By the time that Krieg and Uller got back from The Edge to their crowded apartment in Imp City, Blitz and his merry band of psychopaths had finished their adventure in scientific sabotage, putting back the Human World a piece of miracle technology and likely decades of theoretical advancement. In its way, it was something of a shame to Moxxie. Miracle Technology was a rare thing to be developed explicitly outside of the realm of Heaven. And though the two mad scientists who were responsible for it were now safely ensconced in Hell, it still irked Moxxie in a hard to adequately explain way that they were enforcing a status-quo that was already on malfunctioning life-support.
Moxxie knew that while it was theoretically possible for his Thaumaturgical Portals to reach from the Human World to Hell, he also knew that the strain of generating one would rip his body to shreds and likely kill him. For the time being, using Blitz's book was the best way they had to get to and from that plane of existence. It didn't limit Moxxie from being able to use his portals how and whenever he so pleased here in Pride Ring, though. So they had no sooner returned home from the job and landed in the office than Moxxie opened a new gate to Blitz's apartment and bombed through.
"So, ah... who the fuck is this guy?" Blitz asked, from where he was counting money at his own kitchen table. 'This Guy', was an Envy Imp who was being held at gunpoint by Tilla, who held her infant in her other arm.
"He is the one who is the providence of that book," Krieg said from where she stood on a step-stool to cook some eggs. And one hell of a book it was. The Codex Cruac In Alabaster was considered by those in the know about both history and magic the quintessential lost-tome of magic and lore. While there were more high-profile lost tomes, few had the cultural cache to the imps that the Codex In Alabaster had picked up over the centuries. Even had it held no magical secrets whatsoever, it still would have been worth ten thousand times its weight in Angel Steel, just for being able to speak of the history of the True Ancients of the impish race.
And it was encrypted.
"Any luck, hon?" Millie asked from her place making biscuits next to Krieg. Nobody had even asked her. She just saw that the oven was empty and started baking.
"Whoever encrypted this knew what they were doing. If it's in Enochian, which I'd pretty much take as a given, it's not in a stepwise cipher..."
"A what now?" Blitz asked.
"Where you take each letter and replace it with one a certain number of letters along the alphabet. It wouldn't work in Enochian, because the letters don't have a defined 'order'," Moxxie said. "And it's not a simple substitution cyper either, because there are no triple lettered words in Enochian, and there's one right here... There's a heuristic involved that's a key to it. We need the key to solve the cipher.
"Are there any clues?" Tilla asked.
Moxxie slowed the world down and ran through every single possibility of heuristic ciphers that he'd ever heard of, and then invented a few more to test against while the world was still around him. And despite all of that, he couldn't brute force this. Given that this thing was written several thousand years before the concept of computers was imagined, they had to have a fairly simple way of decrypting it.
He let the world start to catch back up as he turned the book over and started to examine it's every millimeter. The words on the back read 'In the memory of our mothers, the secrets that they learned, and the monsters that they stole them from' in unencrypted, Middle Enochian. The now smut-filled letters had been gilded at some point. There were still infinitesimal flecks of gold in some of the corners of the letters. The glue that held the book together had three distinct smells. One was a sort of cold gelatin smell, musty and dry, the oldest binding of the book more imbued into the pages than clinging to their edges. The next was earthy and sedate, a subsequent attempt to keep the tome from falling apart which still left tiny bits left between paper and spine. The last was acrid and tart, likely done within the previous century. There was a strange leather tab attached to the spine. That arrested Moxxie's attention for a moment.
He ran his finger along it. It had been cut. From the erosion and weathering, that cut had come between 90 and 80 years ago. And that tab was situated in such a way that there was a manufactured notch in the book near it. As though the leather was supposed to go inside of there.
Something had been cut off of this book.
"Krieg," Moxxie said, "could you look at this for a second?"
The young Thaumaturge turned her back to the stove-top for a moment and leaned in to the little tab he pointed out. Without needing instruction, she whispered words of disentropy and a reversal of the causal link, words of power old and powerful, an interface with the liquid paradox of the Abyss. When she did, the yellow of her eyes being overtaken by the black of her blood, she laid her fingers on the tab, and pulled, as though extracting an ingrown hair. As she did, leather reconstituted itself, a strap the width of two of Moxxie's thumbs side-to-side and densely marked with bands of tiny Enochian letters.
This was the key. Moxxie knew that. But the key was itself encrypted. He quickly flipped the tab over, seeing that there was nothing on the underside. Well. If this was what he was given, this is what he'd work with. So he set about trying to figure out how this key was supposed to work. The most cunning locks were not the ones that were the hardest to pick. The most cunning locks were the ones you didn't even understand how they were locked.
He tried comparing the letters on the strip to the page, trying to deduce some sort of commonality between them, comparing the strip to the most common Enochian words. That failed, so he tried introducing heuristic ciphers to the two of them. And when he tried to to that, he found that he was trying to empty an ocean with a sieve. He was using the wrong tool for the job.
Another look at the strip. There were markings at the point near where it had been cut. One could be forgiven for thinking that it was a quarter starburst. An array of angle markings from perpendicular to parallel to the cut of the strip. But there was something about that 'starburst' that Moxxie noticed. The cut angles were all of different lengths.
Moxxie looked to the two pages which were open before him. Oh. Oh you clever crones. The writing was not printed, for that technology wouldn't be invented for many, many centuries, but the handwriting lacked what most hand-scribed texts usually had in droves; variability. In a typical old text, it was likely words would be spelled differently in every paragraph, words would have different sizes, and even individual letters would vary in stroke length, width, and kerning.
The scribed letters on each page were perfectly formatted. By hand. And each page had a slightly different format.
This was a physical key cipher. Something using an object to create a one-time pad, that without which you could struggle and toil over for centuries and have nothing to show for it.
So he started to create objects in his mind to physically stretch that strip over. And in the beginning only managed to baffle himself. But after a few misfires, he remembered when this thing was made, and who it was made by. It wasn't people who were on the very bleeding edge of cryptography. It was made by very intelligent imps, using what they could get their hands on.
The object was simple and uniform.
The angles denoted something, so he tried laying them at angles along a rod within his mind. While the letters started to do some unexpected things, they didn't yet resolve. So he turned the round rod into a four sided one. That threw things out of whack, so he tried five. And at that, things almost perfectly lined up. Five sides, Five Tenets of Thaumaturgy. Of course. And then he started adjusting the sides of each face of the rod in his mind, making it larger and larger, millimeter by millimeter, until he reached nine. Nine millimetres, nine Phases of Thaumaturgy. Well, nine 'spines', but they were basically just a millimeter before Metric became a thing, so it still fit.
