Wendy was running out of time.

Though the progress on the Paradox Engine continued, it was slow going, as the science it operated by had to be invented anew for every part of it that was added, and recalculated for every attempt. And though none of the people involved ever actually took a break, bit still rankled Wendy that time was slipping away from her. The deadline was looming. The moving day. It would have to come before then, or else all of this was for naught. And she was not about to allow 'naught' to be an option right now.

Still, there were worse ways to be, than a Power who was an unspoken guest of the King of Lore. The servants were friendly enough, now that they weren't terrified out of their wits at the mere existence of her. There were no assholes for her to have to counteract or countermand. There were only Purson and Penemue and young, cooing Tabris. Frankly, Tabris was far more adorable of a baby than he had any right to be. It was as though reality had shaped the most baby-ish baby and given it to angels to raise. And though he pulled his parents attention away from the Engine and its construction, Wendy couldn't fault them for doing it.

In its way, she was happy that they would, or that they even cared to. It showed that some angels had working hearts. How strange that she had to go to literal Hell to find them.

No, that wasn't fair. Heaven had decent Angels, too. Just not as many, it seemed, as Hell did.

Octavia was a good seed. She'd be alright, Wendy reckoned.

At the moment, the four of them were sharing a dinner in one of the smaller dining rooms, one that apparently, Purson had built as a vain hope that he would have a chance to ever dine in private with his bride again, placing brick by brick with his own hand many millennia ago. This room had a certain homeliness that other rooms in the Palace of Lore lacked. It showed that it was an act of love, if not desperation.

"You are worried," Penemue broke off from her repast.

"I'm always worried," Wendy admitted.

"You fear that time will pass you by," she said. Purson, who was busy bottle-feeding Tabris, offered no opinion, merely lofting his brow at the statement his other half provided.

"It'll be done on time, because it must be done on time," Wendy said.

"If we try to offer an incomplete device to Lucifer, not only will it enrage him, it will also fail to do what you need it to. While I'm certain you have little to fear from Pride Incarnate, we very much do," Penemue said.

Wendy rubbed at the edges of two of her eyes with her fingertips. She couldn't fault Penemue for pointing out the inevitable. The Engine would be done when and only when the Engine was done. But still, time was passing. And it bothered Wendy immensely. "I always thought I had all the time in the world. I turns out the days are passing way too goddamned fast."

"Eternity is a strange beast for the unaging," Purson said with a sage nod. "For those such as we, we fallen angels, the days are either a blur or a slog, with no gradient in between extremes. I empathize with you. The days have suddenly become precious indeed, as Tabris grows larger and more hale with every one that slips past us. One day, his childhood will be gone, and all that we will have is our memories of it."

Wendy tensed her fist, and stood from the table. She found her appetite had abandoned her, so she left before pointing out rather sharply that there was a distinct difference between one's nostalgia for the simple times of a child's youth, and the existence of the human race as a cohesive society on Earth. The angels likely watched her leave, but offered no comment. They were smarter than most, and had the unusual ability to understand that there were other people, with other drives, and other inner-lives outside of themselves. And frankly, dragging the point before them again at her rapidly approaching deadline was only going to alienate what were, to be fair, supportive comrades.

She needed to clear her head.

She needed to calm herself and think.

And there was one place in the last forty goddamned years where she'd had the luxury of doing that.

So she allowed herself to break apart, her body dissolving into colorful smoke that dissipated until she was spread all throughout the Palace of Lore, poking at the various doors and windows until she found one opened, and then letting the wind carry her across Hell.

The truth was, she could have phased through the Palace walls easily enough, but that might have upset the magicks that Purson had placed there untold centuries ago. And lacking any other graces, Wendy knew not to annoy your business-partner by breaking their shit.

Pride was much as she remembered it from her long durance in its foul prison, but the small details were betraying that time had indeed passed. The moon, which hung in the sky with a pentacle cut into its tidally-locked face, now had other scars cut into it, almost disrupting the pentacle but not quite. Lucifer's tantrum was far reaching. And the towns of Pride were even more smashed-to-bits than usual. No longer simply left to rot away and collapse by lack of maintenance and the passage of decades, the buildings had been kicked down by Exorcists in a tantrum of Heaven's own, just to ensure that Hell was as meager and unpleasant as possible.

She swept as a gale above burned fields of hellish staples. The joke was on the Angels, though, in that even burnt, some of these crops were utterly intact. The roots were strong in Hell. Pity the same couldn't be made true of Heaven. Onward, past a set of green-houses, hastily repaired to get them operating again, which played host to stolen human coffee bean, struggling to grow even the more terrain-and-climate tolerant Coffea canephora down here where the conditions actually created the entirely separate Coffea infernica, which by her own examination was not even genetically related to the Earthly strains of coffee bean plant, merely sidling into their genus through cultural misunderstanding and convergent evolution. Still, if you leached the vile 'skins' off of those hellish beans, they could be made drinkable. More drinkable. Drinkable-ish.

She pressed beyond the wind, her vision exploding outward when it approached the outskirts of Pentagram City and she started to connect with all of the lichin, mold, slime and scum that nobody ever bothered to clean away from the compacted megalopolis. There was only one part of the city, True South, where her vision was blinkered, and that was because True South was subject to truly caustic acid rain that left no botanical or fungal survivors. Or animal survivors, for that matter.

It was a heady feeling, even after years of experimentation and experience, to be able to see whole neighborhoods at a glance from myriad angles in each moment, to hear hundreds of conversations overlapping each other in her mind's ear to the point where it was nigh-impossible to follow any single one of them unless she slowed and narrowed herself. Just another reminder of her now post-Sinner existence, no longer bound by the frailties of a small, inexpert body that had been subjected to indignity and shame. Another reminder that what she was setting out to do was possible. If she could only beat the clock itself.

"Now where was… right. There," she said, as the wind that was Wendy finally spotted the telltale intrusion against the skyline which was the Happy Hotel. And most shockingly of all, the neon sign at the top of the conglomerate-building-and-tanker-ship actually said Happy Hotel. Wendy paused at that. In all the time she'd been there, the first word had been 'Hazbin'. Wonder what that was about.

She approached closer, by definition approaching by way of the roof. But as she drew closer, there was an absence that she felt that stunned her every bit as much as the very-appropriate signage for the hotel.

There was no lingering dread and terror beneath her.

Like a sand-figure blowing away in a gale played in reverse, she reconstituted her body at the doors to the balcony, opening the unlocked doors to one of many rooms in the hotel she had not seen, but uniquely refused to because she had been scared shitless of what she would find there.

The penthouse was empty.

No Radio Demon cackling to his obtuse and opaque schemes, no machines of unspeakable description that Sam had described from his time up there. Just open real estate, bereft of even the first sign of habitation. She glanced to the light-bulb, tracing its wire back to the switch, and activated with a pulse of her being not currently attached to her body. When the lights came up, it told a slightly different story than the absence first had.

There had been fights here. There, a pillar scarred by Black Binds, and a strange ichor left at the pillar's base. There, flame and scorch-marks, and there radiating cracks in the flooring as though an explosion had been rooted yon. Had Charlie finally evicted the Radio Demon? If so, about time, and good riddance.

But then, she had the stab of fear. Just a little bit, not truly deep, for Wendy could now see that Charlie, for all her gentle and endlessly forgiving nature, was not a weak thing. No, Charlie was bright and mighty and hale in a way that only three other beings she had ever encountered had been.

Those three being Thor, Samuel, and Gabriel.

But still. She might be akin to those pillars of being… but the Radio Demon was still the Radio Demon.

Again she broke apart, racing down to the ground-level. She paused at the conservatory. It was getting rather unkept, but hadn't devolved to the utter wilderness that she would have expected by now. Somebody was trying to upkeep the room full of flowers and plants. Not very well, and not very expertly, but trying. And she was pretty sure the one who was currently in here wasn't the one who did it. She paused as her body swirled into being, drinking in the memories of this place if nothing else.

