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.

54. Shockwaves

There were many places that Vaggie would have preferred to be and people she would have preferred to be around, and 'SerpeCo' and 'anywhere near Sir Pentious' were extremely far down on that list. But she had needs, now, and those were needs that she had to admit that she was out of her depth and out of her skill-set in fulfilling. She was expected to oversee the wellbeing of now thousands of soldiers belonging to Charlie's Second Legion of the Damned, the Legion of Dawn. Gone were the days when the Legion existed mostly on paper, with only two old soldiers just sitting around in mostly empty cohorts waiting for their bodies to drop dead for there would be no release from duty for them. Now, they were thousands strong. And even still, Vaggie doubted they were enough for what Charlie needed.

So she was sitting in front of this lunatic naga with his idiot egg-bois in the building he had just inside the protective umbrella of New Purgatory. And she was here doing something that, if Charlie knew she was doing it, would break her heart.

"Could we fucking focus for even five goddamned minutes?" Vaggie demanded, rubbing at the one eye she had left.

"I'm sorry, did you forget that my brilliance requires explanation – at length – to impart the proper gravity of their elegance to the lower classes?" Pentious asked, sounding outright insulted.

"I am much higher ranked than you are, Overlord," Vaggie let her annoyance be plain. Now that she was a Legatus Damnatio, she outranked just about every other Human in Pride who wasn't also part of Hell's military. And that meant that she could swing dick with the best of them, despite not being born with one.

"Oh, fine," Pentious had a very put-upon look on his face. "If you really must drain all the fun out of this, let us go directly to business."

"Thank you," Vaggie said caustically, because it had been a goddamned dog's-age since she sat down here, and all of that time was spent trying to get him to the fucking point. "You're a weapons maker."

"I do dabble," Pentious said with a prideful expression.

"And you're doing it despite the fact that you promised – swore an oath – not to do it in New Purgatory," Vaggie said.

"Well what am I supposed to do? Ape that johnny-come-lately Vox and try to get into 'electronics' and 'media'? I know enough not to cross the Last Living V," Pentious said with a glare out his window. "No, I am a master of the physical and the mechanical! War machines of a more distinct caliber and exquisite craftsmanship!"

"Assembled by your Egg-bois who, cumulatively, have a less-than-room-temperature IQ," Vaggie pointed out. "Let's face it. Without the warmachines you lost, you're not a threat to me. Me!" she pointed at herself with her thumb. "And to be frank, I'm starting to doubt if you were a threat even when you had them!"

"Well I never! Did you come in here just to insult my craft?" Sir Pentious seemed deeply hurt by her words. But then again, he was an extremely… open… individual, about as capable of guile as Vaggie was of sex with men – in that it was something which had happened in the past, but was a messy and gruesome affair that the one involved obviously didn't want any part of, and notably was quite terrible at.

"No, I've come here because I know you're double-dealing. Providing weapons to the local Overlords just outside the gates of New Purgatory. That stops. Right fucking now," Vaggie said, leaning forward to thump her fingertip against Pentious' mahogany desk.

"That isn't what I agreed at all! I agreed to not cause trouble in this little borough, and I have kept my side splendidly!" Pentious complained.

"Every time you enable them," Vaggie said, pointing outward, and indicating the rest of Pentagram City which was, at best, in a state of slow self-destruction on the best of days, "you make it seem more and more that Charlie herself is weighing in on their shitty little problems. And one day, they're going to decide that she's just another Overlord, and start treating her like one."

Pentious blinked at her, his frill rising for a moment, then glanced to his ledger, then back up at her. "I'm sorry… is she not an Overlord?" Pentious asked.

"No she's not!" Vaggie pointed out.

"Because she's acting very much like a successful Overlord," Pentious countered.

"She is not an Overlord," Vaggie said.

"She has taken and fortified a section of Pentagram City," Pentious raised a hand and began ticking off facts on his fingers, "she has unified them under a single banner of force, she enforces rules of conduct on them that differ from the surrounding area, she holds a monopoly on violence and vice by controlling that strange Succubus and the Fucksmith's Guild, she has a standing force of arms," he paused and switched hands. "She has declared an entire class of denizens as 'her property'…"

"The fuck are you talking about?" Vaggie asked.

"Those strange humans with the halos!" Pentious said, pointing above his serpentine head.

"She is not – they are not her property!" Vaggie said.

"She's behaving as though they are," Pentious said. "If she's not an Overlord, then the definition of Overlord needs to be updated to specifically exclude whatever it is that she's doing; because by the encyclopedia on my wall," he pointed and there was in fact an entire encyclopedia set lining one bookshelf, lacking one book that covered the latter half of articles beginning with 'E', "she is not only a textbook Overlord, but a very, very successful one."

"...Fine. You know what, that's not the reason I'm here in the first place!" she snarled. "I am here," she said, upon a purging breath, "to offer you a choice of one of two options. There will be no 'not choosing', or attempting to weasel your way into a third."

"I don't like where this is going," Sir Pentious said, slinking back in his seat with his frill flaring out in alarm.

"You're not supposed to," Vaggie said. "Option one. You refuse my second option, keep playing fuck-fuck games with the local Overlords, and I make you leave New Purgatory – dead or alive, it doesn't matter to me – and everything that you built here I take and sell for pocket change."

"I'm not a fan of your ultimatums, purple female," Sir Pentious hissed at her. That made Vaggie pause for just a moment. Purple? She had always been grey. No, focus on the matter at hand.

"Option two is that you work for the crown," Vaggie said.

"...I'm sorry. What?" Pentious asked.

While Vaggie despised these iron-mongers with all that she had and all that she was, she had to admit that they were capable of feats of engineering that the humans of Earth were unable to match. They had laser guns. They were bulky, energy hogs, and tended to explode when something went wrong with them, but the fact remained that Hell had laser guns while Earth was still fucking around trying to find some way to make bullets go faster than just being blasted by a small explosion. Having a highly educated, utterly immoral experimenter-class lead to advancements that any sort of societal agency of health, safety, or basic sanity would have nipped in the bud.

And frankly, Vaggie needed one of those educated lunatics right now.

She pulled out her Hellphone, and flicked over to the pictures she'd taken after the mass Exorcist attack on New Purgatory, of the Goetia's 'wonderweapon' shattered and its pilots murdered by nothing more than a militarized pickaxe in the hands of Heaven's much superior wonderweapon.

Pentious glanced up with furrowed brow at her, unsure of why she was showing this. "The last time the Angels made a push at this borough, we lost all but six of the fifty Blasphemers we deployed to defend the district. And all of that, we barely managed to kill ten of those fuckers."

"Yes. Yes I can see the problem," Pentious said. He turned and slithered over to one of his floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets, and opened one of the middle drawers which was about at head level, extracting a dossier before returning to his desk. He opened it and she found some utterly impenetrable engineering-ese staring back at her. "The problem with the Blasphemer, other than being designed by a committee of SONS OF WHORES!" he roared toward his window with a fist raised in anger, before turning back and speaking to her as though that hadn't happened, "is that it is designed to counter the capabilities of Angels. And not very ambitious angels, at that."

"And?" she asked.

"Exorcists aren't Angels," Pentious said something very basic.

"Obviously," she said.

"No you…" he then took a calming breath of his own. "They," he said, very measuredly, "are innately resistant to the same attack that cuts clear through the defenses of Angels. They are a problem requiring a different tool to defeat. You can't open coconuts with a can-opener, after all!" he seemed very proud of that analogue, laughing to himself at it.

"And you think you could do better?" she asked.

"Of course!" Pentious even sounded a bit incensed at the implication that the truth could be anything but. "I have been designing weapons and systems for two hundred years! This," he swatted the file before him, "is the work of amateurs!"

"And you think you can do better? They're already back-ordered for the next decade," Vaggie raised an eyebrow to a calculated degree to get under the naga's scales.

"If you want a tidal wave of garbage, go ahead and buy from that impish huckster and his foolish Sinner underlings!" Pentious expounded. "I produce elegant, beautiful, and spectacularly deadly designs! I could take ten of them to one with a design of my own!"

"Those are big words. What even would that 'design' of yours even have that would make it better?" Vaggie asked.

"Well for one thing, a sturdier frame!" Pentious railed, gliding toward the blackboard and rage-designing as he went. "There's no reason to be hamstrung by weight limitations if you can provide enough power to the motive drive! And fuck it! I'll make it fly! Who even cares how fast the legs go if you're airborne! The fusion cells will have enough power to send you into low orbit!"

Vaggie sat back, but didn't refrain from sending insulting questions his way, letting him in his fit of pique design and conceptualize a weapon that Charlie would have that would dwarf anything her enemies would bring to bear. Two brushes with the Exorcists had made it very clear to Vaggie at least that New Purgatory was not in any way a secure location, even surrounded on all sides by increasingly fanatical and well trained soldiers.

It was telling, that even despite Vaggie's doubts, despite her disbelief, Charlie's indomitable spirit was starting to spread to those who worked under her. With the return and glorious transformation of Fiona (who was calling herself 'Saint-George' these days; Vaggie couldn't gainsay a change in name when things of this depth changed, though), there was visible, tangible proof that Charlie's way worked.

