This story continues to be incredibly heartwarming. I love the slow reveals of the domain of Ruin, and all the little details in the descriptions.
I am *very* curious about how souls being damned to hell works, if that's how mortals there arrive or if they're born native? (This may have been explained previously, if so my bad.)
I am *very* curious about how souls being damned to hell works, if that's how mortals there arrive or if they're born native? (This may have been explained previously, if so my bad.)
Basically if a soul dies "in corruption" or "in grace", they go to hell or heaven and live as spirits in the afterlife. Through an as of yet unexplained process, they can then eventually become angels or demons! If a soul dies in neither state, then they reincarnate in the mortal realms!
Standing on a bluff made of an ancient skull, looking down into a vast miasmatic bog, and wearing nothing but her shift and her leggings with her sword tucked into a scabbard that hung at her hip, Caelel Silverhawk considered the nature of honesty and the difficult nature of truth telling in the face of diresome threats. Before her eyes, a series of watchtowers were congealing from nothingness, raw mana flowing through the focused efforts of Ruti, the Baron of Rot, his palms spreading as he touched his part of the Realm of Ruin and shaped it to his whim, powered by the souls of the dead that dwelt within his purview. Cae quashed a moment of concern, a feeling of worry, knowing that despite his expression, she had done the mathematics equations: They had enough motes to construct the watchtowers.
It was just a matter of effort and dedication.
Ruti lowered his dark palms and opened his eyes, smiling shyly as he looked upon his handiwork. Each watchtower looked somewhat liked a petrified, hollowed out mushroom, their tall caps reaching wide above the canopy of the swamps and marshes. They had fences around the edges, tarps laid out to keep the merciless sun off the back of the souls manning them, and at their heart, glittering crystals that could be used to send a signal to the center of the Realm – warning of attack, spies, or other trouble.
"That makes this boarder secure against any raiding forces that Pillage might send," Cae said, rapping her knuckles against her sword for good luck. Her brow furrowed slightly. "Will the souls here be willing to...man them?"
"They will," Ruti said, his voice firm. Then, sighing, he thumped back onto the ground. Grass crinkled under his backside and he rolled his head back, peering up at the sky, letting it shine upon his features. He was, as usual, dressed in the most miserly of dregs – rags and rotting scraps of leather. Cae looked up at the sky, rather than risk looking down at him. "I never imagined I'd be able to build so much, I always assumed I'd run out of energy and never tried."
"That's why surveying is so important," Cae said, her cheeks flushing as her finger traced the edge of her sword's pommel. "I fucked Citri."
The words popped out of her mouth before she could stop them – the guilt, gnawing at her belly, left her unable to do anything but. She realized, immediately, that they were the most terrible error. It was like feeling a mortal slipping between her arms as she flew high above the clouds, reaching for them...and knowing it was too late. They would fall, and fall, and fall, and hit the ground and come to red ruin, just like her and Ruti's relationship. She already began to reach, time seeming as if it was slowing to a crawl, her hand moving to cup over her mouth, as if she could cram the words back into her traitorous throat before they reached Ruti's ears. But...no. It was impossible.
It had already been said.
"Um, yeah?" Ruti asked, cocking his head ever so slightly to the side. "Of course you did?"
"I'm sorry, it was in the throws of passion, after a battle, and and I...I…" Cae blinked slowly, her glowing wings mantling in shock. "Of course I did?"
"I mean, I knew you did," Ruti said, smiling. "He's my fellow Baron."
Cae felt her entire face grow hot, and buzzing, like she had bees under her skin. "He...t-told...you?" she whispered, slowly. The idea, of two males discussing her lasciviousness, her wantonness, her sin! It was almost too horrible for her to even consider. And worse, that gentle Ruti was the one who-
"No?" Ruti asked. "Why would he need to tell me?"
Cae blinked, her wings mantling again.
"Anyway," Ruti said, pushing himself to his feet and smiling at her. "I'm glad you had such a good time with him – did you want to talk about it?"
Cae shook her head, mute in shock.
"Well, then, I need to rest," Ruti said, stretching his arms behind his back, cocking his head to the side until his neck popped. "Channeling that much magic was more tiresome than I expected." He reached down and smacked her rump with a single broad palm, making Cae squeak and jerk upright. Her eyes widened – and he froze, then stammered. "S-Sorry, just...uh...a flash...you know, sparks. Heh. Since. Um. Citri, and all. Bye!" He turned and hurried off, walking down the hill, rather than transforming into a butterfly or whatever else he might have done – considering the lack of magic he currently had, having spent so much, it was not surprising.
Cae blinked again.
"...I believe I need to study more," she whispered.
With the Rot boarder secured and with her scouts – including Shale – out to make sure that Pestilence hadn't marched, Cae practically flew through her remaining tasks as fast as she could, scribbling notes, sending missives, checking on supplies, working out battleplans, and finally, providing a report to Lord Arral, who took it all with a serious nod and a grunted 'very good, General.' This left her a chance to slip into her room, move to the drawer where she had concealed Lady Ruin's journal, and to take the book out. Cae set it down on the bed beside her, her brow furrowing.
The blank pages sat there, taunting her – now with whatever they might hold, rather than their emptiness.
Cae crossed her arms over her chest, her wings folding as well as she considered. Speaking a word searches for it – but what could possibly explain this? She bit her lip. Then...despite herself, she found herself thinking on the first thing the journal had shown her: The argument between the woman who would later become Lady Ruin and her future husband...what was it she had said?
"Soul architecture," Cae said aloud.
The pages flipped as if an invisible wind blew them, and then settled. The two words soul architecture burned into existence, on the upper left edge of one of the pages. More text began to swirl into existence on the page, but Cae didn't even bother to read it: She lifted her head as the room around her bled away like smoke, and the past took its place. She found herself...not where she expected. Some ancient sepulcher, some strange and occultic room, something unfamiliar, something...not…
Not the training halls of Heaven.
They were empty and dim at first. Then, skidding backwards, Alia fi-Fiar, the future Lady Ruin, came into view. She was dressed in simple traveling robes which billowed around her slender form as if caught in a hurricane force wind. She skimmed along the ground on a skein of crackling lightning, her arms spread wide, and a quarterstaff jacketed in brilliant white light hovered between her palms. She twitched her fingers, and each twitching movement caused the staff to twirl, plunge, thrust, shift back before her face – interposing itself again and again against a flaming sword as a heavily armored war-angel that Cae recognized as her Proctor - though a younger, less scarred version of him – sought to cleave her body in twain.
"I see you're not much," Alia said, her fingers twitching to bring her staff twirling up to cover her head as the Proctor's flaming sword swept down. "...interested…" Twitch. This time, the staff thrust forward – and it struck against the Proctor's close faced helmet with a sound not unlike the ringing of a vast, golden bell. The war-angel stumbled backwards with the resounding force of it, a ripple of distorted air blooming around the impact. "...in academic curiosity!"
"Corrupted wench! Hells take you!" The Proctor roared, stumbling backwards, his hand going to his dented helmet. "You tore an angel's soul apart!"
"I did put her back together again – and got permission," Alia said, her hands lowering so their palms faced the floor. This brought the glowing quarterstaff down low to the ground as well – less threatening.
"You committed a cardinal sin – you broke the design of Heaven itself!" the Proctor growled. "When you put her back together, as you so callously call it, you left the angel in question altered! Changed! Fundamentally!"
"I did?" Alia sounded honestly somewhat taken aback. She frowned and then lifted one hand, snapping her fingers. A familiar book came into being with a flare of black magic. It dropped into her palms and she held it in her left hand while a quill shimmered into existence in her right. "How so?"
The Proctor growled. "You make mock of the Creator herself with your vile blasphemes. Each angel is born of a mortal soul – a soul hewn to perfection by cycles of reincarnation! When a soul is born in Grace, born of Heaven, it ascends to us, and is given wings and angelic might – for it needs no shaping, no tests, it simply is what it is. And you altered such a creation...you marred an artwork ten generations in creation, leaving-"
"Yes, yes, but how are they different? Is it subtle? Gross?" Alia asked.
