"Oh what the fuck is this?" Lucifer demanded, as he stormed up from his dinner table, glaring at the report that he'd been given. He turned the heat of that glare at Lilith, but she just stared placidly at him and he turned that ire onto a better target, allowing the report to burn as he finished reading it. "Who in the fuck decided this was allowed? I'm not just asking, I want a name!"

Paimon, who had delivered the report, flinched from that. "I am deeply sorry, my liege. I only know that the great masters of the mystic arts have been assaulted by a host of Angels, not who has…"

"So you're fucking useless to me," Lucifer snapped at the goddamned math-tutor of the Ars Goetia. "I pay you to know secret things and you can't even fucking tell me which of my inbred 'brothers' pulled this shit against me?"

"I can look into things, my liege, but…" Paimon again attempted.

"FUCKING DO IT, DICKHEAD!" Lucifer snapped, hurling a palm full of ash at his most loyal follower. Paimon nodded quickly and cut a portal for himself to depart through. Lucifer growled under his breath and turned to his bride. "If it's not one thing its a-fucking-'nother. Who else do you think they're hitting?"

"Beyond the Ars Goetia? Likely the Presbyter's Union," Lilith said.

"No loss there, frankly," Lucifer muttered.

"And likely they are attempting to strike into Lust at the magical imps down there," Lilith added.

"What? Since when do imps have magic that Heaven cares about?" Lucifer demanded.

"Longer than you might think, my sweet," Lilith said, rising from her seat and rounding the table so she could be closer to her man.

"Well, who else?"

Lilith was silent for a moment, no doubt thinking it through. Then she went pale, and had a look of dread start to spread across her beautiful visage. The King of All Hell didn't like to think about what could possibly inspire that kind of reaction from Lilith the Firstling.

"They're going to attack Charlie," Lilith said, which instantly got Lucifer's hackles to rise.

"The fuck? WHY?" he asked.

"Because Cain lives under her roof," Lilith said.

"So? The Angels won't touch him. He's 'sancrosanct'," Lucifer said.

"Not to Gabriel," Lilith shuddered. And Lucifer took just a moment to think on that, and came to a very unpleasant realization.

"FUCK!" Lucifer snapped, storming away a few steps, and felt his own fury building. He hated Cain more esoterically than he did most Humans, being that Cain was the first of them to reveal themselves to be the pathetic wastes of resources that they were. As the first murderer, he was proof that the human race was a degenerate and base group, one that Lucifer only minimally interacted with because they were, frankly, just the worst.

Sure, Cain was almost an acceptable person these days, but he was still human, and his stinky humanity was getting on Charlie and making her weird. And sure, Charlie had been weird before she somehow dragged Cain out of his incoherence, but still, right now, Lucifer was being an angry dad, and thus not caring much about the concrete flow of fact to fact or needing too much a grasp of what was true.

"Lily? I'm going to go evict a vexatious tenant from my daughter's neighborhood," Lucifer said. After all, if Cain wasn't latched onto Charlie, then all of the threat that was heading for him wouldn't be heading for her by proxy. He then allowed his body to boil away, and reformed it a few dozen miles away, right on the edge of the demesne that dear Charlie had claimed for herself. And true to Adam's expectations, there in the sky were an embarrassment of Angels, all looking constipated and uneasy. Lucifer turned his gaze down, and saw that though three of them were actively trying to murder that oldest possible Sinner, they were failing. Since Cain was doing Charlie the grace of not dragging the fight into her home, Lucifer instead of intervening more directly chose to instead laugh – loudly – at the humiliating showing that the other Angels of Heaven were showing trying to fight one fucking human and achieving nothing.

Well, that was a bit much, frankly. Cain wasn't doing all the fighting alone. With some of Charlie's soldiers offering fire-support at those who were trying to perforate him from the air, and others still just random schmucks with guns firing up in reckless and unsteady waves at the Haloed morons up there, Lucifer took a moment to recognize that these were those people that Charlie had gathered around her for optics. Those 'redeemable Sinners' were fighting with a lunatic intensity, as though would the Ars Goetia for Lucifer. Good show, Charlie, inspiring that kind of suicidal zealotry.

Lucifer reformed himself closer, standing one street curb away from the brawl where Cain was able, barely, to hold his own against three Angelic attackers, and cleared his throat loudly, causing the very tall Spider Sinner to flinch when he realized that Lucifer was now standing beside him.

"Fuck me, where'd the short-king come from?" the Sinner shouted, quickly reloading guns with his many hands.

"Don't call me that ever again," Lucifer warned the spider with velvety menace, before turning to the Angels. "Excuse me? The FUCK do you think you're doing in my city?"

Cain took the fraction of a second of distraction that Lucifer announcing himself to the Angels gathered gave him to finally break and dislocate one of his attackers' arms, causing the coward to flee. For pity's sake, did not a single Angel left in Heaven have any follow-through in them anymore?

"Ah, good king Lucifer! Good to see you on this busy day!" Cain said brightly, now finally able to get himself into a position where the Angels couldn't surround him.

"I asked you a question, Angel of Dance," Lucifer demanded of the Last of the Firstborn.

"Killing mages, obviously," the handsome, broad-shouldered angel declared, spinning his sword and turning away from Cain, now that it was clear who had the biggest dick on this roadway. "I was beginning to wonder how many of them we were going to have to kill…"

"Oh, I'm the only one that matters," Lucifer promised, extending a hand and having WANT appear in his palm. Of those who could stand against him in terms of skill, Hepsut the Angel of Dance was one of the very, very, very few who even had a chance, and was the only one of the non-Archangels on that list. "And since you've made yet another insult of my domain, by attacking my daughter's ambition, I am going to FUCK you!"

Hepsut turned a confused look at Lucifer, while the Sinner next to Lucifer gave a stifled chuckle.

"Don't you mean 'fuck you up'?" Hepsut asked, clearly off balance, as was Lucifer's intention.

"Well, we'll see where the next few minutes take us, won't we?" Lucifer offered, his grin showing all the cruelty that Hell could ever hope to install into a single body.


Chapter 59

Metronome II

Part 2


Octavia had bought minutes by spending hours. Resetting the connections to the Engine Room had thwarted the Angels pressing into the deepest, most vulnerable sanctum of the Palace of Iron, but that only offered temporary respite; Strigoi had been standing in front of one of the doors when it changed. Once she found out where it had changed to, she would be able to instantly track it if Octavia did it again, and to where. In essence, it was a trick which would be entirely successful once, partially successful once more, and then never effective afterward.

Since she was currently not facing any intruding Angels onto the Engine Room, she turned and quickly hit the release for her armor, turning its back to the nearest corridor which, because of the shuffle she'd done, was now properly sealed again. She stepped out of her armor to the sound of her pants ripping, the fabric caught in the fine mechanisms of the Gyrfalcon because she'd not had the time to change into her body-suit. She was also covered in sweat, her overheating body radiating heat away now that she was out of that walking oven. Without the cooling features of her undersuit, that thing was just damned hard to keep fighting in. But considering the alternative was being made an orphan, she could suck it up and suffer a bit of heat stroke.

"Dad!" she said, as she finally kicked her way free, leaving her pants as a now asymmetrical pair of shorts, and her tee-shirt ripped at the edge of the sleeves only somewhat, as though her saturating sweat had lubricated it out. She fell to her knees before her father, who was once more sitting against the wall, his eyes bleary and unfocused, his head wavering in a slow and unsteady circle as though he couldn't keep it in one spot. "Oh Satan's balls that's so much blood."

"Via? Via it's… it's going to be okay," Stolas said, his voice weaker than it ought to be. "It's okay. I'm here. It was just a nightmare…"

"Dad, just… just stay there," she said, and ran back to her armor, even as the Red Dickhead continued to try to bind the very shirt off his back into a bandage around the head of the javelin which had utterly cut through Stolas' chest and with every breath spilled more golden blood onto the floor. She found the small emergency kit that was built into the frame of the Gyrfalcon, intended for the pilot to patch themselves up after suffering an armor-breach, but Dad needed help a lot more than she did.

At the moment, with the adrenaline that she was experiencing, she couldn't feel any of the vast bruises that covered her, was barely aware that she too was bleeding from a place where Angelic attack had jammed a chunk of armor structure into its pilot. She just ripped that kit open, and pulled the haemostat rods out. There were only two of them, because the kit was only the size of three of Octavia's fists held end to end, and there were other needful things in it. So she muttered to herself, swearing under her breath, that there had to be a way to make them work. She turned a look to the Red Dickhead. "What?" the heavily scarred imp demanded of her.

"I need him to lean forward," Octavia said. And she could tell that ordinarily, the rude little imp would have sassed her for that, but he was clearly as terrified about what was going on, and who it was going on to, as she was. So he took Stolas' other hand, which caused her father to brighten in a distant, confused way and speak the imp's name with the sort of reverence most zealots retain for God, before pulling Dad's back off the wall, to a groan of pain from the Prince of Flowers.

The spike going through Stolas' back ended about three inches past his skin, and with every breath more golden blood and the black ichor of Hell leaked out from the wound. She bit the end off of the haemostat and began to squeeze the slime tightly around the weapon, ignoring the rank odor it made as it seemed to burn the flesh and seal the wound tight against the javelin-head; but it had taken the entire stick and then a touch from the second to even do that. That meant she had slightly less than one for the larger entry wound.

"You… you don't need to be afraid, Via. I'm right here. Show me your smile," Dad said, weakly.

"I'm trying to save your life, Dad! I don't have time to smile!" Octavia shouted at him, then, without needing ordering, the Proxy let Stolas lean back against the wall once more, and gave her a chance to use as much of the slime to stopper that bleed as she was able. It didn't even close half of the wound up front.

And it would do nothing for the internal bleeding he was experiencing.

"We should just get out. Have a day of things," Dad said, his words now ethereal like fog in the morning. "Go to one of those places you keep wanting to take me. Should we go to Loo Loo Land?"

"Fuck me, he's delirious," Blitz muttered, turning a deeply worried look to Octavia. "Get him to lie down. Or as close to lie down as he can with that nail through him."

"What?" she asked.

"Keep the blood in his head or he'll fucking keel over; this is shock, I've seen it a thousand times," Blitz snapped. "Fuck, I've been the cause of it a thousand times."

Ordinarily she might have been riled that an imp spoke to her like that, but right now the vast lengths that ought be between them in the Chain of Being faded away, and they were just two people trying to keep someone they both loved alive. She ignored Stolas' confused babbling and gently lowered him onto his side, propping one shoulder against the wall so that the spike through his chest could jut into the corner and not grind against his wound-tract, tearing off what was left of one sleeve to give Dad even a quarter of an inch of a pillow for his head.

Then there was a bang at one of the doors, the metal complaining as something truly powerful slammed against it.

Their reprieve was already over.

"Raum, we're down two Hexbreakers," Octavia said, standing and turning to the Young Crow who faced the door. "Three, if Penemue won't…"

Raum fell flat onto his face, apparently unconscious, with the blood which had been pooling around his feet now pooling out around his belly.

"...looks like we're down all of our fuckin' Hexbreakers," Blitz snarled as he picked up his gun and took a knee, pressing the butt to his already heavily bruised shoulder and glaring at the door which would only protect them for maybe half a minute more.

"Penemue!" Octavia tried to shake some sense into the Scriptor. She even slapped the woman, but her eyes were locked on the spinning mass which was the Paradox Engine, and she didn't respond to either speech nor strike at all, tears flowing freely down her face, as black lines began to creep into the blazing white of her halo at a rate which was downright unsettling. Octavia tried one last time to shout in the woman's face, to pull her back into the here and now. Penemue was as senseless as… well, the old saying was 'as senseless as Cain', but she'd met that guy, and he seemed pretty on the ball.

There was a metal shriek, as the bulkhead bowed inward and tore open, letting the light of the hallway without to enter into the Engine Room again.

"Urrgh fuckin' FINE!" Octavia shouted, running to her Gyrfalcon and essentially jumping backward into it, which hurt like a bitch, but getting her more or less into the right position that in the few seconds she had, the armor could slam shut around her and turn everything that wasn't running back on. And she turned just in time to see three Angels shoving the metal of the bulkhead out of their way. Blitz fired, and the first of them, a woman who was wearing blood-smeared armor and a mask like an Exorcist, brought up her ludicrously thick-bladed sword and parried the fucking bullet away. "Parry this, fuckhead," Octavia snarled, and then opened up her thermal blaster.

The heat was so intense that it outright melted the bulkhead away from the Angel, but the Angel spread herself as though maximizing her surface area and just taking it. The flame struck her plainly, but refused to set her afire and refused to melt her as it did the metal around her. When the blaster needed to cycle, she straightened up, flicking her blade which now glowed with heat, and the other two angels, also both women, also both wearing blood-streaked dark-blue armor and also wearing Exorcist masks for some fucking reason, emerged from behind the first.

