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.

56. Canonicity

The day started out so normally, when considering what happened by its end.

The office of IMP had been open for a little over an hour, and there was already one well-to-do client who'd arrived right as the doors opened, looking perturbed and willing to spend a lot of money to comfort herself. It was the same Ice Elemental that they'd almost taken a job from almost six years ago now, and she was clearly more apt to treat IMP as peers rather than disposable scum. The reputation of the company had elevated in the last half decade to the point where it was widely held that if there were better employable killers that existed in Creation, they must have been working for Heaven because there sure as shit weren't better in Hell.

Moxxie was keeping track of their conversation through the wall, even as he and Millie lounged in the loveseat in the reception area. Gone were the days where they had to look perfectly professional, because their reputation now patched any laxity with weight of deeds. She was deeply pregnant now, and managed to be even bigger than she'd gotten with Beatrice. Not that she'd gotten fat, no; all of her weight dangled off of her belly and made her have to waddle when she walked.

It was twins. Moxxie could outright hear two heartbeats in there, but that still left the mystery of whether they'd be identical or fraternal twins, on top of whether Beatrice would be getting brothers, sisters, or perhaps even one of each. Millie had had to withdraw from work earlier than she had with Bea, but Blitz, being in his now-usual state of confused-at-his-own-good-mood, allowed it with only minor bitching when they found a job that she, chainsaw-on-legs that she was, would have made faster by her presence.

But just as all good things must when imps were involved, it came to a confusing and abrupt end on November 13th, 2028.

At first, Moxxie thought that somebody had turned on a radio somewhere unseen, and tuned it to one of the Weirdo Frequencies, those ethereal wavelengths between the Radio Demon's Cavalcade of Screams and the Numbers Stations that conspiracy theorists had worked themselves into fatal apoplexy over a century ago. The song – and it was a song – that came through was thready and delicate, like having a single strand of cobweb drag across one's skin, but both Moxxie and Millie both heard it, and glanced around for its source.

"Do you hear that, hon?" Millie asked, sitting up and wrapping a protective arm around her belly.

"I do. Where's it coming from?" Moxxie asked. He hopped off of the loveseat and moved over to Dessie's desk. She glanced over at him, bright and cheerful as she ever was. "Did you tune in to the Weird Wavelengths?"

"The what?" Dessie asked. Moxxie narrowed his eyes, and then leaned closer to her computer. Though he did hear the song coming from that direction, it clearly wasn't coming from her computer. Merely the same direction.

He turned back. "I think," Moxxie managed to say, when he realized that the music was now coming from the direction of Millie also. He broke off, blinking in confusion, and moved closer to her. She was glancing all around, as though trying to track a particularly rapid housefly in its flight. "...Millie? Where does it sound like it's coming from?"

"...Moxx, it feels like it's comin' from everywhere," she said, finally locking her eyes on his. He helped her down off of the loveseat, and as he took her hand in his, the music seemed to clear, becoming more free of noise and distraction. And it was steadily, if slowly, growing louder. Just as Millie had said, now that he was in contact with Millie, he could hear that song coming from every direction at the same time.

He shared a deeply worried look at his wife. Then the door was thrown open, and Loona strode in, her ears flicking wildly, with Maelstrom trailing after her looking worried and confused. "What the fuck is that noise?" Loona asked.

"What are you all talking about? I don't hear anything," Dessie said.

"Loona, talk to me. What's going on?" Maelstrom begged.

"Do you two hear this or am I losing my fucking mind?" Loona asked.

"We hear it," Millie said.

"Fuuuuuck," Loona muttered. And only then, as the music hit a strange note and ramped its volume a little higher did Maelstrom's back grow rigid and his eyes go wide. He blinked, glancing around in panic in all directions. "Fuck's sake, Mal, do you hear it now too?"

"Where is that coming from?" Maelstrom asked.

"What are y'all talking about?" Dessie asked, even as the music grew louder, beginning to thud against Moxxie's eardrums. Three and a half minutes. Exactly two hundred eighteen seconds. Only a few beings in all of Creation got those three precious minutes of warning. Because there then came a shocking, nauseating silence.

And then Moxxie felt his head start to creak and groan as madness dumped into it.

The Roughs fell together to the floor, clutching to each other and Moxxie holding his head with a spare hand. Loona outright reeled and almost fell to the floor, only catching herself on the wall and being held up by Maelstrom, who didn't respond whatsoever. Dessie likewise looked at the fallen with confusion and alarm, doubly so when Blitz began to swear violently and the sound of something breaking reached the now thoroughly distracted Moxxie.

A ruinous weight of memories crashed into Moxxie, memories of a life he didn't live. A life paltry and pathetic and unmanly. A life of failures and humiliations. All of his worst moments since his escape from his Mafia-Don father amplified and made even worse. It took an active act of will to force his own selfhood to the fore, to erect a breakwater against the intrusive thoughts and remind himself that whatever assault was being levied against him, Moxxie Rough was still Moxxie Rough. That Moxxie Knolastname was dead and buried, and few if any mourned.

"What the FUUUUUCK is going on?" Blitz demanded as the Ice Elemental outright collapsed out of his office, clutching her face and crying desperately. He looked utterly fine at first, but Moxxie could, even in his crippled and debilitated state, note that there signs he was suffering just as Moxxie was. That his restraint was being exercised to its utmost to stay standing and looking like an actual business owner and not flopped on the floor like the rest of them. "Loonie! Loonie are you okay?"

Even as Blitz ignored the client and rushed to Loona's side, Maelstrom was helping her stand. "I'm fine, Dad," Loona clearly lied. "What the fuck is happening to us? Why do I…"

"Um… boss? What's going on?" Dessie asked, looking deeply unsettled by all of this, but otherwise utterly unaffacted. Moxxie managed to get to his feet, helping Millie up, even as he suddenly remembered a fight against Striker that he'd never engaged in, down in the volcanoes of Wrath, and gave his head a shake to clear that strange figment away so that he could focus on the here and now. And he heard that there was shouting coming from the hall.

"I heard something from Krieg's," Moxxie said. He puffed out a breath, letting these bizarre false-memories wash over him and giving them no purchase on him, as he helped Millie to one of the waiting chairs, then stepped into the hallway. Blitz opted to come with him. The shouting, as it turned out, was Krieg shouting for her mother. That got Moxxie and Blitz to share a look, then run as fast as their current malady would allow them to BKMS, with the latter kicking the door open to find Tilla slumped forward over her desk, with Uller and Krieg standing before it.

"What happened?"

"I don't know! Mother just fell unconscious!" Krieg snapped back to Moxxie with barely a glance back at him.

Moxxie gently lifted Tilla's face from the desk, leaning her back into her chair, and saw that she was breathing very shallowly, but otherwise was utterly untouched. He even experimentally used Rough's method on her, to reverse whatever had just happened to her, as he suddenly remember that camp-counselor who'd drowned himself while high instead dying by pyrotechnic to the face. But there was nothing to rewind. Her body was utterly fine. It was just that her mind barely functioned, and that was one of the few things that Rough's Method couldn't rewind. "She should be conscious. This doesn't make any sense."

"What is going on with her?" Krieg asked. "And all of you, for that matter?"

Moxxie paused, having a thought, and deciding to spin up his brain to run it down. And he realized that Krieg and Uller seemed utterly unaffected by what was harming Blitz, Moxxie, Millie, and Loona. And Tilla served as a common linkage between them. He turned to Blitz.

"Sir, are you remembering things that didn't happen?" Moxxie asked.

"I just thought I was daydreaming extra hard 'cause that icy bitch was boring," Blitz said.

"Daydreaming about what?"

"Stolas livin' in the apartment 'cause his shit got rocked, and I was sad all the time 'cause mom was still dead," Blitz said. Moxxie snapped his fingers in a eureka moment.

"That's why you're not affected," he pointed at Krieg. "We're being bombarded by a hypothetical timeline where Tilla wasn't resurrected, and in that timeline, you would never have been born, Uller would never have become your apprentice, and Maelstrom wouldn't have escaped Nathan Birch!"

"...problem?" Uller said.

"What?" Moxxie asked.

"Why am I not remembering still being a slave in Envy then?" Uller asked.

"Ditto," Maelstrom agreed. "And for that matter, what was the music I heard before all of you started reacting like this?"

"...Satan damn it," Moxxie muttered, his eureka evaporating away before a more complicated reality. "Something stranger is going on and I don't have enough information to guess what…"

"FIX MY MOTHER YOU PRATTERING NIT!" Krieg shouted at him.

"I don't even know what's wrong with her, let alone why she's unconscious!" Moxxie shouted back, as he suddenly remembered having to abort the mission to murder Johannes Burtholder – a single kill, because that other him hadn't invented double killing – because one of Burtholder's protectors had managed to grievously injure Millie and they had to drop everything to save her. Well that was just sloppy. Moxxie gave his head a shake and emitted a growl. "Just… everybody stay close. Whatever's happening, we don't know why its happening to us, but somebody's going to try to take advantage of it."

Of course, Moxxie, for all his titanic intellect, was curtailed from correct deductions if he lacked relevant information. No amount of mental speed could summon information out of nothing. And he didn't realize that what he and the others on the top floor of the Miller Building were merely a small group of the countless affected by what was reverberating throughout Creation in the November morning.

---

Chapter 56

Canonicity

---

The Hotel reeled, as though every third person were suddenly trying to hold their head together lest it spontaneously explode. Rachel had been mid-conversation with Charlie, speaking on the requirements of expansion if she really was going to start accepting a flood of bona fide redeemable souls, fresh off the assembly line of Judgement, when Dazzle, who had been flitting about nearby moving files between cabinets fell still for just a moment, the flying goat thing becoming po faced and the files falling from its hooves. Then, even as Charlie was mid sentence, its eyes rolled back into its head and it dropped to the floor, dead.

Charlie noticed it when Rachel recoiled from the sight, and then the Nephilim rushed over, calling the small magical-construct's name in increasing panic as she picked the thing up and tried to evoke a response. But it was clear from the slackness of its body that there was no life in the creature. One moment it was doing its job. The next, for no readily apparent reason, it dropped dead.

Then the screaming started.

Since Rachel kept the door cracked just a bit, so as not to soundproof the office in case an Exorcist showed up or something, she could hear Angel Dust's voice, pained and anguished, coming from the lobby. And even as she quickly strode toward the door, leaving Charlie with the corpse of her pet and possibly protector (Rachel had never discerned what Razzle and Dazzle's role in the Hotel was), she started to hear Husk as well.