The Proctor roared in fury and rushed towards Alia. She clapped her book shut and then thrust her quill out as if it were a weapon – and weapon it was. The feather shot from her palm, shrouded in a red flare, and plunged into the Proctor's face plate and into his cheek, puncturing it and creating a scar that Cae knew quite well from her time in the Academy. The Proctor kept plunging forward, ignoring the pain and the fire and the blood. His flaming sword swept out and when Alia's staff interposed itself betwixt him and her, it was shorn in half with a spray of splinters and a crack of splitting stone. Alia's eyes widened and she skimmed backwards on her glowing lightning.
The Proctor didn't swing wildly – instead, he held his sword in both hands, waiting for his moment.
Alia didn't give it him.
She spoke a single word that echoed in the room and distorted space. The walls of the Academy shivered, threatening to crack and break, while one of the pillars trembled in its moorings and then cracked in half. The sword clattered to the floor as the Proctor transformed, in a single flash. When the light faded, Cae saw that he had been reduced to a mouse: Small, white furred, with a bright pinkish-red nose that twitched in what could only be the mouse version of pure wroth. He squeaked and scrabbled wildly atop the armor that had clattered around him. To Cae's surprise, the same shocking transfiguration had struck the mortal sorceress as well...and that made the knowledge click in Cae's mind. The most powerful mortal arcanists could, with great training and effort, speak the same language as the vast Choir that perpetually sang the Creator's glories in Heaven.
The danger of speaking the language of Creation itself, though, was the word had to be in your mind as you spoke it – and thus, it worked its way upon you as well. Alia had turned herself and the Proctor into a rodent, by speaking that word into being. Cae shook her head slowly – wondering how Alia would…
And Alia vanished in a crackling sparking pop. This caused a horrible sense of dislocation as the illusion shifted with a blurry, smeary suddenness into what was clearly an arcanist's occult workspace. Mouse-Alia appeared on a summoning circle, and a glowing crystal came to life. Alia's voice came from it, tinny and echoing, and spoke a single word that, like the prior word of Creation, caused the room to groan and creak. Two alembics cracked, a cauldron spilled, some books flew from the walls, and the window that looked out onto an ancient, desiccated city, shattered outwards in a bloom of glittering particles.
However, it did mean that Alia was once more human. She sighed as she stood in the mess, naked as the day she had been born – and Cae was suddenly, painfully aware that this entry must have been before Alia had been burned, her face showing no sign of the scars that her future self would have. But more...Alia was truly beautiful, in a way no angel could ever be. Tiny imperfections rooted her in the world, made her a part of it, and just looking at her made Cae feel that squeezing jealousy in her chest that she could never...be...that again. She looked away, biting her lip hard as Alia's voice, dry and clinical, continued to speak.
"All in all? A fairly successful trip – I've determined that angelic beings, in terms of their soul architecture, are remarkably similar to humans...save for one important, telling difference. While the human soul is made of their Pa and Lo souls – to use the Cerantian term for it – an angel appears to have their Pa and Lo souls fused into one, a kind of...single uber-soul, threaded into their body at several interesting connection points worked into their nervous and skeletal system. The wings, I believe, serve not merely as locomotion, but as a way for the Pa soul to shunt energy normally lost in interspiritual communications into a simple visual effect, as a way of losing the excess motonic energy." She sighed, and Cae heard a shuffling of robes. When Cae glanced back, she saw that thankfully, Alia had dressed. "There remains the question, then, of how exactly angels dream – for all do, and yet, it is the separation between souls that creates the dream in mortalkind." She frowned. "Unless the Sages of Cerentius are...mistaken. But Ming Ha's architectural theory of the soul has been backed by empirical proofs. There must be something I am missing."
She sighed, then smiled.
"Well, now, I believe it is time to begin investigations on demonic entities. But for now, I am going to go to the bathhouse. Journal, end."
The past bled to smoke, and fog, and Cae found herself sitting in her room again, blinking.
She…
Felt…
Dissected.
And annoyed.
"Demon soul architecture!" she snapped, glowering at the book.
Pages flipped and demon soul architecture appeared in the book. The world melted away and when Cae lifted her gaze...her eyes almost popped out of her head. She was looking upon a vast, comfortable looking bed of red gauze and silk. Sprawled upon it was Alia, her face half covered with a silver mask, concealing any scars she wore. She was completely nude, her modest, dusky brown breasts squishing ever so slightly as they pressed against the bright blue shoulder of a tall, curvaceous blue skinned woman, with two arms to each side, the limbs bifurcating such that one draped over Alia's shoulder, one cradled her ass, a third held aloft a small glittering wine class, and the fourth held a book crooked between her fingers, thumb popped in to keep the pages from folding shut.
"Mmm," Alia sighed. "I am beginning to think that you have a very different definition of the word riddle, Kala."
Kalasta, the Baron of Secrets, chortled. "The answer was spaghetti, mortal."
"...oh," Alia said, frowning.
Cae slammed the book shut in reflexive shock, her cheeks burning so brightly that she was shocked she had not burst into flames. She sat there for several long moments, then closed her eyes and whispered an oath under her breath. "Fuck." She had to learn what a demonic soul architecture was – to understand this strange and dangerous world she had found herself within. Besides. It wasn't as if she was watching for prurient reasons. She was here on an intelligence gathering operation. That was all. She opened the book again, unsure if she would need to ask for the same place...but no, the world around her bled away and she found herself watching as Alia snuggled up against the four armed former Baron of this Realm of Ruin. She watched as Alia's dark fingers caressed along Kalasta's muscular belly, sliding the tip of each between the runnels and lines of her muscles.
"How does a scholar like you get so yoked," Alia asked.
"You have no idea what strange things demons write their lore upon – you have to shift enough infinite tesseracts of lore up and down shelves, you realize the benefits of working upon your musculature." Kalasta grinned and sat up. This motion caused her deliciously full breasts to swing fetchingly from side to side, before settling as she shelved them with one of her muscular blue arms. "Now, Alia, I believe that I succeeded in that particular riddling contest." She smirked. "That means I get to ask of you a boon or a bounty, eh?"
"Mmm, true." Alia leaned forward. Despite the mask covering half her face, she was more than able to...Cae couldn't bring herself to look away...to fasten her lips around the dark blue-purple nipple that jutted from Kalasta's breast. She sucked upon her and Kalasta let out a slow, eager sigh, her eyes half closing. The hand that held a book set it aside, so she could caress the top of Alia's head, fingers brushing through that long, wavy black hair. Alia moaned, licked, sucked, nuzzled at Kalasta's breast with the eagerness of a...well, Cae supposed the closest thing she had felt or seen was...Citri. Her cheeks burned, watching the lewd display – but she tore her eyes upwards to see that Kalasta had a wicked smirk upon her lips, her eyes flickering.
"You do know this won't distract me from asking of a- ah!" She gasped as Alia drew back and a spark of electricity popped from her tongue to Kalasta's nipple, forcing the Baron of Secrets to arch her back. "W-What was- oh Hells!" Kalasta moaned as Alia grinned and wiggled her tongue. A rime of frost glittered along the edges of that soft, flexible thing – and Alia ran that edge of frost against Kalasta's achingly sensitive skin with a vicious, vindictive slowness. Alia wrung from Kalasta a moan that was only muffled when her upper left hand cupped over her mouth, covering it. Kalasta bit her own hand as Alia's other hand reached up, fondling, squeezing, tugging upon her other breast. She used more force than Cae thought would be pleasurable – and when her fingers slipped away from Kalasta, candle wax glistened upon the demoness' nipple, bright and recent, as if dripped from a burning wick.
"Oh you don't play f-fair!" Kalasta gasped as more spots of wax bloomed into existence – all Alia had to do was flick her fingers and they'd seem to splatter, bright reds and pinks against Kalasta's bright blue skin.
