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.

58. Metronome II, Part 1

"Fuck me, you'd think this place would get less busy at this time'a year," Blitz muttered as they returned to Heaven. It was looking to be a trickier fight than last time, because for reasons of pregnancy Millie had to sit this one out. That meant that Gadreel and Maelstrom were going to have to pick up a lot of slack. And if Vidar survived this, well, that was proof positive that he could swing with the big guys.

There were still few people down in Hell who wanted specific Angels dead, but few was a lot better than none. Oh, sure, there were a few fucking jack-holes who wanted Michael or Gabriel killed, but even Blitz at his most pig-ignorant knew that he and his could take down an Angel, but were smart enough to clear out when an Archangel showed up.

"I don't think it ever stops, sir," Moxxie noted. It'd taken quite a bit of practice on his off time, and quite a bit of practice that likely only he (and admittedly maybe Krieg) were capable of surviving to reach a point where he could confidently open a portal without the Angel's magic punishing him for it. Of course, the margin of safety grew wider with every day, as the Angels withdrew from Probity and tried to build new defensive lines on Charity. The problem that even Moxxie saw with that was that there were only a few 'competent' military leaders who were capable of protecting a target as big as an entire Cloud of Heaven, and most of those were either Secondborn like Gadreel and thus not given much credence, or were Innocent and thus given even less.

"So how far are we going to be going to have to ruck this?" Vidar asked.

"Less far than you'd think," Moxxie said. One of the most incalculably valuable things that Uller had brought back from Heaven was his Portalling Matrix, an array of magical observations, tests, and ether-levels that made safe Thaumetic teleportation between Clouds possible. In fact, by selling that information to the Clan Cruac's family of Voog, he'd essentially catapulted that family into contention for who would eclipse Drevisté and put them back into their much-desired second place spot in Cruac, earning vast monies and external political influence by performing mercenary transport for Legions to the higher clouds of Heaven.

Sure, they didn't have lasting success as Fort Abandon had been, but now Heaven was being attacked at the level of Charity, Kindness, Generosity (nominally) and Temperance, all at the same time.

"Jophiel will likely consider these battlegrounds as beneath her notice," Gadreel said.

"So what's this bitch's deal? Atheed was basically an Exorcist. What's she?"

"Pretty and vain," Gadreel answered, while Moxxie took a moment to recheck his Blessing Tip (it was still of course in pristine condition). "She has created no few enemies both amongst our employers the Goetia and other Secondborn. Frankly I am leery as to this contract. While she is a deeply unpleasant person, and I would wish to beat her about the face and head with a sock full of coins, I don't believe she's really done anything worthy of death. Not really."

"Well, Naberius wants the bitch dead, so dead the bitch will become," Blitz said. "You gonna open that door up for us some time today, Moxx?"

"Working on it, sir," Moxxie said, letting the rifle dangle on its strap and taking a feel for the flow of power up here on Heaven. It was like a strange wind, one that Heaven was influencing in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. It would grow weaker the higher they all went. But it needed to be accounted for. He did the calculations, comparing it to the arrays and tables of observations that Uller had made. Frankly, for all Uller was still barely into his adulthood, he'd likely go down in history as one of the most important magical researchers of all time, simply because he, unlike the Clan Cruac, wrote shit down and made sure it got disseminated instead of cloistered away.

Then, when he was confident of the correct arrangement and ritual, he twisted his hand and flicked. He could feel the 'angelic guillotine' slamming toward his magic, but it cut not his vital strand but a sacrificial flow he had created to throw away, making the portal open up into the verdant green and well-tended environs of what looked to be a bucolic idyll, way up in Cloud Temperance. The lowest dwelling of Angels. The place where the Grigori were dumped.

"Well fuck me, that don't look like any Heaven I'm used to," Blitz noted, looking through the aperture. Vidar in particular turned a look of distaste from the brick-and-concrete hellscape around him to the impossibly cozy green in front of him, and Moxxie could tell that he was adding this to his internal book of grudges.

"Three hundred years ago, this was the shape of Heaven all the way down here to Probity," Gadreel said sadly. Then she walked forward, and crossed the divide of four Cloud Barriers harmlessly to return to her old stomping grounds. Moxxie turned a look to Maelstrom, who quietly nodded and followed after, sniffing the air and looking around. The other two imps followed after, leaving Moxxie last through to close it behind him. The instant that he was past the portal, he was struck by the smell.

"Fuck me, it smells like Stolas' place," Blitz muttered. Moxxie nodded. While they had only run IMP briefly out of that Goetic Manse, he knew exactly what Blitz meant. Stolas, horticulturist that he was, had done his very best to reproduce to his utmost a sort of botanical Heaven In Hell. Vidar outright coughed, even gagging slightly.

"The fuck is that smell?" Vidar asked quietly.

"Pine," Maelstrom said, giving a light swat to a limb of needles ahead of him. Vidar glared reproachfully at the trees as though they'd done him a personal wrong, but Moxxie reminded them that stealth, being this far from any backup, was important. Gadreel nodded at his assertion.

"If you have appropriate disguises, use them now," Gadreel said. Moxxie, having learned how to change his disguise from Uller's research, turned his human disguise into that of a rather-tall Cherub, dark fleshed and freckled, non-existent wings appearing at his back that did nothing to give him lift. Blitz didn't bother, nor did Vidar. Gadreel's form shifted so that the faintly glowing tattoo on her back faded from view and her clothing shifted, but it still looked very much like herself. Moxxie even pointed that out. "No, now I look like my 'sister', Hariel," Gadreel said. "She, still, lives in this concentration camp of the Secondborn."

Moxxie turned a look to Maelstrom, who shook his head. "I can look like an Innocent, but they aren't allowed up here either. I'm not going to bother," the Hellhound said.

And with that, quietly and carefully, they began to slink toward the manor of Jophiel.

Moxxie quickly caught a strangeness in the air, though. That there were far fewer people out and about than their should have been. While those who could afford to move more openly did see, from time to time, a Cherub scooting along through the air, or in the distance behold a lighted window grow dark briefly in the Heavenly late-morning as somebody moved within a building, there were far fewer Heavenly people doing things than Gadreel had warned them to expect.

It made their movements faster, but it began to prick at Moxxie's paranoia. Something was out of shape and out of sorts. He didn't like it. Something was wrong.

Ahead, the bucolic sweep of trees and shrubberies opened into something of a hamlet, the buildings a bit large to be a medieval village and a bit too well built, but otherwise having the same sort of walkable coziness that such old habitations embodied. The buildings themselves were made of wood, but wood painted in bright and friendly colors, or else stained and left to gain a mature and worldy visage. The roofs were all made of tiles, with most of them having a particular green shade to them, and a few being red, blue, or a mixture of the three. There were no vehicles, for why would there need to be for Angels?

The neighborhood was silent as a graveyard.

Moxxie turned a look back to Gadreel, then looked back to Blitz and the others hiding in their bush. He gave them a subtle shake of his head, that he thought there was a trap. Because this very, very much felt like a trap. He moved overtly, Gadreel-as-Hariel at his side, while the others crept along through the trees and the bushes and the leafy cover. "Am I being paranoid, or is this somehow 'wrong'?" Moxxie asked.

"If you are paranoid, so am I," Gadreel agreed with him. She made a motion for him to halt for a moment, and walked over to a dark window, leaning to one side to peek inside. She then turned back to him swiftly, as though with a touch of urgency. "We should move to Jophiel's cabin," she muttered.

"What was in there?" Moxxie asked very quietly, but it still sounded to his ears like a gunshot in the almost crippling silence of this hamlet.

"What wasn't there is what unnerves me," Gadreel said. He turned a look at her demanding more. "I have never known Gadrah and Ash-Hai to ever both be out for something. Both are very much homebodies, with very, very different skill-sets."

"Why am I thinking this is gonna become a big fuckin' thing?" Blitz bemoaned from the bushes.

"Because you're paying attention," Gadreel said, and Maelstrom nodded along with her. The next few buildings Gadreel also peered inside, but didn't relate what she saw within them. Finally they found a very nice cottage, very well upkept and looking like a very ideal of the rustic lifestyle. And when Moxxie tested the back-door that they'd circled around to, he found it unlocked. He turned a look to Gadreel, then to the others who emerged from the bushes. "She's not inside."

"Let's lay a trap for the bitch!" Blitz offered.

Moxxie, though, opened the door and walked in. It was very nice inside, cozy to the extent that it reached a near perfect 'peak-coziness' upon which no more added knicknacks or kitsch would increase it. It had a small kitchen area, a larger living room with a table fit for dining two, or four if you tucked your elbows in, and a bedroom to one side. There was no bathroom. But considering Angels had no biological impetus to shit, that made sense. Anything an Angel ate was converted into song and light. There was no waste from such thorough annihilation. But what caught Moxxie's gaze was a scroll left abandoned on the table-top, between a pair of mugs bearing coffee that had been allowed to cool to room-temperature.

"Moxxie, have some caution," Gadreel whispered at his back, and he reached up to pull the scroll off of the tabletop. And as his eyes ate its contents, he had a moment of gut-deep worry.

And it must have shown on his face, because Blitz, who had been digging through pockets to find something worthy of setting up a booby-trap, paused when he looked at Moxxie. "Well, shit, Moxx, what's got you all twisted up?" Blitz asked.

Moxxie handed the scroll over, allowing both Gadreel and Blitz to read it. Vidar and Maelstrom seemed to have little interest in it, instead keeping ready for an ambush which now Moxxie was certain wasn't coming. Because the scroll was listing way, way, way too many names, names that Gadreel had mentioned while on their purifying jobs, as being some of the more specifically talented members of Heaven. The most worrying name amongst them was Azrael. The Firstborn Death's Chosen.

"The fuck? It says they're mustering just outside something called 'the Plaza Beyond'. Wings, what is this shit?" Blitz snapped at the Angel under his employ.

"They must be mustering for an operation, and from these names, it's a significant one. Stand close. Jophiel is there and I can bring us there by Transit," Gadreel said.

"I don't like Transiting," Vidar complained.

"We lack the luxury of your comfort today," Gadreel said, reaching over and grabbing his horn, while Maelstrom laid a hand on her shoulder. Moxxie and Blitz both laid hands on Gadreel's hips. Then there came a fluttering of wings.

And a lurching in Moxxie's stomach, as he felt the wellspring of his Thaumaturgy so far away as to be almost sterile. Oh this was bad. This was really bad. If he hadn't had a lifetime of not-having-magic before his more recent acquisition of it, it might have outright shot him in the gut for its intensity, the stillness and deadness of the Wellspring of Impish Magic. He experimentally fed out a twist of his personal magic, to see if he even could. He could, but it felt attenuated and bullied, like trying to carry a polite conversation in a heavy-metal mosh-pit. And even though he didn't actually do anything draining with it, when he released it, it immediately withered and he felt that the hole in his hold of Ethers was not recovering in the slightest. This place was the exact opposite of the Temple of the Seething black. A place where Imp Magic was forbidden by nature.

He finally got out of his own head after only taking a second or two – thank Satan for the Oaths and their ability to let him think quickly – and looked around. They were in a castle turret, standing next to a narrow slit-window that overlooked a promenade. And in that promenade there was gathered a host. At its head there was a big guy, shirtless and built like a Slothling imp, blond and beefier than an ox. There was another, one that Moxxie almost didn't recognize, who sat in a chair behind the pacing man. There was much said about Saint Michael the Taxiarch, that he was 'the most glorious of the Archangels'. But Moxxie wasn't seeing it. He looked weathered down to a nub, and was favoring one shoulder lightly through his robes.

"The fuck are they saying down there?" Blitz asked, trying to push Moxxie out of the way.

"We are far too far to hear," Gadreel said. She started looking for a closer roof-top, no doubt to bring them, but Moxxie hissed at her to stop. Those rooftops were utterly open, and there had to be a thousand gathered Angels down in that plaza. He paused, looking at the stones of the plaza. Those stones were pentagons. And were tiled regularly. His mind briefly ground to a halt trying to come up with any sort of model which would allow pentagons to tile a plane, but decided that this was Heaven, his magic was broken, nothing made any fucking sense.

"I can hear from here," Moxxie said.

"Then tell me what they're saying!" Blitz demanded of him.

Moxxie nodded, and stared out at the crowd. To the beefy angel walking a pacing trail. "...audacity, because that is the only thing which will win us the day," Moxxie was able to pick out his speech even for the distance and against the hubbub that obscured it. "So the plan is to make best use of that audacious insanity and cut from Hell their most troublesome vectors for attack. How many of you have been cast back from the line by fell sorcery, even though your bodies were still hale and your minds still eager?"

There were calls from the crowd agreeing with the large one, and each one that Moxxie intercepted was matched by a deepening of the grim look on Michael's face.

"Exactly, my friends, my comrades, my Host!" the large Archangel, whom a glance up to Gadreel confirmed by the sheer unmitigated hate in her eyes that this had to be Gabriel, said to the assembled horde. "Too long has Hell had the edge in Magical combat, able to tilt battles that good Heavenly arms and will ought to have won! Through their vile trickery, they have taken and subsumed all of Probity! Will we allow them to live with that victory, friends?"

A chorus of no's hit the air.

"Exactly," Gabriel said. He then turned to a group which was remaining quiet. Gabriel cast his arm toward Michael "What say you, those closest to my brother's heart? Will you help us wipe out the Hexbreakers this day?"

"How many are you willing to allow die to see this done?" a female voice asked, sultry and smokey, much like Lilith's had been, to Moxxie's memory.

"You wound me, Strigoi," Gabriel said with oily tone. He turned to face the others with a broad gesture. "The only ones who ought to die today are the Hexbreakers of Hell! Surely we host of two thousand are capable of pinning down and massacring twenty traitors! That's two hundred hands per halo!"

"Hands that are not yours to order!" the woman, Strigoi, claimed.

"That's true," Michael finally broke his silence. "They are mine. And this plan is mine also. This will not be the mad macerating machine that Gabriel ran into the bowels of Hell. There will be no auxilia of any kind, no Cherubs nor Innocent gunmen. Just two thousand Angels of the Host, killing twenty two traitors, and five thousand more to burn Hell's magic to the bedrock."

"They're preparing to kill Hell's Hexbreakers," Moxxie said. Blitz blinked then looked actually afraid.

"He's gonna what?" Blitz demanded.

"He's gathered those two thousand, Jophiel included, to try to swamp Hell's Hexbreakers under weight of numbers and assassinate them," Moxxie said.

"FUCK!" Blitz snapped. He pulled out his phone and tried dialing somebody. Moxxie snatched the phone from him.

"SIR!" Moxxie hissed.

"They're goin' after Stolas and I gotta fuckin' warn him!" Blitz shouted at him, grabbing the phone back.

"If they're going after the Hexbreakers, they've… they're going after the Presbyter's Guild and the Clans Cruac as well," Moxxie said. And dread now ran through him. "And that means they'll be coming after Millie, because they'll be coming after me."

"FUCK!" Blitz snapped. "Gadreel, get us back to Hell!"

"I'll take my own way back," Moxxie said, pushing Vidar to Blitz and Gadreel, while Maelstrom closed in at Moxxie's side.

"Will they go after Krieg as well?" Vidar asked.

"They'll try," Maelstrom said. And then Moxxie cleared his head, and invoked the information that he outright stole from the Grimoir Ultima Mundi, and using nothing but his own personal power and the meager ambient magic of Heaven, created his first interplanar portal, straight from the top of Heaven to the top of Hell. Gadreel gave a nod, laying hands on the two imps that she was escorting, and then vanished into a fluttering of wings. Moxxie turned to Maelstrom. "I'll rally the Hounds. They won't strike against us directly. We're not important enough. But we'll be able to help you and yours."

"I appreciate it," Moxxie said, and then they crossed his threshold, and vanished from Cloud Diligence mere minutes before the most catastrophic attack of Hell by Heaven to happen during the Second War For Heaven began.

---

Chapter 58

Metronome II

Part 1

---

"Indeed, it behaves in every manner identically to that of Olea europaea," Stolas said, as he presented a sample of the first viable Hell Olive (or Holive, as those who declared it impossible had said) to the gathered Goetia, here in the outer reaches of the Palace of Iron. It wasn't his choice to hold this event here; he knew that while years apart had cooled the ire between Stella and Stolas, he still didn't wish to impress upon her patience any more than he absolutely had to as the other parent of their shared miraculous child. Said child currently sitting in a chair off to one side of the little gathering of former Angels who had followed Lucifer into damnation, and those who had chose damnation over the iniquity of modern-day Heaven.

