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.

18. The Vital Importance of Patience

Cloud Four was a stark departure to the lower clouds. Here, one could stand at any part of the promenade of land and see not so much as a single unsightly tower of slapdash and desperate construction forming pillars that connected the root of the Cloud to the bottom of the Cloud above it. Well, that was a bit hyperbolic in actuality. The actual tops of the towers didn't nearly reach so high; with the cobbled-together materials, a lack of technical know-how, and the desperate haste by which those structures were erected, and then expanded, they seldom made it more than half or two thirds of the way to the bottom of the layer above. That still made them a horrifying spectacle to behold, that seemed to dominate all directions and all horizons, such that only actual effort by Angels could rise above them, and to do so found one broiling in their own skin at the 'proximity' of Heaven's equivalent of a sun.

No, this one was different because there were no obelisks of desperation blocking the view of where the land met the sky. There were rolling hills, occasional and delicate towers, a few smaller manses, the kinds of things which used to be very commonplace in all Clouds of Heaven. But what dominated Four was the dead farmlands.

Birah knew why the farms had failed. He knew, and when he explained it, people ignored him. It failed because they were pulling too much nitrogen and nutrients out of the soil matrix without putting anything back in. The fields were tilled, even now, by Armisael, Seraphim of the Fields and of the Womb, heedless of how he was doing nothing but tending to dead dirt. Birah took a moment, leaning down to grab a clod of it about the size of his fist. It felt light as a feather. When he squeezed it, it didn't crumble and deform like soil. It fell apart like pressed dust. There was no wind here, which was a blessing of itself. If there was so much as a breeze, all of this would be carried away in and choke the lungs of everybody in this entire Cloud.

"Well?" Hepsut asked of the other of their trio.

"Give me time. He is a subtle one," Forfax snapped, not bothering to look at Hepsut, as he walked through the dirt, his footfalls not leaving footprints – unlike Birah and Hepsut's, which absolutely did.

"I think we're chasing ghosts," Hepsut muttered, picking at the lobstered plates of his armor. It was a mighty panoply that Azazel had given to him, well made and incredibly protective from physical threats, brilliant and beautiful in its elegance, its craftsmanship showcasing the decorations edged along select seams, or in particular places. But when Birah asked for the one that Azazel would doubtless be due to make for him next, Azazel just pulled a hauberk of dull chain from a closet and passed it to him before making it clear without words that he would be offered no more.

"What is even the worth of it?" Birah muttered as he thought of Michael's revelation to him. He, a Hexbreaker? That would make him the only one left in Heaven, if it were true. But it still didn't come close to explaining the back-handedness that he faced from every set of hands that he encountered from the rest of Heaven. What use was this chain if somebody like the Demiurge got it in his head to stab him? A suit of chain gave about as much protection from a proper stab from a being like that did as it did from the cold.

"What was that?" Hepsut asked.

"Nothing. Not a damned thing," Birah said. When he turned to Forfax, he was a bit surprised to see a dark eye glancing at him. Forfax didn't offer any sort of expression, though, no judgment, no doubt. Just making it clear that he saw something that Hepsut didn't. Well let him look. It seemed all he was good for. Twice he'd faced the Demiurge before today, and twice he'd run away when the fight began. Even Birah knew he could do better than that.

"Demon magic was used here," Forfax finally said. "A form of movement magic. Like Transiting, but more base."

"True Teleportation, perhaps?" Birah asked, moving to the spot that Forfax had been staring at, his feet crunching and throwing up swirls of dust with every step he touch. It was already starting to gather in something of a nimbus around the three of them. The only reason they walked here and didn't dare to fly was because their wings would have been that dire wind that Birah had thought about as a source of calamity for the whole ring. And it would have erased any clues, besides. Birah held out both hands, teasing as he pressed for the barely visible threads of magic not native to Heaven, and he did indeed find them.

It was hard to describe what Birah saw, as he deconstructed the magic that was between his hands using the power that made his halo burn extra bright. Explaining song to the deaf, color to the blind, or elegance to the stupid would be easier. He could pick out individual flows of otherworldly force, of any force. The forces of nature, he could feel them. The artificially aligned field of gravity that drew everybody down onto the soil of Cloud Four; he could feel that. The seething electromagnetic force repelling at the atomic level all things from touching his body – or even allowing his body to really touch itself? He could feel that too. And he could feel the more esoteric forces, of which there seemed to be more and stranger sorts every decade. Like this one. And when he at last picked the right weave out of its cluster, the thing snapped into its most useful form. A line. A line that shot across the sky and vanished on the other side of the horizon.

"I know where he's gone," Birah said, necessarily simplifying it. He had a direction and a distance. "But I still don't know why he was here."

"He wanted something that was here, before idiot-farmer Armisael turned the dust," Forfax said flatly.

"Put some respect on the names of the Seraphim, brother," Hepsut said.

"It has made my job more lengthy, annoying, and taxing. That thing," he pointed at Armisael, in the distance, "is getting precisely as much respect as it is due."

"You said that the first spot you unearthed in Cloud One was an old smithy, correct?" Birah asked.

"It was," Forfax said.

"And he has been spotted moving bags of something around. Material that he had to go through physical effort to reveal and obtain. Which means it can't be something he can make himself," Birah said. Then he stared downward. Could it be? He gestured for the others to take a few steps away, then flared his wings and cast his hand downward in a grasping motion, whereupon the dust before him was blasted down and out of the way in very deliberate fashion, and what was sent up was immediately compacted down into sandstone.

It was fifteen feet down, down where the dust ended and stone began, that he found what he had feared he would find. Petrified wood, shaped to a purpose. A plowshare, with its blade missing, one that had likely been sitting down there, getting churned deeper and deeper into the dirt – and later into the dust – for thousands of years. Its design was practically neolithic.

"This has been disturbed," Forfax said, sliding down the slope of the displaced dust and coming to a halt next to the device, well below them. He lifted the thing, looking at the divot that he'd pulled it out of. It was doubled up. This thing had been lifted like this, and then set back down. And from the unnaturally straight cuts in the likewise petrified lashings that had held the blade in place, it was obvious that the Demiurge had dug down here to steal that chunk of bronze, before putting the device back, and covering his tracks. "Why would he want such a thing?"

"Because it was ancient," Birah said, realizing the importance of it. "He's collecting echos of the Word of God. We need to go!"

"Then we go," Forfax said. Birah Transited first, coming to a halt on the inside of a roots-warehouse that likely gone empty for five decades. It was a cavernous thing, more akin to the infrastructure of human farmers than those of more angelic bent. But this had once been human land. Of course it was to their sensibilities. And though empty of turnips or carrots or potatoes, it was not empty entirely. Within was a device, one that to Birah's eyes shuddered against the world and made all things in this corner of Creation quiver. It was a hideous, lopsided and inelegant thing, but held such power that elegance was a tertiary concern, as it didn't even warrant being secondary. And the reason they could see that device, was because it was bathed in the harsh, hot light that emitted from the pane of light that framed the Demiurge's head.

"Demiurge..." Birah said, his words somehow echoing both exactly once and louder than he had uttered them, which caused the one so named to turn and regard him where he stood, in that moment alone.

"This does not have to be this way, Angel."

"What are you doing with that thing!" Birah pointed at the device that the Demiurge had spent quite a bit of time assembling. Even now, Birah knew that every moment it existed was one moment too many, and that it was as dangerous a collection of detritus as an atomic bomb – only this would be far more terrible if it went off.

"My duty to Creation," the Demiurge said. He turned in the direction that Birah had come from for a moment, then turned back. "I wasn't aware your kind could reverse-trace True Teleportation. Or even see it. I'll have to be more careful in the future."

"Just stop," Birah said.

"You'd best choose your conversation carefully. I've delayed your... comrades... for a moment. But they will come. And I don't doubt that you have a lot of questions," he said, and then turned his back to Birah, another fucking snub that at the moment that he didn't have the time to be irascible about.

"What duty could you possibly have? You are the enemy of God!"

"All thinking beings with moral reasoning ought be enemies of God," the Demiurge said. "A being that makes claims of omnipotence, but creates the universe that the humans dwell in according to the pattern that he does, is either lacking in true omnipotence, or his design was born with a fundamental desire of most primal cruelty. And that thought has come to you as well, don't try to deny it."

"It has not," he tried to lie. The Demiurge turned a disappointed look at him, and Birah felt the oppressive gaze on him again. A sensation he'd only felt otherwise when in the presence of Raguel. "You can Look Within, can't you?"

"I can and do," the Demiurge said, minutely adjusting the device before him. "And you are running out of time. You've got two more questions, give or take, before Forfax finds a way to Transit here."

"I've asked my question. What duty do you have?"

"To be smart about a suicide mission," he said. "Lilith was operating off of incomplete information. She was unaware that, had I murdered God and toppled his throne, all of Creation would burn away with him. I can't have that. So I'm having to be thorough."

Birah was stunned. "You actually want to murder God?" he asked, his voice strained.

The Demiurge sighed, slumped for a moment, then turned to him, smoke rising up to cowl his head in a snarling lion helm. "Yes," the Demiurge said.

Then there were twin flutterings, as two Angels Transited in at Birah's side.

"And your time has run out," the Demiurge finished.

---

Chapter 18

The Vital Importance of Patience

---

She'd lost everything.

When she divorced Stolas, she lost everything.

Sure, she had a third of his money, but for him, money was paltry. He had it in such plenty that only the Deadly Sin of Greed could meaningfully better his 'family' which consisted of his 'father' Paimon and his 'brothers and sisters' who were created to be Stolas' siblings. No, wealth she had. What she lost was far more dear than that.