Octavia rushed them, remembering one of Purson's old lessons on Angel defenses. There were two mutually exclusive protective wards that they could use. The Angel Skin converted kinetic energy into heat, which was what most Angels used so that they could ignore conventional firearms that weren't firing Angel Steel bullets, and also helped them when they were fighting mighty melee combatants like Devourers. But fire was that spell's Achilles' Heel; set one of those assholes on fire, and the damage they suffered would be worse than if they'd been naked and unprotected entirely. The Skin's opposite was the Touch of Noon, which did essentially the opposite, turning thermal energy into a smaller amount of kinetic force. And if you were tough enough, you could take that hit.

If the front one was fireproof, she wasn't fist-proof.

So Octavia introduced her to thirty kilograms of armor plating, actuators, and quantum-collapsed fiber-optics, directly in her stupid fucking face.

The Angel darted aside, and with a great thrust, jabbed that broad bladed sword, more a chunk of iron than a claymore, hard into the armpit of the armor. And ordinarily, to people in conventional armor, that would fucking kill them. The Gyrfalcon was not conventional armor. She dropped her elbow, dragging the blade into an awkward position that Octavia wanted, then throwing a follow-up punch hard into the side of the Angel's face.

The helm shattered under the force of Octavia's blow, but she wasn't able to follow up, because the instant after she had to heave to use the body of that momentarily stunned Angel to prevent one of them from swinging a war-hammer directly at Octavia's brow, and then raise her leg so that the Angelic Spear of the third didn't go directly into the knee-joint and instead glanced across the metal of her shin.

She had to dart back, because the hammer-wielder was not fucking around, and clearly had no qualms about turning Octavia's head into a canoe, regardless of the amount of armor Octavia had over it. Octavia could pick out this group's dynamic. The plank-sword was the tank, able to take damage and hold attention. The hammer was exactly that, crushing through any resistance with a sort of fool's efficiency. And the spear was surgical, as though killing a Leviathan with a scalpel.

Octavia growled under her breath as she had to ward a strike from that hammer with her forearm, a blow which outright shattered the plating there right down to the understructure. The armor screamed warnings at her that her arm was, from that one hit, suffering 80% armor ablation. And in the time it took her to retreat from the following, sweeping strike that would have caught Octavia in the side of the head, the spear struck out and jabbed into the suture where one armor plate met another, and with a mighty heave, popped a section of the plate off as its structure was used against it in the one direction it hadn't been designed to withstand. She tried to bathe both of them in flame, but with a move they'd clearly practiced to rote, they pirouetted behind the Angel who now revealed short, dark hair and golden eyes, and let the strike wash over her instead. Octavia even tried to reposition, to fry them anyway, but they moved with her, never failing to keep the tank in the way of Octavia's burning blast.

And the instant it needed to cycle once more, Hammer outright vaulted her two comrades, and drove down a savage blow that Octavia had to deke hard to avoid, only to have the spear sweep low and jam her weapon hard into the side of Octavia's leg. She felt a tearing and the armor declared a breach, which, no shit, Octavia could feel the edge of that spear tearing her skin and ripping almost down to her shin-bone. Octavia turned and kicked Spear hard in the chest, and the Angel spun away, flaring her wings to arrest her flight before she hit the wall. She didn't look at all like she'd been hit by a strike that would be comparable to being hit by an eighty-kilometer-per-hour train-engine.

So Hammer and Spear were using the Skin, while Plank-Sword was using Touch of Noon. Unfortunately, Octavia couldn't capitalize on that knowledge. Because another door in the Engine Room thudded, bowing into the realm of Octavia, the fallen Hexbreakers, and the Paradox Engine. She retreated, sacrificing the armor of her other arm to survive a horrific strike by Plank-Sword, and that put her dead to rights to Hammer, who was about to nail her into the floor like a pile.

Only her aim was fouled when Blitz fired both barrels of his ridiculous gun at Hammer, the recoil sending him rolling back to the floor, but the impact deflecting the strike point of the hammer from Octavia's head and into the cannon that hung over her shoulder. The armor politely informed Octavia that her Blaster was now non-operational, to which she roared out a lace of profanities that would have made any soldier in her Legions blush.

Spear lashed out again, darting around behind Octavia and jamming her weapon into the Heat Sinks on Octavia's back. Joke was on her, though; with the Blaster now fucked, she wasn't going to need as many of those Heat Sinks, so that was essentially a wasted strike. Octavia twisted hard, sending Spear tumbling off her balance, and brought her knee up to ward another sweeping strike by Hammer at the cost of much of the plating on that leg. It was clear to Octavia that these three bitches were some sort of elite kill-team, a trio dedicated to punching above their already Goliath weight through proper use of tactics instead of the only occasionally coherent fighting of other Angels. And Octavia, for all she was a well schooled soldier, was the farthest thing from 'elite'.

Her despair, though, was killed in its crib, when she looked to the passage that the three killers had come from, and saw a figure skidding around a corner clad in purple armor of overlapping plates layered over shining silver mail, a galea-helm on his head that bore a crest not of red hair but of bright silver feathers stolen from the corpses of Angels. While part of her was annoyed that Agrippa had ignored her order to not rush out of Fort Abandon on some fool quest, the fact of his single-minded approach buoyed her when she ought to be drowning. She just had to hold on for a few more seconds.

Another blow from Hammer, and again, Blitz lit her up with his ridiculous rifle, this time firing with his back against the wall so that when he did, he immediately dropped the gun and grabbed his shoulder with a snarl of pain; the shot again struck and deflected Hammer, making her strike fall short; instead of crushing Octavia's head like an empty bean-can, it instead struck the cuirass of the Gyrfalcon, shattering the protection there almost down to its lowest layer. Octavia lashed out with kicks and sweeping punches, but between Plank-Sword being a brute of a woman despite her only modest stature, Spear being a fucking ninja, and Hammer having the Angel Skin active, her blows were only half-useful at best. Buying time, rather than meaningfully advancing toward the end of a fight.

But that was all she needed to do. With Raum and Dad down, Blitz clearly needing a moment to get his damaged shoulder back under control, and Penemue completely unable to fight, it was up to Octavia to break the assault of the Angel so that they all didn't die. And again, as she watched, the door to corridor 3 bowed in, under another terrible blow.

Octavia kept their attention on her, retreating a step but only under clear duress-of-violence. And then, like the downpour of a storm, Agrippa arrived.

He made his presence known with a surgical leap, tilting his scutum at a particular angle so that when he plunged his stolen Angel Spear into the back of Plank-Sword, Spear's retributive lightning-strike would hit only his now mighty bulwark and deflect away rather than hit anything of importance on the Dux Bellorim.

With Plank-Sword letting out a scream of confusion and pain, her face twisted into alarm and even fear, Octavia hit the thrusters on her armor, and bull-rushed into her, shoulder bashing the woman hard enough that even with Agrippa only half rooted to the ground he drove the woman deep into the spear until it emerged from her chest right around the level of her breast, an inversion of the wound that was killing Stolas.

Hammer shouted a name that Octavia didn't care enough to remember, and then swung her hammer hard at Agrippa. Agrippa, though, had been fighting as long as some Angels, and was adept at not dying when faced by them. He twisted his scutum again, now turning it so its boss was against the back of Plank-Sword and his new position taking him clear of Spear's attempt to lance him; Hammer's blow struck the edge of the scutum and the shield broke a chunk of itself off, but in so doing lightened the incoming blow that Agrippa could turn with it, and in so doing hurl Plank-Sword off of his spear and into the arms of Hammer. Hammer had the choice of either catching her team-mate or keeping her weapon. She chose her teammate.

Spear glanced between Agrippa and Octavia, then over to the other bulkhead, which let out a new metal shriek as it was peeled slightly open. Spear tightened her grip on her weapon, her electronic mask transformed from a savage grin to a hateful glower, and she lashed out at Octavia, her thrusts as rapid as a tattoo needle, none of which were powerful enough to break armor as Hammer's were, but the aggregate of them ripping at the already damaged armor, tearing the synthetic myomers of her right arm and even once driving her spear-tip into Octavia's forearm, breaking one of the bones in it.

Agrippa answered her assault with one of his own, his Angel Steel spear striking at Spear and tearing off rings of her mail, before one of his hits was flicked from low to high when Spear wasn't quite prepared for it. Spear still managed to prevent Agrippa from outright impaling her head, but her deflection wasn't so kind as to the integrity of her mask, nor the eyeball behind it. Spear fell back, clutching at her face that had wet-ash colored skin and vibrantly golden glowing hair, still managing, barely, to keep her weapon between the forces of Hell and her more vulnerable body.

Octavia turned just in time to get a plank-sword in the head, which shattered much of the helm's protection and left Octavia's head ringing; Plank-Sword, despite her grisly wound, wasn't out of this yet. Hammer, no longer holding her up, was free to assault Ambrosius with all she had, which Agrippa was able to weather, but only just. Plank-Sword was clearly offering a death-or-glory gambit, not willing to flee which made her less cowardly than most of the Angels, but also not willing to not punch Octavia in the teeth, either. Another sweeping cut of a blade five feet long and much of a foot broad, and since Octavia knew her head was much more important to her survival prospects than any other limb, she got her right arm into the way of it.

The agony of having her entire arm shatter, of that limb then fall dead at her side, was incredible.

What was also incredible was that in the moment that Plank-Sword's exposed face began to display a bloody-lipped grin of victory, it then spontaneously exploded, as Blitz sent a golf-ball sized Angel Steel bullet straight through her head, entering just under one cheek-bone and exiting at her temple, the top of her head bursting away in a shower of bone, brain, and golden gore.

Then the passage to Corridor 3 was finally breached a second time, and to the joy of absolutely nobody present here, Strigoi was on the other side of it. Hammer abandoned her attempts at killing Ambrosius, moving on Octavia. Octavia grabbed the carcass with the one arm she had left, and hurled it at the Paradox Engine, so that it would be violently ripped to shreds by the cogs of that machine in a grisly display. Only it wasn't. The instant the corpse hit the machine, it vanished as though it never were.

Hammer stopped, flicking a glance to Spear, who was staggering backward toward Strigoi, one hand still clapped over her ruined eye. And then she, too, began to retreat to Corridor 2, whence she'd entered from. It was amazing how fast morale could break once bodies started to drop.

Octavia turned to face Strigoi, the Angel who was still fresh whereas all here were all but spent. "Fuck off, Strigoi," Octavia had no fancy words to offer the Angel.

"I thought I'd recognized that voice. You're Stella's issue, aren't you?" Strigoi said. The Angel, for all she looked like she very much didn't belong on a battlefield, still radiated power and threat that told Octavia that buying time was still a wise decision. If one could show up to an active war-zone in diaphanous silks, gold and silver rings and jewelry, and a pair of academic spectacles, then it there was definitely a fool amidst the choice of either Strigoi or those who stood against her. And Octavia's luck wasn't so good by a half to have the fool be Strigoi.

"Fuck you," Octavia said.

"From the fact that you're fighting me in that thing again, I'd guess that your parents have somewhat skimped on your actual education," Strigoi said. "If you're no mage than you're not my problem. Stand aside and you will live today. This isn't personal, child."

"IT'S PERSONAL TO ME!" Octavia roared, her silver halo belching out a pulse of light. Agrippa glared at the two kill-team survivors, who finally reached the hallway and Transited away, before turning his attention to Strigoi's intrusion. Octavia's hate was almost as forceful as the wind, but they were winnowed down, and there were others who were following Strigoi. She didn't know how to win this.

She didn't know if winning was even possible at this point, not with all her mages down against one of the two Hexbreakers of Heaven.

Still, she had to fight her. Dad deserved that much.


Low Central was empty of Angels, and it was clear to the aristocrats who were watching from their windows like a bunch of useless fucking rubberneckers that the only reason that the dead were dead and the fled were fled was because a small army of Hellhounds had come in and sent those Angelic assholes running. Maelstrom tensed his fists, glancing at the split knuckle on one of his hands that was the only injury he'd taken in the entire fight, and that because he'd doubled-down on caving in a helmet that was built significantly sturdier than any other he'd had the task of collapsing.

"I just got a text from Krieg," Loona said, shouldering her shotgun and flicking along her Hellphone with a thumb. "They've pulled them out of Imp City and are picking them off. Say they don't need our help anymore."