That there was something better than the unending suffering of Hell, and an inevitable execution at the hands of Heaven's mechanical or organic executioners.

It wasn't yet a hope of Vaggie's own. Her time before Charlie in Hell, brief though it had been, had been but a capstone to the suffering of her life on Earth. And together, they had made it very clear that for the woman once called Agata Vialpando, there was no hope worth holding on to. Hope was like like crushed glass. It took someone with more fortitude than Vaggie had in her whole being to even touch it, let alone grip it with such furious intensity that Charlie did.

So Vaggie did what she could do, if she couldn't hope for herself. She helped clean up the blood that Charlie's desperate hold caused to leak from her hands. As the woman's lover, as her friend, as the wretch that Charlie raised up from the gutter, and as the mistress of Charlie's Legion, Charlie deserved absolutely nothing less.

It would be hours before Vaggie finally left Sir Pentious' office, but she was smarter than the 18th century weaponsmaker. She managed to wrangle an agreement to focus all his work on her weapons, that she could use to protect her loved ones. And she got him to stop his stupid Overlord shit at least while he was living in New Purgatory. God knew that there were enough morons out there that needed a beating with the clue stick; Pentious was just the one that Vaggie could reach with it.

As the sun went down, and she walked the safe, clean streets of New Purgatory, leaving today's little piece of realpolitick behind her, she still felt no hope. But Charlie was her guiding star. As long as Charlie still hoped, Vaggie would be right there with her, making the impossible inevitable. It was the least that she owed the Princess of All Hell.

Frankly, she owed more than she could ever repay. And Charlie kept adding more debt in that happy, thoughtless way that people who never had to worry about the costs of things ever did. It was good that there was at least one kind heart in Hell. And whatever it took, Vaggie would be the armor that kept cruelty from destroying it.

---

Chapter 54

Shockwaves

---

Even after days in this Ring, the sky still bothered her. She had been used to it being any of any number of colors, from the green of Greed, to the honey-orange of Gluttony. But this strange, houndsblood-red sky? It unsettled her.

And doubly so, because folklore warned her about this Ring. It was where The Beast dwelt. And for those like her, there was nothing more dangerous than the Beast That Grins.

Esther got off of the bus, finally at the outskirts of Imp City, the Second City of Pride. She had been told it would be a sad, miserable blister of mechanical blight and collapse. But to see it with her own eyes, it put to lie the words of her mothers. She had been told to expect crumbling concrete and roads more pot-hole than tarmac. Instead she saw a city the likes of Sietch Cruac, but needing none of its magic to keep it standing.

Buildings stood here without Wyrds to hold them skyward, there were no Glass Towers to send out the masking wards, no constant tingle of the protective magics that were intended to keep imps safe from the predation of outsiders. But Esther knew first hand that those protective magics had proven to be useless when a real threat appeared. So perhaps it was no more safe but much more comfortable to be without that tingle. She stood, naked but for her clothes and the magic she could muster (a paltry amount, much as it shamed her) in a city that seemed to have imps, not exactly in charge, but at least in mind with its creation.

Still, there was no time to think about architecture. She had a mission. A quest. A quest for the honor of her mothers. And the subject of that quest was here, in this city. The Beast That Grins might already be aware of her, and coming for her. But if she died gruesomely at The Radio Demon's hands after having completed her quest, then the honor of her entire family would at least be salvaged.

Esther Nuckelavee was here to murder Mildred Rough, Krieg Miller, and whatever fool else got into Esther's way.

"Fuckin' move, you idjit!" a brusque shove by a Sinner caused Esther to stumble face-first into a bus-bench, which hurt tremendously and caused her to have to sit down in the slush for a moment and shake some sense back into her head. It wasn't until long seconds later, as the rest of the people got off of the bus and ignored the imp sitting on the pavement that she got her senses back about her. By the time she did, she couldn't see the Sinner who had done insult to her; he had already vanished down the flow of foot-traffic.

"Fool. I will show them all," Esther promised.

She got to her feet, and then started walking. Though her quest was righteous, she knew it was going to be difficult, because Pride Ring was very much a foreign territory, alien to her and her sensibilities. And notably, it was very, very large. A continent-sized shelf of land to try to find where the coward who murdered the root of the Nuckelavee bloodline would be hiding.

"I will search for a dozen years if I must. I will find you," Esther promised.

And then she was immediately shoved to one side, and when she regained her balance, she turned to see what happened, and only could see the churn of foot traffic. But there was something off, something not right. She reached for her purse, and found that the strap now ended without its pouch. She gaped in dread, at all that she had left, now instantly gone.

"No," she snarled. "I don't accept this. Fate will not deny me my revenge!"

"We've got a live one over here! Ha!" one of the fiends around her mocked her as she stormed back whence she'd come, her sharp eyes flicking between the imps and fiends and Sinners who populated the street. And there, she saw one imp, only half as tall as she, skulking about in a most suspicious matter, darting into an alleyway as soon as traffic allowed it. With a snarl pulled onto Esther's face, she followed after, cresting the edge of the alley and into the darkness.

It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the dim of the alley, and ahead she could see a veritable rats' nest of back passages that ran between and behind the buildings of the streets, and managed to so exactly in time to see the small imp zip around another corner. Esther gave a superior chuckle. These Prideling Imps were every bit as pathetic as her mothers had described them; diminutive, diminished, miscegenated and paltry, truly the worst of the impish race, the farthest from the Lustling clade that Esther was proudly a part of. She followed after, only to almost instantly have her foot shoot out from under her and deposit her into a pile.

She rose, snarling, looking for the trip-wire or trap that had been laid here to upend her, to by that wretched cur more time. She found instead that she'd managed to tread directly on a bag of kitchen waste, and in the cold, it slid slick as oil.

Esther stayed there on her hands and knees for a moment, shivering both in cold and in anger. There was no reason why the Nuckelavee Family should have been exposed to this idiocy. In a just world, they would still be in control. Not the fractured, shattered mess that they'd become after the Coward called in her Fiendish Assassins to gut the Clan Cruac in the most uninspired of ways, and to leave the Temple to the Seething Black so corrupted and contaminated that it would not play host to a ritual for at least another impish lifetime. To kill a High Crone with the aid of fucking outsiders was a sin. To desecrate their temple was a blasphemy.

And blasphemy ought be repaid in blood.

She forced herself up, and started running. Which didn't last long, because Esther was a Wonderworker, not an athlete. Her sprint very quickly degraded into a jog, navigating the dark passage between buildings following the only way that this fool could have gone, marked by the occasional footfalls in the slush. Ahead, and not far. She summoned her strength up and held it close; though it would drain her dearly, she was even capable of creating a Pain Elemental, and from the feel of this degraded Ring, there was pain aplenty for her to pull together.

She attempted to skid to a halt around a corner, only the footing under her betrayed her a second time and sent her falling sideways to the concrete, her proud proclaim being replaced by a surprised squawk. She pushed herself back to her feet, and stared at the imp who had stolen her things, still holding the pouch of her purse in his hand.

He was not alone.

Surrounding the purse-snatcher there were seven other Pridlings, all of them resembling the first in face and form, only their horns giving away that some were women rather than men – and given the rumors about this clade, it was likely that one of them may have even been something in between!

"Give me back my effects, or suffer the consequences!" Esther demanded, bristling at the indignity of having to face down these vile curs.

"Holy shit she actually followed you! What is she retahded or something?" a faintly female voice came out of one of the Prideling's swarm. Esther's mouth twitched into a grimace of anger, and she very nearly loosed her Pain Elemental at her for that insult. But Esther needed to be surgical with this. It wasn't like she could just create these things willy nilly. It took a great wonderworker to produce more than one in an hour.

"She ain't half bad lookin'," another said. "Figure we could get some scratch for her."

"Give. That. Back," Esther warned.

"What's that smoke-shit she's got? She tryin' some shit there Bruuz?" the girl-imp demanded of her brother(?).

"This is a Pain Elemental, a magic beyond your filthy kind's capacity. To touch it is to know pain beyond the greatest tortures to be dreamt of demon or imp alike!"

"...So why would we touch it then?" the she-imp asked.

"GIVE ME BACK MY PURSE!" Esther brandished the Elemental that she realistically daren't release, trying to cow these horrid creatures.

"Yeah. How about we don't?" the purse-snatcher, apparently named Bruuz, said. "Give it to 'er!"

Esther glared at him.

And then she felt a terrifying pain crash into the side of her knee, dumping her to the ground and causing the Elemental in her hand to burst into harmless smoke. She collapsed, her leg buckled under her from the bludgeon which had been sent crashing into it.

Esther tried to get up, to do something – she hadn't planned that far ahead – only to have that bludgeon race in from the corner of her vision and bash her in the face.

It honestly wasn't as painful as some of the blows to the head she'd taken when in her lessons. It was more troubling that it made her head feel cotton-stuffed and made it at least pleasant that she was a day hungry so there was nothing in her stomach to vomit up. She tried to get her limbs to obey her, to push herself off of the concrete, to get her magic to obey her, but all that those useless tubes of meat and bone did was flop around.