She lost her daughter.

"You have a grim look, sister," Purson said where he stood at her side, overseeing the construction of her fortress-palace on the Edge, and the now-permanent portal to Heaven that was being fortified within it. "You needn't worry about my workers. They know their craft."

"I don't care about your workers," Stella muttered. She'd expected whole-heartedly and whole-mindedly that as soon as the association between the Power Couple of the Ars Goetia was severed, Octavia would see Stolas for the effete failure that he was and come to nestle in Stella's new nest. But Octavia didn't. She looked at the two of them, of mighty Stella and worthless Stolas... and she chose Stolas.

Stella began to walk away from the construction that was underway, noting that Purson hesitated only a moment before turning and walking with her. That she chose Stolas over her own mother was baffling to Stella, but what was only the start of it. With the effects of the divorce in the air, the Princess of All Hell personally came in and took the trophy of her favorite Exorcist kill from off her mantle. If she'd just snatched it and walked away, that would actually have been less insulting than the fact that the girl apologized, and tried to offer mere money for something that was priceless, while making it clear in words unspoken that no matter the resistance that Stella put up, that thing was going with Charlotte when she left.

And then, the final dessert course of her new privations, Agrippa remained in Stolas' service over joining hers. That stung, too. He had been a quite attentive lover for decades now, ever since Stolas became... well, what Stolas had become. He could speak to her on even footing on topics of warfare, of tactics and strategy, of the utility of violence and savagery. She would even go so far as to say that despite the fact that he was but a lowly Sinner, he may be the closest thing she'd ever had to a confidante. And he stayed with Stolas.

No, she growled under her throat, and forced herself to face reality for what it was. Ambrosius was not staying with Stolas. He was staying with Octavia. For that reason, and that reason alone, Stella could abide his absence. For every moment he spent with Stella's wondrous daughter was one where he made her more dangerous, more mighty, and more resilient to the mercurial tides of Hell's highest aristocracy. She would need to be the most vicious and dangerous person in Hell to survive the age that Stella predicted was coming. And if there was one person in all of Hell outside of Stella herself to mould Octavia into that kind of person, Stella had to admit that person would be Ambrosius Severus Agrippa.

"You are going to break your teeth if you grind them any harder, sister," Purson noted. "Though that for you would be a mild inconvenience at worst."

"And for you, no inconvenience at all. Do you even have teeth?" Stella asked of him. He was such a strange being. Just a man-shaped bag of viscous slime, held together not by divine meat and bone and but by the magic of his Halo. He was essentially unkillable to mundane weapons. If anything so much as cracked his Halo, though, he'd drop dead on the spot.

"I have such things as my form requires," he said, not looking insulted that she'd jabbed at his chosen visage for the day. He never settled on one for very long, but they tended to have similarities.

"And is your woman hiding inside you like she usually does?" Stella asked, as they began to descend a staircase which, though built, was not yet decorated to any degree, leaving it spartan and unglamourous, and also vulnerable to flanking fire. There was a schlorp sound, followed by Penemue appearing as she usually did, walking out of the body of Purson and taking a spot a step ahead of him, grabbing his hand and putting it on her shoulder as she continued walking.

"Of course. I have reasons to watch hellish industry creating something ex nihilo instead of repairing existing works," Penemue said, her usually stony expression somewhat content and gleeful, in a stark change from the usual.

"Why do you even do... that," Stella gestured vaguely at Purson, who though larger than any human, was still a fair bit shorter than Stella herself.

"Have you ever tried it? He has no internal structures and his matrix is tremendously cozy," Penemue said, gesturing at him.

"Pleased to be of service as furniture," Purson said with a twinkle in his dark eye that drove a spike of envy into Stella. Stolas had once spoken to her that way. Had once looked at her that way. And now? Now she was alone.

"Additionally, we have been forcefully separated for an eon. It is my prerogative to therefor spend as much time as I am able to, as close to him as I possibly can, to make up for lost time," Penemue continued. She then had the slightest twist of her lip that on most anybody else, would be an expression of utmost sauciness. "And given his unusual physiology, I have certain options that I would otherwise be denied."

"Cease, please," Stella demanded. They began now to walk across the floors, or rather the structure that would run under the floors when the manse was completed. Given that they were building a new fortress-palace from scratch with all of the advancements that ten thousand years had given the craftsmen of both Hell and Earth, the engineers and workers were pulling all proverbial stops to make this the greatest building designed by human and Hellborn hands, since Lucifer's palace had been raised up as an act of his own will. "Such suffocation can't be good for your child."

"His matrix his thoroughly oxygenated," Penemue pointed out. "He does breathe, after all."

"You do leave me breathless," Purson said in an utterly conversational tone.

"After this long, I had better," Penemue said. "As for the child? It is an Angel, born of Angels. Exactly why we came to you today."

"What do you want?" Stella asked, pausing at the rut in the construction which would be the great formal doors, and then the descent down to the grounds. Grounds which would be the last things put in, and were currently housing a flotilla of trailers and caravans. They would likely be there, working all hours of every day, heedless of snow or inclement weather, until the thing was built up, even though that was a task of years. Oh for the good old days of slave labor. Oh for the days when slave labor didn't result in dogshit compared to paid labor, at least.

"By the autumn of this year, I will have a son," Penemue said.

"You already know it's a son? I didn't know Octavia would be a girl until she hatched," Stella interrupted, which drew a flat look from Penemue. Without answering her implication, the Scriptor continued.

Penemue continued: "...and that son will be symbol to all of Creation that we are entering a new, post-God age. Do you really think that Octavia only came about now by sheer chance, cousin? No. Octavia was able to be born in the modern age because God has become insensate and heedless. And where Octavia was the crack in the dam of Angelic infertility, Tabris will be the first of the flood that will follow after it."

"For somebody 'rebelling' against the determinism of God, you do have a lot planned for the knot of cells in your womb," Stella noted. "Determining its sex, already having a name..."

"How long did it take you to name Octavia?" Purson asked.

Stella was caught out by that.

She hadn't named Octavia. Stolas had.

"Irrelevant," Stella waved the thought away, moving now to the first structure that had been created on the grounds of the Palace of Iron. It would eventually serve as a guard-house for the grounds, a barracks and training room for her now-expanded legions. But now, it was the place she rested her head each night that she cared to sleep. Sleep seldom graced her these days. Regret poisoned those dark hours of inaction, and spurred her back to her feet, to do something to chase them away. "Why Tabris, by the way?"

The two of them shared a look which communicated much amongst them, but little to outsider Stella, before Penemue offered a rare, undiluted look of utter smugness. "Spite," she said, her melodic tones even a bit sweet.

"Our lives have been dictated from the instant of our creation unto the instant of our destruction by God," Purson said, "as mandated by His Prophecy, subject to no change or alteration no matter our intent or ability. In the moment of Lucifer's creation, God knew and allowed Lucifer to grow discontent, to rebel, and to drag all of us down here after him, wings torn from our backs, with my ladies' rare exception. But no more. My distant eyes have told me that the Prophecy has been cast into the Abyss. Free Will is now no longer polite fiction, but entrenched facet of reality."

"Tabris will be the Song of Freedom. Whatever he does with that freedom is his choice. And we will do everything in our power to ensure that he has as much choice as Angelically possible," Penemue said with a sort of maternal fierceness that Stella could empathize with. "Which is why we come to you."

"What could I even offer him, other than perhaps teaching him to fight?" Stella asked, as she pushed open the doors to the barracks and entered the chamber. It was cold. She didn't care to keep it warm, not for her sake alone. The vast inner space was at this point packed, roof to floor, with boxes of her things removed from the Palace of Flowers. And in a distant corner, a bed that she could so seldom use. They took a turn, away from those boxes, and into a little room serving as an impromptu kitchen, one that would eventually be torn out once the barracks resumed its true function. There, Stella made herself tea.

"Teaching him to fight if he so chooses would be a valuable lesson, and one would endorse with whole heart," Purson said, standing ever a half pace behind Penemue, his hand resting gently on her shoulder, his large fingers clasped in her delicate ones.

"But the primary thing we've come to ask, and we are indeed asking, Stella... is that you be willing to protect him," Penemue said.

"Protect your child? Why should I?" Stella asked, keeping her back to them more than not. She didn't like to look at them right now. To see them managing to bypass the whole doldrums of what a marriage becomes and enter instantly some sort of post-post-post honeymoon phase, where their passions no longer were enflamed, but they nevertheless didn't decline into apathy and bickering but instead grew together like a vine on a trellis... It burned.

"Because Octavia is nearly fully grown, and despite your greatest intentions to the opposite, you still find a desire to mother something," Penemue said.

"Bold claim to make of somebody you haven't seen in an eon, Penemue," Stella muttered, turning with a cup of tea but sparing herself the envy of looking at the new Power Couple of Hell by instead staring down into the dark surface of her cuppa.

"You fought so hard to be a woman, in all that entails," Purson pointed out.

"Nobody asked you," Stella muttered.

"We ask you, not your ex-husband and your family, but you, to be the one who will look to the good of Tabris if something were to come to us," Penemue said.

"You want me to be her 'godmother'?" Stella asked, now flitting a look up from her tea. Penemue just did a simple nod. Up, down, done.

"Hell has become incredibly dangerous, now that the Old Peace is dead," Purson said.

"You may be able to fight an Exorcist to a standstill on your own. I am fairly sure that I could not," Penemue admitted.

"I don't doubt as well that they have algorithms to specifically target the weaknesses of we, their enemy Hexbreakers," Purson added.

"What do I get out of it?" she asked. "I'm going to be busy as fuck with this whole war going on, and won't have time to have your little creature clinging to my ankles as I go around. I am Princess of Iron, now. My duties are greater than once they were."