"Mortals are not given a fair lot, we have to cheat," Alia said, drawing her mouth back. Cool fog blew from her lips, caressing along Kalasta's tortured nipple – and she waved with her other hand. More hands appeared, shimmering and purple, crafted from raw magical energy. Two plunged down, caressing between Kalasta's thighs, while another cupped her tit, squeezing her so roughly that the cooling wax cracked off her skin. Another thrust two fingers into Kalasta's mouth, forcing her tongue down and pinning her head into the pillows. Alia shifted and moved to straddle one of the Baroness of Secret's thighs. She pressed her tight, hairless brown cunt against the sleekness of Kalasta's muscle and began to grind herself against her.
Cae dared not even breathe, despite knowing this was mere illusion projected to her from the diary.
"Now, my dear Baroness, was that boon or bountry?" Alia purred.
"Mmph!" Kalasta moaned, unable to get a word out between those fingers teasing her tongue, forcing her lips open. She squirmed and tried to buck her hips, as if she was trying to get Alia off her. But Alia's magical hands and her flesh hands were both equally merciless. She twisted and tugged on Kalasta's nipples. She dripped blazing hot wax in a slow, tracing pattern, splatters striking belly muscle, belly button, traveling down and down until they splashed onto the pubic hair that dusted the skin above Kalasta's sopping wet cunt. Slick, bright lines of blue frost gathered and vanished along Kalasta's skin as she writhed, moaning desperately.
Alia flicked her finger. Two magical fingers popped from the Baroness' mouth and she moaned. "Alia!"
"Mmm, not exactly a bounty. Or a boon." Alia smirked. "Are you forfeiting?"
"No, I-" Alia's fingers, flesh and magical both, thrust into Kalasta's cunt. The demoness' back arched and she wailed in pleasure. "Yes! Oh yes! Oh yes!" She quivered and a warm gush of her demonic girlcum soaked Alia's palm as Alia smirked, most wickedly.
"Well, since you are forfeiting," she purred. "I suppose this means I now get to ask my questions, yes?"
"You bitch!" Kalasta laughed, around eager, panting gasps. "You mortal upstart wench." She closed her eyes, then smiled. "Ask of me any secret you wish to know, whore, and I might grace your ears with their truths."
Alia chuckled. She rolled away from the Baroness and laid upon her back. Her mask, despite the jostling, remained firmly fixed to her face. The eye that was visible, twinkled as she crooned softly. "Tell me...there is a link between the Barons and the Lords of Hell. Tell me what it is."
The Baroness frowned. "Hurm." She cocked her head. "You're never going to Heaven, not after that stunt you pulled in the year 7 of Alkezar's Reign, but…" She settled back into her bed. "Mortals sometimes launch their own little crusades on Hell, to 'save' a soul here or there, to try and destroy what lurks in their own hearts. Are you going to bring these secrets to some Sultan or Satrap above? To a magistrate, who will think he at last can kill evil?"
Alia laughed. "Heavens above, you much think me a bigger fool than Degi."
Kalasta grinned. "Dee does not think you a fool. He merely finds you incredibly annoying. He admits your genius quite candidly." She sighed, then looked off, to the side. Her smirk was playful, and her eyes knowing. "However, this secret is not for you, sweeting."
"Hmm?" Alia sounded confused.
"Oh, nothing," Kalasta said...and Cae realized, with a cold lurch, that the demoness was peering at her, directly. Fiercely. Cae jerked her head back, opening her mouth – but before she could speak, Kalasta thrust her fingers forward, and Cae felt a strange cold piercing sensation thrusting through her skull. Her vision went gray, then black – and Kalasta chortled. "If you ever wish to review this in that journal of yours, you will see it quite clearly. Your acolytes may have a harder time of it."
"How cruel!" Alia sounded amused. "You can see the future?"
"One never needs too, if one's as intelligent as I. Now, the diagram."
"...oh my goodness…" Alia's voice, once so haughty, so amused, had become awed. Cae reached up with one hand, the other bracing the book open in her palm. She rubbed at her eyes, but that cold spike remained, and she was still unable to see. She scowled so fiercely that she was sure she would rend time and space itself apart, to get at the Baroness of Secrets – but then Alia's soft voice reached her ears. "Oh that is fascinating. And-"
"Ah, ah, stick to the diagrams, no need to be too vocal."
Cae slammed the journal shut. "That bitch," She whispered, her voice hot and fierce. "Secrets! Gah!"
She sat, fuming on her bed, then tossed the journal aside and stood. She stretched her arms, then reached down, tugging her shift straight on her shoulders. Her wings mantled and she lifted her chin. "Enough of this," she grumbled under her breath, frustration and curiosity both pricking into her flanks, spurs that felt so real and so fierce that she was shocked she did not bleed along her hips. She emerged from her room and stalked down the corridors of the house, seeking...which room? She considered, for a fleeting moment, going to Citri...and her knees and her will grew equally weak, thinking of what she might learn there.
New positions.
New sensations.
How it might feel to have candle wax...
He might also actually tell you what you want to know, oh General, her own mind sneered, venomously sarcastic. After he's made you a slattern once more. Then he can go and boast to Ruti again.
She shook her head and headed to the rear of the house. There, Lord Arral slept – and as rain continued to patter down onto the roof, she came to the large doors leading to his chambers. Two infantrydemons stood at guard there, both nodding to her. "General," one said.
"Is Lord Arral awake or sleeping?" she asked.
"He's in conference with Baron Dee," the other guard demon said, inclining her head, wisps of grayish fog trickling from beneath the mouth guard. "Do you wish to speak to them?"
"Yes," Cae said, shortly. "Inform them I am here."
The two guards bowed once more and, through some invisible signal, one ducked into the chambers. A few moments later, the door opened again and there stood Baron Degi, the Baron of Despair. He eyed her with a flinty frown, his glittering, compound eyes pitiless, cold. "What do you require, General Silverhawk?" he asked, sounding clipped and tired. "The Lord and I are in important discussions."
"I need to understand something – it is vital to the war effort," Cae said, frowning as she did so. "I have tried to discover the truth circumspectly, but it seems the only way to get a straight answer from you demons is to wring it from you with my bare hands. And so, I am done fumbling in the darkness. Lord Arral will answer these questions, or I will wring it from you with my bare hands, do you understand?" She stepped forward, and Degi took a step back. His palms lifted.
"Can it wait until the morning?" he muttered.
"No," Cae said, fiercely, not sure what obstructions might crop up between her head hitting the pillow and now. "Let me through."
"Lord Arral needs a moment to-"
Cae's ears, sharpened to the subtleties of battlefields, heard the faint click of metal on metal. She frowned. "There's something in there," she said, then grabbed onto Degi's shoulders and strode past him. The Baron of Despair reached for her, his voice a strangled cry of alarm, but Cae was sure of it – that had been chain links clicking together. She saw that there was a reading room, a private library, a roaring and banked fire, then open doors leading back to the bedroom. She was drawn forward by her heedless momentum, and knew already, she was making a mistake...but by the Creator's name, she was sick of being forced to step back, to wait, to hesitate, to hold herself in tension waiting for answers or dangers both. And so, she came to the doorway and froze, her eyes widening and wings snapping wide.
In what be the most important sex scene of all time, Cae discovers that, firstly, Degi and Arral enjoy some consentual bondage (specifically, Degi ties up.) This shocking realization drives Cae to forthrightness, and she demands that Arral explain the true relationship between himself and his Barons. And so, Arral explains.
Humans are beings of divided souls, as Cae knows. Angels and demons are created when a human's soul comes into alignment with one of two extremes: Angels are extremely unified. Demons, though, are extremely disparate - when a human's soul is large enough to contain multitudes, a demon is created. Arral is the 'prime' soul, while Citri, Degi and Ruti are each parts of his spirit, containing and representing parts of his personality, and their demonic followers are each tinier fragments of the whole, formed into one vast being, Ruin.