She even tried to curse them all, but the thing that came out of her mouth was 'glhuerr…'

Bruuz began to dig through her purse, pulling out the flint-lock pistol she had intended to kill The Coward with, and with a look of derision, threw it to another of the gang. He pulled out a few ticket stubs and receipts – Esther wasn't sure why people handed her paper along with the thing that she bought, but it must have been for some reason – and then finally a small, glossy piece of paper, its imprint facing the thief.

"The fuck is this? She's got nothing but a garbage gun and two fucking bullets!" Bruuz complained. "You fuckin' worthless bitch! You wasted my time with this dumb fuckery? Just for that, I'm sending you to the FUCKING BLOCK!"

Esther didn't know what 'the fucking block' was, but its name gave dire implications. She tried to focus her will past her stuttering consciousness, and even drag the magic out of own flesh if needs be, to call up another Elemental, to at least go down swinging.

Sadly, the only one who managed to get a swing in, was the Prideling she-imp with the oversized wooden truncheon, who brought it down a second time onto Esther's head and finally dropped everything into blackness.

---

"What the fuck are you doing here? Don't you have a party to go to?" Regicide asked of Maelstrom as he showed up at the gunsmith's shop.

"The party doesn't start until the afternoon. What am I going to do, sit around doing nothing all day?" Maelstrom asked.

"So… any chance that you might be able to drag a few more along? I hear those things get kinda wild," Liss added, leaning against her mate behind the counter which displayed Hound-made guns for sale to whoever wanted to pay for them. And since they were modestly cheaper than many other kinds of weapons, a lot of people came in to quickly buy a gun to kill the guy who cut them off a few days ago, or something of a similarly petty nature. This was Hell, after all. The humans down here tended not to be good people.

"Sorry. I'm already a guest's plus-one," Maelstrom said. "I don't think Krieg will appreciate me trying to chain plus-ones like that."

"Come on. How many times is she gonna get married?" Liss pressed.

"That would depend on how long Uller survives," Maelstrom said with a chuckle. Barely past her twentieth birthday, Krieg had announced that she and Uller had not only been in a relationship for years but were getting married. And since they weren't a bunch of Wrathly Satanists, they didn't do the weird thing of having it overseen by a minister of faith, in a chapel or temple, but instead just sign some paperwork and then throw a lavish party in celebration of it.

Maelstrom was happy for them. Uller had his demons, but he was fighting them admirably well enough, and would likely be a useful anchor for Krieg so that her ambitions didn't leave her untethered to reality. More than that, it was clear that the two were deeply fond of each other. The only people who were more amorously in-love in Maelstrom's social circle was Moxxie and Millie, who were still going at it like somebody was trying to make them stop. And that comparison even included Maelstrom and Loona.

Loona was a busy woman, and Maelstrom was too. Their dynamic didn't end up being incendiary, as with the Roughs, nor flare-and-plateau like Uller and Krieg, but rather a different, very cozy thing. Let others dance in the bonfire. Maelstrom and Loona would be sitting at a comfortable distance in the warmth of it.

There were days where he still had that shard of nightmare, of waking up naked under the rusty chain. But those nightmares always fled when his eyes would snap open and have glorious Loona Miller curled up next to him snoring like a chainsaw.

Which would then preclude him getting back to sleep.

Win some, lose some.

"I don't see you fighting very hard. Ah well. Imp food tends to be a bit… intense for my palate," Reggie said. He paused as a moderately bleeding Sinner limped into the gun-store, pointing at one of the guns on the wall. Reggie turned and handed the double-barreled shotgun over to the former human – who had his jaw dangling loose like it its mandible bone were shattered and it were held there only by his skin, then handed over a box of shells without a word said to a handful of Souls being pressed into his hand. The Sinner left, loading his new shotgun with clearly vengeful intent. "They use way too much sulfur in their cooking. I don't know how they can stand it."

"They have much weaker noses than we do," Maelstrom said with a shrug.

"Ah well. Have fun with Loona," Liss demanded of him.

"Always do," Maelstrom said, then paused, his ears flicking to the door which was even now closing. He could hear voices out there, but then again when could he not? His hearing was very good, and only seemed to get better with years off of The Chain. And he could tell that there were a bunch of people grunting and struggling about to emerge from an alleyway. He turned to at least give a glance at it before continuing the conversation, but what he saw was a tetrad of Prideling Imps trying to surreptitiously carry a fifth imp amongst them, that imp being significantly larger than any of them and thus not an easy burden to carry. They failed patently at any kind of stealth.

The imp, a girl by her horns, was beaten black and bloody.

Maelstrom sighed and said to himself that it wasn't his business.

But then, he remembered the Chain. And how easy it would have been for anybody to have lifted it from him. As that orange-haired human said during one of his visits to Fiona: You either become who you needed to save you, or you become what you needed saving from.

He left the store and crossed toward where the imps were slowly lugging their larger victim away. Considering that opposite the gunstore on this street were a Hellhound run, gun-festooned weapons manufactory and an actual Church of Satan, they were showing at least a milligram of basic sense not doing their dirty deeds over there. Of course, now that Maelstrom was out of the shop, over here was exactly no better.

"Hold on a second," Maelstrom shouted to them, striding up through the slush. This road only saw industrial traffic at dawn and dusk, so the slush never got a chance to be splattered down into the storm gutters, meaning his footfalls landed with wet and deliberate thwaps. The Pridelings shot a glance his way, and then ignored him. "You, Pride imps. Stop for a second," he specified.

He could outrun them, and since they were carrying a possibly dead girl they were even further hobbled. They obeyed because he gave them no option. "How 'bout you go fuck yourself, knot-dick?" one of the imps said. He sounded very young. A teenager at most.

"Hospital's that way," he pointed over his shoulder. Lying. He was pretty sure it was south.

"Fuck you and your hospital!" the imp boasted, puffing out his chest, despite the fact that two feet all, the little blight only barely made it to Maelstrom's thigh.

"So what? You're gonna take that girl and rape her?"

"Ain't none 'a your business. Fuck! OFF!" he tried to make himself seem dangerous, pulling out a flintlock. Maelstrom had a moment of concern, but that moment fled when he noted that he didn't smell any powder coming from it. It wasn't loaded. He sighed, shook his head, and started toward them again. "Cruella, bash his fuckin' knees backward!"

Maelstrom didn't even react to that, allowing the she-imp 'Cruella' to run up with a baseball bat and swing it with all her strength into his knee. It stung a tiny little bit. He paused, looking down at her, not saying a word, then started walking again. A few moments later, he felt another blow causing a slight twinge of pain as it bashed into the back of that same knee.

"Could you contain this one? She's being annoying," Maelstrom asked. Not to say that the little brat was utterly toothless. He imagined that before his long, miserable tutelage on torture of many kinds at the hands of Nathan Birch, those blows would have actually meant something to him. As it was, they were beneath attention, let alone concern. He heard a growl of fury coming from behind him. And his instinct told him something was coming toward his head.

In a move faster than the imps could better, he flicked his head back and slammed his jaws onto the bat, the wood splintering under his teeth and stopping the blow that the ambitiously launched imp would have sent into the back of his head instead coming to an abrupt, shattering halt. He grabbed 'Cruella' from where she dangled, aghast, from her weapon, then spat the now three-chunked bat out onto the street. He turned to the Pridelings. "I don't think that girl wants to go with you. Run away."

"Fuuuuucking run boys!" the Prideling in charge finally shouted, and the members of the tiniest clade of imp all scattered to race toward the skulking places that could hide them. They even dropped what looked like a purse pouch in their haste to get the fuck away from what they perceived as an angel-adjacent level of threat. And if they did so, they figured his strength properly.

Damn it felt strange to be able to be so prideful in his might and not feel a conceited and arrogant ass for doing it.

"Don't kill me! I was just gonna rough you up a bit!" Cruella begged.

"Fine. Go away," he said, lowering her to the ground, but holding onto her shoulder so she couldn't immediately dart away. "Just remember that all Hellhounds have teeth, and are a lot stronger than you are. It might just save your tiny little life."

Then he released her, and she was racing away leaving only a trail of urine to show she'd been there at all. With that, he turned finally to the abandoned girl. Her face was swollen up in a bruise, making much of her face black and there was a crack near the middle of one of her horns that oozed a strange ichor. She was looking at him, her limbs weakly trying to find purchase on the cold concrete. To pull away? To move toward him? He didn't know, and he didn't have time to find out. It was cold out today, and he had hours to kill before Krieg's marriage party. While this wasn't what he'd intended to do, there was no harm in saving somebody.

Maybe if he could save enough, he'd finally pay down that debt that Loona refused to admit that she put on him by saving him all those years ago.

"Come on. The local Satanists will look after you," he said, picking up the battered, delirious she-imp and holding her like a disobedient cat as he marched her toward the run-down factory-seeming Temple of Satan. Much as the Satanists claimed to be for the good of themselves and their own community first, there were enough good people willing to throw a little bit of extra effort to the wider world. They'd done it for Uller. Maybe they could do it for this kid, too.

