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.

Comments

Broken Things

[takestime]

You aren’t mad all the time.

(That feels - important - somehow - )

But when you do get mad, it feels like the mad is bigger than you, bigger than your house, bigger than the sky. When you get mad, you scream, because that feels like the only way to let it out of your skin, even though you want to hold onto it, too. You scream and stomp and thrash and bite, and your dad just holds you.

Sometimes you hate that. It feels like he doesn’t get it, and you don’t know how to tell him, you don’t know the words for how big the mad is. You bite him a lot, when you’re mad.

But it’s - solid. You don’t hate it afterwards. You don’t always know why you get so mad, and that’s a little scary. It’s okay, when he’s still holding you, when he talks to you in his deep, quiet voice, and you can feel the heat of his heartbeat.

You know why you’re mad right now, though. You want to go see the rabbit field, but Dad says you can’t, because it’s raining, and it won’t stop raining. You want to see the rabbits! You don’t want to draw, and you don’t want to hear a story, and you don’t want to calm down and play with Sir Flops!

You throw the little wood-and-rag knight with soft lambswool ears as hard as you can. Away from you, just away. But it hits the wall and for a moment you’re shocked out of screaming by the crack when it hits the wall, and the carved head splits right in two.

He’s broken and you’re so mad it’s hard to breathe, so mad it hurts a little, like a fist is squeezing you and your face is on fire, but you drag in the biggest breath you can because you are going to scream -

But when you turn to yell at your dad, he doesn’t look tired and patient and steady.

He looks -

He looks -

You’ve never seen him look like that.

You’ve never seen anyone look like that.

“...Dad?”

He jerks, a sharp-wild movement that makes you think of grasshoppers jumping, his eyes too wide, his face too white. It’s not the way a person is supposed to move.

You don’t like it.

“Stop it!” you yell, but he doesn’t stop it. His breathing is making a cricket-rattle noise, and he gulps like a fish down at the pond. He can’t do this! It’s still raining and it’s not fair and Sir Flops is broken and you don’t know what’s wrong with your dad and you’re so mad but the mad feels small for the first time. It feels like a thin jagged spike of lightning in a huge dark cloud of scared and you don’t know what to do.

So you ask for help from the only other person you’re sure will hear you.

Kahl! Something’s wrong with dad! Your whole leg tenses with wanting to stamp it, even though he isn’t here to see it.

Your head feels heavy and your eyes are stinging and your throat is sore and you don’t want to say please come, because you kind of hate him even though you don’t know why, but he’s there before you have to.

You would have, though. You were about to. You were.

Kahl looks around the room. He frowns a little, looking at dad, but he clearly doesn’t understand. This doesn’t happen! This isn’t supposed to happen! Something is wrong with him!

“Fix it!” you yell, pointing at him.

“I -” says your dad, and his voice sounds all wrong, like if a voice were made of just coughs.

Kahl kneels down next to you. He puts a hand on your cheek, and it feels cool like stone in shadow, and just as hard as he moves your face to look at him.

“I am not the god of fixing it,” he tells you, in a voice full of the tiger’s growl, but that’s one of his normal voices so you don’t care.

“But you have to-”

“No, I don’t,” he interrupts, and it sounds like - like the last stone falling. You don’t know how. “Go get your boots and your rain hat,” he tells you. “We’re going for a walk.”

You don’t think he’s going to take you to the rabbit field. But you get your boots and hat.

When you come back to the main room, Sir Flops is still in parts on the floor, and your dad still looks wrong, and he isn’t looking at you, but he’s not cricket-rattling anymore. He’s sitting down on the floor, holding onto the doorframe towards his bedroom.

“Dad?” you ask again, quieter this time. He does a smaller grasshopper-jerk, and waves a hand, as if shooing you out the door with Kahl. You don’t want to leave him alone, but you go.