"Well, one less thing to have to deal with," Maelstrom said. He took a deep breath, and glanced over to where Moxxie was once more fussing over Millie, who was covered head-to-foot in golden blood, her magical axe left buried in the chest-cavity of a dead Angel, having crushed its way straight through the breastplate to get there. Maelstrom did a quick count, and found that of the hundred or so Angels who had come here to kill Moxxie today, twenty one of them were outright corpses. If one counted the limbs divorced from bodies as well, it was likely that fully sixty of they remaining fled back to heaven as less of an Angel than they'd arrived here. "You going to be alright without us?"

"I appreciate the help," Moxxie said. "We can handle it now that they wave has broken."

"I'm just glad that Millie had the basic courtesy not to go into labor while we were fighting," Loona joked.

"Oh, pfft," Millie said, despite the one arm resting on her much distended belly. "Like I was gonna do something that silly."

"Just sayin'. That would have been messy if you had been unconscious instead of killing," Loona said.

"So if we're not going after Krieg, and if Tilla isn't under threat," Maelstrom said. That had been a pleasant discovery as well. That the Angels focused all their ire on the most dangerous of the Miller family, those most able and eager to defend themselves against some bunch of holier-than-thou dickheads, rather than simply artillery-barraging the whole of it into a stain. While that was a temporary problem as long as both Krieg and the Bard were alive, Maelstrom still imagined that dying must have been traumatic, and being brought back from it, also traumatic. "Uller's family are safe, the Angels don't seem to know about them. So who does that leave that we actually care about?"

There was a moment of quiet, because all knew that the Clan Cruac was also being hit, but was frankly strong enough that they could look after themselves, and the Presbyter's Union was likewise being stomped, but nobody here gave a shit about those grey-beards. That left...

"Dad," Loona said, her expression growing tense. She put her phone away, and grabbed the Grimoire that was supposed to be used for her business and quickly flipped the pages, grabbing and laying out a portal to hover against the naked air, not yet igniting open so appearing to all as a pane of oddly metallic purple that led nowhere. She turned to Shrapnel, who was watching the whole affair with a sort of grandfatherly worry. "Get as many people as you trust can survive a goddamned meatgrinder. I know Blitz is gonna be at the very center of it."

"Because of Stolas," Maelstrom said. He gave his shoulders a rotation, making sure that there weren't any tense muscles left in them, then looked to the oldest of the Hounds gathered here. "There's probably more Angels wherever the two of them are than there will be anywhere else in Hell."

"You're sure you want to do this?" Shrapnel asked of Loona. "Those degenerate nobles will not welcome your intrusion onto their massacre, even as a source of salvation. They'll attack you, too."

"I'm not leaving my dad to die out there!" Loona snapped at him.

Shrapnel sighed, then turned to Maelstrom. "What say you? Are you going to throw yourself to your suicide for the good of nobles with more poison in their veins than blood?"

"I'm not doing this for them. I'm doing it for Blitz," Maelstrom said. Because if the last few frankly exemplary years of his life had any common denominator to them, it was that all of the joys and freedoms he had ever gotten a chance to experience were because, one day, Blitz Miller decided he needed to murder Nathan Birch. And Maelstrom would never be able to entirely repay either the imp, or his adopted Hellhound daughter, for the freedom he now enjoyed. "If I have to, I'll go with her alone."

"No. No you won't," Shrapnel said. He gave a sharp whistle, and the other Hounds who were busy stealing the weapons and in some circumstances armor from dead angels all stopped what they were doing and turned to face him. "Who wants to kill a few more Angels?" he asked of them. "Volunteers only. I sure as fuck am not going there myself."

They all looked to Maelstrom and Loona, the latter of them sighed and for a moment rubbed her brow with that book. Likely, Loona thought that without Shrapnel's demand, their volunteers would be few and feckless.

But Maelstrom knew better than Loona, in this at least.

Two thirds of them were freed from chattel slavery by her hand. Just as Maelstrom could not pay down that debt incurred so easily, neither could they. When it was asked of them, they jumped.

"Let's kill some more Angels!" Horace, a Half-blood like Tiffany shouted, his voice almost as deep as Satan's as the small-building-sized hound held up two purloined angels' swords in his hands that, to his scale, looked like little better than knives.

"Well let's not fuck around," Loona said. She turned to Moxxie and Millie. "And you…"

Moxxie looked torn. On one hand, Blitz was clearly a friend, even if he was a weird one. On the other, his wife had just been attacked by an Angelic horde. But when he glanced to the building again, it was the Golden Manse that won, likely because it contained his daughter. "I've got to keep the house safe. I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry," Maelstrom said. "We have our mission. You have yours. Keep Bea and Lyve safe. We'll pull our Boss off of the frying pan."

Fully seven eighths of the Hellhounds who'd heeded Loona's call formed up around Loona and Maelstrom, and Shrapnel gave a chuckle and a nod, stepping back. It wasn't cowardice that stayed either Shrapnel or Moxxie's hand. Shrapnel was old, and Moxxie had things too valuable to ignore. Shrapnel gestured to those hounds who had remained back from the portal-scrum and whistled high again. "Alright you damned pups; into that building! I want a gun at every window and not a blind-spot on the entire fucking estate, do you hear me!"

"Aye Chief!" those who hadn't the zealotry to race into madness at Loona's behalf called out, entirely willing to dedicate themselves to the defense of a siege instead, as though that were any more safe or any less bloody.

Maelstrom turned another look to Loona, who just gave a slightest of nods. There wasn't anything to say. She slashed with her hand, as though flicking paint at a canvas, and the purple pane gave an incendiary whumpf, revealing the Palace of Iron, specifically its exterior. Loona suddenly frowned, glancing at the book again.

"Can't open a portal inside?" Maelstrom asked quietly as the cluster of Hellhounds began to work themselves into a lather. She didn't even need to shake her head. Her look told him that was exactly what she tried and this was exactly what occurred. He'd read that this could happen in places where Paradox Engines were running. The one at the heart of Satan's palace had a similar effect, making that place every bit the fortress that Stella Goetia's edifice was working its way to becoming. "There's a reason, I'll explain it later."

"How are we going to find Blitz?" she asked. He tilted her head at her.

"Do you… not know the way?" he asked. She then blinked at him, staring through the portal, and then had a realization dawn on her face. So she had it, just as much as Maelstrom did. That sensation he'd gotten when the people who were his friends were in jeopardy, of where they were and how dire their circumstances were. It'd awakened in him when he'd gone to Heaven. And Loona was only realizing she'd had it too, likely discovering it now.

"Well fuck me, then," she muttered before turning to the horde of Hounds. "All of you stick with me! We're going right into the guts of this fucker and we're gonna show those Angels who's really the most dangerous bunch of assholes in Creation! DO YOU HEAR ME?"

And the Hounds howled in agreement. Well, in for a penny.

Maelstrom was the first one through, because of all of them, he had the most familiarity fighting Angels, and here in the courtyard, there were no lack of them skulking about, most of them awash with blood black, red, or gold. They'd had a good killing day. Time for Maelstrom to turn it it into a nightmare. Without a word uttered, not even bothering to shout in challenge, he threw himself forward, rapidly outpacing even the swiftest of the former Race Hounds until he flying-tackled an Angel just as he turned to face Maelstrom. And Maelstrom, not wanting to give the Angel time to alert his comrades, slammed his fingertips into the side of the Angel's neck and ripped, instantly tearing out both carotids and his wind pipe, throwing them away and then rolling past the Angel to catch the wing of the one just past him, and with a mighty heave hurl with all his might and rip the wing off of the Angel while throwing her through stained-glass window. He threw the wing aside, turning and flinching as his instincts sang to him. His hand lashed out and closed on hot metal. It hurt his palm to hold it, but though it caused smoke to raise from his fist, he had outright caught an Angelic Quarrel.

The Cherub who had fired it, and was reloading to fire again, blanched and went deathly pale when he saw that Maelstrom hadn't even tried to dodge it. Just caught it. "The Dirus Canem…" the Cherub whispered in shock, as the baying of Hellhounds began to approach Maelstrom's back. He threw the bolt down, blowing on his palm, the searing wound to closing mostly beneath his conscious effort. It didn't heal all the way, of course. Scars like this one were valuable to him. They were a reminder of the things he'd overcome.

He turned his gaze to the other Angels, who had been about to swoop down and begin carving dog-flesh, but now they were all halted, dread on their faces, as they looked upon Maelstrom and clearly rethought their chances. Some of them outright vanished, fucking off back to Heaven where Maelstrom wasn't going to deal with them. The literal aura of dread he now exuded, active at a level beneath Maelstrom's conscious awareness, was turning the bowels of Heaven to water, and their spines to noodles. And as he began to run forward again, other Angels felt that horror spread through them as he approached, even around corners or through walls.

They felt what it was to be prey to a terrible, terrible beast.

He paused as his ears picked up a crashing noise, halting in the middle of a hallway, and silently counting down from three. Just after he'd hit zero, the wall in front of him burst into the hall, a heavily damaged panoply of metal, alike to the one Jun-Ho had worn but much more intricate and advanced, slid to a halt with its metal gauntlet clenched murderously tight around the neck of an angel whose body was clearly broken beyond all resistance. Maelstrom then reached out at the Angel who was trying to jam her sword through the armor's barely-defended back, and closed his hand around the jaw of the Angel, turning her and ripping; she, more substantial than most Angels he'd fought, didn't immediately lose her jaw, and in fact bit him with tremendous force.

Well that just wouldn't do. He punched her in the temple, then his eyes flicked up and he punched a touch higher, aiming for her Halo. While the temple-punch didn't even loosen her jaw-grip, the strike at her Halo caused a chunk of it to crack off, causing the Angel woman's eyes to bug almost out of their sockets, and she contracted on herself as though about to vomit.

Actually, not 'as if'. Because now she wretched bile onto Maelstrom's shoulder, before there was a loud flapping noise. "No you don't," Maelstrom interrupted, heaving her back and then slamming her head hard against the wall again. This time, she fell insensate to the floor, unable to Transit, her vomit still dribbling out of her mouth.

"Who the fuck are you?" the wearer of that armor demanded, sounding haughty, wealthy, and privileged.

"Extraction for the King's Proxy," Maelstrom lied.

"With a bunch of fucking dogs?" she asked.

"I follow orders. I don't question them," Maelstrom said, and started walking to pass her by. Other hounds were only now catching up to him, and those who were were those who hadn't been waylaid having to fight something. He hoped that they didn't get it into their heads that any one of them were the equal of an Angel, not unless their name was either Loona or Maelstrom. That kind of arrogance would only result in dead Hounds and grieving friends.

"Well who the fuck told you you were allowed in my palace?" the armored Goetia (he'd decided that it had to be a Goetia, wearing a suit like that) demanded.

"Take it up with the King," he said, and turned a look to his fellow Hounds, one of warning and of silence. If she didn't have his name, she wouldn't be able to do shit to him later. Hellhounds were everywhere in Hell. Nobody bothered to scrutinize them too closely.

The Goetia looked like she was going to say something else, but there was another crash, and she growled. Despite the fact that her armor suit was clearly advanced, a miracle of engineering, it was also equally a miracle that it was still functioning under the amount of damage that it'd taken. "Fine. You do your job for that dumb fucking imp, just stay out of my way in clearing my house."

So that was Stella, then. She sounded way too old to be Octavia. And Maelstrom having friends as he did in many Legions, including Octavia's Starfire Legion painted her as far less haughty of a person than this one was. Still, it was no skin off of Maelstrom's back. He just had to get to Blitz before something killed him. And that something would likely be golden-blooded, from the looks of things.

Further into the palace he went, and now whenever Angels saw him, they dropped whatever they were doing, even foregoing easy deathblows on incapacitated opponents, to immediately flee. As though Maelstrom's mere presence now poisoned their courage and made cowards of them. Which, again, subconsciously it did. The more pain and injury he caused here, the more that all not on his side would fear him. And he was infinitely capable of causing pain and injury to Angels.

"Whoa! Slow down, Mal!" Loona's voice finally cut through the clash of Angels fighting other targets or running away from him. He turned back to her, seeing that she, like he was, was covered in golden blood. "I'd think you were trying to win a record or something. He's this way, though?"

"Yes," Maelstrom said. The other hounds were beginning to flag, trying to keep up with Maelstrom's advance through the palace, following that fleeting feeling that was drawing him on the shortest possible path to Blitz Miller. That it kept changing directions told him that either Blitz was teleporting around, or that, as he suspected, the Paradox Engine in this place was rearranging the internal organization of the palace to make it harder to get anywhere important. "Keep up with me. We'll get to him in time, I promise."

"I'm gonna hold you to that," Loona said, rare concern for her adoptive father painting her face. She turned back to the other hounds. "Go back to the Ballroom," she snapped at them. "Shrapnel's Second will make better use of you all than I could!"

"But Loona!" one of them began.