---

There was a droning in the air when coherency began to drag its way back into Esther's perceptions, words of unspeakable power, words that wouldn't have been out of place in the Temple of the Seething Black. She had a pounding headache, and her face felt puffy and bloated, but she was awake.

"The Lustling awakens," a dry, grinding voice came from nearby. Esther turned, and saw one of the Lust Fiends nearby, but wearing something anathema to their kind, in that it covered her from the hanging-scar at her neck to the point where her feet touched the floor, only offering barest glances of her toes. All else was concealed by form concealing red.

"That didn't take long," a voice that returned from a dream answered.

"She is stronger than most imps I am forced to deal with," the shockingly well-covered Succubus ground out. "Most would die from the beating she received. She is a creature of will.

"I'm sure," that voice said. And when Esther finally craned her neck that way – which hurt, because life was not fair to the imp – she could see a moderately sized Hellhound who was bending metal into seemingly ritualisticly valid shapes using only his bare hands. She blinked at that. She would have expected that feat of strength from a much larger beast than the one she beheld. "I think imps just have a natural resistance to blunt force trauma. You should see the hits to the head my employer takes."

"Your task will be finished with what you hold, as less was required for her than was expected," the Succubus grated out at the Hellhound, who shrugged and finished turning the slab of metal into a shape that called to mind Outsider power, something outside of the grasp of the Imp. It made Esther wish that she had actually paid attention when that Drevisté gave a guest lecture to her class. Truly, the metal seemed to be rendered as clay in the Hound's hands. What monster of a being was he?

"Where am I?" Esther finally summoned the strength and clarity to speak.

Both the Hound and the Succubus turned to her, then glanced back to each other, as though doubting they'd heard what they heard.

"You're… in a Temple of Satan. Obviously," the Hellhound said, gesturing toward the Succubus with her shockingly form-concealing robes. "They were willing to give you some potions and such to heal that skull fracture you had. Which I paid for by making… whatever these are."

"Your strength is a gift from the Father and we thank you for using it to the benefit of His Chosen," the Succubus said. She then turned and departed, leaving Esther and the Hellhound to their own devices as she began to drift up and down the pews, which had a fair few people sitting in them, mostly imps and Hellhounds.

It took Esther an embarrassing amount of time to reconcile this with the stories of the Cult of the Brick. Because this seemed so… earnest. She had expected those Wrathly brick-worshipers to be a ridiculous display. Not so bone-shakingly sincere that their words vibrated the air like a fiddle-string.

"Let's get you up," the Hellhound said, stooping at her side and offering a hand. She tried to swat it away, but she still felt a nausea take her and the swat became a lethargic wave. The hound caught her hand and gently pulled her to a sit. Her head still hurt. But considering apparently the truncheon to the head she'd had before had broken her skull, that was perhaps to be expected. She felt bandages wrapped round her head and the base of her horns, one horn itself having a metal clip-brace clamping it to its shape. "Right. You got a little messed up by those Pridelings. Despite what they are, you can't afford to underestimate them. They might be weak individually, but they always have numbers on their side."

"Who are you? And who was that?" she asked, the words coming out more slowly than she'd like.

"Maelstrom is my name. That was Abbess Jilt," he gestured to the Succubus, who had now sat down beside one of the Hounds on the pews. "Can you stand?"

"I must stand, so I shall," she said. Still, it wasn't easy. She managed to get to her feet, but she needed a frankly shameful amount of support to maintain her footing. "What reason have you for bringing me here? I have no money to pay you."

"Hounds have a vested interest in preventing the proliferation of slavery, no matter who's getting enslaved," Maelstrom gave a shrug. So an Ideologue, he was. While convenient for her and her lack of funds, they were often rigid in ways that made them difficult to deal with.

"You have done me service, one I will repay if I survive the day," she said.

Maelstrom stared at her for a second, then sighed. "Yeah, you're gonna die walking home. Where do you live?"

"I have no home in this Ring," she said. "Only my mission."

"A mission?" Maelstrom's eyebrows lofted at hearing that. "Well do tell what that mission is."

He finally stopped holding her upright, now that she was able to, even if wavering, keep herself on her feet with only occasional contact with the nearby pew to steady herself. "I am here to kill the people who murdered my mother."

Maelstrom, who looked like he had been expecting something of far greater levity, paused and thought at that. "That's some heavy stuff for a kid like you."

"I am not a child! I have seen sixteen years!" Esther snapped at him, only lying a little.

"And you sound really familiar. Where are you from?" Maelstrom asked. He had a growing suspicion on his face. She scoffed and turned, stooping (and nearly falling over) to pick up her pistol, the two rounds that she had for it, and the photograph of her mother and herself. There were two others in the photograph, her half-siblings. Dullbloods both, so they earned no pride-of place in the picture. All were solemn. The picture had been taken only weeks before the Massacre.

It was the only thing she had left of her mother. Of her entire Family, even.

She didn't bother to mourn her mother again. There wasn't time. She needed to keep moving. So she moved toward the doors which seemed to lead up and out, passing by some ensorcelled drapes that, once past, completely cut the gut-shaking drone that the choir was singing, allowing the sounds of the city to take their place. She went up and out of the cracked wall, and found herself once more in the streets of Imp City.

She had to find the Horned Building. If she found that, she would find her mother's killers. A bullet for her Mother's killer. Then a bullet for the Coward who slew Great Great Grandmother Ruut. Then whatever could come next would come next.

"You have no idea where you're going, do you?" Maelstrom's voice was suddenly directly beside her. She let out a squawk of alarm and punched hard at groin level. The Hellhound instantly flinched his leg in front of it, and it felt like she punched velvet sheathed marble. Her alarm squawk turned into a pain squawk, and she shook her now aching wrist. "Yeah, don't do that again. I value my testicles as they are."

"Leave me be, dog! You are no part of this!" she demanded. She could see no horned building in the skyline. But the city was large, and she, as an imp, was short. She likely needed a different, loftier venue.

"Maybe, but I'm choosing to be. So what are you looking for?" he asked.

"A building. One that towers against the sky in defiance of good sense. A building horned like a proper impish figure," she said to him, hoping that maybe he'd accept that and shut up.

"Hm," he said.

"Hm what?" she asked.

"I used to work in a building like that. 'Till the Exorcists knocked it down back in '24, anyway," he said.

"It was doubtless another horned building, unrelated to that!" she said.

"No, I'm pretty sure it was your building," Maelstrom said. He pulled out a Hellphone – a device considered heretical by the Mothers – and showed her a low-shot up at exactly the building that had been mentioned in the hushed and worried whispers of the survivors of The Massacre, as the very heart that beat filling the tumor of Cruac's humilation with its vile blood. A symbol of three killers who did their trade not for honor or for the will of clean blood, but for paltry money. The Fool of Despair and the Fool of Wrath and the Fool of Pride. Those who imposed themselves heedless and thoughtless upon Cruac's plans. The Hungering Forge, Calamity, and Pride Incarnate. The cards which showed the fate of those who so pressed.

Always in threes. As all disasters come.

"How could the building be gone?" she asked, as a sudden gaping hole appeared in her plot.

"Honestly, it was surprising the building was still standing when the Exorcists arrived," Maelstrom said. "Who are you looking for? A lot of people pulled up stakes and moved to a new spot when that one came down."

"I… I need to seek out the Roughs," she said. The Hound turned another glance to her, and nodded, idly typing out something on his Hellphone with a thumb. "They must pay for what they've done to me."

"Really?" he asked.

"They killed my mother!" she snapped.

"From what I've read about them, they've killed a lot of peoples' mothers," the Hound said idly.

"Well if you're just going to mock me I'll go on my own!" she snapped at him. But before she could turn away, his hand came down and landed on her shoulder. And her body, struggle though she may, couldn't shake it loose. It was clear he was making a statement that she was going nowhere without him.

"You'll stand here for another three minutes," he said, just as a whistle blew behind him.

"Let me go, Hound, lest I sic my magic on you!" she snarled.

The Hellhound, though, pointed down the street, as a bus turned a corner about twelve blocks away and began to lethargically move toward them. Likewise, without fanfare, a large company of Hellhounds, chatting happily amongst themselves, emptied out of the building that was beside them and pooled around the two. She then saw that there was a sign, standing canted at an angle for somebody seemed to have bent it askew, that red 'bus stop 65'.

Just about two minutes of waiting later, the bus came to a halt with a hiss in front of her. This one was unlike the one she traversed the Rings in to get here, in that it seemed to have at least been cleaned within the last day.

"IMP's new building is over on 192nd street," Maelstrom said. "Which is bus-stop 73."

"What are you even doing?" she finally was able to shrug her arm free of his grasp, entirely because he allowed it.

"If I don't come with, you'll be dead before you get there," the Hound said. He then gestured after the crowd of Hounds who were pressing into the bus. "Better go fast. The seats are filling up."