Angel Dust turned to her, and then immediately let out a shout of surprise and alarm, his extra set of arms pulling a pair of guns and pointing them at her in shock of finding himself no longer alone. His other hands still held onto various herbs and several bulbs of still-dirty garlic.

"Who d' fuck are you and when did you get in here!" Angel Dust demanded. He looked different from how she'd remembered him. A lot of the porn-star's softness was gone, and hardness had taken its place. There was something sharp and angry in his eyes now.

"Don't tell me you're the one keeping this place together," Wendy said.

"Wait a fuggin' minute… why do you sound like Wendy?" Angel Dust somehow, miraculously, put 2 and 2 together and correctly ended up with purple.

"Give your head a shake, Angel Dust. It's me," Wendy said.

Angel Dust blinked at her, then he laughed, his arms with their guns vanishing back into his body without a ripple of how he managed to hide them. Let a man keep some secrets, then. "Well I'll be. Charlie said you got out, aftah all! Mook I am for not believin' her. What's bringin' a high-and-might presence like y'self down to us loozahs?"

"Trying to save the world, needed to clear my head. Is Charlie around?" Wendy asked, pointing toward the doors leading into the hotel, which was teeming with activity and life.

"Yeah, like anybody could ever get her to leave," Angel Dust laughed, then motioned for her to follow him. She paused, though. Looked at the small dominion of plantlife that had been hers while she remembered how to be human. Looked past the windows, to the… military ammunition dump that was now in the back yard. She was really gonna have to work on her peripheral vision, to not have consciously noticed that on her way in. Then she turned toward the hotel once more.

"Welcome home, Wendy," she whispered to the flowers.

Chapter 44

The Paradox Engine

Charlie sat in her chair, feeling especially dejected and downcast, staring at the letter that had been left under her door through the night. A note by somebody who had lost faith. From someone who was abandoning the program, and returning to the dead-end life of all Sinners trapped in Hell.

She had expected that the first outright abandonment would reduce her to tears, to break her spirit such that she would run wailing into the night. But instead she just felt heavy and tired. It just didn't compute to her, that Benedict would cut his lines and leave. But she knew his handwriting, having seen it before. And she saw it again now. There was no pressure or strain. Clearly, this letter hadn't been written under duress. No, it was writ by sadness, just as it was read.

It hurt, to have somebody lose all faith in her. To give up. But as much as it hurt, she found she had no tears to shed.

"Hon? Are you alright?" Vaggie asked, peeking around her door. She glanced from the Nephilim who could Redeem the Damned, to the letter which had awaited her in the morning, and sighed. "He left, didn't he?"

Charlie just nodded. Not because she couldn't trust her voice not to bawl, quite the contrary; because if she said yes, it would be as flat an emotionless as a psychopath's. And she wasn't sure why it'd be like that. Maybe the strain, of all of this, was finally becoming too much. Maybe with the War and the bloodshed and the loss of Niffty and so many other people she tried to guard behind her shield had finally broken her, and made her just like everybody else down here. A shattered husk of their former selves, fit only for hedonism, violence, and self destruction.

Or maybe Charlie was just having a mopey day.

Vaggie moved to Charlie's side and scootched so that the two of them shared the chair; it was a snug fit, two full sized women in a single office-chair, but the chair was sized for something like a Minotaur or a Devourer. The moment that Vaggie was next to her, Charlie didn't so much break down as melt into her girlfriend's embrace, mumbling about what a shitty day she was having and having Vaggie rub her back and make soothing noises of her own.

It hurt to fail. It hurt not just her professionalism, but her pride. And while she wasn't her father, pride was still something that she had, if not nearly in his levels of abundance. And failures like with people like Bennie brought back to focus the precarity of people like Vaggie. Benedict hadn't been a particularly well-heeled, influential, or personally powerful Sinner. He'd just been one of the countless billions who had briefly graced Hell, a gear in the machine, a snow-flake in the blizzard of them. If he preferred his chances out there, as a person of no great renown or fortitude, what possible hope did Vaggie have, when all of the base-line power that Benedict had just by being Damned had been ripped from her within weeks of her arrival down here?

Today was fomenting dark thoughts in Charlie. But at least Vaggie was here. Here where Charlie could keep her safe. Safe from everything.

So as it turns out, Charlie may have been a bit possessive. She actually surprised herself at realizing that, sitting as she was two-to-a-chair and wrapped around her girlfriend.

The door opened without a knock, and Angel Dust leaned in. "I hope you two ain't fuckin', cause you got a guest yer gonna wanna see!" Angel Dust said.

The moment of vexation, of rising ire in her fell as she actually took in his words. She sat up, incidentally lifting Vaggie and depositing the much lighter and less powerful woman into her lap as she did. "Angel, what's going on?" she asked. But Angel Dust merely smiled and threw the door wider.

When Charlie stood up abruptly, Vaggie gave an 'ack!' of alarm and fell to the floor. Charlie immediately apologized and picked her girlfriend up, before looking to the figure who was passing into the office with them all. Wendy. Again. Now, she didn't have that pane-of-light thing behind her head, but it was still clearly her, looking nearly human but for her three eyes. Vaggie recoiled from Wendy, pulling a knife that gleamed sharply in the light and tried to interpose herself between Charlie and danger, as though that was the dynamic that Charlie was even going to allow, let alone encourage.

"What are you?" Vaggie asked, voice dripping with dread.

"I can't be that hard to recognize," Wendy said, her tone clearly amused by Vaggie's protectiveness over her much-stronger lover. "I get it, I've got two more eyes than I used to. My voice didn't change that much."

Vaggie blinked, narrowing her one remaining eye at Wendy, then turned and gave a glance to Charlie. "Is… that Wendy?" she asked.

"Well, yeah, of course. Who else would it be?" Charlie asked.

"That!" she pointed at Wendy again. Charlie gave her an unimpressed look.

"Yes, Vaggie. That's what she looked like when she was alive. More or less," she said.

"When you said she was at Purson's, I didn't… how is she even here?" Vaggie asked.

"Well…" Charlie began.

"I needed to stretch my legs, and they said something that I had to leave before I said something mean in response to," Wendy said. She turned and thanked Angel Dust, who pulled the door closed behind him as he left. There was a strange blip in Charlie's vision, because now Wendy was sitting in one of the chairs, leaning back as though staring upward through the ceiling. Then another blip, and Wendy was standing next to the map that was tacked up to the wall, displaying the whole region that had been staked out as 'New Purgatory'. "And it seems I'm not the only person who's been busy since I left."

"Why… do you look like that?" Vaggie asked. Wendy gave a chuckle. There was a shudder, and she was in that chair again, facing them.

"Why do you look like that?" Wendy asked. Vaggie's paranoia curdled into annoyance. Which may have been Wendy's plan. "I am what I am. What I was always meant to be. New Purgatory, though. I see Sam's idea is starting to actually send out roots."

"Not very strong roots," Charlie muttered.

"Not very strong roots," Wendy echoed with a mildly chiding tone. "You managed to Redeem another Sinner. That I'm not a fluke is the root of this place, and that'll never let go now that it's set. Did something happen? I saw what happened up in the penthouse. Did you finally get rid of Alastor?"

"...yes," Charlie said.

That hurt almost as much as failing Benedict, but in a different way. It was one thing when somebody said, 'I can gain nothing from this place' and leave. That opinion could be (and was, by Charlie's estimation) factually wrong. It was another to say 'I will not help you from today until the end of days.' To turn her back on Alastor, on the very worst of Hell, felt like a repudiation of the very premise of this place.

It was a different flavor of failure. And she was getting quite the sampler of those, these days.

"Good riddance," Wendy said with a no-nonsense nod. She pointed at Vaggie. "I see you agree with me."

"I mean… who wouldn't?" Vaggie asked.

"That guy was a problem from the day he Fell, and will continue to be one until the day he's expunged," Wendy said. And she gave her head a slow shake. "And with the things I've seen, the places I've been, the things I've touched… I increasingly fear that there may not be anything powerful enough to kill him, or strange enough for him not to ignore."