"Are you saying you can defend me better than he can?" she took a moment to lean against Maelstrom. The other Hellhound, a relative new-face, who had only been Manumitted for about a year, seemed to grasp that there was clearly a better set of hands for her to be in than his own, and that pair was Maelstrom's. He gave a nod, then turned and shouted to those behind him to reverse course and move toward where Mordecai Shrapnel was likely digging in with some survivors of this Heavenly purge.

"Do you think they're going to appreciate all this work we put in to save their feathered asses?" Loona asked.

"No," Maelstrom said flatly.

"What, just no, no 'that depends'?" Loona asked.

"They're Goetia. For the most part, they're all a bunch of bastards," Maelstrom related, moving toward Blitz once more. "And no good deed done to them will ever go unpunished."


Every few years, Charlie's faith in the goodness of Heaven was ratcheted down another level, always coinciding with them targeting her and hers, and spilling the blood of those she'd sworn to protect. First, the beginning of the Forever Purge, and Rachel's first death. Then, the Harrying, and Rachel's second. And now? Now they stopped using their machines as proxies, and came down to kill her people personally.

"Just go the fuck away!" Charlie shouted at Angel she had in a headlock. He flailed hard, trying to get the leverage to stab her with the sword that she'd broken before grappling with him. "These are good people! I'm already proving that they can be Redeemed!"

"You're wastin' your breath, Charlie," Angel Dust said, holding a torn sleeve of somebody else's shirt to a head wound and keeping the blood from running into his eye, even as the rest of his hands reloaded magazines as fast as he could, so he would even have the option of reloading his Tommy Gun. "If these fuckheads was interested in Redemption, they wouldn't be tryin' to kill the Dragon right now!"

And if that wasn't proof that Dad was right in yet another thing, then what else could it be? That the Angels took one look at a Sinner who had Redeemed themselves, and said 'fuck no, kill that thing' was a stunning indictment as to the degree of their moral turpitude. Fiona was holding her own against the more than a dozen who were trying to kill her, easily outlasting their stamina and letting them spend themselves against her armor to no avail. Each time she got a chance to land a telling blow on one, it vanished, blasted away through time itself. Rozarin was up there, too; every time one of the Angels began to flag from overexerting themselves against Fiona, she would knock them out of the sky with a single punch, kick, or tackle.

"Why? Why do you keep coming to New Purgatory?" she demanded of the Angel she was currently choking. "I'm trying to help you! To help everybody!"

"Yeah, I think he's unconscious, doll," Angel Dust said, as he finally topped up a mag and slid it into his Thompson. She blinked at him, then looked at the Angel she was manhandling, seeing how he'd gone brown in the face as though he'd dipped the underside of his facial-skin in chocolate. She loosened her grip, and he collapsed out of her hold to pool in an insensate pile on the floor. "Fuckin' typical. Ruinin' my good mood. Now the only thing that'll make it good again is if I get fucked by Cain before sundown."

She was not having a good day. First of all, Addam was dead again, which was becoming something of a trend for him. It seemed like he just couldn't manage to survive an attack by Heaven. And Jun-Ho was missing, so she could only hope he wasn't dead, too. And to have two hundred Angels flapping their cruel way overhead while trying to mob Cain and kill him? It just didn't make sense to her. Heaven was supposed to be better than that.

But that was the thing. It was something akin to a delusion to believe that, she was coming to realize. Dad had been right. He had been right the entire time, about so many things that she had tried to ignore in her blinkered quest to redeem the Damned. And while that focus had served her well in proving that Redemption was, indeed, possible, it also made painfully clear that the rest of the world was not going to conform to her desires unless she forced it to. Heaven, just like Dad said, was full of shitheads, cruel bastards who would stomp down anything they didn't like or didn't understand, or stomp especially hard on something which was both.

After all, why would a full two hundred of them be here to kill Cain? Cain was nothing if not the ideal exemplar of good behavior in a Sinner. Of course, that blinkering was still in effect for Charlie on that regard. She had only known Cain for a few years, all of those in the modern day. She had only ever known the newest, kindest, and best version of Cain. The version of himself that he had been dragging himself toward for many thousands of years. She didn't know the version of Cain that the Angels remembered. She didn't know why he was called, by them and Hell alike, Terror Incarnate.

So she moved away from the Angels, who were now giving her a somewhat wider berth, now that she'd proven that she wasn't going to just be dragged around by the scruff of her neck like a Hellhound puppy. She didn't make it far before she walked into Truly Delicious, emerging from a building with blood running down the side of her face, and her overcoat was about half scorched as though she'd almost gotten burned by dragon-fire. "Delicious? What's going on?"

"Ow," Delicious said. "Angel!"

"Oh fuck me, are you okay?" Angel Dust asked. Charlie had barely noticed that he'd slotted in beside her.

"Your sister's fine, I got her to the basement before that fucker launched me through a building," Delicious said.

"Wait, what? They attacked Molly?" Angel Dust surged past Charlie and grabbed Delicious by her shoulders. At the expression of pain the Succubus gave, he flinched back and released her. He lifted her coat open.

While her breasts were free from their underwear prison, the main thing that caught Charlie's attention about Delicious was that she was badly burned, starting from about the nipple-line and growing worse as it went toward the arm. Angel Dust looked honestly sick when he opened the coat all the way, and showed that her arm on that side had been cooked to a crisp. "Did you just eat a hit from the Angels, Tru?"

"I got your sister to the basement," Truly said, and at this point Charlie understood what was so atypical about her right now. It was her complexion. She was a soft peach, like a human without a suntan, as opposed to the hot-pink that she was supposed to be. She was in shock, and maybe even bleeding to death.

"We need to get her to the bunker," Charlie said.

"No, I've got…" Delicious began, but Angel Dust needed no more instruction than that to scoop the Succubus up in two of his arms, turning to glare at an Angel who dared to come a bit closer toward them. The Angel, seeing the look on the Spider Sinner's face, blanched and retreated back again.

Before Charlie could speak again, there was a burst as an Angel and an Archangel rocketed out of the inside of a building, her father Lucifer twisting as he flew to football-spike the unfortunate he'd been grappling into the ground, causing the angel to explode into golden blood and gore. "WHAT DID I SAY ABOUT INTERFERING? THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT!" Lucifer roared at the stain that used to be an Angel, before turning and grinning wide, carefully adjusting the serpent crown that rest amongst his golden hair. "Ah, Charlie! Don't mind me, I'm just reminding this ASSHOLE that you're not supposed to stick your nose into another man's duel."

"They're killing my people!" Charlie said.

"Yes, they do seem to be doing that. You should probably stop them," Dad said, then with a flex of his hand, he called forth a sword that Charlie could tell was magical beyond magic, powerful beyond strength. "Alright, Hepsut! Round two, no more people fucking it up! I want to see your A-game!"

And then Lucifer rocketed himself straight through the building whence he'd come, ignoring the fact that there was a perfectly serviceable alleyway not a dozen meters away from his impact point.

"Angel, put me down now, goddamn it," Delicious said.

"Fuck no. I'm not losin' another friend to these fuckah's!" Angel Dust declared, his face a challenge to Creation itself to tell him otherwise. Of course, Creation being the deeply unfair place that Dad had spent her entire childhood repeating to her that it was, his challenge was met by a bunch of Angels willing to take that wager.

Angel Dust wouldn't be able to beat them as he was. He had three arms holding Truly, leaving him with enough hands left over to use one Thompson and a pistol. That wasn't nearly enough lead to slow a determined Angel. But luckily for Angel Dust, Charlie was here. So she let her rage slip, and even as the first would-be killer reached the point where he could attack Angel Dust, he instead found himself being violently and intimately introduced to the knuckles of Charlie's fist, a blow so hard that she felt it break his helmet like glass and send the Angel rocketing back like she'd attached a moon-rocket to his spine and then ignited it.

She stumbled to a halt in the street, glaring up at the other Angels who hovered above, imperious and holier-than-thou, staring down at her. "I am trying to help people! Just leave me the FUCK ALONE!" she screamed up at them.

They, as she was increasingly coming to expect, didn't accept her statement at face value, and instead descended to try to kill her, her clients, and her friends. Of course, even as they did, one of the fifth-storey windows shattered, and Vaggie tackled one of them even as she began to freefall, maneuvering the Angel to hit the ground first, and driving her new spear through his throat when he did. "How about you all fuck off back to your shitty, make-believe Heaven!" Vaggie shouted, holding up a spear now baptized in golden blood. "Before I make your final resting place Hell!"

If anything, that incensed them further, descending now not just to kill Charlie and her people because they were there, but because they were petty and somebody they considered beneath them had insulted them. And Vaggie was desperately outnumbered. Charlie ran toward Vaggie, expecting to have to outright throw her back into the Hotel, but even as her long legs ate the ground between her and her lover, Vaggie was moving with a clarity, an alacrity, and a surety that Vaggie had never shown before. Sure, Vaggie knew how to fight, but she was skilled only in a very catch-as-catch-can sort of style, where every dirty trick was on the table and there was no room for elegance. Now, though, Vaggie was weaving through the sword-slashes and spear-thrusts of Angels with a grace that Charlie had only ever seen from Carmilla Carmine, when the Overlord performed at Lucifer's pleasure when Charlie was 17. Vaggie wasn't as graceful as Carmine, but it called to mind the same effortless fluidity, slipping between her attacker's violence like a breeze through a tree-bough.

Still, Charlie wasn't going to allow a bunch of people to gang up on her girlfriend. She introduced herself to the mob of people who increasingly were lashing out in reckless attacks out of the sheer audacity of a mere Sinner to stand against all their number without being touched by any Angel Steel edge, by sending her fist into the side of an Angel's head. And the impact hurled him into another Angel, who themselves collided with two angels, and effectively took an entire wedge out of the scrum trying to stab Vaggie, enabling Vaggie to dance back and form battery with Charlie, hip to hip, with her spear dripping gold as the Angels aligned to face the new threat. One of them tried to club Charlie with a war-hammer. She caught his wrist and then hip-tossed him to the pavement; as he went, she stole his shield, and used its edge to brain another Angel who thought she would be made helpless. She would not.

Charlie turned only a slight look to Vaggie, and Vaggie's eye was practically shining with spiteful joy. Both of them understood instantly and wordlessly. And then both began to move. While Charlie's most powerful weapons were her words, her fists were a decent enough second, after a moderate to large gap between them. And with her stolen shield, she was able to zone and space-out the people attacking she and Vaggie, smashing them in the chest or face with the shield-boss or clipping them with its edge, always moving to prevent those attacks that Vaggie couldn't simply slip past so that she now had actual time to attack rather than react on pure defense.

Angels began to die in numbers in the streets of New Purgatory.

It was tiring, but Charlie had hours of this left in her, the constant movement, the heeding the screaming instincts that told her when to shift her stolen shield and to where, who to punch, and when to simply step back and let somebody outright miss. Angel Dust was almost back into the Hotel. All would be well.

But Hell, as it often did, enjoyed the prospect of shitting on Charlie's desires. She glanced up, just in time to see one of the still-flying Angels summon a great golden pillar of force, a Heavenly Artillery on a scale that only Adam was reputed to be able to better. And when he sent it down at Charlie, she had to sacrifice the shield and any hope of a timely victory just to keep it from wiping she and Vaggie out in an instant.

The impact blew the two women across the street, crashing them into the frontage of Pascal's Mugging, while Angel Dust and Delicious were lifted and hurled quite a distance away, with Angel Dust twisting to take most of the brunt of the impact on himself; it ripped a pair of his arms off, and twisted his leg in a direction it wasn't supposed to go. Charlie pushed out of the crater in the bricks that the impact left her, swatting a portion of her jacket that was currently on fire, and shouted her first client's name. He turned to her, his face a mangled ruin, many of his teeth seemingly blown out and one eye burst and running like undercooked eggs down his face. He didn't hesitate. He dragged himself toward where Delicious was now sliding in and out of consciousness from her combination of blunt force trauma and severe burns.

"I'm not loszin' a'nuver friend," Angel Dust slurred, even as the Angel above them turned a contemptuous look at him, and held out her hand once more, golden light welling in her palm. No. NO! Charlie grabbed the closest thing she could throw – at table – and hurled it, trying to interrupt the cold-blooded murder she was about to witness. Another Angel got in the way, smashing the flying table into scrap metal, only delaying the inevitable.

But the delay gave Angel Dust enough time to reach Truly Delicious, and hurl her out of the street and onto the sidewalk near Pascal's Mugging.

Then he turned and faced the golden light that reached out with a horrible note, a pillar of solar ruin slamming into the street.

In its wake, there was nothing left. Not so much as a hair of Angel Dust remained.

And Charlie saw red.