She looked so tired, so spent. As though she wished that she could melt into the upholstery and sleep for a year. But considering that by all metrics that Lucifer had demanded of her, she had succeeded in the impossible task he'd saddled her with, with the only remaining peccadilloes needing sorting at this juncture being the completion of a few more Legions (a task which would sort itself given a bit of time), she had a right to be unsociable right now, and only interface with the party to let out occasional exhausted groans.

"I hope you have the oil to prove it," Raum said. Stolas put on a superior look and produced a vial of Holive Oil that he'd pressed himself in order to verify that he'd cracked the thing. The oil was a different color, because Holives were still white as opposed to that dusky green of Earthly olives, but when Raum sniffed and tapped a bit of it to his tongue, he doubtless found them indistinguishable from that created in the living world. "Exemplary. I knew if I gave you enough time you'd get that thing to behave!" the Young Crow said with a laugh.

"If you want the seedlings, you'll still need to pay for them," Stolas pointed out. He wasn't one of the wealthiest beings in Hell by accident. His creations were worth a lot of money to many different hands. Especially since Holives seemed especially able to sequester lead and iron in their stems. That had been a development of sheer accident of mutation, making these things actually able to grow in the poisoned topsoil of Greed without making them themselves poisonous.

"Always such a mercenary, Stolas," Raum said. "One day, you'll do me a favor just for the sake of doing a favor."

"If ever did such a favor to you, I would need to do one for your brother as well, and then to his friends, and then I would be doing unpaid favors for the rest of my eternal life," Stolas pointed out.

"Ah, well. I can't have you being a damned Satanist now, can I?" Raum gave a mild chuckle, and held up a hand with several fingers raised. "I want four acres worth. Payment still as we agreed?"

Stolas gave Raum a nod, then broke off from the Young Crow to look at the gathered Goetia. Octavia's scheme to get Judgement running again had worked better than Stolas had suspected, and likely better even than she'd hoped. She related to him at least before that ploy began that she hoped that at least somebody was willing to take up the job of Provisional Judge. But she hadn't understood just how dearly the Ars Goetia held their homeland in their hearts. By giving them a chance to be their best Angelic selves again? It awakened something in them. Now there were various Goetia jockeying for the 'right' to see to the induction of the Sinner, the Unwashed, and the Innocent.

Which made Octavia groan all the louder, because that made a new problem that she was having to deal with the delicate personalities of her fellow Goetia instead of just Saint Peter. Apparently they needed a lot more people doing the work than the Goetia were capable of offering, even with their surprising willingness to take part.

He wished he could tell her to just take heart. She'd already solved one impossible, intractable problem in only a few years of Governorship of Heaven. This one was paltry by comparison.

He moved through the paths of the gathering, and saw Penemue standing on her own, looking rather guarded. Well, more guarded than usual. "Greetings, Penemue! I'm surprised you aren't with your husband and son!" Stolas said as he approached The Scriptor.

"They would rather stare at a machine than be here. And frankly, having had to endure this, I can now understand the appeal," Penemue said.

"Staring at a machine?" he asked.

"Yes. Purson's been obsessed with some strange readings he's been getting from the Paradox Engine ever since it started up," Penemue said, joining him as he walked through the crowds. It vexed Stolas that Blitz had canceled in his promise to escort Stolas here, his enthusiasm for 'an exciting job' winning over his ability to heed former commitments. But while it did sting for Stolas to get left in the cold for a day, it was muted somewhat by the reasoning Stolas gave that a Blitz who didn't disappoint him from time to time would have been an uncanny and unsettling thing, too perfect to be real.

Blitz had his flaws, many of them in fact. As many as Stolas had. And it was by those flaws that Blitz was so perfect for Stolas.

"Thinking about the imp?" Penemue asked.

"He's off up in Heaven assassinating another of our cousins," Stolas said with a dismissive wave. "I think he's gotten an acquired taste for it ever since he managed to drag down Atheed."

"He has a right to. Atheed is not whom I would call an 'ideal' first Angel for like him to hunt. In fact I'd dare say Atheed was only a half step below the Sword Seraphim in some ways," Penemue said.

"Well, he's not anything but a pile of bones in New Mexico right now," Stolas said with a laugh. "He promised that he would kill me, when I first fought at Lucifer's side. Well, the joke's on him; I outlived him by years."

"Imps are very much the arteries through which the chaos of the universe flows," Penemue said. Her visage softened just a touch, noticing how Stolas was navigating them, slowly but surely, toward where Octavia was zonked out on the chair at the edge of the gathering. "I know what you see when you look at her," Penemue said. "So much potential. Seemingly infinite streams of it. And you don't know what she'll achieve but surely it will be monumental."

Stolas nodded, smiling in a most wistful way. "She was a miracle when she was born, and has only ever proven my estimation of her more right with every day she draws breath."

"I sometimes find myself standing at Tabris' bedside, just watching him," Penemue said, glancing at the great doors that lead further into the Palace of Iron, to its heart where the Paradox Engine of this building was resting. "There are just so many things he could become. And I don't know which I should even encourage. It seems so overwhelming."

"Parenthood is," Stolas said. "But from the sound of things, you're doing well enough."

"High praise for somebody who didn't even come to the party of his birth," she jabbed.

"Purson didn't attend Octavia's, either," he snapped back, and then realized that she had been joking, and offered a quiet apology.

"Who said my name?" Octavia roused from her torpor to see her father and distant-aunt approaching.

"Your father, darling Via. Who else?" Stolas said brightly as he approached.

"Everybody in Hell, as I turns out," Octavia said, flopping forward to sit in a most undignified manner. Of course, everybody here ignored her, as the rumors both born of the mill and those that Stolas and Stella had followed through and verified painted her job as one that literally nobody else in the Goetia Families wanted, despite its considerable prestige. Considering how tightly she'd coiled the strands of responsibility and privilege in that posting, any hand knew that it would be impossible at this point to extract the much hated onus of duty from the perks of being required to do that duty. "No, I'm not going to move up your request for Preference, Naberius."

"Raum, actually," the Young Crow said.

"How do people tell you apart, exactly?" Octavia asked.

"That's something that only comes with being around us for ten thousand years, young lady," Raum said. He tilted his head. "Is my brother still harping about his bad haul?"

"You all agreed to the rules. You can't voluntell an Innocent to work for you the way you can a Sinner," Octavia said.

"I suppose that is true enough. My elder is much more used to throwing his weight around," Raum said.

"You look simply a fright, Via," Stolas said, squatting down next to the chair and taking one of her hands in both of his. "Have you been getting enough sleep?"

"In what time?" she asked. "What time is there in my goddamned working day that I can actually sit down and take a nap?"

Stolas sighed, and nodded. He, for a moment, spotted Stella on an upper balcony over this gathering of a section of the Goetia Families. She was likely doing just as Stolas was, keeping an eye on their daughter. But she was content to do it from afar. "Well, as soon as your extra legions are up to strength, I am going to take you on a little vacation somewhere. I know there's an interesting planet in the Tadpole Galaxy where the atmospheric conditions make every sunrise and set explode across the sky in rainbows!"

"It would certainly beat Loo-Loo Land," Octavia admitted. Raum gave a chuckle at that.

"How long has it been since that Blight down in Greed Ring burned to the ground?" Raum asked.

"Seven years, about," Stolas said. "And Lucifer sued the land developers into insolvency so it could never be rebuilt."

"How awful for those who can't afford Lucifer's prices. What are they up to for a day ticket now? Four hundred Souls per person?" Raum asked.

"I've never understood the appeal, myself," Stolas admitted.

"Of course you don't. Otherwise you wouldn't have taken me to the knock-off when I was a chick," Octavia said.

But before Stolas could defend himself from such slanderous implication – from his daughter no less – there was a flapping sound, and one more Angel joined the gathering of those same that had abandoned the madness of Heaven for the laughably comparable sturdiness of Hell. Gadreel immediately turned and looked around, confused by why there were so many Goetia here. She must have not received an invitation to this meeting. But more important to Stolas was that she released a hold of Blitzie, who swept his gaze across the crowd exactly once until he found Stolas, and then took off like a shot toward him.

Well, if he was feeling eager, then more joy for Stolas. He faced the imp who navigated the forest of legs and skidded to a halt at the outside of the scrum of Angels. "What the fuck are you standing around for?" Blitz demanded of Stolas in lieu of a more genteel greeting.

Stolas' grin widened. Well if he was that eager…

"Didn't you check your fuckin' phone? Somebody's trying to off you," Blitz then shattered Stolas' lascivious fantasy. Stolas blinked at him, then did check his Hellphone, noting now that he'd indeed missed a message from Blitz. One that was so badly spelled that even Stolas couldn't interpret it. Obviously haste did Blitzie no favors in typing.

"Nobody would be so stupid as to try to attack me here. I have nearly two dozen of my cousins within arm's reach!" Stolas said.

"They had hundreds of–" Blitz, began, dragging Stolas a step away from where he'd been standing.

And because of that jolt of movement, the Seraphic Steel javelin that would have punched out his heart instead slammed into the side of his chest, tearing through his ribs and lung and causing golden blood and black ichor to ooze from Stolas' wound that while agonizing, wasn't instantly fatal.

"Attack! We're under Attack!" Raum roared, and then another Javelin punched through the ceiling to strike him, landing lower and nailing him in his guts. He howled in pain, falling to the floor, before the Young Crow snarled, and with a heave of his hands snapped the shaft of the Javelin off, leaving its head embedded in him.

"Lockdown! Lockdown!" came the call on the loud speakers, as Stolas held out a hand and despite the incredible pain of his impalement created a wall of wind, and did so just in time to prevent a third missile from slamming into him and no doubt snuffing him out entirely.

"DAD!" Octavia shouted, rushing to him as he staggered back a few steps and fell to a squat. Her hands fell on the shaft of the javelin, and she gave a tentative pull. Stolas shouted in pain, but it was Blitz who jumped up and slapped her across the face.

"Don't pull it out you dumb bitch, that'll kill him!" Blitz said. And despite calling darling Via 'a dumb bitch', he was right to do so. Instead Blitz pulled a shotgun from inside his cloak, pressed the barrel to the shaft, and outright shot it off, which twisted the head and made Stolas glad he was biologically incapable of soiling himself.

"Where even are they?" Octavia raised a valid question. Because they were indoors, and the ceilings weren't so far away as to obscure an assassin. But the answer came when Stolas fought through the pain and narrowed his vision. There were holes, as though punched through by a sewing needle, in the roof of the gathering hall. They'd been thrown from above, with monumental power.

"There's probably hundreds of the fuckers out there, so we need to get somewhere they can't peg us from above!" Blitz demanded, grabbing Stolas' hand and pulling him up to his feet. Stolas remained hunched, though, because having the Steel of Angels pierced through him was about as painful as one would have presumed. "Yo, goth-chick! Have you got some place safer than here to go?"

"The Redoubts," Octavia said with a nod, and helped Raum to his feet. Even as they took their first steps toward the door, the entire ceiling ripped and was torn away as dozens of Angels cut it from its footing and hurled it aside. The instant that they could see the clouds overhead, they could also see the army of angels, their halos beating out the sun on this overcast day.

And above and more shining than all of them was Gabriel, bare chested and his hair blowing in the wind, who glared down at all beneath him with a look of almost divine contempt. "Death to all traitors of Heaven!" he declared, his voice exploding across the sky.

"I need my Armor," Octavia said, and outright dragged Raum out into the Hallway before they could make good on that. And behind Stolas, as he limped as fast his body would allow him, he could hear the forces of Heaven attacking the Ars Goetia. And in his heart, he knew that it wasn't going to end well for his cousins in rebellion.

"HOW DARE YOU RUIN MY FUCKING CEILING!" Stella's voice burst much like Gabriel's had, and Stolas favored to give one last look back, as he beheld Stella, somehow already wearing her mechanical panoply, deliver a ruinous blow to Gabriel, who only at the last possible instant realized that he couldn't simply ignore it like he could most attacks, and sent the Archangel flying into the distance with his skin cut open by the flanges of Stella's mace. "GET OUT OF MY FUCKING HOUSE!"

Stolas almost turned, to try to help her, but was in that instant pincered. If he didn't help Stella, she'd surely die. But if he didn't help Octavia?

That didn't even bear thinking about. He would simply have to hope that Stella had remained as sharp in her skills as she often bragged. But he somehow doubted that any amount of sharpness would save her from the horde that was up there.

This time a decade ago, he had been so sure that Stella would be standing over his funeral cairn. Now, now he wondered if tomorrow – presuming he even survived – he might be standing over Stella's.

---

Vidar kicking the doors in on Kreig's office was annoying, considering she'd just about gotten Uller riled up to a level that he'd mount her on the office-desk, but the look on the young Envyling's face quickly dumped cold water on her amorous intentions with her husband. Because to know Vidar was to know ten thousand faces of anger. But today she was discovering he had at last one of fear.

"Angels, coming to attack you," Vidar said, sounding out of breath.

"What? Why?" Krieg demanded.

"Sending them for every Mage… even the Presbyters…" Vidar took a moment to suck air and catch his breath. Tilla, who was standing out in the waiting room, rose to her feet.

"Everybody out, we are closing effective immediately!" Tilla shouted, and the various Sinners and Fiends all complained, but Tilla reached under her desk and extracted a shotgun, using its pump to punctuate her sentence with intense violence. That got the grumbling to end, and people to make for the doors.

"How long do we have?" Krieg said, making sure to back-burner her ardor and get her head into the game.

"Minutes, maybe," Vidar said.

"Not enough time to make this place a fortress," Krieg muttered, knowing her own limitations when faced with plural Angels. She could kill them, of course, but it would leave the Miller Building a pile of rubble. And she'd just gotten comfortable here. She twisted her hand, opening a portal against the wall. "Dismas!" she shouted through that aperture to the lower floor. The patriarch of the Cruikshank family turned to her in surprise, and walked through the gate toward his sons and daughter-in-law, still needing his cane to ease his movement. "Go with Vidar and Mother to our home. I want my siblings safe."

"Krieg, where are you going to be?" Tilla asked, towering over Dismas and Vidar with shotgun in hand.

"One building over killing Angels. No time, just go!" she said, sweeping a hand and creating a new portal, then manifesting a prismatic barrier that pushed all of them through it. It left only she and Uller here in the office before that portal shut. She turned to her husband. "Do you…"

"Of the two of us, I'm the one who has actual experience fighting Angels, love," Uller said, actually looking comfortable, now that his father and brother were safely out of harm's way. He flicked his arm and a third portal opened, on that opened onto the roof of the second-tallest building in this neighborhood. Now that the last levels of the Miller Building had been injected in and it reached its final stature of 99 stories, it was head and shoulders above those around it much the same way that Tilla was with her fellow imps. And the husband and wife had only had a few seconds on that new roof when Angels began to appear above the Miller building, one of them gathering up a great pulse of golden energy.

"Oh no you fucking don't," Krieg hissed, then her eyes went black-against-black, and she cast out a long, brutal fork of Darkning that hit the Angel that was about to Artillery the Miller Building into a crater. The annihilation of light struck the Angel and sent it (her?) flying back, and those two dozen others with it to turn toward the pair of imps. There was only a moment of silence and stillness, no doubt as the Angels way over there related that they'd found their target, and were going to attack. Uller took that last moment he had to call up a few more wards, likely thankful at last to be fighting Angels in a place where he could use every single dirty trick he'd ever devised without the realm itself smacking his hands with a ball-peen for the attempt.

The golden light mounted again, smaller bolts of it from different casters. Krieg grinned, about to do something drastic, but Uller laid a hand on her shoulder and shook his head. No need to brute force this, then; she would need her vast stockpiles of magic to kill these things once the Angels gassed themselves out. After all, if Impish magic was weaker in Heaven, would it not make sense that Angel magic was similarly weakened in Hell?

The launched their beams at the pair of imps, a ridiculous sight that the Angels (who had mounted in numbers until there were half a hundred of them) were dedicating military-grid-square levels of ordnance at two of the lowest link in the Chain of Being. And in most circumstances, finding that ridiculous would be sensible. But Uller raised up two barriers, arrayed like a pike head, points converging a hundred meters away from them and having a minute angle separating them, so that when the beams struck, they didn't overwhelm and knock-down Uller's barrier, but were instead redirected to flow along its surface, parting and leaving the two of them utterly unhurt, even if the tide of Heavenly Artillery did knock off the two upper corners of this building.

