with himself, leaning against an empty bookshelf and picking at his teeth with a toothpick, mostly likely as an affectation because nobody up here was blessed with entirely too much to eat. Jun-Ho was also there, his Glamour up making him look like a tall but emaciated man.

Cain was not.

"Where is Cain?" she cut through all pretexts.

"Cain?" David asked, glancing between Jun-Ho and herself. "Wait a minute, Jun-Ho; are you actually going around with Cain of all people?"

"I was, for a time. He's dead-set on a reunion with his brother," Jun-Ho said. "Tell me this, though; is Adam still down here?"

"Adam? No. No they actually let Adam into the Upper Clouds," David said, already getting deflected off of his alarm, which reinforced to Roz that Jun-Ho was just that good at manipulating people. "The Angels have him built into Ophanim-1. I don't know how human he was before the last War For Heaven… but I don't know how much human is left of him now."

"That will break Cain's heart," Jun-Ho said.

"It broke a lot of our hearts," David said with a nod. "To see something so pure become so… so whatever it now is. At the very least his mind is broken. He hasn't so much as visited his own wife and children in more than a thousand years. I'd thought better than that of him."

"Damned shame. I see Ahmadi there, and Uller. Who else managed to reach the rendezvous?" Jun-Ho said.

"Angel Dust is around," Uller answered. "As is Maelstrom."

"Down only one at the half-way point. It's not ideal, but it's better than I'd feared it'd be," Jun-Ho mused.

"There's just one thing about that," Roz began. But before she could elaborate, there was a whump sound, as though something heavy were landing nearby, even though all of them were inside a sealed room. And joining them suddenly was the Fiona. She rose up, and her crimson armor burst away from her in a flare of red dust, sweeping behind her whence it disappeared, leaving her wearing boots, leg-clinging breeches, and loose white shirt that was unbuttoned to her navel exposing all the cleavage she had as well as the rock-hard abs below it.

"Well, there's a sight for sore eyes," Fiona said.

Jun-Ho blinked at her, and there was a short-circuit sound, followed by his Glamour collapsing and having the somewhat damaged power-armor with its massive ruck of food on its back reveal itself to the room. David blinked at it, not alarmed but certainly surprised. Jun-Ho raised a finger to make a point, then recognized that his armor was showing. He grumbled something under his breath, and forced the Glamour back up. Birah's fuckery was persistent. "Apologies. I would say the same applies to you, but I have to admit, I don't recall you ever looking like that."

"Hoooolyyy Shit will you look at 'dat!" Angel Dust entered the conversation. "Fuck me, dragon, you goin' pirate on us all?"

"I've been a pirate a lot longer than I was a knight, Angel Dust," she said. She then pointed at him and Jun-Ho, while staring at Roz "So why do these two recognize me instantly whereas I had to drub it into your head?"

"I blame the head-trauma," Roz offered.

"Shit, dame," Angel Dust said, giving her a mildly confounded look-over. "If that's what 'gettin' redeemed nets ya, I'm more 'n half curious what I'd look like."

"Oh, the looks are the most superficial part of it," she said. She then turned to David once more. "So is this everybody, then?"

"It is," Striker said. He had his hand on his gun. "What is she again?"

"This is Fiona! She's from the Hotel!" Angel Dust said with a companionable nod.

"...why is my gut tellin' me I can trust this random person I ain't ever seen before can be trusted? My gut don't ever tell me that," Striker narrowed his eyes in distrust, which was clearly at war with what his instincts were telling him.

"I'm a people person," Fiona said with a cheeky grin.

"Look, you were about a fart away from askin' to join this little bit a lunacy back when you fucked off to Heaven," Angel Dust cut in. "So are you still down to rip some shit up?"

"Of course," Fiona said. "I meant it then and I mean it now. Nobody should be stuck up here if they don't want to be."

"So y'see that? We're not even down a guy! Things worked out even-Stevens," Angel Dust gestured toward the dragon-knight. Or perhaps toward the dragon-pirate, as her current attire suggested. Striker was clearly trying to summon forth his usual glut of paranoia, to find some internally valid reason why he could tell Fiona to fuck directly off and leave them all to their mission. But that instinct was failing him. And it was frustrating him that it was failing him. And it was frustrating him that his frustration was internal.

Despite her powerful appearance, her attire as a one-handed pirate-queen with a circular-pane halo and dragon's eyes, every whit of Roz's – and apparently everybody else's – perceptions told her in no uncertain terms that this woman was a friend. That she was safe. That it was safer to have her than to not.