This single strip of leather, when you ignored all of the symbols which did not align with the path of reading, contained eight individual sub-ciphers. He was about to instantly test all of them against the page before him, then stopped himself, and experimented by using exactly one; the one whose letter 'durǿ' exactly matched the length of the etch in the strip for that alignment.
Perfect match.
And the page instantly resolved itself in his mind in completely legible Enochian, speaking on the secrets of refinement of ambrosia from Sweet Tar.
"I've got it," Moxxie said.
Krieg hadn't even managed to turn back to the stove. Millie was still looking at him. Tilla was still saying "ooooh,"
It'd taken him less than two seconds.
"The cipher is in that strip of leather, somehow?" Tilla asked.
"No, I mean I've just decrypted the entire book," Moxxie said.
"I'm so proud of you, Mox-mox," Millie said, giving his cheek a pat.
"Just like that?" Blitz asked.
"Just like that," Moxxie said with appropriate pride. This? This could well herald the beginning of what he had demanded in the Gates of Purgatory; an age of the Imp.
Chapter 10
The Best Water Is The Newest
Hell was freezing over.
It was an unusual case in Angel Dust's experience. In the decades he'd been here, he'd never seen a year where Lucifer let a storm happen this early in the winter, and never seen the temperature not swing right back up to melt it away immediately after. But the fact of things was, this year wasn't exactly ordinary. 2022 was the year of Sam In Hell. It was the year Angel Dust was freed from his dumb, horrifying bullshit. And if it wanted to snow a bit, well, fuck it. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
"Alright, that up to ya' standards, sweetheart?" Angel Dust asked of the john who was on the verge of coronary collapse, splayed across most of the bed. He didn't answer, and Angel didn't care. The great thing about prostitution was that if you had a good enough reputation, you could get paid up front, and then not have to harass them with a sore hole. When the chimp-like Sinner could only offer pleased and coital grunts, Angel Dust just chuckled under his breath, and started getting dressed.
Funny how he used to be a little bit ashamed of whoring. But there was a reason for that. When you don't get to chose who fucks you, you lose a lot of dignity. While Angel Dust was not exactly fixated on matters of personal dignity, the idea that he had to open ass for fuckin' Valentino's fiduciary wellbeing was staring to erode at his soul. He was so, so fuckin' happy that Valentino's skull was riding a pike of rebar outside the ruins of Porn Studios. Last time he'd seen it in passing, they'd put a Santa hat on the fucker. Let that crusty moth seethe in Double Hell forever seein' himself that kinda laughingstock.
Once Angel had his shit together, he left the little 'love hotel' and slut-strutted his way out. The other benefit of Valentino being dead was that he got to keep all of his money, so on the few occasions that he had to get stuck in to the economy of Pride Ring, it went a fuck of a lot further. In fact, he only turned about three or four tricks a month since Valentino's demise. The money just didn't run out.
He was of course mostly ignorant of the fact that since he was as close to sober as he'd ever been in either his life or his afterlife, he was spending a lot less, but still, it gave him all kinds of time, all kinds of freedom, and a free roof over his head made that money go even farther.
Shit. At this rate, he was going to be able to start saving some. For what? He didn't know for certain. Maybe buy a nuke like Sam had. Just to have it. Naw, that probably wasn't the best idea. With that little dame who kept mistaking him for a girl wafting around his room, he wouldn't put it past her to trigger the thing by blind accident. And even if she didn't it might fall off a shelf and hurt Nuggz.
His ruminations on what to do with his suddenly and – to him – inexplicably increasing money was cut off when two mooks were hurled through a plate-glass window of a barber shop, directly into Angel Dust's path.
"You mother fucker!" the guy said. And when he rose up to his gorilla stature, Angel Dust redesignated him. This wasn't any old mook. This was Furious George Stirling. "You come into my house an' disrespect me? How fuckin' dare you!"
With a bound, Stirling launched himself back into the barber shop, only to have a few meaty crunches sound, followed by the sound of an explosion then a thunderclap, and he was sent rocketing back out and impacting a passing car hard enough to drive it into oncoming traffic and instantly choke the street in a multi-car pileup. Angel, who had been staying prudently still at the edge of the bedlam, was thus able to clearly see as the door to the barber shop opened, and a hot daddy of a man came out.
"Petty trash should mind its words more carefully," the DILF said with shining ego and audacity. "Give me what I want and I leave you to your wallowing."
Angel Dust didn't even hide the fact that he was feasting with his eyes. Whoever this guy was, he was dressed immaculate, a vest and formal shirt and tailored slacks that did little to hide the fact that the man was lean like a welterweight boxer and all of his muscles corded tight under his skin. And though his eyes were solid green, Angel Dust could feel that the man was giving him a sly look.
"Oh my, ain't that somethin'?" Angel Dust said. Please let this guy be bent. He was well willing to get extra sore today if this guy was one of 'em.
"Just a moment, strangers, I've got some trash to take out," the hot-daddy declared to those who had, like Angel Dust, paused in the street. Furious George peeled his way out of the car that he'd been impaled into, and spitting out some broken teeth and blood, he slammed his fists into his chest before charging.
And this guy fought like it was a game. Wild swings that would have shattered concrete or steel beams were ducked and weaved around, as the green eyed Sinner effortlessly evaded every strike, ducking grapples and sidestepping kicks with a satisfied look on his face. Only once he had done a complete circuit around Furious George and returned to his place with his back to the ruined window of the barber shop did he do something that caused his fingertips to shimmer. This time, when George tried to launch a haymaker that would reduce flesh to pulp, the well-dressed Sinner slammed those fingertips forward into the naked air and then ripped upward; when he did, a rent in reality not too different from what the Strawberry Pimp made appeared, and when George swung his arm through it, that arm came off as though cut off by a laser.
With Furious George's power-arm now flopping bloody to the pavement, the green eyed Sinner then lashed forward with both hands, boxing George's ears and stunning him, before windmilling his left hand and raking it down George's face, trailing fire as he burned out George's eyes, hooked his fingers into George's mouth, and then slapped his other hand upward at a right angle, palm to palm, causing his mouth to explode in flame, throwing teeth and flame and burnt blood in every direction as it exploded away George's cheeks. Then he swept low before dragging an uppercut which crackled with frost as all the snow in the street was compacted into a pillar of ice that locked George in place from groin to neck. Then the Sinner stepped away, and made a tearing gesture downward. There was about a second where everybody flinched, waiting for what that would do.