"I don't trust you," she said with narrowed eyes and a continuing headache.

"Good. You shouldn't. You'll last longer in Pride that way," Maelstrom said. She grumbled unhappily under her breath and got onto the bus.

The bus was warm, at least. Heated by the presence of a plethora of Hounds, but warm nevertheless. And it didn't stink of wet-dog as she had been warned. Still, she sat on the hard plastic of the bus-seat and glared at the middle-distance, straight through the far wall of the bus, through the stores on the storefront and possibly in to the far distance of the edge of Imp City entirely.

This was becoming exhausting. She much resented having Maelstrom lingering around like a bad fart on a windless day, particularly because he seemed to be enjoying her struggles as a font of entertainment, rather than righteous revenge. Well fie on him. If he wished to be amused, she would give him a proper drama to consume instead of the usual hellish comedy. He likely never suffered a day in his life, the luck-blessed beast.

Even now, though, her doubts were worming in. She could feel them even as she tried to reject and dismiss them. If the Horned House was gone, maybe the Egoist Killers were gone as well, moved to a place she couldn't assail them?

But she had to be resolute. She would be the redemption of Nuckelavee. She would… she would give them vengeance.

She had no recourse but to sit and wait as the bus made its stops, disgorging most of the Hounds and replacing them with a few Sinners and fiends and imps, who looked suspiciously around them at how clean the bus was, as though thinking that surely they were stepping into some sort of trap. It seemed that cleanliness was something these top-siders had no reckoning of. Fools, the lot of them.

Finally, her stop, and she saw a building that towered into the sky. At its very top there were tall, illuminated letters, spelling out the word Miller. She blinked at it. At the audacity and gall of it. That The Coward would advertise her position for all of Hell to find. If only the murderers of Esther's mother would be so polite. She had only a passing rumor of where to find Krieg Miller. She had essentially nothing on the whereabouts of Moxxie and Mildred Rough. In fact, even inquiring as to those two had been met with dread and silence, and warnings not to pursue them.

So she did what imps ought. She followed the lead she did have, getting out and taking the few steps needed to get from the bus-stop, which was entirely-too-conveniently close to where the Miller Building stabbed into the sky, and entered the colossus.

It, too, was shockingly clean. Cleaner than she'd seen anything built to the specifications of imps outside of the Sietches, at least. And vexation upon her name Maelstrom was still following her, turning his amused expression from her to his Hellphone from time to time. "Go away! I needed you not at all, and certainly not longer!"

"Yeah, naw. I'm going to see this to its end," Maelstrom said with a contented smile. Well damn him to a deeper Hell than this, then. She gave thought to where The Coward would be hiding, and entered the elevator. She hit the lowest button, which read ST. Maelstrom looked like he was about to say something, but his Hellphone chirped at him and he returned his attentions away from Esther, where they belonged. The doors opened to reveal a subway terminal.

The Coward wouldn't be hiding here. What the hell?

No, Esther thought. While Esther knew Krieg Miller to be a coward, it was doubtful the woman thought that about herself. She likely thought herself glorious and triumphant. So she heeded the lessons of Ruut, and pressed the button for the highest floor, next.

"Really?" Maelstrom said, as they ascended.

"Really what? Who asked you?" Esther snapped at him. He was looking at his Hellphone, though, and turned a mildly distracted look at her.

"Well fine, then. If you wanna do it…" Maelstrom muttered, then chuckled a bit and tucked his Hellphone into a pocket. She glared at him, demanding psychically that he reveal his secrets to her. Sadly, his mind proved adamantine, especially to an ability that no imp actually possessed. The doors opened, and showed a hallway that lead up along the penthouse. On one wall, there was the circular crest of the Immediate Murder Professionals, the catspaws that The Coward had used to destroy the sanity of Clan Crauc. She almost walked past it, but she saw that there were 'employee of the month' portraits visible through the window into the sitting area. And on one of the oldest ones, there was the face of her mother's killer.

Esther felt her blood heat, and she quickly pelted back to throw open the door. But it was locked.

And she had no magic that could undo a door that quickly.

"Yeah, they're closed for the day," Maelstrom said. She turned back at him, glaring, having not noticed that his face was amongst those monthly-employees because she hadn't been actively looking for it. "See? Dessie the Receptionist isn't in."

"Maelstrom, is that you?" a woman's voice came from across the hall, which was blazened with LAST CHANCE Conglomerate. From out that door came another Hellhound, this one a bitch far paler than Maelstrom was. "Who is this?"

"That's a good question. She brushed off telling me her name," Maelstrom said breezily.

"I am Esther Nuckelavee, and you would do well to remember it!" Esther snapped at them. She then saw Krieg's name on a sign above the door at the end of the hall, and dismissed the two hounds so she could not see the deeply concerned look on the new bitch's face, or could she perceive Maelstrom mouthing 'trust me on this one'.

She stormed up to the doors, and gave them a kick. These at least obeyed her in opening, showing a reception area devoid of people. The only noise after the bang of the door rebounding off of the wall was the very thin hum of the overhead lights, something that even the slightest noise would have drowned out. This place was as still as a tomb. But not abandoned, not even a bit; it looked to have been lively even this time yesterday. But not today.

Was there some sort of holy day for these Pridelings that she hadn't been taught about? Some event which would drag them away from where Esther could conveniently kill them? She stewed, teeth grinding and fist clenched on the pistol that was the only thing her older brother could scrounge up to put in her hand. She had not known her father, because why would she need to? All he was, was a source of seed that resulted in at least one Wonderworker. Her elder brother, the dull-blood, he was the oldest of her branch of the family left.

"Where are you, killer?" she demanded, as though the office would give her an answer.

"No fucking wonder Krieg's is closed. She's getting married today," the unknown bitch pointed out.

"Yeah, I did hear that," Maelstrom said idly. She turned to glare at the two of them, those people who were looking at her as an amusement.

"You knew that she wouldn't be here, and you let me come up here and waste my time anyway?" Esther tried to let her anger make her sound desperate. Sadly, she was too young and too small of a creature to come off as threatening to anything larger than a cockroach.

"I mean… you said you wanted to go after some… what was the name you were after again?"

"Mildred. Rough," Esther hissed.

"Millie?" the bitch asked. She turned a look to Maelstrom, then shrugged and half made a nod, as though agreeing to something that wasn't said, before returning her attention to Esther. "Yeah, she's at the wedding, along with Fatass and their kid."

"Why do you keep calling him that? It's just us right now," Maelstrom said, sounding much more genuine in tone.

"He compared me to a meth-addict," she answered.

"That was almost a decade ago. Let it go, Loona," Maelstrom shook his head gently.

"Fuck you. I'll start calling you tubby, too!" she answered. Esther, though, had had enough of that, and brandished her gun at them. "Oh, looks like she's got her nerve back."

"Where," Esther demanded, "is this wedding? I will see this quest done!"

"I mean… I could tell you, but if you were to walk, it'd be over by the time you got there," Maelstrom said with very frank tones.

"Then bring me to it by your swifter ways, dog!"

"Hey. Don't be racist," 'Loona' coached.

"Fie on you! You are not imp and therefore all of lesser blood!" she said.

And Loona outright laughed at that. Maelstrom turned a look at her. And Loona quickly collected herself before Esther lost her temper and sacrificed one of her very precious bullets on a target not germane to her quest.

"Oh, sorry. It's just funny hearing that from her," Loona said. "Fine, kid. If you're so dead-set on going to this fucking wedding, I'll drive you myself."

"Why?" Esther asked, her paranoia pricking.

"Because now I wanna see how this ends too," Loona said.

"Fuck the both of you!" Esther snapped at them.

"Nooooo, you're way too young," Maelstrom said.

"Yeah, and I don't really have a thing for imps," Loona added. Esther felt as though some circuit in her brain popped, and she just had the anger drain out of her. Fine. There was no bullying these beasts into submission. They were either too stupid or too proud to hear it.

"Just take me to where they are lurking," she said.

"She can even ride shotgun," Maelstrom said. Loona rolled her eyes, and the two of them turned toward the elevators. "What are you even doing here? You know what day this is."

"I run a fucking company, Mal," Loona said. "Bitches like me don't get whole-days-off anymore."

"You're going to run yourself into an early grave going like that," Maelstrom said.

"And I know just the guys to solve that when it happens," Loona gave Maelstrom a light elbow as she walked. Esther just followed, fuming. The end was near, now. Her mother would be avenged. Nuckelavee would be avenged.

---

The party was in full swing, having been kicked off by an exuberant announcement that anybody tied to the Miller family by blood, employment, or positive circumstance was allowed unlimited amounts of beer and liquor at the bar. It lacked any sort of ceremony or solemnity to it, the likes of which Moxxie and Millie had at their own wedding, for there were no pontiffs overseeing the event, no red-priest to deliver service and ceremony. But despite all of that, there was a certain vitality that this celebration had which even Moxxie's own wedding, shame to admit, had lacked. This place was vigorously impish, offering only the slightest concession to the enjoyment of the other races, because the vast majority of the people invited and involved were of that species.