Cae, shocked, finds this beautiful and inspiring in equal measures. In this moment of revelation...she becomes divided. Literally! The two Cae's are quickly determined to be her and another her who didn't hesitate to kiss Arral: A minute difference, but large enough to split an angelic soul. The two are pleasured by Arral and Degi until they come into unification again, transforming Cae into something entirely new and unknown to the world - much to Arral and Degi's shock. Cae's last words before falling asleep in a well-fucked stupor are that they must talk to Ruti, for he knows and understands transformations and may be able to answer this mystery...
Lord Arral was the only one in the room – the metal had not come from some other demon creeping in through the large, stained glass windows depicting crumbling ruins and ancient towers. The light that shone from candles flickered along him and along the chains that bound his arms above and behind his head. He was nude and bound, his massive form forced to his knees, giving her a look upon the Lord of Ruin unlike any that Cae would have ever imagined possible. His form was...superficially, humanoid. Yes, his skin was the inky black of darkest night, but he lacked the eerie insectoid nature of Dee or the greyhound proportions of Rue, or the flaming sparks of Citri. The only inhuman thing, other than his sheer scale, was the antlers that thrust from either side of his brows.
But then, looking closer, she saw the seams and the lines cut into his skin. There were breaks all through the Lord of Ruin's body, spots where his skin wished to come apart – and from between those lines, flickering and glimmering, was a light. It seemed to flow through his body irregularly, as if there was a sun contained in his chest, bounding here and there, trying desperately to find a place to escape. His broad chest had a large crack in it, right where his breastbone met the curve of his upper left rib. That crack shone and flickered intermittently as his inner light slipped and shifted. His belly muscles were a cliff-wall of masculine power, heavy slabs that perfectly counterpointed the broad weight of his shoulders, and his thighs were thick enough as well – battering ram legs that ended in powerful hooves, another inhumanity that contrasted beautiful with the rest of his...his...sheer perfection.
His cock, titanic as befitted the rest of his body, was contained within a rusted cage of steel, trying to harden and remaining trapped. His lips were bound and gagged. His head was bowed, but had jerked up when Cae entered into the room. His eyes widened and he remained very still as Dee stepped up behind her.
"W...What is…"
"You need to leave," Dee's voice was a low, sharp growl. "This is not for you."
"You're...torturing him!?" Cae snarled. She turned, then grabbed onto the frock of the slender Baron. She lifted him with one hand, pinning him to the wall. "You torment your own master, you worm!"
Dee gasped, then actually laughed. "Angels! Angels!" He cried out. "Heaven save me from Angels!"
"I am no more tormented than I am restrained," Lord Arral's voice came, rumbling and amused. Cae turned and saw that, despite the manacles and the chains, he had wrenched his hands free. He stood, and his antlers almost brushed the ceiling.
Cae's mind flashed upon her Proctor whipping her. Of the strange thoughts burning inside of her. Cae prided herself on her quicksilver mind and her adaptability – but right now, she rather wished she could cling to uncomprehending stupidity, anything would be better than knowing, realizing what she had done, what she had interrupted, the place she had put herself in. Bile rose up in her throat – not the bile of disgust, but the burning hot words of pure shame. "O...Oh my Creator, I am...I am so-" She set Degi down, brushing golden palms along his frock, trying to pat it into proper shape. "I am so sorry!"
Lord Arral, to her vast shame, laughed. Still nude, he clutched at his belly and threw his head back. He boomed out a deep, deep laugh that originated deep within his soul, pealed off the walls, rang in Cae's ear, a gonging shame. She put her hands over her face as Degi adjusted his collar with one hand and muttered, just close enough that she had no choice but to overhear it. "Angels."
"I am quite glad you were so eager and attentive in my defense. But...ahem…" Lord Arral coughed and took his robe in one hand – it had been tossed over a nearby chair. "If we are to be interrupted so, I hope it is for a good reason?"
"I…" Cae flushed, then turned back to face him. Her hands clenched into fists and she pinned them at her hips. She glared up into his eyes – not risking a glance down, not at that entrapped python he had swinging between his muscular legs. "I need to know the precise connection between you, your Barons, the Barons and one another. Now."
"And why is that?" Lord Arral asked, curiously. He had his robe half on, paused, with one edge draped over his shoulder. "To take it to Heaven?"
"I…" Cae hesitated. Then she looked down at her feet. "Yes." She couldn't lie. She knew it was a battlefield, a battlefield of words, against someone who had captured her, imprisoned her. And yet, she couldn't force her heart to believe it. She cursed her weakness, and also...felt a strange lightening on her shoulders. A vast, heavy weight was leaving her and she felt as if her heart, too, was being unbound. She had not realized how burdensome her duty to Heaven and her armies had felt, until she had...not cast it aside, even, but simply brought it into the open, for all to see. She lifted her head. "But, also, I need it if I am...to defend you. Barons have been ripped from you – how, and why, and what the effect they are...how I can prevent it from happening again. All that matters, does it not?"
Degi frowned at her from the side. "You as much admit that you want to clap us in the golden chains of Heaven, you-"
"I will tell you the truth," Lord Arral said, his voice a deep rumble.
"My lord, Arral!" Degi turned to face him. Arral, his robes still half forgotten, shook his head.
"I am the Lord of Ruin. It is in my nature," he said. "This may be the crack in the foundation – that one day leaves this place as nothing but stone, rotting under the vast, unending sands. So be it. It...all things come to ruin in the end, General Silverhawk. If I could not accept that, I would be a poor Lord of Ruin." He smirked, slightly. "Though, because I am demon also, I will fight against it with my every last breath. For if I couldn't defy the natural order of things, I could never be a demon, now could I?"
Cae smiled back, shyly.
Her eyes, traitor orbs, flicked down.
Good lord, even soft and contained in a cage of steel, his cock was titanic. Half as large as Citri's, and he was soft. She felt so dizzy she feared she had caught rotlung.
"Now, the truth…" Lord Arral said, jerking her eyes back up.
Cae nodded.
"Angels have one soul, fused together, interchanging, shared. A tight connection. A piece of clockwork." He smiled, slightly. "They are the far end of the possibilities that mortals exist upon – when a mortal's two souls are in alignment, they become angels. But when a mortal's souls grow far enough apart...they become a demon. And when there is room in a soul, when that soul grows vast enough to hold concepts like, say, Pestilence, that soul has more than a Pa and Lo, more than a Han and Lee, more than a Kemshet and Shalin – to use the various words."
He gestured to himself. "Arral. Lord of Ruin. My soul, though, contains within it...Citri. My passion, my flame. My love. Degi, my despair, my sorrow, my...artistry. Ruti. My rot. My transformation." He spread his hands. "Their souls, too, have souls within them – Laeushale is as much a part of Citri as he is a part of me. And the same is true, likewise, General Silverheart. So, you seek to find separation, distinction, holes – but you will find only one whole."
Cae stepped backwards, her mouth opening slowly. She closed it again.
"You...you're...all…" She whispered, wings spreading in slow shock.
Lord Arral inclined his head. "And when we lose a part of ourselves, when a Baron is rent from our side by force of arms, I am as changed as you would be if you were...struck in the head, or had a spike jammed through your eye socket." He sighed, quietly. "Some parts of myself were...easier to lose. But losing them still altered me. Still altered Citri, and Ruti, and Degi. And they themselves changed, when they were threaded into other souls.
Cae's knees trembled. "T-Then...then…" She blinked. "How many actual demons are in hell?"
Lord Arral chuckled, a low, grinding boulder crashing against another. "How many people are in a man? One? Or a billion?"