The answer came as a meteor came down from the heavens and blasted the bottom half of Furious George's body off. With his opponent down, and the other man whom he'd thrown through the window still cowering on the pavement, the hot-daddy took a moment to flick away the dust and soot and blood from his outfit, then picked the other man up by his scuff.
"Give," he demanded. The barber pointed into the building, and the hottest guy in the street after Angel Dust himself nodded, and beckoned with one hand. A hair-ring wafted into his grasp as though carried on the wind. He dropped the barber and carefully gathered the long hair that fell down his back, and fitted it through the ring into a basic braid. He then put his fine shoe on the back of the barber amidst the shattered, but gradually Regenerating cadaver of Furious George. He then turned and swept that green-on-green gaze across all those who were watching. "Let this be a declaration. Some of you have things that belong to me. I am a sentimental man. Those things have sentimental worth. If you give me what belongs to me, I will thank you, and leave you be. If you do not," he thrust a showcasing hand toward the shattered carcass on the street, "then I will show you why Cain was called Terror Incarnate."
The crowd began to mutter, some of them pressing back as though his reputation in that moment started to take up space. Still, Angel Dust didn't do likewise. So this was Cain, huh? Cain was a hottie. And Cain reached through the shattered window to pull his jacket off of the coat-rack, sweeping it on elegantly and dusting a few shards of glass off of it. Then he started to walk, looking very pleased at himself.
"You lookin' for a good time, hot stuff?" Angel Dust attempted. Hell, he'd get fucked by this guy for free. Cain turned a look at him, and gave a chuckle.
"Not today, little spider. But perhaps tomorrow," he said, gently turning Angel Dust's chin to follow him as he continued to walk away. Well, if that wasn't something to look forward to here in hell, nothing was.
With that now behind him, he continued toward the Hotel, to his place. There was still a lot of cooking do do, now that there were guests again. And that ginger, Rachel, she ate enough for two big thugs, let alone a little strip of nothin' like she was. Still, there was a strange contentment that had settled into his heart. Valentino was dead. Angel Dust was free. He could fuck exactly whom he wanted to. And there was ciabatta bread to make.
He barely noticed that slight grinding sensation in his spine, as something began to precipitate out of the bone. Not yet dumped out of the flesh... but a process had started weeks ago. A process that still had a long ways to go. With a whistle on his lips, fuck-money in his pocket, and the chance to get plowed by Cain somewhere on the horizon, all was looking up for Angel Dust here in Hell.
The knocking at the door turned Fiona's attention away from the windows, here at one of the higher rooms of the hotel. It was far away from the bunker, and its soldiers. It was far away from the ground floor. And it was at least one story below the loft where the Radio Demon had made his den. Despite the assurances of the daughter of the Devil Himself, the proximity to the great deterrent that was the Radio Demon, and a literal army of armed people downstairs, Fiona didn't feel safe.
She knew that her body was not the typical feminine waif or bearer of maternal rolls. It was broad shouldered and pinch-waisted, her upper body forming a V before flaring out again at her hips. The dresses outright would not have fit somebody of her body shape. And those pants that they'd offered were uncomfortable for two reasons. One, they weren't tailored for digitigrade legs, and two... well... it hurt any time she moved her lower body at all. Thus why she was sitting in a wheel chair. She could walk, yes. But why walk when you didn't have to?
"What do you want?" Fiona snapped at the door, not turning away from the sight of snow gathering up in the streets of Pride. Lucifer must be feeling festive. Usually it turned to slush within minutes if not seconds.
"Your food," Rachel's voice came from the door.
"Then don't just stand there. Feed me and get out," Fiona demanded. The door opened, and Rachel pushed the tray in, with a significant amount of food on it. Even with the silver lid holding most of the aromas in confinement, she could still pick out rich seasonings and spices, which made her mouth water, and dragged her attention away from snow and freezing homeless people. But Rachel didn't just leave the tray and depart. She hefted a portion easily as big as Fiona's from the lower section, set it indelicately on the writing desk nearby, and opened to show much less... interesting... fare. "What are you doing?"
"Eating. What does it look like?" Rachel asked, as she began to consume deep fried potato slices. "You've been ignoring my calls."
"Fuck you," Fiona said.
"You have the option of leaving the Hotel at any point, but until and unless you do that," Rachel said patiently, "I always know where you are, and I expect you to show at least a modicum of respect for what I'm doing."
"You're right. I should leave," Fiona said, making to sweep the meal off of the cart, but when she tapped the covered bowl of soup, she smelled the unmistakable aroma of saffron. And that was not something you just let soak into a carpet. So she scowled, hard, at this damned Norwegian managing to bait a trap perfectly to catch the likes of Fiona O'Daire. She pulled the dome of silver off her meal, and instantly knew that they had as much as shackled her to that fucking chain again. But this time, with the carrot, instead of the dick. STICK! Stick!
"Are you alright?" Rachel asked.
"What?" Fiona asked.
"You went grey for a moment there," the Scandie with her Halo said. Fiona frowned, then looked at her left hand, and saw that she'd buckled the silver dome under clenched fingers. Somewhat self-consciously, she chucked it into the lower tray. It would be awkward trying to eat with her off-hand. But considering that she no longer had her good right, she had to adapt.
"I'm fine," Fiona lied brazenly.
"No, something just triggered your panic reflex," Rachel said evenly. Fiona turned a glare at the woman, expecting judgement, or worse, pity. Instead, utter neutrality. A stating of fact with no inflection whatsoever. "And since it happened when you looked at your meal, it was something you thought about. What was it?"
"It was Fuck You," Fiona said.
"If the meal is not to your liking, you don't need to choke it down for my sake. I'll just eat it instead," Rachel offered with a shrug as she began to dig into a large, deep-fried filet of fish. Fiona glared at her, wishing she could be as incensed as she thought she ought to be. But instead, she felt empty.
"Why are you doing this? Really?" Fiona tried to deflect.