Krieg herself decided to attend in a fairly simple, green sun-dress. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have been utterly frigid for her to be out and around in so little under this weather, but she was a Wonderworker and if she wanted a diaphanous dress of satin to be as warm as three layers of wool, she could make it so, and thus did. Uller, conversely, wore rugged clothes, the likes of which you would rob the graves of ancient kings in. And the two of them were, to the expectations of most, nauseatingly happy today. Moxxie however was not most people. He still considered his own wedding to be the second most significant and happy day of his life, after the birth of Beatrice for the first and before the day the lot of IMP killed Nathan Birch as the third.

Millie was smiling sublimely, as she watched Beatrice and Wayland playing together with Eppcor, Deia and Vinz Mitvic, with Eppcor taking the lead as he was older than them by a bit. Still, having the five kids toddling about and shouting with joy as they found a stick of significance, turned over a rock with pleasing bugs underneath it, or managed to catch one of the tiny trash-raptors and pet it as it thrashed against them and bit them no doubt did her heart good. Veela, now in the fourth grade, considered herself too old for their childish games. Kids always wanted to be older so very much. Just like adults always wished they were kids again.

They had been so afraid for Beatrice's wellbeing for so long. Moxxie knew that he wasn't immune to the protective mania that had infested them when Ruut made her play the day of the child's birth. And for the next three years, the pair of them practically smothered the girl with attention and protection. They were suffocating her. The rational part of Moxxie knew it. That they were creating a child who would eventually come to resent her parents for their behavior around her. That he had to let go. But the rational part of Moxxie, even augmented by his ever increasing intellect, still found itself subordinated to one critical truth.

Beatrice had been taken from them once. And he would never allow someone to harm her ever again.

Or at least, that was the way his thoughts went, until he admitted, to himself and to his bride Millie, that they weren't the only people looking after Beatrice. All of the Miller Brood looked after her as well, as though Bea were one of theirs, similar to the way most imp plural-marriages worked; a group of children raised in common by their shared parents. And having Tilla and Dessie's eyes on Beatrice meant that, for the first time in years, the two parents of their beautiful girl could relax.

And then they relaxed so hard that Moxxie gave Millie another child to have to worry about, but that was a problem that would rear its head in about four to five months.

There was a chirp from Moxxie's Hellphone, and when he pulled it out, he found yet another message from Maelstrom. Saying that they'd hit traffic and were going to be a bit later in arrival, and that the would-be assassin was getting antsy. Moxxie sighed, but sent back a message to keep the child sedate until she arrived.

"Is that little bitch still coming?" Millie asked, her tones surprisingly sweet considering their subject matter.

"She's just a kid," Moxxie said. "Grown up with nothing but cherry-picked stories of Nuckelavee supremacy and 'how good it was' in the days before Ruut's death. She has no idea how Hell really is."

"She's a fucking Nuckelavee, Moxx," Millie said, her good humor curdling.

"She's trying to commit suicide-by-Millie," Moxxie answered her back. Maelstrom had found that Esther girl flailing and utterly failing to survive even the introductory hazards of Imp City, and took pity on her. That pity extended to sending messages to Moxxie and Millie about what he was doing, who was involved, and asking what to do about it. Ordinarily, Moxxie would have simply sent back a response of 'pop her head off like a cork and be done with the entire bloodline', but Maelstrom had sent a picture of the kid. She was even less developed than Krieg had been when they stole Tilla and the others out of Lust more than half a decade back. This 'Esther' wasn't a burgeoning, world-eatingly ambitious young woman, she was a child. An injured, confused, and grieving child.

Moxxie had only ever killed one imp-child to his knowledge. And that had been on a day when he was willing to kill literally anything, his rage overwhelming his good sense and good nature. He wasn't going to kill another kid today. Especially not a kid who, by now Loona's assessment as well, was both laughably not a threat to any of them and also on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

"Well we should let her," Millie said, turning aside and pouting.

"It's time we buried this hatchet. And not into some poor child's head," Moxxie said, sliding the second sentence in as Millie turned to him and raised a finger to offer the opposite. She resumed her pouting twofold, at having been stymied. "I mean… what's the worst she can do? She's got an even worse version of Blitz's old gun, only two bullets for it, and likely hasn't fired one of them more than a dozen times in her entire life."

"What if she misses and hits Bea?" Millie demanded of him.

"We don't let her do that," Moxxie said. He flexed his hand, feeling sparks of thaumaturgical power flowing as he did. "I can make sure that she can't."

The party continued, and Moxxie looked to the crowd even as he tucked in next to his pouting wife. She'd loosen up soon enough. Millie had a hard time holding onto grudges, but only when it was against people she loved. The rest, she could hate until the foundations of Hell rotted out and all fell into the Abyss. It was yet another good quality of hers that Moxxie wished he could emulate. There were too many times he found himself nursing a grudge against someone who was, by all rights, a close friend, because he simply had never been taught how to let go of old pain. Millie was teaching him, slowly. But it was a long lesson in the learning. Even for him.

After all, if she hadn't managed as much as she had, he would have been right beside Millie in demanding this child's death for the audacity of her hunting the two of them down – laughable as her attempt at it ended up being. Seriously; the girl couldn't even manage to win a fight against Prideling imps. Pridelings! Those guys were some of the saddest forms of imps that still existed in Hell!

Only the Despair Imps were considered 'worse', and that clade was millions of years extinct, now.

She heard a hurrah coming from the central knot of the party, where Uller pulled Krieg into a kiss that Krieg seemed mildly embarrassed by. She wasn't big on public displays of affection, but she still managed to blush herself black and continue chatting with the other guests. Moxxie could hear a whooping sound from the edge of the gathering, where Millie's father Joe was manning a massive barbeque, with tongs in one hand and a stein of beer in the other. Krieg hadn't specifically invited Millie's dad to this party, but since he was already up here making a fuss over Beatrice and being a gushingly proud father of his pipe-bomb of a daughter, he decided to invite himself and bring food with him. For that reason above others, Krieg gave him permission. Nobody wished to cater for an imp party in the middle of winter, not for any amount of money.

Saffron had given a call to Millie to congratulate her on her new child, but hadn't come up to Krieg's party. She was still down in Wrath. She sounded more at-peace than she ever had been up here in Pride. Or even in Greed, now that Moxxie thought back. Still, she remained very much a background figure in Moxxie's life, ancillary and external. For all it hurt, Moxxie understood her lack of presence here.

Krieg had even invited The Bard, but that old legend had offered no response and wasn't present. Just as well. Moxxie didn't want a curse-driven calamity to land on their laps on what ought to have been a happy day for everybody involved.

By far most out of place at the gathering, though, were the two angels.

Gadreel was here because she was 'Uncle Blitz's' employee. Stolas was here because he was 'Uncle Blitz's' lover. Both of them looked utterly baffled at what to do surrounded by imps and in the presence of another angel. It seemed that both of them just decided to started to isolate and sharpening knives, or follow Blitz around like a twelve foot tall shadow, respectively. There was a distinct layer of comedy in how awkward the two were, both around each other and with the circumstances that they'd found themselves in.

The last contingent of note was Uller's side, all of his brothers joined by their more distant relations who now were living small but content lives in Hell's uppermost ring singing songs in Deepcant and by far being the drunkest of everyone here. But proudest of the lot of them was Dismas, who foreswore liquor today, and simply stood at the edge of their muster, keeping himself upright with a cane. He was very much a changed imp from when he'd been wheeled into Pride. Now he almost even looked healthy, if definitely prematurely aged.

"Are you real sure about this, Moxx?" Millie asked.

Moxxie turned his attention back to her, and gave a glance to the kids, who were making snowmen – which caused Moxxie a moment's confusion because there definitely wasn't enough snow on the ground for them to have gathered up into that pair of balls which they stuck with sticks and rocks for facial features and limbs. He gave his head a shake. Kids were strange. They must have run about to unseen corners of the garden to grab unmelted snow by the armload to make that thing. "I'm not killing a child today. Not during a wedding," Moxxie said.

"I really hope Maelstrom and Loona are right about this," Millie said. There came another strangulated yelp from Moxxie's side, and true enough it was a text from Maelstrom telling them that they'd be there in less than five minutes.

"We need to take our places," Moxxie said. As much as he talked a big game about not killing a child today – or ever if he could help it – that didn't mean he was going to allow this stranger to put the lives of his people in danger recklessly. No, the Roughs were going to be in control of this situation, from its dirt to its outer atmosphere. And though for most, setting up a trap for a crazed gunman in five minutes was a bit of a reach, Moxxie could do it three dozen times over. He thought fast, and there was only a minor need of magic involved.

Their chosen venue was a bench and table on the outside of the party, one that still had a dusting of snow on the ground chilling their hooves, where there was still line-of-sight to where the kids' snow-imp was having its tree-branch-horns shoved into place. Of course, Moxxie had put up a barrier between the parents and the children, one modified to be utterly invisible like clean glass. And then, they waited. It didn't take long for Moxxie to hear the engine of Loona's van – which used to be Blitz's van, in the times before Birch – came and parked. And it took only a short bit after that for the would-be assassin to show herself.