Cae's head swam. "S-So...so...so...you...you...all of you have...have...are...I…" She was grappling with the idea – but the idea was as intoxicating as it was terrifying. The idea of being more than just an angel. Of being more than just a general. Of being more than just Cae. The idea echoed in her mind and she heard Arral's words, warm and crooning within her body, within her mind. Souls the size of oceans. Mortals that could be many people. Vast tapestries of relationships and love and life, all in a single heart. Throbbing, beating. She had once felt jealous, of how Belai the Mongoose could be general and farmer, all at once.
"N-No wonder Alia asked to marry you," she whispered.
"How do you know of her?" Arral asked, his voice fierce. He strode towards her, grabbing her arm, tugging her forward, the heat of him blazing and terrible. She jerked her head up, gaping at him, her wings spreading wide.
"How could you not know?" She whispered. "Laeushale-"
"Do you track every errant thought, every passing fancy?" Arral growled, quietly. His eyes bored into hers. "Laeushale, Citri, the whole House of Fire, they all don't feel the pain as much as I and Degi do, they are creatures of passion. They remember the heat of Alia's loins. Not the cold of her body, lowering into the damn crypt! They remember the warmth of her laugh, not the...the...the choking as she breathed her last, and I could do nothing. And you think she asked to marry me? You think...you think so highly of me? Of my pathetic self?"
Cae blinked up at him. "You asked her?"
"Of course…" Arral whispered, huskily. "I could do nothing else, when a star falls into my mansion."
Cae's hands reached up. She gently cupped his cheeks. Her fingers traced the smooth, elegant cut of his jaw. She breathed, quietly. "How could she say no, when she knew what you are?" She whispered, her eyes wide. "I...how could anyone ever think you are a defect in the great plan?"
"What?" Arral's brow furrowed.
"The Creator made oceans, and she made souls," Cae whispered. "How could she not make one, reflected in the other?" She shivered from head to toes. "I wish that I could be a world, like you."
"That's...a dangerous thing...for an angel to say," Arral rumbled. His hand cupped her cheek. His palm was vast enough that she could lay her head, her hair, part of her neck into him, to feel his fingers cupping around the back of her scalp. He was as hot as Citri – as comforting as Ruti...as dark, and mysterious Degi. She trembled in his grasp, and the quiet of the moment made her heart thumping in her ears sound like the beating drum of an errant war party, driving her forward, forward, forward. She could hear a dozen whispering voices at the edges of her mind, the sound of herself, the words all warnings – all calling upon what she had been taught, what she had been trained...but she ignored all. Instead, she turned her head. Her lisp pressed against Arral's palm. Her tongue darted out, and she tasted his sweat.
He tasted like…
Possibilities.
"We cannot," Arral rumbled, drawing his hand away. Cae almost fell, her wings spreading.
"You fear Heaven will chase me?" She asked, her voice hot.
"Fear? I know," Arral said.
"It's true," Degi said, startling her. His hands were clasped behind him, his lips pursed, his somber insectoid eyes glittering. "They search, they hound. If they realize where you are, precisely, they may risk it."
Cae, her heart lumping faster, harder, frowned. "I…"
"Go," Arral said, lifting his hand. "Citri made the mistake – he saw in you another Alia, another...star. But I know the truth. You and I are but a passing moment. An instant. A flickering candle, in the eternities of our lives. We both will live eternal – lest our lives be rent apart by sword or arrow or mace. And in that...in that long twilight eternity, I will fade in your mind. I will...draw away. I will become nothing but that few short months, or years, where you fought Hell with Hell. And that will be all. That must be all."
My memory must be a ruin, Cae thought. That was what he meant.
Heh.
So much for defiance. But of course. He had defied the order of the world once – he had taken a mortal wife. And he had watched her die, turn to dust, become nothingness in his hands. After such chastisement, who couldn't resist obeying. And maybe that, more than anything else, was why Arral enjoyed being bound, chained, collared, gagged. Held by despair and made to hurt, he could maybe feel whole again once he was freed and moved once more – keep away the blackness of true horror for a moment more. Cae's hands clenched and closed her eyes.
Within her breast, there was a war.
She wished to throw herself upon Arral. She wished to know him – not merely carnally, but spiritually. She wished to see a soul so vast it could hold Ruti, gentle Ruti, and Citri, and even Degi. She wanted to see what fractal, manifold possibilities lurked within Degi's breast. She realized, with a start...she wanted to be bound by Degi. To feel his scour upon his back, and unlike the Proctor and Heaven's chains, she wished to be released and tremble in his arms, to whisper joy in his ear, to thank him for opening her eyes.
And…
And she wished to flee from the terror that demons were right.
What if the Creator had not meant for souls to do this?
What if their defiance was right.
What if…
What if Cae was wrong?
She closed her eyes, feeling her heart wrenching, and she turned and she stood – she remained in place...and she strode after Arral. She took his hand. Her fingers gripped his and she whispered.
"I defy you," she whispered. "I will not leave. I do not know if I will stay. But...neither...will I go." She squeezed him and Arral turned, his eyes widening as her wings spread, then she yanked him down and their lips met. The sizzle-heat of the contact burned through her body and her wings swept around his shoulders, drawing him close. Arral could no more keep his hands off her than he could keep his body from smoldering from within. Those vast palms of his cupped, cradled her ass, squeezing and gripping her. His tongue and hers met and danced together as her head cocked to the side, taking his tongue into her mouth. Her free hand skimmed along his muscles...but other hands were already tugging at his cage of enforced chastity. Cae's fingers and the stranger's brushed together, and when she pulled back, she saw gold touching gold.
Another Cae.
Another her.
She was kneeling beside her, cheek pressed to Cae's thigh, her wings rustling, as she tugged the last strap and Arral's vastness sprang free. His cock got caught under the hem of Cae's shift, blazing hot against her belly, swelling, making her shift bulge as if she was already penetrated. Her mouth opened in shock as she and the other Cae looked up, down, at one another. Their wings touched and ebony black feathers touched, one and another. Degi let out a quiet oath – reverent: "Fuck."
"What…" Arral blinked, looking between the Cae's. Then he whispered. "What did you do?"
"I…" Cae whispered.
The other Cae stood. Her fingers brushed along Cae's feathers – teasing them. "You fell!" she whispered.
"No, you did!" Cae exclaimed, pointing at the other's wings. Cae, that is, the other Cae, looked at herself. Their wings beat, the same nervous frisson sliding through both.
"Angels don't fall!" Degi said, his voice full of shock. "Not in the ten thousand years since the Realms were birthed."
"Yes they do!" Cae and the other Cae exclaimed at the same time.
"No, they do not – it was one of the many secrets Kalasta left with us, before she...left…" Degi shook his head. "The idea that angels can fall is a tale that angels use to keep the Hosts of Heaven in line – one of their many reinforcing myths."
Cae and Cae both looked at one another – and their mouths parted in the same shock.
"What I don't understand is...why are they so...alike?" Lord Arral rumbled, shifting subtly to extricate himself from the two angels. "You...you should be more different, to sunder like this."
"I mean, if I were to venture a guess," Degi said, his voice utterly dry. "An angel is so straight laced, so tightly bound, that even a minor divergence, at the right moment, might...splinter them as if they were a demon. I suppose that angels truly must be single minded, for this to be the first to have ever been discovered by us."
"We are," the two Cae's said, at the same time. "I…" She shook her head. "I hesitated."
"I did not," the other Cae said, blushing.
"But both of you kissed him!" Degi sounded furious.
"But I hesitated," Cae admitted, her cheeks burning.
"Hells save us," Degi said, clapping his hands above his head. "Heavens too! Mortalkind can pitch in, Caelel Silverhawk, you veritable absurdity, you...you...you featherbrained angelic nincompoop! Only a gold bound, stiff backed angelic fool could turn such a historic event into a Destroyer amusing farce."
Cae flushed and her other self scowled and put her hands upon her hips. "Listen here, Degi," She said. "I...I have been through quite a lot in a very short time!"