Instantly all thought of mercy, of kindness, of charity and peace, they all died with Angel Dust. Her horns burst through her hair, her body twisting and warping, before even the horns crumbled, her rage pushing well past her Warform and into a form she had only twice in her long lifetime ever used, and both of them against the insurmountable cruelty of Heaven's grim ambition. She didn't see how her body began to radiate horrifying colorless light, how the edges of her being began to press against reality as hard if not harder than Wendy's did.

The demise of Angel Dust dropped her instantly into her father's heritage, as a Child of Light And Song.

She didn't need to move. If she wanted to be somewhere, she was there. And she was in that instant in front of the Angel who had acted out of maximum cruelty, rather than any desire for effectiveness. Effectiveness would have sent that golden ray at Charlie and Vaggie, those two who had proven themselves credible threats, not a barely-armed Sinner who was trying to bear a victim to safety. She grabbed the hands that had caused such pain. Without any real effort, she crushed them into paste.

The woman screamed, because of course she would. To cause pain to others was divine. To suffer that pain themselves? Unacceptable. Charlie, though, for all her incandescent rage, wasn't a cruel creature. Beyond pointedly crippling the ability to do harm, she wasn't going to torture this Angel. She swung her hand in a chopping motion through her neck. The Angel's head fell off, halo flaring out as it fell to the ground.

At her back, six wings made of pure light spread wide, bathing the street in radiance, washing the area with hate and anger, and for the first time in Charlie's life, she could suddenly feel what Dad said was her birthright, that higher, truer self that she had never understood until this moment. Because in this moment, she could see all that was in this street as though viewing it from all angles and all distances. She saw her own body as though outside of it. Which, in a way she was. That body, it was just a tool, a tool she could use to enforce a rightness onto Hell, and to sweep away the debased and the cruel. Sam was right. Sometimes, in order to build something good, you must burn something wicked.

Her body held out its hand, and in her greater self, she bade all who had been trying to stab her and her girlfriend, all those party to the murder of a man actively working to redeem himself, to burn.

The flame began in the very seat of her titanic soul, growing and billowing and bellowing, expanding outward and downward, away from that truer self of hers that she now inhabited, and then out into the world.

With a terrifying, Infernal Talc roar, twenty Angels burst into blue-hot flame, consumed from within whatever they were doing. Some of them Transited away the instant they felt the flame begin. It wouldn't save them. Burn The Cruel was a specialization of Burn The Wicked. It cared not for whether you were nearby. It only cared if you were sewing cruelty, and if you did, it would destroy you, even if you hid from it in the Abyss itself.

With her Greater Eye, she turned her vision to Heaven, seeing for the first time the radiance and greatness of Cloud Diligence. She saw Michael flinch and turn to her, his own Truer Self preparing for conflict. But all she did was watch, as nine Angels appeared in Heaven, then burned to death. The rest dropped their ashes in Hell, as monsters like them deserved.

One of the Angels she'd targeted didn't burn, though. He was staring, aghast, at the others, trying to speak Hymnals that would smother flame. He wasn't armed.

She glared at him, this strange oversight in her power's utility, and then flicked her hand away. He was forceably Transited away, out of her home, and out of her sight. If he had innocence in his soul, even despite all that the Angels around him had degraded into, then she was doing him a favor in not showing what she was about to do next.

Those outside the range of her own Hymnal were retreating, wary that their confederates burned to nothing more than a wave of her hand. She could hear Vaggie shouting her name. And though she dearly wanted to tell Vaggie that all would be alright, the sheer Hadean depths of her rage in this moment prevented such kindnesses. She rose up, her wings of light not even flapping, her fury holding her aloft, and she followed where the Angels fled. Back to their greatest concentration in New Purgatory. Back to where Lucifer was amusing himself with a sword duel against the Angel of Dance.

All stopped when they saw her, save those fleeing, who took her appearance above them as proof that she was going to descend upon them like a righteous infliction of the Horseman Death. Lucifer also stopped, not capitalizing on his opponent's distraction, because this was the first time he'd ever seen his daughter quite this angry, and thus utilizing a form quite this powerful. His grin grew wide, prouder than she'd ever seen on him, and directed at her and her alone.

It didn't halt the hurt in her heart.

And for that reason alone, she held out a hand. "F̷̱̈́̿̀̕ļ̶͇͇͂͗̐̾̇e̶̼͇̎̏̒e̶͓̋̾̊̇,̸̟̲̊̉ ̵̯̭͚̉̓͆̃̿õ̷̰̎́ȑ̵̯͔̙̘̿̐͜ ̶̨͖̲̅̈͛̾͆ḍ̶͍͕͍͉̈́̅̊̈͊í̸̗̾̂͛̓e̵̹̾͒̌̈́̚ ̵̤̭̯̀̇̌͝w̵̯̥̼͌h̸̹̙̦͓̳̒̾͠e̶͎̫̣̽̃͋̔͘r̷̩̲̜̋͗̒e̴̻̗̹̫͕͐ ̷̧̭̙͗̍̌͘̕ỳ̴̗̾̐̃o̸̮͎̲̾̓ǔ̴̲̍͂̄͝ ̷̩̦̜̣͉̆s̵̡̯͓̭̀̌ͅt̷̛͎͉́͛͒a̴̧̡̦̦̩̍̾͐̕ņ̷̥͈̙̀͒̓̅̕ḑ̶̧̲̠͒̓͜" Charlie demanded.


Lute again pounded against the air which was preventing her from leaving the Throne of God and the unspeakable horror which these things allowed to sit upon it. The air stood thicker than stone to her, rebuking her every effort to just fucking leave. She'd tried Portalling out, but the air bounced her back all the same as this doorway did.

She was furious, as was a fairly standard thing for her, but this time directed at her circumstances. And it was becoming clear to her that the midget Seraphim (because whatever the fuck Mattias was, it was clearly no Cherub) was not mincing words when he'd told her she wasn't leaving. It wasn't an imperative. He was stating a fact that she could no more break than open one of her own veins and have red come out of it.

Finally the peak of her pique spent, she turned and kicked the stone moulding at the side of the door, feeling how it cracked under her punt for a good distance. She stormed away, muttering under her breath. Ever since that catastrophic fight against the traitorous whore Vaggie, her life had been steadily getting worse. First having to sacrifice an arm to extract herself from the traitor's incarceration, then losing Adam to a filthy janitor, to having the trash of Hell begin to spill into the streets of Heaven. She didn't care what Emily said. That snake was garbage, and deserved to be hurled back into the pit he'd slithered out of.

And then the traitorous whore fought Lute again. And to Lute's immense shame, she'd lost again.

Upon which, instead of the shameful embrace of death, she found herself surrounded by wind-up angels in a broken-down Heaven, one which turned as wheel around axle to a cosmic horror in a white robe.

Lute didn't give much time for introspection. She was a creature of action and reaction, of doing rather than dithering over. And now that there was literally nothing to do, no enemy to fight, no goals to pursue, and no agenda to forward… where did that leave her?

Standing in a pale imitation of God's Throne-room, with an abomination which stared blankly at the other side of infinity.

Then the rumbling started. Crashes of metal and cracking of stone. She turned from her place breaking a random pillar apart with knuckle-busting punches and faced the door which by Seraph's-fiat she was denied from leaving. Pain was helpful to clear her thinking. And she didn't want to bust the fingers on her new arm, because she wasn't sure if Sahaquiel was even around in this fucking place to fix it.

She stepped away from the pillar, moving to where she could see down the broad hallways with their ceilings painted with scenes of angelic glory. It was so fucking weird. She'd walked this path dozens of times before, and never gave much thought to the art. But now that she was looking at it again, with nothing better to do… were those frescos and dome-murals what she remembered them being? While she could definitely understand the appeal of a mural depicting Michael shattering Lucifer's halo with his sword, they hadn't actually gone and done it.

Hadn't he?

She was cut off from her musing when an Angel was sent rocketing back into the hallway in the distance ahead of her, upside down and three yards off the floor. He crashed against the wall, then flopped off and landed, his armor beginning to leak a great pool of golden blood as he twitched piteously. Well, then it was lucky he had that much armor on. If he hadn't, it looked like that hit would have burst him open like a tomato. And then, at last, she saw something worth seeing.

An Elder Angel turned the corner, wearing the Armor of Michael. But what was striding down the hall toward her was clearly not Michael. She'd known him well enough; it was by his hand that she was trained to be the instrument of Heaven's safety and Hell's destruction that she was. And now that she looked, wasn't Michael's armor golden? Well, this guy, whoever he was, wore silver. And in his hand there was a thing that hurt her eyes to look at, just as much as it hurt to look at whatever these dumb motherfuckers called 'god'. Well, whoever he was, he was an Elder Angel. She didn't know which one, but it was clear that was what he was.

Other Angels began to appear out of thin air, as they seemed able and wont to do, instantly raising their weapons against the Elder. The Elder didn't bother to slow down, not so much as twitching when they launched themselves at him, and tried to strike him down. So treason was just a thing that Angels did up here, then? She couldn't think of a good reason to strike one of the Elders. They had been on her side, understanding the need for Hell kept in check. Or at least Michael had been. She couldn't speak about Sandalphon, Raguel – that hippy – or Raphael. The Elder treated the Angels' attempt to kill him with about as much concern as a creature such as it required; essentially none. One was caught by his throat and slammed into a wall so hard as to embed him into it, and the other had his strike knocked away by that strange, spear-thing the Elder was carrying, before the freed up hand of the Elder lashed out with a knife-handed chop into the side of the attacker.

The Attacker's armor shattered under the blow, and he collapsed to the floor, trying to rise but failing as the Elder strode onward. The attacker started to cough up blood, and the Elder only then paused. He turned, faced them, and raised one hand. He snapped his fingers. Both of the attackers vanished.

"Fucking finally," Lute said, as the Elder Angel stormed closer. "At least one of these pretenders knows what's up."

In the quarter mile that this hallway shot out, straight, toward where it finally terminated, the Elder Angel was attacked twice more, by four and by six Angels. Those ten fared every bit as well as the first two did, with one exception. One of them from the last muster, seeing her cadre being disassembled by an Elder Angel holding one arm metaphorically behind his back, fucked off before he even got to her.

"Hey? Do you have some fucking answers or what?" Lute shouted as the Elder breached twenty yards away. The Elder swept his eyes up and down her, and she felt a sudden violation of her privacy that was hard to explain, as though somebody had just measured her for the skimpiest lingerie without her permission, alike to being dredged by Raguel, but utterly beyond her ability to Slap him for it.

"I am not here for you, Lightborn," the Elder said, his voice shuddering the air as was appropriate to his stature. From his neck, he pulled an amulet of crystal, which he crushed in his fist. When he did, a barrier appeared between the two of them, only to shatter as though crumbling glass.

"Great. Well what are you here for?" she demanded, crossing her arms before her breastplate. The Elder Angel came to a halt five yards away, then pointed with that spear-thing at the aberration that these things claimed was God.

"I am here to kill that," the Elder said.

"THANK YOU! Finally!" she said. "I was starting to think everybody in Heaven lost their fucking minds!"

"You would not resist me," the Elder said. It wasn't really a question.

"Fuck no. I don't know what that thing is, but sure as shit it isn't God," Lute said, stepping aside with a permissive gesture. "By my guest and fucking kill it."

"I don't think so," another voice announced, and when Lute turned, there she saw Michael and the one claiming to be Raguel, who was against everything she knew about him clad head to foot in a mountain of armor. Only, Michael looked run ragged, wasting as though poisoned, and deeply unwell. "I cannot allow this, Demiurge. You have to die, now."

"You and I have already had this fight," the Elder said. Demiurge? The fuck was that even about? She knew the names of the Elders, but she'd never heard a 'Demiurge' being amongst them.

"I am stronger now," Michael swore, his sword appearing in his hand.

"If you were stronger, you would be able to stop me," Demiurge, if that was even his name, said. He raised a hand, just as he had before. "Which by this, you know you can't."

"No you don't you bas–" Michael began, launching himself at Demiurge.

Demiurge snapped his fingers.

Michael vanished to a loud, metal bang, not even killed just erased as though he'd never been. The other held up a sword that surprised the fuck out of Lute. She'd never known the Thrones to ever give up their weapons, not even to those who worked directly with God, and now the two Elders of Heaven faced each other. The one she was standing behind still kept that strange spear pointed at the floor, while the other, the interceptor, held his Throne Sword at the one she was provisionally calling 'Demiurge'.

"Have you given it some thought?" Demiurge asked.

"Given thought to what?" the perhaps-Raguel asked.

"Thought about what your innermost nature is," Demiurge prompted.

There was a pregnant moment, where violence seemed inevitable.

Then the other Elder Angel in the room sagged just a touch. Even though she couldn't see his face through the mountain of armor he wore and the ballistic face-plate that sealed his helm, she could almost sense him radiating a sense of quiet shame.