"Well, he's gone," Charlie said, a mask of anger sliding into place on her face. "And if he ever dares to show himself to me again, I'll make him rue the first sin he ever committed."

Wendy stared at him. "Oh. So it was that messy. Who did we lose?"

Charlie sighed, and sat down again. Vaggie, this time, didn't try to squeeze in beside her, remaining standing at Charlie's right hand. "Niffty," Charlie said.

"The man-hungry stalker is dead?" Wendy asked, and then tilted her head. She blinked a few times, then her eyes went wide. "...she's buried in the back yard."

"Yeah. Along with everybody who died when Alastor refused to protect this place," Charlie said.

"I imagine that was the final straw on an already mostly-broken back," Wendy said. She gave her head a shake. "This topic isn't doing any of us any favors. Why don't we try talking about something happier? I saw that Husk is looking more human than I ever recall him looking. Do you think he'll be the next one to go up?"

"Husk? No," Charlie said. Then she tilted her head. "But… maybe? Why do you think that? It can't just be because of how he looks…"

"It's more than that," Wendy said. She frowned, as though summoning up her reasoning, and not appearing happy at the shape it manifested. "It's… like he's woken up from a half century of nightmare, and while the waking world is still shit, it's still better than his dream."

"Maybe Rachel's having a bigger effect on him than we thought?" Vaggie asked.

"If only I knew what effect that was," Charlie said. Rachel was just so hard to get a read on. On one day, she would emancipate a truck's worth of slaves from bondage, and the next she would put them in entirely ad-hoc and implied bondage to herself. One day she would vouch for a crumbling Sinner on the verge of walking into the Pride Wall, then the next, she would without shame and without compunction demand that another be picked up by the scruff of his neck and hurled outside of New Purgatory, potentially indefinitely. It was less a question of whether Rachel was changing Husk; it was clear that she was. No, the issue was what she was changing Husk into.

"Right. Rachel." Wendy sat back in her chair. "I can't say I know much about her. I didn't work with her long, Sam didn't say much, and what he did say was pretty obviously through rosy-lenses. And as for–"

"She's not what I expected her to be," Vaggie took the words right out of Charlie's mouth, cutting off Wendy.

"Really? She might have been a bit shell-shocked, but she must have been a fairly exemplary person, if she both managed to raise Sam into what he was and got into Heaven besides," Wendy said.

"You'd think that," Charlie said. "You'd really think that."

Wendy lofted one of the three brows she had at that statement. "Oh? Do tell," she said.

"I didn't take you for a gossip," Charlie said.

"I'm learning a lot about myself now that I'm a Redemptor," Wendy said.

"A… Redemptor?" Charlie echoed.

"It's clear I'm not a Sinner, anymore. I tested the Pride wall, and it doesn't do shit to me. I've walked the Earth, and been fine," Wendy said. "Clearly I'm not an Innocent. So I must be something else. And as a taxonomist of my own right, as well as the notable advantage of being the first one, I called dibs on the nomenclature."

"Who exactly are you redeeming?" Vaggie asked, finally moving away from Charlie and pulling her own chair to the side of the desk behind which the Princess of All Hell sat.

"I suppose that will vary by the Redemptor. I'm taking responsibility for the ecology of the Planet Earth," Wendy said. She shrugged. "Gotta do something about that Anthropocene Mass Extinction Event going on, don't I?"

The door opened, then, and Rachel entered, with her arms filled with dossiers. She didn't pay any attention to them for the time it took to navigate the stack which went beyond-head-level for her to the point where she could awkwardly stack them atop a table, the teetering pile of them wedged into a corner of the room.

"Since we've got more room open, I think we should be discerning as to who…" Rachel began, then turned and spotted Wendy. "...Gloria? What are you doing here?"

"How do you know her?" Charlie asked, having glazed over Wendy's mention.

"Heaven," Rachel said, moving to stand at Wendy's side. "She's the reason why Cloud Two had as much food as it did when I was up there."

"Why didn't you tell me you knew Rachel?" Charlie asked.

"I did. You weren't paying attention," Wendy gestured toward Vaggie. "Like I said, from what I know about her, it doesn't surprise me that she got into heaven. She's essentially willpower, embodied."

"I don't need your praise; my ego isn't so delicate as to require constant feeding," Rachel said.

"So you knew she was like this?" Charlie asked.

"Like what?" Wendy asked.

"A functional sociopath," Rachel provided. Wendy chortled.

"You're not a sociopath," Wendy said.

"As the one living with my mind, I'd say I beg to differ," Rachel said. She turned to face Wendy flush. "So why are you back down here with us mud-people? Shouldn't you be easing hunger pangs up in Heaven?"

"I decided to take a swing at a much larger mass-starvation in the making," Wendy said. "And come to think of it, how exactly did you get here? You don't strike me as somebody to take the big leap off of The Edge."

"Got thrown," Rachel said.

"Gabriel?" Wendy asked.

Rachel nodded. "Gabriel."

"What an asshole," Wendy said.

"I've never met him. Is he really that bad?" Charlie cut in.

"Imagine every bad stereotype of an Angel that your father ever voiced in your presence," Rachel began.

"Amplify it a thousandfold," Wendy added.

"Then give it an entire faction of lesser cronies who take his example as permission to be the worst version of themselves," Rachel finished.

"And even then, it's only an approximation," Wendy said. "Michael was a decent guy. Obedient beyond a fault, but decent. Raguel? He was actually Good, with a capital 'G'. But Gabriel? If he ever even learns of your existence, he will burn Hell to the ground for the glory of murdering you."

Charlie blinked at that. "Why? What did I ever do to him?"

"It's not what you've done which signed your death warrant. It's who your parents were," Wendy said.

"Right, because she's a Nephilim," Rachel said, preempting Charlie's assertion that it was because she was the Heir to the Low Throne. Apparently that was just icing on the homicide cake.

"He's going to be a problem," Wendy said with a sad nod.

Charlie was quiet, as the moment grew heavy under the implication that the only reason why she hadn't had the angelic equivalent of a thermonuclear warhead (which was, obviously enough, Gabriel showing up himself) launched at her was that she was unknown to the powers of Heaven. It stung, strangely, that Michael and Raguel hadn't spoken of her. But given what Wendy said, maybe it was for the safest, if not the best; if Gabriel was as bloodthirsty as described, better to keep him in Heaven, and away from what Charlie was trying to do.

"So can we get back to running things? There's a slot open in the program and I think we should discuss who's getting it," Rachel said.

"What?" Charlie asked.

"Benedict, am I right?" Rachel asked. "I saw him skulk out."

"And you didn't stop him?" Charlie asked, an edge of anger slipping into her voice.

"How could I have stopped him?" Rachel pointed out her complete lack of infernal power. She then shrugged. "Given what I know of his mindset, he'll come back unless something kills him. It might be a year or so, but he'll be back in the Program eventually."

"...really? You're not just saying that to sooth my nerves?" Charlie asked.

"Benedict is a Centennial Sinner. He cut his teeth in the Pride War, before his side was wiped out by the Radio Demon," Rachel said. "Getting away from that is, to him, likely worth any price. But the junk-food-law applies. Sometimes in a world of filet mignon and caviar, you have to eat some garbage to remind yourself why you shouldn't eat garbage."

"That sounds… rather cynical," Charlie said.

"Cynical to your benefit, though. So you should accept it," Rachel said. She turned to Wendy. "So when you say 'saving the world', you mean what exactly?"

"That depends on how badly oligarchs fight back. It might be a bit of tight-belted legislation. It might be ecoterrorism," Wendy said.

"Wendy!" Charlie said.

"Unless it becomes an existential hazard for a person's net worth to have more than nine digits before the decimal point, there will always be human-dragons who need to have Memento Mori whispered threateningly into their ears," Wendy said. "Humanity can be better. But as long as 100 of the worst of them have absolute legislative, economic, and therefore military control over the affairs of the planet the better of humanity will only ever know the feeling of boots on their necks from cradle to grave. I can end that, so I will end it."