"You will get the undying allegiance of the House of Lore," Purson offered. "We are not offering our son into your future care lightly. Whatever the cost of your protections would be worth, we would pay it."

Again, Stella looked upon the two of them and saw what she could have been. If only Stolas hadn't pulled back. Or if she hadn't responded to that with anger and with cruelty. In other words, if the impossible were possible and if left were right. But Penemue and Purson were not the reason for her anger and her envy. No. She could lay that at nobody's feet but her own. She had insulated herself from introspection for quite a few years now under that low, seething heat of constant outrage. With it gone, she could see clearly for the first time in decades. And what she saw there, naked under the light of an honest day, sickened her. She saw herself.

"I'll protect your child," she said. "Provided the little fuck doesn't get on my nerves too much."

"You have our thanks," Penemue said. "Now that we've got that out of the way, we can get to our other works. You're aware of Lucifer's demand for the Highest Censure? Oh, of course you are. You were there when he gave it," she gave her head a shake. "Would you be averse to building the Paradox Engine into your palace? It would allow you to magnify your power in the defense of this new edifice five-fold."

"And you're doing it here instead of in your own manse because you think it's a decent price for taking your unborn kid as my ward," Stella spelled out Penemue's logic.

"Accurate," Penemue said.

"Do so," Stella said. If somebody was willing to make you stronger, then you took their deal. They had a vested interest not to betray Stella, if they were going to be potentially entrusting this to-be-Tabris to her.

"We should begin at once. My sweet?" she asked, over her shoulder.

"At once," he agreed. Penemue was sucked into Purson's larger form and he started to walk away, leaving Stella alone. In that moment, just when Purson's extra heavy footsteps crossed the threshold of the barracks and left her alone, why Stolas would sometimes break into dirgeful song toward the end of their marriage. He felt terribly trapped in a marriage to a cruel woman.

Now she was terribly free, with nobody left. It was almost enough to drive her to despair.

---

Forfax's sword was in his hand the instant he laid eyes upon the Demiurge, and Hepsut's only a moment later. They needed no instruction from Birah to attack, launching themselves without warning or parlay to the creature that was stampeding its way through Heaven. More smoke wafted from the Demiurge, as Samael's death's-head mask appeared clutched in the jaws of the lion just in time for his utter lack of a dodge to cause the blade to impact the metal and deflect away, dragging Forfax off of his line, the Demiurge bending him over like the arch of a bridge, then driving a greave up into his belly and sending him rocketing up and through the ceiling, punching a hole clear through the roof.

Birah raked with his fingers, and spake word of power to invoke Michael's miracle of control over time. Even as he felt the insistent fingers of magical power reaching up from the fabric of spacetime to snare, impede and capture the Demiurge, Samael did a sweep with one arm, his scythe appearing for a moment as it caught up those tangling strands, and parted them in very much the way that scythe would reap wheat grains. Hepsut nevertheless lashed out with what Birah knew from practice to be an impenetrable web of burning steel. Hepsut, after all, was the Angel of Dance, and the blade in such an event as a one-on-one was so close to a dance that he could use his Mastery to its fullest effect.

And Samael did retreat a few steps, warding away blows to the sides of his knees, or to his armpits with his elbows or the backs of his gauntlets. The dance intensified, as Birah started to run. Not toward Samael, no, Hepsut had that well in hand. Birah was running toward that blasphemy of God's Word made manifest, to destroy it before it did whatever it was intended to do.

Samael, even as he retreated, deflecting the merciless and endless onslaught of attacks, kept his eyes on Birah. And the instant that he judged Birah to have either gotten too close to his device, or that Birah had made a folly of position, the blazing light of the eyes through the death's-head mask died, and a shrieking grey-black smoke began to coil around his off-hand forearm, a hellish containment magic of some sort. I wasn't until the Demiurge pumped a pure sensation into it that Birah recognized it; this was the opposite procedure to what he had expected to possible. To create a Pain Elemental, you isolate existing agony, then contain it. You don't set up the containment, and then inject the pain from yourself!

A flick of Samael's hand, and the thing raced at Birah. If he had been as magically blind as most of his brothers, sisters, and cousins, the Pain Elemental would have crashed into him without so much as a chance to dodge. As it was, he quickly raised a ward, one similar to what made a Pain Elemental in its way; containment magic, which he dragged the ambient despair from the region into, so that when the Pain Elemental struck, it struck a concentrated wall of 'I don't give a fuck about anything anymore', and caused the attack to streak away. He dropped the shield, and invoked the Canticle of Sloth, a word that reset the world to a sluggish pace. Hepsut's movements were not so impacted, so dedicated was he to the dance of death. And Samael was pushed even further onto the defensive.

Wait.

He wasn't being defensive, Birah realized. If Samael had been defensive, he would have tried to do something high risk, high reward to get out of it. If there was one commonality amongst the accounts of how the Demiurge fought, it was that he took the first opportunity to get a fighter out of the fight as he could, then he moved on. He wasn't retreating. He was waiting. "Hepsut, caution!" Birah shouted. Hepsut didn't give indication that he'd heard, as that would have caused a hesitation in his sword-dance, thrown off his rhythm. There was a fluttering, as Forfax appeared at Birah's side once again.

"Drop this sloth at once! It only benefits him!" Forfax demanded, holding his belly as though it were still tender.

"He's..." Birah began, but even as he spoke, the Demiurge stopped fighting as though he were encased in molasses, and enjoyed a brief, unexpected explosion of rapid movement. He pressed past a thrust at him by Hepsut, allowing it to grind along his counterfeit Plate of God at his ribs, before grabbing Hepsut's forearm with one hand and his upper arm with another. With Hepsut's elbow now pinned against Samael's armor-girded ribs, he could do nothing in the time he had before Samael reefed back and hyperextended that elbow to a sickening crunch. The blazing sword fell from Hepsut's now useless hand. The Demiurge then spun away, holding one hand out toward Hepsut, before snapping his fingers and having a shockwave of magical force smash into the angel of Dance and sent him rocketing through the wall the same way that Forfax had the ceiling.

Enough of this. Forfax was right. He ended the Canticle and gestured with his own rods toward the device. "Destroy that, it's what matters not him!" Birah said.

"Reinforcements are coming. I sent a message before returning," Forfax said, eyes locked on the Demiurge, his new prey in this unkind Heaven.

Forfax flexed an arm, and with a mighty heave, cast out a javelin of crackling light, one that split and parted, duplicating, tripling, and multiplying until it was a fusillade while his wings spread from his back, launching himself forward. The array of incoming weaponry was one he could not have dodged by anything short of teleportation to somewhere at least ten leagues away, and he seemed to grasp that, so he simply stood still, holding one arm up in front of his eyes, so that when the entire barrage struck him, the spears shattered on his armor without finding so much as a whisper of a gap.

It was a ruse. Forfax was not charging the Demiurge. Instead, he raced to the device, grabbing ahold of whatever part of it he could wrench free and tearing it loose. He flexed his body, preparing to Transit away with this no-doubt critical component, but the Demiurge swung his still crackling arm with a snapping of his fingers, and Birah could feel a terrifying flux of magic as all of Cloud Four became Anchored. That was Leliel's miracle! How had the Demiurge learned the mastery of space? Regardless of the answer to that question, when Forfax flapped hard his wings, there was the fluttering sound of feathers against the wind, and he was still standing there in its outset.

"Don't be difficult, hunter. Give that back," Samael said, his gaze turning toward him.

"I think not," Forfax declared, still holding the strangely shaped chunk of metal in his off hand, as he summoned his Messer sword that blazed with moody red fire.

"Pity," Samael said. He took a step toward, and Birah gathered the strands of his own personal power and began to craft a dart that would bypass even this counterfeit Plate of God to strike at him under it, but while doing so he felt something else tugging nearby. He turned, and saw that the dissipated smoke of the Pain Elemental was snapping back together. If his attack had merely been Angel magic, he could have released it to no ill effect, but he was trying something dangerous, so could do nothing as the Pain Elemental raced back toward him, shrieking without voice as it crashed into him, and his entire existence became agony.

There was an explosion between his hands, in front of his chest. That would have ordinarily been debilitating on its own, exquisite in anguish, but it utterly vanished before the tide of undiluted and indeed concentrated pain that washed through every Angelic neuron that Birah's body had to bear, his eyes blind and the shriek of torment that escaped his throat never reaching his own ears as they were assaulted by a deafening cacophany to complete his sensory unpleasantness.

He didn't know how long the Pain Elemental rendered him useless, but he knew it was longer than it should have. Even with every moment stretched out to an eternity, the part of Birah's mind that still understood magic knew that the Pain Elemental could only hold so much pain before it was disgorged, or else exploded uselessly free of containment. This was drawing pain from Birah himself to keep itself going. And not just Birah. But from his angelic nature itself.

Birah had to concentrate. To force himself to grasp the strand of his own magic, of his own power, of his very being. And he had to snap it.

He would only have moments.

He'd need to reconnect it before he Flared Out.

He couldn't stay on the floor screaming.

With effort that cannot be put to word or page or image, he metaphysically grasped the strand of power given to him by God Almighty, and clawed at it, heaving at it, tearing at it, to sever it so that the Pain Elemental would finally run out of power and allow him to stand, to concentrate, to fight back.

And he couldn't.

Until something changed.

The world stopped. The agony cut off, not gone, but paused, as there was brilliant, cold light. He could feel a hand on his now beared chest, one that felt damp and clammy and cold. As the vision resolved itself, Birah could see that the grisly form of what had become of Michael was there, Time Locking Birah so that he would not be compromising. But that instant was all Birah needed to finally snap the line of his own life.

