Holy Opposites 6

	I awoke screaming.  The pain in my chest, the awful agony of the boiling blood of Styx on my bare skin, the feeling of falling, it was too much to bear.  I forced my eyes open and saw how I was tumbling down away from the Hells, towards something worse.  I was adrift in the Astral Sea, the endless and infinitesimal nothing between realms.

	I don’t know why my journey didn’t end there.  I shouldn’t have been able to survive in the Sea, but I did.  I don’t know why the blood of the Styx didn’t erase my memory.  Maybe my fear and confusion kept me alive.  Maybe I survived on pure hate.  Maybe somebody good and kind was watching me, and breathed air into my lungs, warmth into my flesh, and hope into my heart.  All I know is that I was in incredible pain.

	I tumbled through the Astral nothingness, through a whorl of light and sound, and then fell more, slower, into the Elemental Chaos.  I blacked out as the pain grew to be too much, which probably saved my life as I fell through the territories of the daemons and the Baernaloths.  I drifted through currents of astral blood, through the Rift, and into the Abyss, still unconscious.

	Once I was through the Rift, though, I still don’t remember.  Logically, it should not be possible that I fell through over four hundred layers of the Abyss so quickly, without waking up, and without trying to navigate.  Maybe somebody was helping me; maybe Pale Night thought I would be good food.  Either way, I ended up half-dead, in total agony, covered in reeking blood, and alone on the shores of the moldering forest of Androlynne.  I swept ashore, curled up in a ball, barely alive.  Eventually, I mustered the strength to crawl inland, under tree cover, so that passing demons wouldn’t spot me.  I don’t know how long I managed to go, but I eventually blacked out again.  When I came to, my legs felt a bit stronger, so I could stand, but all I saw was a battlefield.  Angels and other celestials, Noble Eladrin and the like, were clashing with distant demons in huge blasts of light and sound.

	I don’t know what I expected to find.  I struggled through the rotting trees, looking for anything that could show me the way.  The way to what?  There’s no way out of the Abyss except back into the river, and that lets out in a place so horrible that even Asmodeus and Orcus fear it.  I walked for maybe a few hundred feet, and then I found somebody even more pathetic than me.

	I stumbled over a root and nearly fell on a child.  I stared through the pain and saw an Eladrin child there, a boy, naked and horribly beaten.  He was obviously paralyzed by the jagged shard of rock in his neck, he was emaciated, and judging by the burns on his chest, he had been set on fire.

	Here, I saw something so heartbreakingly helpless, even I had to do something.  I tried to sit down next to him, to try to comfort him, and he just started mouthing ‘no.’  As if I could make things worse.



	I looked up at the two Ryairans sitting beside me, and while Axiopistos was still unreadable, Dreblin was obviously unhappy to hear this.  Still, the Chosen wasn’t staring at my ears or skin now, so I figured that was progress.  He was leaning back in his chair, arms crossed, looking up at the ceiling, though clearly still listening.  I pressed on.



	I tried not to frighten the boy, but I knew then where I was.  I was in Androlynne, the depths of Pale Night’s realm.  I wanted to speak to the child, to let him know that I wouldn’t hurt him, but what was the point?  He was trapped in the Abyss.  So was I.  I had a soul, so did he, so maybe if we both died, we could go to Kelemvor and he would… do what?  Judge us?  I was inherent sin, he was a mind-broken child.  What judgment could he make?

	My introspection broke with a wall of fire.  I screamed and fell as a Balor the size of a house landed beside the child, leering at us both, with whip in hand.  It lurched towards us when a shadow appeared on the ground behind it.  A Planetar, easily the size of the demon, landed a flying kick on the demon and sent it sprawling.  The tree I was beside crumbled, pelting the child and me with wood, and the two mighty beings wrestled for their blades.  The Balor breathed fire on the angel, but the angel was stronger, and managed to force the stream to shut with an elbow strike.  I saw my chance – to what, I did not and do not know – and screamed again as the Balor rolled between the angel and me.

	The angel took its chance as the Balor spun around to silence me, driving its hand into the demon’s chest hard enough to crack metal.  The Balor stumbled towards me, bellowing in rage.  The noise turned into a strange hiss as a gleaming sword made of ice appeared in its chest and made its way down to its crotch.  It stumbled again, falling to its knees, nearly crushing the child.  It looked down and started to breathe fire again, in one last act of cruelty, but the angel drove its foot down on the Balor’s heel and dug both hands into the monster’s burning flesh.  It simply ripped the creature in half, its head lolling impotently on one shred of neck, and the demon exploded in fire.  I tumbled away, badly scorched, as did the child, who was clearly on the verge of death now.