"Might… want to reel that in a bit," Rachel said, her brow furrowed. "Because that sounds like Injustice: Gods Among Us levels of tyranny in the making."

"What?" Vaggie asked.

"A Superman story where Kal-El ended up becoming dictator of the world. Do any of you people read good literature these days?" Rachel asked.

"Wow. That's a deep cut from my childhood," Wendy said.

"Exactly," Rachel said, leaning in on Wendy. "If you're going to take on the Sisyphean task of saving Earth, you're going to have to understand why Kal-El prefers to be Clark Kent over Superman. It is easy, and tempting to be a god when you have power over people. But that doesn't make anything you do as a god just."

Wendy leaned back, blinking a few times. Then she turned to Charlie. "Yup. That's definitely Sam's mom," she said.

"You doubted that?" Charlie asked.

"Hey, when I was working with her in Heaven, I didn't put two-and-two together," Wendy said, defensively. "Fine. So no ecoterrorism. How do I end the stranglehold of the oligarchs?"

"Make the world into your Gotham," Rachel said. "Equip people to solve their own problems at the bottom. Then equip the people to solve the problems above them. Then above them. You keep going upward, until you are barely even involved in the toppling of hegemons. And you'll have built a machine that will continue functioning long after you turn away from it."

Wendy laughed. "Being better than God at something does appeal to my ego."

"I thought it might," Rachel said. She then tilted her head and looked to Wendy again. "You weren't actually going to do the ecoterrorism, were you?"

Wendy sighed. And shook her head. "No. But it was a comforting fall-back to think about if my other scenarios fail."

Rachel nodded, as though she'd suspected exactly that. Then she puffed out a breath. "Why did I come in here again?"

"The new guy to the program," Wendy provided.

"Right! We've got a lot of reading to do but… of course, you're distracted now," Rachel said as Charlie got up out of her chair.

"Would you like to look at what we've gotten up to since you left?" Charlie asked.

"You've certainly gathered a fair few people," Wendy said. "How many of them are actually trying to be better people?"

"More than you'd think!" Charlie said.

Rachel sighed, and rubbed at her brow as Charlie rounded her table and guided Wendy out into the lobby. The lobby which had gone still and silent, with a phalanx of heavily armored Legionaries in Blasphemer armor forming a chevron, with unarmored fighters pointing rifles at her door. When Charlie came out, a ripple ran through them. When Wendy joined her, the tension raced toward the stratosphere.

"What are you doing? This is Wendy. She's a former guest," Charlie asked.

There was clear disbelief in the soldiers, who kept their guns trained on Wendy. Charlie sighed, and pulled out her Hellphone, quick-dialing Roth. "General? Your soldiers are being twitchy. Could you come tell them to calm down?"

"You'd think you'd never seen a three-eyed woman before," Wendy chided.

It only took about two minutes for the doors to the inner hotel to burst open and Obadiah Roth to join them. The Fury, who had been fresh-faced when he first showed up on their doorstep, was now marked with brutal scars on his left side, his eye an obvious synthetic replacement, the arm and leg on that side made of metal. He took a look at the fact that Charlie was actively body-blocking Wendy, then to his own men, and began to belt out orders.

"WHY ARE YOU MAGGOTS POINTING GUNS AT YOUR PRINCESS?" Roth demanded.

That shook the people in the phalanx ahead of her.

"IF ANY SLUG I SEE BEFORE ME DOESN'T SAFETY THEIR WEAPON IN THE NEXT THREE GODDAMNED SECONDS I WILL INTRODUCE IT SIDEWAYS INTO THEIR DICK-HOLSTER, WHETHER THEY WERE BORN WITH ONE OR IF I HAVE TO CUT IT! AM I MAKING MYSELF CLEAR?" Roth roared.

That got everybody to point their weapons somewhere not at Charlie, or at Wendy by extension.

"That's what I thought," Roth said. He then turned to Charlie and gave her a curtailed bow. "Would you mind explaining to me, at least, why there's a fucking Angel huddled behind you?"

"Oh, she's not an Angel. She's just Wendy. She used to live here," Charlie said. Roth looked at her as though she were utterly daft. But then he rose to his full stature and shrugged. Clearly this was not a 'him' problem. The soldiers who had been about to open fire on Wendy were now dispersing under Roth's unkind glance.

"Don't feel bad for that. I get that most places I go these days," Wendy said.

"Well, you shouldn't. Now let's show you what's changed. Can you believe we actually use the dining room now?"

"Really? When did you get rid of the propeller?" Wendy asked.

And with that, to the murmuring of disbelieving crowds, who looked upon what they saw as something from the strangest corner of Heaven talking to someone from admittedly one of the stranger corners – psychologically speaking – of Hell, they passed into the dining area, and talked of lighter, less eco-terrorism-y things.

The machine still didn't work. And that vexed Purson in a way that he struggled to find language for. It vexed him because he had made one before, in a fraction of the time that this one had, that had worked without even a single failure or explosion. It vexed him because the steps that he remembered from the previous one were now all of them proveably incorrect ones to make in the follow up. It vexed him because it was an art masquerading as a science. Purson was a good journeyman at science, not the foremost expert at its strictures but more than capable at understanding its methods and means. But at art, he was something of a rank amateur.

Tabris, at least, offered some respite from the constant and repeating failures that the Paradox Engine threw into his path. A mere glance at the dark, inky and swirling eyes of his son restored all that a day of failure and frustration depleted in him. He knew that had he not Tabris each evening to remind him of the importance and criticality of his task, he would likely have despaired.

"The approach of her 'deadline' is still half a year away," Penemue intruded on his thoughts, pulling him out of his dark mullings and back into the here and the now, reminded him that he was holding the child that an eon had denied to them both, and that his slice of Hell was currently a brighter place than it had been in a hundred centuries.

"Forgive me. Sometimes these ill moods sneak up on me," he said. The nursary for Tabris that the three of them were sitting in was a very new addition, having been hastily (by Angel's standards, at least) created transforming the nearest room to Purson and Penemue's bedchamber into a place fit for an infant prince. It was a tighter thing than their spacious abode, but considering it had been a 'small' reading room before its transformation, no great surprise. The walls still played host to innumerable books, books that Tabris still had not yet learned to read. But considering Tabris was not yet a year in this world, reading was perhaps a bit early of an achievement to expect. How long had Stolas, for example, been a child? How long had Octavia?

He set the child down, under the images that would play, magically recorded on a crystal, that would display great events and people from the long history of Heaven and Hell alike. The child, though, quickly settled in and fell asleep, leaving the two Angels who had made him to stare at the seemingly impossible miracle that had happened in strict defiance of God's Will.

"I still can't believe he's real," Penemue whispered, unwilling to stir the child.

"Have you been talking to Stella?" Purson asked her. She turned to him, surprised he'd jumped topics, but probably grasping that he had a logic connecting the two. "He's too young yet to learn to fight, and defend himself… but if he grows with half the speed that Octavia did, then he will need a teacher soon. And Stella stands as one of the best of them."

"I have been," Penemue said. "She's been somewhat melancholy for the last while. I'd dare say that she and her husband had traded moods, but now that he's an ex-husband, and she there is no trading to be done between them, I worry about her stability."

"It's foolishness," Purson muttered. "Her daughter is right through the Gate. If she feels so abandoned by her, just go up and talk to the woman."

"Stella is not a rational actor," Penemue pointed out, taking Purson's hand and walking toward the doors to the nursery. She briefly tensed, then glanced back to ensure that the baby-monitor was on – it was – before crossing into the hallways, which, like most of the rooms, were walled with books. "If she were, she'd never have lost Stolas to infidelity in the first place. Stella is a creature of passion. And right now, her passions have done her ill, so she is ill done by them in turn."

"She remains Tabris' Godmother," Purson said, his mouth not happy with the term, but it was the cleanest and most obvious one for her situation and role. "So we should do what we can to ensure her wellbeing, if only so if something happens to us, she will be capable as well as willing."

"She needs a victory of some kind," Penemue said. "But I struggle to think of what victory we could arrange for her. Neither of us is a martial sort."

