climax

	Axio swung again with his balled fist.  The High Succubus – it was uncanny how much she resembled Cavria – snarled and ducked it, driving a blow into his groin.  Axio gasped in pain as cold tingles spread through his body followed by a wave of numbness, but he forced his way through it.  He drove his knee up into her midsection and doubled the fiend over.  She gagged and lurched away, then summoned a ball of black flame and hurtled it into his chest.  Axio screamed as the fire burned at his pristine flesh.

	Doors up and down the corridors swung open as resting visitors awoke to find the source of the chaos.  What they saw was a naked angel fighting a naked devil.  A few wisely ducked back into their rooms, but most stared, transfixed.  Doshellas was the first party member to arrive, and did so with his dagger in hand.  When he saw the sight, however, he froze.  The pooling blood from a slaughtered maid had spilled out into the hall, where Axio and the devil’s kicking feet had splattered it onto the walls.  Patrons were scattering and screaming now, and one knocked Doshellas back, sending his dagger scattering across the ground.  He scrambled to retrieve it as Luanea and Verashon emerged from the stairs, hurriedly pulling on clothes.

	“What’s happening?” Luanea demanded.

	“I can’t tell,” Doshellas grunted.  “Looks like Carvira and Axio are fighting, but it’s not Cavria.”  He grabbed his dagger and ran up to where the pair were brawling.

	“DIE!” Axio roared again, driving his fist into the Succubus’ other eye.  She screamed in pain as Axio unloaded two of his Smites into her head, sending her reeling back, her face a smoking ruin.

	“I’ll fuck your soul out!” the Succubus snarled, dragging her wicked claws across his bare chest, trying to rip his throat.  Blood fountained from Axio’s chest and splashed onto her arms, staining her already-red skin.  She pressed her attack, scything with her hands.

	The main door rocked back on its hinges as Cavria charged in, glaive in hand.  She spotted the devil attacking Axio and charged, weapon held high.  “Out of the way!” she roared, knocking gawking inn-goers aside.  Clutch only barely had time to see her coming before the razor-sharp blade slashed at her side.

	Clutch recoiled, swatting the glaive away.  “Vreugde!  I knew you’d show up,” she snarled in Infernal.

	Cavria growled with hate and brought her glaive up for a second swing.  This time, she added the fullest power of her Smite to the strike.  Clutch barely rolled out of the way, just in time for Luanea’s swing of her bastard sword to take her right in the skull.

	Clutch tottered and fell, stunned, as the silvered weapon knocked her on her bare backside.  Verashon leaped on her next, clapping a hand over her mouth and stabbing deep between her ribs with his short sword.  Clutch’s eyes went wide, and she screamed in pain behind Verashon’s hand.  Her magic flesh started to knit shut even as Verashon withdrew the blade, but before she could react to her pummeling, Axio was on her.  He grabbed her bare shoulders and lifted her clean off the ground, then slammed her into the stone floor with all his strength.  Clutch screamed as she felt something in her vertebrae pulp, and her body went numb from the chest down.  Axio lifted again, pinning her to the wall, and rammed his hand into her chest under her breastbone, punching clear through the skin with his pointed fingers.  Her eyes flashed white and the scream from her mouth turned to an incoherent screech as Axio blasted her innards with his magic.

	Clutch died on Axio’s hands as the spell incinerated her heart.  Axio didn’t stop hitting her for a full ten seconds after that, until he was on his knees.  He slumped and panted raggedly while her body slowly disintegrated and fell back to the Hells.

	Cavria gingerly knelt beside her partner and wrapped an arm around his shaking shoulders.  “It’s over, Axio,” she whispered.  “You won.”


Faceoff


	Ryaire found Axio’s dreaming mind with no trouble at all.  He was radiating concern, and in fact walking quickly away from the great playground at the heart of the Arbor.  She was beside him in an instant, of course.

	“My Chosen, your heart is heavy,” Ryaire observed.  “What troubles you so, that you would seek me out so directly, after promising not to?”

	The look of horror on his face when he turned to her chilled even her godly heart.  “A High Succubus came within seconds of killing me tonight,” he said.  His voice and pose were haunted to an extent she had never seen.  “She’s been… she’s been tormenting me… I thought the visions were from you, but…”

	He looked away.  “I’ve been acting poorly for days now… I thought I was just tired, but is it possible…”  He ground his palms into her eyes, and his wings closed around his back so firmly that the light died off a bit.  “Has she been influencing me?”