She threw open the door, showing the lobby with fully a dozen people fallen to the floor clutching their heads, screaming as though their lungs were on fire and shouting was the only thing that might put it out, while tears and snot ran down their faces. Angel Dust was one such, laying on his back with two sets of his hands clamping down on his head and covering his face, while his lower set hugged his body protectively. Husk was slumped over the bar, his head raised up exposing his neck which he reached toward tentatively, his own screams more fear than pain.

"Husk, what's going on!" Rachel demanded to know as she jogged over. The instant that she entered Husk's very obviously narrowed cone of vision, he grabbed her; lunging across the bar to drag her over, he pulled her past a drinker who was just sitting there, no longer imbibing, with a look of confusion on his face. The act caused several drinks to spill onto Rachel's sweater, as he clutched her and held her close, wrapping around her like a living suit of armor. "Husk! Talk to me!"

There was no getting answers out of him for at least a minute or two, but he did slowly start to calm down. By the feel of his heart pounding against her ear, whatever spell it was that afflicted him had sent him almost spiraling into terrified madness. And she served ably as a balm against that terror until finally he loosened his grip enough that Rachel was able to extract herself and pull the both of them to their feet.

"Hey, buddy, you just spilled my drink," one of the patrons said, giving none of the madness around him the respect that even Rachel could tell it deserved. Husk answered by not even bothering to produce a knife; he simply slammed his hand onto the table-top in front of the Sinner, then crooked his fingertips down and ripped back, tearing four ruts into bar-top from the sheer, panic-driven power. That got the Sinner in Charlie's Legion to shut up.

"Husk, speak to me. What is happening to you, and Angel Dust for that matter?" Rachel asked, as Roz, who'd been standing back confused as all the bubble of madness burst on the Hotel, finally moved to help Angel Dust over to the Recovery Couch. Rachel brought Husk in that direction as well.

"I don't know. I just… I felt like the Scarlet Fucker had me again," Husk said, his usual gruff and uninterested tones made ragged and genuine. "I saw things, Rach. I saw things which didn't happen…"

Husk obviously needed a moment to think, so Rachel turned her attention to Roz and Angel Dust. "What about you? Do you have any insight into this?"

"I have no idea what's going on whatsoever," Roz said, glancing to the others, who were even now being pulled to the sides of the room, plopped into chairs if they were available or just propped up against a spot of wall if there were not.

"Mother fuck, what the shit bitch-lasagna is goin' on!" Angel Dust demanded.

"What about you?"

"When the fuck'd you get here?" Angel Dust asked, finally turning from his spasming and facing her. He still seemed twitchy and out of sorts. "And why the fuck do I remember Val still bein' up in my shit when I killed that fuck-nugget six fuckin' years ago?"

"And why do I…" Husk said, hesitating, then made a flare of his hands. With a magician's flourish, a set of cards appeared in that hand. But they weren't just normal cards. It was clear that each one was a made entirely of metal, so sharp at its edge that it could be used as a razor to shave with.

"When'd you get those?" Rachel asked.

"...in those fuckin' memories," Husk said. He turned to her. "I ain't owned a set like this since the '90s, when I was still running with Furious George."

"So you just, what? Manifested a set of Sharp Cards?" Roz asked, joining them as they paced around the lobby in their shared confusion.

"No… these are the exact cards I had when I was with George," Husk said. "I… I remember making that grab instead of him. I remember being an Overlord. Being in the Soul Trade. And I remember losing it all to the Scarlet Fucker."

"At once, instead of gradually?" Rachel asked. Husk nodded. At that point, a cat jumped up onto the bar, causing Husk to start back from it in alarm. The cat was black, with an unnaturally long tail, and more pressing than that a large, single eye. A more whimsical part of Rachel wondered if this was a feline reincarnation of Niffty. The cat didn't seem to have a mouth at all.

"What the sweet fuck?" Husk demanded.

"Who let the cat in?" Rachel asked.

"Fuck me, ain't that Charlie's cat?" Angel Dust asked, rubbing at his head as his nose began to bleed.

"Okay what the FUCK?" Delicious shouted as she stormed in from the elevators. She was wearing her usual attire, but looked deeply pissed about something.

"Hey Tru, are you gettin' this shit in your brain, too?" Angel Dust shouted over at her as she stomped over.

"Am I trying to figure out why I remember being a Satan-damned pornstar? Yeah! I'm fucking getting it!" Delicious said, reaching past Husk to grab a bottle of rye whiskey and drinking straight from the neck. Husk let her have a deep pull, then grabbed the bottle back, before emulating her.

"I fail to see how you could make a living at that with your injury," Rachel pointed out.

"I fucking know, human!" Delicious snapped at her. She leaned with her back to the pillar holding the overhang of the bar up and flexed her hands as though she deeply wanted to punch something or someone.

"This is so strange. I'm not experiencing anything," Rachel said.

"Well who the fuck else ain't?" Husk demanded. And he was answered by Jun-Ho helping Addam, who was almost limp in the Korean's arms, back into the Hotel, almost dropping him onto Angel Dust's lap before grumbling and putting the Babylonian into a nearby chair instead. The look on Jun-Ho's face told that he, too, was suffering under whatever madness they all were.

"I take it from the state of you that you're all feeling this too?" Jun-Ho asked, his voice harsh as though he were using the near-full extent of his willpower to not scream.

"What d'you got?" Husk asked.

"Heaven intact, but with more and better-hidden cruelty," Jun-Ho said. He turned to Rachel. "So why not you?"

"I have no idea," she said. She then spotted Roz, who was likewise looking around at everybody around her with confusion. "Roz!"

The Angel walked over from where she was checking on a weeping Sinner and keeping an eye on people that wailed and thrashed and clawed at their heads. "Have you figured something out?" she asked.

"There are people in the street afflicted too. It's either wide spread, or indiscriminate," Jun-Ho said, leaving Addam to join their cluster by the bar.

"Well, what about…" Roz said, glancing back. Rachel then leaned around her and saw that Charlie was looking deeply unsettled, alarmed at the state of anguish that suddenly so many seemingly random people were afflicted with. "Charlie? What's going on?"

"I have no idea!" Charlie said. "I just started to hear screams and… what's going on?"

"What connects myself, Charlie, and Roz, and excludes all of you?" Rachel asked. "There's a pattern here that I'm not seeing."

"Angel Dust, are you okay? Your face is bleeding!" Charlie said.

"I'm fine. Just gettin' visions of bein' chained to fuckin' Valentino for some dumbass fuckin' reason. It's bugging the shit outta me! I fuckin' killed that loser!" Angel Dust declared.

"There's more going on here than just that," Rachel said. "Husk… how specific are the memories you're being bombarded with?"

Husk blinked a few times, then seemed to be searching his memory. And then his confusion turned to alarm. "The fuck? I remember a completely different past. Different choices made. Different… gambles… lost."

"What about you, Angel Dust? How specific are your memories?" she asked of the Spider Sinner who was now approaching their scrum.

"Gettin' bitch-slapped and manhandled and not bein' able to do shit about it? It's fuckin' infuriating!" Angel Dust said. His face dropped. "I… I remember… Holy shit, I remember how scared I was of that psychopathic freak."

Fear was one of the few emotions that Angel Dust seemed to have a supreme lack of. Which by Husk's admission was due to a fuck-up on Sam's part in trying to help the now ex-pornstar.

"And you..."

"Seraphim who were able to talk for themselves," Jun-Ho answered her question, "not like the mindless machine-things that there are up there in Heaven today," he had a sad look. "I remember who Metatron could have been. I remember Emily."

Charlie, having moved up at Angel Dust's side, was staring wide eyed at the cat. Rachel, was about to ask the same clarifying questions of Truly, found herself cut off when the only Nephilim in Creation let out a squeal and scooped up the cat, spinning around and holding the cat close to her as she did. When she finally stopped, tears were leaking from her eyes.

"Keekee! How can this be possible? You died twenty years ago!" Charlie exclaimed.

The cat-like entity just stared up at her with its one enormous eye, and then started purring against her. That got Charlie outright sobbing. And that in turn got Rachel even more confused, as the hypothesis she was about to offer had to be scrapped in exchange for one even more tentative, and able to hold even stranger facts.

She reached into her smuggler pocket, and dialed her other self. The other Rachel picked up after only one ring. "What's this about? We've got a boat to catch," other Rachel said.

"Are there people falling down screaming clutching their heads up on Earth right now?" Rachel asked.

"Not… particularly," other Rachel answered. "Dean? ...I'll be frank, we are sneaking onto a yacht and fleeing to Africa right now so we don't have the best sample-size to test against, but everybody I see is just going about like normal. Is Hell getting Cerebro'ed?"

"Only some of Hell," Rachel said. "And seemingly random people. And apparently a decades-dead cat came back to life." Then Rachel realized the dangling thread. "...Cerebro'ed how?"

There was a loud noise on the other side of the line, a hazard claxon that only rang twice before shutting off. Rachel gave a run-down of it, but her other self managed to grasp it fast. "So all of the long timers… What about the Radio Demon?"

"We kicked him out years ago," Rachel said.

"About fucking time," other Rachel said.

"Language," Rachel said.

"Loosen up. It's a new century," other Rachel said. "So we can't tell if Alastor is suffering – but if he is, I'm not going to cry over him. What about Vaggie?"

"What about Vaggie?" Rachel asked.

"I'm thinking this might be a Crisis on Infinite Earths going on right now," other Rachel said, and Rachel almost hung her head at failing to realize that as a possibility. "We just need to find out who the Flash is and make them stop."

"If anybody is The Flash in this universe, you know who it'd be," Rachel pointed out.

There was a long silence. "...oh," other Rachel said. Rachel gave a brief good-bye and turned to Charlie. How exactly was she going to explain this to them? They didn't have her reference pool.

"Where is Vaggie?"

"She should be helping with the Legion. So she is…" Charlie turned toward Addam, trying to wipe the confused but happy tears from her face, as 'Keekee' the very incarnation of Schrodinger's Cat hopped out of her arms and began to rub itself against Charlie's long legs. Addam, who was now able to sit up under his own power, shook his head.

"She never came out," Addam said.