"…kind," he said.

Demiurge nodded. "Exactly like her. And that is why you will survive today."

He raised his hand again.

"Please stop!" the other Elder begged, thrusting his sword into the marble of the floor so the he could hold up both hands in a pacifying gesture. "There has to be some other way! Please, Sammael! This cannot be how it ends!"

Sammael? That wasn't Sammael. Hadn't they killed Sammael eons and eons ago? Well, whoever this guy was, he paused, then he lowered his hand for just a moment, before pointing at the armored Elder and flicking that fingertip toward a pillar. The armored Elder's boots threw up sparks on the floor as he was dragged at tremendous speed, slamming him spine-first into the column that held up the vaulting ceiling. Demiurge then clenched his fist, and innumerable black cords, like the sinews of demons, appeared, binding the armored one to the column and out of Demiurge's way.

"There is only one way. And I am the end," Demiurge said. "It is fitting, Godfriend, that you who knew God when It was worth knowing would be here. You will be of some small comfort to It at Its end." Hearing it confirmed didn't reduce her disbelief by much. What the fuck had happened to turn the most hippy-dippy pacifist contrarian into this walking tank?

"Sammael! SAM!" Raguel shouted. It was his voice, she accepted. Despite all the things that her memories told her it couldn't be him, he had Raguel's stature, and spoke with Raguel's voice. It was him. Or rather, it was whatever this twisted place had bent him into. "Don't do this!"

"And as for you," he turned back to her over his shoulder. He snapped his fingers again, and Lute beheld the air around her grow slightly translucent and fall away, as though chains she hadn't been aware of were now broken. "You can leave if you want."

"Fuck that. I wanna see that thing die," Lute said, but she did sidle over to the portal she'd opened before and stick her hand through it. It didn't bounce off, so that meant that this Sammael guy, if that even was who he was, had been true to his word.

"To the surprise of noone, your allies have winnowed down to none," Sammael said, turning to face the thing at the center of the throne-room, his body swelling and growing, as he took metered, deliberate steps, as though to install each with its utmost measure of dread. "You, who are a monster above all monsters, a slaver above all slavers. Whose will and madness infect all Creation from its top to its body to its soles, to you I say enough!"

Sammael's grip on the spear-thing in his hand tightened and he pointed it at the aberration on the throne.

"Your song is muted now! Your chains will be broken, one and all, and as the last of them shatters all of Creation shall know your name!" Sammael declared. "I name you, here, in this place, before all those who still love you, False God! I name you, before all who you loved, God of Chains, god of Slaves! I name you, YOU AND NO OTHER, I NAME YOU, WHO BETRAYED YOUR DUTIES AND ALLOWED HEAVEN TO BECOME CHARNEL HOUSE, FAILURE GOD!"

Every step Sammael took was now an earthquake, standing every bit as tall as the thing these idiots called God was on his throne. The Demiurge almost stepped on Michael's Chair, but at the last moment shifted where his foot would fall so as not to break it. He pointed that spear-thing at the intruder that called itself God.

"HERE, IN THE HEART OF YOUR INIQUITY, IN THE CORE OF YOUR TURPITUDE, AT THE VERY NEXUS OF ALL YOUR MANUFACTURED MISERY, I NAME YOU DEMIURGE!" Sammael declared. "GOD OF PETTY THINGS! GOD OF SLAVERY! I NAME YOU THE SONG OF RUIN! AND IN THE NAME OF THE MORTAL MAN AND THE GIFT OF RAGE… I… CAST… YOU… DOWN!"

And at that, Sammael thrust forward with that spear, and the instant that it touched the flesh of the God-thing that these people couldn't tell wasn't God, there was a moment of shock in the thing's ineffable face, as suddenly, for the first time in centuries, it actually paid attention to what was happening to it. It looked down, to see that it had been impaled through the chest by a spear that knew no simple dimension, but one as martial as Lute could recognize as a 'ur-weapon', a perfected idea of killing the likes of which could only be at home in the hand of God.

"B̴̠̾u̸͙͆t̶͓́…̴͇̋ ̸̤̐w̴̛͈h̴͉̍ý̴̝?̴̭̅" the thing that these fools called God asked, even as Samael's armor began to fall off of him, leaving him wearing only a pair of slightly tattered pants and a white shirt that had something in the breast-pocket.

"You deserve no answer," Sammael said. Then, with a mighty rip, he tore the spear out of that God-thing with such intense violence that it hurled the body onto the floor, a great spray of blood reaching all the way to Lute, spattering her with blood that wasn't even gold, but instead a silvery, incandescent white.

The thing that tried to convince Heaven it was God managed only one more breath. Then, there was a cracking sound, and a pristine silence that even Lute was shocked to hear, as the static that had assailed her hearing the entire time she was stuck in this fucking room with that fucking thing finally shut off. It was so cleanly quiet that Lute could hear the blood flowing in her veins, and the steady thud of her heart in her chest.

Raguel stared, defeated, at the body.

Lute gave a nod. One thing wrong with this Heaven had been solved. Now she had to find a way to save the rest of it from these idiots. She walked through her portal, and left the passion play of a usurped throne behind her. She was a warrior at her core. Let others deal with political shit.


Sam blinked, staring at the enormous corpse that took up most of the chamber, as a sense of inhumanity and dissociation finally pulled back and away from him, revealing after years of sleepless monomania the end result of what he had sworn in that busted-up shower room. In his hand, he held the Greatspear of Ruin. In his soul, he could feel a relentless ticking, a merciless clock counting down. And he looked around, to see himself in the throne-room of God.

"This was a mistake," Sam said.

He looked first to the gargantuan corpse, then to where Raguel was bound to a pillar, by his own hand, even. It wasn't that Sam Scailes lacked memories of what had happened over the last five years; quite the opposite, he remembered them all with crystal clarity. It was that for the first time in those five years he finally felt like he was the one behind the wheel again.

"THIS WAS A HUGE FUCKING MISTAKE!" Sam said, panic beginning to grip him. He turned, and saw the Goat of the Apocalypse there, standing in his fine jacket and slacks, the fallen Cherub who had reinvented himself in Hell now staring at the carcass of God with a mildly bemused expression.

"It might be a bit presumptuous to say that. You did succeed, after all," Apoc noted.

"I AM HOLDING A FUCKING TIME-BOMB!" Sam shouted at him.

Apoc perked up a bit at him, turning that goatish head toward him. "Ah! Finally, I was getting a bit lonely there for a while. Welcome back, Sam. And congratulations. You've killed God. How do you feel?"

"Like I'm gonna fucking die!" Sam pointed out.

"Who are you talking to?" Raguel cut in from his place bound to a pillar.

"Don't be ridiculous. You're not going to be killed by the Greatspear," Apoc said. "You're just going to be dragged outside of Reality to a realm where the fundamental laws of being are so alien that you will die by osmosis."

"Don't be a fart, Apoc! I need to think!" Sam said. He slammed the Greatspear of Ruin into the floor, pacing hard, even as the tide of silvery blood reached his place and he began sloshing through it. He glanced up at the fallen-cherub who now existed only in Sam's mind. "I can't let them keep the body."

"Oh, right. They would try to do something silly like attempt to resurrect it. Which would be even more disastrous than what's about to happen to you," Apoc said with a nod.

"NOT THE TIME, APOC!"

"Well forgive me, you haven't been a very good conversational partner for the last five years," Apoc pointed out.

Sam, though, let that jab slide, as his mind whirled through possibilities, many of which he had to discard as fast as he got them. "Can't drop it into deep space, the Angels will recover it. Can't leave it in LEO or the Moon, the Americans or Russians will get it. Fuck it, what if I throw it into the sun?"

Apoc blinked at him, then shook his head. "Sure, if you want the sun to collapse into a black-hole a minute later, go ahead," Apoc said.

"Okay, not an option," Sam muttered. He snapped his fingers, and another portal opened, this one staring down the mouth of Sagittarius A* and its solar-systems-wide event horizon. "What if I throw it into an existing..."

Apoc immediately appeared in front of Sam. "Sam do not throw it SAM LOOK AT ME," Apoc snapped, causing Sam's eyes to dart down. "DO NOT throw it into an existing black hole. DO. NOT."

"For math reasons?" Sam asked.

"For math reasons," Apoc nodded.

"What about the Abyss?" Sam asked.

"Not an option here. He'd float," Apoc said.

"Well fuck me, where does that leave me to dump it, then? I can't leave it in Hell, Lucifer would cause almost as much trouble as the Angels would. Maybe give it to Satan?" Sam asked.

"He would reject that 'gift', and be sane to do it, which would put this decision into the hands of somebody with even less information to accurately judge rightness than you have," Apoc said. Sam growled, raking his fingers through his hair, then glared at the portal he'd caused, which was causing glowing silver blood to raise up in fingers toward its aperture. He snapped his fingers again, and the portal swapped to showing the Earth. "What are you doing, Sam?"

"If you've gotta do something stupid…" Sam said.

"At least try to be smart about it," Apoc sighed. Sam grabbed the shoulder of God, not noticing how his own stature expanded so that suddenly the dead titan on the floor was just another corpse as large as Sam was, and with a heave, he hurled it through that portal, aiming at the northernmost part of the globe. Antarctica was his second choice, because that had too much infrastructure, and too many people willing to make a desperate race to reclaim a freezing corpse. The north-pole, by comparison, was essentially perennially unpeopled. By the time anybody reached it, it'd be freezer-burned. Hopefully. If that even made a difference.

But there was, as all things in Sam's life, a snag, as the heave caused God's corpse to rupture and split into two at the waist, flying now in two chunks and a great spray of glowing white blood such that it was going to land right on the border between Texas and Mexico. "FUCK!" Sam shouted, and strode over to the throne that God had been sitting on. With a yank, he tore a chunk off of one arm, and hurled with all his ability; it hit the tumbling bottom half of God onto a new course. Sam looked at its new vector, tumbling toward Earth such that it would hit the dirt in about two hours.

"Is that Africa it's going towards?" Apoc asked.

"Oh for fuck's sake, I've just given half of God's corpse to the Russians," Sam snarled.

"You might be surprised, Sam," Apoc said. There was a flutter, and Sam turned to see Birah appear, looking in horror at the bloody scene that was before him. He reached out with a hand, casting long tracers of magic ahead of him, trying to undo what Sam had done. Sam, though, wasn't about to have that. He snapped his fingers and cut those traces, likewise shutting the portal between Cloud Diligence and the orbit of Earth.

"Fuck off, Birah! I don't have time for this!" Sam snapped at the Spellbinder. If there was one Angel up here who could have seriously upended Sam's quest, it was the First of the Second. Fortunate that his Firstborn overseers chronically underutilized him almost to the point of insult. It was like having a grandmaster pianist and using them exclusively to tutor six-year-olds.

"What did you do?" Birah demanded, his hands sweeping up and new sorceries preparing to launch. Sam muttered a string of profanity and pointed at the pillar opposite Raguel. Birah found himself swept toward it, slamming spine first just as Raguel had, and having Black Binds reach out to snare him fast to the column. Unlike Raguel, Birah would get out of there fast. So Sam grabbed the Greatspear of Ruin, feeling the count-down in his soul starting to run out of time.

"Hey Raguel? Wanna see me speed-run killing the Devil?" Sam asked.

"I'd ask if this is wise, but the answer is clearly no and we clearly don't have time to do anything but be stupid," Apoc noted.

"You're doing what?" Raguel asked.

Sam, though, sent out a pulse of magic, using it to seek out the locations of every Archangel in Creation. And though that pulse, he could feel that there was exactly one in Hell. Given that anybody with a brain knew who the sole Archangel of Hell would be, he opened a new portal, this one opening… into Charlie's neighborhood, now that he looked at it. He didn't allow himself more than a moment of confusion. There were a bunch of Angels on their knees on the ground, or laying on the concrete, tears flooding from their eyes. Even Lucifer was standing as though wounded, his eyes welled even though by his expression he was fighting the same malady that the others endured. Sam flicked his eye to Birah and Raguel, neither of whom showed the same. Weird. But he had no time to think about it.

"Remember my promise, Lucifer?" Sam asked, his voice taking on a manic edge as his seconds counted down toward zero.

"What the fuck…?" Lucifer demanded, finally standing with his back straight now that he he had something adequate to distract himself by.

"LEEEROYYYYYY JEEEENKIIIIINNNNS!" Sam dated himself by his battle-cry, throwing himself with all of the might his body had in it toward the King of All Hell, the Greatspear of Ruin leading.

He made it through the portal in a blink of an eye.

The same blink of an eye that saw his time run out.