Purson nodded. He paused by the audience-room, which had seen very little use over the last few millennia, and then suddenly a fair bit of it in the last year. Gadreel's defection to Hell was not a shock to Purson. After all, Penemue had her beaten by more than a year in leaving Heaven behind for a side where their kind could be free. But still, Gadreel was not the last. Chazaqiel had managed to crawl into Hell not through a safe-passage like over The Edge, but instead by plunging through The Garbage on Cloud Diligence and then barely making it to the roots of the Qliphoth before the sucking exhaustion of the Abyss killed him and dragged him into destruction. Now he sat in that room, a tree of medicines being pumped into his withered, damaged body, as he recovered from the exertion of almost completing a plunge from which no being save God ever returned.

They came to Chazaqiel, who turned his head to regard them, his sunken eyes widening when he beheld them. "I saw the child," Zaq said. He looked wretched, degraded by forces Angels were not meant to endure. And lacking a Vigilance down here in Hell, he would need to recover from those infections slowly. Despite being a Secondborn and younger by far than Birah, First of the Second, he looked much older, approaching his geriatric years. And that was far older than Purson remembered him being; he had always had an older look about him, hair grey like rain-clouds and a fluffy beard that for some reasons artists conflated with the face of God. Now that hair was falling out and the beard was thinned. But he would recover. While Zaq was not the youngest Secondborn (that was Desreel The Youngest, who was merely 390 years old), he still had much of his creation-borne vitality to draw from.

"Yes, and isn't he beautiful?" Penemue asked.

"A finer thing I've not seen in many years," Zaq said. He tried to stand, only able to rise by taking Purson's hand. "I hope you'll forgive my appearance in your manse, but I had to see it for myself."

"Well, you have seen it. Now you should probably away to Our Lady of Unreasonable Violence to recover yourself," Purson said.

Zaq wafted that notion away like it was rancid flatulence. "I came here to be close to my kind, not to be surrounded by hellspawn…"

"A notion you had best rid yourself of," Purson said with stern tone. "As a new Goetia, you have a responsibility over them, just as they now must pay dues to you."

Zaq gave a chuckle. "Can't say I thought I'd hear you defending the Hellborn," he said.

"Time changes all of us, in shocking ways," Penemue said.

"And yet both of you have scarcely changed at all," Zaq said. He leaned in close, with a somewhat conspiratorial look to him. "And tell me something… is it true, that you've built a Paradox Engine?"

"That is true, but it has long since been expended," Purson said. "Lucifer used its power to cut free the Ring of Betrayal and hurl it to destruction."

"Amazing," Zaq said. "First an impossible child, then an impossible engine. Truly, you are Sahaquiel reborn."

"I'm sure Sahaquiel is Sahaquiel, no matter what his current manifestation," Penemue waved off. "You're trying to flatter my husband. Why?"

Zaq looked caught out by her sudden bluntness. "What, am I not allowed to remark on these impossible events I see before me?"

"You are not, if they are intended to cloud his reason and predispose him to some scheme or folly. Why are you here, Chazaqiel?" Penemue asked, staring – nay, glaring – with intensity at the newly defected Angel.

The newly arrived defector from Heaven looked to each of them in turn, and found two impassive, unmoved faces. He sighed, and tightened his grip on the stand of bags of fluids that would do some small benefit to him as long as they migrated into his body. "I don't know what to do now," Zaq said.

"Freedom is a terrifying prospect to those who are born outside of its proxima," Purson said.

"And I was sure that Lucifer would kill me when I was dragged before him, unable to even rise from the floor. I had fought against him, in the last war. He is not known for forgiveness. And he had little to offer now, either."

"But he didn't kill you," Purson pointed out the ending that Zaq was meandering toward.

"And I don't understand why. That is not the Lucifer I have been told to hate and to fear," the Cloud Watcher said.

"So you come to us because you think we can show you truth when you are upended from it," Penemue summarized.

"You remain, both of you, some of the most well-associated masters of Lore and Knowledge, even by those who despise what you've become. My world has ended. Heaven is not what I thought it was. And neither is Hell."

Purson had little patience for this. Time spent trying to restore Chazaqiel's peace of mind would necessarily pull away from the creation of the Paradox Engine that he had been charged with by the King of All Hell. And the sooner he could discharge that terrible responsibility, the sooner he would be free to be the kind of father that young Tabris deserved.

"I am not a master of truth, Chazaqiel," Purson said. "I am a master of lore. Of History. I can tell you what is. I cannot tell you what must be."

"You will have to construct that on your own," Penemue joined him at this conversational point.

"Who else can I even talk to? Who else even is there from the old days?" Zaq asked.

"If you're truly desperate for old-times and old faces, speak to Stolas. He remains in good standing down here," Purson said.

"He's supposed to be dead…" Zaq said.

"Well, what was supposed to be is not what is," Penemue said.

"...damn it, and damn you as well," Chazaqiel said, more bitter than angry. "To be feasted on by the Qliphoth and sprayed by the Abyss and still have nothing to show for it."

"You are in Hell. Here, as you could never be in Heaven, you are free," Purson said. "Speak with Stolas. Find your bearings. It is always good to see another of our kind coming to stand on the right side of history," Purson said.

Chazaqiel sighed, and sat back down, leaving Purson and Penemue to walk beyond him and his dark considerations. Penemue, though, had a look on her face, a consideration which was quickly germinating in the fertile soils of her monumental mind. And it took very little time at all to sprout.

"What thought has occurred to you, my dearest?" Purson asked.

"It's a fancy," she said. "A lark that I find I can't dismiss," she admitted, as though couching herself against appearing a fool. Well, fie on that. Purson would never, in all the years of God and Death combined consider her a fool. He coaxed it out of her. "Our cousin back there, floundering in ignorance and grappling with a state that he has been cast from grace, now resting, injured and agonized, in Hell."

"What of him?" Purson asked.

"Who else could that have described, once, a long time ago?" Penemue asked. Purson furrowed his brow. It was true, that in the days after The Fall, Purson had been in the boots that Chazaqiel now was forced to wear. "And what did you do in that state?"

"You cannot mean…" Purson said.

"In pain and distraction, you built a Paradox Engine. Now, with neither, you find yourself unable," Penemue said. "There is a common factor at play, one we're too blinkered in our shared vision to behold. So…"

"So to build the second Paradox Engine, I must put myself in the mindset I was in when I built the first," Purson muttered. He shook his head. "An impossibility. When I Fell, I had lost you. That wound can never be emulated in the current day."

"Don't be so poetic. You felt pain even with your abnormal physiology; it changed your thinking. It may be that mere and simple physical pain can place your mindset into the right alignment," Penemue said.

"You sound rather eager to torture your husband, my dearest," Purson pointed out.

"I lack the craft to torture myself and build such a thing. I'm sorry, my sweetest, but I can't think of any other way."

Purson chuckled richly. He put a smile on his face. "What's a bit of torture between husband and wife?"

"Then we should return to work. If nothing else, Tabris is asleep, and that gives us some hours to work," Penemue said.

"I hope…" Purson began, but let the sentence go abandoned, because Penemue draped his arm over her shoulder and down onto her chest, which she held in both of her hands as though wanting almost to sink into him, but still wanting to be outside of him in the same moment. The truth was, it mattered little what Purson hoped, right now. He would either build a Paradox Engine, or he would be punished by Lucifer. His left ear still bore the scars from where it had been surgically reattached after the last time Lucifer was anything but best-pleased with him.

Whatever hopes were to be had in this house would be best kept silent. Putting them to words was to make plans, and it was well known that When Men and Angels Plan, God Laughs.