"Fifty against two. That hardly seems fair," Uller noted.

"I agree. Do you want to sit this out so that it's more equal?" Krieg asked.

"Oh no. Heaven taught me to despise these jackasses," Uller said, not flinching in the slightest as the Angels fired another barrage at the two of them, which reacted exactly like the first had, only now since there was no building they were standing on to hit, the deflected rays of ruin instead punched into other buildings beyond and behind them.

"You'd think they'd understand that that didn't work," Krieg said, gesturing toward the blade of Thaumaturgical force which deflected now its third barrage.

"Angels are not the most adaptable of creatures," Uller said. "Oh, I speak too soon. Here they come."

Krieg laughed, and held up a hand, before raking down. The half of the Angels who had broken formation and rushed toward the pair of them then found themselves being engulfed in a veil of flame that stuck to them and burned like napalm. Then at last did she hear them scream. Some of them vanished into thin air. One, who was so consumed that he had become nothing but a wailing, wing-flapping ball of fire, hit the point of Uller's deflection-plow, and split himself in half under the force of it. He fell, dying or dead she cared not which, leaving only smoke and a smear of golden blood hanging in the naked air ahead of them.

"Now would be more appropriate," Uller said, as she watched him twist magic into increasingly complex forms. She wasn't completely sure about what specific Wyrds he was using, but they felt like traps. And traps bought her time to school Angels on humility.

She breathed deep, pulling the ambient Pain that existed because Hell kind of sucked in general into a great bolus, one that she kept pulling from the location, then from the people who were panicking in the building the two were standing atop, until the shrieking, whirling ball of grey smoke and spectral skulls was as large around as she was tall. Then, she carefully looked out at the Angels, both those survivors who had beaten out their fires and those back-liners too cowardly to join them in their charge, and to each and every one, she reached out and created a Thaumetic tag, assigning all of those who had come to kill her a number by which they could go fuck themselves.

And then, connecting her Greater Pain Elemental to those tags, the sphere exploded into forty four screaming streaks of grey smoke headed by a ghostly skull. And when the first hit, and the Angel began to plunge toward the ground shrieking in agony, the others tried to teleport away. Ordinarily, that would have done them the luxury of not getting hit by a Pain Elemental, which was a better state of being than the alternative. But she'd tagged them. So the instant they emerged from their teleportations, the Elemental assigned to them jerked off of its old course and raced toward them anew, catching a whole new wave of them before the now increasingly panicking two dozen tried to teleport again.

Again, the elemental veered its course toward where they had fled. Three of them dropped themselves directly above and before Krieg and Uller, only ten meters up and ten meters out, meaning those Elementals chasing them had far farther to go to nail them. But Krieg didn't allow herself fear. She simply stepped back and allowed Uller to slot in front of her, spreading his arms wide as though preparing to catch an incoming tackle. And the first Angel to try to rush them, Angel Steel sword clutched in her hand, only got five meters before the trap Uller set was unleashed, and her body was flash frozen by a Frostgrave, causing her rush to become a plummet, crashing to the edge of the roof in front of them. Vexingly, once the Angel hit the roof, the ice burned away, and the Angel, bloodied and freezer-burned, got to her feet.

"Resistant to cold, noted," Uller said, and then snapped his finger toward her. There was a tremendous, thundrous silence as his own Darkning took the survivor square in her chest and blew her off the roof and into the sky. The other two then raced down, trying to follow the first's path precisely so that the 'mine' which caught her wouldn't catch them also. But Uller had planned for that, clearly. Because the leader in the charge only got to within four meters before there was a metal slicing sound, and then he disassembled into meaty, gold-blooded chunks from the Black Blades that Uller had somehow made fucking invisible and left hanging in the air.

The fact that Uller hissed and retreated told Krieg that this was his last plotted defense on that particular line, and that there was nothing to stop the third Angel. So Krieg pulled Uller past her and then cast her own arm out, summoning her more conventional Black Blades to batter the incoming Angel. He allowed his armor to absorb most of the assault, but she wasn't just throwing shit at a wall and seeing what stuck. She was getting blades behind him. Gadreel had been forthright in that there was a gap near the scapular of Angelic armor, a place where a well placed edge could kill even a fully armored member of their ilk. Of course, she had to survive the next few seconds, so she brought up a barrier that the Angel crashed into, and then sent his sword blazing against.

She could have increased the strength of that shield until it was adamatine, but that would have taken precious ethers and even more precious time. So she simply let it crumble and shatter, taking what time it bought her to dart back away from the one swing she allowed this Angel to even approach her, before she ripped back with her arm, and a blizzard of Blades that had been behind the Angel reversed their course and slammed into his less-protected back. She knew that at least one hit the gap, for a spray of golden blood was lifted by the injury. But it managed to stall him. And that was all she needed.

Because at just about that point, with the Angel both injured and distracted, the Pain Elemental she'd launched finally hit him and incapacitated him, making it easy for Uller to pull his gun and shoot dead in the face.

She then looked up and saw that it left thirty supremely pissed off Angels staring down a pair of imps.

She might have been good, perhaps even the best that the impish race had ever produced, but the power differential was not in her favor.

"Scarper?" Uller asked, seeming to outright read her thoughts.

"Scarper," she agreed, and then twisted a Portal into being even as the Angels all massed their Heavenly Artillery and prepared to send a lobbing shot over the barrier and reduce the building they were standing on to a pad of glass. Uller outright lifted her and launched himself through it the instant it was wide enough, its edges so close that they almost sheered off the ends of his horns because the portal wasn't done opening when he went through it. She immediately closed it, but even still Uller had to dive aside as a fist-diameter beam of Heavenly power snuck through and glanced away into the side of a factory. The factory rang like a bell at the impact, but didn't crumble as the buildings had.

"They're going to follow us," Uller pointed out the obvious.

"They'd be poor assassins if they didn't," Krieg agreed. She took just a moment to suck in some breath, and to think. And she glanced toward an older section of the skyline, one that hadn't been torn down by Exorcists a few years ago. "As long as we have rooftops and a few seconds to prepare, we can whittle them down."

"Hopefully fast enough," Uller agreed, and turned with a snarl as one Angel appeared nearby, spotted them, then vanished again. They'd all be back in a matter of seconds. "It's never easy."

"I wouldn't forgive fate if it were, at this point," Krieg laughed, taking her feet and backing through another portal and stymying the Angels at least another moment, as she began to scheme how to precisely and deliberately disassemble the cadre of Angels that Heaven had sent specifically to kill her and her beau.

---

Heaven was losing its shit. The last time Lute had seen Heaven this riled was when that deluded child Emily tried pulling that bullshit with the snake. Only now, and here, it was worse.

That didn't surprise Lute. Frankly, everything about this Heaven was worse than the one she remembered. Lucifer had a grain of competence, Heaven had surrendered almost all of its own, and they met in the middle to be awful together. But that wasn't her problem. If she could just talk to God, all of this shit would get sorted when He put it right again.

She paused in the shadow of a palace that soared with lofty architecture, but otherwise looked very slapdash. She had walked the halls of Michael's palace before. They hadn't looked like this. But that wasn't her business. Michael looked like shit, and obviously had been dragged down by whatever it was had happened in the last couple of years. Again, a problem that God could solve with a whim. But there were innumerable other things that kept bothering her.

Gabriel was Gabriel, obviously. But Gabriel and Michael had always been left hand and right. She might not have been a spy of any description, but the scattered conversations she'd overheard while skulking had painted a Heaven that was divided between Michael's Micheline faction and Gabriel's own Gabrielites, the two at loggerheads about essentially everything. Recently, Gabriel had been suborned to Michael, a fact that according to the nattering of the Angels in Lute's proximity utterly infuriated him.

What could have Michael done to Gabriel, or Gabriel to Michael, to have soured that long, long good spirit between them? Was it Gabriel always pushing for Armageddon? Even Lute could admit Gabriel was too eager to end the universe by a half, but surely that wouldn't be enough to make an enemy of Michael.

There was too much she wasn't seeing, too much she didn't know.

For most of Lute's existence, she'd been a soldier. Not knowing things was just kind of a thing that soldiers did. They followed their orders and let what they didn't know be somebody else's problem. But when Adam died – or perhaps more accurately seemed to die – she was suddenly put in charge of things. And that meant it was now her job to know things. And despite any other flaws she had, she took her work really fucking seriously.

The streets were mostly empty of Angels, but saw Cherubs flitting about on their little wings doubletime, as though working extra hard to make up for the lack of Lute's fully developed comrades. The building next to her was unguarded, though there was a great pad in front of it that had bootprints visible for the absence of their boots, as though something had stood there for so long that the stone had bleached everywhere but where that unseen being had stood. From the scale of those feet, it had to be a Throne, or maybe one of the lesser Seraphim. But the fact that the door was unguarded was the important part. She quickly crossed the road, and went right in the front door as though she belonged here.

Which she did. She might have been years divorced from what she remembered, but this was still Heaven, and she was still an Angel. The symbol on the door was a figure of eight wings, all festooned with eyes, divided in half with a harsh line. Only not quite. Like it was actually slightly more than half. She pushed the door open. Whoever put that door there wouldn't stop her from reading The Acts and figuring out what the hell went wrong since the Exterminations ended.

Only when she stormed through the foyer, ignoring the Cherub that asked her what she was doing here, she tried to open the door deeper into the repository of the Acts of Heaven only to have it slam shut in her hand and since she was still holding it lurch her forward to smash her face into the wood, so tremendous was the power by which it was closed. She snarled and pulled harder, only to now find the door which had almost opened for her before was now as immovable as a Pillar of Heaven.

"I said," the Cherub repeated himself with baritone voice, "what are you doing in my house?"

"I am trying to read the Acts," she snapped, turning to the Cherub. But the Cherub she saw wasn't a tiny, baby-animal like form that she usually dealt with. This one appeared as a man with skin the dark-grey of a Seraph's ebenezer, his brows sharp and strong, his visage not infantile but commanding and regal. "...who are you?"

"I am Mattias," the Cherub answered. "Whose Thirdborn are you?"

"Why the fuck to people keep calling me a Thirdborn?" she demanded. "Let me through, little man! I have a right to…"

"The Acts are my province as the Parliamentarian of the Taxiopolis," Mattias said, giving his grossly oversized wings a flap and depositing his three and a half foot form atop his desk. "You have as much right as I decide you do."

"...what the fuck is the Taxiopolis?" she asked. Mattias narrowed his eyes at her, and her arm gave out a warning chirp at her, as it sensed powerful magic being directed at her. She braced herself, but the warnings didn't materialize into threats.

"You are not an Angel, though you look like one," Mattias said. "Curious."

"What are you talking about? I've served Heaven for hundreds of centuries!" she snapped at him.

"That is true, I can sense as much," Mattias said. "But not my Heaven. Not a Heaven where Angels are Sung into being. You are made of light, not song."

"WHAT?" she demanded.

"Such a curiosity," Mattias said. He tilted his chin toward the door she now couldn't open. "Why do you need to 'read' the Acts?"

"To find out what's gone wrong in Heaven since I've been gone," she said, which made her emit a strangled noise and clap her hands over her mouth. She hadn't meant to say that.

"You would have to have been gone for a very long time indeed for me to not remember you, presuming your position is an honest one. I am older than almost all of your kind," Mattias said. Another sweep of his wings, and he now hovered in front of her, scrutinzing her closely.

"Bullshit. God Made you when he was done with us," she said, repeating what was plainly obvious to anybody who asked.

Mattias' brows rose at that. "So a different cosmology, then. Fitting, given the difference between Light and Song. You shall not cross that door and read the Acts, because the Acts are not scribed. I am their keeper," he said. She mouthed 'what' in dismay at him. "If you would ask for the goings on of Heaven, then it will be divulged by me or else learned through rumor and hearsay. Speak, Outsider Angel."

"...How did Lucifer fuck up Heaven this much?" she asked, her first and most obvious question essentially ejaculating out of her mouth despite her best efforts to control herself. What the fuck was that little man doing?

"Lucifer was cast from Heaven for his open rebellion and attempt to take the Throne twelve thousand, three hundred twenty nine years, seven months and three days ago," Mattias said. "I am somewhat unclear as to the exact hour and minute of his exile, as there was a great deal of ceremony surrounding it and I'm not sure if you should account it from when he was hurled over the Edge or when the Highest Censure was ignited."

"...what?" Lute demanded. She reached for Adam's Sword, but a minute gesture from Mattias hurled her back against the wall and pinned her there as though God Himself had flattened her against the marble.

"Don't be rude," Mattias said. "Your next question."

"What did you freaks do to Adam?" she found herself asking.

"God bade Sahaquiel 'improve' him," Mattias said. "The details of that improvement were not made available to me, and as such are not recorded in The Acts."

"Improve? They cut his dick off!"

"He is no longer living. He has no more use for it," Mattias said.

"How did you bring him back from the dead?" she demanded, trying to push off of the wall and loom over the Cherub but utterly failing to move so much as a hair.

"Adam is not alive. We did not 'bring him back from the dead', because he is still very much dead," Mattias said.

"So you're puppeting a corpse?" she asked, aghast.

"Innocent do not leave corpses," Mattias said. Lute's eye twitched, because that sounded like utter bullshit.

"Release me, Cherub. I'm going to get my answers from God Himself," she said.

"A second opinion? Acceptable," Mattias said. He made another small gesture and now she wasn't being flattened against the wall anymore by incredible, unbreakable force. "I must say you won't be happy with what you see, though."

"I don't care. I'm going," she snarled at the strange little man-thing, and cast her mechanical arm to one side, a portal twisting open and revealing the inside of God's Palace, all built in shining marble and lustrous gold, constructed to cyclopean scales. She moved through before that shockingly powerful Cherub could do something to stop her.

Instantly when she went through her portal, she was beset by a weird, awful noise, like TV static that grated not on her hearing but on her very soul. And there were a pair of doors through which that awful un-sound was coming from, a pair of doors left slightly ajar, another set of foot-prints on the marble where monumental guards had once stood for all of time, at least until last month. She slipped past the door, and almost fell to a knee, so sickening was the phenomenon she was lashed with.

It was terrible. It was disgusting. It picked and prodded at her, attempting to tweeze off fragments of her and rearrange them. It was unholy, unclean, and vile to its utmost. Even with an empty stomach she had to fight not to wretch and spew up bile. Ahead of her, in pride-of-place in this vast, cavernous chamber painted with scenes of all of Heaven's history, there was a throne, as cyclopean as the rest of the architecture. But what sat upon it?

"What the fuck is that?" Lute asked, her stomach all the way up in her throat. She glanced down, to the foot of the titanic throne and saw that there was another Archangel there, nine feet tall and clad in an absolute bunker of armor above and beyond even what Lute's new paradigm would have asked. She had a feeling she could stab this guy all day and never meaningfully harm him. But that was a thought she'd have later, because right now, her mind barely registered him, under the weight of unmatched disgust.

"Mattias? What is this?" the other Archangel demanded, turning to face her, his six wings spreading out behind him and filling the room with light the color of reflecting steel. His voice was familiar.

"WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?" she pointed at the titan seated on the throne, that strange, twisting and protean abomination, that unspeakable horror from beyond mortal or immortal comprehension.

She did not know that she, alone, looked upon the face of God, and saw not what God wanted to be seen, but what actually was. All of Creation was Song, after all, and thus all was built according to His design. But Lute, she wasn't made of Song. She was made of Light. And light dispelled darkness, mystery, and obscurity whether it wanted to or not.

Lute looked upon God, and saw something vile.

Lute backed away from the impossible horror that these idiots had enthroned as divinity and walked into Mattias, who had followed her here. She turned, drawing Adam's Sword and deflecting away so she could keep both the Archangel and the freakish Cherub in sight.

"Put that away. There are to be no arms in the face of the Father," the Archangel said, stomping toward her. When the blazing white eyes that shone through the featureless ballistic face-plate bored into her, she felt as though she was being psychically ransacked, felt as the intruder force demanded from her answers she didn't want to offer. So she, with a thought, activated The Slap, which was now built into her arm. And the Archangel recoiled, as a spike of Angelic Power hit him right in the brain for daring to dig into hers.

"WHAT? THE FUCK? IS THAT THING?" Lute demanded.

"What are you talking about? That's God," the Archangel said, halting with wariness in his posture now that he knew that digging into Lute's brain wasn't going to happen.