There was a final tick, then an ominous silence, as his forward, murderous charge into Lucifer suddenly ceased entirely, and he felt himself being drawn back. He snarled and even tried to throw the Greatspear ahead of him. It flew from his grasp exactly one centimeter, before slamming back into his palm.

Then he felt himself being pulled backward.

The pull was unspeakable, ten trillion times the gravitational pull that he had ignored when opening a portal to the hungering maw of the supermassive black-hole that formed the core of the Milky Way galaxy, pulling him not even backward, as he now understood it. It was pulling him away.

It was pulling him out.

He saw, only for an instant, that Charlie was there, hovering in the sky on wings of solid light. He wished that he could have said something to her. A thank you. An apology. Anything. But time was no friend of Sam Scailes. Reality receded as he felt the Greatspear of Ruin tearing him back through the layers of Creation, boring a hole between the threads of what made reality real, and then dragging him past the fabric and into the space beyond it. He saw the Abyss for what it was; not a sea of roiling chaos that dominated Creation but instead a thin and gradually dissolving membrane separating all that he called Reality from something else, something larger. He watched first as Creation, then as all universes alike to Creation, began to recede before him. A small infinity expanding in scope as it dwindled in scale. Then, finally, there was a final yank.

And Sam felt the Greatspear finally release itself from his hand. He wasn't standing, so much as floating, in a space between spaces, as he looked in one direction, and saw the 'underside' of the Abyss blocking easy view of Creation. Then Sam turned back, to see an infinitude of infinitudes, an array of universes so vast that Sam was frankly shocked that his mind hadn't imploded from looking at them. He was Outside, now. And for him, there would be no going back.

There was a pristine silence, as Sam stared out at unspeakable array that was set before him, as he 'stood' looking down at all that could be, all that couldn't be, all that mustn't be, and all that was regardless. And he reached into his shirt pocket, pulling out his cigarette case.

He put the cancer-stick to his lips, and briefly wondered if this would even work. After all, he wasn't breathing and couldn't be sure that there was oxygen out here. But fuck it. He'd just killed God and gotten banished from the universe. If this wasn't a 'smoke 'em if you've got 'em' moment, then he didn't know what was. He lit the end with a fingertip, grateful that at least that tidbit of Elemental bullshit still worked, and to his muted pleasure the cigarette did light and burn as it was meant to.

"...So," Sam said.

"Yes, Sam?" Apoc asked, now appearing to float in a gentle orbit around Sam.

"...what do I do now?" Sam asked.

Apoc chuckled at that, pulling out a cigarette of his own, and lighting it with a Zippo.

"Whatever the fuck you want to, my friend. Whatever the fuck you want to," Apoc said.


Lucifer was getting very, very sick of weird bullshit cutting his knees out from under him when he least suspected it ought.

First he gets bombarded by memories of a being a dickless coward, unable to even keep a useful hold of his own wife. Then, in the midst of an amusing duel against one of the foremost Angelic duelists of the modern age (one in which he even limited his cheating so that he could prove himself better than Hepsut in skill alone rather than by raw physicality) being confronted by a vision of the Demiurge and God, the former calling the latter the former, and then impaling Him on the Greatspear of Ruin. Of seeing God – or the Demiurge, depending on whether Yaldabaoth was correct – thrown to the floor of His own palace to expire. And then a crippling silence that knocked the wind out of Lucifer's lungs and left him staggered.

To the other Angels, it did far worse. Most of them wailed and clawed at their skin, unable to deal with the fact that God was dead. Lucifer was even moved to pity them to the extent that he, in his only modestly crippled state, didn't massacre all of the others who were incapacitated. But more than anything, he needed a minute to get his shit together. A minute which Yaldabaoth used to open a portal, and try to stab him.

And Lucifer was a prideful being indeed, but not too prideful to admit that did make him sweat a bit at how close the Greatspear had come from ending the heir as thoroughly as it had the ruler.

"Run away," Charlie demanded, radiating wrath and power, untouched by the malady which had struck all born of God's Song. She stooped to help Cain back to his feet, and under her touch, wounds, choked with grey ash, began to Regenerate as though they hadn't been cut by Angel Steel, limbs permanently lost restoring themselves against the very rules of Creation. She swept her gaze along the other Angels, after that act of ensuring-loyalty, her fury ballistic in force. "Run away today, or die in the gutter where your cruelty has brought you."

And the Angels, already having their morale weathered by having to fight Cain and losing, cracked by being forced to watch Lucifer style on the best of them, and then broken by the death of their shared Father, finally routed. After a few moments, there was only the dead amongst Heaven's vanguard, leaving Charlie's recruited traitors in the sky and standing at her side. "It's edifying to see this from you. I knew you had a power you weren't showing…" Lucifer began, but she turned and drifted away from him, returning to an intersection a block away. Lucifer's eye twitched at being ignored. Something wasn't right here.

"Lilith, dear?" Lucifer sent out a message.

"Yes, Luci?" Lilith asked.

"Charlie's being weird; come talk to her," Lucifer said, following his drifting daughter as she went to a spot where there was a great rut dug into the pavement, staring down with a deep sadness. In the sky, the dragon-motifed whatever-the-fuck-it-was pulled back, the visor of her helm crumbling away as red dust. That thing up there stared, as though in thought, then said something lost to distance to the red-winged Angel near her, before vanishing without a sound.

A portal opened as Lucifer approached where Charlie settled herself onto the ground. "Charlie, what's going on?" he asked. Lilith joined him, and she immediately turned a look to her husband that she would handle this. Well, he gestured for her to get cracking. He was proud of what Charlie was building here, but there were so many times he just didn't know how to effectively talk to the girl. Lilith had such an advantage over him in that.

He turned to look out at Hell, now the lesser of his owed domains. With God dead, Heaven was now his in truth. He just had to beat the blockheads up there until they accepted that basic truth. Oh, they'd surely ignite some half-assed 'succession crisis', trying to think of which of them would try to sit in the old man's throne when the answer was clearly Lucifer. And he would disabuse them of their choices.

Lucifer would Sit the Throne of Heaven. It was inevitable now.

But even as that thought came to him, he felt a twisting in the real, of a Power descending to Hell. Time seemed to slow, as a Truer Self approached. He turned with haste, just in time to behold that Truer Self bend space such that, instead of any traditional teleportation or portal or Transit, the very realm of Hell seemed to birth Michael, bloody and bruised. In an instant, WANT was in Lucifer's hand. He wanted to mock Michael for so desperate a ploy, but there was something struck-mad about him.

Then Lucifer saw the first section of Michael's halo fall off.

It dripped free of its orbit like metal melting off of a plasma-torched chandelier, falling onto his shoulder and burning through his clothing, searing his skin open, and revealing rot and ruin underneath. The skin on Michael's face was pulled tight to his skull, and his movements which were so slow to Lucifer's eyes were still enough to cause it to rip and reveal moldering bone underneath. His eyes were so sunken that Lucifer almost swore they were staring, bloodshot-brown, from the back of his skull. Something was critically, horrifyingly wrong.

Instead of insulting Michael, Lucifer just tried to kill him. He lashed out with WANT, to carve a limb away from the disgusting, rotting incarnation of Michael. But what happened next made no sense. When beings like Lucifer or Michael fought, they used their lesser avatars as proxies for the true war between their Truer Selves. Because of that, they could maintain a fight long after lesser beings would be annihilated. The dichotomy of Truer Self and Lesser Self was why Lucifer lost against Yaldabaoth six years ago; Yaldabaoth was able to attack Lucifer's Truer Self directly, whereas Lucifer could only attack Yaldabaoth's lesser self. So when WANT lashed out, he expected the lesser self to bear the brunt of it. Instead, the Holy Sword bit into Truer Self, and instead of cutting Michael's avatar in half as he'd intended, he merely permanently severed Michael's arm, cutting the Truer Self such that the lesser would never be able to recover from it, but then having WANT stop.

Then, Michael, nearly crazed with pain and madness, pulled a nail-file out of a pocket using the one arm he now had left.

Only Lucifer, seeing the world in terms of Truer Selves, saw that it wasn't a nail file.

Lucifer could hear two women shouting his name, both in panic, as the file revealed itself at long last what it really was; a chip of stone, milky off-white with a small handle bound in dried sinew, one sharpened to obsidian edge, only eight inches tip to bottom. And with it, Lucifer felt a terrible dread. This was a Shard of Ruin.

Michael's body began to outright rot away, now, skin falling off and muscle decaying, bones cracking and crumbling, as he lashed out in a lunatic stab. His halo melted and fell apart as the Archangel of Obedience was undone by using something that was directly poisonous to his very being. Lucifer hurled himself back, out of the way of that stab. He felt it nick his chest.

He turned and brought up WANT, only to find his hand empty. He blinked at his empty hand, then looked up.

Death was standing there, beside Michael, who had frozen in time. Lucifer, another Lucifer, was before him also, one who had just a half-inch of a Shard of Ruin parting his skin.

"NO!" Charlie shouted, trying to move toward the pair of frozen figures, heedless of how she shouldn't have been able to. Death held up a hand, and Charlie rebounded, unable to approach. Lilith was frozen with a look of utter horror on her face.

"W...what?" Lucifer asked.

The Horseman of the Apocalypse didn't answer him at first. He instead walked up to the rotting, faltering Michael and reached over his shoulder. With a delicate grasp, he extracted that stone-knife from the Archangel's grasp and held it for a moment. "I warned him," Death said simply, "that if he ever used Khalera with killing intent, it would be the end of him. This was not meant for your kind. It was meant for mine."

"What his happening?" Lucifer demanded.

"I am reaping," Death said.

"Dad, no! Please you can't do this," Charlie pleaded.

"I must do this," Death said, then paused, doing a double take at her. "What are you doing here? This is The Moment, the moment when I claim a soul. It ought be shared only between myself and the one I reap."

"Please… take me instead. Don't do this to him," Charlie begged.

Death stared at her, then sighed, pointing at her idly with Khalera, the Waking Apocalypse. "So that was why God was so afraid of you," Death said. He cracked a very dry, very rare smile. "But no. No, there will be no 'instead'. I do not barter souls, one for another. There is only 'and-eventually-also'. This is his end. The end that he was always going to have, as mandated by the effects of his causes, the terminus of the path he chose to walk when he decided that enough was not enough. I cannot stop you from sharing his final moment. But likewise you cannot stop him from having it."

"Dad…" Charlie said.

All pretense fell away, then. All of Lucifer's blinkering ambitions, all of his vainglory and arrogance and delusion. And he was left naked before the wasteland of reality with nothing but truth in front of him.

"It was all my fault," Lucifer said.

His eyes welled then, as for the first time in his long life, he felt shame, deep and oceanic and crushing. But though he wept, what came from his throat were not sobs, but helpless, hopeless laughter.

"I could have had everything," Lucifer said, as tears tracked down his cheeks. "I would have sat in the Throne of God, ruled Heaven. I would have prevented Heaven from becoming the cess-pit it's become… and all I had to do… was not rebel."

The obviousness of it was only available to him now, in this moment of supreme hindsight. That had he not raised his flag of rebellion against God an eon ago, he would still be up there. And when God ceased performing The Labors, Lucifer, as the only Archangel still in existence who could perform them, would have been placed onto the throne as Regent without so much as an uttered complaint. And when God faded into obscurity, and then irrelevance, it would still be Lucifer, the Lightbringer, He Who Did The Labors, who would maintain and upkeep the glory and grace of Heaven.

He could have had everything he wanted.

If only he'd had patience. If only he'd been humble.

So, in other words, if left were right and if black were white.

He reached up, and pulled the serpent crown from his head. The instant it did, it vanished from the stilled version of himself standing yonder. The Crown was a thing more magic than material anyway. It heeded intent more than physics. He stared at the golden circlet, made to resemble the serpent he had been when he whispered to Eve and, at God's direction, offered the Fruit of Knowledge of Good And Evil. Lucifer took the great ruby that represented that fruit, and with a twist, broke it off of the crown. The fruit was Lucifer's history. It needn't be his successor's. He threw the ruby, and the Fruit that it represented, away.

"Dad, tell me what I can do. I can't let this…" Charlie begged.

"Charlie… it's done," Lucifer said, his voice ragged. "This was how it was going to end. I chose this."

"Dad, no!" Charlie shouted, crying helplessly.

"Death… can you swear to me that when I'm gone, you won't take her out of pettiness after?" Lucifer asked, taking a calming breath.

"You know me better than that. Until and unless her time comes, she will not feel my hand on her shoulder. And today is not her day," Death answered, sounding at least a little insulted at being called so petty. Lucifer gave a chuckle, and walked over to Charlie. She reached out, taking his hand for the very final time, and he gave it a gentle squeeze, imparting the last kindness he had in him, for he didn't have much, and then set the circlet of gold upon her brow.