"Degi sometimes grows sharp tongued when he is confounded," Arral said, gently. His vast cock swayed as he stepped back, hooves scraping along the ground. "But...this...is quite...interesting." He said, slowly. "Angels were always more powerful in their unity than their division – does this splitting lessen your powers? Or…" He chuckled. "Or...damn...I am torn myself." He licked his lips. "Fortunately, we can always split our efforts, can we not?"
"We can?" Cae asked, while the other Cae blinked – then let forth a shocked gasp. Behind her, Degi – despite his fierce words – had stepped up. His hands swept beneath her arms and cupped her breasts, squeezing, fondling her. He tugged her nipples through the shift, and Cae gasped as she felt the same sensation tingling through her. The separation felt caul thin, right then and there. She quivered and almost fell to her knees – but Arral's vast hand cupped her between her thighs. His finger, nearly as big as some men's cocks, ground against her cunt as he held her up with ease, lifting her up and pressing her back to his chest. He crooned into her ear.
"We can learn quite a lot, I think, Degi and I," Arral purred.
"Oh Creator…" Cae moaned – both of her, their voices intertwining.
"This is going to get quite confusing," Degi said – even as his fingers sank into Cae's shift and ripped. Cloth and fabric tore and her large, heavy golden breasts sprang free, her bright silvery nipples glittering, begging to be sucked, tugged, licked.
"Since when have we demons had any worry about...chaos," Arral said, his voice amused. His thick, thick finger was thrusting up into Cae, whose hips bucked in time with the crooking of his knuckle. Her eyes fluttered shut and her black on black wings bear against his chest. She groaned hungrily, her mouth parting as she panted hungrily.
"Oh yes…" She gasped. "Finger-fuck my fallen pussy…" She moaned, the wanton words flowing through her mouth – but not her mouth. The other her was moaning, and such lewd, wanton words she was using! Cae opened her eyes, watching as the other her arched her back and gasped. "I'm an angel whore now, a demon fucker in truth! I want your cock so badly, Degi, as much as you infuriate me!"
Degi smirked, his eyes glittering. "Well, she was right. She doesn't hesitate."
Cae bit her lip, shaking her head – while bucking her hips against the finger fucking her. Arral grinned, his antlers glittering. She reached up, grabbing onto one, holding onto his antler for dear life – her hips roiling in time with his fingering...and yet, he was so aroused that his massive cock nearly bumped against his belly, arcing smoothly, elegantly upwards. Degi, wickedly, pushed the other Cae forward, and Cae tasted upon her lips the salty-sweetness of Arral's cock. Good Creator, if he tasted this good, she was shocked that-
"How in the Realms did Alia ever leave your bed?" she moaned, her voice husky, less wanton than the other her – for it was impossible to be more wanton than moaning and licking the tip of a titanic demonic cock, bending forward and grinding one's bright golden ass against Degi's impressive bulge. By comparison, merely nearly cumming one's brains out while being finger fucked was downright restrained.
"She spent a year there, first time," Arral purred. "But Ruin was not as dangerous a place there…" He gasped, then, as Cae pushed herself forward – both of her moving to take more cock, though the one that was held in Arral's hands...Creator, even she was growing confused as to which her's skin was which. Her body tingled as she grabbed onto her own tits, squeezing, and opened her mouth...and she breathed in, breathed in for her own self, for the other her glugged and gurgled as more and more cock forced its way down her throat. Cae felt both as if she could never breathe again – and also, felt the warm rush of her own breath, filling her mind with focus, allowing herself to think, to feel…
To feel every inch of Arral's impossibly huge demonic cock utterly destroying her own throat.
"Ohhhh Creatooorrrrrrr!" Cae wailed, her back arching.
She came. She came a flood upon Arral's finger and palm, her glowing juices splashing down his somber black wrist, and she felt her flood pattering upon her own face as the other her was impaled down to...maybe a third of his cock. Her body quivered and Degi grunted – then smirked.
"Should have removed the hose…" he whispered – and Cae, gasping and quivering, eyes blazing with white and black spots, could see the other her had spurted all over him. She panted quietly, while Arral smirked.
"I believe I cannot wait a moment more, do you, my Baron?"
"I cannot either," Degi said, then sighed softly. "This is going to end in fire, tears and blood, you know that?"
"Absolute shambles," Arral agreed. He set the trembling Cae upon the bed, his finger slipping from her. The other Cae squeaked as she was pushed atop Cae – and the two gaped at one another, Cae's wings, and Cae's wings spreading. Four midnight black wings, shimmering and glossy in their perfection. Cae blinked...and the Cae that hesitated whispered, softly.
"I think…" She said, her hands caressing along her own self's hips. "I think we can be...we can…"
"Be what?" the Cae that did not whispered.
"We can be," Cae breathed. "Whatever we wish...and...and if we are, then the Creator must have wished it – no? She made oceans…"
"..and she made souls…" She whispered back. Breath on lips. Warmth on warmth. Silver lips pressed together as Cae and her own self kissed. Their breasts pressed together and their nipples ground, one against the other. Sensation fed back to self – circling around and growing brighter and brighter, a scream of sheerest bliss. Cae felt another change, furious and bring rushing through her. She grabbed onto the Cae that did not's ass, while the Cae who hesitated spread her thighs. Their cunts pressed together, grinding and slippery. Their tongues played together as demon baron and demon lord watched.
Cae felt the change.
She did not hesitate.
She did not.
The blazing heat faded, and she opened her eyes, smiling dazedly, her four wings fanning around her – one above, one below, iridescent black. Her eyes glowed brighter than even before, and her skin seemed to blaze with an inner heat. Light escaped her cunt, teasing that more heat and more energy blazed within her. Her voice reverberated with the resonance of the universe itself as she spoke to a gaping Arral.
"Be not afraid, my love," she spread her thighs, her fingers reaching down. She spread her cunt and Arral walked towards her. His hand caressed her, and jerked back.
"You blaze like a star...what...what are you?" He whispered.
"I am what I am," Cae whispered, feeling the delight of the moment. She laughed. "And now, right now? I am yours, my Lord Ruin." She cradled his head with her hand, fingers drawing hissing lines of steam along his skin, flashing sweat into clouds. The burn felt so good, Arral moaned huskily. He leaned forward, pressing mouth to hers. His cock slotted against her cunt and he was eased into her not merely by her own hips lifting and spreading, but by Degi's eager hand, taking a hold of his master, guiding him into her center with a firm push. The power of his thrust quaked the bed, shook the house, and caused Cae's back to arch. Her four wings beat and she cried out in bliss.
"Oh Cae!" Arral moaned, huskily, his heavy balls clapping her bright golden ass. Her hands reached up. She took hold of his antlers, pulling him down, pressing her mouth to her nipple. His tongue rolled it. He crooked himself almost in half, to try and fit his bulk to her. His hips couldn't stop themselves, not if he had a thousand aurochs yoked to him, pulling him away. Degi watched, his insectoid eyes glittering – and he wept silently, for the moment was too perfect, too beautiful to ever last. To ever be more than a fleeting glimpse of Heaven.
Cae moaned in bliss, her reverberating voice ringing off the walls. She grabbed onto Arral's shoulders, fingers sinking into his skin, dimpling it as she bucked her hips back just as eagerly. The bed shook and every slapping impact of his balls against her ass made her cry out again. "Arral! Oh Arral! Arral! Yes! Yes! Yes!" She cried out again and again – and needed no words more complex than that as he plunged into her again and again and again.
There was no end to it. His titanic cock stretched her cunt impossibly wide – if she had been mortal, there would have been pain and blood...but she was not mortal, not angel, not demon. She was Cae, and she took every single one of his woman-breaking vastness with a pleasure and a croon that echoed like a chasm. Her glowing eyes met his and she managed to gasp out a soft: "Is this all a Lord of Hell can give?"
