Holy Opposites 5

Chapter Four:


	Normally, the castle and fortress in Nessus was full of quiet weeping.  Despair hardens souls, but Asmodeus, the God of Sin and the absolute evil of the Nine Hells, was a master of finding ever more subtle and delightful ways to induce despair in the damned.  He was an artist, in truth, and losing his grace in the downfall from the Astral Plane, so many millions of years ago, had not lessened his cleverness.

	At that moment, he was trying out a new toy.  His devouring of Azuth in the aftermath of the destruction of Dwemerhardt had been a fortuitous chance indeed, and a bonus opportunity of the Spellplague.  He, alone of the Devil Archbarons, had seen it coming, and had been prepared, to his daughter’s discontent and Mephistopheles’ rage.  He had seized on the power of a god, made himself greater for it, and ended the Blood War himself, earning a place in the halls of the True Pantheon for his trouble.

	He had to be wary, of course.  He was the only devil to rise to godhood in untold millennia, since the Time of the Rauth at least, and more than a few demons had managed it first, like that indolent cur Orcus.  His power was immense, to be certain, but it was not uncontested, and if Belial or another Archbaron sensed weakness, he could lose it all.

	He deemed it unlikely as he mused over his work that day.  He was standing at the back of a line of several devils in his service, staring over their heads as a swirling cloud of black, magical fog rushed in and out of the spectral bodies of forty women, standing like mannequins on the table before him.  This was the culmination of his project, to undo the egregious error in judgment his former Succubae had committed.

	His bloodied lip twisted.  What fools those sluts had been, he thought bitterly.  The Succubae, his loyal slaves, had turned on him when he had plunged the Blood Rift and the Abyss beyond it into the Elemental Chaos after eating that fool Azuth.  Why?  He had not ascertained, nor had they bothered to tell him.  It took a colossal effort to turn oneself against one’s own inherent nature, as they had, shifting themselves onto the path of true Chaos instead of the absolute Law he embraced.  How had they all found the strength, he had wondered.  How and where had they found the raw, galling NERVE to turn on him like that?

	“Master Asmodeus?” the devil at the front of the line asked nervously.  “Are you alright, sir?”

	Asmodeus blinked himself back to attention.  “I am,” he said coldly.  The fog had slipped slightly too far away from the bodies as he had been distracted by his hate.  The shifting red clouds outside his window matched his temper, and they stilled when his focus returned.  “Are we yet arrived at the time to begin the final touches?”

	“I believe we have, sir,” the cowled devil said.  “Shall we?”

	“Yes.”

	Zariel and Dispater watched from the shadows behind him.  Neither would admit it, but both of those devils were a bit anxious.  Both were ungodly, non-deifacted, and so could never even attempt alone what Asmodeus was doing here with their help – creating a wholly new form of life.  Replacing the Succubae with even more powerful versions of themselves, with all the powers of seduction and soul-harvesting the old had possessed and none of the weaknesses, was a monumental task.  For the three of them to attempt it, in the face of their rivalries and mutual hatreds, was immense in its own right.

	To succeed as they were about to… that beggared belief.  Yet here they were, just as Asmodeus had promised.  Forty women, slowly assembling at the molecular level, being bound to their law and their desires for power, and ready to serve their new masters.  Each would have thirteen, and one would serve as their new Queen, the Succubus Liege Lady, who would sit at the feet of the Throne of Ruby itself, and attend to Asmodeus’ court.

	“Such a thing, this,” a devil in the corner audience whispered.  He leaned forward, his hands itching in anticipation.  “My lordship Asmodeus is as good as his word…”

	Asmodeus luxuriated in a roll of his eyes.  Of course he was as good as his word.

	The women on the table began to spin on their vertical axes, rotating for the inspection of the line of devils that faced them in a row.  Each craned their necks to watch as the channels of blood carved into the floor of the laboratory tower of Malsheem, Asmodeus’ home citadel, flooded with new offering.  The blood was human, elf, dwarf, goblin, all the races which could sin, and Asmodeus had collected it personally from the weeping stock in his basement.  Some was his own, too, the blood of the mighty angel he had once been, before pride had blinded him, and he had fallen from Celestia to his current exile.  His wounds never closed.  He hated how the blood built up and had to be discarded, but he had always kept some, ready to use in experiments.  Not where the lesser devils could see him, of course.  He had to maintain security, after all.