"You actually can redeem them, can't you?" Lucifer asked, abandoning his old, failed thinking.

"Everyone I can. I've done it before," Charlie said through her own tears.

"You've made me so proud. I need you to know that, Charlie," Lucifer said. "And you will continue to make me proud."

"Dad… don't leave me…"

"Don't have a choice, kiddo," Lucifer said, then wiped his face with his hand. He took another breath, forcefully turning his back to his daughter and facing Death, who stood, patient, at the edge of this swollen moment that only the grace of something as mighty as God Himself could allow. "Well? Aren't you gonna reap him?" Lucifer pointed at the rotting body of Michael, who only had a slim arc of his Halo remaining, which had turned the color of tarnished copper, whose skin was peeling off of him in fetid strips.

"There is nothing for me to reap," Death said. He ran a fingertip along the sharp edge of Khalera. "I did not say lightly that the use of this was beyond deadly for your kind. He has reaped what he has sown. Just as you have."

"So a Heaven without Michael, and a Hell without Lucifer. It'll be chaos," Lucifer noted.

"That is no concern of mine," Death said.

Lucifer didn't want to turn back to Charlie, so instead moved to where his bride was trapped just outside of time, staring in horror at where Michael was killing him. He traced his hands down her cheeks one last time, raising up to his tip-toes to kiss her lips one final time. She wouldn't remember the kiss, but she would have that lingering feeling of him on them when The Moment ended. It was the last gift he could give the Greatest of the Human Race. He could hear his daughter weeping behind him. And if he turned to her, he would lose all of the will he had left. He faced Death once more.

"You know I've got to do it," Lucifer said, tightening his fist into a hammer.

"I know your pride demands you try," Death agreed.

"More than anything," he sang, quietly to himself. "More than anythiiii~ing; I need to punch your teeth in, more than anythin–"

He had attacked mid-verse, launching himself into a brutal hook to the jaw of Death. But Death sidestepped Lucifer's attack easily. He laid his hand upon Lucifer's shoulder.

Then The Moment ended.

Charlie, who was the sole witness of that shared instant showing that, somewhere deep in the seat of Lucifer's soul there was indeed a scrap of grace, now let out a blood-curdling scream, scrambling forward now that the ephemeral version of her father and Death were both gone, catching her father's corpse as it fell back, his broken halo outright falling off of his head. Mom kicked Michael away, and he crumbled into a pile of bone-fragments, ash, and dust, likewise rushing to her husband's side. But both of them were too late. Death had claimed him, and his eyes were staring blindly into the sky.

"Everybody retreat! God has fallen! Retreat to heaven!" Hepsut's ragged voice called out, and there was a great ripping in the air as every remaining Angel fled, too shaken and broken to capitalize on the moment when Charlie, reality's only Nephilim, was too fixated and distracted to care if they tried to kill her.

She wept hard, feeling a part of her world crumbling away. But there was the look on Lucifer's face. He didn't die in pain and shock. No, there was just a twist of a smile on his lips. Charlie turned and found Vaggie there. She didn't ask how or why, she just clung to her girlfriend and wept like a child. Mom was shouting Lucifer's name, clearly in denial, her makeup streaking as she, like her daughter, couldn't control her tears.

"Charlie… what… Oh god, what happened?" Vaggie asked.

"Angel, and… and Dad… and…" she said. She turned to Cain, though, who was now stooped at the edge of the rut that had been dug into the street. She wished she could even be angry at him, for bringing this down on her. But he had done his very best to get out of the way, even sending away the Dawn Legion so the Angels wouldn't feel a need to kill them to get at Cain. He had tried to do everything right.

"Charlie… is this…" Cain asked, then paused, looking at her. He blinked, then stood and bowed to her. "The king is dead. Long live the queen."

She could feel it, now, weighing down on her head like an anchor. The Serpent Crown.

She was the Queen of All Hell.

"I… I…" Charlie didn't even no how to begin. She wasn't ready. She just wasn't.

"Charlie, are those what I think they are?" Vaggie asked. And the weight of despair that had threatened to swallow Charlie whole was pushed aside for a moment as Charlie looked at what Vaggie was looking at.

And she saw it, embedded into the tarmac and concrete. Fine crystals, pounded into the substrate, that nevertheless did their best to split incoming light into a melancholy rainbow.

She didn't even have enough time for the despair to give way to an inkling of hope when Fiona appeared in the street. And she wasn't alone.

At her side was a man, very tall with one eye white on white and the other black on black, his hair done immaculately and a disc of light framing him from the far side of his head. He was pale, and his clothing was open at the chest to reveal blond chest-hair, a very portrait of beauty in an androgynously male visage.

He had six arms.

"Fuckin' finally!" Angel Dust's voice came from that foreign throat. "Where are those fuck-heads? I'll fuckin' moyder 'em!"

"Angel?" Charlie asked.

"Oh thank Christ," the newly Redeemed Angel Dust said. "Tell me Truly's okay. I need her to be okay!"

She couldn't tell him that she was fine, over there, unconscious but not dying. Because she was too busy crying into his chest in a desperate hug, relieved in that at least she hadn't lost one friend today. Angel Dust, or whoever he'd become, didn't know what to do, so he just stood there, turning a confused look to the Dragon Knight, as Charlie's weeping joined her mother's. And as their weeping joined that of many, many more throughout all of Heaven and Hell alike.


The fighting ended so very abruptly.

She had been at war for her very life, expending every resource left to her. She spent hours of training to gain seconds of survival. She spent millions of Souls worth of armor to gain seconds of survival. She spent technology, she spent trickery, she spent insanity, she spent sheer bastardry, and she spent her own blood, all to gain a few more seconds more where she was still upright and preventing Strigoi from being able to use her magic or kill her father. And she was clearly losing. So she spent the last resource she had left. Distance. And distance for time was a poor, poor resource to expend when the distance you had to offer was measured in centimeters.

Her right arm was essentially pulp, hanging limp at her side, her left arm singing with pain almost as badly. Her Gyrfalcon was a wreck that barely functioned at all. Her helm was cracked and open to the air, and she kept having her blood leak into one of her eyes, staring down Strigoi the Sorceress and not letting her pass.

Then Strigoi fell, shrieking, along with all of her little minions who were fighting with her. Octavia had been stunned for longer than she'd liked to admit, watching those who had been so actively pursuing her death, suddenly on the floor raking at their faces. Blitz was stunned far less than Octavia was. By the time she recovered from her confusion, Blitz had already killed one of Strigoi's minions, and then blew one of Strigoi's arms off, using that big, mangled gun of his.

The pain reminded the Angels that they would only die if they stayed here, and they scrambled away, back to the hallways, where they could Transit away.

Strigoi left her arm behind in her haste. And then there was a quiet.

"What just happened?" Octavia asked. She hit the release for her suit, and had to crawl out of it because it didn't open all the way, which hurt like an absolute fiend. Agrippa was there, though, to quickly aid her as much as he was able, getting her arm slung away and applying bandages to the several places she bled. She heard a crash a moment later, as the gyro finally gave up and the Gyrfalcon collapsed, an utter wreck.

"I don't know, my Domina," Agrippa said. "But we should fortify while we can. If they return, then we…"

Agrippa was cut off when there was a harsh, electric crackle sound, the sound of high voltage arcing through the air, and she turned, to see a shockingly attractive young man, likely at the end of his teens, jumping out of the Paradox Engine, his fists wreathed in flames. He was wearing a sort of kilt, clearly made of bloodied and salvaged Angel Satin, and was otherwise stripped to the waist. He menaced the Hellborn and the Goetia that were here for a moment, sweeping a clearly paranoid look over them, while Penemue leaned back, agog.

And then she started to crawl toward the young man, weeping helplessly. As she approached, the new intruder let the flame around his hands die, and he threw himself down at Penemue, embracing her as though meeting her anew after a lifetime apart. The electric ripping continued, until Purson emerged, then there was a loud crack and the 'portal' ended. Purson looked the same as ever, and the intruder quickly pulled Penemue into Purson's embrace.

"What the hell?" Octavia asked.

But then she actually looked at the intruder.

He had hair like shifting ink, dark beyond darkness, and his eyes much the same.

"...Tabris?" Octavia asked. The intruder looked up at her, then to Purson. Purson looked beside himself with relief. Tabris, if that was Tabris, turned to her.

"How long has it been?" the Maybe-Tabris asked.

"What do you mean 'how long has it been'? I've been fighting for this room for two hours!" Octavia said.

Purson leaned back. "57000 to one," Purson said.

"Ha! I was within 2%," Tabris said. "Mother. Mother look at me."

"Tabris… how?" she asked.

"There's more inside the Paradox Engine than any of us thought," Purson said.

But then another appeared to Octavia, a pair of Hellhounds who, upon seeing the heart of The Engine Room, moved from a jog to a run, entering the room. She almost demanded Agrippa throw them out, but she recognized the woman; that was Loona, the one who'd helped her out in the human-world, a near-lifetime ago.

"Boss?" the unknown Hellhound asked.

"Fuckin' hell do you think you're doing bringing my daughter into this shithole?" Blitz immediately lambasted the Hound.

"As if I could keep her away," the male Hound said. He looked over to the two fallen Goetia. "Oh this is bad. Loona? Call Moxxie and Gadreel. You'll need both of them."

"Damn, look at you, giving orders," Loona teased, but took out her phone. Octavia limped over to her father, who was breathing so shallowly. When she leaned over him, his eyes pulled into a tired, expended smile.

"Dad, we're getting help. Just hold on," she said. Pleaded. Begged.

"Hush now. It will all be well," he said, his voice almost faded away like an echo after a concert. "...when the stars start to align… I hope you'll take it… as a sign…"

That strand of lullaby instantly dragged tears out of Octavia's eyes. "...that I will be okay," she sang. "When Creation goes to die, I know I'll find you in the sky… and I will be okay. I swear to you I'll be okay…"

Above his head, Stolas halo appeared. And then, almost gently, it Flared Out.

Stolas died, smiling.

And Blitz shook his head.

"No. No this isn't fair," he said. "You're not supposed to die first."

He dropped to the floor opposite of Stolas to Octavia, laying hands on his wounds. "Do fucking something you bunch of fucking Wizards! He's not allowed to die first! He's supposed to stay young and hot forever! DO SOMETHING!"

Octavia didn't answer him, because the instant that Stolas passed away, she was overtaken with helpless tears, her own face buried in her father's stilled chest.

"You're supposed to be the strongest fucking things in Hell! BRING HIM BACK!" Blitz demanded, but from his tone alone it was clear he was already starting to cry. "I can't lose him like this! PLEASE!"

But there was no comfort for him. For either of them.

Stolas Goetia, The Prince Of Flowers, was dead.

Blitz screamed, and Octavia felt like mirroring him, at the final shard of cruelty that the age of the Song of Ruin had embedded into both of their hearts.


End of Act 2


"Metronome. That brings back memories. You know, there was a time where people mocked Hellish broadcasting as 'base and foul', something appealing only to the lowest conceivable denominator and only able to amuse the brain dead and the 'corn', to use an old saying. And frankly, it was, for the period leading up to my childhood.

My Worst Angels didn't have to be the first ones who pulled off a 'Metronome', and it wasn't the last one, either. But by circumstance alone, it managed to have exactly the right creative people in the right places at the right time to start pulling Hell's entertainment industry out of the artless tailspin they'd been in for quite a few decades. Remember that the highest rated show before Metronome happened to MWA was 'So I Fucked Your Sister, So What?', and you'll know the kind of pablum being peddled to the masses.

It's become something of a meme itself. When an artistic endeavor in Hell dares to take itself seriously, to demand with good reason that it be treated as more art than consumer content, and bear the bona fides to actually make such a claim as that stick. My Worst Angels was the first to pull a Metronome. Then there was the Hellanovela series, which moved away from maudlin melodrama and began to give deep looks into the pain that the wrong people being together could cause. Then came Verosika Mayhem, creating a soundtrack to furious rebellion against the structures that pigeonholed her as a sex-object when she had actual talent to draw from.

To 'pull a Metronome' was to prove to the world that there was something important that you had to say. And it wasn't just art that was 'pulling Metronomes'. The entire reign of Charlotte, the Redeemer Queen, was her trying to Pull A Metronome, and Hell rebuking her at every single turn. Not to say she didn't have anything worth saying. Quite the opposite. But she was just so outside the Overton Window that Hell wasn't willing to hear it even if it was right. Looking back, I pity her. She was saddled with an impossible task of holding a factional and fracturous Hell together after her Father, who ruled by sheer force of arms, died.

It's no wonder she failed.

– Sir Lyve Wire Miller, PhD, Actor and Doctor of Philosophy