Arral growled. He drew from her, his massive shaft blazing with the golden light of her juices. He grabbed onto her upper right wing, using the join between shoulder and back as a lever to twist and bend her onto her belly. With her rump in the air, wiggling fetchingly, Arral pounced upon her. His hooves settled onto the bed and he grabbed her hips into hands that could crush boulders. When he unleashed his ferocious, desperate eagerness upon her, his cock slammed into her and the bed did rock hard enough to snap two of the legs into powder. Cae gripped onto the sheets and cried out again and again and again, all four of her wings beating as she arched her spine.
"Yes! Yes! Yes! Obliterate my angelic cunt! Fuck me!" She moaned without hesitation, without shame. Her massive tits slapped against her own chin as she cried out again and again and again, her eyes closed to slits. Her wings beat in time with her fucking, and she tightened around the cock filling her. Juices splashed along his balls and Arral cried out, husky.
"Cae...I…"
"Fill me, oh Lord of Ruin!" She moaned, tilting her head back, her voice desperate. "Drown me in your spunk."
Arral groaned low and desperately. His eyes screwed shut and his face had almost a mask of pain upon it as he quivered and he started to cum...and cum...and cum. The warmth of him filled her, swelled her belly, then burst out around his cock, soaking her thighs, the bed, splashing his belly. Degi, kneeling down,licked at the droplets that fell towards the floor, moaning as he tasted the cum and her juices, as if they were the finest wines. Cae panted heavily, her body trembling. In the clarity of the moment, shining clear like crystal, she spoke.
"Tomorrow...Ruti…" she whispered. "He knows how butterflies...come...to…"
Dragon, that was an incredible sequence that I'm going to try to reread tomorrow because my ADHD is acting up, but the emotional complexity and depth here is incredible.
Dragon, that was an incrediblt sequence that I'm going to try to reread tomorrow because my ADHD is acting up, but the emotional complexity and depth here is incredible.
Caelel woke to find herself once more herself – and, like a fleeting dream, the transcendental oneness, the knowledge that she was and could be more than ever dreamed, remained in her mind for just long enough to impress upon her the shape, the taste, the vanishing color, and not a single iota of the actual heft of the matter. It was, in short, the most infuriating, frustrating, taxing thing to awaken too, and managed to sour her mood, despite the fact she currently sprawled in the Realm's most comfortable bed, her body entangled and held against a cliff-face of masculine perfection. Lord Arral's arms were locked under her belly, and his bulk covered her entire back – a blazing heat that throbbed into her wings like the healing light of Heaven itself. She scowled at the wall despite this all, and clenched her fists, and tried to hold onto that feeling…
But it was gone.
She squirmed in Arral's grasp. The Lord of Ruin lifted one arm to allow the angelic general to sit up, her hair tumbling along her shoulders. Her wings fluttered and she blinked at them, jerking her head so hard to the right she nearly hurt herself.
Her wings were once more blue-white, shimmering and pure.
"That's just confounding," she hissed.
"Ruti," Lord Arral murmured.
Cae looked down at him – and saw that he was awake, his antlers dimpling the pillows around his head as he rolled onto his back.
"That was the last thing you said, before you fell to sleep – Ruti would understand transformations. Remarkably cogent for a woman who had made history and, also, was...so…" He paused, playing words around on his tongue and in his mind before finally settling on: "Distracted."
Cae snorted, loudly. She would have expected having graduated from Citri to his lord Arral would have shook her – but the opposite was true. It wasn't simply that she was growing more inured to breaking her angelic vows. It was also everything she had learned about the true nature of the Realm of Ruin. The very idea remained...heady. She wondered if she could get any angel to actually believe it...and what did it mean? What did it truly mean for the war between Heaven and Hell.
She frowned. She didn't know if she was ready, or even able, to answer that. There remained questions she couldn't possibly-
The door to the bedchamber burst open. An infantrydemon with the faint sheen and rubbery skin of a member of Ruti's domain entered into the chamber, spear clattering as he swung his arms in an ungainly jog. "My lord Arral! We must-" He stopped dead, his eyes bulging as he saw Cae, her bare body tucked next to the massive bulk of Arral. He turned on his heel, giving her his back and Cae felt a momentary, fluttering flash of shame. She took hold of the sheet, sweeping it up and over her chest, holding it there – and then felt her shame grow even brighter, as having her body only thinly covered by a nearly translucent caul of white fabric only accentuated her curves. The demon continued his report, though she could hear the strangled note in his tone. "Pestilence has marshaled an army – but he advances past the villages, ignoring them!"
Cae slid from the bed, modestly only partially forgotten. With one arm still holding sheet to her chest, she barked out: "How many forces can we call upon and how quickly?"
"The message stations you had built, uh, m'am...Lady...My...my Lady?" The demon sounded unsure, confused.
"I fucked him, I haven't married him!" Cae snapped, startling a snort of laughter from Arral. "General will do fine – what do we have?"
"Three platoons of infantry, two of archers, and a company of horse from Ruti's domain, scant fliers," the demon barked out.
Cae chewed her lower lip, modestly only entirely forgotten – with her arm not shifting to keep her makeshift covering about herself, it swept into a narrow column that exposed her hips and some of the sweep of her belly. She tucked her arm in tighter, frowning intently. "Who leads Pestilence's armies…" She murmured, half to herself.
"Puzak," Arral said, his voice growing grim. "The Baron of Panic."
"Panic, Lies, Denial, it's a strange purview considering they don't have Rot…" Cae muttered.
"When plague spreads, those spread just as quickly. You're fortunate that the Lord of Greed ripped Avarice from Pestilence's fingers three years back," Arral said, his voice grim. "Though, getting Avarice to equip even an allied Baron's troops is nearly impossible, so they say."
"But they're all one in the same!" Cae turned to face him, scowling.
"Ah, and you've yet to meet a thought you could not order, an emotion you could not bridle, nor break?" Arral asked, grinning most wickedly as he sprawled back into the bed – his body a massive black shadow, rippling with muscle and promise. Cae's cheeks flushed bright silver and her wings fluttered behind her back as she turned to face him. "For demons, a lot of what goes betwixt the ears in mortals and angels takes entire homes, bedrooms, and battlefields. It keeps Hell so interesting."
"Interesting!" Cae scoffed. "Yes, I sure do enjoy launching a major land campaign to get my left foot to step after my right!" She turned back to the infantrydemon, who had risked turning back around and gotten a full view of her heavenly sculpted ass. This had reduced the poor creature to a trembling, blushing pile of armor, scales and two quite stiff spears. The one that Cae could actually see was all that supported him, considering his other spear had robbed his knees of their solidity. "Send word to Laeushale to get my armor and gather her fellow fire spirits. I want them to carry Citri and Degi away from here. Send for Ruti himself, we'll be meeting the enemy on his territory."
"Yes my lady, uh, General!" The demon snapped up a salute, then turned and scampered off.
Cae took a moment to think through the angles, spinning in her head like war-angels. She pursed her lips.
Arral, still reclining in bed, watched her intently.
"You look just like her," he murmured, quietly. "When you're thinking?"
"Hmm?" Cae looked at him, blinking as the final battle plan came into focus in her mind. "...Alia?"
"You have been reading her journal," Arral said, quietly. "I've yet to open it. Too...painful." He paused. "Is there…" His hesitation held the needle thin thread of purest hope, whose note was utter agony to hear. Cae felt that war in herself, that battlefield that demons made so awfully literal. But in the end, honesty won out. Whatever she could do for this mighty, strange Lord of Ruin, it could not be built on lies. She looked away.
"I am not the reincarnation of your Lady, my Lord," she said, quietly. "She did not become an angel – she may be mortal, still, up there…" She lifted her gaze upwards – even if modern theoastrography had firmly determined that the shape of the Realms bore no relation to suns and skies, deep caves and cthonic trenches. The mortal realms were no more above the Hells than Heaven was. Still, she looked at the ceiling, at the rococo splendor that had been left to decay and peel, gold glinting among the dust and the cobwebs. She sighed, quietly. Last night, she had had a perfect view of it – but in that haze of lust and passion, her eyes had been focused too much on Arral's face. His chiseled jaw. The cut-scars that glowed with the inner light of his vast, vast soul. She shook her head, focusing once more. "I'm sorry."