Another groan and the machine began to slow and shudder, causing the Goetia and the Redemptor to sigh and sit back, deactivating the machine and allowing it to rattle to a halt. To call this thing an 'engine' only made sense from the metaphysical perspective, now. It certainly was not up to the task of turning chemical energy into mechanical force. A dozen iterations with radical redesigns between each and the work of months of mind-bending science had turned what had originally been something like a diesel-electric generator in profile into something that looked… well, alien. It was rings within rings, gears within gears and wheels within wheels, as though somebody had made the most fanciful pocket-watch conceivable, something more out of a steam-punk picture than reasonable engineering, and then inflated it out by layers of scale and complexity. The core of it was a set of non-intersecting pseudo-coils, which despite looking like free-floating rings set concentrically within each other when the machine finally came to a halt, the truth of them was that they were much, much stranger. Those 'rings' were merely the three-dimensional shadows of mechanisms currently being blindly built with fumbling tools and no way to check their work in higher dimensions.

Even as Wendy was now, it beggared her imagination how this thing was even going to function, let alone all of the work that went into building it. Yet still, she reached into gaps that she knew were too small and too crooked for her limbs, feeling the pinch and crush of metal against her fingers, questing to complete a device that it was clear nobody properly understood. While her eyes were ill equipped to see all of the mysteries of this damned thing, at least she could see where Purson's own vision faltered, which enabled them to go far further than he would have managed alone.

Frankly, without Wendy, it was likely that Purson could have toiled for a century and not had a working machine. It was just a pity that Wendy had mere months left to make this impossibility a reality.

The rings settled into their resting state, and Wendy looked at her hands, which were bruised and bleeding with blood almost vividly crimson. If Wendy had been a more high-minded individual, it might have been shocking, seeing herself injured after having been essentially impervious from the moment of her Redemption onward. But to Wendy, it was just a symbol of hard work buckling even the hardiest hands. She looked to Purson, who sat back, and adjusted the screws that plunged spikes into his inkish flesh.

"That is so creepy," Wendy said.

"My wife was correct, in that pain is part of the process," Purson said. Penemue had been here for some time today, but at the first cries that came through her baby-monitor, the Grigori had vanished to the fluttering of wings and left the two of them staring at the machine which had failed them yet again. "But it is not all of the process. There are still things I cannot recall. Important things which brought life to this base matter."

Wendy chuckled, watching as the splits in her hands began to close and pull together, as though rewinding in real time from the duration when they first had been injured, until the cuts were gone but a few of the bruises, and the swelling with them, remained. "I would call this matter the furthest thing from 'base'. I understand now why Sam didn't want me going to Sloth. The more I look at this thing, the more it calls to mind that horrifying abomination they say is down there."

"Whoever this 'Sam' was, he was prudent indeed," Purson said, now adjusting a 'crown' on his head that tightened and squeezed his brow; under such settings it would have crushed Purson's skull, if his living form actually had such a thing. "The Delirium Engine is a grim thing, one best left out of most conversations. I have had to destroy swathes of my own living knowledge simply so that I may dream safely from it," Purson said.

"I think you'd like Sam. He was a good man. It's a pity what he's turned into," Wendy said.

Purson narrowed his eyes. "Do you speak of Samael, the Poison of God, with such familiarity?"

"He and I used to be neighbors, briefly," she said.

"Not only have you spoken to the Demiurge, but you were party to his concealment. Of course such strange things would follow you about, Child of Paradox," Purson laughed.

"There was no concealment. Sam wasn't the Demiurge when I knew him. I didn't realize what he'd turned himself into until I ran into him up on Cloud 4. And let me tell you, it's as mortifying as it was disappointing to me."

"You were… disappointed… by the Demiurge."

Wendy leaned back, and thought of the way to put this. "Are you only Tabris' father?" she asked. Purson narrowed his eyes, clearly asking her to elaborate. "Could you, Purson of the Ars Goetia, be adequately described to somebody using only the phrase 'he's Tabris Goetia's father'?"

"No. That is only a small part of who I am," Purson said.

"Imagine the reverse," Wendy said. "Imagine that was what everybody called you, Tabris' father, ignoring or outright ignorant of everything else you were. Imagine that the part of you that was Tabris' Father outright smothered those other parts of you, so it would be prime among them."

"He is trapped under a persona," Purson grasped.

"And the longer he's trapped under it, the less of the man I knew will remain. By the time he does what he set out to do… there may be nothing left," Wendy said.

"Which spurs you just as much as your self-set timeframe," Purson said.

"What?"

"It's obvious to me, you are an enemy of the future as you see it. I suppose it only stands to reason that someone who was a confederate of the Demiurge, who has sworn to murder god, would have so broad and overwhelming as an enemy as the entirety of 'the future'," Purson said. "That somebody transformed through their choices would necessarily put themselves against the weight of eternity. Not simply having a task, but a duty. A responsibility, even if one made by thine-own-hand. I could name a half dozen in all Creation who are as driven as you are, in the ways that you are. Have you ever met the Grigori Azazel?"

"A few times," Wendy said, leaning back, and taking in what he said and zoning out on what he was saying now. Was that what this was? A duty that would take an eternity to undertake, as price for freedom from damnation. To take the place of Sisyphus, and build the stone with her bare hands that she would until the end of days push up the hill? No. There was more to it.

There was some aspect of herself she was even now ignorant to, some part of her she had not yet plumbed in her few and fleeting moments to ponder. What was she?

By her own words, she was a Redemptor. But she'd said that glibly, if only to have a snappy title to offer that really weird looking Angel who bent the light around him (to Wendy's eyes, at least). It had several meanings. One who redeems, as a jab at the Angels who were standing around impugning each other and getting nothing done. But also one who cultivates. She was a botanist in life. She'd become a gardener in her first afterlife, and a flat-out-farmer in her second afterlife.

So what was it that that made her a Redemptor?

It wasn't just a happy night of Karaoke and sleeping off inebriation.

It was a decision.

A decision to never let despair mark her path ever again. A decision to keep growing.

A decision to save herself. So she'd have the chance to save others.

She looked to Purson, the searing implication finally settling onto her. She knew what the Demiurge was supposed to be. A god of petty things, a god of slavery, of endless and unbreakable obedience. And that wasn't Sam.

What that description rang true, for, though, was a certain throne-bound Deity up in the highest Cloud of Heaven.

God was the Demiurge.

And that meant that there was something else moving against Him.

There was Something Else, using Samuel Scailes as Its catspaw, seeking the destruction of the Demiurge and an end to a universe of slavery.

"What is happening?" Purson asked. Wendy blinked and turned to him. Then she turned to the machine. The machine was humming, no longer the metal clack and whisking of parts pushing past each other, but instead vibrating as though outright oscillating into a proper and unheralded alignment. The rings began to drift out of their status-quo, forming a strange, layered globe, the metal beginning to glow, as the base steel, titanium, and brass began to spontaneously transform.

"I didn't do anything," Wendy began.

"Oh, but you did. That was what it needed. It needed an impossible realization," Purson said, a grin that was so very against-his-features spreading onto his face. A glee, almost manic, came to his black and swirling eyes.

He picked it up, heedless of the parts which were spinning to life and beginning to strip layers of his 'flesh' off, carrying it from the cradle of its creation and out of the building. He bore it, even as it lacerated him, to the footstone that would become the very beating heart of the Palace of Iron's great arcology of splendor and martial might. He didn't even have to set it down. When he released his hands from it, hands which now ran freely with golden blood, the Engine continued to hover where he had held it. The rings at the heart of the machine blurred across each other, not just sliding through and intersecting each other but seeming to pass through reality itself, racing to other untouchable realms on the edge of understanding. The rings became a square. The square became a cube. The cube became a shadow of itself, rendered in the blurring metals which, now that she could see clearly, were transforming. The steel became Seraphic Steel, born here in Hell against the very laws of reality itself. The brass became Orichalcum, which though unlikely was at least feasible, if you had a skilled enough Alchemist. But it was the titanium that stunned both the Angel and the more-than-human alike.

The titanium was transforming, glowing white, into Prima Materia, the first material that God had ever wrought, His experiment at the Concept of Metal.

All Prima Materia still in existence were remnants of that first experimentation, those many tonnes winnowed down by loss and misplacement, or else rotted and rusted to nothing in the environment of Hell. Only God could make Prima Materia.