"...is she still in our room?" Charlie asked. Rachel moved to follow, with Husk and Roz joining her forming a small cluster that took the stairs up to the second floor. And they quickly moved from a hurried walk to a fearful jog when they heard the outright shrieking that was above them.

Charlie threw the doors to she and Vaggie's room open, and Rachel instantly saw something that caused her some pause: there was golden blood on the floor. There was red blood along with it, as though a Sinner and an Angel had been grappled together and beat the piss out of each other. But the trail lead into the bedroom, where the shrieks were their loudest.

The last thing before the bedroom door, which stood ajar, that caused Charlie go to pale as a ghost, was Vaggie's eyepatch, laying in a mixed pool of red and gold.

When Rachel followed in, just behind Charlie, into the bedroom, they found only Vaggie, no Angelic interloper who had assailed her. She was laying face down on the floor, her face fists up at her face, her legs trying to worm her deeper into the room but lacking the coordination to do more than flop. Charlie screamed her lover's name and moved to scoop her up. And the moment she did, she turned Vaggie over to reveal the face that her initial position had hidden.

The brand on Vaggie's eye was gone.

The eye itself was still missing, but the Seraphic Steel Brand, which should have marked her for her entire afterlife, it was gone. Somehow the eyelid, which had been so long sewn shut, had been ripped open. And emitting from that socket was a constant stream of strange, strange blood.

"Help me!" Vaggie begged, clinging to Charlie like the Sinner was drowning and the Princess was the only rock above the water-line. "I still see it. I can't stop seeing it. Fucking help me! Help me I can't stop seeing His Face. There's too much! I can't… I CAN'T!" Vaggie screamed. She raked at her face, peeling her own skin and causing it leak blood. But the blood wasn't just golden. There was also crimson blood of a human. And the blood of the Angel and the blood of the human refused to mix, to form the shining scarlet that was Nephilim blood, instead remaining as immiscible as oil and water.

Even Rachel could do nothing but stare in shock as Vaggie clutched onto Charlie and wept blood that her body shouldn't have contained.

---

Heaven was shaking, from its root to its leaf.

Birah had been risen from his slumber – a need that seemed to have roared into being after his explosive near-death and stay in Vigilance – to a sound of discordant music that emitted from every mote of Creation. Then, the screaming started.

He had struggled out of his small domicile, only to find vast swathes of Firstborn writhing on the ground, their flesh warping and shifting, bending and tensing like pudding shot with a bullet. Other Angels still stood back and watched in abject horror as their fellows wailed and bled on the ground, as their skins ripped and mended and changed. And through it all under every horror and terror, Birah could perceive with his unique senses, that there was a will underlying all of this.

An underlying will, that seemed to be saying 'WHAT SHALL BE'.

"Call for Raphael! Don't just stand there!" Birah shouted at the stunned Firstborn that stood nearby. He nodded, and with a fluttering of wings, vanished. Birah leaned down, trying to invoke The Healing Miracle on the grotesquely warping Firstborn, only to have it fail in a way he didn't expect. That there was nothing wrong here to fix.

The screams came from other streets as well. He walked the colored brick ways, rounding towers shining and pristine, and found that most of the other Angels that weren't spasming on the street were as the one back there had been: too stunned to be of help.

"What is this?" Birah asked, even as he stormed up to one of the burlier Firstborn and told him to help the fallen. The Firstborn was too shocked by the scene to even be offended to receive directive from a Secondborn, moving to help the fallen as much as he was able, which wasn't much. He was helping pull a Firstborn woman who's flesh spasmed and bubbled like boiling chocolate to the side of the road, when finally he saw a Secondborn, silver-eyed Hariel, stumble to a halt 'round a corner taking in the same view that Birah was now trying to remedy.

"Birah? What the sweet hell is going on?" Hariel asked, staggering over to him and squatting by his side as the Firstborn shrieked so loudly that blood launched from her throat, spraying Birah's shoulder. Then there was a strange organic snapping sound, and the warping of the Firstborn's flesh ceased, returning her to features to normal.

"I don't know. There was a few moments of discord, then…" he gestured around, ignoring now the Firstborn who had lapsed into unconsciousness. Others still writhed and screamed, shouting gibberish and clawing at their protean flesh.

"This is happening everywhere," Hariel said, wincing as though through a migraine.

"What?" Birah asked.

"I just came from the Taxiopolis. Fully half of the crowd is on the floor wailing," Hariel pulled Birah to a stand.

"Half?" he asked. "What about…"

"Michael and Gabriel didn't warp, as these were, but they seemed badly set by some mental assault. Whatever's happening, is happening at random."

Birah frowned, then looked up as he saw more Angels joining the flailing and the wailing. Those upright were almost all Secondborn. "No," he said. "Not random. Hariel, you at least can speak; what is happening to you?"

"My head is pounding, and I feel constantly weak and fatigued. As though I were a corpse still staggering about," Hariel said. She shook her head. "And… and I remember… a mask. And The Dancer Carmilla. I remember… Hell… pain… and then blackness."

So it wasn't isolated to just the Firstborn. But there were other questions still to ask. And Birah could think of one who could answer them. "Azazel!" he shouted.

There was a shimmer in the air, a circular pane of magic opening revealing Azazel in his foundry, but the noises of industry had been eclipsed by the howling of Angelic suffering. "This is a bad time to call me, Spellbinder. Half of my workers have collapsed."

"And you feel nothing?" Birah pressed. Azazel, who had been distractedly looking away from Birah paused, then turned to face him.

"I feel hale and well. Why?" he asked, eyes narrowed.

"And the Secondborn who work for you?" Birah further pressed.

"Helping the… Oh. I see," Azazel said. He faced Birah flush. "Go to the throne. I will meet you there."

"What?" Birah asked.

"Trust me," Azazel said.

Birah turned a look to Hariel, but she jerked her head in a dismissing gesture. He nodded. "Do what you can, keep them comfortable."

"Solve the problem," she ordered him. As if he even knew what exactly the problem was.

He tensed and flapped his wings, and the streets of Patience fell away, replaced by Diligence and the Palace of God. He leaned back, off of his balance and even feeling slightly nauseated; he'd attempted to Transit directly to the throneroom, but was discombobulated when it dumped him out here by the edifice's front doors. The Sword Seraphs were collapsed onto street, blocking the road in one spot, their fires gone out and their blazing blades tumbled from their hands. And there, Birah saw Hepsut, sitting on the ground clutching his head.

"Hepsut!" Birah shouted to his long-time companion. He rushed to the final Firstborn's side, only to have Hepsut shove him away when he tried to stoop down next to the man.

"Stay back, stranger!" Hepsut shouted.

Only it wasn't Hepsut's voice. Not really. It came from his throat but it didn't sound like him precisely. As though another sound-alike had dubbed over the words that came from the Angel of Dance. "Stranger? It's Birah, you ass!" Birah said as he got back up from where the shove had sent him sprawling.

Hepsut looked at him, and there was a long moment of complete lack of recognition, before he turned and smashed his head against the pillar he was seated back against, cracking the stone and causing his skin to rupture and leak golden blood.

"Fuck! I'm sorry, Birah. I don't know what's going on," Hepsut said, his voice returned to normal.

"What is happening?" Birah asked.

"I'm seeing things… impossible things. I don't… I need to think. I need to remember," he said, sounding desperate.

"I'm going to check on the palace. You stay here," Birah said. "I'll do what I can."

Hepsut merely gave a jerking nod, swiping some of the blood off of his face only to have new overtake it and replace it. Birah made his way through the doors, which stood ajar. Which shouldn't have been the case, but the Sword Seraphim were clearly off duty right now, so much that ought to be currently was not.

He had only just entered the grand edifice of the Palace of God when he beheld all four of The Horsemen standing in the hallway, looking toward the heart of the structure where the Throne of God lay. This was so far beyond unusual that it beggared the mind. Never in Birah's long life had he ever seen the Horsemen anywhere in Heaven except for the Shadow of the Throne.

"Ah, there you are," Death said evenly, while War whetted his sword, while Famine meditated floating above the ground, and while Folly hopped from foot to foot in excitement. "I would recommend against going much further into the building than this."

"Why are you here?" Birah asked of the older-than-reality incarnation of the concept of death.

"I didn't want to be at the epicenter of The Collapse, nor be bound by The Structuring," Death said. Birah just stared at him. "Ah, I see you haven't understood what's happening here," Death gave a breezy smile. "It's the end of the world, little Secondborn."

"What?" Birah asked. The door behind him opened again, and Azazel staggered in, his gait showing that he was just as befuddled by the mis-Transit as Birah had been. But he didn't show his shock, his discomfort, or in fact anything on his face, when he beheld the Horsemen gathered before him.

"The old world ends today," Death said without a care in the world. "The world according to God The Father shall end, and a new one will take up its place in its stead."

"The Demiurge is detaching Creation from God," Birah said.

"Exactly so," Death said. He finally turned to Azazel. "Greetings, armsman. Have you come to pay witness to the changing of an age?"

"I came to try to stop it," Azazel said.

"There is no stopping it, now," Death said. He gestured vaguely ahead of them all, "In fact, if you were to try to interfere, not only would you very likely die in every way one such as you can, but also you would also die in some ways that you can't. And beyond that, if you somehow did manage to evade my putting my hand on your shoulder, interference now would simply see Creation unravel with its Author severed from it."

"Enough flowery prose, Death! What is happening?" Birah asked. Death sighed, and reached into his robes, extracting a piece of toast (why he had a piece of toast in that pocket was a mystery beyond Birah's comprehension) and holding it up before him, while War handed over a pair of small horseshoe magnets, which likewise defied easy explanation. Tucking the toast into the pit of his elbow for a moment, Death held up the two magnets.

"This," he waggled the right-hand magnet, "is all of Creation as you know it, all of the people you know, all of the history, all of the triumphs and the failures. Whereas this," he waggled the left magnet, "is oblivion, an ending above all endings, an unraveling of all things which are not me. And as you can tell, they do not touch, and the ruin of the latter never spills into the former."

"Because you're holding them apart," Azazel said, his eyes narrowing.

"Yes. In this metaphor, I take the role of God," Death said. He then released his hold on the right magnet; the force pulled the two together, entangling them, the moment he released his grasp. "But the moment I stop holding on, doom. So what if someone were to do something clever?"