"Because there were only three undamaged people in my entire life that I was able to understand at a visceral level. The rest of the people in my social circle whom I did not need to wear a mask for were all fundamentally broken," Rachel said, pausing only long enough to chew on fish before continuing. "Hell is filled with broken people. I honestly feel far more at home here than I was when I was alive. Although frankly, if Heaven weren't starving, I would still be content doing my work there."
"And what does that make you? Some sort of failed angel?" Fiona asked.
"No, that was my son. And he hardly 'failed'," Rachel said with a smile that showed uncommon warmth. From her at least. She gave her head a shake. "Did you have any children?"
"No. No time for them," Fiona said, leaning back and starting to prod at her food. It was true gourmet delights, clearly of Italian provenance and bedecked with the finest in fineries that the treasure fleets of Venice could reap. To put simply, it smelled divine, and looked delightful. And Fiona felt as though her stomach had been replaced by a brick for all her appetite. "Had some quicken, but none lasted. Got stabbed too many times, got an infection, then it wasn't a problem anymore."
"You're very cavalier about your own body," Rachel noted, having finished one filet and started on the second. That was clearly enough food for a man twice her weight, and she was packing it away with haste. "Fair enough. If I had your physicality, I'd probably show it off too. But something seems a bit out of place."
"And what would that be?" Fiona asked with impatience.
"In my experience, sexual abuse survivors tend to layer up, not show off," Rachel said with a shrug, not even noting the fact that Fiona was just wearing a blanket covering her from the waist down.
"And how'd you know that?"
Rachel reached to her collar and yanked it down. And showed that she was wearing two layers under the one that was visible to the outside world. "Of course, I'm something of an unusual case. I had a lot of bad memories of almost freezing to death. I swear that my blood is made of Freon. And I refuse to be a weather-hypocrite. I'll take the heat any day of the year before I suffer the cold."
"Stop," Fiona demanded.
"Stop doing what? I'm doing a couple of things here," Rachel said, motioning to the meal that she was rampaging through.
"Stop trying to hook me to some sort of empathy machine by showcasing all the shite you've been through. We aren't the same!" Fiona said.
"You have spent the last thirty years of your life in torture and exploitation. I spent the first sixteen of mine in the same," Rachel said with a shrug. "Can't change it. Won't deny it. And 'hooking you up to an empathy machine' is about the last thing that I'm trying do do, since I wouldn't know how to work such a thing if it even existed."
"I hear there's one down in Sloth these days," Fiona said snippily.
"I'll have go to check at some point, then," Rachel said. "What I know is that down here, Flesh Follows Soul. Your body is what your soul says it should be. And right now your soul is saying that your groin is to be plated to the point where you can't even walk. Apropos of nothing, how are you using the bathroom?"
"With great difficulty," Fiona muttered unhappily.
"Charlie, my employer, she wants to see you Redeemed and sent to Heaven. I don't," Rachel said. "Heaven is a – if you'll forgive the language – shithole festooned with self-righteous torturers, idiots, and maybe a dozen angels worthy of their wings. I would not inflict the likes of that on you. Instead, I want you strong again. Strong and free in the ways that you need to be."
"And what are you doing that's so important that you'd go behind the Princess of Hell's back for?" Fiona asked, sitting back in her wheelchair.
"Because of something that she mentioned in passing. Of creating a Heaven in Hell. All of the plenty of Hell. All of the virtue that Heaven is supposed to embody. Redemption in my opinion is a non-starter. But creating something that Heaven would be envious of, down here where we have the resources to support it? That is something I can approve of."
"And you need me as muscle. To enforce it," Fiona said.
"I need your muscle to build it," Rachel said. "Charlie is naive. I can see you nodding, you agree with me on that. She thinks that she can treat her clients like children and see results. That might work on the chef, but it won't work on the likes of you. So I'm handling what she can't, and I'm doing it in a way that might work."
"...build?" Fiona asked.
"A hotel is a decent headquarters. A seed, if you will. But we need more. More infrastructure. And people we'll trust to put in place. I'm told there is going to be another Purge soon, and there'll be no end of rubble to shift in its wake. If we're going to build anything, we need to clear the ground first. I've already essentially got Husk's help; if I ask him, he'll say yes. The tricky one is the chef," Rachel said, having finished her fish and moved to finishing the chips.
"That whore man? The one who made this?" Fiona gestured at her meal which honestly looked delightful.
"In life, I never had much cause or means to interface with the gays," Rachel said. "I don't have any moral reasons to revile or demonize them, but since coming to Hell it has been made clear to me that I'm a product of a previous, less tolerant generation. And despite his effeminacy, he's also a terrifically violent mobster, like all of the people I need. There is a need for pointed and directed violence in Hell, just as there was in life. And shameful to say it, in Heaven as well. But that violence isn't an ends. It's a means. I could find no shortage of violent people to make serve my ends. But it's what else that they have that makes Husk and Angel Dust valuable."
"What, you need a bender that can cook?" Fiona said with a scoff.
"Amongst other things, yes," Rachel said with a nod. "And I need somebody who can get places that people don't want the likes of me to be. And I need somebody with perspective. Somebody who has seen what a millennium can do to the culture of Hell. It doesn't have to be you. I could with some finagling possibly get Cain to do it. But I am offering it to you."
"I don't have 'perspective' on sweet feck-all," Fiona said. "I'm just a killer. Plain as day, nothin' else to say."
"If you were 'just a killer', you would have been killed eight centuries ago by others who can claim that same thing," Rachel said. "There is something that enabled you to survive in Hell where most of your contemporaries didn't. It's not your strength of arms. There's plenty of mighty idiots out there, and as far as I can determine, they get purged young. And it's not your propensity to violence, because in the last three centuries, the 'aggressors' of every pogrom, purge, or act of extermination have been hunted down and erased. I think there are as many original recipe Nazis down here as I can count on two hands. All the rest are gone. And why? Because they didn't have what you do."
"A lack of passionate enemies?" Fiona asked flatly.
"Please. You've got lots of those. And now that you're not under Birch anymore, they'll come for you again," Rachel dismissed, which actually made Fiona feel a bit better. It actually did her soul a bit of good to know that she'd still get to go wild on that cloven-hooved arse-wipe down in True South again. She'd done a lot of damage to Nicodemos back during the previous century. He was not a man to forgive. "I'm talking about a sort of grand, self-preservation instinct. Even when you were at your most feral, you still knew how to keep yourself alive."
"I'm plenty feral yet," Fiona promised.