Only God, or something as paradoxical as He was.

There was a tearing sensation, and sound that had some of the characteristics of a massive churchbell ringing, but rendered as though in electric current and the crash of tide against stone. There was a snap and a rippling outward, as reality became locally somewhat unreal, the Paradox Engine taking its first, struggling breaths, this newborn-impossible struggling to life now with a fighter's resolve.

Purson was on his knees, laying in a slowly expanding pool of his own blood, as he stared at the perfectly impossible mechanism that he'd created, for the second time in his life. He'd even broken the rule of singular creation, she realized. But if this was the time, then she had to go now. While the Paradox Engine was still powering itself up, still digging into reality and making it so that a portion of what was Real was henceforth considered 'not'. There was a tide of power, pulling heat out of the pair of them, out of the air itself, as the area around the machine began to line with frost. It needed power to sustain itself for now, until its edict was in place, and reality was shaped according to its device.

"Glorious," Purson said, eyes fixated on the machine which briefly formed an elongated slab, seemingly of stony texture with its clashing rings before abandoning that vision for whatever reason. She patted the Ars Goetia's shoulder, and looked now at the rings, which came to an abrupt halt at the heart of the machine. But still the sound, still the draining. Though it was momentarily still, it was the farthest thing from dead.

The infant unreality had pulled in its first lungful of air.

"In case I don't come back, thank you. And take care of Tabris," Wendy said.

Before the infant unreality could release its first true cry, she allowed herself to break apart, and forced herself into the heart of the machine.

And she felt herself become unreal as Creation unraveled just a tiny bit further.

The hour was early, and Lucifer was eyeing lustfully the mug of coffee that was slowly being drip-fed with stolen Earthly coffee. Lucifer deserved the best, after all, and Arabica put to utter shame what this shit-hole could produce natively. So fixated was he on the slowly filling mug, filled with that black blood of rejuvenation and alertness that he actually missed with his many magical eyes how Purson was barging into the palace, bull-rushing past the functionaries and little-people that kept this place ticking over nicely.

Though Lucifer had first not noticed, he was not blind, and at some point before the mug was ready, he did. Still, he made no effort to do anything about it, heedless of how Purson, bleeding from his hands and arms, desperately called out for his King. Not until… the last… drop.

Blorp.

There it was. Lucifer plucked the cup up and brought it up to his nose. Ah, good coffee. Aromatic and bitter enough that it needed no accompaniment. Not to say he never used such; he was always eager for new delights. But today was a superb-coffee-made-simply day. One had to always remind oneself of the baseline, so that one could enjoy the heights of being, after all.

After Lucifer took his first sip, smiling at the rich flavors that no bean grown in Hell could match, he finally shifted his magic and his will. There was a fluttering noise, and Lucifer, clad in his Royal Pyjamas, appeared before the freely bleeding Great King of Secrets.

"You're bleeding on my floor, Purson. This had better be good," Lucifer said, sipping his coffee.

"I've done it, your grace!" Purson said, his eyes wide like a madman, not seeming to even be aware that his arms were shredded and leaking blood. "The Paradox Engine lives again, and it needs only you!"

Lucifer stood there for a moment. He took a measured sip of his coffee.

"What?" he asked. It was way too early in the morning for magical bullshit.

"A way to shred the directive of God Almighty," Purson said, and held out a hand. Though there was a pool of golden blood quickly forming in his broad palm, atop it, floating, was a plain ring of Prima Materia.

That chilled Lucifer's blood. The only Prima Materia that still existed in Hell was held in stasis, so that he could form the Holy Sword WANT. It degraded so very quickly down here, that of all that was smuggled down during The Fall, now, mere milligrams remained. But the ring looked untarnished. Unblemished. Uncorroded.

A though it had been stolen away from the forges of Heaven this very hour.

"Wear this, and your mere presence will grind down the Highest Censure," Purson continued, spittle frothing the edges of his mouth in his moment of mania. "The longer you spend astride the Clouds of our stolen home the weaker the Censure will become and the stronger you will be! You asked for a Censure torn down in less than a century: I GIVE YOU A CENSURE TORN DOWN IN LESS THAN A YEAR!"

The scream of triumph from the throat of the King of Secrets shifted the paintings on the wall and the tapestries draped along passageways as though it were a mighty gust of wind. Purson essentially fell to one knee, holding the ring toward Lucifer atop his bloody palm.

This was tremendous. Tremendous almost beyond expectation, but then again, it had been put into motion by Lucifer so tremendous should have been his benchmark. He took another sip of his coffee, swirling the complex flavors around his mouth, before he stepped up to the hand and plucked the ring from the blood it was now floating atop. And the blood even dripped immediately off of the ring, unwilling to stain the Prima Materia for even a moment, leaving it white and glowing. He gave a glance at his hand, and slid it down a finger.

For all the morning was not a time for Magic in Lucifer's eyes, he certainly understood a fair bit about it. And he knew what certain kinds of magic felt like, when they were flowing through him. He could feel the Old Magic of his bride Lilith when she soothed and supported him, a primal magic that she had learned on her own, without directive of God nor Angel nor Demon, altogether. There were few left in Creation who knew the Old Magic. This wasn't the Old Magic.

He knew the many songs of the Angels, the way they would cascade along him like a hot shower after a cold day. This wasn't Angel Magic. He knew Demon magic, how it walked like spider's-feet along his skin, tightening its grip as it grew stronger. It was not Demon Magic. He even knew the feel of Imp Magic, how it started in your stomach and then spread outward into your veins, the sound of your own heart in your ears as it empowered you and turned your blood to poison. It wasn't even their debased art.

No.

The last time he felt this particular brand of magical power, it had been as he put on the Girdle-Harness that Purson had made for him an eon ago, before he with his own hands ripped the Ring of Betrayal from its footing beneath Sloth, and hurled it into oblivion.

It wasn't identical, a trick to poke him in familiar ways and delude him; the Girdle-Harness had been an atomic-explosion of unspeakable and even impossible strength. This, though, was more stubborn, sticky and viscous like tar. This would endure the End of Reality.

In a word? Purson had done it again.

"Excellent. Stop bleeding on my fucking floor," Lucifer waved the Goetia away. And then as he turned away, he focused his will and did what even he had dared not do until this very moment.

He forced himself back into Heaven.

There was a fluttering of feathers, louder than most, and Lucifer found himself standing at the topmost of the towers of Fort Abandon, standing on a roof in his Royal Pyjamas, looking out upon his homeland once more. And though the wind that he constantly felt blowing away from God's Throne stung at him as though he were being actively sandblasted… it was so much less terrible.

He could endure pain for an eternity. Even without aid, save for the ring which slowly lost its luster on his finger until it appeared a drab ring of hard-beaten titanium, he could endure this.

Despite the pain, it no longer melted him.

Lucifer began to laugh. The soldiers up here in their guardpost nearby exchanged nervous looks in their golem-like armors, but he bore them no attention. No, he laughed, and laughed, louder and louder, until his uproarious mirth drowned out the wind, and then until it outright defeated the sound of guns firing.

Lucifer was standing in Heaven, on his own, and only had pain to show for it.

And in a year, he wouldn't even have that.

"MICHAEL!" Lucifer roared into the sky. "WHEREVER YOU HIDE! WHATEVER YOU BEAR! WHOEVER DEFENDS YOU! NOTHING WILL STOP ME!"

Lucifer spread his wings, shadow swallowing the light of Heaven around him, his arms raised in absolute triumph.

"I WILL HAVE MY VENGEANCE! AND I! WILL! HAVE! MY! THRONE!"

There was somebody in Glory's room.

She could still hear Mum and Dad downstairs, arguing as they always did these days. Even in her youth, Glory knew that between them, things were bad. She didn't understand why Dad put up with the things Mum did to him. Didn't understand why Mum couldn't just let Dad be.

Of course, she was still a child, and only had a child's perspective on things. But if there was one thing that a child's perspective gave her, it was that when she turned over in her bed and saw another sitting in the chair next to her, she didn't immediately scream or cry or presume the worst. Still holding onto that childish optimism and childish outlook, she didn't have the paranoia to be afraid of an unknown presence in her room after the sunset.