At this point, Death pulled out the toast and held it against one magnet, while moving the other magnet opposite it. He then released the magnet again. But this time they didn't clack together and entwine because there was toasted bread in the way. "What if someone were to build something to hold them apart on its own?" Birah gave voice to the question that Death implied. He gave his head a shake. "But that would mean he'd need to Create Ex Nihilo…"

"Which the Demiurge is perfectly capable of," Azazel noted.

"...living beings to form that gap," Birah said. Azazel turned to him, the only hint of his confusion being the set of his eyes. "Creation is a living piece of art and history. It would need living 'struts' to hold it away from annihilation. Which… Oh God help me," Birah turned to the doors. "That's what's happening to the Firstborn. He's turning them into struts."

"You are cleverer than most of your kind," Death said, as he handed the magnets away and bit into the toast. "Of course, the process won't be perfect. There's going to be errors that appear. People who were alive, dropping dead. Beings who were one thing, becoming another. People who never had a chance to be, suddenly appearing. But those errors are struts in and of themselves; every flaw that pushes Creation away from oblivion is a useful one."

Birah stared for a moment, then thought hard. And he realized something. "The Unhallow," he said.

"What of it?" Azazel asked.

"If this is a feat of reality-crafting," Birah paused, turning a glance to Death, who took another bite of his toast and nodded, "then a place where reality is thin might tear entirely! I've got to check…"

"Birah, calm yourself," Azazel said, clamping a hand on his elder brother's shoulder. "You won't help much if you race off recklessly."

Birah growled but nodded. He turned to Death. "Is the rest of the palace truly as dangerous as you imply?" he asked.

"In some ways, more," Death said with a shrug.

"Then don't let anybody in. Anybody!" Birah said.

"Bold to think you can order me," Death remarked. Then shrugged. "But it would be unnecessarily difficult to Reap the ones inside that maelstrom. Very well."

"Where do you think you're going?" Azazel said, staring Birah in the eye.

"My house. I need to get something before I go to the Unhallow. I'll be at Fort Purity in a few minutes…" Birah began.

"Birah, enough. Tell me," Azazel began.

"There isn't time," Birah said. He shrugged his way free from the Grigori of Arms. "Fort Purity," he reiterated. Then he Transited back to his abode.

The House of Birah was a small thing, though larger than the manses that the Grigori were relegated to. It had enough room for his laboratory, a place for him to make his dinners, and a place to sleep. He appeared in the laboratory right next to the control-rig that he'd been steadily tinkering to improve for years now.

"Here's hoping that Essence Shunt works this time," Birah said as he dropped onto his back in the Rig and fastened the connectors to his head. Then, with another flex of his will, he Transited again.

Instantly, he became blind to the Lab, but he how heard the fluttering of an angel's wings and he was standing in the ugly, can-shaped tower of Fort Purity. There were no concessions in this structure as to the comfort of man or Angel either; all it had were release bays and repair gantries for forty Type 24 Exorcists. Birah paused for a moment, listening to how, when the breeze died, he could just barely hear explosions and gunfire in the incredible distance. The frontlines of Hell were going to reach this place soon. Maybe in a matter of a week or so. What would happen next was beyond Birah's insight.

Instead, he turned his gaze down. And he blinked in confusion, looking through the eyes of his automata and seeing the ground crisp and clear. He half considered briefly Transiting his body over to look again, but discarded that notion. He'd built the optics of this angel-shaped drone to be too-dumb-to-fool; whatever they saw was related, one to one, to Birah. That left him vulnerable to dazzling attacks or true darkness, but it also allowed him to know that what was before the drone's eyes may as well be before his own.

The ground should have looked… the best way to describe it was 'indistinct'. Distance was a tricky thing in the Unhallow, with distant things appearing nearly within arm's reach, while those which one were practically about to walk into might appear just barely cresting the horizon. That made for a ground that looked like it was rippling and surging, frozen for as long as you looked at it from any one vantage, but otherwise shifting and teeming. And at random places, where the grass died and the trees grew into spirals, Things would push their way into Heaven. Fort Purity had been established in the worst found of those spots, places where pines formed corkscrews to one side, where the grasses grew into fractals, where the ground formed cresting waves. Where madness tried to sneak into Heaven. And the Exorcists were allowed, here as nowhere else in Heaven, to do their butcher's work.

If it were walking in the Unhallow, it was either The Archangel Uriel, an Exorcist, an idiot, or something far worse than all of above, and it would reap the fate that such existence demanded.

And yet the ground was ground. The trees, though bent, didn't twist onto themselves. The grasses looked parched and sun-dried, and mathematically calculable.

It looked more normal today than it ever had in the six thousand years since the Unhallow formed.

But he saw something at the foot of the tower that caused him to pause. There was a destroyed Type 24 down there, its head cut from is body. And it didn't burn away.

There was another flutter, and Azazel joined him. He gave Birah's surrogate a look, then nodded, as though mildly impressed by it, before following Birah's gaze to the machine on the ground. He gave a quiet 'hrm' and jumped the rail, letting wings of manifested magic slow his descent so he landed gently beside the headless machine, a move which Birah mirrored.

Close up, Birah could see that decapitation wasn't the only injury this thing suffered. It had been stabbed straight through its plated skin and wings, tearing the innards of the thing. Birah touched his chest, and compared the feeling. Heart rupture. Lung rupture. Spine cut. Eviscerating slash. All with smooth, clean edges, showing that this was not a tearing weapon like a claw, but instead…

"This was killed by a sword," Azazel said the words before Birah could. "...by somebody with training in how to kill Angels quickly, from the look of it."

"Well, it might have been effective against an Angel, but Exorcists aren't Angels," Birah said. Then he turned, and saw that one of the hatches that released these things during a Bleeding Event had been cut open. Again, by something with smooth edges. And inside, the pod of three Exorcists waiting release had been butchered just like this one, only it was a touch sloppier with them.

"Those ones were attacked first," Azazel said. He moved over to them and looked at their wounds. They were cut at the wrists and calves, as though trying to hamstring and cripple them. A useless gesture against a mechanical automata. But then the stabbings refined. The one with its head split like a log had been the first to fall. Then there was another clash, two Exorcists on one attacker in a confined space. They tried to bull-rush it. There was a slam over… there. Birah turned a confused look to Azazel, for there was Angel Blood there.

He went over and touched it.

It wasn't Angel Blood. It was gold, like Angel Blood, but the viscosity was wrong, and the types of magic contained in it were utterly alien. He glanced back, guessing at the rest of the fight. The assailant managed to get the Exorcists in a line, then ran both through, before having to hack off their arms and leave them stumps on the floor.

One of them wasn't inactive.

"It'll have footage," Birah said. He Sang a tablet into existence and connected it to the data-port that these things had to dump telemetry when they were Recalled.

And just like that, by looking at the time-stamp when the Exorcist relayed that it had gained mission-impeding damage, he finally saw what had done this.

It was a woman, no taller than Birah from the perspective of things, with short, white hair and golden eyes. Her face was set with a look of outright hatred, and there was a Halo as black as Famine above her head. She was holding what was clearly the Sword of Adam in one hand. The other arm appeared to be made of brilliant white metal.

"It seems that we have our first manifestation of Death's struts," Birah said.

"We must check on Adam at once. If she has his sword…" Azazel coached.

"Then she must have taken it from him first," Birah finished. He gave the Grigori a nod, then let the tablet vanish. Whatever had happened to the Unhallow was something he'd need to explore later, when reality wasn't collapsing like a badly built tower.

---

The screaming was dying down, at last, but the only one who Charlie really was fixated on right now was Vaggie. Her love, her heart, her soul, who clung to her and muttered things that Charlie didn't understand. What did Zagan's wife have to do with anything? Or Rosie the Cannibal? Charlie despised the very thought of Cannibal Town. It was a place dedicated to savagery for savagery's sake. She wouldn't mourn when it was gone.

It also didn't help Charlie's nerves that Vaggie was bleeding golden blood from her eye. The rips that she'd put into her own cheeks had already healed, closing and Regenerating far faster than they ever had in the past. Vaggie, because of that bastard Karasnikov, had almost no Hellish power in her entire being. Her Regeneration was only a little better than being a human being like Rachel. But now, after clawing most of the way into her own mouth, half an hour later it was like she'd never done a thing. Just the crusty gold under Vaggie's fingernails showed that she'd done it in the first place. At least she was now down to just breathing raggedly. Charlie was entirely willing to have her cute girlfriend holding her, doubly so if it helped her deal with… frankly Charlie didn't know what.

"So why is this," Charlie indicated her girlfriend to the women around her, "not happening to you?"

Roz could only shrug. "I have no idea," the Thirdborn former-guest admitted. Also joining them now were Ayla and Cain, though Cain was sitting in a chair and kneading his head as though trying to assuage a terrible headache. Ayla, conversely, seemed utterly unaffected. General Roth, too, had been untouched by the madness, a rarity amongst the people here.

"It seems that it's affecting some people more than others, but we're denied knowing its criterion," Rachel said from the outside of the scrum. "It could be it affects people based on how long they've been dead. Buuuut..."

"Vaggie died less than fifteen years ago," Charlie harpooned that thought, and gestured toward Ayla, "Whereas she's been dead for closer to 20000."

"And that Cain is affected when I'm not means it's not based on time," Ayla muttered.

Rachel, though, frowned and glanced away, as though having a thought. "Rachel? We're kind of all in a panic right now so just share what you're thinking!" Charlie asked.

"I've been trying to come up with a way to put it, shut up and let me think!" she said, running her fingers through her uncontrollable cloud of red hair. "Angel Dust," Rachel finally said, pointing down, then toward the door, "Husk, Sir Pentius, and Vaggie. What do they have in common?"

"Nothing?" Charlie asked.

"Wrong," Rachel said. "Every single one of them was here on the day that this Hotel opened."

"...So was I. What's your point?" Charlie said.

"For one thing, you're a Nephilim, so you being exempt from things should be expected, rather than confusing," Rachel said. "I would wager all of the money I'm allowed to touch that if Niffty were still here, she'd be writhing on the floor – although in her case she'd be enjoying it – along with the rest of you. And I'd offer a side bet on A… on the Scarlet Fucker having to sit it out like Cain," Rachel said with a rare profanity.

"Attagirl," Husk said from outside the suite, as he didn't see fit to intrude on Charlie and Vaggie's domicile.

"Okay? So why would it matter if we were all together back when the Hotel opened?" Charlie asked.

