Reckoning

[takestime]

Once again, Zerxus does not know the true plans of the God he has freed.

“I do not need to destroy him,” Kahl said, not long before he graduated. He has said nothing about will, or won’t, or why.

Or how.

When they re-enter the Hells, Asmodeus knows. He summons Zerxus to him, and he permits Kahl - a strange and minor god, to his senses, of a suitable temper to add to his court - to follow. He enjoys when supplicants walk willingly into the heart of his power.

Zerxus is kneeling, when Kahl begins, commanded to silence by his Lord, and so unable to interfere.

“I am a god of revenge,” Kahl says, when Asmodeus demands he identify himself. His voice is as quiet as a knife in the dark, his green eyes a distant beacon. The rolling tide of him ebbs and builds, as it always does when a plan comes to its crux, the zenith of his power. He meets Asmodeus’s eyes, and looks into him, down and through, all the way down to the savage, miserable unending howl at the very bottom of his ancient soul.

“It wasn’t fair, was it?” Kahl says, softly, soft as the endless waves of the ocean, wearing continents away. “That they chose someone else over you. It wasn’t fair.” It is and isn’t sympathy. Kahl’s sharpest teeth shine, eel-like, needle teeth that never quite closed in his father’s throat, a thirst that will be parched, unquenched, until the end of time. It wasn’t fair, but there is no fair. Justice is mad, so unfairness can only be answered with more unfairness. This is the truth Kahl knows.

“And you were locked away. For so long, so long, so long. There is only one kind of togetherness, after someone you love has filled you with pain, and that is the intimacy of sharing it back. I know.”

Asmodeus can feel the working of another divine power, which is neither an attack nor a binding, but something more terrible than either, something like enthralling, something like drowning, not merely Kahl’s will trying to overmaster Asmodeus, which would never, could never succeed, this is his place of power, and he is the one who never yields. But Kahl’s will is aligned with Asmodeus’s will - or Asmodeus has aligned his will with Kahl’s - and it drags on him like an undertow. Asmodeus is smart enough to be wary, but too arrogant to panic, to refuse to listen any longer and screech his way out of the terrible, seductive understanding wrapped layer upon layer around him.

He is a king, and kings always do like to hear their own heart’s voices uplifted in others' mouths.

“What are you doing?” he demands, and he sends Kahl pain for his presumption, casual and callous, like a backhand across the face. Kahl walked into the deepest Hell, and it is Asmodeus’s place, by divine nature, to punish all those who are here.

The pain roars through Kahl like an undersea earthquake, triggering a tidal wave. Because this is not the deepest Hell. Not for him. Both condemned by family, left to fester forever, both clawing their own way out -

“I am the God of revenge,” Kahl says again. Asmodeus is almost as smart as he is arrogant; he understands his doom in the very next moment, when Kahl takes the gathered power of their confrontation and, instead of fighting him, or binding him, or swaying him, blesses him instead.

Kahl steps in close. It should not be possible unless Asmodeus willed it, unless he allowed it. But he has sought the blessings of revenge for as long as he has hated, and he cannot barricade that open road now. Kahl puts a hand on his chest.

“You awful, ash-bitter, beautiful thing,” he croons. “You did it. You broke out. You hurt them. You hurt them all, so terribly. You did it.”

Asmodeus cannot stop him. Asmodeus cannot want to stop him. It is cool water he has never tasted before, in all the ages since he was cast here. It is cool water, and he is a god of fire. Kahl pours it into him. Lets the hook catch, the knife twist.

“It was enough. You can be done now.”

Asmodeus chokes on it.

“No. No - I’m not - not yet, forever, I will hate forever, I will fight -”

He snarls, roars so loud the pillars shake, tries to tear Kahl in half from shoulder to hip, but Kahl is too strong, in this moment, stronger even than the stone foundations of the Hell. Asmodeus is sizzling like a quenched blade, like coals in the rain, black veins crawling across the red edifice of his skin, brittle chunks of him starting to come apart, like black and grey charcoal falling from a burnt-out log. There will not be enough of him left, soon, to hold back collapse. Not without the hate.

Kahl’s hand sinks into his chest, as easily as into a bed of warm ashes.

“You are a lawful thing, King of Hell,” Kahl reminds him. “And you have given your heart into my domain, for ages of the world.”