"That thing? That thing?" Lute pointed at it. "Are you out of your fucking mind?"

"Calm yourself, please," the Archangel said. "What do you see that I cannot?"

She paused, about to snap at him, but what tripped her up was that he sounded so dreadful and sincere. Like he knew that there was a veil that he'd never been allowed to see behind, but also knew that he had a responsibility to know it no matter how much it hurt him.

"If you call that thing God, then this is not Heaven," Lute hissed at him. "What did you do to God?"

"This is the only God we've ever had," the Archangel said. He turned a look to Mattias. "What is going on? Who is this thing which looks like a Thirdborn but acts like a First?"

"A creature of Light, not Song," Mattias said with frustrating calm. "Some approximate of an Angel developed through a convergence of evolution, perhaps."

"Fuck you, I am an Angel!" Lute shouted at the little bastard.

"Why would… it was because of The Madness, isn't it?" the Archangel asked.

"It stands to reason. I would ask Strigoi, but she's busy. Should I ask of Birah? He shouldn't be too occupied right now," Mattias said, his tones utterly conversational as though this weren't a tense standoff. But then again, she was increasingly getting the notion that Mattias was not a typical Cherub, in senses of either sanity nor power. "I believe she is from another Heaven, and from her reactions here, that she was created by another God."

"There is only one God," the Archangel said, but even Lute could tell that he was saying that out of rote, not that he believed it to his boot-heels.

"In this iteration of Creation, perhaps," Mattias said. "I would need to consult with Penemue to verify my suspicions."

"Penemue has been in Hell for six years, Mattias," the Archangel seemed annoyed to have to remind the small man.

"Ah, so that's why she is wanted dead. I had been wondering," Mattias said brightly.

"Why are you morons just sitting here allowing that FREAK to sit in God's throne?" Lute shouted at both of them.

"Because it doesn't matter what we do. God, or God as we see it, is insensate," Mattias said.

"Well throw it out! Get God – the Real God – back!" Lute demanded.

"From where?" the Archangel sagged slightly. "This... being, as you describe it, created all of Creation. What alternative do you propose to replace it? What even could?"

There was a flutter, and a handsome Angel appeared in the room, starting at the fact that Lute was here and bearing a sword. "Raguel!" the new angel said. "What is this Thirdborn doing here, armed?"

"Ignore her," Raguel said. Wait, really? Raguel? Really? "Why have you come?"

The newcomer turned a confused look to Lute, but then backed up until he could hold both Lute and Raguel in his eyeline at the same time. "The Demiurge has been seen in Diligence."

A growl of fury came from the mountain of armor which was Raguel. "Why now, of all times?"

"He might be coming here. We need to…" the newcomer Angel began.

"No, he is going to the Plaza Beyond," Raguel said. "I will find Gabriel and have him follow me there."

"What about the Lightborn?" Mattias gestured toward Lute.

"We have no time for her!" Raguel snapped. "She'll either be a problem to us or not. Now we need to buy minutes without spending hours."

"Very well," Mattias said. He gave her a look that was so neutral that it managed to wrap around to being insulting again, then said, "do not leave until I get back," before vanishing to the noise of fluttering wings. The Archangel likewise disregarded her, and vanished to that same noise, along with the unnamed newcomer, leaving Lute alone in the throne-room with an abomination.

"...why is Adam blond?" she asked.

The thing on the throne didn't answer her.

---

Shit was bad, and bad in the worst kind of way. Stella's palace had sheltered Blitz and Stolas and whats-his-beak from any more sniping by virtue of having too much armored building in the way, but that didn't stop the Angels from simply tearing their way in a layer at a time. It was almost like somebody shoved a tracking transponder up Blitz's ass, how uncannily they managed to hunt him down.

While Blitz didn't like running, he liked to fancy himself in his older age 'not an idiot'. And even a deadly son-of-a-bitch like him did not stack up well against a gaggle of Angels all baying for blood. Plus, moving constantly made the ones that did reach him do so as dribs and drabs, instead of as a clump. He could fuck up an individual Angel who showed up bursting through a wall like a juice mascot. He was essentially shit-out-of-luck if the number that reached him at any one point was higher than three.

The building shook, causing the wood panels of the room they were even now against his better judgement pausing in to creak. And while it was good to Blitz to catch his breath a bit, he knew that most of the reason they weren't stringing along Angels right now as because Stolas and that crow guy were actually legitimately injured. He'd tried to shift the spear in his lover's chest, only to have it burn his hand like acid at a touch; that javelin tip was a Deeply Blessed Angel Steel, so holy that it was harmful to even somebody protected against things he didn't understand by the obviousness of it.

"Raum, don't touch it unless…" Stolas said, then had to breath deeper. His face had an uncomfortable slackness to it, as though he were exhausted beyond his breaking point and unwilling to have his body admit it. Raum ignored Stolas' advice and wound a bandage around his gut-wound, actually managing to do something smart for a noble and make an Impalement Pressure Dressing.

"I am not dying from a goddamned ambush by a pointy stick," Raum hissed back at Blitz. And as soon as he had the bandage put in place, he sagged against a wall, likewise catching his breath and having flop-sweat ooze out along his black feathers. He gave his head a shake after a moment of more or less performative recovery, and stood once more, still askew and off balance, but at least no longer quite so badly bleeding.

Blitz didn't look at Stolas, whose clothing had been painted gold and black by his blood and that weird ichor he had. He didn't like to think about that. And maybe if he didn't think of it hard enough, he'd be protected from it just like he was from mystical bullshit.

"We need to get to Fort Abandon. Their defenses are still intact," Raum said, tones tight and forced.

"It's a long fuckin' way from here to the Heaven-portal," Blitz pointed out.

"Which is why we should start moving now, before we…" Raum began, but cut off abruptly.

"Fine, better there than here," Blitz said.

"Where is Octavia?" Stolas asked, his voice light and reedy. "I saw her a moment ago. Where is she?"

"You told her to get her shit and she went to get it, we've been over this," Blitz said, his frustration simmering. He grabbed the arm that wouldn't cause Stolas to yelp in pain from and dragged him into motion. He pointed at the other Goetia. "Where is the portal from here?"

"Straight shot through the structure, a lot of narrow passages. But there's one big run, that they might already have watched," Raum said.

"Then fucking get moving before 'might' becomes 'definitely'," Blitz coached. He dragged Stolas with him, finally releasing his hold on Stolas to advance up to Raum's side and turning his ears up so that he could hear the smaller noises of this goddamned ambush.

He could hear almost every scream of terror, every shout of arrogant derision that demanded it, and every wet and meaty splorch of something being murdered. They were all amplified such that it was physically painful to hear them all, like they were being driven in by tapping roofing nails into his skull with each twitch of noise, but he could hear that there were Angels on their path, merrily killing Stella's underlings and Legionaries whenever they found them.

The halls of the Palace of Iron weren't as hoity-toity as most of the Goetic Manors that Blitz had had to fuck around in since he'd been saddled with the job of Proxy. This one was pure purpose with only a thin layer of pomp over top of it. Every breach-point they passed that the Angels used to get into the hall or stairwell they were in was small, the kind an angel had to squeeze through, rather than just peeling the wall or roof away as they had in the gathering hall and sauntering in. This whole place was a bunker, dressed up to look like something modestly appealing.

That fact saved Blitz's life as he heard a crash two halls over through the wall. He darted back and pulled Stolas back, managing to back up two steps in the second that it took the Angel to smash his way through one layer of wall, then finally impact into the hall they were actually in with such force that the wall bowed inward towards the imp and Goetia. But it didn't fail under the first blow. That gave Blitz the split-second he needed to drag his new toy, a Carmine Castigator from his coat and plant it up against his shoulder. The shoulder and hand-places had been rubberized, because otherwise they would have burned Blitz's skin down to the bone. But even through the layer of rubber, its tuck against Blitz's already burned cheek seared and hurt. It was a simple thing, not elegant at all like the Blessing Tip or the Purgator. It didn't have fancy optics for a long, accurate shot. It just had a very big barrel, a very robust breach, and fired a bullet rated in inches.

The second blow of the Angel who stormed into the room revealed a woman with long, flowing blond hair, shining golden eyes, and a look of utter contempt on her face. That was all Blitz needed to pull the trigger at her. The upper barrel fired, the impact kicking Blitz back until his back slammed into the wall behind him, but the bullet hit the bitch right in the tit; only it didn't kill her like he'd wanted it to. Instead there was a weird crystalline cracking sound, so as soon as Blitz had the Castigator under control and back on target, he pulled the second trigger to the lower barrel, and sent the other bullet that was the size of two middle fingers flying at the bitch. This time, it hit her just below the opposite tit. And the impact tore the holy bitch in half, painting the wall behind her with gold as she collapsed, gasping and shocked, to die on the floor.

"A fuck, that's gonna sting in the morning," Blitz muttered as he breached the thing and let the pair of grenade-sized casings pop out, replacing them with two of the very few extra rounds he had for this thing. Yeah, it was fun as hell, but after getting it even Blitz had to admit, to himself, that there was in fact such thing as Too Much Gun. He rotated his tenderized shoulder and pointed ahead of them, away from the hole in the wall. "There'll be more fuckers coming. Don't just stand there!"

That got the Raum to break off from staring at Blitz in shock. Yeah, I kill Angels, fucko. Stop your rubbernecking, thought Blitz. He started way, but turned back and grabbed Stolas to drag him along. Blitz hadn't noticed that Stolas was staring at Blitz the whole time with a distant expression on his face. He didn't have time for it. Instead, he extracted the claymore mine that he'd pocketed on that weirdo human totem job up on Earth years before, quickly setting it up to give any gold-blooded fuck who tried to follow him the very rudest kind of surprise.

He jogged to catch up to the former Angels, and didn't have to jog very hard to do it. They were completely failing to haul-ass. "Shift it, you dumb bitches!" Blitz demanded, which managed to get a bit more activity out of Stolas, as he shook his head.

"We're heading toward the Engine Core," Stolas finally said.

"What about the portal?" Blitz asked.

"Piss!" Raum muttered. "They'll be attacking that for certain!"

"Fuck 'em. We'll go around," Blitz said. That certainly explained the sound of bedlam ahead of them.

"We can't. If they take down the Paradox Engine, it might detonate," Stolas said, shaking his head like an injured Hellhound trying to get coherence into its thoughts.

"Detonate?" Blitz asked. Raum had a look of dread spread across his corvine face as a realization occurred to him.

"It'd take out everything in hundreds of miles. It might even break off this whole chunk of Pride and send it into the Abyss," Raum said swiftly.

"It's never fuckin' simple is it?" Blitz muttered. "Well fine, I guess we're heading toward the fight like a bunch of dumbasses."

Fortunately, heading toward the fighting was simpler than running away, because the Angels stopped pounding through the walls as though entirely happy with where Blitz and his Angelic lover (and that lover's coworker) were now heading. In fact, it was the calmest minute and a half that he'd gotten since all this shit kicked off. In fact, it even left Blitz in a perfect spot, directly at an Angel's back, that he could run up and shank the fucker in the neck before he even realized Blitz was there.

The bulkhead ahead of that now-dead Angel was closed and locked, and looked way tougher than any gun Blitz had to crack it with. In fact, the Angel looked to have been trying to cut through, bit by bit, using Heavenly Artillery in half-inch thick streams to cut the lock out. He'd only gotten a sixth of the way around the mechanism when Blitz offed him.

"Well shit. I don't know 'bout you, but I can't walk through solid metal," Blitz pointed out.

"Give… give me a moment," Stolas limped to the door, falling to lean against the wall and moaning at how that jostled the metal spearing through his chest. After a moment to catch his breath and to shake off the pain, he punched in a combination into the nearby pad. It failed. He blinked, gave his head a new shake, and put in a different combination. This one actually opened the thing.

Instantly, there was a ghastly wind of grey and black, one that crackled with impossible flames, that hit Blitz and swept past him, only prevented from nailing Raum and Stolas because Raum put up some kind of magic shield. But because Blitz had no idea what the fuck that was, it spared him entirely.

Beyond, with his back to some sort of mechanical whirlygig, was Purson, looking like a figure made of living ink. Huddling behind one of his legs was the guy's spawn, fear clear on his face. But Purson almost wilted with relief when he saw that through that door were not a bunch of head-up-asses Angels, but in fact a pair of Goetia and a dashing imp.

"So there is some small luck left to me after all," Purson said. "Come inside quickly! If they find that door open, they will storm through!"

Raum put himself under the uninjured shoulder of Stolas and the two stooped and limped into the chamber, which looked somewhat like a lecture hall, only without seats or desks, just a weird construction that was shaped like a quarter-sphere, at its corner point resting that machine thing. There were other doors than the one that Blitz had come through, doors showing damage and bowing as they slowly surrendered to damage, and a weird copper sigil inlaid into the floor. Blitz gave a thought and swatted the big red button on the inside of the room, and let the door he'd come through slam shut just behind his tail.

"Stolas, you're hurt," Purson said.

"Many are hurt. Stella may be dead," Stolas said. Good riddance, though Blitz. She'd never failed to be an utter bitch to him. And frankly she'd been a bitch to Stolas as well, so fuck her for that, too.

"Where is Octavia?"

"Bunkering in Heaven, I pray," Stolas wheezed, then coughed hard, spraying golden blood onto the front of his shirt when he did. His face was overtaken with a rictus of pain for a moment, but then he rallied. "We will have to hold them here."

"Stella may surprise you," Purson mentioned. "She still has her wings."

"So do I. It won't help either of us," Stolas said.

"So should we start stacking shit against the doors, or what?" Blitz cut the two off before they got all in the reeds when there were literally Angels coming to kill them all.

"Right," Purson said, looking suitably chastised. He pointed to a door along the straight wall near the machine. "In there are spares. It wounds me to use such finely crafted things to make barricades, but better they be used thus than to have us all vaporized."

"Heavy expensive shit used for cheap-shit jobs. Got it," Blitz said, and threw the door open to find big plates of metal on wheel-trollies. He had to heave with all of his might to even get one started moving, and when he realized just how fucking heavy and dense these things were, he rejected his initial plan of building barricades at the doors, and instead opted to form a kill-box. Considering the ceilings at the doors were only nine feet up, there wasn't enough room for Angels to try tricky shit.

It was exhausting even getting four of those fuckers into position, but he had only gone back to get a fifth when there was a different kind of metal shrieking than what he'd heard going on at the doors to this room, this one not of metal resisting but of metal failing.

He looked over, and saw the metal being peeled away like second-rate edible lingerie, the kind that honestly left an aftertaste that got in the way of going down on somebody. And peeling that metal was that blond, beefy fucker with no shirt on. Only now, he had an angry brown bruise on one shoulder, and a few trickles of blood running down his pecs.

"Gabriel," Raum said in dread.

"Oi!" Blitz shouted, pulling out his Castigator once more. "Go fuck off and hunt somebody else's boyfriend you fuck!"

And then he shot both barrels at this Gabriel motherfucker. And though both hit him, they didn't seem to do anything at all, not even causing a ripple across his skin. They certainly didn't slow him down.

"I knew you were debauched, little Goetia, but to fornicate with one of those? Revolting," Gabriel said, sounding way too fucking erudite and pompous for somebody who looked like that. A guy that beefy was supposed to be bass and gravely. Fucking Angels, man…

He stormed in, an Angel racing around him to join him in the Kill Box, at which point Purson cast out a hand and said some funky words. Gabriel paused for a moment, dismay on his face, as he looked at the inky Goetia. The other Angel, who had been in the process of preparing to hurl a javelin, was intercepted by two bolts of Heavenly Artillery, one from each of Raum and Stolas.

The Angel burst into a golden mist, but the effort drove Stolas to collapse. Blitz shouted his name, turning his back on the Angels and putting himself in the way between that Gabriel bitch-bag and Stolas. Stolas had a glazed look on his face for a moment, confused and in pain, but then he gave his head a shake, and coherence came back.

"We need to…" he began, but broke off into coughing, as a breaking sound came from behind Blitz. He turned, and saw that Gabriel was walking past some shattered, near-transparent something or other, about to stomp up to Purson and do very anatomically unpleasant things to him.

"You earned this by treason. Next is your unholy spawn. And after that, your wife," Gabriel promised.

"You will do no such thing!" A woman's voice shouted from the door he'd ripped open. Coming in was a small Angel, her halo bearing tracks of black through it, and dragging in each hand the chunks of dead Angels. She hurled them ahead of herself, and despite her small stature and lack of intimidating features, even Blitz cottoned to that this was one bad bitch. "You will die before you lay a finger on my husband or my son!"