"...because of the story," Vaggie said, her voice raw. She pulled back from Charlie, then looked to Rachel. "'s-okay. I think I… I think I got this."

"Vaggie?" Charlie asked.

"It's a story. That's the way Alastor sees reality. As a story. One he can read ahead or back in. And we were all there, together, when the story began," Vaggie said.

"VAGGIE!" Charlie said, pulling her lover into a hug which Vaggie groaned a little at before letting her loose again. She still looked rough, but better than before. "I was so worried, are you feeling better?"

"No, I still remember roughly ten thousand years of a life I didn't live, and being personally responsible for killing several thousand Sinners on Adam's orders, so no, I'm not fucking doing well," Vaggie said, but finally sat with her back to the side of the bed, but still keeping her arm around Charlie's waist.

"You what?" Charlie asked.

"I… I think I was supposed to be an Angel, hon," Vaggie said, daubing at the blood that was beginning to clot on her face under her eye. "And somebody just… fuckin' changed who I fucking was so that it happened."

"Do you still remember your mortal life?" Rachel asked.

"Yeah, clear as goddamned bell," Vaggie said.

"And now you also remember being an Angel. Named Vaggie," Rachel pointed out an incongruence.

"Oh fucking bullshit," Vaggie said with her face pulling in with extreme distaste. "Adam named me after a fucking vagina."

"What?" Charlie asked.

"That does sound like something my father would do," Cain opined from the side of the room.

Charlie turned from him back to Vaggie. "You said you chose your name because it was your last name and your…"

"Yeah, 'V. Agata', that's what I told you because that's what happened. Adam you absolute cocksucker!" Vaggie said, and spat out a bit of blood when she did. It was so weird, how the blood immediately separated, keeping the red away from the gold.

"Husk?" Rachel said loudly.

"Yeah Rach?" Husk asked.

"What do you remember happening since coming to this hotel?" Rachel asked.

"Didn't 'come', I got dragged," Husk said, moving to lean with one shoulder against the outer door's doorframe. Rachel leaned to shoot him a look, and he grumbled. "Fine. There was a bunch'a bullshit about the Extermination getting moved up."

"More than 'until Hell runs out of demons or Heaven runs out of Exorcists'?" Rachel asked.

"They did it by hand, came down to do the deed themselves," Husk said, frowning as he pawed through his new thoughts. He glanced up at Charlie. "And you canceled that apocalypse by having Niffty shank Adam."

"Niffty was a maid, not an assassin!" Charlie said.

"Told her to stab any Angel she saw. Caught Adam while he was monologing," Husk gave a shrug.

"A moment," Cain said, leaning forward in his seat. "That makes no sense. My father was a man, not an Angel. He would return."

"I don't know the rules that life was runnin' by, just that Niff stabbed him to death after her father," Husk nodded toward Charlie, "pounded his ass inside out."

"What does this have to do with…" Charlie tried to come up with anything.

"Vaggie was an Angel, worked for Adam," Husk said. He narrowed his eyes at her. "Kicked out for having a shred of mercy."

"...for sparing a kid, yeah," Vaggie said.

"So this is one common other-life that we recall?" Cain said. "So why am I locked with this strange pain, these memories of… of madness?"

"Maybe you were dead in that life. Maybe something worse happened. Can't say," Husk said.

"No, no I remember still being alive, a vile sadist of a human, rightly hated for the sins I refused to recoil from," Cain said. He gave a laugh. "Perhaps there is some mercy in dying after all. Hell, if nothing else, has forced me to be a better man than whatever it is I now recall."

"This all does nothing to answer the major question of the day," Rachel said, even as Charlie helped bind the slow trickle of blood that still oozed from Vaggie's eye, "that being; why are we experiencing this now?"

There was a moment of concerned silence, then Roz raised a hand.

"Um… since I have no memories of this… let me ask you all," she said. "Do any of you have other memories of The Demiurge?"

And like that, the pin seemed to drop for everybody afflicted.

"No," Husk said.

"Sam never came to the Hotel," Vaggie said.

"The Demiurge never revealed himself or tore down the walls of Heaven," Cain said. "Of course. This is the Demiurge's doing."

"...alright, that answers one question. And raises another. Why would he do that? Why would he…" Charlie gestured to Vaggie, who was staring at the golden blood on her hands, how it formed a nearly plastic-like plate over her skin, cut through with crusty dried rivulets of crimson.

"Because he had to," Husk said. "I know the guy. Maybe better than anybody left here, now that Wendy's fucked off and doing whatever. If he's doing something this drastic, it's because he has no other option. Because anything else he would try ended up causing even more pain and ruin."

"That almost sounds like you have faith in my son," Rachel said.

"He might have been a self-important martyr-complex drowned in Catholic guilt bottled up with anger issues and unable to get over his fucking self, but he honestly believed in what he was doing," Husk said as Rachel began to scowl at him. He gave his head one last shake, then gestured toward Charlie and Vaggie. "And the fact is, there's a fuckload of confused people down there, who don't know what's goin' on and don't have enough people they trust to talk about it. What are you gonna do about that?"

"So we're just not going to talk about how I might be half-Angel now?"

"That puts you in the same boat as Charlie," Rachel said.

"Same boat as Loona Miller, more like," Husk muttered.

"What was that?" Charlie asked.

"The fuck are you all sitting around down here for?" Fiona asked as she pushed past Husk and entered the suite, but she then was struck silent by the blood trail, and the fact that the now standing Charlie and Vaggie were covered in both red and golden blood. "Okay, that's probably a valid reason to be sitting around down there for. Have you been paying attention to what's happening everywhere in Creation right now?"

Husk grimaced. "Sam's almost done. He's gonna go after God soon," he said.

Well, even if that were the case, it didn't absolve Charlie from her duty helping those seeking redemption. And if there were people confused and in pain under her roof, her responsibility was to aid and help them. "We can discuss what we remember – or don't – later," Charlie said. "We've got several hundred Sinners to take care of."

---

Lute's life was a fucking joke, it seemed like.

Thousands of years of service to the good of Heaven, thousands of years smashing hellspawn into paste and ensuring that those wretched filth never rose above the gutter where they belonged, and what did she have to show for it? A prosthetic arm, two dead best friends, a tonne of responsibility she never asked for, and two consecutive lost fights in a row against THAT BITCH.

And now, after all of the sacrifices she'd made, all that she'd lost, she manages to survive a spear to the eye only to wake up surrounded by robots that looked like her friends who tried to kill her, trapped inside a pillar of shining Angel Steel. But she wasn't going to flop onto the floor and throw a tantrum. That was a Seraph's luxury. Instead, she sat on the roof of one of the infinitude of hideous brick buildings that extended toward the horizon in every direction, and held the head of the machine she'd bothered to bring with her.

It was a clever device. It didn't have any of the frailties that THAT BITCH had revealed to Lute when they lost that first fight at the Hotel. Contrary to the then-doctrine of Exorcism, these things were heavily armored, sometimes used shields, and had no internal organs to speak of worth hitting. In a darkly funny way, these things were the extreme of the paradigm that Lute had had to invent to keep her girls alive once the filthy fucking Hellspawn learned how to kill her kind.

Still, staring at a mechanical face was doing her no favors. She tensed the pinkie finger of her false hand, and a prong came out from its nail-bed, which she shoved rudely into the dangling cords and wires of the head, before opening her palm. What she saw projected above her palm was a bunch of nerd-shit at first, the kind that she very happily left to the Virtues while she did work that Heaven actually appreciated – an empty Hell would have made for a very happy Heaven, after all – until the device began to parse through things and start giving her information she needed. Who. Where. When.

The Where was answered first.

She strongly doubted it, though, standing up and looking around again.

"Bullshit," Lute said, eyes narrowing at what this device claimed was Cloud Probity. How in the everliving fuck had any Cloud of Heaven gotten this bad? Had THAT BITCH somehow catapulted her into some terrible fucking future where Lucifer had taken over Heaven or something?

The next question was answered by the machine, which noted that the year was 2028.

Again Lute called bullshit on that.

"Even Lucifer's dumb ass couldn't fuck up Heaven in three damned years. What the fuck?" Lute demanded. The wind and the distant noises of warfare answered her not. So she returned her attention to the stream of nerd-shit that her arm was spewing at her, and let the thing dig through whatever this false-Angel had to it, until finally there were pictures.

Pictures of battle in Hell.

Well that, for a change, made the perpetual scowl burned into Lute's face twitch smirkingly with contempt. So there as still war going on with the filth? Good. But then she blinked and looked at one of the pictures, which showed an Elder Devil she didn't recognize, one black of pelt and larger even than Satan, that 'roid-head of Wrath, was supposed to be, about to swat at a figure in tent-like white robes, topped by a black digital mask and long, gold-tipped horns, held aloft by golden wings.

Impossible.

"Adam?" Lute asked. The date for that picture was, by this clock, almost two years ago, which put it two years after Adam died.

So Lute did something quite unusual for her. She tried to give something a bit of thought.

And if this place had an Adam, that either meant her old friend was still alive, or these monsters were making some kind of mockery of him. And she now immediately had to figure out which it was, to deal with it in either case.

The Exorcist-in-Chief threw the head away and cast her arm to one side, a portal opening and leading all the way up to Cloud Patience, stepping through and leaving this farce of Probity behind her. And the moment she emerged, she almost turned back and looked again.

Patience was almost exactly how she remembered it.

There were others here, other Angels. They were seeming to work to search the area for something. Lute closed her fist on the hilt of the Sword of Adam, but when one looked at her (she wasn't a creature of stealth to any degree), the other Angel immediately let her gaze slide over Lute and pass onward, as though Lute were both acknowledged and was not what they were looking for. Lute just stood in confusion for a moment before she heard a call, and several other men and women with blazing halos ran over, pulling a flailing and warping Angel-shaped mass of screams and pain out of a building. Two of them picked it up by its shoulders (?) and legs (?) and then vanished into thin fucking air, the strange mutant disappearing with them.

Lute gave her head a shake. This wasn't her problem. This all reeked of nerd-shit, and she was a killer, God damn it all. For fuck's sake, she was the premier killer of Heaven, not some Virtue dork!

So she moved through the streets, marching right past her comrades who didn't give her more than a look as she passed, moving through the great city of alabaster and gold that housed the pest-control experts of Creation. And though the buildings were tall and glamorous, there was something minutely different about them that Lute couldn't put her finger on. She gave her head a shake. Just ahead, as the road gently turned, she could see the great Manor of Adam The Firstling.