"...Oh, nobody's told you about the tumor yet, have they?" Rachel asked. She palmed her face and sighed, pushing the now empty plate away from her. "Have you been noticing a change in your emotions since you woke up in that bunker?"
"Yes," Fiona said. "And I'd claim that you were drugging me, but..."
"But you've not accepted food or drink since then, and you're not an idiot," Rachel said. "The change was because there was a growth inside your brain. A dark passenger in your mind, goading you into violence, hunger, and vice through subtle but unceasing pressure. And now, for the moment, that dark passenger has been kicked out."
"You're why I can't get proper angry anymore?" she clarified.
"Your anger is still there. You're just not igniting into a lunatic excess of rage at slight or no provocation," Rachel said.
"Who gave you the right to fuck with my brain?" Fiona demanded.
"I did," Rachel said, her eyes colder than the surf of Cork. "Do you feel it? The clarity of your thoughts? The restraint that you've lacked for the last nine centuries, and the decades before your death? Do you feel that control that you've lacked, and which let anybody who wanted to put a leash on you, do so? You're welcome."
"How dare you?"
"Because it worked," Rachel said, rising to stand before Fiona in her wheelchair. Had she not been chair-bound, Fiona would have towered over this little woman. But circumstances were what they were, and the disparity was now in the other direction. "Every calamity which befell you in Hell was one that you either brought upon yourself or were heedless to stop because of your deformity. I have removed that deformity. In a more sensible Hell you would be thanking me for this, for giving you an avenue to power. But you're still not entirely sensible yet. I can tell. You are still expecting to think in the ways that your brain once forced you to. But time is on my side. You'll figure out how your mind now works. You'll feel the calm that I gave you. You'll exploit the control that I gave you. You will relish in victory only possible because of what I gave you. And in the end, you will build a Heaven here in Hell at my side, at Charlie's side, that you will be safe in. That you will delight in. That you will discover a want to protect. And the name Fiona O'Daire, once reviled and then pitied, will once more be feared, and then, respected. Eat your dinner. It's not drugged, and it's getting cold."
And then, without another uttered absurdity, Rachel turned and departed the room.
Husk, who had been standing just on the other side of O'Daire's door, puffed out a lung full of smoke as Rachel threw the door open and exited, slamming it behind her before returning to a more sedate pace toward the elevator.
"You're scary as fuck sometimes, you know that, right?" Husk said.
"I've got to get through to her somehow," Rachel said with a shrug.
"Well I think you nailed 'er," Husk said.
The cafe was shuttered and dark, unsurprising since in this part of the Earth it was around three in the morning, and the 'city' was merely a town with delusions of population. Still, as far as places to perform a surreptitious meeting go, a coffee shop in a nowhere town in a random corner of North America was a pretty quiet one.
Raguel dulled his halo to a guttering spark, so that he didn't cast light that would attract the eyes of the mortals beyond. This was already in a way a treason beyond the pale. He wasn't going to start being a fool and creating witnesses to it if he had a say otherwise. The cafe had a strange floorplan, awkward and stunted as though it had been roughly shoehorned into a building that hadn't been intended for it. Well, one wall was a bank-vault which was missing its door, so it seemed quite literally the case.
And from that 'vault', which was in fact the kitchen area, came a strange, hot white light. A light he'd seen before. A light which had defeated him.
"I have come," Raguel said.
There was little sound as the Demiurge emerged from the kitchen, with a carafe of coffee in his hand. He pointed at the windows which looked down onto the essentially vacant streets, and when he did the glass became opaque. Raguel didn't shift his expression. And even if he had, the Demiurge would not have been able to see it, through his mask.
"And you came alone. One would almost think that some of your kind can be held to their word," the Demiurge said, picking a table near the center of the anemic seating area and pouring himself a cup of coffee. He offered the cup to Raguel, who simply stared at it, before shrugging and starting to drink it himself.
"Why did you let me live?" Raguel asked, after that calculated silence.
"How many died?" the Demiurge countered.
"Excuse me?"
"How many Angels do you know have died as a direct result of my presence in Heaven? How many are you certain of?" the Demiurge asked.
Raguel narrowed his eyes. "You have crippled several," he said with clipped tones.
"Crippled, yes. But a crippled Angel bounces back fast if you don't go to truly cruel extremes to do it. Extremes which I saw no need to approach here in Heaven. How. Many. Died?"
"...none," Raguel admitted.
"So your question is moot. I let you live for the same reason I let Atheed and Malik and Shamsel live. Because it does me no benefit to kill any of you," the Demiurge said. He took a sip of his coffee. "While there is an increasing flood of hypocrisy in your brethren, there are few amongst them who have done things worthy of death."
"And you would be the judge of that, I presume?" Raguel asked, standing over the Demiurge. He didn't seem to care about the dynamics of power that Raguel was trying to enforce on him, didn't care that a man standing while another sat in such environs as this was the one with the power. Apathy and indifference, the Demiurge wielded like a shield.
"You could be a judge as well," the Demiurge said. "You have the same gift I do. And likely I have it because you have it. Can you honestly say that there are no Angels still in Heaven who have committed heinous crimes against humanity?"
And again, the Nephilim rose to Raguel's mind. He quickly tamped it down. "If you have my sight, you would not even need to hold this conversation," Raguel pointed out.
"Would that it were, Raguel. Would that it were," the Demiurge said. "I cannot See Within you. It creates 'feedback'. I see you seeing me, seeing you, et cetera. Have you tried using it on me?"
"I have not dared," Raguel admitted.
"Because it was impolite?"
"Because you are the Demiurge and it would fail," Raguel said.
"What would you say is your nature?" the Demiurge suddenly veered.
"I beg your pardon?"
"What would you say is your nature?" The Demiurge repeated. Raguel stared at him. "Because I've learned that your Gift and your nature are very different things. My Gift is the Gift of Rage. And I cannot even tell what my nature is. Which is apparently a source of power for me. You, though... your Gift of Justice and your nature are balanced somehow. I can hear it, a tune just under my hearing..."
"Why do you need to know my 'nature'?" Raguel asked.
"...Apologies. You don't know yet. Fair enough. I'll ask again later," the Demiurge said finishing his cup of coffee and immediately pouring another.
"Why have you come to Heaven?"
"To end the apartheid of Heaven," the Demiurge said. When Raguel leaned back, he continued. "Don't tell me that you don't see it. Humans crammed into a concentration camp for the good. Despair in the streets of Heaven. People shutting off their minds to escape the misery of paradise. Angels descending to cliques and sectarianism. And through it all, a disorganized war launched by the worst of you against the rest of you."