	I expected to die there, on that spot of soggy Abyss dirt, with only a dying youth and an angel for company.  The Planetar loomed over us both, but reached for the child first.  It rested its hand on the child’s head and set it to sleep, before turning to me and speaking.

'''What are you, girl?'''

	I struggled to answer.  “I… I think… I’m… a succubus, but…”

'''You do not know.  That is unusual.  You have the soul of a child, and the body of a Dark Temptress.  Yet here you are, a foe to a Balor, guarding a child.'''

	The angel crouched, still looming over me.  The fires had died out on my skin, and I looked up into its divine, radiant eyes of glowing lavender light.  “What will you do to me?” I asked.  The pain seemed to fade, just standing near this divine creature.



	“I felt…” I trailed off, struggling to recall the sensation of lying before heaven manifest.

	“Clean,” Axiopistos said quietly.  “You felt clean.”

	I looked over.  He was staring intently now, his fingers laced together before his mouth.  He was resting his elbows on the desk, leaning forward.  I shrank from his scrutiny.  “Yes, sir,” I said quietly.  Had I offended?

	“Please continue,” he said in the same tone.



	The angel looked down at me, at the child, at the fiery remains of the demon, at the slowly growing fire in the surrounding trees.

'''From whence do you come, girl-child?  You are no demon, nor are you of the kin of the old Succubae of Malacanthet, nor the clades of the Erinyes.'''

	I screwed my eyes shut.  “I… was cast out of the laboratory of Asmodeus… the Lord of-”

'''I know Asmodeus, devil.'''

	The angel’s voice was sharp.  I nearly heaved at the sound of disapproval and cold hate in its voice.  “P-please… I don’t… I don’t know what to do,” I whimpered.

'''How long ago did you come to be?'''

	I hesitated.  I had no idea.  “Perhaps… a few days?”

'''What?  Days?'''

	“Maybe,” I said weakly.  My vision was swimming.  “I… he…”  All went black.



	Safely in Axiopistos’ office, I rose to my feet and walked into the darkest corner of the room.  I rested my hand on the painted stone wall and looked down at the floor as I remembered the shuddering terror of my time in the Abyss.  Dreblin shifted uncomfortably in the silence, but the Chosen did not.  He rose to his feet, and, perhaps sensing my distress, he walked up behind me, though he made no move to touch me.  He held a few paces back, trying not to loom over me.

	I nodded.  “I… I don’t know what he did to me, but when I came too, I was healed.  I was sitting in a pool of radiant, steaming water.”

	“In the Arbor?” Axiopistos asked.

	“Well, no… not yet,” I said.  “That was later.  I went to Arvandor first.”

	He frowned.  “The elf afterlife?”



	“Where am I?” I asked nobody.  There were no people here that I could see, not anywhere.  I was up to my waist in warm, fragrant water.  I was sitting on the bare stone of a shallow pool, perhaps fifteen feet across.  I felt curiously small in this place, like a child in their parents’ wardrobe.  I was leaning back against soft moss, covering more stone.  I tested it with my fingers – it was deep enough to act as a cushion.  “This… isn’t the Abyss,” I noted aloud.  “At least I hope not.”

	“Why not?” a voice asked from behind me.  It was a Noble Eladrin, I knew from my magic memory, a potent celestial, and a distant relative of the Eladrin more normally encountered in the Prime and the Feywild.  He also looked strong enough to break me with one hand.

	“I… well, if it were this nice, there’d be no reason to be good in life,” I quipped.  I hesitated as soon as I said it.  “I… I don’t know where I learned that joke.”

	The Noble Eladrin stared me down for a moment before moving around the pool from me and sitting down, cross-legged, staring at me through the steam.  “A powerful angel brought you here, Succubus.  Why?”

	I grimaced.  “I have no idea, sir.”

	“Sir?”

	“Well… I feel like you outrank me here,” I said defensively.

	He nodded.  “Indeed.  The angel dropped you in the water.  It’s a healing pool, you know.  Planeswalkers come here sometimes, just to enjoy themselves, and as long as they behave themselves and don’t bother the petitioners, we let them rest here.”