Ah, so that'd be Penemue. Blitz was terrible at names, when they were rich-people names. Give him a thousand poor-people names and he'd have 'em memorized in a heartbeat. Like Amy, or Vine.

No, it didn't occur to Blitz that those 'poor people names' belonged to actual Goetia. He was, in the end, not a smart imp.

She lashed out with some magic stuff, and Blitz found himself trying to shelter Stolas with his body, a laughable proposition because Stolas was a fuck-load bigger than Blitz was. But Gabriel had proven that his gun was pretty much bitch-useless here. So if being an impish shield was all he was meaningfully capable of, he'd fucking do it.

Blitz didn't like that Stolas had gotten hurt. It didn't sit right with him. It made him scared.

There was a bunch of more magic bullshit going on, but Blitz found himself turning concerned looks to his lover more than to the fray. Stolas was still trying to help. Whenever he had a deep breath in him, his face would tighten in concentration, and he would cast out a hand, doing some kind of mystical whatever at Gabriel, who had to just be over there and take it.

Stolas wasn't doing so great.

That thought kept trying to pound its way into Blitz's head, and he pointedly ignored every time it tried. He refused to grapple with the reality that Stolas was worse off in this fracas than Blitz was. His world view couldn't take it. There was a lash of something that he felt ruffle the back of his coat, a grim magic that would have ripped apart something that wasn't Blitz when it touched him, but his ignorance was his shield. And he would use that ignorance as a shield for Stolas, too.

He could feel Gabriel approaching, his footfalls rattling the floor. A glance over Blitz's shoulder showed that he was advancing even through the combined magical efforts of Purson, Penemue, Raum and Stolas trying to hold him at bay. In fact, the only people who weren't actively attacking the shirtless shit-heel were Blitz and the kid over there. And that kind of wounded Blitz's pride.

Well, never let it be said that Blitz was slave to good ideas. He growled and rushed at the big-guy, who was completely ignoring him, pulling his wing-knife from his other boot – he'd swapped boots when he got his leg replaced – and preparing to stab him in the thigh with it. But without even favoring the imp with a glance, Gabriel swatted Blitz with the back of his hand, sending him streaking into the wall hard enough to crater.

And again, Blitz's ignorance saved his life. He knew that getting hit would hurt, he wasn't that dumb, and the Remit wasn't that permissive. No, what he failed to understand, and thus was protected from, was just how fucking strong Gabriel was. That bitch-slap should have unraveled Blitz atom-from-atom. Instead, it merely left him sliding down a wall, with a crack in one of his horns that gave him an instant headache.

But whatever the big guy was about to do was interrupted when a circle of some kind built into the floor alit in front of him. Gabriel looked down, then darted back, just in time for a pillar of golden light to connect floor to ceiling. When the pillar ascended out of the room again, the ring on the floor was now a burn-mark, and at the circle's center was fourteen feet of metal and gadgetry, one that immediately fired a set of rocket-thrusters on its back and plowed into Gabriel, forcing him to stumble exactly two steps back.

"Dad! Where's Mum?" Stolas' kid's voice came from that machine.

"Octavia? No! Go away from here!" Stolas said, with panic and dread in his voice.

"It makes no difference to me. I was coming after you next," Gabriel said, cracking his knuckles, even as Blitz finally sucked in a breath of air and forced himself to his feet. But before anybody could do anything badass, horrifying, or deadly, there was a loud flapping of wings.

Standing hunched over in the room was now another Angel, this one armored to ridiculous levels, with his hand on Gabriel's shoulder. Blitz couldn't even see this new guy's face.

"Oh what is it now, Raguel?" Gabriel injected that name with a particular kind of bile that Blitz knew well as pettiness.

"The Demiurge is moving on the Plaza Beyond," Raguel said. That actually got Gabriel's derision to part like the lifting of smog in the afternoon.

"Finally making his move. Always when I'm about to have my fun," Gabriel said. Then, there was a robust flapping of wings, and both haloed figures vanished, leaving the Goetia and the imp in the room, but the sounds of battle approaching in a new wave.

"Dad? Dad your wound!" the machine charged over to Stolas.

"Barricade the doors," Raum interrupted her before she could encroach on where Stolas was sitting with his back against the wall, the Paradox Engine to his side. "More will come, and we'll need every edge we can get against them. You too, Proxy. That gun of yours might have been toothless against Gabriel, but it will more than prove itself against my former cousins."

"Sound's like music to my artificial ears," Blitz said. Was Stolas wheezing harder now? No. No, Blitz decided, simply not to think about it. He had something he could do to kill Angels. He'd focus on that, instead. Maybe ignorance would protect him from this, just like it protected him from magic, or a bitch-slap from Gabriel.

---

The first truly pleasant surprise that Moxxie got today was that when an Angel tried to charge down from the sky and destroy The Golden Manse, he impacted a wall as transparent as naked air and broke his own face. Only when the Angel hit it did it ignite to Moxxie's new eyes, revealing what had been quietly waiting for years since Moxxie and Millie had essentially squatted their way into ownership of the former Proxy of Lucifer's manor. The whole thing was warded with some form of magic that even Moxxie barely understood, a kind of Old Magic, that essentially refused Angels passage. It hadn't tripped for the Exorcists, because Exorcists weren't Angels. Now, though, when another Angel cast down a hand and hurled a tree-trunk sized beam of Heavenly Artillery at Moxxie and Millie and Beatrice's home, it deflected back and almost took out one of the Angels hovering near the one who'd attacked.

So in a word, through circumstances that Moxxie hadn't put into place but would certainly take advantage of, he had at least a moment to prepare himself and Millie.

In one arm, Moxxie had Beatrice; in his other, he held the hand of Lyve. Since Barb relapsed because of that assault on her mind – something that Moxxie frankly couldn't fault her for, considering it was bad enough to Moxxie and he was neither a deeply-traumatized former-sex-cultist nor a substance abuser – Lyve had been living with Moxxie and Millie. There was no way they were letting Lyve fall back into The System.

Of course, that meant that there was one more imp in jeopardy today. It didn't change the math of Moxxie's fears much. Millie was about to pop, and if circumstances were as darkly comedic as they tended to be when Moxxie was involved, she'd likely enter labor in the next few minutes and then fall unconscious during the worst of the Angelic push.

"Moxx, yer givin' me that look again," Millie said, rolling Zahm in her hands, uncaring that she was as pregnant as imps could possibly get while carrying a battleaxe that filled her with incandescent rage.

"You should go with Tilla and the others…" Moxxie began, trying one last time to convince her. But she rebuked him without saying a word. Just a stubborn expression, her eyes growing narrow and her fists clenching the axe that she had made magical tightly in her fists. "Okay. Okay you won't. But still, we don't know how long until that barrier comes down. I've never seen its like."

"So cut open a little bit, and kill the angels as they trickle in," she offered.

"Yeah!" Lyve said brightly.

"That's too risky!" Moxxie said, releasing Lyve's hand to pull his bride close. Beatrice, not understanding the whole of the situation but clearly aware that her parents were afraid, tried to hug them both when they were close together. The gesture warmed Moxxie's heart, even as there was another dull gong-sound outside. The Angels were still intent on ridding Hell of its magical paragons. They would not rest until they either succeeded, or perished.

A look between husband and wife, between the two imps who had sworn the 37 Oaths, between those two tines of the tuning fork that sang the harmony of black blood, change and unchange, affirmed to Moxxie that he would allow the Angels only the latter of those two options today.

He released his wife and leaned down to Lyve, putting Beatrice down on the floor. "Lyve, I need you to go downstairs. There's a room with a big metal ball up on stilts. Go in behind that, and wait for us to come and get you. Can you do that?" Moxxie asked. That room was probably the safest in the manor, if not the entire district. Considering what Moxxie had figured out about it, he reckoned that anybody hiding inside or behind that thing may as well be cradled in the palm of Satan.

Lyve gave a nod. "C'mon, Bibi!" he said, taking Bea's hand and pulling her as fast as his little legs would take him toward the stairs down. That gave Moxxie just a moment to puff out a breath. He looked to Millie again, and ran over literally everything he knew about anything, about killing, about Magic, about politics, about Angels, in his mind, combing his own memories for anything that might be a magic bullet that could give them an edge. It took mental hours. He found nothing in the second he allotted himself.

"For the li'l'uns," Millie said, shifting her grasp of Zahm.

"For all of us," Moxxie answered. And then he opened the door, reaching through a portal to grab the Blessing Tip from IMP's armory and the one magazine of Angel Steel rounds they kept near it. There was increasingly more and more of that metal in Hell every day, as fixtures abandoned by Heaven were brought down and melted down, driving down the price for the stuff even as the rate at which Hell used it drove the price back up. It wasn't many bullets. Maybe it'd be enough.

And when Angel Steel failed, he still had his magic, and Millie's raw, physical power.

There was a crack, as one of the Angels finally managed to breach the barrier that had been denying them, a harrowing blow that sent spider-cracks across the naked sky. One crack reached downward, forking just before reaching the ground, and Moxxie saw only through his magic eyes that an otherwise invisible chunk of something fell out of place. The Angels didn't take long to find it. And since it was on the far side of the garden wall, all Moxxie could do was tell Millie where they'd be coming through, and start running.

Even six months pregnant and a sneeze away from labor, she reached the wall like a cannon-shot, kicking the wall down so hard that it exploded and pelted the Angels who were descending to use the breach that they'd created by sheer accident with flying bricks and debris. It didn't slow them down long. They were armored for war. A part of Moxxie was at least a little proud that, if his count was accurate, the Heavenly hit-squad sent to kill him counted between 40 and 50, with more appearing by the minute. It spoke to how much his reputation as a Willworker had grown in the six years he'd been capable of even doing it. One of the fumbling Angels finally found the edge of the barrier, and pushed in.

Moxxie sent a .450 Magnum-sized round of Angel Steel through the eye-slit of his helm for the audacity of him. Sure, the slit peeled some of the round off, but enough of it went in to number that Angel's 'remaining days of living' at zero.

The next one through caught the first by the back of his gorget before he could collapse, and strode in using the armored body as a carcass-shield. And since that precluded Moxxie being able to kill that thing easily, he did something daring, and flicked his hand in a circle, creating a tiny portal behind the intruder, firing at that instead. The round raced out with a calamitous bang-and-snap as it shot through the portal, changing its directional-vector without having to sacrifice any speed whatsoever, driving itself after that 'deflection' into the unarmored section at the back of the new one's knee.

The angel let out a scream – sounding oddly female, considering the masculinity of the armor it was wearing – and dropped the carcass, just in time for Millie to launch herself forward, and with a brutal, downward strike, crush the helm of the second Angel to a burst of golden blood, before she ripped sideways and tore off part of the helm and revealed that she'd gotten Zahm just about perfectly half-way into the Angel's skull. With her swipe, she'd cut the Angel like a cake now missing a grisly slice.

The others landed, and sent out a barrage of golden quarrels at the two of them. Some, which had been aimed wide, hit the still standing transparent barrier and shattered harmlessly. The rest whistled through, and Moxxie found himself hitting the deck so that they would race over his horns instead of turn him into an impish pincushion. Millie, though? She didn't need to dodge. She spun Zahm in her hands, and it turned so quickly that it sounded like a propeller, looking to all who had less able eyes than Moxxie like she'd somehow summoned a circular wall in front of her that knocked all of the bolts away before they could hit her.

There was another tremendous crunch, the transparent barrier losing that adjective and becoming plain to see even to Millie; it was now festooned with reaching cracks along all sides and crown, and chunks of it were beginning to shift loose. Not man-sized chunks, but enough that Moxxie actually had to turn the Blessing Tip and give the Angel who was about to bushwack him from on-high an impetus to try something else.

"The barrier's coming down!" Moxxie shouted, getting to his feet, even as Millie was now in the knot of Angels outside of it, depriving them of legs and arms and in only one case a head. Unlike humans or other more unusual beasts, the Angels seemed to have a sense of self-preservation. Once they lost a limb, they typically vanished from the fight, leaving their limbs behind. Millie was only out there for about three seconds, before there was a fresh blur, and she appeared at Moxxie's side, glaring at the hole as she tried to ward him backward protectively.

"We can't let 'em into the house!" Millie snarled, her protective rage at a point of incandescence. Moxxie felt a twist in the air, a Doppler rush of something approaching at high speed from behind. He grabbed Millie and yanked, turning her so that she could see it as it approached; a pair of Angels almost managed to spear Moxxie's head even with his increased speed and near-zero reaction time, but Millie took that affront to the safety of her man as she did with all insults. Violently.

She was pressing forward then, even as Moxxie regained his footing and hurled a hand back, forming a prismatic wall at the first hole that had been cut, then twisting his hand and speaking words of torture and imbuing that barrier with a Pain Elemental, making it a most intimidating roiling wall of grey. That gave the Angels in that direction a moment of pause, as Moxxie tried to give Millie support, to shoot one of the Angels coming for them. But these ones, women-Angels both, wore outfits like Exorcists, albeit darker in hue and stained with crimson blood. He snapped a shot at one of them, and the Angel deflected it away without turning her attention off of Millie, who was occupying most of their efforts trying to cut their way into the twirling wall of wood, steel, and rage-magic that Zahm manifested.

Another crunch, and another chunk fell out of the barrier, an Angel squeezing in and flapping his wings hard, launching himself directly at Moxxie. He cast out a hand, Darkning racing up to hit the Angel, but this one made some sort of gesture with one hand and outright caught the Thaumaturgical lightning, before hurling it away behind him like a wadded up newspaper. He flexed his hands, and then cast them down with golden light, Heavenly Artillery launching to scour Moxxie, Millie, and the two Angels she was fighting, all off the face of Hell without discrimination.

Moxxie, though, very much didn't want to be wiped of the face of Hell, so he flexed his will and formed a magical barrier, one that stood as though air to physical things but was made to withstand magic absolutely. More than that, he didn't just create a wall; walls, when applied with powerful forces on unsupported reaches, were burst through. What Moxxie did was turn it into a dome, so that when the Heavenly Artillery hit, it was deflected down and into ground, or else up and into the barrier above, whereupon it deflected and knocked down the ceiling of that disused slave-quarters that Moxxie had never gotten around to turning into a guest-house.

The Angel swept lower, even as Moxxie allowed the first barrier to fade, and Moxxie felt more than saw Angelsong manifesting additional golden warriors, ones that raced down in suicide plunges trying to nail Moxxie to the ground with their spears. Moxxie had to move with all of the alacrity that he'd ever managed to wring out of his body to avoid them; it was like having to dance between the bullets of an active shooting gallery.

Millie was still holding her own, pregnancy be damned, against two of them doing their best to kill her by any means possible. But Moxxie wasn't about to let so much one Angel into that building where his daughter and Blitz's nephew were hiding. Not even one. He formed a triangle with his hands, and spoke the words that called forth the gamma-radiation-laser, which at last hit a telling blow against the Angel, causing him to fall to the ground with one wing bearing a head-sized hole in it. He didn't land in a pile, though. Almost as though he'd expected to be shot down, he landed already spinning into a lunge with his sword; Moxxie, already off balance from dodging the Song Warriors, could only flop to the floor to avoid this strike, and that would necessarily leave him wide open for the next one.

Get hit now, or get hit an eight of a second from now. Not good options either way.

Of course, he didn't just fall there and take it. He made his mind race faster, trying to find a way out of this that didn't involve impalement. The only one allowed to penetrate him these days was Millie. And though that was a pleasant thought for a moment, it didn't free Moxxie from the now glacially approaching sword that was trying to spit him like a skinned hog. There was something he was missing.

And then he realized what it was. A bit of trust, and two words.

Come Running.

He didn't even speak them, merely thought them 'hard' enough, and interfaced with Naked Law in a way that otherwise only the Litigator Demons could. Sending out a signal to any who could hear it, any who would connect to it, that he needed immediate aid.

Before the sword even had a chance to hit him, the Angel was sent crashing to the ground after intercepting a Hellhound's fist with his cheek, an impact so hard that it crumpled the helmet and left distinct knuckle-marks in the steel. One instant Moxxie and the Angel trying to stab him were alone. And the next, Maelstrom was there, already mid-punch, as though knowing exactly what that call meant and how to best exploit it.

Maelstrom didn't say a word, instantly leaning aside from a thrust that tried to skewer his face and catching the arm of the Angel who tried it, before hurling her with crater-forming force into the ground, then planting his foot on the woman's armpit and ripping the arm off like the Angel were a doll.