	The blood enriched as it passed beside the feet of the devils.  Each poured a bit of magic into the blood as it flowed.  The Erinyes gave their deep, powerful lust, which they had once used to rule the Succubae when they were still devils themselves.  The Erinyes had been the coven-mistresses of the Succubae once, and they would be again.

	The Barbazu gave strength, the Advespa gave speed.  These devils would be no mere whores, but mighty warriors, each capable of manually extracting souls they could not pleasurably seduce.  Behind them all stood Asmodeus, mightiest of Devils, and their God besides, drawing on the power of the other two Archbarons, and driving it through the blood beneath them.

	The blood was boiling by the time it reached the end of the little trenches.  The mist rose from it and coalesced into muscle, skin, bone, fat, hair, the fibers and components of a woman, and took form within the twirling bodies.  The bodies froze and dropped to the floor in heaps when the black fog and the blood mist interacted, and Asmodeus grinned.  It was working.

	Save one.  He spotted one body flinch when it should not have, and frowned.  What was that?  An error?  He did not make errors.

	The movement stopped, and then all forty bodies rose.  Each woman was different-looking in the fiendish eyes of the assembled audience, but to a mortal’s sight, each would have seemed identical.

	The mist vanished.  The fog disappeared.  As one, the forty High Succubae opened their eyes and shifted their position to sit on their heels.

	“Success,” a devil in the line said wearily.

	“What?”

	Every head turned to face the ranks of sitting women, including me.  I was turning my head in confusion, though.  I couldn’t tell what was happening.

	“You!” an urbane but fiery voice bellowed.  I looked up in fear as a huge man in red, far larger than I, drove his foot into my bare stomach.  I doubled over, but he grabbed my long hair and yanked, lifting me up into the air.  I screamed in pain and fear, swatting at his hands.  “What are you?” he demanded, in a voice like liquid hate.

	“I-I don’t know!” I wailed, trying to stay still.  Moving too much pulled at my hair.  “Where am I?”

	The huge red man’s eyes flew wide open, and he threw me against the window, which cracked.  I fell to the ground with a crunch in my chest, and a jab of white-hot pain.  I looked up and screamed again – the red man was surrounded by dozens of horrid monsters!  Lumpen, skinny, bulging with muscle, they grouped around the red man with looks of terror and disgust on their hideous faces.

	“You, reject, you have a soul!  How do you have a soul?” the red man demanded, looming over me.

	It all came crashing in.  The magic bound into my brain unspooled, dumping thousands of years of lore into my head.  I swooned and collapsed back onto the window, which cracked my rib further.  Names, wars, places, dates, it all rushed into my mind.  In an instant, I was fully aware, and fully terrified.  I was in the pit of Hell, the deepest ring of Nessus, in the fortress of Asmodeus himself, and I was born to rape and defile.

	“Because you’re not as smart as you think,” I growled, determined to get one jab of spite in at the monster who had created me without even asking first.

	He roared in anger and kicked, and I blacked out as his boot drove me through the window, into the turmoil of the river Styx below.



	I looked up from the desk in the Paladin Axiopistos’s office as I recounted the tale.  I felt tears gather in my eyes as I recounted the horror of my existence, of being rejected by even the Archdevil himself, and being murdered mere seconds after creation.

	“Except you didn’t really die, did you, dear?” the old friar asked kindly.

	Kindness.  That was so alien to my devil’s mindset that I hadn’t even known what it was when first I saw it expressed, by myself, no less.  “No, sir,” I said softly.  I flicked my shoulder-length hair out of my eyes and looked up at Axiopistos.  His young, angelic face looked back, impassive, and as distracted as I was, I had to appreciate that.  He wasn’t judging me in a way I could see, and he was actually very handsome.  I had to ignore that, though.  I am a devil of illicit sex, and my impulse to act on the beauty of others is inherently wrong.

	“No, first I suffered.”