The anguish poured out, grey smoke dissipating off of him, as the nearly-decomposing looking Taxiarch recoiled in confusion and alarm. Birah could feel his heart shuddering to a halt in his chest, feel his brain starting to misfire. He had only seconds. But Time Locked, it meant he had as much time as he needed, to grasp that flailing end of the other side of his own might and grab it. There was no power that could reforge it save that of Raphael's immediate intervention. Or so the thinking went. But Birah had watched the Healing Miracle. He saw its flow, its method, its words made manifest.

So Birah did something considered very rude.

He invoked Raphael's Healing Miracle In Full, on himself.

The guttering and flaring of Birah's Halo ended, and with a mighty flare it returned to blazing white, and he sat up, unable to see what was beyond him, for Michael had encased them. "Are you entirely insane, Birah! That should have killed you!" Michael's once lyrical voice was now so shot with fry that it sounded like gravel grinding through mud.

"I will fight for my home," Birah said, again refusing to relent even for the moment. He stood, and though he was shorter than Michael, in this moment, this strange, impossible, blasphemous moment, he felt as though if he had to, he could literally shove Michael over and take over the Taxiopolis. Michael had looked grim in the library. Now he looked approaching death's door. His skin was covered in bruises and lesions, his eyes sunken and bloodshot. His Halo, dear God his Halo; it wasn't sitting above his head anymore, but canted to an angle, and no longer a band of uniform, crisp white light, but lopsided and uneven, flickering and fluttering. Whatever Birah had just gone through, Michael was going through worse. Before Michael could offer a word of reproach, Birah was once again rude, and used Michael's miracle to shatter the Time lock over him. Forfax was laying in a crater pounded into the floor, both of his legs shattered. Engaging with Samael was Baraqiel, the lightning which was his birthright raking the armor of the Demiurge as he tried to keep the stolen part from Samael's device out of its place.

The warehouse was utterly shattered, its ruin spread over an acre, so that the device was now naked to the sky. But with the realm Anchored, this was all that would fight the Demiurge until they came in through a means that wasn't Transiting. Even as Baraqiel tried to bash his divine lightning straight through the metal skin of this False Plate Of God using his crackling mace, it was clear that it was of no avail. Even those parried blows that should have imparted a stunning shock did nothing to slow the Demiurge, who was pressing the emaciated Angel backward, trying to get the chunk of the device that Baraqiel held in his other hand. Birah knew that Samael was losing patience. And when that patience elapsed, cruelty would ensue. So he preempted the Demiurge, summoning his 'weapons', somewhere between a pair of rods and something akin to tuning forks, and slammed them together, emitting a shockwave of sonic force that, once started, was not magical in the slightest. The impact, tailored as Birah could make it, caught and spun Baraqiel, but impacted the Demiurge flush and sent him crashing hard into the dirt, which then deflected him up and embedded him into a silo such that only his legs were sticking out of the puckered wound in the storage building.

A desperate smile came to Birah's face, as he cast out with his rods and golden chains raced up from the ground, snagging the Demiurge's ankles and dragging him out of the hole and to the ground, legs splayed almost in a splits. Michael launched himself to the point where the Demiurge had fallen, his blazing sword out and pressed its very burning tip against Samael's eye-hole. "Yield. You are beaten," Michael said. Samael tried to pull his leg free of its binds but they were adamant. They'd better be. Birah had perfected the Word That Binds long ago for, well, not this exact occasion, but for one akin to it.

The Demiurge stared down the Taxiarch who had him dead to rights. Then he raised a hand, fingers tight. Then, a crisp snap.

The golden shackles, which should have even been good to hobble a Horseman, shattered into inert chunks. Michael flinched, but recovered in an instant to thrust that blade forward, into the unprotected gap in the Demiurge's helm. But there was a stutter in Birah's perceptions, one he recognized as a specific ability of the Powers From Outside being made manifest. The Retcon. To erase and rewrite history to suit a specific ends. It was a power that was denied to all of Heaven, and to all of Hell, for it was too ruinous to be trusted in any hands but God's. It shouldn't have worked at all. But the Demiurge may have grasped that, and only used it in the most subtle way; he retroactively made it so his head was one inch to the right when Michael thrust, so that his blade ground along the side of the helm, catching on the teeth of the lion's maw

Then, before Birah could react, to stop him, to do anything at all, the Demiurge was moving. It was an explosion of movement, hurling himself up to his feet, his entire body swinging as though imparting all of the force of an exploding star into a gauntleted fist, one that he drove in a brutal, wide hook directly into Michael's face, the impact of which sent him skipping away over the terrain for miles, strange, mustard colored blood falling to mark his path. A few of Michael's ashen white feathers hovered in the air in Michael's absence, as though not quite realizing that he'd been evicted from that spot, before they, too, fell.

"I have scarcely begun to fight," Samael said, and turned his dread gaze onto the two lesser Angels who'd dared to obstruct him.

---

If there was one lesson to be learned in the fine art of gambling, it was knowing how and when to pick your moment. Some games had this as an obvious and baked-in concept. You had to know not just if your poker hand was good, but if it was in fact better than everybody else's at the same time. A mediocre hand is a perfect moment to strike when everybody else has a hand full of shit. A Full House is worthless when you're across from somebody with a Royal Flush. So too with Roulette. Every wheel in existence had biases, likelihoods to land on certain spots more than others. If you were observant enough long enough, you could figure them out, 'crack a wheel', and take an entire casino to the cleaners by stubbornly betting big on just two numbers.

Even more skill based games had an art of patience to them. Craps, once you were as good at manipulating dice as Husk was, wasn't about what happened to come up when you inexpertly hucked the dice; it was about how long you could fool the pit-boss and the dealer into thinking you were a rube, how quickly you dared manipulate your inevitable winnings, and how long you could keep the more-or-less winning streak going before they first changed the dice (which did nothing, because Husk could throw box-cars on dice fresh out of the factory ten times in a row if you asked him to), and then finally had a bunch of goons just pick him up and throw him out for the audacity of being good at something.

And then there was the complicating factor of having accomplices in gambling. Rachel, for her part, was terrible at poker. Not because she didn't know theory. She'd listened raptly to his run-down on optimal play for a beginner like her. And even still, she lost all of her buy-in in record time, without ever seeing a call that she won. The only time she didn't get 2-7 off-suit was when Husk purposefully fucked with the deck to give her something good. And she still lost that flop, because even with him stacking the deck, an eight came outta fucking nowhere to give Becca quads.

No, for all the deck-fuckery that transpired around her, that wasn't what bothered Husk. What bothered him was that she had a strategy. One he didn't agree with, to make her look even dumber than Piggot when it came to hands. To brick just about every good hand and let him win in her stead. Because even when other deck-stackers were working to fuck over Husk, he won every hand that mattered. Give a little, get a little. Her play wasn't smart to a sharp like him. Lucky there was only one other sharp at this table, and she was too amused to say anything.

No, it wasn't her play or her strategy which bugged him (though it fuckin' did), or even the fact that he'd bought her back in three times with the winnings he got from the others (which fucking rankled). No, it was the way she was dressed.

Barely.

"Is this a good hand, babe?" Rachel asked, her voice even sounding practically nothing like her, uptoned at the end so that nearly every sentence sounded like a question. She had about a quarter the clothing on that she usually did, her updo staked in place to hide her halo and the pale skin drawing all attention south of her head. Husk nearly snarled at her display, told her to knock it the fuck off and be her goddamned self again, but the fact was, he was raking in tonight, and if he did much better he'd be able to weasel out of moving that fucking couch for Becca. He didn't care how much money he made or lost by the end of the night. He was not going to move that stupid fucking couch up that awkward fucking staircase.

"They're s'posed to be the same thing, babe," Husk muttered.

"Collusion!" Piggot said, pointing. He then got cuffed upside his porcine head by Siegel, sitting next to him.

"We know!" Siegel said. "And it ain't doing her any good, so shut the fuck up and either fold or check."

"You've gotta teach her how to do this properly, Husk. This is just embarrassing," Becca said, from where she boasted the second largest hoard of chips after Husk himself. It was fitting, as she was a Draconic Sinner; having a hoard of coin-like objects was very much in character.

"I tried. Ain't my fault she's hopeless."

"I didn't think you still had it in you to pick up strays. She is a cat, isn't she?" Piggot said.

"The fuck kinda cats are you looking at? She's a Doll Demon, not a cat, dumbass," Siegel said.

"Yeah, well, this one kinda snuck in and now I can't get rid 'a her," Husk said.

"I wasn't referring to that. I though you'd sworn off women in general," Becca said.

"Turnin' gay are we?" Piggot asked, looking a bit eager. Not because he was gay. He was just horny for all holes, that one. And about as dumb as a hole besides.

This time Becca wrapped her broad, white wing across the table and slapped Piggot across the face with it. "Celibacy, dumbass. I swear to fuck, Siegel, do you shit in his ear every morning to fill the hole where his brain should be?"

"Something like that," Siegel said, shaking his head and folding his hand. Piggot, colossal moron that he was, didn't seem to grasp the insult in that.

"I'm out. I'mma take a shit. Rach? A minute?" it hurt for Husk to fold while holding bullets, but this bullshit needed an explanation right fucking now and his patience was worn down to a nub.

"Okay babe? I'm out guys?" she said with a sort of chipperness that Husk was having a hard fucking time telling wasn't genuine – and the only reason he knew that was because he knew Rachel too fucking well by this point.