The Angel shrieked in horror and pain, then vanished, leaving her arm, golden and bloody, in Maelstrom's grasp, which he promptly hurled at the Angel trying to stand up with his fist-dented helm, shocking and terrifying the Angel while Moxxie aimed for the nearest unarmored part of him, his wing spur, and fired. There was a sickening crunch as the wing was blown off, landing in a shattered pile amongst white feathers and golden blood, and the Angel immediately fell to his knees, vomit pouring out from the visor of his helm. Maelstrom needed no instruction to grab that helm and wrench backward, tearing the angel's head off, which he then threw aside.

"Finally," Maelstrom said. "I was wondering where they all were. I half thought we got the Hounds panicked over nothing!"

There was another crack, one that fell in the background of Milly managing to disarm one of her attackers with Zahm and have him promptly Transit and regain his footing out of axe-range. She spun, looking, surprised, at Maelstrom. "Where'd you come from?"

"They're at Dennys, obviously," Maelstrom ignored Millie's question, and Moxxie nodded, swinging his arm wide and opening as wide a portal as he was able, linking the stoop of the Golden Manse to the parking lot of Dennys. And through it, he saw a bunch of Hellhounds, all carrying rifles, being led by a grizzled old Schnauzer of a Hound.

"Let 'em have it!" Mordecai Shrapnel announced, and the Angels who had been preparing to charge instead called up shields or shifted those shields they actually carried to defend themselves from a barrage. Unlike Exorcists, Angels could feel pain, and sufficient quantities of lead were a very painful thing.

"Well, are you just gonna float up there? Or are you going to join the fun?" Maelstrom outright mocked the Angels trying to shield themselves from their ballistic onslaught. It was so strange, seeing Maelstrom finally grinning like a mad fool, surrounded by Angels who wanted him and anything like him dead. A part of Moxxie considered perhaps that Maelstrom had finally snapped and gone insane. He'd certainly had enough trauma over a long enough time for it to add up. But a glance back saw that same mad grin on Shrapnel as well. And the Angels, those closest to Maelstrom? They finally, finally, looked afraid.

"We're down forty in five minutes against two imps," Moxxie was able to pick out with his now peerless hearing, "and now they've got The Black Beast with them? Fuuuuck this, just call Gabriel to deal with him!"

A few of the Angels outright vanished, then, their morale broken. But that still left another twenty odd now looking very unhappy about their chances, while Moxxie now felt very much better about his own. Maelstrom laughed, as Loona stepped through the portal with a Pulse Gun in her hands.

"Knock those cocksuckers out of my sky!" she shouted, and then the skies over High Central became lead, terror, and spraying golden blood.

---

The fight was mortifying in its intensity. She'd only ever fought a handful of Exorcists, and had never taken into the field in her Gyrfalcon before against her distant cousins the Angels. For years, she had been safely far, far behind the lines, dealing with problems of economy and procurement. And all of those years of middling-at-best martial training were only somewhat remedied by Mum stepping in to take a more active hand in Octavia's soldierly development.

If only she'd had more time.

There was a noise in her ear and a warning in her peripheral vision that the armor was beginning to ablate as Octavia stood at the doorway to the Paradox Engine's chamber, trying to keep the Angels who were massing and ebbing like storm-waves on a beach, sometimes pressing her until she was back into the room with Dad and the others, other times withdrawing as though thinking better of their chances against other targets.

She knew she was only playing a small part in this. One soldier in respectable panoply was only a speed-bump. But she was a speed-bump before the brick wall that was four Hexbreakers. She wagered that this was probably the best defended room in all of Mum's palace at this point. That, though, got Octavia to ignore considerations that Mum might already be dead out there, and face the fact that she was having to tilt and tuck her arm to prevent a blizzard of golden crossbow quarrels from ripping into and destroying something that would be rather fatal to her prospects of surviving the day if it was hit.

As soon as the assault ebbed, she sent out just a tentative 'vurp' of flame from her cannon, not sending the Infernal Talc with this shot, simply forcing the Angels to keep their distance so that they didn't join the other burned things in this hallway. There was only one corpse that she could claim as her own, an Angel who had tried to take advantage of a weakness that she let him think she had, only to ram backwards when he tried to stab her through her heat-vents, and crush him against the wall. He still fought back after that, so she set his ass on fire. That finally stopped the Angel. These new group of chucklefucks were more careful, though. It was clear they had ranged out how far her flame-cannon could actually fire, and made sure not to toe that line very hard.

"Dad! Are you still okay back there?" she shouted, not turning over her shoulder because there wasn't need of it. With her augmented displays, she could see that he was still sitting against a wall, his shoulders slumped forward with the red dickhead protectively standing in front of him with a big fucking gun in his hands.

"Just fine, Via," Dad said, his voice thin and reedy. "Just need to catch my breath."

She didn't have time to fret over him, though. These fuckers at the end of the hall needed to be pushed back, to give her some breathing room. After all, this was only one of four hallways that reached the Engine Room. And if she spent all of her time on this one, the others would get overwhelmed, and their doors torn down.

She feinted a charge, which the Angels didn't respond to. She'd been goading them for a while, now, keeping them off balance, unsure of which attempts were her trying to spook them, and which would see her actually launch forward. They knew her range and stayed outside of it, but she was still entirely in theirs. She needed to do this just right, and doubted she could. It was Seviathan's trick, one that she could only replicate one time in three. That heedless burst of speed, sending sparks flying when the feet ground against the floor under them. But she had no choice. To get them to back off, she needed to suddenly close before they could retreat.

So she hit the thrusters on her back, and was sent rocketing forward just as abruptly as a feint, only this time with much more weight and meaning behind it. She held out one hand, guiding herself along one wall as her feet returned to the ground and began to tear ruts in it, just as her fingers tore up the paneling of the wall. In all, it was a paltry jump, only moving thirty meters, but doing it in a moment, and then she sighted for maximum range, cycled over to IT blast, and fired a horrifying green flame that the Angels had to either Transit away, or be consumed down to their fundament under.

Finally, as her brain tried to comprehend why this hallway always had no flooring and a weird pit in the middle of it, she heard a tormented shriek of metal, not coming from beside her as architecture would dictate but from directly behind her. That sound was from one of the other doors being ripped open, and the paths that connected the Engine Room to the rest of the building were not ones that obeyed the laws of Euclidean geometry. She turned and rampaged back whence she'd come, having to duck awkwardly under the door to return. Other angels would come to this spot, but she wasn't about to leave Dad to the lack-of-mercies that the Angels of Heaven had.

She slammed her fist into the ground, sliding back into the Engine Room going sideways, tearing ruts as she came, and the instant that something passed the threshold she was facing, she unleashed an ungodly blast of horrifying, mind-twisting green flame. She thought she hit somebody, was sure there had been an angel there a moment ago, but her eyes and her memories conflicted as to whether there was a target. Oddly, the flames lapped languidly on the floor, refusing to eat through it like they would with literally any other substance. Regardless, she hit the thrusters on her back again, and raced forward, again turning to cut ruts into the floor and skid to a halt in front of the newly opened path. There were Angels there, who were recoiling as though in horror, and when she made herself plain as their present doom, two of the five outright fucked off, Transiting away.

It was another lesson that, in retrospect, Octavia had put off 'too long', learning from Gadreel or Yeqon how to use her angelic heritage to teleport. Of those Ars Goetia still in hell, there were precious few who even could, and though that number included her mother, Stella Goetia was a warrior first and an educator a distant thirtieth. Still she flicked over her IT Blaster and released a terrible blast of it.

Only the flames turned from green to blue after only half a second of blast, an alarm buzzer sounding that she'd already run through her entire supply of Infernal Talc. This thing didn't hold very much, because it was literally the most dangerous substance in the universe to carry around. It was far safer to run out before you needed it than to have it explode and erase you from time, a rare case where prudence won out over deadliness in weapons-design. It didn't dissuade her from bathing one of them with the now-blue fire and causing him to shriek, tumble, and then Transit away. The other two, avoiding the hole that now had always been in the floor, launched themselves at her.

The impact of the two of them drove her skidding back, but didn't knock her off of her balance. In that, she could only thank Mum for her tutelage. While being brought to the floor would be bad for her, the armor still gave her options that would get out of a deadly bind. Still better to not end up on the ground at all, though. She twisted at the hips and hurled, throwing one of the Angels off and causing him to slam loudly into a wall. He fell, only to have a golden beam race out from Dad and tag him, pounding the Angel into the wall and smearing him along its length until the unlucky fucker hit the room's outer corner near door 1 and was burst to bits. It still left one of them struggling against her armor's power assist and trying to get the point of his glowing white sword into the thin gap between the plates of the shoulder and chest piece. She snarled, and rooted her feet, squatting low for a moment, giving the Angel a bit more purchase, but giving herself a lot more. Then, with a massive heave, she lifted the Angel off of his feet and power-slammed him to the floor, before stomping hard at his head. The Angel wasn't stunned long enough for her stomp to land, though; he rolled to the edge of the hallway and vanished, leaving her to pound a crack into the floor.

Then she immediately felt herself be rocked by an impact coming from door three. Those shit-brains were already back into position. She turned to stomp toward them, but even as she moved toward the wood-paneled hallway that lead to the Palace Proper, she saw other Angels sweep into the utilitarian concrete of the hallway that lead to Electrical Capacity. She glanced between the two, trying to gauge which was the bigger threat, requiring her more specific attention.

The answer came as one of them down the Palace Proper path hefted a thick recoilless rifle onto his shoulder and fired.

Dodging out of the way would have been elementary, something she could have done in her sleep. But there was a problem with that. Her dad was trying to keep himself from bleeding to death behind her. And having to deal with a three inch shell bursting in your face tended to get in the way of that heady endeavor. So she did something that this armor was not rated for; she got in the way deliberately.

The impact knocked her clean off of her feet, the alarms of her armor warning her that the armor on her pelvis was badly compromised, and that there was a fault with the leg actuator. She snarled, and forced herself up, dragging down a javelin from the dispenser that was built into the shoulder opposite the Hell Blaster and hurling it back at the asshole who'd put her on her ass. She missed, because she only had a rudimentary education on thrown-weapons, entirely because she had not seen any value in pursuing it. What was the point of a javelin when a laser can do more damage and hits at the speed of light itself?

Yet another failure of forethought on her part, watching how the Angel simply leaned aside and let the Javelin streak past and then embed itself into the wooden paneling of the walls.

Dad was standing now, though he looked grim indeed; he was sagging on the side that leaked golden blood with every breath, and a terrifying amount of it leaked from his mouth as he wheezed, but his red eyes still trained on the dipshits in Hallway 2, doing magic shit at them with Raum and Penemue moving up to support him.

The imp flinched, then pointed his gun at Octavia. Octavia not being an idiot, moved out of the way and let him shoot at the Angel down the wooden path with is big fucking gun; he actually hit the Angel over there with his recoil-less rifle, the impact of the bullet tearing off the shit-licker's arm. With a scream of pain he fell to the floor in shock, leaving Blitz to fire at the next one, who had been in the process of quickly reloading the tube. That one simply dove toward the ground, only to have the bullet clip his Halo and tear a chunk out of it. His own screams were worse even than the ones who Octavia had burned to death. Another Angel looked about ready to vomit, looking at the poor bastard that Dad's boy-toy winged, before grabbing the back of the guy's armor and the two of them vanishing.

She didn't even have a moment to breathe in, to accept that for a moment Hallway 3 was empty, before Door 4 bowed in significantly, the metal gonging as tremendous force had been smashed into it. Well fuck. So those Angels had managed to somehow find three of the four passages scattered randomly throughout the Palace of Iron that led to the Engine Room. This was just an encapsulation of her luck; either bad, or none. And it was choosing now to be especially bad.

Octavia backpeddled, beholding after the duck as her parallax allowed that the four Hexbreakers (minus Purson who was standing back near the engine with his boy) were engaged with an Angel woman without armor, wearing what seemed a slinky dress. The red dickhead tried shooting her, but the bullets just vanished before they could reach her, even if they were made of Angel Steel. The others were working to their utmost, and straining on their tasks which were invisible to Octavia but clearly demanding much from all of them, just to match this one woman.

"Ah, well that's something I haven't seen in a while," a familiar voice came from that Angel woman, which instantly made Octavia's blood seethe.

"I see you're still a massive cunt, Strigoi," Octavia snapped at her, tearing a new javelin from its place on her shoulder as means of threat. Now that she had a face to match with a voice, she hated her even more. Who the fuck said Angels were allowed to be that hot? That was bullshit, is what it was. "Go fuck off back to the gutter your mother shit you into!" Octavia profaned.

"How uneducated you are. I was hand-crafted by God. You were an accident made by that one's," she gestured impudently at her wounded father, "sad little dick."

"Spoken like a whore who never got a chance to see it! Ha!" the imp laughed at her, then pulled out a grenade, ripping the pin out with is teeth and hurling it at her. She wafted, and the arc of the grenade was abruptly intercepted and swept up to one corner of the concrete path she was moving through; it even tried to detonate, but the pressure she held it up there caused it instead to flash over into a ball of snap-fusion as the pressures involved accidentally enabled the iron to fuse down into lead, leaving only chunks of black metal to tinkle down to the ground when she released the ward.

But Octavia put Strigoi out of her mind, allowing Dad's boy-toy to lambast and insult her as she returned her attention to Door Four just in time to see it tear open. She hurled the javelin she had, which caused the Angel who had been about to kick his way through what remained of the bulkhead and enter the Engine Room to duck back, for even just a moment, which was enough time for Purson to realize that they were now 75% naked to outside aggression.

"Where the fuck are you, Seviathan!" she shouted in her armor.

"A bit busy, Duchess!" Seviathan's broadcasted voice sounded strained and distracted. "Apparently Heaven remembers that the Von Eldritch Family used to have a bunch of mages, and sent some Angels to kill us!"

"I need you here!" Octavia snapped.

"And I'd prefer to not bury my parents and sister today! I'll get to you when I can!" Seviathan snapped back, before cutting the feed. So that was her most promising backup essentially left to wither on the vine. She knew that of the two of them, despite Octavia's much-longer practice in the Gyrfalcon, it was he who was the master of its use. With just Octavia, Seviathan, Purson and Penemue, they could have stood against these Heavenly fuckers essentially forever.

But that wasn't the Hell that she had to live with. She had to deal with the fact that the door which had been peeled and breached was now cut and launched at her. She rooted one food back and braced, slapping the four inch thick plate of steel away as it slammed into her, leaving it to crash into the wall closer to Raum than she would have preferred. The Angels there were not all heavily armored thugs, which actually made Octavia more concerned. She could out-fight a thug. She couldn't out-magic a mage, and that was what those robe-wearing Angels made no attempt at hiding that they were. They flared out their hands, and the armor let out a wail of alarm calls, as suddenly the feet were driven into the floor and the actuators strained to suddenly support fourteen tonnes of weight.

Then twenty one.

Then thirty.

For once, she was glad that those hucksters had so desperately overbuilt this thing. Even as the Angel Magic so increased the drag of weight on her, to many times that of the gravity of Hell, the armor didn't collapse and rip her apart as it formed a very small, very flat pool. No, these actuators and the myomers powering them were rated for seventy five tonnes of dead lift. It didn't allow her to actually walk, though; that would likely break her already damaged hip motors. And that would be a fatal mistake to make. So she grit her teeth, allowing the structure of the armor she was in to compress her legs to an agonizing degree, forcing the blood up and out of them and back into her torso where it could be sent through her heart and keep her from GILOC.

The others who were with that mage advanced into the room, no doubt concerned that the mage hadn't killed her, but still attempting to put pressure on the others. And Octavia wasn't about to just let that shit slide. She locked target on the nearest Angel, and sent out a wave from her Hell Blaster. Now no longer sending out Talc, the stream of ungodly heat was almost untouched by the insistent grasp of gravity, splashing the nearest Angel with almost invisible blue flame. The instant it hit him, he shrieked and tried to Transit, only for a dull thud sound to echo in the room, followed by him falling to the ground and expiring on fire.

That mage recoiled in shock for just a moment, eyes on the dying comrade she'd carbonized, and then he redoubled his efforts on Octavia. Thirty five effective tonnes of weight. Forty. One of the Mage's comrades hurled a javelin, one with a tip of Angel Steel, at her armor, only to have it immediately veer downward as it approached her and slam into the floor. She didn't doubt that the Angel felt in that moment like an idiot. Doubly so because it landed close enough for Octavia to grab it.