And she was every bit as sad a figure as Maelstrom had related. She was walking unsteadily, clearly had a traumatic head injury that she wasn't recovering well from, and was battered and bruised black. One of her horns was cracked. The only reason they couldn't see her Nuckelavee brand was because it was bound up in gauze which was stained grey from her bleeding scalp. Her eyes even seemed a little glazed, when they slid past Millie for a second, before sense snapped back into them and they locked on her.

"You!" she said, pointing at Millie, as Loona and Maelstrom stood behind her. Just like that, the assassin was trapped, and likely didn't even realize it.

"Me?" Millie asked.

"My name is Esther Nuckelavee! You killed my mother! Prepare to die!" she shouted. Then she pulled out her pistol, and began arduously loading it. The two couples, in front of her and behind, all shared an amused look. This kid was really, really bad at this. Finally, the child cocked the hammer back and pointed it at Millie. "Do not run! I am owed this vengeance!"

"...am I runnin'?" Millie said. Moxxie paused only briefly to check the wyrd he'd run through her clothing, making it as tough as her skin. It was still running, so he simply expanded the barrier protecting the children into a band that surrounded all of them invisibly, and waited.

Esther seemed confused by Millie's response. Clearly she had expected something else from Millie. So with a snarl, the girl pulled the trigger. There was a rippling boom, and the bullet raced out to the cloud of grey smoke. Moxxie could track the bullet as it flew, and as it hit Millie right above her left nipple… and deflected off of her, barely ripping her jacket, hitting the barrier and sparking out of existence.

"What the fuck was that?" Blitz's voice carried across the party.

Esther stared, then looked down at her gun, and with panicked haste began to load the other bullet that she had. Millie opened her mouth to say something, but Moxxie gave her a look to let the kid do it. Millie seemed to grasp exactly what he was saying, and nodded, taking a few steps closer. Esther tried to retreat, but bumped into the legs of Loona and Maelstrom, hemming her in. She almost dropped her gun once during the reloading, before finally scrabbling it back up into her grasp and pulling the hammer back. This time, she aimed well up from the skin that was hard enough to stop bullets, and girdle that Millie was wearing right now to protect their new child which was itself bulletproof on top of her own monstrous resilience.

This time, Esther aimed for the head.

She fired again, and this time the bullet raced out from the gun and hit Millie right in the eyebrow. The bullet sheared into two parts, one side scooped by her eye to fire a sliver off to Millie's side, while the rest of the bullet deflected skyward, having done no damage to Millie except having pulled a few of her eyebrow hairs out of their seat.

"YEEHAW! IT'S A PARTY NOW!" Joe declared from the barbecue, and then six more shots rang out into the air, followed shortly after by a small array of other small arms fire going off like lethal fireworks. Moxxie was only confident none of it would come back down and kill somebody because it was winter in Pride Ring, and anybody whom would ordinarily be hit by such bullets was staying the fuck out of the streets.

"So… I'm still waitin', hon," Millie said. But it was clear that the Nuckelavee had put all of her hopes into those two bullets somehow being miraculous, kill-anything bullets, despite being nothing more but lead and powder. And confronted by her own complete incompetence, inadequacy and the impossibility of her vengeance, the girl's eyes began to well and her knees grew weak. She fell into the snow and began blubbering.

And at that, even Millie began to have her outrage at the intrusion on their lives crack. After all, this kid was no threat to them whatsoever. And Millie, raised as she was by good, Wrathly Satanists, knew that the only pain that was good and righteous was that reflected upon those who would cause the heedlessly cruel. This child wanted Mildred Rough dead, without even knowing anything about Millie, about who she would surround herself with, or how to survive one day in the Ring where her target was living. And then, even more laughably, she expected that she would then kill Krieg at her own wedding!

It was a child's plan, from start to finish. A folly from which there could be wrung no victory, clear to anybody with an unclouded brain. And when confronted by reality, the vengeance fantasy that Nuckelavee had constructed for herself crumbled away. And she saw what was in front of her.

"Do you see the girl in the yellow jacket?" Moxxie asked, pointing toward where the kids were all playing, now doing some sort of pantomime in front of their constructed snow-imp. Only Wayland stood aloof of them, staring off into the middle distance at something out of Moxxie's line of sight. Esther turned, and beheld Beatrice, acting her little heart out in her game of unknown rules. "That our daughter. A daughter stolen from us. By your mother."

"You killed my Momma," Esther blubbed.

"Which one was she?" Millie asked.

"She was Hortence Nuckelavee!" Esther shouted. "You cut her head off!"

"Sugar, I cut a lot of crones heads off that day," Millie pointed out. That got Esther bawling even harder.

"Millie," Moxxie said gently.

"What? She literally just shot me in the face!" Millie pointed out.

"And look at her now," Moxxie said. The girl herself was knelt in the snow, crying helplessly as she muttered incoherent things in her thick accent.

"The kid put all of her anger and sadness behind a wall of revenge, and when that failed, well…" Loona added.

"Exactly!" Moxxie said. She faced the child, stooping down to get on her level. She was holding a picture, the Nuckelavee was, of a stern looking woman and a girl who was clearly Esther. And Moxxie recognized that woman. That was the one that Millie got time-stopped half-way through the woman's neck. So Esther's mother didn't even get the luxury of dying quickly.

"You don't have the marks," Moxxie pointed out. Esther continued blubbering. He turned a glance toward the knot of the crowd but couldn't directly see Krieg. Still, he knew her face well enough to know differences, and know that the three ritual marks at her temples and the point where a widow's peak would be if she had one were missing on the kid. "You were too young to know the horrors that they did to girls like you. They weren't righteous, Esther. They were a backwards family that enforced industrialized rape of the young and fertile."

"You don't know my family!"

"My friend Blitz is one of the cast-offs from Ruut Nuckelavee herself," Moxxie denied her. "A dullblood, branded useless and worthless by her own hand. And that same dullblood was the one that spilled her guts onto the floor of her tower."

"Ruut was going to lead us to…"

"Ruut's thinking was outdated three centuries ago, which if you've learned your math means it was retired by anyone wise a century before she was even fucking born," Moxxie stressed, his tone growing harsh as he went. "You were told that Ruut was somebody like Ur-Crone Beatrice, when she was just another grasping, blind idiot who refused to accept reality for what it was. You know Krieg?"

"What…?" Esther asked, looking where he was pointing. Krieg wasn't there, but was likely in that direction.

"Would Ruut die to a trio of magicless killers?" Moxxie asked.

"...no?" Esther obviously had no idea where Moxxie was going. But since Moxxie was making it up as he went along, she was in good company. He hoped this was the right point to make.

"So you admit that however Ruut died, there had to be an able mage involved. Brute force would never have done the job," Moxxie said.

"...yes?" she asked, snorting and staring up with teary red eyes.

"And what would you call somebody who was somebody able to even stand for a few minutes against the magic of Ruut Nuckelavee?" Moxxie said.

"A… a powerful Thaumaturge," she said.

"And Ruut decided that Krieg was useless as a wonderworker and had her consigned to the breeding program," Moxxie finished. Esther blinked in confusion. "Yeah. Ruut didn't even bother teaching Krieg magic. All that Krieg is, she is out of rage and defiance out of the mistreatment. Mistreatment which Ruut spread like cancer to everybody in her bloodline."

"She was going to make a new generation of…" Esther tried to counter him, but Moxxie finally found that he had demographic statistics on his side. He pulled up his Hellphone. "What is…"

"That is the birth-rate of Lustling imps as kept by the Bohta Clan. Very handy. Your generation is the smallest one, with the least children that Lust Ring has had in centuries. And then look here," he pointed at the far right of the graph. At how, starting essentially six months after Moxxie and Millie went go get their daughter back, the population of Clan Imps began to shoot upward.

"They're breeding recklessly…" Esther tried.

"They're celebrating not having to listen to Ruut Nuckelavee anymore," Millie took the words out of Moxxie's mouth.

"Drevisté Family is already claiming to have thirteen new potential wonderworkers, all the age of Beatrice or younger," Moxxie said.

"But… only Nuckelavee has ever had more than ten in a year," Esther said, as another pillar of her world-view of Nuckelavee supremacy was bulldozed.

"And they're discovering more with every passing month. It turns out, the Nuckelavee Program was just flatly wrong. Wrong with how to 'shepherd the blood', wrong with how it used its populace, wrong with how it engaged in magical research…"

"We knew more than…" Esther reached for another of the pillars of her world view, but Moxxie was already in the process of shoving it over.

"There are only three people left in Creation who know how to Resurrect the dead. And two of them are at this party," Moxxie said. "Under Nuckelavee, knowledge of the frontiers of magic receded. It withdrew. The horizon of knowledge grew closer and the world contained by it became smaller, because paranoid and foolish women hid truths about magic that could have caused a magical renaissance and let them die in the bowels of a temple as a result of stealing OUR DAUGHTER!" Moxxie found himself roaring at the girl, who quivered at it.