Your rain hat isn’t very good. Your face is wet. The sound of the rain is good. It feels like you’re the leaves and the paths, like the rain is washing some of the mad out of you. But the clouds are so dark, almost like night time. Your footsteps rustle and crunch. Cold sits in your belly and crawls up your throat.

“It’s my fault. Isn’t it?”

Your Dad would pick you up, hold you close. But he waved you away and Kahl keeps walking.

“Your dad was hurt a long time ago. Before he came to live here with you,” he says, and you know he isn’t lying. You always know when someone is lying. Kahl lies sometimes, but he’s never lied to you.

You think he’s not telling all the truth, either.

“Well, I don’t care when! He can’t be like that! If you won’t fix it, then I’ll fix it!” you say, even though you don’t have any idea how. Even though you are not turning around to run back toward the house. Even though your own breath does a fast little rattle when you think about doing it.

Kahl does stop, then. He crouches down next to you again.

“Imri, listen to me.” He doesn’t touch you this time. But he never calls you by your name. It holds you tighter than his hands could have done. You can’t look away from his eyes. They are so green they make the forest gray.

“It is not a child’s job to heal their parent,” Kahl says firmly.

Kahl never lies to you. Kahl isn’t lying.

You breathe out, a soft rushed gust, and gulp, and you’re glad but you also feel hot and tight in your throat. You feel like you’ve done something wrong. You hate it. You hate that feeling more than anything, and you feel it most around Kahl.

“But then -”

“It is not yours to do,” Kahl says again, more firmly. Harshly.

He takes in a slow breath of his own.

“Time doesn’t heal everything. But it heals more than people think. So we are giving him some time.”

You chew on this for a little while, standing in the rain.

“Can we go get him a present? Besides time? To…to say sorry?”

“Are you sorry?”

You want to squirm around like the worms under the stepstones in the garden.

“...maybe a little.”

You didn’t…mean to. Surprise him. Or - whatever you did.

Kahl nods. “Okay.”

So you walk the rest of the way to the village in the rain, and you get hand pies. Trout for Kahl, onion and ham for you, and two fig and honey pies for your dad, carefully wrapped in oilpaper. The baker shows you how to tie the knot on the twine. Your hands are small and clumsy but you are very careful and you get it exactly right.

“We’ll wait until the rain stops,” Kahl says, so you try to eat your pie very slowly. You remember that you are giving your dad Time.

You still end up finishing it too soon, so the baker gives you one of yesterday’s unsold loaves, now stale. It feels good to rip it into little pieces, and then you go to the pond to feed the bread scraps to the fish. They don’t mind the rain.

After a million billion years the rain stops, and you find yourself dragging your feet on the way back. What if it didn’t work?

But Kahl doesn’t slow down for you, the way Dad would, so you have to run to keep up. When you peek around Kahl through the door, your dad is sitting at the table, breathing slow and deep. His hair is wet like he was outside too. You take off your boots at the door and hang up your hat like you’re supposed to. Sir Flops is gone.

“We brought you hand pies,” you say, your voice a little shakier than you want it to be. For a second, you can feel the mad maybe notice, like a sleeping dog picking up its ears, but you don’t scowl, just put the wrapped up pies on the table.

“Thank you, Imri,” your dad says, and his voice is almost right. His face is the right color again, too, except his eyes are a little red. He has dirt under his fingernails that wasn’t there before.

You want to ask so many things. You want to know what happened, and you don’t want to know. You want to know if he will be okay, and you don’t know the words to ask.

“...where’s Sir Flops?” you ask instead.

“Oh, Imri,” your dad says, too heavy, soft and thick and wet like all the leaves outside. “Sometimes, when you break things, you don’t get them back.” He says it like he doesn’t want to say it, quiet and stopping-starting, like you on the path home. But he picks you up to say it and holds you in his lap. You want to cry and you don’t know why not to cry so you do, shaky and whimpering instead of screaming. You don’t know why you’re crying, when Kahl’s stupid time worked, somehow, but he holds you the whole time. And you still don’t understand how it works. But the time does help, after all.