	Ryaire rested a hand on his shoulder.  Axio fully expected her to try to comfort him, or at least assuage his fears, but her first words surprised him.  “You thought I was tormenting you with visions?” she asked, sounding a bit hurt.

	He rounded on her.  “It’s not without precedent,” he said defensively.  “And I projected myself into this vision because I’m in desperate need of your help, your Ladyship!  There may well have been a High Succubus Prototype in my mind, doing who knows what!  Am I tainted?  Did she leave a mark on my soul?”  He slapped his hands over his chest, rippling the phantasmal fabric of his tunic.  “How long has she been contaminating me,” he spat, “and how did nobody notice?”

	Silence hung between the two of them, uncomfortable and potent.  Finally, Ryaire spoke.  “I do not think she has tainted your soul in some way, Axio,” she declared.  “Recall, the mightiest of Succubae, even these, their replacements, tempt souls to sin of their own volition.  A soul defiled has less value than a soul led astray, to them.”  She took her hand back and looked coolly at her descendant.  “As for the claim that she has been giving you visions, you will have to be more specific.”

	Axio ran a hand through his hair.  “Well… there have been many,” he said.  “I do not know which were yours and which were hers.”

	Ryaire’s rising temper – which she kept in iron check before the children – flared for a moment, and the trees around them shivered.  “I do not send you visions, Axio, save these, in which I appear before you directly,” she said coldly.  “And even this is a reflection of my true form in the Arbor.”

	Axio actually glared back at her, to her shock.  “Oh?  So the murders and terror, the mass slaughters and hideous child defilements that have haunted my nightmares for almost a year, they are simply the product of poor digestion or alcohol?” he asked sharply.  “You told me that as I progress down my path to godhood, I would receive visions of calamity that only my action can prevent.”

	“Yes!  Visions that would coalesce in your own mind, independent of my actions,” Ryaire snapped, and now Axio could feel her anger in her voice.  After weeks of torture, however, he found it somewhat less intimidating – or knee-liquefying – than he would otherwise.  “I do not page them from a library and send them to your sleeping head!”

	Axio’s fist tightened.  “That… you never made that clear.  In fact, you implied the exact opposite.”  Before she could retort, he pressed on.  “And the visions she gave me were the same!  Horrible things, unspeakable things done to children and men and women and whole TOWNS!”  His own eyes flared with his divine power as he forced himself to recall.  “I saw a village burning for refusing to take action against a woman who beat her son, and then my leading the son off to become my squire.  I saw myself butchering Mirabar after they refused entry to Cavria because of her race, then slaking my lusts on the bodies of Cavria and Kyria.  I saw a horrendous fire engulfing a ranch home, and myself battling bravely to put it out.”

	“Enough!” Ryaire said, and this time Axio felt the words like a blow to the chest.  His rage instantly cooled, leaving him aware of how far his tone had strayed from what Ryaire allowed in her home.  “I send you no such visions, Axiopistos,” she said darkly, and the clouds overhead roiled for a moment.  “I do not know how this creature was able to infiltrate your party.  I do not know when it happened.”

	Axio inflated to demand the obvious answer, but a look of heavy warning shut his jaw.  “As for how it is that Asmodeus’ bitch was unknown to me, I will tell you what I told Cavria: Asmodeus is learning to shield them from my sight.  It is happening slowly, and not always with success, but he is doing it.”

	The sky returned to its normal color overhead as Ryaire struggled to bring her volatile temper back under control.  “As for these visions, I do not send them, as I said, so I do not know which ones are from your impending transcendence and which are hers.  I do feel it safe to wager, though, that any that depict you exploiting and harming others are well enough outside your… usual character to be her projections, and certainly you sexually assaulting your party is something I’m sure you’d never do.”

	“Not assaulting,” Axio muttered.  “They were begging for more.”

	“Then you may assume that was a projection,” Ryaire said testily.  Axio flinched.

	“I’ve been struggling to remain sane after weeks of sleep deprivation,” Axio said.  “I was… disrobing to lie with a woman when the High Succubus tried to kill me.  She DID kill the girl.”

	Ryaire’s temper flagged further at that.  “Oh?  She actually tried to kill you?”

	“Yes.”

	“Unusual.  She must have thought her cover about to fail.”  Ryaire took a step back and forced back her rancor, but couldn’t quite displace it entirely.  “Axio, you should have come to me sooner.”

	“I promised I would not come to you for help unless I needed it,” Axio said defensively.

	“Not being able to sleep for two weeks is not normal, neither is having visions of you having wildly out-of-character sex with your party members!” Ryaire said.