"What is your relationship to the Morningstar?" Raguel asked.
"I tried to kill him. Charlie stayed my hand," the Demiurge said. Raguel stared for a moment, but had a chuckle emerge from his throat despite him. "Yes, she does have that effect on people."
"You know of Charlie?" Raguel leaned across the table at him.
"You and I have met before, you realize. Before I even came to Heaven," the Demiurge non-chalantly motioned with his coffee cup. Raguel leaned back, nodding.
"The Fire Elemental holding the carbonized spider," Raguel said.
"He got better," the Demiurge said.
"Strange how you instantly presume that I cared about a random Sinner, no matter the state of him," Raguel said.
"Ah, but you do, don't you?" the Demiurge said, pointing at him with a coffee cup. "You, with your special vision, are cursed with the inability to lose the trees while looking at the forest. You must see every single soldier, on both sides of the war, and know viscerally why they are fighting. And how little choice so many of them have."
"The soldiers of Hell do little to array me to that cause," Raguel said.
"Not to the ones cracking their whips. But to the slave-soldiers themselves?" the Demiurge asked, lofting a brow. Raguel suddenly felt a pang of relief that the Demiurge apparently could not Look Within on him. Cloud 8.9 took a lot more explaining than Raguel was readily willing to offer, and as long as it didn't reach his eyes, the question would not be asked. "I've heard about what you're doing. Gathering live prisoners from the battle lines. Prisoners who are never seen again. Most Angels would simply think you are disposing of them as is proper for an Angel. What are you doing with them?"
Blast. Apparently, that did indeed show in his eyes. So instead, he shook his head. "I am not here to talk about my private affairs. I am here to demand an explanation for what you are doing in my homeland."
"You're clever. You've got the clues. Figure it out," the Demiurge said, sitting back in his seat with a patient look on his face.
Raguel stared at him for a moment, flummoxed.
"Talk it out if you need to," the Demiurge bade.
"Very well," Raguel said. "Your interactions with other Angels are, as far as I can determine, strictly on Cloud One, and the Rat Towers upon it. You are going to areas which used to be something else, in the time before... Of course you know about God's Silence, don't you?"
"I do. Please continue," the Demiurge said.
"The need for ancient relics of the age of God's Word is baffling as you being the Demiurge could manifest anything of your desire with but a hum of your Song. Unless there is something that only age can impart. Something that requires an object to have been created in a specific time, long ago," Raguel continued. He ran a thumb along the lines of his ballistic mask for a moment. "And you have not been seen in Clouds Two or higher. Wait, there were reports of a True Self pressing against Five..."
"Which means?" the Demiurge prompted.
"If the True Self was detectable, it was because the bodily avatar was not," Raguel continued. "You therefore must have sent an intangible avatar into Cloud Five for some reason, to meet someone. And if I were a gambling man, I would place my money on your meeting being with the Grigori, who have suffered much at the hands of Heaven's administration. Which one is for the moment... Wait. I am a fool. You are the Demiurge. Your avatars would not need to be intangible, any more than God's was when he sent it to Earth two thousand years ago. You have been swaying the parents of Nephilim."
"To what end?" the Demiurge asked.
Raguel stared at him, pondering. And the only answer that made sense made very little. But unless 'barely sensible' was worse than 'utterly insensible', he'd have to take the former. So he took in a breath. "You are bound to Cloud One as the humans are, due to your Thirdborn nature. So you are trying to gather snippets of God's Word to craft a pass that will see you through to the higher rings in full," Raguel said. Then he took a guess. "Why do you want to reach Cloud Nine?"
"My business need not be yours. Yours should be to them," the Demiurge said, pointing at the opaque window.
"To who? The humans?" Raguel asked.
"Yes, the humans. Those things which you and your brothers were created from their souls out to safeguard, guide and foster. You claim you are the Justice of God; where is the justice in that man's life?" the Demiurge pointed through a wall. Raguel frowned at him, then pulled out of his body somewhat to look down the claustrophobic 'main street' of this tiny town, to a little gap between two old brick buildings, to where a middle aged man was freezing to death out of the light of the aggressively brilliant Christmas decorations.
"He is... irrelevant," Raguel said.
"His name is Trent Warner," the Demiurge said. "He lost his livelihood in the collapse of 2008. When his wife died of congenital heart failure, he remarried to a vile canker of a woman who spent the next ten years destroying his stability, his sanity, and his dignity, before taking all of his money, liquidating what wealth he thought he had, and fucking off to Australia. He is a good man, with a big heart, who was treated cruelly. And he will die in the next two hours of hypothermia. Why? Where is the justice in this?"
"God's ways are..."
"God has no ways!" the Demiurge surged to his feet, four blazing white wings flaring from his back, glaring down at him with sixteen more eyes and showcasing that even the lies he told himself to make any of this palatable were not going to be accepted in this coffee shop. Not today. "God has done nothing for Trent, or for any of the people in this town, in this region, or this nation, OR THIS WORLD, for centuries! And you still stand there in your blind turpitude believing the same fucking idiocy about the Just World, that God cannot give you more than you are able to handle. Look into his eyes, Raguel!"
And there was a snap, metal and loud against the air, and Raguel found himself standing armored in the cold, staring down at a man who was drifting in and out of consciousness one final time, his extremities already visibly frozen solid. Raguel tried to take a step back, but the Demiurge outright grabbed him, dragging him down until he was stooped over the dying human, refusing to let him look in any direction except straight into the face of Mister Warner.
And though Warner was dying, he stared back. And Raguel felt shame.
"Enough. Please," Raguel said.
The beyond-iron grip of the Demiurge ended, but Raguel did not turn away from the dying man.
"You are right. You were right in Heaven and you are right, now," Raguel said.
"I am no more right or wrong than he is," he pointed at the human lying in the freezing gutter. But then he tilted his head. "But you knew that. You knew long ago that God was not good. So why haven't you done something about it?"
"Who says I haven't?" Raguel said. He knelt down, laying a hand upon Warner's shoulder. It was stiff, and cold. "Peter, if you can hear me... I Judge this one in this moment worthy. Let him pass by our shattered gates. Cast him not down where so many undeserving have been thrown."