And there again she was called to a halt again. Though the building looked how she remembered, there was some sort of weird pall over it, something grim and miserable. The scowl carved onto her face deepened and she tensed her wings to fly over its outer wall and land in a courtyard, which was completely overgrown. She looked up a the windows. They were dusty, as though only cleaned once a century. And the door stood ajar. Where were Adam's Groupies? And for that matter where was Lute's Outbuilding? That guest-house that she'd spent nearly six thousand years in was missing as though the manor had never been designed to have it.

She took the open door as permission to enter, and found that there was exactly one well cleaned path. It avoided the Games Room, which when she passed it saw that it had none of Adam's Earthly amusements in it. It avoided the Dining Hall, where Adam would throw feasts and parties with 'his girls'. It avoided The Fuckery, which the ascended first human used to nail anything with female genitalia. No, this cleaner path led to one thing and one thing only, a room in which Lute's memories said he would only ever go about once a year.

The armory.

The door was open, and the room within was lit with the suffusive glow that came from Halos. She paused at the door. There he was. Adam, the First Man. Adam, who had been killed by a disgusting little freak in an ambush. He sat there, facing away from her, while a Cherub looking like an old man flit around him, with a torch and metal calipers in his hands. The Cherub stopped his circuit around Adam when he beheld Lute, staring at her from behind black-lensed goggles.

"Leave," Lute ordered the lesser Angel. The Cherub turned a worried glance to Adam, but then vanished into thin fucking air just as the other Angels had. What the fuck was up with that? Did everybody get the memo except her that a new movement magic had dropped? She gave her head a shake. That was nerd-shit. Leave nerd-shit to the nerds, like the Virtues and the former humans. She advanced into the room, looking at it and being rather alarmed.

Adam's Armory never had so many actual weapons in it before.

To her vivid recollections, it was a place where he stored the 'interesting' things he looted from the Hellspawn he killed, those interesting goo-gaws that the filth tried to kill him with before he smote them to dust. These, though, weren't obvious Hellish inventions pilfered from the unclean hands of the wretched. These were dozens and dozens of Heaven-forged weapons. Swords, spears, scourges, hammers.

Adam's Axe, which doubled as an electric guitar, hung on a hook on one wall, golden and dusty, looking to have not been picked up in decades. And just below it, a perfect replication, one to one, of the sword which Lute now had slung over her shoulder. The Sword of Adam, given to him by God Himself when he was charged with keeping the Hellish filth in their place.

But then, her entry into the room let her see something else; she was rounding Adam so she could look at the front of him.

His hair was blond.

"Why the fuck are you blond?" Lute demanded. Adam stared forward, his face not even registering that she'd spoken to him. She rounded further, and then she almost retched at what she saw. "WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO YOUR DICK?"

The robes of Adam were opened at the front, which would have made him nude to the world, but there was nothing to reveal there. Instead of that fleshy junk that humans used to make other humans with, there was a strange machine replacing his legs, pelvis, and lower abdomen. It rotated amongst itself even as he 'sat' there, wheels turning within wheels, occasionally having a brief arc of lightning connecting the rings that turned where Adam's lower body once was.

His chest was still intact, the machines vanishing under his skin. This made no fucking sense. Why replace his dick if the wound that killed him was through his chest – a wound which his chest showed no sign of there being one?

"Adam, what the fuck did they do to you?" Lute said, moving up to him. Only once she crossed some notional barrier did those eyes seem to 'activate' and turn toward her.

"Name yourself, Thirdborn," Adam's voice was hauntingly familiar, but the tone of it would have given a lesser Angel than Lute pause.

"What the fuck is a Thirdborn?" Lute asked. She shook her head. "Adam, what the fuck is going on? How are you alive? That fucking janitor stabbed you to death! I had to pick your halo off the fucking ground!"

She didn't include the realpolitick happening in the background, because Adam didn't need to know it.

"I've never been stabbed by a janitor. Name yourself or I will summon the Ophanim," Adam rose from his 'sitting' position to hover slightly above the floor, the wheels-within-wheels turning slightly faster and even Lute, who considered magic by-and-large to be nerd-shit could feel that he was gathering power. And she knew full well that the amount of magic that somebody who'd served Heaven as long as Adam would have power aplenty.

"It's me, Adam. Lute!" she said.

"What is your Sefirot number?" Adam glared at her, seeming to not recognize her at all.

"FUCKING DAMN IT ADAM!" she said, taking his shoulders and giving him a shake. "Leutnant! You named me your-fucking-self!"

"I am not permitted to name Angels. Only God may," Adam said. "Release me or die."

And at that point Lute noticed at last that the helm he was wearing wasn't just a pair of horns with golden tips. It also drove something through his hair and the skin of his head. Large as crucifixion nails, metal was driven down into the skull of Adam by the helm, which she could tell was now a connected part of the greater machine that they had encased Adam in. And worst of all, she now had no clue who 'they' would be who could come up with this piece of barbarism.

It was like they found a carcass, and decided to bring it back to life in the most insulting way possible. Who would even have the imagination to do something this debased?

"Who did this to you?" she demanded. "Why did they remove your dick? Why is there metal in your head? WHY ARE YOU BLOND?"

Adam didn't answer her, instead grabbing her arms and heaving. He likely intended to heave her into a wall festooned with weapons and impale her on it, but she flared out her wings and halted herself next to the Axe, ripping it from the wall and holding it in both hands out before her, using it to ward a blow that crackled with horrifying light across his knuckles, impacting with such reverberation that the Axe was torn from her hands and thudded to the floor. She had to duck and weave the next two blows, and then lean away as he blasted Heavenly Artillery at her from point-blank range, his particular specialty that even this blasphemed version of him seemed to favor. The beam of golden holy light missed her, pounding through the wall into the hallway and then tearing its way through every room on that side of the manor, then fading before it tore through the manor's garden walls.

For all that Adam was fighting, he wasn't fighting the way she remembered. There was no joy, no thrill in it. Adam had always relished in killing the foul and debased, and when he 'sparred' with his girls, he took great pride in 'styling' on the Exorcists to show what ten thousand years of human drive could result in. A part of her was always annoyed she couldn't better him, considering Lute was an Angel and he was a human.

Then a thought twigged to her, actually causing her to pause in her dodging. Adam was always called the Chief of the Ophanim. And now his literal body was made of twisting rings.

Of course, that revelation slowed her down enough that the next last of Heavenly Artillery that Adam launched at her managed to tag her, and she didn't have time to get out of the way. So she activated the Golden Shield, and prepared for how much the next second and a half was going to hurt.

The blast picked her up and smashed her through at least a dozen walls, each one bashing against her armor and threatening to crush bone and bruise muscle. She finally deflected off of the beam – this one did continue, tearing out the gates of Adam's manor and roaring down the street which only by good fortune didn't have some unlucky bastard to get socked in the face by it – and landed in a pile on the overgrown grounds. She snarled, shook her head, and stood, allowing the Shield to disengage and pulling Adam's own sword from her back. Whatever this thing was, it wasn't Adam.

Or perhaps, wasn't Adam anymore.

Adam emerged from the damaged corpse of a house she knew so well, and in his hands he held each of his Axe and a facsimile of the sword that Lute now bore. His must have been some lesser copy, because she'd taken hers directly from his funeral cairn before it was sealed. The two once comrades – once friends – glared across the distance at each other.

This place was a nightmare. And she wasn't the only one who would have to wake up from it.

Whatever showdown fate had set before her was interrupted, though, as Lute heard a fluttering of large wings and something appeared out of the naked air. Again with that teleporting bullshit! This one, though, looked like one of those machines that had tried to kill her when she got here, but less robust. It was frailer, not armored at all, and its face was a projected hologram that she could tell was being cast over a smooth plastic cylinder. But only for a moment. The next, a form of a frail, Virtue-looking motherfucker took the machine's place.

She shifted her stance, wary. And made all the more wary when Adam likewise pointed his Axe at the newcomer, as though not trusting him to be on his side.

"What is this machine, Secondborn?" Adam asked. "Why have you sent this here? There is an intruder in my house."

Secondborn? Is that what Virtues were called here? "By God," the 'Secondborn' ignored Adam's questions, staring at her. And she felt as though he was seeing her naked, a deeply uncomfortable prospect. "...what are you?"

"Fuck you! I'm done of you weird-asses asking me what I am! I have been killing for you for ten thousand fucking years! I've earned my spot in the Hierarchy, you dickshit!" Lute snapped at him.

The 'Secondborn', whoever he was, blinked at her vehemence. "Look, miss… what's your name?"

"She has claimed the name Leutnant. She gave no Sefirot number," Adam said, still favoring the 'Secondborn' with a mistrusting look.

"It's Lute goddamn it!" she snapped at them. She flicked a glance over her shoulder. There were other Angels now staring at her through the hole in Adam's walls. And given she now accepted that Adam was lost to her in even more ways than she had first feared, any time she spent here was just more chance for these weirdos to gang up on her. She was a good fighter. Maybe one of the best still in the Muster of Heaven. But no one Angel could take on the entire Muster and win. "What did you do to him, artificer? Why did you cut his dick off?"

"What?" the robo-angel asked, and then turned, facing Adam, whose robes were still open at the front, exposing the wheels-within-wheels. And when he saw them, he looked honestly shocked, and even disgusted. "...Sahaquiel, why?"

She saw an opening, and she took it. She launched herself at the distracted machine-angel and slashed the Sword of Adam in a sweeping crescent, which cut through the body of this strange dude and severed its upper torso from its legs almost effortlessly. And true to her disappointing expectations, there was not a burst of golden blood and a dying traitor, but instead ruptured plastic and tech-trash, as the machine collapsed, destroyed in a single blow. She glanced over to see the Axe racing toward her neck, and she only just barely managed to deflect it away, then parry the thrust of Adam's facsimile sword.

She was fully on the retreat, with Adam attacking with a focus on brutality and savagery that was so familiar that it hurt her heart that she was the subject of it. But Lute wasn't some whiny romantical bitch. She was a killer. She was Heaven's killer, from toes to Halo.