That was weird. But weird and this group kind of went hand in hand.

"If it'll help sway your mathematics, I can get you up to Cloud Three right fucking now if you so desire, instead of having to fuck around with that fortress over that-way," she pointed in a direction that Roz wasn't entirely sure wasn't random.

"How?"

"I can go back to places I've been. I've been on Cloud Three. Ergo sum," Fiona said with a shrug.

"How long would it take to get us to that 'fortress' she mentions?" Jun-Ho asked of David.

"It's about fifteen hundred miles as the eagle flies," David said.

"That's about a month. And any time saved is food saved," Jun-Ho pointed out to Striker.

"Food?" David asked.

"We have mortals amongst us. Haven't you figured that out?" Jun-Ho asked.

"A nose in another man's business is likely to get cut off," David muttered.

"Fine. But if this turns out to be a trap, know that I will kill you before the springing kills me," Striker said, hand resting on his pistol-grip.

"Fantastic. Everybody lay a hand on me. If there's a way to do this without touching people, I haven't figured it out yet," Fiona said.

"So leaving us again as abruptly as you've arrived?" David asked, as he backed away while the cadre of Hell pressed in.

"I've got places to be, and helping these loonies gets me there fastest," she said.

"Then when you go, be the same avatar of Saint George that you were for us," David asked of her.

"Saint George killed the dragon," she said flatly.

"Not the what, the why," David said. She gave a chuckle, and nodded.

"Fine then. Everybody ready?" Fiona, now Fiona Saint George asked.

A few grumbled affirmatives.

And then the entire Hellish contingent vanished from Cloud 2, leaving nothing but their boot-prints, and a field restored to an almost impossible fertility, to even show that they'd been here at all.

The Angels found Saul David's farm only days later. And though he was interrogated as to why his farm was suddenly fecund where once it was fallow, the interrogation was headed by Forfax, who had neither patience for cruelty in himself nor those he worked with. Though he got few answers he liked, as to the who, the when, or the why, he knew that harming the source of the morale for Heaven's wards would only do Heaven as a whole ill, so let him be.

But there was another thing that Forfax was that most other Gabrielites were not, and that was 'willing to reach out for aid'. So instead of fruitlessly searching Cloud Charity for the rest of the month, as had been expected, Birah and Yeqon were immediately rerouted to Cloud Kindness. The hunt was running. And they were closer then they'd been since the foe had escaped their trap.

---

"Desperate men make desperate gambles. I knew that when the first Hellspawn arrived at my front door, ohhh, about fifty years ago, now. And despite that desperation, it was the kind I didn't expect to find in one of theirs. Sure, the Hellish were creatures of want and of hunger, but humans are as well. Want for comfort made us invent the loom, the wheel, the jacket and the boot. Hunger drove us from happening upon food to manufacturing it, and drove us to greater and greater efficiencies. More mouths fed with less acres, and by less hands. Want and Hunger makes us far more like demons than it does like angels, and yet Want and Hunger still manage to bring out the good in us.

Shockingly, it also seems to do the same in them. Want, for the love of a family, driving small and petty men to do the audacious, the impossible. Hunger, for one's own growth and betterment, driving hellspawn to array themselves against unspeakable odds and insurmountable obstacles, and by surmounting them anyway in broad defiance of good sense, they make themselves more whole by it. I still remember the lad yet. Never came back, to look at the good he did. Because he didn't need to. Out of sheer audacity, out of pride – out of a sinful vice – he improved the lives of roughly a million of we who were judged Innocent. And he didn't do it for payment, or even for praise. He did it because he would know that he could, and that he did.

There's more than one kind of charity in the world. Some people still cling to the notion that only perfect altruism counts in charitable works, and all else is performance. Those people are fools abetting cruelty through apathy. If you claim that charity is impossible, of course you won't pursue it. Laziness, not prudence! Shaitan has built an entire kingdom around performing charity to others for deeply selfish reasons, and that kingdom flourishes such that few in Hell can even match it. Probity certainly tries, as it has better people, but Shaitan's voice is much weaker here, since he cannot leave Hell. No, my point is this: if evil people can do good deeds for stupid, foolish reasons, they should be praised just as much as those who do it out of the sheer goodness of their heart, and allowing them to claim whatever justification they want.

Heaven needed Hell's charity to get itself back on its feet. And when Hell needs Heaven's charity… well, I can't speak for all of it, but of what portion of Heaven I have say-so over, if Hell needs Heaven's charity, they're going to get it."

– Paul (formerly Saul) David, Viceroy Emeritus of Cloud Charity