And then the Demiurge reached down, and laid his own hand on Warner's other shoulder. And when he did, the frozen flesh mended, near-sightless eyes becoming unclouded and frostbite reversing itself as his body was renewed. Raguel turned to the Demiurge, who had a quietly sad look on his face, as he invoked Raphael's healing miracle as though it were his own. And given the Demiurge's nature, it may well have been. After moments, Warner was healed of hypothermia, and staring in awe.
"You are the most important thing in Creation, Raguel. You are a kind man," the Demiurge said.
"I am no man," Raguel said.
"But you are still kind," the Demiurge said. He flexed his hand and created some colorful money, which he placed into the human's grasp. Then, the Demiurge snapped his fingers; there was a flare of light and a sound as though shuffling paper, and Warner was gone.
"What have you done with him?"
"Sent him to a place where he can rest tonight with the cash I've given him. He may die tomorrow. Or the day after. But tonight I can see him safe. It's the best I can do, since the Denial of Time is descending."
"The Denial... you believe that Michael will Time Lock all Creation?" Raguel asked.
"He already has, will, and is," the Demiurge said. He paused. "I apologize. It's hard to explain this to somebody without the sight to see it; He will, and it will become retroactively so, preventing any non-closed loops from generating. I cannot see how far back it goes. Nor can I see how long it will linger. Perhaps it will be the new order for Creation. No Jaunts for the Angels, and no Breaking of the Arrow for demons."
"History will be lost," Raguel noted.
"You have individuals who have been alive as long as Heaven, if not longer. What history you lose will always have been the fault of your own indolence," the Demiurge declared.
"I know. I know," Raguel admitted.
"That you at least don't hide from your own faults marks you as one of the few virtuous ones," the Demiurge said, then snapped his fingers again. There was another loud, metal snap, and they were back in the coffee shop. The Demiurge moved back to the table and continued to drink the coffee he'd made.
"One of few... You've been meeting others, then. At least one you spoke to before our fight," Raguel said.
"What of them?" The Demiurge asked.
"Cagey. Refusing to name their gender thus not verifying whether it was Firstborn or Secondborn," Raguel said.
"I have had to be," the Demiurge said. The Demiurge nodded, sadly, as though in nostalgia. There was so much strangeness to all of this. His anger burned so hot, so furious, but it didn't burn in the ways that Raguel had feared that it ought. He had expected the bearer of the Gift of Rage to be a volcano in roughly human shape, a being more force of nature than reasonable conversationalist, something that would have the might to break the walls of Heaven and the ruthlessness to drop them onto the innocent. Instead... this.
"I need to know," Raguel said. "Why did you come to my homeland?"
"I have a mission," the Demiurge said.
"A mission for which you are recruiting what... our disaffected? Why then aren't you involved in that invasion?"
"I told you already. Charlie bought the only mercy that would ever be shown to Lucifer by my hand. She knows as well as I that there will be no saving him a second time," the Demiurge said. "The forces of the Pit are blinded by greed, by vainglory. There is righteousness in only a scant few of them. And of those few, I have little chance to meet, and to converse with. I seek no ruin for Heaven. It should be, now and forever, a just reward for a just life. This war does nothing to advance that."
"If not for heaven..." Raguel began. He furrowed his brow. No. No, he couldn't be this reckless. "You are trying to reach our Shards of Ruin, aren't you?"
The Demiurge was silent, drinking his coffee.
"You don't know what they will do to you. Even God Almighty does not touch those things lightly. They..." Raguel began.
"I will touch a Shard of Ruin. I will do my duty. And then I will die. And all will be better than it was. C'est la vie," the Demiurge said. "Your duty will linger long after I'm gone."
"My duty has always been to my Father's great plan," Raguel said.
"And how effective has that been for the last few centuries?" the Demiurge demanded from him. "Your duty is not to God. Are you a bootlick, or are you the High Arbiter, the Archangel of Justice?"
"I increasingly fear that I do not know," Raguel admitted.
"Then know this: Humanity is far greater in potential than you know," the Demiurge said.
"I am aware," Raguel said.
"Really?" the Demiurge asked. "Did God tell you that?"
"He did," Raguel said. The Demiurge's brow lofted again at that. "He spoke in confidence things He revealed to no other than I. I was not lightly named The Godfriend. I know the potential of the soul of Woman And Man. What of it?"
"See it through," the Demiurge said.
"To what end?" Raguel demanded.
"To whatever end it leads. They... we... can be so much more than our maker intended," the Demiurge finished the cup of coffee, then snapped his fingers, the windows becoming transparent again. "Until we speak again."
"The next time we meet, I will likely have to fight you," Raguel pointed out.
"We will not fight again," the Demiurge said with a shake of his head.
"How can you know that?" Raguel scoffed.
"Because we do not fight again," the Demiurge said. And then with a snap of his fingers, he was gone. Raguel stared after him, apprehension prickling his skin. If the Demiurge somehow had the power to know Prophecy... to know the What Will Be...
There might be no stopping him.
Raguel turned one last look toward where the alley now lay empty, where the dying man was given a new chance at life. Then, he tilted his head upward. "What is the meaning of all of this?" Raguel asked, as though in prayer. "Was your plan truly so complex as to contain the likes of him? Or is he the sign that all you've wrought is torn asunder?"
God, as He so often did in the current age, only disappointed Raguel with His silence. With less answers than fears, Raguel let his body drift apart, and returned his truer self to Heaven. Perhaps there was some small solace to be found up there. But it didn't seem likely.
Truly, the young were the future of the old made manifest. Ambrosius had been leery of Domina Octavia's concept of 'super heavy infantry' when she'd invented it. And he had expected, stuck in old ways as he was, that it would inevitably fall apart at every echelon required of it to succeed. And yet here he was, watching as the soldiers that had been chosen trained in perfect mechanistic order. In the last few days, a few more of those panoplies had been provided, bringing the size of the honor guard up to a complete Centuria Triarii, thirty men and women (and two imps) better protected than some vehicles that Hell would muster.
Ambrosius wished that he could see the smugness on Octavia, that his own follies and backward thinking would be rubbed in his own face, now that she'd single-handedly defeated every shortcoming that he imagined there to be in small unit organization. He wished that she would tease and taunt him for the old man that he was, who was unable to see the technologies of the modern day as anything but distractions and frippery. He wished. Instead, she was harrowed.