But it was clear to her, with her hundred centuries of experience, that Adam would offer her no openings the way that the Secondborn had. He was pushing her back. And she could see other Angels, beholding Adam engaged in a fight, were beginning to approach. She could hold her own against Adam, perhaps indefinitely. But against Adam and others?

"I'm going to find who did this to you," she promised, in a moment where the Axe and both versions of Adam's Sword were bound together, "and I'm going to fuck them inside out, you have my FUCKING WORD."

Adam didn't answer her, merely narrowing his eyes a little bit.

There was just a hint of something in them for a moment, and the pressure of Adam's two weapons against the one of her own slackened for a moment.

"...Danger-tits?" he asked.

Then there was a jolt as his neck jerked to one side and his body shuddered. Whatever wisp of the Adam she had once known vanished, and his brow raced forward through the net of weapons to deliver a savage head-butt into Lute's face. She could feel her nose break and the blood begin to flood out as she was forced back and only blindly prevented his next two swings at her from hitting.

As though it couldn't get worse. She swung her arm behind herself and blindly opened the portal to literally anywhere but here. Falling back into it, she finally managed to clear her vision to see Adam, her superior, her comrade, her friend, watching her with all of the emotion of a lizard.

She immediately regretted blindly taking a portal, because she had to flap her wings especially hard, gravity seeming not to just pull at her but to grab her ankles and yank. And when she looked down, she could see, just over there, the ludicrous pancake-stack which was Hell. But much more horrifying was what was past it. As far as her eyes could see, demanding her to fall into it, was some unspeakable, roiling black substance that frothed and bubbled and, obvious even to the poetically dead Lute, fucking hungered.

It was like looking up at a sunset and noticing that there was a monster watching you from behind the glow of the sun.

"What the fuck is this place?" she asked, as she was able to keep her altitude against the rapacious hunger of what she would some years from now learn was called The Abyss. But whatever the case, here was not a good place to be, merely a good place to run. So she opened a new portal, and left here as well. If nothing else, she needed to regroup. She could do nothing with a broken nose and no plan. Adam needed to be avenged. Not just for his murder, but for the sin of his resurrection. And Lute had all the time in the world, now that THAT BITCH was nowhere to fuck everything up.

She had time to figure this bitch of a thing out, though. And she had no end of hellspawn and traitors to kill in the meantime.

---

It was well into the early evening when the hubbub began to die down. Rosie managed to keep her composure better than most, not falling to the ground or screaming about the strange visions they had or the pain of a life not lived. She was a very in-the-moment kind of gal. Let it wash over her, and look at what might have been without letting it catch. A near century in the Cannibal Colony had seen not only her ascension to essential leadership to it, but also a smoothness of her outlook that was so sheer that no burdock of strangeness could cling to it.

Still, it was a joy to see Alastor finally come around again. He'd been out of the Colony for years, now, all holed up in that little hotel of his, doing whatever it was that his fussy head would get to. Frankly she'd missed him. He was good company; even if he was a bit modern for her tastes, he was never anything less than an immaculate guest. And when Alastor asked her to escort him to Carmine's place? Why of course she had to agree.

They gathered in the last tower at the east edge of Pentagram City, the last nail of civilization before the city broke apart into suburbs and wildlands, where the symbol of the Carmine Family, a butterfly with a sword through it, hung near its roof. The old building that Carmilla used to use was deeper into the heart of the city, but during the Harrying got knocked down, so she rebranded and moved out here, to where her shy and bookish Goetia husband preferred to dwell. And Carmilla was, as nearly always was the case, joined by her daughters Clara and Odette, as well as the truly ancient visage of Zestial.

Now wasn't that a salacious thing? The old yarn always went that Carmilla was Zagan's wife, and Zestial was Carmilla's other husband. But the fact was, they were just old pals. Zestial had stopped lusting after flesh a long time ago, and the reason that Carmilla and Zestial were so close for so long is because Zestial was more or less responsible for keeping Carmine safe long enough for Zagan to get thrown into hell and reconnect with her. It was a long standing debt that Carmilla admitted in private she was sure she would never fully pay down.

Of course, the other Overlords of Hell weren't in attendance, because this wasn't a formal meeting. No Zeezi taking sitting on a whole sofa because she was that large. No Caliciter making the room hot just by being there. Just the six of them, enjoying coffee, tea and finger-foods.

Carmilla was such a peach, actually providing fingers.

"I suppose by that look on your face that you know exactly what happened to us all this morning?" Carmilla finally broached the subject that everybody else had been dancing around while smalltalk was exchanged and old acquaintances were renewed. Alastor was grinning, as he always did. Such a merry soul, he was. Even in the depths of annoyance, Alasator always had a smile on his face, and always lightened up a room.

"Of course," Alastor said, his distorted voice full of mirth. "We just survived a potential apocalypse by the skin of our teeth."

"Explain?" Zestial prompted, picking up his tea-cup with a long fingered hand. Zestial was odd looking; despite his clothes having a spider motif, he had given up being Spider Aspected long ago. In fact, Carmilla had only been down here for a century when he outright invented the Poison Elemental Aspect, which he still held to this day.

"I'm sure you were rather taken aback and put upon by the strange things you saw, thought, and remembered this morning?" Alastor prompted.

"Memories of a life never lived. A shorter reign in Hell, a war for Heaven much unlike what we now fight. Thou speak of this?" Zestial asked.

"Of course. I'm not sure if any of you have been trading notes, but I find I'm too impatient for you all to come to the discovery on your own, so I shall deliver a little spoiler for you," Alastor said, leaning forward in his seat against his microphone cane. "What you all saw? It was real."

"Impossible," Zestial said.

"I have never killed an Exorcist," Carmilla pointed out.

"And I've never eaten an Angel! Which is such a tease to have remembered it!" Rosie pouted.

"If the things we saw be real, what reality dost we live within?" Zestial pressed.

"This one," Alastor said and then laughed. The others around him turned looks of mild reproach at him. "Oh, sometimes I forget how narrowly you all see reality. What you were seeing was another way that could have been, all viewing your parts of the same one, in point of fact. A lesser reality with lesser versions of ourselves in it, that was trying to overtake our own and erase all of the impacts that we have made here through our deeds."

"Alastor, darling, that other me killed an Angel with an umbrella spike," Rosie said, laying a hand on the Radio Demon's shoulder. He turned a scarlet eye at her. "How come she gets to eat golden-meat but I don't? What makes her less than me?"

"Let's not grapple with existentialism, friends," Alastor said. "I know that I am the superior version of myself because of one key distinction that would outweigh literally anything else."

"And that would be?" Zestial prompted.

"I am free, whereas my lesser version is not," Alastor said. Zestial tilted his head, his four glowing green eyes narrowing at him. "I might as well be candid with you all: I am not a Sinner, and never was. When I died, I was not human. I was something other, something greater. And whereas that other me, that lesser me, is bound to a Deal, his soul enshackled to the will of another, as you can clearly attest… there are no strings on me."

"A heady pronouncement. Hast thee proof?" Zestial asked, his four eyes narrowing.

"You will see the proof soon enough. Sooner than I'd anticipated, in fact," Alastor's smile grew tight, as though annoyance were behind it. "While I am the greatest version of myself, I am not God, nor am I all knowing. I miscalculated with the Nephilim. I presumed too far as to her good nature, presumed that she would allow more laxity in my presumed role of protector of that edifice, and now have to live with the consequences. Had I been more careful, I would likely have her bound in a Deal by now."

"You would try to bind a Nephilim with a soul deal? That is reckless, even for you," Carmilla said.

"Reckless or not, it was not to be," Alastor said with a shrug, one that Rosie knew wasn't as airy and 'c'est la vie' as he was letting on. "I'd only need a fraction of a soul of such caliber's power to do what I had intended. Now I'm going to have to go and be blatant about things I'd rather have kept close to the chest. You'll see what I mean soon enough," Alastor's grin began to show a bit of mirth again. "After all, I'm not one to go about without making contingencies. Striker still owes me dearly."

"Who?" Rosie asked.

"Oh, don't worry your pretty head about him," Alastor cooed. "That's between me, an imp, and his master," he turned to the others. "The name for the event you all had to endure this morning was 'Canonicity Collapse'. It was the work of the Demiurge, somewhat sloppy work if you ask me; he wanted to prevent one kind of apocalypse by almost going through with another. Samuel, I'm disappointed in you. I thought I'd taught you better."

"Wait, what?" Odette piped up, blinking in confusion behind her spectacles.

"All of Reality here in Creation, be it in Heaven, Hell, or the Earth in between, is connected to God, who served as its original author," Alastor said. He gave a brief laugh. "I just realized how apropos the idiom 'death of the author' is for this circumstance, how His Creation has gone on without His input. But I digress! The whole mechanic behind the Collapse was that Samuel wished to untether Reality from God so that it could continue on without Him. And because he is deeply uninventive, he managed to fuck it up and connected to a different Author instead."

"So… reality is still… doomed?" Clara asked, shifting to sit a bit closer to her mother.

"Oh, no, farthest thing from it, in fact!" Alastor said brightly. "It's just that one hack of an author has been exchanged for another hack of an author, whom at least I can appreciate because He allowed me to be who and what I am," he sat back and took up a china cup with Arabica Coffee smuggled down from Earth, drinking fully half of it in a single long sip. "That is the shape of reality, I'm afraid. We are all but actors in a play, playing parts penned by an unseen set of hands. Well, all of you, anyway."

"Greater arrogance comes from you this day than any day I've felt before," Zestial pressed. "Hast the proof to mount such conceit?"

Rosie wasn't sure what happened next, exactly. She was a simple woman, at heart. You did right by your tribe, you didn't waste food, and if somebody messed with the good-spirit of a party you butchered him and cooked him as an entree. But the twisting of reality around her was clear even to somebody who kept her black, pit-like eyes as close to the ground as she did. For just a moment, she could have sworn that she felt like all that was real was splitting apart again, as though the pain of this morning were returning, only centered on her pal the Radio Demon as the symbols danced around him and the world grew crooked and strange.

"Trust me," Alastor said, his voice almost lost to static. "The proof of the pudding is in eating it."

Then with a snap, all was normal again.

Zestial gave a nod, seemingly convinced. "Hark!" the ancient Overlord said. "I knew that I saw in thee such great power. To have it demonstrated, even a shadow of a shadow of the Demiurge, sees me fit."