For a moment, as he holds Asmodeus’s heart in his hand, all of Hell is alight with it, like a dark night illuminated and made alien in the flash of a lightning strike. For a moment all the fires are the cold, shrouding mists of Kahl’s realm, all the hooked and rusted blades cool and keen and well-kept, all the shrieks and screams the steady honing rasp of a whetstone, patient and implacable.

“You’re so tired,” Kahl murmurs, and strokes Asmodeus’s steaming brow with gentle fingers of his free hand. “You’re so tired. You’re bored, because you know the meaningful work is done. You did it. You did enough. You’re done.”

Asmodeus is clutching Kahl’s arm where it disappears into his chest, then sags, as though perhaps Kahl is the only thing holding him up. He seems to shrivel from the inside, like burnt paper.

“I’m - so tired,” Asmodeus agrees, shaking, as Kahl’s power hammers on the chisel of truth and cracks him open. It wouldn’t work, if it weren’t true. That, too, is revenge: bringing home the truth of what someone has done.

“You did so well,” Kahl croons, joyous and vicious, and for a moment his grass-green eyes are forest-fire red, and that, too, is true.

“But - I can’t. I can’t be done. Tyranny is never done, hate is never done -”

“But you are,” Kahl insists, rolling over him like the sea, like reckoning, obliterating, washing edifices and pretenses away.

“Hate is never done,” Amsodeus repeats, but he shakes when he says it, instead of the pillars of his palace. He sounds tired, tired and desperate. Ashen flakes of him are blowing away now, even in the hot stagnant air of the throne room, pitting his cheeks, hollowing the sinews of his arms. Zerxus, on his knees, commanded to silence, weeps in silence. As the terrible heat of Asmodeus’s hatred finally burns out, a few of his tears finally hit the floor, rather than evaporating on his cheeks.

“Then that is no longer what you are,” Kahl says with a shrug.

He would have resisted peace for all the ages of the world, except that it came as this blessing. His endless hate bleeds away from him, and it has long since become his lifesblood. Kahl holds him until it is all bled away.

Asmodeus lasts a few odd, lingering moments longer, a husk of his former self, his grandeur and sly cleverness, his will and determination and meticulous calculation, all his fine qualities still precariously piled together, like stones without mortar, like heaped autumn leaves: bewildered, with nothing to drive them or hold them together.

He looks so much smaller, now, and terribly bewildered. Lost. Who is he to be? What is he to do? Another creature, perhaps, could have gone on, in search of those answers. But there is simply not enough of him to hold up his own weight, not with the burning, towering core of him extinguished. He crumples away.


Zerxus is released.

“No,” escapes from him, like guts spilling from slit belly, involuntary, thrashing, the moan of a fatal blow. As though Kahl had pulled his own heart out, just as Asmodeus once did. “No. You said you wouldn’t - I didn’t want this -”

Kahl watches him mourn, stumbling to the wreckage, and does not point out that he very much had said he would, and never contradicted it; that saying I do not need to did not contradict what he had promised before. His face is calm, tinged very faintly with sorrow, cool rather than cold or stern. Asmodeus, after all, had put his heart in Kahl’s hands, had been his, as much as any abused and vicious mortal.

“Would you prefer I revoke my blessing?” he asks, when Zerxus cannot find the words for more protests. “And go back to pretending that this is not what you are working toward, pitifully and hopelessly, every moment you wish to redeem him? He can have peace, or he can never have peace, and remain as he was. Those are the only choices.”

Zerxus hates him, in that moment, more than he did watching Asmodeus dissolve. Hates him for making him party to it, for making him assent to it.

“Well, they shouldn’t be,” he snarls. His horns feel heavy on his head, heavier than they have since he first got them, like the heaviness of dead things.

Or slumbering things.

Kahl kneels down next to him, and digs in the ashes, the already dull armor, the brittle shimmering of divine bone shards. He pulls out a small, fist-sized lump, an iron coal, cooling, with only the faintest orange glow.

He holds it out to Zerxus.

“He cannot be what he was. But many things can be done with souls. Given a life, it could grow into something else. But he may not thank you for it.”

When Zerxus takes the smoldering metal in his hands, nevertheless, they do not burn.