He could feel full well the apprehension that she was feeling right now. Ambrosius had been the second of his family to die against that Punic invader. He had only joined the army after his father died; he had sworn vengeance against Barca and all of Carthage. By the time he died, gored by an elephant's tusk when the last of those great grey beasts was finally brought down and expunged from the Italian peninsula, he had known fear, known doubt, had children of his own whom he now knew would swear vengeance upon Carthage and Barca if he fell. And they did.
The difference between Ambrosius Severus Agrippa, and Brutus Secundus Agrippa, was that Brutus succeeded.
But those ancient wars were long gone. So too Brutus, and the entire Agrippa family as far as Ambrosius could discern. The winnowing of time was ruthless. And the avaricious and greedy grasp of the Archangel of Want was even worse. He found new duty here in Hell, in indirect service to the brute who had made a mockery of Ambrosius' gods, tore down their underworld, and took slaves of its denizens. He could not be bitter. Savagery was the way of the world. Rome was great because it was the best at deploying that savagery in its time.
The soldiers paused in their drill as an imp without armor popped into being in the vast lawn of the palace. Ambrosius didn't even need to narrow his vision and sharpen his gaze to tell that this was the master's lover, the imp. An imp that scarred and with that... particular... of fashion sense did not exist anywhere else in Hell, Ambrosius wagered.
"Legatus!" one of the soldiers in the Century called. "Intruder!"
"Stand at ease. This is the Proxy of Lucifer," Ambrosius declared. The armored soldier turned as incredulous a look as he could while utterly encased in heavy ablatable armor. It still disagreed with Ambrosius' sensibilities for somebody so... uncouth... to be a public lover of a public figure, but such things were not his to complain about. As long as the red cretin didn't bring danger to his master or mistress, Ambrosius could abide him. The soldiers turned confused looks amongst themselves, silent because of their technology, as those who knew began to inform those who did not. There was no stopping gossip in the military. Frankly, they were more gossipy than weavers, soldiers were.
Ambrosius watched the little man approach, staring down his beak at him as he always did. Not because he was an imp; no, Blitz Miller had proven himself entirely fitting to be a part of Ambrosius' Legion of the Damned had he wished to be. Ambrosius disliked the imp's attitude. "What's shakin', chicken leg?" the imp asked, which required a muster of Ambrosius' stoic forbearance to prevent him from striking the little creature.
"Prince Stolas is busy with Goetic matters," Ambrosius said. It was only a partial truth, but what could serve to keep the imp away would be all the better for everybody's sanity. But the imp showed a face of less lust and bravado than usual. One almost... contrite.
"Yeah... I'm not... actually here for him today. Well, I could be, but that ain't why I got sent," Blitz said. He reached into his coat, and pulled out a scroll, marked with the golden seal of the Fruit of Knowledge of Good And Evil. Ambrosius did not start at the appearance of such a thing. His back instead, if possible, grew straighter. He knew what this was. So he turned without a word and opened the doors to the palace and began to walk.
This was the moment that Domina Octavia had been fearing. He didn't even need to hear the words to know. But still, he had duty. And that duty would be done to its end. He walked the imp through the palace to the place where it split into three, and then into that section of the edifice that Ambrosius knew for a fact that the imp did not know how to navigate, because he'd never been within it. It took no time at all to reach Mistress Stella. It felt like it took an eternity.
When the doors opened, Stella turned and saw the red cretin, and immediately her expression grew sour. She flicked a glance to Ambrosius, likely about to demand to know what this madness was. But for all Ambrosius' stoicism, he was still but a man. And the dread that he felt was obviously plain upon his aquiline face.
"I was told to give you this, so..." Blitz said. He moved to the table near the door and plunked the thing down. "Yeah. I don't wanna have nothin' to do with whatever this bullshit is, so see ya later, masturbaters!"
Then, he darted out of the room, no doubt to avoid the oppressive air that he had brought in with him. Ambrosius didn't even have the pique to hate him for it. For all the red cretin had by his own hand stolen the right to speak in Lucifer's name, he was not a political being. He had such low cunning as to know when the likes of him were best simply leaving.
Stella moved to the scroll, her hand pausing over it, a hesitation she would have allowed herself in the presence of nobody but Ambrosius. Her eyes were hard on the scroll, as though a raptor eyeing a snake perhaps too close to their pray. Still, with a twist of her beak, she picked up that scroll, broke the golden wax of the seal and unfurled it. Her face was perfectly schooled to stillness, her eyes scanning down its surface.
"Is it time, my mistress?" Ambrosius asked.
"...it is," she said. She refurled the scroll and set it down whence she'd taken it, turning and staring through the walls as though into another wing of the palace. "I should... I should tell..."
Tell her daughter that she would die this day.
"Take up your panoply. I will see to your affairs. As we have agreed," Agrippa said.
Stella stared for a long time through that wall, though her eyes did not allow her to pierce it. Then, she allowed herself a second moment of weakness. She hung her head, then nodded. "Do. See to it. And promise me you will raise her to be the most dangerous being in Hell."
"I will stop at nothing to see her in glory," Ambrosius swore. If he would have to be her second father, he would do so with pride. With that, her eyes pursed as though trying to hide something even if only from herself, she primly strode through the doors, and towards her armory. And Ambrosius started to devise a way to break the inevitable to his Domina Octavia.
"Those tinkering little shits managed to beat me to the punch! I don't even see how they did it, but they did it. I've been building weapons down here for more than a fucking century and I never even thought about making the common soldier bulletproof. It's things like that which drive a man to despair.
Ah well. I've learned from my mistake. The landscape of Hell's combat has changed a lot in the last few decades, hasn't it? The old turf-wars now seem so utterly small and silly when compared against the movement of legions of demons and the Holy Host. So I've changed with the times; Hell doesn't need another 'tinker'. It's got those meddling fucks in Glowtown to do that. No, I'm a more refined personage. Let them build toys for the grunts. I will build weapons for real warriors.
...
Oh, don't get me started on the Purge Unending. I'm used to about a tenth of my customer base dying every year on New Years Eve. But Heaven? They went too GODDAMNED far! How was I supposed to run a FUCKING BUSINESS and maintain my reputation as a craftsman if a fucking Exorcist can come down at any time of night or day on any day of the week to kill my workers, my employees, and my Eggbois? It's ridiculous. Whoever turned the key on that little decision upstairs should be DRAGGED INTO THE STREET AND SHOT!
...
Oh wait... they did?"
- Repentious, ex-Overlord and Founder of SerpeCo, Redemptor.