"Why thank you, Zestial," Alastor said genteelly. "You were always a civil soul down here. In fact, if my memory proves correct, you were the first Overlord to look me in the eye and not down your nose. Well, down where your nose used to be," he broke off with a laugh.

"I hath not lasted so very long by denying what my four eyes doth see before me," Zestial said.

"And you, missus Carmine; I am deeply thankful for the professionalism that you've shown to me for the last eighty years," Alastor said, turning to the second-most ancient Sinner in the room. "I can tell you hold little love for me, but you treated me as a peer when most would only behold me as a pest. And for such professionalism I can only give my deepest thanks."

"To deny the Radio Demon's power would be to deny reality, and that's fundamentally bad for business," Carmilla said. Her eyes narrowed. "Why are you saying this, now?"

"And you, Rosie, my dear, my pal, my chum," Alastor turned to her next. "One of the few people who knows how to keep a good thing rolling, instead of bucking to the relentless tide of time. I have always cherished our time together in Cannibal Town, and the aesthetic that you've enforced on it. Tell me, is it true that your predecessor was a savage, utterly without standards?"

"Oh yes," Rosie said. "He didn't even have the good grace to taste good."

"For giving me an island of the familiar and the comfortable to relax in, away from the reckless advance of the rest of Hell, I can never completely repay you," Alastor said, his smile wistful, and sincere.

"Why are you sayin' this, Alastor?" Rosie finally got what had Carmilla suspicious.

"Because I'm going to be going away," Alastor said, thumping his microphone cane lightly on the floor to punctuate his statement. "And I might not be coming back. So I am going to make sure that nothing that ought to be said is left unsaid."

"You're goin' somewhere?" Rosie asked. She stifled a giggle. "Don't tell me you're gettin' airs as to going up to Heaven, now!"

"Heaven, Earth, the places Outside? My itinerary is, for the first time in nearly a century of damnation, finally open once more," Alastor said. He stood, and extended a hand to Rosie. She took it, rising up to stand beside him. "And because of that, I needed to speak to you. As for you two, my confederates, my friends! I can only offer you a bit of advice."

"So what…" Rosie began.

"Actually, two pieces of advice," Alastor said. He then turned to Rosie. "Be a dear and get my coat for me? You're such a doll."

"Oh for you? Anything, sweetheart!" Rosie said with a laugh of her own. She started to gather the things she'd set down while Alastor turned to face Zestial and the Carmines.

"My first piece of advice is this, Carmilla," Alastor said. "Let your children go."

"What?" Carmilla demanded.

"They are pre-Diluvian Sinners, just as you are. They have been in Hell for an eon. And yet they are still utterly dependent upon you. Because you have spent those hundred centuries coddling them," Alastor said, while Rosie finally packed her clutch into her purse and started toward the study's mahogany door.

"What mean you by this insult?" Zestial asked.

"They have the experience and time in Hell to be the third and fourth most dangerous former humans in Hell," Alastor began, "after myself and Cain. And yet still they have never spread their wings. Why would they–"

The door shutting behind Rosie closed off the rest of Alastor's piece of advice. Rosie, though, was excited. During the Pride War days, when Rosie had toppled and devoured Solumei, Alastor and Rosie had gone on actual adventures! Going out on risky forays after treasure or knowledge or both. And from the way he was talking, it finally called forth the old memories of those earliest years of Alastor In Hell. He was going on an adventure again, and damn it all, Rosie was coming with him. It was such a shame he had no place for romance in his life, but she accepted him as he was. He wouldn't be her lover, because he didn't seem to even notice the lack that an absence of lust left in his life. And she had beaus aplenty she could come home to. But the adventure itself? That was worth anything.

Frankly, Cannibal Town had gotten kinda boring in the last few decades. Oh, it was still pleasant and upstanding, with smiling people meeting her each time she left her home, a place polite and civil and quite unlike anywhere else in Hell (because Rosie had neither knowledge of nor interest in Satanistic civilization), but order begat boredom. And Rosie was a lady who appreciated a bit of excitement in her life.

She moved to the coat-room, and a pair of imps quickly dove into the array of dresses, coats, and hanging body-armor, extracting her fine jacket, lined with fur from a silver fox, just as she liked it. She also told them to get Alastor's coat, a thing scarlet like all of his attire was, and made from much the same cut and style as his 'indoor' clothes, so that when he wore it you could scarcely tell he had a different outfit on.

For Alastor to be this excited to go, at this time, with these circumstances, that adventure he had in mind surely had to be up in Heaven. And while her palate was going to be disappointed, because even Rosie had learned through the grapevine of rumor that dead Innocent in Heaven left no remains to consume, there must have been something else that pulled Alastor's attention up there. She was eager to see what it was.

Her walk back through the halls reached that mahogany door again, and she, without knocking, pulled it open.

"–reasonable price, which given your status as Hell's premier weapons dealer, you will obviously be able to afford," Alastor said. Despite the fact that he was standing at great ease, there seemed to be a strange pall of dread over Zestial and the Carmines. The daughters were close in, huddling against their mother, who was herself leaning back and against the black-suited form of Zestial who now regarded Alastor as though he'd never actually known him at all, and deeply was terrified by what he'd learned. "After all, why should she be the only one of her kind in Creation, hrm?"

"...get out," Carmilla hissed, her expression one of barely controlled panic.

"Of course," Alastor said with a showman's bow, then swept toward the door which Rosie held open. "Remember my advice, old friends! It may just save your souls."

Rosie stepped aside so that Alastor could swish past her, pulling his coat and donning it in a single motion, as they left the others behind. "What was that about, sweetheart?" Rosie asked.

"Some people don't know how to accept good news," Alastor said with a laugh. Rosie laughed with him. Some people really didn't. Leaving the building didn't take long, and they were walking the streets of Pentagram City once more, she in her fur coat and he in his almost identical red outerwear, past the piles of snow which had been shoved out of the street and the frozen carcasses which would have to wait on their Regeneration until they thawed. Today was nippy. Really nippy for Hell, at least. Though the sun was out and the wind was barely a breath, it still shot fingers of chill through her; it had to be near zero!

"I'm sorry, I can't contain my curiosity anymore, Alastor," Rosie said. "What's this big adventure you've got in your head?"

"The very biggest, Rosie my dear," Alastor said. "This morning was a reminder, something of a kick in the pants, to pursue my own interests."

"Well if you're hurting for entertainment, I can certainly help with that; nothing a little gang-war can't stir up if not new amusements!" Rosie offered.

"I'm charmed that you'd offer, but no thank you," Alastor said. "I'm talking to my chiefest drive. I merely pursued entertainment because my truer aim was, for a time, lost to me. Now, it is returned to me, and I will wield it to the hilt."

"Well do tell. This sounds enthralling," she said.

"Oh, it is," Alastor said. He paused in his pace for a moment, as though something occurred to him. She asked what it was. "Oh, I just remembered that Mimzy is still trotting around down here. I'm going to have to visit her at some point."

"Catch up on old times when you were alive?" Rosie asked.

"Have a proper dinner," Alastor said. He started walking again, this time lagging just a half step behind her, as they navigated in the direction that would eventually see them to Cannibal Town. "And I really must thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for the conviviality that you've shown me over the years."

"You keep that up and I might start to think you're not the Ace-in-the-hole you claim you are," Rosie tittered.

"A what now?" Alastor asked.

"So where is this great adventure of yours taking us?" Rosie finally interjected on him.

"First, to Wrath Ring, to the Palatium Iracundia – that old king's roost – and the Basilica Vermiculi," Alastor said. When she made a face that told him she didn't know what that was, he continued. "The great cathedral of Satan, dedicated to the Altar of Worms."

"Oh, and what's waiting for us there?" Rosie asked, eyeing up a particularly dull-witted looking specimen who had a porcine Aspect and thus promised tasty meat. She was forestalled by Alastor's hand on her shoulder, making her halt.

"I'm afraid there is no 'us', in this," Alastor said.

And Rosie felt a new kind of chill, far colder than the wind of winter, run down her. She tried to turn, to look at her old friend, but her body didn't let her more than look on the hand that Alastor had put on her shoulder. At how the hand had grown long-fingered and crooked.

"And while it pains me to do this… you have something you're unable to give up willingly that I'm going to need. But take some comfort, Rosie; I will always remember you fondly," Alastor said, his voice almost ripping the sky despite its soft tone with each word. She finally shook the terror, and turned. Just enough to glance over her shoulder.

To see Alastor, fully in his Warform, twelve feet tall and teeth like bronze daggers, staring at her with eyes that were wailing pits to a hungering nothing.

Against any other threat, Rosie would have gone down swinging, and might have even won.

Against Alastor, Rosie the Cannibal, Overlord of Cannibal Town, and owner of a Soul bearing in it the Gift of Joy by coincidence of fortunate Dealmaking, was devoured without so much as a chance to scream.

---

"Cannibal Town. What a waste of time, lives, and effort. There was a time, back during the Second War For Heaven, that the place was, if not useful, then at least civil with its politics. But then Rosie disappeared, and with it, all of the plates she'd kept spinning began to fall off of their straws and shatter on the ground. Cannibals can be jovial, civil, jolly things, but only if you literally or metaphysically hold a gun to their head at all times. Rosie was that gun. You either obeyed her vision of what Cannibal Town should be, or you got devoured until you either did, or until you left.

Her successor hadn't Rosie's vision, nor her grit. The old-timey ah-shucks veneer of those people-eating freaks fell off their faces fast, and shattered so completely on the ground in their wake, that only the old timers like you and me, those who either don't age, or have a way around aging, remember that for a brief period they were, if not good neighbors, then at least bearable ones.

What they became afterwards? Hunger cults. Roving meat-clans, no longer partaking of their delicacies in a discrete section of Hell where those who didn't want to have to deal with them could simply avoid them. No, now they were Everybody's Problem. And when they became New Purgatory's problem, I pushed for a permanent solution to them. One that I'm surprised that the Queen was not only allowing, but eager to see done.

I burned the district to the ground by my own hand. Well, mine, and a good friend's. Look, you don't have any idea what weird bullshit the Mind Eaters got up to, let alone the roving bands of flesh-eating psychopaths who didn't ascribe to anything more than hungry nihilism. By the time we got to them, they went from an anachronism held in check by an Overlord, to a festering blight that began to give birth to monsters. I don't regret doing what I did. I sleep far better knowing I did it, in fact."

– Truly Delicious, Chief of the New Purgatory Constabulary.