"If you're gonna fuck in my bathroom, do it in the shower and turn it on when you're done," Becca ordered, going all in and no doubt preparing to drive Piggot into insolvency. Husk rose and didn't exactly drag Rachel with him to the bathroom of the house. She chewed her gum loudly as she rose and followed. He instantly saw that she flicked her gaze to the path she was taking, looking for mirrors that could turn people's vision on her. Once she found none, her airhead expression and vanished from her face, returning to its usual cold intensity, even while her body still did its bimbo-thing. It wasn't until she rounded the corner that she let her gait return to normal, catching up with Husk quickly as they entered into the bathroom that was almost as big as a room at the Hotel. Becca had been fucking rich in life, and came to Hell ruthless enough to be rich down here as well.

"What the fuck was all that?" Husk finally asked at a grating whisper as he pulled the door shut behind them.

"Are you aware that Piggot and Siegel are human traffickers?" she asked.

"What about it? Lots 'a people move meat down here," he said.

"And they've been doing oddly well," she said. "You said that Piggot only gets one buy in every round, 'cause that's all he needs. Today he got in twice."

Husk paused, then leaned back. For all she was wearing the attire of a Vegas Hooker, now that she was talking like herself again the illusion was pretty thoroughly broken. "That is unusual," Husk admitted. "What's yer point?"

"They've had an influx of money, but they're afraid to gloat about its source," she said. "I take it that they usually talk about big sells that they've made in the past?"

"It's happened before," he said. Like the time they managed to smuggle a living hooker down from Sri Lanka. She didn't last long, but made them a lot of money before she got killed.

"So think about the kinds of people that flesh-peddlers would be reticent to admit that they were peddling," she prompted.

"Devourer Aristocrats, but nobody'd want to buy them. They're disgusting. Succubi and Incubi are ten for a bent penny. Can't be a bunch of living humans, or they'd be gloating," Husk ran through them aloud, as there was no reason not to. Then he looked up at her, and blinked a few times. "Fuck me, you think there's another one 'a you down here?" he pointed a claw at her as he asked.

"One of me, or somebody like me," she asked. "And while I don't doubt that whoever the poor bastard is is having a bad day, ordinarily, it'd thoroughly not be my problem. But there is one other kind of person that they'd be unwilling to admit to getting."

Husk racked his brain for a moment, unable to grasp her meaning, until she lightly patted her bare belly which, despite her goliath intake of food, barely had any pudge on it. "Wait one fuckin' minute. Are you sayin' that they found another fuckin' SAM?"

"A Sinner who can be trafficked across the Pride Wall, with all of the benefits thereby, would be worth a colossal amount of cash to certain buyers. And somebody like that would be of tremendous help, both temporally and morally, to the Hotel project. Samuel managed to become a magical powerhouse in months, yes? Wouldn't you like to have another person, beholden to us, who can do the same?"

"That's a bit fuckin' manipulative to say it like that. I'd just get 'em to get them free of whatever horseshit that Siegel is in," Husk said. Rachel made an 'aww' sound and pinched his cheek.

"Look at that, actually caring whether somebody he barely knows lives or dies," she said in an infantilizing tone.

"Knock it the fuck off or I'll punt you clear out of the half of an outfit yer wearing," he said, swatting her hand away. He pulled a lit cigar from the extradimensional space at his side and took a deep, lung blackening drag off of it. Cigars weren't meant to be dragged on like this, but fuck it, he needed to think. "So what's our play here? We can't just jump Siegel after the game. That would-have-been Angel will just disappear across the Pride Wall if he thinks we're gonna go after it. And I don't know 'bout you, woman, but I can't cross that particular line in the sand."

"You bet me," she said.

"I bet you," he repeated.

"I've already managed to establish a thoroughly unlucky reputation. You wager me. You lose me. You track me. And then you retrieve me and the Gifted at the same time."

"Flat no. Come up with a better plan," Husk said.

"It'd work," she began, but he cut her off by just flatting a hand across her mouth.

"You'd get buggered by both Piggot and Siegel before you even got out of the parkin' lot, chained up, likely even Geas'd so you couldn't run away, then passed around his goons like a sex-doll. God damn it, woman, you ain't goin' through that shit on my fuckin' watch!"

She was silent for a moment, then stepped back, away from his hand. "So sexual sadists as well as slavers. That changes my calculus," she said.

"No shit," Husk said. He breathed out a tar-choked lung full of smoke. "Why even bother pussy-footin' about? Just call Charlie and get her to buy this bastard. She's got enough cash that even the most stupid offer would disappear into her coffers."

"That's a good point," she said, reaching into Husk's interdimensional pocket and extracting his Hellphone. He uttered a 'hey!', but she immediately dialed up Charlie, turning away from him and starting to pace the bathroom to the click of stripper-heels on marble tile. "I'm aware of the hour. Are you willing to sign off on my emancipating some slaves using your money, granted that there might be Betrayed or even another like my son among them?"

There was a pregnant pause.

"They'll be in the Hotel in the morning. You can greet them yourself," Rachel said, then handed the phone back to Husk.

"How in the fuck did you get that?" he said, snatching it from her hand.

"You're not the only one who's good at sleight of hand," she said. Well never mind the fact that despite being as non-magical as a plantar-wart she managed to extract it from his magical, free-floating pockets. She puffed out a breath, then body-part by body-part pulled herself back into the airheaded bimbo that she'd pretended to be out there. The transformation was fucking frightening. Uncanny, even. But she did it without using a whit of magic, so this was something that she'd done before while she was alive. Probably did it so long that it became her first nature.

When she strutted out, twirling a loose strand of her hair and chewing her gum loudly, Husk could only shake his head after her. How in the name of all Hell held sacred did he end up tangled up with the likes of this dame? Still, a dry chuckle escaped his throat, and he followed after.

The game after was a pretty base affair, with Piggot bitching but not being bought back in after his bone-headed play got him gacked by Becca. Salamanca, who had been staying quiet and inconspicuous to that point started to pick up his game, gently tugging chips away from both Becca and Husk by drips and drabs, while Seigel finally tilted and Husk crushed him with a bluffed six-eight offsuit. He still didn't manage to get free of that fucking couch, which she was purposefully leaving in her lower level just to fuck with him. Seriously, she could have had that bitch upstairs a hundred times over since she left it hanging over his head like a sectional sword of Damocles.

"Well, I think that's as much as I've got in my blood today," Husk said, while Siegel grumbled and pushed off from the table.

"That's not like you, Husk. You're usually duelling against the sunrise," Becca said with a raised brow.

"He's just bushed from the bitch," Piggot giggled.

"Wouldn't you like to know?" Rachel asked, even managing to seem younger than her thirty mortal years through behaviors and tone alone.

"Seigel? A got a minute?" Husk said, as he swept his chips over to Becca's accountant, another reptilian Sinner who was obviously quite content in the shadow of the Walton Dragon.

"For you, Husk, any day of the week but Sunday," Seigel said, with a grin, while chips were exchanged for cash, because this was Hell and even the friendliest of games simply weren't. With a couple thou now in his pockets, metaphorically speaking, he followed after the newly crowned king of Pride flesh (now that Valentino was dead and gone) to his behemoth of a car outside. He knew that rigs like this could be called 'land yachts', but then there was this fucking thing. He wouldn't be too surprised if there was a fucking jacuzzi in it.

The streetlights didn't illuminate him any better than Becca's house lights did, but the snow falling offered a sort of shimmer around the snarled horns that jutted out of his otherwise fairly human looking face. Well, that illusion died when he smiled, as he did now, and showed teeth like rows and rows and rows of hypodermic needles, and eyes which were red on black. "Lookin' to offload your meat? She'd earn a bit for people who like 'em looking human."

"I ain't here for selling. I'm here for buying," Husk said, which sidestepped that little stab of insult. Piggot, who was now in the drivers seat, didn't hide the fact that he was leering at Rachel's breasts. Fucking hell, Rachel, cover those up. You're gonna catch pneumonia out here half naked! But that thought didn't show on his face, because when it came to tells, he killed those bastards a long time ago. "I hear you've got some new product. Something a bit... foreign. Something... able to export."

Seigel's smile grew wider, reminding Husk uncomfortably of the Scarlet Fucker. "I should have known that you'd hear about that. They don't call you the Swindler Incarnate for nothing, do they? Do they Piggot?"

"Do they what, boss?" Piggot asked. He had been distracted by the tiddy.

"Fucking amateur," Seigel spat. "It's lucky you got all that muscle or I'd make fucking bacon outta you!"

"What'd I say, boss? Come on!" Piggot said. Siegel made as though to back hand at him, but given the distance it was purely a gesticulation rather than a threat.

"So let's say that I do got some rare goods. What are you thinking? Getting some plans on expanding your grasp to Greed, maybe? Maybe take it from 'em so you can do it yourself?" he gave Husk a nudge. Husk stood stone faced. Rachel continued to chew and ignore the fact that a human as disrobed as that in weather like this should have been shaking themselves to death. She was a tough one, that Rachel Scailes.

"Do you care why I want it?" Husk pointed out. "Does it matter? Two hundred thou."

"Two hundred? Please. I could offload that bitch for a half-mill in a heartbeat," Seigel said, but Husk could tell that he wasn't actually insulted by Husk's offer.

"Maybe. If you can actually manage to sell her," which did indeed confirm to Husk that this was both somebody like Sam, and a woman, "before somebody like Lucifer comes and snatches her outta yer hands for nothing. Two hundred thousand, cash on the barrel head."

"Cash on the what?" Piggot asked.

"Quarter-mill," Siegel said.