She knew she couldn't effectively throw it back. It was taking all of the grit she had and of the level of craft imparted onto this machine to even just remain standing. But she nevertheless telegraphed that she was going to hurl this bitch at the Mage. And that got a look of shock, then panic into the face of him, and he suddenly dropped his gravity-attack and spun up a weave of a more defensive measure. She didn't throw this javelin at him, instead picking a closer, easier target, one of the Mage's 'bodyguards'. It hit him, but he'd gotten his shield up and in the way, so that it pounded first through his defensive bulwark, then through his arm that it was strapped-to, before finally digging as much as it remained able into his flesh. One of his fellows dragged him back, out of the Engine Room, where he was able to Transit safely.

Octavia didn't have the wherewithal nor the time to glance how the others were doing. She knew from the noise that the group was now being attacked by all three open corridors, but she was doing all she could to hold this line here. The others would have to do what they could, while she did what she could.

There was nothing else to do but fight. So fight she did. With the Mage on the defensive, she blasted the bodyguards with flame, seeing how they sacrificed shields or hauled up the bodies of the dead to ward themselves from her attacks. It was almost Hell-like in their effectiveness; ugly but not entirely worthless. And not how the Angels of Heaven had been willing to fight this time five years ago. She stormed forward, unable to sense how a shining silver halo had ignited above her head, one that pushed the shadows of the fight away from her and gave her enemies pause.

She would not know that they looked upon this halo of an enemy aligned to the pit and saw none of what they would consider 'corruption', none of the touch of the Abyss corrupting and weakening it. She would not know that the time in Hell that her father and mother, and in fact all of her Uncles and Aunts had endured had taken a literal, magical toll on their ability to manifest their Angelic powers to their highest potential. She would not know that when they looked upon her halo, they saw no corruption, no weakness. Just purity, of a sort that the Angels had presumed that they held a monopoly upon, and that from that purity naturally came power.

And she especially wouldn't know that she was showing them exactly what her power was. It wasn't flashy like Dad's magic, or obvious like Mum's ability to bypass protections. It was shown not in grand displays or feats otherwise impossible. It showed itself in her doing what she had trained to do. It showed in all the things she'd put the work in.

She was moving forward now, ignoring the damage warnings her suit was yelling at her and advancing on the fuckers who were trying to hurt her dad. And they were retreating, clearly seeing her as something of an existential threat. The Mage had moved from panic to utter dread, watching as the mechanical panoply stormed toward him. He glanced at the others, shouting something at them that Octavia didn't care enough to hear. Then, even as she swatted away an attempt by one of the bodyguards to strike her with a burning sword, the Mage bitched out and fled. A moment later, the bodyguards did likewise, leaving her alone in the hallway.

"Penemue! Beware!" Purson shouted. Again, Octavia didn't need to glance over her shoulder, for her armor did that for her. She instead turned and rocketted back, this time almost tripping over the pre-existing ruts in the floor but having the training required to keep her footing even as she beheld that Mage now pressing forward out of Strigoi's passage. He hadn't fled. He'd relocated. And the Hexbreakers who had been holding Strigoi at bay now found themselves only barely able to keep their heads above water. Octavia began to lurch into a sprint, to just grab that fucker and rip his head off. But before she got up to speed, Strigoi snarled an inarticulate insult at the imp (because the Red Dickhead had not, at any point, stopped insulting her in frankly creative and enlightening ways). Then she cast her arms wide, and a beam of Heavenly Artillery as thick around as a temple-column raced out, slamming into the imp.

Even as Octavia was about to consign Dad's lover to 'evaporated', she saw him fly off of the beam and smash into the wall, which clearly knocked the wind out of him. But it should have, as mentioned, evaporated him. Reduced him to a fine, black mist. It was only in that moment that she understood the shape of Lucifer's remit on the Imp. Of Solipsistic Wellbeing. The Red Dickhead knew that Heavenly Artillery was an attack, but not how bad of one it'd be. So the remit more protected him than didn't.

She had just launched herself into a brutal tackle at Strigoi when the beam raked the wall and then swept over to clip the Paradox Engine, causing the room to immediately shake and rumble. Octavia almost reached Strigoi when the other mage forced her back and out of Octavia's way. Well, one mage was as good as another to her; she heaved with all of the might that her suit gave her, and ripped the Mage apart from shoulder to groin.

But then the suction started.

The Angels all stopped, grabbing onto the ruts in the wall and floor, while the Goetia had to cast magics to hold themselves in place. Octavia could see that the Paradox Engine was doing… something. Something bad, something terrible. The Red Dickhead almost got dragged into the whirling, crashing, sparking machine, only to arrest himself by jabbing his big fucking gun into a nook along the floor used for testing aparatus, wedging it in, then clinging to that gun like a chunk of flotsam after a shipwreck.

Purson and Tabris, who had been standing next to the engine when it was struck, had it the worst.

Purson fought hard, his fingers tearing open and staining the floor with golden blood as he scrabbled to hold himself in place, while his other had was clamped around Tabris' forearm. The youngest Goetia in the room was outright being lifted off of the floor, his feet mere centimeters from the whirling, crashing machinery as its malign gravity demanded they fall in. Octavia had the advantage of weight. She started to run toward the King of Secrets, but before she made it three steps, his foot was pulled from the paltry purchase it had, leaving him likewise dragged off of the ground and holding onto the floor by two fingertips.

Penemue cast out her arm, trying to launch some sort of spell to save her husband and her son.

But lost under the noise of the fighting and the panicking, there was the sound of Purson's fingertips ripping clean off. And both he and Tabris flew back and into the machine. But they weren't blended into a splat of golden blood like Octavia had dreaded. No, they just vanished entirely the instant they touched the metal. And Penemue staggered forward, shrieking in horror and loss.

There was a loud, metal clunk as the light twisted sideways in the room, all hues bending as though transposing along the color wheel, and Octavia instantly found herself falling, but the gyroscope in her suit dragged her feet under her before she reached the wall which had suddenly become the floor. The Red Dickhead, Dad, and Raum started that plummet, but there was another thud, and then Octavia dropped a second time before she even had a chance to really cogitate on standing on a wall, landing on her side on the floor. The room became black beyond blackness. The room let out a shriek.

Then, the madness stopped. She pushed herself up, just in time to see the Red Dickhead shoot an Angel in the back of the head with his big fucking gun which had its barrel rupture at its tip from the stress it'd survived. The corpse was slowly pulled along the floor by the now much lesser suction of the Paradox Engine, slowly creating a golden streak past where Penemue was now down on her knees, weeping helplessly as she looked upon the machine which consumed all of the hope of her life.

Damn it all, was this all going to be on her and the imp to keep everybody alive? She snarled and sprinted forward, shoulder-bashing an Angel who had been in the room but didn't drop to a place where the imp could kill him so that he went flying into Strigoi. The two Angels went down in a stunned pile, while Octavia herself grabbed the flexed, warped edges of the bulkhead and shoved hard, pushing them out of the Engine Room. Then, she went over to the panel on the side, grateful that she'd actually read the manual Purson gave her on how this thing worked. She threw the thing open, and picked one of the five levers and swung it down. There was another loud, metal bang, and Strigoi and the Angels beyond her vanished as Door Two no longer connected to that concrete passageway, instead opening to a hallway that looked like it lead to the mess-hall for the soldiers' barracks.

That bought them minutes, at best, and was a trick that would only work once.

She backed up, glaring at the other doors, and the Angels who were withdrawing in alarm but not to the point of Transiting away. When they did, she'd Change those paths, too.

"Never fuckin' easy, is it, kid?" the Red Dickhead asked, reloading his gun, while Dad coughed again and had more golden blood coat his chin and the front of his shirt.

"If it was, this wouldn't be Hell," Octavia found herself agreeing with him, despite how much she disliked him. So she took a breath, steadied her feet, and faced the wave which would crash against their shore again soon enough, keeping the wailing Penemue behind them, the bleeding Raum at their side, and little hope of them surviving the next quarter hour.

---

There were few places Gabriel liked to be less than the Plaza Beyond. It was a place which reeked of powers not intended for the hands of the weak-willed and biddable, terrible things, things that the Father should have simply thrown away long ago. But God had refused to dispose of these things two eons ago when asked, and reiterated his refusal an eon later when Lucifer proved himself a traitor. God obviously had some plan for them, one he simply hadn't revealed to Gabriel yet.

Oh, it annoyed him that likely Michael and even that milksop Raguel had been told first, and were now lording it over Gabriel in that they knew the shape of the future more than he did. Well who, of the lot of them, was tasked with ending the Mortal World in Armageddon and seeing the righteous gathered up into the bosom of Heaven, and casting all the rest into the fires of perdition? Gabriel! Gabriel is who! It rankled that he was left so out of the loop on so critical a part of God's ploy. And more than that, because he had been left out, now he had to find out what the fucking Demiurge wanted with them.

Walking the Plaza Beyond was a disorienting experience. None of the directions one walked made perfect sense. One could walk one direction in a straight line and find themselves doing a meandering circuit of the Plaza and ending up right where they started. Objects and kiosks that appeared nearby were often far and hard to reach, while often enough one could blunder into the side of something that was otherwise invisibly over the too-close horizon. And Transiting? Once you were inside the Plaza itself? Don't even fucking try it.

Not to say Gabriel hadn't tried it. It just left him embedded into the superstructure of Cloud Humility, which might have killed him if he were not Gabriel.

There was a metal snap, and a figure appeared out on the edges of Gabriel's vision. He stormed toward it, calling Revelator into his hand, but as he stomped toward the figure, which even now was moving into the Plaza despite him, he found that figure grow further away. And while Gabriel wasn't an Archangel of particularly deep thoughts, he at least recognized when something wasn't working. He immediately started walking backwards, and grinning as doing so brought the figure closer, until he found himself standing where the figure had entered the Plaza.

"DEMIURGE!" Gabriel roared at the intruder. The man, plated in armor carved with the coils of a serpent, made all in lustrous silver, bearing on it the head of a lion with a death's-head faceplate in its jaws, turned to him, and he could feel blazing white eyes glaring at him. "Have you come to the throne of Heaven to die, today?"

"Someone has," the Demiurge answered. He held out his hand, and that scythe of living flame appeared in it just as Revelator had come to Gabriel. "Maybe even more than one someone."

"I can't let you do that. Heaven has no place for filth like you in it," Gabriel declared, stalking toward the Demiurge, swelling until he towered over the second-greatest filth that Hell ever produced (after, of course, Lucifer itself).

"Are you going to monologue at me? Because if you are, I would rather you just attack so I can get on with my day," the Demiurge cut him off, with a deeply bored tone. Oh that cheeky shit.

"Very well. Die, Demiurge!" Gabriel declared with a sense of deep glee. To finally be crossing swords with one of the Great Evils of creation, it validated all that he was, all that he had wanted, and all that he had fought for. No longer laboring under the coward Michael, having his every good idea watered down until it was worthless, no more having to be a pawn in another, less capable Archangel's game. Now, he was just Archangel against abomination, the Might of Heaven, against the Foulness of the Pit.

He stuck first to send the Demiurge's head off, but the fiend blocked the hit; it still sent him stumbling, because Gabriel wasn't the kind to attack with anything less than his whole arm. Some Angels would toy with their prey, poking and prodding at them with increasing power until they finally revealed the full range of their might and skill and crushed their foe. Gabriel had no time nor tolerance for such pomp. Every strike was a killing-strike. Every blow was as terrible as the dawn.

Gabriel flew after the Demiurge, slashing down to cut the thing's arm off, only for the Demiurge to deflect the blow, not losing his footing this time because he had clearly been off balance for the first. This time the impact shuddered through the Demiurge, likely causing his muscles to quiver and tear; had the fiend's weapon not been something he Sung into being, it would have shattered under Revelator's touch. Gabriel then immediately drove a front-kick into the Demiurge's chest, feeling how metal flexed under his sandal-sole. It didn't shatter as Angel Steel would have, meaning that the entire suit had to be made of Prima Materia.

"So you actually managed to get the Father's old armor out of the pit where Lucifer dumped it? I was wondering why none of my minions were able to hurt you. I guess this answers that question rather handily," Gabriel said with a savage glee under his words. "It won't save you."

"Your lack of perspective will be your undoing," the Demiurge said, slowly twirling that reaper-of-men in his hands and retaking his footing. And Gabriel found himself mildly put off. He knew when somebody stared with hate at him. And all he got out of those blazing white eyes was… disinterest. Like Gabriel were somehow beneath the Demiurge's notice as anything other than an obstacle, as though he were no more than inclement weather on the Demiurge's insane journey, something that could be endured and ignored. And that infuriated Gabriel on a level that he couldn't truly enunciate.

"Like your presence was the undoing of your mother?" Gabriel taunted. His grin ratcheted wider. "I've gotten to know her very, very well, Samuel Scailes. I broke her body again and again, and she told me things. Told me you were a scared little boy, with nothing but human frailty and human failure haunting you for your entire life. And now you come and stand here against an Archangel, one hand crafted by God's own word? You have the arrogance to think a former fucking human can win?"

But the Demiurge didn't look angry at that. Gabriel had tried to incite him into anger, so that he'd make more mistakes and Gabriel could pound him into the dirt because of them. But he stared at Gabriel as though the fate of his mortal mother were utterly beneath concern.

"Yes," the Demiurge said.

"Maybe I should go get your mother again? Turn her inside out for you," Gabriel promised.

"You can't. She's not here. You lost her when you threw her out of Heaven," the Demiurge said. He shrugged. "She's not important here. And your attempting to use her against me is a failing strategy."

"...and here I thought humans loved their parents," Gabriel said.

"And what do you know about humans?" the Demiurge asked, then turned to walk away from Gabriel, as though outright ignoring the fact that he was in a fight. Oh, how fucking dare he? Gabriel rocketed himself forward, trying to slice the Demiurge in half at the diaphragm with Revelator. And the blow took the Demiurge off of his feet, sending him rolling along the ground before he was able to use his momentum and a flare of his blasphemous wings to right himself, rotating the arm he'd used to try to block the blow. Ordinarily such strikes from Gabriel caused his targets to fucking explode. He just looked bruised and annoyed.

Shit, even Lucifer couldn't take a hit like the Demiurge did. Now, though, there was a new expression barely visible through those skull-eyes of the faceplate; impatience. Not even fear or concern. No, the Demiurge was annoyed. With a snarl, Gabriel launched himself at the Demiurge once more, sweeping Revelator through life-destroying arcs. And the Demiurge dodged back, using that man-reaper to deflect Revelator's course – barely – from ending his unholy life. Gabriel grinned, and as one sweep of Revelator ended, he lashed forward with his empty hand, grabbing the free wrist of the Demiurge, and tried to crush it between his fingers. The metal refused to warp, but it was clear Gabriel had a hold, now, and was well inside the reach of the Demiurge's ridiculous weapon.

The Demiurge seemed to grasp that. Not to surrender of course; that filth obviously had more pride than that. But instead, he released his grasp of his weapon, letting it fade away. He didn't try to counter-grapple Gabriel, just tense his neck so that when Gabriel smashed the side of the Demiurge's helm with Revelator, the fiend was stunned rather than decapitated. He almost got a thrust in, one that would have plunged into the eye-slot of the skull faceplace, but the Demiurge raised his now empty right hand, his fingers tensed.

And then those fingers snapped.

Instantly Gabriel was blinded and burning, searing as all the clothing Gabriel wore caught fire under unbelievable heat. He squinted an eye under a melting eyelid, and turned, and saw that the Demiurge had forcefully Portaled the two of them just above the surface of the fucking sun. Well he wasn't going to have that. Gabriel might be on fire, but he was still the Might of God. He heaved, hurling the Demiurge past him, sending him down into the plasma flames of the sun around which the Mortal World turned. He vanished into the brightness, and Gabriel almost smiled, even though every moment he remained here, mere meters from where the plasma ended and superheated near-vacuum began, was killing him. He'd probably hurled that fucker half way to the core with that heave.

Of course, that just meant that Gabriel had an extra half-second to think himself victorious when the Demiurge, burning hotter than the star that he'd been hurled into, erupted and drove a thoroughly unexpected haymaker punch into the face of Gabriel. As it connected, Gabriel could feel the barrier between the mortal world and Heaven shatter for a moment, a blast of heat causing the sky to bloom above Cloud Diligence in stellar fire for just a moment, before the impact of the Demiurge's blow sent Gabriel toward the ground. He didn't allow himself to crater like a cretin. He flared his wings, and halted an inch from the pentagonal tiles, allowing himself to settle, and idly reached up and touched the side of his tongue, noting how it smarted and his fingertip had a trace of gold on it.