Millie laid a hand on his shoulder, and he felt his overwhelming spate of fury begin to recede, an ambitious wave pulling back into the surf leaving the terror of wet sand in its wake. Even Loona and Maelstrom seemed a touch perturbed by him. Moxxie took a breath. Calmed down. Yes, they'd fucked around. And by their combined hands, Nuckelavee had found out. This was just an echo of a blast that had long ago claimed its final victim.

"You are worshiping fools and failures, believing stories that your forebearers used to make themselves feel better about holding a boot to the necks of their fellow imps," Moxxie said.

"..b-but you still…" she began, pointing at him.

"What? But I what?" he asked.

"How did you do it?" she asked.

"Easily," Moxxie said.

That pulled a pulse of tears out of Esther, and she launched herself at Moxxie. Millie twitched to throw the girl a few blocks away – which would have been terrifically fatal for the young imp, but Moxxie's hand on hers held her still, and he simply accepted Esther crashing into his chest and battering him with her fists. She put her whole being into every swing, and they did sting a bit. But Moxxie was not the frail, effete, glass-cannon of an assassin he had been when he began with IMP. If only so that he could have sex with his beautiful, wonderful wife for longer periods each day, he had been working on his stamina and resilience. So when she battered and beat at him, he did nothing but stand there and take it.

Until she just let out a wail of loss and leaned against him, now only able to give kittenish thumps with her fists as she was utterly spent.

Moxxie pushed Esther back to sit onto the dirt and snow. "I'm not special," Moxxie said to her. "I'm not some prophesied 'chosen-one'. I'm just an imp. And when your mother took this normal imp's daughter from him, he acted as any normal imp would."

"But… how? How could you…" Esther now blubbed weakly.

"You don't have kids, li'l 'un," Millie said, standing in battery with Moxxie. "If your mother loved you as much as you thought she did, she would'a taught you better. And she would have gotten the fuck away from Lust Ring as fast as her feet would'a taken her."

"But… my mission…" Esther said.

"Yeah, who gave you that mission? Who gave you that gun?" Moxxie asked.

"My b-b-brother," she said.

"Dull blooded?" Moxxie asked. Esther nodded. "So he wanted you to go off and kill yourself. Which means you've been a bad enough sister to him that he saw that as a good option. Welcome to the wasteland of reality, Esther. It's time you start to comport with reality."

Esther just wept quietly on the ground, as Moxxie looked up to the Hellhounds which brought her here. "It's never easy is, it?" Maelstrom asked.

"Never is. Still, thanks for warning us," Moxxie said. Maelstrom began to open his wallet, and Loona groaned at him.

"Oh for dog's sake, Mal…"

"Oh shush," Maelstrom said. He pulled out a few bills and threw them onto the ground in front of the weeping child. "That's about a hundred Souls. Use it to leave Pride Ring and don't come back."

"Get your life together," Moxxie agreed. Giving the kid a ticket away would make this become a not-problem even faster than not. "And if you ever – look at me," he snapped and she flinched, looking him in the eye. "...if you ever come after me, my wife, or after Krieg again, at any point in the rest of your life… I promise you this: Satan Himself would not be able to find what we leave of your corpse if you do."

Still sniveling, the girl took the life-line that was offered, taking the money and walking, miserably, toward the edge of the garden where Krieg's marriage party was taking place.

"We maded a snow imp," Wayland said from Moxxie's side.

Moxxie damned near jumped out of his own skin, finding the young imp standing there looking up at him with those big red eyes. Millie and the Hounds also did a double take, clearly having not noticed the child's approach. And when Moxxie glanced toward where the other kids were still playing, he saw that the barrier he'd put up to keep any potential ricochets from hitting something that couldn't survive them was still up.

And still surrounded them.

How in the fuck had Wayland gotten inside of it?

Moxxie released the barrier, before the weeping remnant of Moxxie's most furious and righteous day could walk into it, and stooped down to Wayland, who was bundled in so many layers that he was practically a sphere with horns. "How did you get in here?" Moxxie asked.

"D'y wanna see the snow imp? We maded it!" Wayland exclaimed, pointing back toward the effigy of imp-kind rendered in snow.

"Answer my question, Wayland," Moxxie said.

"I walked into the air and it bonked. So I went to a place where it din'a," Wayland said in that slow, drawling way that kids did when they had to produce a sentence with more than five words. Moxxie glanced around, trying to see any place that would have produced a gap in his protective ward, but saw no stone formations, no sagging trees, no archways of earth or root or concrete. He could see no place that a gap would have been made. "D'y wanna see it? I helped get the snows!" Wayland pointed again with a mittened hand which was white with fluffy frozen water.

Moxxie sighed. The sky was red, imps' blood was black, and Wayland got into places where you didn't expect him. These were truths of Creation, self evident and axiomatic, as solid in existence as the fact that humans were bastards and Angels, by and large, were worse.

"Sure, Wayland. Let's go see your snow imp," Moxxie said.

"Is that your dad over there, Mills?" Loona said.

"Yeah he's barbequin' up some…" Millie began, but Loona got an excited look on her face, her tail beginning to wag behind her as she started toward the older Wrathling imp.

"Guess you sold her on that real quick," Maelstrom said. He looked after her in a way that Moxxie knew he all-too-often looked upon Millie. Of wondering how you managed to get so lucky. Well, that was Moxxie's day to day, now, as he tucked his arm around Millie's waist and pulled her close against the chill of the Pridely winter, and was dragged by an enthusiastic child toward a crude approximation of an impish form, being described with all the earnest intensity that a five year old could muster.

Moxxie looked toward the heart of the party, watching how Uller and Krieg went through strange rituals that Moxxie and Millie's wedding hadn't had, such as stealing hats, setting fire to a plate and then shattering it, or having the table where the two 'newlyweds' were sitting be physically picked up and thrown into a pond, leaving them seated, with Krieg looking baffled and Uller busting a gut laughing. While Moxxie still cherished the day she wore black, with the long indigo train, he could see that there wasn't a complete bankruptcy in ceremony when imps decided to lock themselves together amongst the other Clades.

He had just managed to part himself from the long-winded explanation of the game that the kids were playing to see that Krieg had taken something of a page from Millie, in that she'd pulled the largest flower out of a bouquet, and held it aloft. The people near her began to mill and give faux-panic. And when she hurled it at their thickest clump, the parted like the waters before a hydromancer, with Maelstrom managing only just to press out of the way before he was hit by the flower that, if the 'curse' was right, would signify which poor fool was getting married next.

Millie had fought five women for the privilege of catching that flower at her little sister's wedding, not long before she and Moxxie got married.

All the people here, though, treated it like the fearsome vexation the tradition claimed it was, and created a great pool around it, before laughter erupted from them. Nobody would be hoodwinked into marriage today it seemed.

Until Beatrice toddled up and grabbed the flower, looking very pleased with herself, and vanished into the crowd once more, which laughed even harder at the spectacle.

Despite the trouble that the Nuckelavee remnant had brought here, it still managed to be a happy day in Hell.

---

"That winter marked the real first year of my life. Life has given me a lot of time and a lot of perspective to look back on the frankly shitty person I had been leading up to that March afternoon, and what happened there in that park was likely the only possible combination of events that could have transpired that would have kept me alive.

I was a spoiled rotten little shit, one who, because I was born with certain advantages, would be forever expected – and expect of myself – a level of personal supremacy that history just didn't bear out. My mother was a Crone of Nuckelavee Family of the Clan Cruac of Lust, and a crone in good standing. Stationed and established, she had proved that she could pass bright blood on, by having me, and reaped the social benefits from that. My brother, my youngest, my baby brother Astarion, he was born Stationed. But my two other siblings? Dullbloods. Not to be spoken of in polite society.

Black blood, I treated my brother and sister like shit. And frankly I can understand completely why Fred saw the dissolution of Nuckelavee to be rid of an awful, arrogant little shit of a sister while he took what was left of my family and emigrated to Greed. It took decades to rebuild that relationship, and it only happened because the Golden Bloodline is fucking ridiculous and could afford to mock me instead of take any threat I posed seriously. Seriously. Mildred's skin is bulletproof. BULLET. PROOF.

I know that they still hold a grudge for trying to ruin their party, but I've done all the rebuilding I could. Either they'll accept that I've tried to be a better imp, or they won't. That's not my problem anymore. In a way, I can only thank them. Because they broke me of my illusions of grandeur and supremacy, I was able to meet the man and woman who'd be my husband and sister-wife. My children are alive today because I was forced to face the fact that Nuckelavee is dead and buried and for good reason. And let's be perfectly frank: I was less than hopeless in prospect of going against the Ur Crone, even before they admitted that she was one. If I'd taken a swing at her, that woman would have shown me no mercy whatsoever, and there wouldn't even be a stain left of me.

I'm sure she still can't stand me, actually! I am the closest thing she has to competition in the magic-for-hire business on this side of Hell. It's not my fault she focused all her time and effort into Purgatory and Pride and let me settle nicely into Greed."

– Esther Nox, Crone of Cruac-In-Greed and Founder of Vexation