"Fine. I can swing a quarter," Husk said. Which he only could by grace of the House of Morningstar, but if Rachel cleared it with his boss, then all was golden. He offered a hand. When Siegel reached for it, he retracted it just a little. "Final payment when I can look at it and verify it with my own eyes."

"You don't trust me, Husk?"

"Motherfucker I don't trust myself. Why the fuck should I trust you?" Husk bit out at him.

"Can I have a go at your bitch while you do business?" Piggot asked eagerly.

"Feel like fucking a pig? They've got a dick that's like a corkscrew," Husk asked Rachel. And just like him, she didn't let the revulsion that she no doubt felt pierce her shell of persona.

"Nah, you'd tear up somethin' I use to make my money," she said.

"Come on boss, make her bend!" Piggot begged.

"Shut the fuck up Piggot! You're lucky I give you as many bitches as I do!" Seigel shouted at him. He then turned back to Husk with a placating smile. "It's so hard to find good help. He's got big arms, but a tiny fucking brain. Luckily, I don't need him for his brains. Quarter upon inspection. Mind if we drive you? It's actually rather impossible to get to my warehouses if we don't."

"Then by all means, chauffeur us," Husk said. When they rounded the back of the car, out of Siegel's sight, Husk leaned toward Rachel. "You'd better be fuckin' sure about this. This guy is a real fucking danger to women like you."

"If things get bad, I'll be fine. Just make sure to kill me before you run," she said.

Husk was still for a moment. "What?" he nearly yelped.

"Stab me in the skull and let me die, and I'll pop back up at the Hotel in a day or two," she said, as though that weren't a horrifying prospect to consider.

"You're outta yer fuckin' head, woman," he said to her as she rounded the back corner of the land-yacht and made for the rear doors.

"You love it, don'tcha?" she asked with her fake voice. This bitch was going to be the death of him.

---

Birah felt sick to his stomach, which was a bit odd because he'd taken that blow pretty definitively to the skull.

The sound around him was a dull roar, nothing rising up out of the static as he pushed himself away from the ground, and the pool of his own vomit that he'd landed in. What the sweet merciful Heaven just happened? He tried to push to a stand, but only managed to reverse his previous prone stature, leaving himself nearly supine with one arm bracing him upward at an angle. The skies swirled with dark clouds. And that was odd. He gave his head a shake, trying to throw the stun and remember why it was odd.

He'd tried to get the Binding of Isaac on Samael, memory returned to him. It was a human device of magic, but one so obscure that perhaps the Demiurge wouldn't be able to undo it before a more telling blow could be landed on him. The downside of the Binding was that it had to be instigated at tactile range. And he'd failed to ignite the magic before Samael bent out of the way, and drove an armored elbow into the side of Birah's skull for the trouble.

The nausea was parting, his vision returning to the almost thunderous clashing of metal against metal. Hepsut was like Birah, in that he was downed of the fight, with Forfax looking over him. One of Forfax's eyes was swollen shut, a sullen brown bruise painting half of his head. Considering the unpleasantly bent nature of Forfax's left wing, it was a miracle of itself that he wasn't simply lying in the dirt screaming of pain. He looked to the Demiurge, and saw that he was facing down Michael and Baraqiel, who plied blazing sword and crackling mace against him, while he continued to fight without even bothering to draw his scythe to battle them.

With a growl deep in his throat and outrage in his eyes, Birah pushed himself to a stagger, and flicked out a hand, draining his own pain into a Pain Elemental of his own. It made the veins of his arm burn and spasm, as he faked the black blood of imps in a way that he was pretty sure that he was alone amongst Angels in being able to achieve. The thing streaked out, leaving him feeling renewed enough to continue fighting; that the Demiurge shattered it with a back-handed blow before it could reach him was immaterial. Birah nevertheless stumbled for a moment, as the blood in his veins turned to poison, and to keep the poison from killing him he transformed the poison into stone. He had to will the stone out of his body, falling in a concrete-like clot behind him. His wings were starting to go numb, as his body unconsciously diverted blood away from them to keep him alive. He just needed to slow Samael enough for Michael to kill him. There was no other way about it now. The Demiurge had to die before he succeeded in his insane task.

Michael fought with such skill and poise that none of the greatest champions of Hell or Earth could match him, but Samael didn't seem to care how mighty he was. The Demiurge ignored most of Michael's blows, and blocked only those of them that he found most inconvenient to him. Come on, get closer damn you Birah! It was to another shock and alarm when Birah got close enough to Michael to see the magic which was loosely looping around him, lazy and indolent. He staggered a step, managing to stay at a jog, but when he quickly racked his brains for what those could be, he suddenly had the notion to collapse them in his mind's eye.

That was an Anchoring Miracle, connected to a Transiting Miracle, connected to a Dimension Gate.

"Michael! Away from him! He's tricking you!" Birah shouted, but against the din of metal against metal it was lost. Or perhaps simply not heeded, as Michael plied with single-minded intensity, his strength ever mounting and his speed ever accelerating. Until finally Samael sidestepped him, allowing a sweeping cut to bypass him, nearly striking Baraqiel in the process, and have him stagger a few steps beyond. The shin-strike that Samael drove in the small of Michael's back looked almost contemptuous, and sent the Taxiarch rolling through the dirt. He tried to flare his wings and resume his footing, Michael did, but the attempt was marred by an uneven rise, so that even regaining his stance was beset by a stumble. He took a step forward, and then fell to a knee. His face was pale as a corpse's, soaked with sweat, and his hair seemed so thin as to make him either desperately irradiated, or as though he'd been plucked like a chicken.

Michael tried to rise, to resume the fight.

He fell back to his knees, desperately pulling in air as though he were drowning on dry land and having miscolored blood ooze from his ears and nose.

Birah had seen enough. There was a rumored wyrd, one that was not to be used by Angels, for its power in their hands was doubly ruinous. But given the stakes, he could think of nothing else, and if the ruin would spill even a tenth onto the Demiurge that it did onto Birah, it'd be worth it. It'd buy the time that Strigoi needed to break the Realm Anchor and bring Gabriel. If only he could remember...

"Finally done?" Samael asked, turning a glance to Michael. Michael stared at him, blowing wind as he tried to get his body to resume the fight. But the fight had left him. Samael reached out toward him, fingers pressed tight. But Baraqiel reacted faster, grasping and clenching that hand shut before the fingers could snap. Samael turned an unimpressed look to Baraqiel. "You do realize I don't actually need to snap my fingers, don't you? I'm just a big fan of John de Lancie."

There was a flash as all of the magic surrounding Michael spontaneously collapsed, activated, and Transited him to some random corner of the Human World, before Anchoring him there. Baraqiel snarled and struck at Samael, trying to sent lightning directly into his eyes and brain him, but there was not even a blur of movement so much as the other hand of the Demiurge appearing in the weapon's way. He then flicked, and sent Baraqiel flying away, directly at Birah. Birah had to dodge aside with a beat of his wings, which hurt like all manner of damnation in their blood-starved state. He tried to prepare a new hex to drop on the Demiurge, something obscure. Something destructive. Maybe even a slow acting one.

Birah got no chance to think because there was another stutter in the real and Samael was standing in front of him with his hand grasping the back of Birah's neck. With a heave that no strength that Birah could summon could match, he hurled Birah face down onto the dirt and stone. Stars flit in Birah's vision, even as he tried nearly blind to stand. He was intercepted by a boot dropping directly onto his wing-spur, driving it and by extension him down into the dirt and grinding, the pain drawing a grunt from his throat as it suddenly felt as though somebody'd pinned him under a mountain.

"That was a foolish thing you did with your Line. And unnecessary. It was only intended to last for six hundred seconds," the Demiurge said from his place pinning Birah to the ground. What?

"Stop!" Baraqiel said, his voice wavering. "I will destroy it and you'll have nothing!"

Birah looked up, and saw that Baraqiel had the piece of the device in his hand, prepared to rip it apart. He couldn't see the Demiurge's expression, but there was a long pause, one that landed as rain began to fall on Cloud Four and turn the dust into slime, and then mud.

"Go ahead," Samael said. "I needed that device to speak to Probity, Charity, and Kindness. I can speak to Humility any time I wish. I have grown beyond it."

"Then... then why were you fighting?" Baraqiel asked, his confusion plain across his face.

"Do you feel that?" Samael asked. At first both Angels said nothing, but then Birah did feel something. Something vast. Something incomparable. Something approaching from below and sweeping inexorably upward. "That, my potential friend, is the sound of The Denial Of Time, the true miracle of Michael the Watchmaker's Guardian. I feel it on the wind. I see it behind the clouds."

"He's Time locking Heaven?" Baraqiel said, still holding the chunk of Samael's device, because he had nothing better to do with his hands anymore. There was a thup near Birah's head as Samael dropped Baraqiel's purloined mace onto the ground. Birah considered grabbing it and hitting Samael with it, but he had worse than no leverage right now. All he could have done is rap at the Demiurge's ankle.

"He's invoking the power of God to Time Lock all of Creation. No more time travel, by anybody, for any reason. We can now speak more fully, now that time-travelers can't intercept what's going to happen. Do you feel the song stuck in your head, fellow traveler? That insufferable, inescapable tune that haunts your every waking moment and follows you into your nightmares?"

"What are you talking about?" Baraqiel asked, but with a look of fear rather than confusion. What?

"Syncretization. The power to take something existing within God's sight, and mutilate it into whatever form He so desires. Do you remember your old name? Do you remember the face of your real father?"

"Of course I know my father's face," Baraqiel said.

"How many eyes does he have?" Samael asked. Almost smugly.

"One! No, two! Wait... no," Baraqiel now looked stunned as though somebody had clubbed him in the head. "One. It was definitely one. But... why..."