"Who are you?" Glory asked, sitting up and letting her Ninja Turtles blanket pool at her lap.

"A tricky question to answer," the adult said. She looked kinda like Mum, but also kinda like Dad. She had Glory's hair. And her eyes were green, like Glory's. Only now that the child was paying attention, she saw that the adult had three of them, a spare eyeball right in the middle of her forehead. Lucky you, you probably won't need glasses, the child thought, not quite grasping that humans ought not have three eyes. "Are you alright, little one?"

"Mum and Dad are fighting again," Glory said. She didn't know why, but she somehow felt, down in her gut, that she knew this woman. Had she met her at a reunion? Maybe one of Mum's? Mum was from across the pond, so most of Mum's side of the family Glory hadn't seen in years. Again, Glory failed to recognize that she was staring at a three-eyed woman in her bedroom after dark, and that this was at all odd. "Are they gonna leave me behind?"

"No. No they'd never do that," the adult said. She leaned forward, and let out a sigh like Dad did after he finally stopped quarreling for the day with Mum, something that felt more tired in her soul than Glory was in her body at this time of the night. The sun was barely down, and they already put her to bed. She was a big girl, now. She deserved a later bed-time. But even trying to bring that up with them only set her parents arguing again.

It seemed that almost anything she said started an argument between them, these days.

"Despite their… failures… your parents love you dearly. It's just that they don't love each other nearly as strongly," the familiar stranger said. "It's not your fault. It never was, and never will be. They're… they're like two left shoes. They're just not supposed to be together, you know?"

Glory gave a nod, remember the time she tried to ignore making exactly that mistake. It lasted exactly an hour before her stubborn streak lost out to her discomfort.

"I still remember this room," the stranger said, tracing her fingers gently across the wallpaper, which was textured and squishy, displaying various Pokemon prancing and frolicking, bright and colorful even with the dying of the light. They slowly grew grey, as the sky lost its redness. "I still remember laying here… wondering if I could help them somehow."

"Did you used to live here before me?" Glory didn't understand what the familiar-stranger was saying, so she asked the question that she could grasp.

The familiar-stranger turned to her and let out a chuckle. "Yes. I suppose I did, used to live here," she said. She looked out the window again, looking at the sun setting over the forest to the west, as the night came for Southampton and the stars began to twinkle into being. "Those trees were gone, where I'm from."

"You should plant new ones!" Glory said brightly. And the familiar stranger actually cracked and laughed at that, as though she'd made a good joke. Glory didn't understand.

"No. I can't plant those trees, not anymore," she said. She then turned to Glory. "But you could. Or better yet, you could keep them from getting cut down in the first place."

"You want me to tell them not to?" Glory asked. She wasn't a large girl, despite her big-girl status. She was what Mum called a 'late bloomer' and a 'catch-up-kid'. Even compared to other children her own age at school, she was small. She didn't know how a grown-up would take being told to not cut down trees by a seven year old.

"More than that, I need you to demand them not to," the familiar stranger said, her face growing sad, like Dad's did after the arguments stopped. "And I'm sorry, but I have to take away your choices to do it. Take away some of your happiness and your innocence. But it's the only way for you to be strong enough, fast enough."

"You wanna take my what?" Glory asked.

"I'm giving you a responsibility," the familiar stranger said, leaning forward so she could look Glory in the eye, three-to-two. "You are going to be the one who saves the world."

"I'mma be Batman?" Glory asked eagerly, her young mind not grasping the tragedy of the character.

"No. No you'll be something much more heroic than that," the familiar stranger said. She reached into her coat, which Glory hadn't seen until now, and pulled out what looked like a ball of living, hot, white flame, one that danced and licked from its place hovering above her palm. "You are going to be Gloria Gwendalyn Monday."

Glory found herself reaching for that flame, but the familiar stranger shook her head gently. She scooted closer, then slowly pressed that flame straight through Glory's banana-pyjamas. She felt it hot on her skin for just a moment. Then she felt it pass beyond, beyond the bones of her chest.

There was pain. It was a greater pain than any Glory had ever known in her seven years of life, and likewise it wasn't a kind of pain that her seven years had acquainted her with. It wasn't like that time she ran into a table and then spent the rest of the afternoon crying with a lump on her head. It wasn't like that ear-infection she got that hurt so bad it kept her up for two days in a row. It hurt in other ways. It hurt like she was watching a favorite toy finally break. It hurt like her best plan failing. It hurt like the thought of never seeing Mum or Dad ever again.

She didn't scream, because it wasn't that kind of pain. But it was enormous.

And she found herself crying.

The familiar stranger was gone, but there was something in Gloria Monday, now. A heat in her blood, a thunder in her heartbeat. And she found that she knew things that she hadn't known before. She understood just how apropos her asking if she would be Batman ended up being, of how Batman was a hero crippled by loss. She knew she would lose things. She knew it would hurt.

And now, with dawning realization, she realized the exact stakes of what the stranger… no – now that Gloria Monday could feel the Gift of Rage beating in her breast (and in fact, that this was The Gift of Rage), she knew that the 'stranger' had been a vision of her potential self. A version of her which, like Batman, had lost too much to ever to back to a normal life. She cried, and realized that the world was hurting, just like she was hurting. And that nobody strong enough was fighting for it.

She got up, trying to wipe her eyes with her hands, but new tears just took their place. The argument ended downstairs. As she pulled her door open, she only made it two steps into the hall when Dad's head appeared at the stairwell. He saw her weeping and pain stretched across his broad face; like a trampling bull, he made his way up, scooping up his daughter and hugging her tight.

"Is something wrong, Glory?" Dad asked.

"Can I stay with you tonight?" Glory asked. Dad turned a glance back toward the stairs, toward the argument he had abandoned at hearing blubbering. Then he faced her again.

"Of course you can, Glory. Of course you can," Dad said, and pulled Glory tight to his broad, barrel-chest. Glory had a responsibility. Glory had to save the world.

But tonight, this last night, she could be a seven-year-old with soon-to-divorce parents, wanting to be comfortable, safe, and loved. The fight could start tomorrow.

"It's a complicated question. In a way, I have been cheated of an immediate bounty of dying ecomass, of the deaths of billions of humans. But humans are an unusual specimen. Capable of both boundless cowardice and boundless courage. Infinite stupidity and infinite brilliance. And capable, history has shown, to do those things which those of more blinkered viewpoint considered to be impossible.

Do I feel cheated? Yes and no. Those six billion humans that ought to have died over the past forty years are for the most part, still alive. But those six-billion humans who would have died of hunger and pestilence and inter-human warfare have had children of their own. I have lost a windfall, but I have secured agriculture. And it is entirely to the Redemptor, the actions of one Human who decided, against history itself, against the flow of time, even, I will note, during a Time Lock, to shift the course of events. She impresses me, that one. It will be a shame to reap her when her mortal life ends. Very likely, she will end up as one of the Thirdborn, considering the impact her life has caused.

Ah, but you look without seeing; those six billion will die. At some point, and in some manner, they will die, and I will reap them. How is irrelevant to me. When, even, is irrelevant to me. In the long tail of time on the astronomic scale, everything dies. In five billion years, the star around which your planet circles will bloat, collapse, and die. In a trillion years, the final star that shall ever burn shall be born, and a scant few billion years after that, it will die as well. Death is inevitable, interviewer. And I am nothing if not infinitely patient.

Still, though all things pass, it is in their passage that they find glory. The beauty of the transient is not lost to me. In fact, I find it to be some of the finest things that are the most temporary. A breeze displacing, for a moment, a stifling air. The last notes of a song. A dish only best served piping hot. These things are lost in hours, or minutes, or moments. And yet they are no less precious for them. So let the Human delay my harvest of six billion souls by a few decades. What she has given me in return are countless delicate moments to explore and savor. I am very much an epicurean of such things."

–Gadreel, acting as Conduit for the Horseman Death