The Demiurge managed to get Gabriel to bite his own tongue. Even Lucifer hadn't managed that much.

Not caring about the relativity of space-time, Gabriel had no concept why the flames didn't continue to bellow into Heaven and set its sky afire, didn't know nor care to know that the rupture in the human universe was locked in a particular place at a particular time, and the locations of all things in the universe now expanded away from it meaning nothing would ever be near to it again. All he cared about was that there was a deeply aesthetically displeasing crack in the sky, in front of which flapped the burning form of the Demiurge, his armor overtaken and propagating white, hot-beyond-heat flames, as he gradually descended to the level of the Plaza Beyond.

"Dirty pool, human," Gabriel noted, tapping an eyebrow and feeling how some of his brow-hairs crumbled from the brief surge of heat. "You're tougher than I thought. I think I'll… what the fuck are you doing? Get back here!"

The Demiurge turned and walked away from him, moving into the Plaza and disregarding Gabriel's pronouncement, which was unacceptable to him. So he charged after the monster here to murder the Father, and launched himself in a tackle at him. The Demiurge must have eyes on the back of his helmet or something, because the instant Gabriel was off the ground, he snapped his fingers again and vanished, causing Gabriel to roll to a halt, just in time to see that reaper-of-men streaking toward his right eye, swung with all the might the Demiurge had to offer.

Gabriel laughed and held up an arm, only hissing slightly as the tip of that scythe pared lightly along his skin, just deep enough really to tickle his nerve endings and actually make it hurt. "You're going to have to do better than that, human!" Gabriel taunted him with the Demiurge's weakest attribute.

"...Alright, I will," the Demiurge said. And then he went still beyond stillness. Gabriel hurled himself forward, only to slam against a barrier unseen. But what he could see was that the whites of the Demiurge's flames that danced unabated on his armor, which now stood perfectly still, were turning red. Oh that fucker. He'd put Gabriel in a True Seal! Locked him outside of time and space!

Well that shit wasn't going to fly.

"Father," Gabriel asked, his eyes closing for a moment as he flexed his fist and slid Revelator back into its scabbard. "Grant me might beyond might. Grant me strength beyond strength that I may destroy those who do you ill."

He opened his eyes, his fist heaved back for a teratonne blow.

"Amen," spake Gabriel.

And then he launched that punch forward with all of the Might of God behind it.

Ordinarily, there was literally no amount of physical force that could break a Grand Seal. That device of magic, most predominantly the domain of Michael the Watchmaker's Guardian, was one that separated space into that which was in one zone, and that which was not, and that only by magic could the two ever reconnect, fundamentally severing the links of causality between them. But Gabriel was not strong. He was Might Incarnate. He was all of the impossible power of God infused into a single body, given agency to do God's Will. So despite the fact that no amount of force or impact should have broken that magical disconnection…

The Seal broke anyway.

He didn't know how long he'd been in the Seal, because time became a very tricky thing to reckon when you were divorced from the greater flow of it, but things in the Plaza Beyond had changed. He wasn't alone anymore. Now there were a bunch of fucking Thirdborn here. But before he even had a chance to snarl at the little traitors' presence, he saw what they were doing.

They were attacking the Demiurge with near-suicidal abandon.

Even as Gabriel drew Revelator once more, he watched as a pair of Thirdborn tried to tackle the Demiurge, to allow another, shorter Thirdborn to shoot him with a burning gun. The Demiurge deflected that incoming bullet with the back of his gauntlet, then punched the spare, bookish looking Thirdborn in the back so hard that Gabriel was pretty sure he heard the Thirdborn's spine break. The other, a dark-skinned, mustachioed once-human, was picked up by his throat and slammed into the ground with such force that pentagonal tiles jumped from their footing, becoming heptagons briefly while they were airborn before resuming their five-sided state upon touching the ground. The Demiurge caught one, and with a flick hurled it at the gunman. The tile raced out like a blade, ripping the gunman's arm off despite being one inch thick and made of blunt stone.

There were others, all Thirdborn with their strange Haloes, who were lying on the ground in bad states, often with pools of blood around them. And Gabriel changed in that moment his estimation of what the Thirdborn even were. They had been loyal to Heaven after all, if they were willing to spend their lives at the last hour against an impossible foe just to keep Heaven alive.

Of course, Gabriel didn't look deeper, seeing that only those three were actually hurt, and the others were play-acting to set a tableau such that Gabriel wouldn't question it; additionally, he didn't question that the three who had been injured were only injured in such ways that Vigil could restore them without issue. He saw them fighting for Heaven, and Gabriel believed it. He was not a creature of nuance.

"Stop playing with the chaff, human!" Gabriel declared, feeling Revelator rest in his palm, its blade erupt into hungering fire. The Demiurge turned to him and said nothing, turning away from the lesser Angels he had maimed and walking toward the heart of the Plaza, once more ignoring Gabriel and calling him, tacitly, not worth his time.

Well he wasn't about to have that. He lashed forward, blazing past the Thirdborn who had fallen to a man to buy precious moments that Gabriel needed to break free of the Demiurge's foul containment. The fiend wouldn't escape him, and wouldn't be allowed to live. Unlike the utterly toothless powers of Michael and Raguel, Gabriel at least knew that he was hurting the Demiurge with every blow he landed. And he landed many.

The Demiurge blocked another body-splitting blow, but the power of it drove him to a knee, that knee breaking the tiles under foot and causing cracks to spread across the base of the Plaza. Here, nearer the center than Gabriel had been since the last of these damnable knick-knacks were dumped here around the Greatspear of Ruin, the sun burned not white in the sky but green and sickly, casting all with sickly shades and painting the intruder with the shades of disease he embodied. The Demiurge tried to stand, to force his way back to his feet, but Gabriel was mightier, pressuring him down so that his kneel became a near-splay.

"When you die, Heaven will triumph over your feculent master Lucifer, and will stand glorious for another ten thousand eons," Gabriel hissed at the Demiurge.

"Where is the glory of Probity, Charity, or Kindness?" the Demiurge had strain in his voice, but matched Gabriel's glare with heat of his own. And then, shockingly, Gabriel found himself being forced back. The Demiurge arduously retook his feet, his eyes blazing with heat beyond heat as his gaze showed a sheer incandescence of rage the likes of which Gabriel had never seen before. "And what makes you think I won't be killing Lucifer next?"

Gabriel scoffed, and then drove a rib-pulping kick into the side of the Demiurge before he could properly regain his balance. He didn't have to be an honorable warrior to fulfill an honorable ends. The Demiurge needed to be destroyed for the good of Creation. And that fundamentally good ends justified any means that led to it.

The brutal kick sent the Demiurge rolling, only just managing to regain his feet before Gabriel was upon him again. He was favoring that side now. Good to see it confirmed that there was indeed meat under that metal. The Demiurge tried to ward Revelator with his war-scythe, but at this point Gabriel accepted that he wasn't going to win this with one severing stroke. This was going to be one the same way that the Demiurge won over Michael; by beating him down until his body crumbled entirely.

Gabriel caught the edge of the death's head mask under his fingertips and ripped it out of the helm, revealing the face of the Demiurge for only a moment before he drove his fist into it. Again. The Demiurge was stumbling back now, and got his guard up enough that the next seven blows that Gabriel launched at his face weren't as solid as the first two, but consistently sent the invader backward until his body crunched against the Pillar of Salt And Sacrifice, that Shard of Ruin that Gabriel had dumped here billions of years ago and then promptly disregarded.

"Time to die, Demiurge; God is in Heaven, and all is right in the world," Gabriel said.

He fully intended to beat the Demiurge to death with his bare hands, if that was what was required of him. And he'd enjoy it, so the time would veritably fly by while he did it. But even as he reached back to drive a savage straight into the already bleeding nose of the Demiurge, to blacken the Demiurge's other eye as he already had the first, he found his arm snag on something.

He looked back to see a titan of muscle and hair and hate standing there, eye-to-eye with Gabriel even in his expanded form. His hair like fire, but streaked with grey like ash, his beard the dying bed of embers left after a bonfire. His eyes the harsh electric blue of a lightning bolt.

And when Thor, last god of Asgard, punched Gabriel in the face, it really, really fucking hurt.

The impact threw Gabriel away from the Demiurge, as Thor stormed after him, arcs of electricty jumping between the once-Baraqiel and any metal thing around him. "I have wanted to do that for a thousand years, bootlick," Thor said, his voice rumbling like thunder. "And now I may finally do far worse."

"Oh fuck off, little god! I'm not here for you!" Gabriel said, standing and delivering a back-hand that would have cloven a mountain in half.

Thor caught it, and wasn't moved by a hair.

And then Thor backhanded Gabriel, and he wasn't too proud to admit that he was seeing stars from the impact of it. "A thousand years of insult you gave me! A thousand years, after killing my father, my cousins, my friends! My wife! My children!"

"Oh fuck you," Gabriel snapped. "It was Lucifer that killed your blonde bitch of a wife! Get out of my fucking way!"

Thor sent his brow crashing into Gabriel's for that. "Do not speak of wives when you haven't a grain of love in your entire body!" Thor roared at him, terrible as a once-in-a-millennia storm. "Do not speak of sons when you stood by, smiling, as they were killed, if you had not spilt their blood yourself! You are a gaoler! Nothing more and nothing less! A living chain binding all your foul Father saw as beneath contempt!"

"You should be fucking grateful that Father took you into His care," Gabriel shouted at the lesser god. "Because if He hadn't, do you know where you'd be? FUCKING DEAD! Just like your whore wife and idiot offspring! Baraqiel at least had some purpose in Creation! You're just a relic of a religion that nobody cares about, a last echo of a song nobody wants to sing anymore!"

Thor shook his head. "He was right. You were complicit in their murder."

"What?" Gabriel asked, not seeing how this beef-brain drew such as conclusion.

"You pointed Lucifer at my proud family, told him of the Roots of Hel that would lead him to fair Asgard, and then let Lucifer do what you wanted him to do," Thor said. "A living shackle. That is all you are. And you shall be broken as one."

Gabriel was about to tell Thor that the dumbass Norwegian was high on his own farts, but there was a glimmer, as the once-angel pulled something that Gabriel had thought destroyed from beneath the furs and leathers and woolen jerkin. That silly hammer of his. Well, Gabriel had had just about enough of this. He struck Thor's hand away, a blow taking a significant amount of force and effort. Gabriel was the Might of God, but Thor, it seemed, had been a god of power as well. The two of them were more closely matched than, well, Gabriel and anybody else.

Even the Demiurge seemed to pale before the power of Thor, let alone Gabriel.

Gabriel first slammed his shin into the ribs of Thor just as he had to the Demiurge, lifting the red-maned godling off of his feet, and making it so that when Gabriel swung Revelator, the idiot would have no ability to get out of its way. And finally he felt the edge of Revelator bite through furs and leathers and then into flesh, scoring deep into the front of the shoulder and the pectoral of this simple-minded fool. Gabriel felt the hot, scarlet blood strike him in the face as he reset his grasp and drove it to plunge the tip of Revelator deep into the body of Thor, and to end the Aesir once and for all, eight hundred years too late.

Only Thor prevented that by getting his palm in the way, allowing the burning sword of Gabriel to cleft his hand but still clamp onto his own fist, preventing more than the very tip of the blade from reaching Thor's chest. Thor didn't even look like he was in pain. Just rage.

Then there was a shocking pain from behind Gabriel, something piercing his skin under his shoulder blade. Gabriel glanced down in shock as a thick needle erupted from his pectoral, reaching out by almost a foot, before its head split open into four tongs of silvery metal. Thor then roared, and hurled Gabriel to one side, tearing Revelator from his palm; Gabriel felt the tongs slam into his chest and bite in, and his flight became an arc, as he skidded to a halt on the tiles near the Book Of Astral Ways, encased as it was in crystal so that one would at least have to break their way in before reading its blasphemies.

Gabriel tried to pull the metal out of him, feeling how it ground against his lung with every breath, but was far too fine of a thing to actually collapse the lung or wound his breathing. He then glanced back, and saw that there was a fine chain that reached out behind him, anchoring him to a spot near where he spotted a human of all fucking things, skin dark as Hariel and bearing a Gapped Halo. With a snarl, Gabriel tore up a brick and hurled it at human, catching the intruder in the face and causing her head to detonate and her partial halo to fade away, dropping the harpoon-gun she'd had in her quickly dissolving hands. Gabriel grabbed the chain and pulled to sunder it, but instead of shattering the slender chain that staked him to the ground, he only felt it rip the skin of his back and burn at the tissue of his bones and lung.

"The hell is this?" Gabriel demanded, and then stressed harder, pulling with his full arm, and only achieving further pain for himself. Thor, standing over yonder, simply glared at him, tucking that silly hammer away and cracking his knuckles.

"Enough," the Demiurge's voice came, and suddenly there was a snap of perception as though the Plaza Beyond suddenly became a coherent space and not the mess of ruptured and bleeding spacetime that it had been for Heaven's entire existence. In the middle distance, Gabriel saw the Demiurge there, staring at the Aesir god and the Might of God. "You'll have another, better chance to break him in the future. Today, you are not ready."

"I swore I would kill him," Thor declared.

"And you will be there when his body breaks and his Halo is torn from its root. But that day is not today," the Demiurge said.

"What did you do to me, human?" Gabriel demanded of the Demiurge. The Demiurge ignored him, turning away and walking toward the centerpiece of the Plaza Beyond. To a great, awkward stone, which the tiles all circled around unwilling to touch, which has been made invisible by the twisting of space, now revealed again by its absence. Within that stone, made of silvery benevolith, there were two cracks. And within one of those cracks, there was the Greatspear of Ruin, wedged and waiting for all eternity. Only once had it ever been used, by God to slay The Beast Itself, the greatest and most foul of the Leviathans, the most terrible foe of their kind that had infested Heaven. Only when the Father slew The Beast Itself by His own hand did the tide of battle turn, and the foul monsters be hurled into Hell where they belonged. And then, God slammed the Greatspear back into its stone; the brief period holding that gruesome weapon had visibly aged God, wounded him.

And now the Demiurge was reaching out to its haft. "No. No you fucking don't!" Gabriel snapped, surging against the chain holding him in place only to be almost jerked off of his feet.

Gabriel watched as history reached its end, not even an Armageddon but something far, far worse. The Demiurge's man-reaper appeared in his palm briefly, and he set it down against the stone that housed the Greatspear, abandoning it, and finally grasped the haft of the Greatspear, near its head. And then with a single yank, one that sounded like slicing through paper more than it did through stone, he pulled it free of where God had declared it contained.

The helm of the Demiurge wafted away in smoke, and he turned the haft of the spear, so he could look upon the Greatspear's head, a shape that obeyed no laws of geometry, akin to a shuttle-tipped spear in one orientation, or a leaf-head in another, or a jagged chunk of barely sharpened rock in a third. To look upon the killing edge of the Greatspear was to look upon an infinitude of piercing things, a million billion objects whose design was 'to penetrate'. From needles, both sewing and hypodermic, to sword-blades, to arrow-heads.

And then, in a place that Gabriel recognized as the seat of his titanic soul, he felt a tick. Followed by another. And another. Tick tick tick tick.

"The alpha of the omega," the Demiurge said, staring at the weapon. "This ends today. All of it."

"I'm not finished yet! I will still burst your skull like a fruit!" Gabriel shouted at him.

"No. You have done all you could, and you failed," the Demiurge said. "Thor? THOR!"

The grizzled god of thunder turned to him, begrudgingly. "I want to taste his blood."

"Another day. Or else it will not be his carcass you gloat over, but the inverse. And thank you. You were very helpful," the Demiurge said.

He raised his other hand, as Thor broke off into grumbled Norwegian profanities. The Demiurge snapped his fingers. There was a loud, metal bang.

Then Gabriel was alone in the Plaza Beyond, now completely sensible in its layout given the greatest source of wrongness was taken from it, with only the groaning, moaning bodies of the Thirdborn who had failed just as much as he had to keep him company, as Gabriel's fury reached truly incandescent heights, only made hotter by his rage at his own impotence, against the backdrop of that incessant, infuriating ticking.

---

To Be Continued