"Do you remember your wife?" Samael asked. The storm grew stronger, lightning forking in the sky as the rain began to increase from a drizzle to a pour. Thunder rumbled, coming closer by the moment. "Do you remember the smell of her each night?"

"Fresh bread... and beer and honey," Baraqiel said, then looked into Samael's eyes with alarm in his face. "Why am I remembering this? What is this?"

"What is your name?" Samael asked.

"I am..." Baraqiel said, then took a step, the device-piece falling from his hands. "I am..."

He blinked, and shuddered.

And when he spoke again, his voice grew deeper. Gruffer. As though from a much more robust throat.

"I am Thor. Son of Odin Allfather. Nephew to Liesmith Loki and All-Seeing Heimdall and half-brother to Avenging Vidarr. Husband to Verdant Sif. Father to mighty Magni and strident Modi," he said. His hair wasn't blonde anymore. Now it was red like an angry fire.

"All names that God massacred, or allowed Lucifer to massacre, because He had no need for them, and didn't care enough about them to make a place for them in His design. The World Serpent, your fated enemy, buried at the core of the world where he could never rouse. Your children left to die because Gabriel is already God's might. Your father killed because God needed no competition to His purported wisdom," Samael said. Birah tried to tell Baraqiel not to listen to him, but he didn't even need compulsion by Samael to fail. Because nobody here was talking to Baraqiel anymore.

There was no Baraqiel to talk to.

"You have two paths. One, you act the subservient Angel to your slaver-God, and one day he allows you to become the Archangel Barachiel once He decides you're meek and subservient enough. A path requiring His hand. A path now impossible," Samael said. And then Birah could see Samael's extended hand at the edge of his field of vision. "Or I can give you back what God tried to steal from you. Your name. Your power. Your rage. And you do with that Rage what a child of the Aesir is wont to."

Baraqiel... didn't even seem to hesitate. He stepped in front of Birah and grabbed Samael by the hand and forearm. And before Birah's eyes, all that was the Angel Baraqiel melted away. A beard of furious red sprouted from his face, and he gained three times his mass in seething muscle, his robes tearing apart as he expanded out of them. Samael shoved backward, and Birah was sent sliding along the mud away from them, as there was a tremendous and deafening crash of lightning, a bolt dozens of yards wide slamming down and enveloping both, melting the dirt into glass and blinding Birah for a moment as he pushed himself to a sit.

When the afterimage and the roaring deafness parted, there was a deluge pounding down, sending steam up from the glassed ground. Baraqiel was gone. Unsyncretized. Returned to the god that he once had been. Thor turned those now steady blue eyes to Birah, then past him to where Forfax and Hepsut were still supine in the distance. "I could kill them all, for what they've done to my family."

"The Angels had little part in your capture, Son Of Odin," the Demiurge said. "I intend to punish the one who did. Will you stand by me?"

"I am not whole," Thor said. He clenched hands that looked like they could crush toasters in them, straining against an absence.

"Mjolnir was cast into the Abyss, of course, so that it couldn't be used by another," Samael said. And he held out a hand. There was a twisting of the warp of reality, as matter was summoned into being – Sung into being! – in the form of a mighty sledge hammer head, attached to entirely too short of a haft. "I don't care about what God wants."

"Then I am with you, brother in vengeance," Thor said, taking his hammer and finally looking complete again. He turned cold, furious eyes at Birah and the others and gestured with his new, impossible weapon. "What of them?"

"Slaves to a slaver-god. Pity them if you have to, but do not hate them. With some exceptions," Samael said.

"They abetted my family's slaughter," Thor began, but Samael just shook his head. "Fine. Kill the king, and let his huskarls cower. As it was in the old days. So it shall be again."

There was a metallic snap, and both of them were gone.

"...this was always about him. This whole thing was a facade to draw him out," Birah said, perhaps to himself. There was nobody else left to hear him. Heaven just lost another Angel. And this time, to something far worse than the mad Heresiarch's press for power.

---

Rachel was very uncomfortable with her level of coverage. The truth was, she knew intrinsically that her sexuality was at best a weapon she could use against others, and at worst a weapon that would be used against her. So she tried to keep it for the most part neutral, beneath notice of either party and out of sight. Today denied her that option. As long as she kept Piggot staring at her breasts, though, he didn't look into her eyes and discern that she might be somewhat less stupid than he was.

She was still fucking freezing, though.

"You sure about this?" Husk whispered to her, a very guarded look on his face.

"No, but it's our best option," she admitted.

"And you're not cold or nothin'?" he asked.

"I'm freezing. But as much as I hate the cold I'm very used to it," she whispered back to him as Piggot finally opened the doors to the building and swept with one large, hairy arm to beckon them in. Siegel stepped through first, and Rachel was little comforted by the waft of air that came out when she and Husk followed after. It wasn't much warmer than the air outside. And it stank of piss, blood, sweat, and fear.

Husk pulled out a new cigar and lit it, obviously giving his mouth something to do besides snarl, and his nose something to smell beyond human desperation, as the two of them took in the enormity of Siegel's operation. It was a warehouse stacked with cages, similar to the size of crates for large dogs, arrayed floor to catwalks ten tall. And more than half of them had people in them. Mostly Sinners, with an even mixture of what remained being imps, Hellhounds, and fiends like Succubi. They didn't even look defiant. They were afraid, shrinking and recoiling from the mere presence of Siegel and Piggot.

That drove anger into Rachel's heart. She didn't act on it, though. They still had to go farther. Find the one that was like her son. Get them out. That was why they were here.

Seigel was talking in broad terms about how successful he'd become in the vacuum left behind by the death of somebody called 'Valentino', how he'd soared stratospherically to wealth and power, and rambled on the quality of his goods. She didn't listen to more than one in seven words. She just looked at broken people, people who'd given up any chance of things becoming better. And every set of eyes that she looked at instantly mapped to another face from her childhood. A boy from Manitoba like her, esconced in La Tuque. A girl in La Tuque with beautiful hair. A child in La Tuque who was going to die of malnutrition from eating unfit meals. And in the 'guards', she saw her once jailers, people who were studied in the art of denying the personhood of their charges.

They were all of them the very textbook of what she'd invented the gift of rage to resist. The hate she felt was pure and clean, directed not at somebody undeserving or uninvolved, but upon those most directly inflicting needless anguish.

Her dark ruminations were cut off when Husk suddenly grabbed her arm. She blinked and turned to him. He was staring at somebody not in a cage but instead chained arm and leg to a post. Her clothes were tatters which did almost nothing to curtail nudity, her skin an almost impish red. And her eyes, red on black much like Siegel's own, did not stare with defeat but fury. There was a gag in her mouth, her hair black, and her horns sweeping back from her forehead in a near circle.

"Is that the one?" she asked at a whisper, while Siegel continued rambling. "How can you be sure?"

"Horns," he said, releasing her arm to sketch them in the air with his fingertips, starting at a point, flaring out in mirrored arcs and returning again afterwards. He quickly flicked his gaze to the other guards, the other brutalizers. They didn't have guns. Pain-prods and bludgeons, yes, but no actual firearms. They were not allowed to kill their merchandise, it seemed. "Fuck me. We're about to do something stupid, aren't we?"

"If you can't do something smart," Rachel began.

"Then you do something right," Husk finished at a nod. He looked up. "You can quit your yammering. Is that the chick?"

Seigel seemed a little put off when he turned, and then followed Husk's point toward the shackled woman. "Yes. Yes it is. We've tested her on the Pride Wall. Didn't even burn when we shoved her through, then yanked her back. She'll be good to you. And if you're starting to get your balls back, I gotta warn you, she's a fighter so don't take her gag out till you break her in properly."

"Taken under advisement," Husk muttered. "You know I'm good for the money. Get your hog to unhitch the bitch."

"Piggot!" Siegel said, snapping his fingers and pointing at the red skinned woman. Husk gave her a glance, leaning in for a moment.

"We doin' this smart or...?"

"Audible," she answered. He didn't sigh, but looked like he wanted to. The moment she saw this abattoir of suffering, the plan changed. And at least he wasn't telling her to stop, so...

"Signal?" he whispered.

"Bang," she answered. And with that he walked away from her, leaving her standing with Piggot in front of the shackled woman who glared at her with an unimaginable fury. Husk, though, went over to Seigel and started to talk turkey, going over the payment plan and where the money would be withdrawn from and given over to. It would have been simpler, Rachel knew, to just pay them and leave. But now that they had seen the scope of this, that wasn't possible anymore. The depersonhood of the downtrodden, at least in this little, narrow way, died today.

Piggot continued working at the chains, for they were robust, and undoing the shackles, which were extensive. There was a different key for each manacle, to slow attempts at picking, no doubt. And Rachel held her patience for as long as she could manage. Ankles were first. Then the one holding her neck to the pole. One arm was bound to her side with rope before he unlocked it. And when he selected the final key for the final lock, Rachel's patience ran out.

She reached into a very uncomfortable spot in her nearly-outfit, and extracted what nobody had noticed she'd had on her. Husk had been very careful with it, making sure it was suited perfectly to her. It was a tiny revolver, one so small that its cylinder only held four bullets. Each of the bullets had been replaced with ones using Seraphic Steel, that steel which can kill the Sinner dead. She pulled the pistol hard against her breast and covered it with her other hand as she drew the hammer back, muffling the click against her flesh. Then she walked a step to the side, held the gun out, and aimed. Not for his head, because she didn't think that the little bullets of this little gun could penetrate quite that thick of a skull, Angel Steel or not. No, she aimed for his neck.

The bang was not as meaty as the movies made it out to be. More of a cherry-bomb than a life-ending blast. But that was all that was needed to send the Angel Steel bullet tearing through Piggot's jugular and carotid arteries, and then blow his larynx out across the skin of the chained woman. Siegel turned, seeing Piggot fall, clutching a neck which now blasted out hot, stinking blood. He didn't even make it a single step before Husk pulled the blade that he'd named after the second love of his life and slammed it up between the final vertebrae and the bottom of Siegel's skull. Neither of them managed to cry out. But one of the guards, one close enough to hear the hubbub, turned and spotted that Piggot was dying a long-overdue second death. He immediately shouted. "BETRAYAL!" he said.

She turned and fired the next three bullets that this pistol had. One missed outright, because she didn't have a lot of training in the use of pistols in general and he was a not insignificant distance away. The second hit him at the side of the chest, likely only to deflate a lung if she was lucky. But her luck, such as it was, proved out when the last bullet, dragged up by the firing of the second, jumped and punched a penny-sized hole through the man's head just beside his nose.

With that done, she put the gun between her teeth and grabbed the keys where they'd fallen from Piggot's slowly expiring corpse. He was trying even now to hold the blood in from the greyed and crumbling wound that transected his neck, but unlike the rest of the injuries he'd likely ever suffered in his durance in Hell, there would be no recovery from this one. The right key had been scrambled into the others, but Rachel knew what it looked like and was able to get it on only her second try, unshackling the red-fleshed Sinner's other arm and having her pull away with confusion and suspicion in her eyes. "What do you want?"

"This is a slaving operation. It turns out I rather hate the idea of slavery," Rachel said, having discovered something about herself today. "Are there any others like you in here?"

"Ones that got thrown through that weird wall? Just the guy with the halo in the truck," she said, rubbing at the raw chafe-marks on her wrists. "Everybody else, they didn't bother to drag back."

"Shotgun surgery. Goddamned amateurs," Rachel rolled her eyes. There was a whistle, and Rachel looked over just in time to awkwardly catch a box of bullets for her pistol, lobbed somehow by Husk, who had essentially abandoned all humanity and entered his androsphinx-like Warform. It was a fascinating sight, a beast with the dimensions of a bull Polar Bear with great black-and-red wings, its coat black and white and red, its claws mostly bone but one on each broad paw obviously a knife of Seraphic Steel incorporated into his body. Without making sound, it hurled itself at a guard just out of sight, and the screaming that the guard in question made was harrowed, agonized, and brief.

Rachel quickly fished bullets out of the box. Only four of them were Angel Steel bullets, so she used those first, knowing that she'd already fired roughly two thousand Souls worth of metal with four finger twitches. With another two grand in her gun, she beckoned for the Sinner to follow. "Name?" she asked.

"Yours first," the Sinner said.

"Rachel Scailes. Social worker," she said. And the Sinner actually laughed at that.

"You'd fit in well where I'm from. Rozarin Ahmadi."

"Rose or Roz?" she asked.

"I've been called both," she said. Then she tensed and pointed, as a guard rounded the corner, spotted the two of them, and then started charging with a riot-shield in front of him. That scuppered Rachel's first plan. So she did as her life hammered into her head that she must; she adapted. The moment that he was too close to shift, she aimed low, and shot him in the front of his ankle, blowing off his foot and spilling him to the floor. She actually tripped trying to get to him, but was able scramble over to him and put her gun to the back of his neck, firing it upward past his helmet and through his unarmored skull. With that, she kicked off her ridiculous footwear. Heels were not ideal for this kind of adventuring. She couldn't see Husk, but she didn't need to. There were more tearing sounds of violence in the warehouse as Husk did what apparently he was pretty good at.

"The day-shift will be coming in soon. We'll get swarmed if we don't leave now!" Rose said.

"Hey! Exit strategy!" Rachel called out. She paused, then looked at her heels. She growled, then picked them up and hurled them into a burn-barrel so that there wouldn't be evidence she was here. This kind of direct action required a lot more planning than she'd given this, she was realizing, and a lot of it was needed to keep backlash from landing on her after-the-fact. Husk's answer to her call was a crumbling corpse smashing through a set of garage-doors and pulling them from their mooring to the metallic explosion of a tension-spring giving way. Beyond were more people, locked in cages that were on the back of a truck. Rachel looked to the keys in her other hand, then moved to the nearest cage with somebody in it. "Your key is somewhere in this. Get as many people out as you can and then scatter."

"What. Why are you..." the ragged Sinner of unclear Aspect said to her.

"Unlock as fast you can, or you'll be back in there!" she snapped at him. He blinked a few times, but then seemed to grow stern and started testing keys. That was about as much as she could do. Now she needed to get to that truck. She immediately ducked, feeling her hair tug as a bullet whizzed through her hairdo and shattered the stick holding it up. It quickly flopped open, but the bullet caused a meaty splort as it hit Rose. She didn't seem to be stopping though. In fact, the pain only made her run faster. Her longer legs ate ground and she hurled herself into the gunfire of that guard who cared less about the condition of merchandise than he did about his own wellbeing, but did him no favors as she leapt off of a crate of expired MREs they used to feed these people and then landed claws first in his chest cavity, promptly turning his innards into exxards.

The truck roared to life. There was somebody in the driver's seat. With speed that she'd never matched in life, she ran up to the lift-bar and hauled herself up to the driver-side window, her pistol pressed to the glass. A peacock Sinner recoiled at the sight of her, but was too close to dodge as she sent the first of her only two effective bullets into his lower beak-jaw, and the second one through the top of his head.

She threw the gun into the cab, opening the door and trying to pull the peacock out. But for all he was an avian-Sinner, he was still a lot bigger than her, weighed more, and was in an awkward position. It wasn't until Rose finished her thorasic excavations and she turned her attention to Rachel that her now wet, still red arm grabbed the dead piece of demon-poultry by his leg and dragged him out of his seat.

Rachel tried to get into the driver's seat, but Rose shoved her into the passenger's as she got in. "I'm only waiting two minutes. Get your friend," Rose promised.

"Husk? HUSK!" Rose said, leaning out of the passenger door. The black and white hell-cat launched across the aperture of the shattered garage door, landing to an explosion of blood and body parts, before quickly running and taking the corner at a drift. There was a shifting of his body, tensing and pulsing as with a final stride he brought his forelimbs up and finished realigning his spine into his more familiar, civilian form, a Seraphic Steel knife clutched in each hand. It suddenly made perfect sense why Husk never wore clothes. That meant that there was never anything to get in his way if he needed to become the beast that he apparently could be. She ducked in, and Husk pulled himself into the passenger seat, leaving Rachel stuck between the two of them like a child in the jumper seat.

"I hope yer ready for some bullshit, 'cause I think at least one 'a them fuckers didn't die. And they will talk. Did anybody see that?" Husk asked, pointing at her now revealed Gapped Halo.

"Nobody living. Rose, go!" Rachel said.

"This better 'a been fuckin' worth it, Rach," Husk swore.

"You're welcome," Rose muttered, as she floored the gas and drove through the flimsy door holding the inside of this 'meat factory' from the frigid winter outside. They promptly ran down somebody as they screamed toward the streets.

"It was worth it," Rachel said. She then looked at Husk again. "Every damned time it surprises me."

"The fuck are you on about?" he asked. Not seeming to realize that he no longer had a snout. A big nose, and the sharp teeth of a cat, but no snout.

"Oh, never mind. It probably isn't important," she said.

"So... this the bitch?" he asked.

"Rozarin," the driver of this truck said, seemingly annoyed.

"Sure you are," he said. He turned to Rachel. "You know, Charlie's gonna be shittin' kittens when you bring this truck an' its bullshit to her doorstep, right?"

"Let her," Rachel said. Husk seemed to chuckle despite himself.

"Attagirl," he said with an approving nod, and extracted his still burning cigar from the many pockets he kept floating around him.

---

"Interdimensional slavery was not a topic that I thought I would have to add to my portfolio when I left the academy, let me assure you. There were a lot of things that seemed so impossible back in the 2020's. Magic? Impossible. The reality of the existence of Hell? Fantasy. Terraforming Venus into a second Earth? Inconceivable! But reality has a habit of not caring about what one believes about it; it will do as it does despite you. I am eighty nine years old, madame Killjoy. I have watched a war between Heaven and Hell spill out into my nations, watched Angels lay waste to cities and watched soldiers march against Angels who'd declared war on my homeworld. Heh. What a droll notion. To call the Earth a 'homeworld'.

Half a century ago, it would have been a miracle for me to be in the state I am at the age I've reached. Now, though, it's just good medicine. Half a century ago, people would disappear off the face of this Earth and we would say they were 'simply murdered', or 'assumed new identities', or 'lived off of the grid', when in fact they were being purloined by the forces of Hell to sate their appetites. Now we know they were taken by your now dead 'Kings of Hell'. And half a century ago we feared Hell. We feared it as we feared nothing else. But time and exposure to the Stuttgart Seven Hundred dulled that quickly enough.

You're just people. Bad people, as the case may be for you and your associates, but there are many enough bad people still on Earth that I cannot say that with any true vitriol. And your crimes, madame Killjoy are to my eyes far lesser than those that some of the living endure with. That is another thing I never thought that a mere fifty years of my life would show me. Tourism of the living to the land of the damned. Your Queen seemed a bit non-plussed by that when it was brought up. She is a formidable sort, but it is truly a ridiculous idea when given voice.

I suppose it is merely my good fortune that I managed to interface with the current administration instead of the old one. I'm given to understand that Lucifer was not exactly a magnanimous or benevolent ruler."

-Rene Desjardins, EUDoCAF Ambassador to Hell