Arral sighed. "You're still very alike. I must have a terrible taste in women." His lips quirked up. "Both of you shine far brighter than I."
"Isn't that the nature of a Ruin?" Cae asked, her voice coy.
The door to the room opened and shambling mass of golden armor and magical runes came stomping in – Shale, carrying her panoply in her flame red arms. "Congratulations, Cae!" she exclaimed around the pile. "Can I get the juicy details now, or-" she peeked around the pile. "...he's still here."
"That I am," Arral said, showing no sign of leaving.
"I will simply, ahem, entomb myself in the lower catacombs…" Shale muttered as she shifted the armor in her grasp, hiding her face behind it. "Brick myself up. Yes. Should do that."
***
Clad in gold and silver, bearing a flaming sword, Cae took to the air with an escort of flame spirits and sought the enemy. The Baron of Panic did not seek to make it difficult. His army marched under the fluttering banners of the House of Pestilence – an Ouroboros snake of green on a black field, a wurm that managed to glower at the world as it engaged in the ancient act of eternal self cannibalism. They had no fliers to ward off scouts, but made up for it with their ranging cavalry: Demons astride beasts with flaming hooves and horse-skull heads that flickered and flashed.
"Nightmares," Shale said, her wings beating in counterpoint to Cae as they both hovered. "Those are Panic's specialty. But see those?"
She pointed with one finger and Cae followed it. The infantry companies at the head of the march were all green scaled, yellow bellied snake women. Their tails slithered along the grounds as their chests were protected by hammered iron cuirasses, and they carried swords and shields sheathed on their backs. They had wide cobra hoods around their triangular heads, and their eyes glowed bright enough to be visible even from a distance.
"Those aren't demons," Shale said, her voice grim. "Pestilence has hired ssviath mercenaries."
Cae felt the awful realization hit her like a bucket of cold water. It was the worst feeling in the realms. The feeling of realizing the bloody obvious. As a war-angel of Heaven, she had never needed to worry about or concern herself with mercenaries...but she had still studied them. She had learned about them. She had put all that information into the context of her old profession as a General of Heaven. And then she had not thought to extrapolate it out to this strange new place she held in the depths of Hell itself: Angels might disdain mercenaries and the Hosts of Heaven might not see the distinction between them and the mortal auxiliaries they could call to service or compel through sheer power...but she was fighting the Barons of Panic, Denial and Lies. The last two could weave a pretty tale and even without Avarice within their purview, Pestilance had wealth enough to pull in mortal sellswords from across the Realms.
She forced the sense of recrimination and self-blame to the back of her mind. Most Angels wouldn't have been able to tell mortal humans from mortal ssviath, despite their obvious differences. She, though, had done enough reading to know that the ssviath were a people that preferred deserts, could fight in anything but heavy snow, and served as some of the finest heavy infantry in the world. They had a trick of slithering forward or backwards while not changing the facing of their bodies, and in the press of close combat, she had heard legends that any ssviath that couldn't cut a man down could crush them in their snake tails.
"At least the stories of the petrification gaze is nothing but lies," Cae muttered.
"Petrification!?" Shale exclaimed.
"It's a myth," Cae hissed, leaning in close, a double sense of idiocy hitting her. "If none of the troops have heard of it, please do not enlighten them. The last thing we need is a panic."
She went back to counting hoods. "Two companies of mercenaries, four companies of infantrydemons, four companies of archers…no fliers...but they're dragging wagons." She shook her head. "That means war machines."
"Why not simply summon them with mana?" Shale asked. Then she snapped her fingers. "The villages!"
"Exactly," Cae said, turning and winging back towards her mustering forces. "If we let them get into range of the Manor, they'll reduce it and...well, I doubt Arral would enjoy that." Her wings cupped behind her back and she dropped down, landing with a crunch before the companies she had called together. The halberdiers from Ruti's forces, and the archers from Degi, were familiar. But Ruti had brought forth his cavalry…
Cae blinked.
She blinked a third time.
"Shale…" She said, slowly. "I was told that Ruti had cavalry demons at his disposal. Armed with lances."
"They do. And are." Shale said, nodding.
"Shale, those are butterflies," Cae said, her voice soft.
The cavalry demons were, in fact, astride large butterflies. Their beautifully patterned and deeply somber orange and black wings were wide enough to cover the length of a horse, making them wider than any cavalry that Cae had seen on the field of battle. Their wings did not beat, but rather slowly undulated, and so, kept the butterfly aloft off the ground, neither rising nor falling above or below the height of an average horse. The demons themselves were clad in armor that looked like charred glass, wrenched and shaped through the crudest means, from lightning struck desert. It clung to their spindly bodies in the same way the armor of an ant or beetle clung to their spindly limbs, and their lances were long stalks of reed-like plants, woven together into a spindly, drooping tip – drooping, like a wilting flower. Only Cae's attentive eyes, able to take in every detail despite her shock, took note that the butterflies did wear barding of leather harness and curious, metal blades that attached to the edges of their wings, adding a sinister aspect to their somber fur and sleek wings.
"They're death monarchs," Shale said, her voice amused. "Bearing leechlances from the depths of the Poison Swamp." She slapped Cae's armored shoulder, pauldron clacking under the impact. "They'll do!"
Cae grunted, quietly. She turned back and regarded the territory she would be working with. The army had mustered as swiftly as it could and marched to a point where they'd have time enough to prepare the ground somewhat. This had somewhat constricted her choices – she would have preferred most to force the enemy army to have to choose between withdrawing or engaging with a swamp at their backs...but that was not to be. Instead, they were in a fairly clear area between two low hills made of the skulls of vast, cyclopean entities that were half buried and half covered in moss. The far end of the field slowly broke apart into the scattered floating islands that sometimes wrenched themselves from the ground in the Hellish realms, while a broad road wound between them, carved of hardened stone. That road was where the enemies would cross from…
"Those islands, they can be corralled, yes?" Cae asked.
"Yes, sadly, or we'd have an excellent choke point there," Shale murmured.
Cae nodded, then turned to her. She smiled. "One more question, Shale."
Shale arched an eyebrow.
Cae asked her question.
Shale's smile was gentle. "No, I do not believe they do."
Cae nodded and turned back to the landscape. "Give the order."
When Panic's army arrived, it arrived in full and impressive order. With their magicians and their willworkers threaded throughout the two wings of their infantry companies, they were able to force the floating islands down, to grind and crunch their ways back into the vast crevasse they had been wrenched from. The result was uneven but usable ground flanking the obsidian road. That road held the wagons and the mercenaries – the snake-women glittered like emeralds and gold coins in the distance, and the odd sound of their scaled bellies writhing along the ground was a strange undercurrent to the stamping hoof-beats of hundreds of demons on the march. Glittering spear points flickered with a yellowish flame, wrapped around their jagged tips and giving them an unsettling air. Cae fought down the impression, her wings mantling up as she watched the infantry come off the suppressed islands.
The nightmare cavalry of the Baron of Panic had taken up the place of honor behind and around the mercenaries. The Baron, Puzak, was among them. His nightmare was larger than the others, befitting his stature. Puzak looked like fine metal armor, articulate and well crafted, with a yellowish flame rather than flesh, filling in between each leather strap and steel plate. His helmet, hovering in a ball of flickering light, was a fourfold face, each one a different dramatic face from some masque theater: horror, despair, joy, and fury, each one carved in waxy white metal and silver metal. The face that thrust forward was one of fury, snarl lipped, narrow eyed. He bore a lance in one arm, resting its length upon his shoulder.
The ssviath mercenaries remained in a tight clump. Their shields interlocked, their hoods spreading as they hissed in unison – a sibilant war cry that sent shivers and prickles up along Cae's arms underneath her armor.
Cae called out. "Baron of Panic. You seem to be enjoying your constitutional – I hope you didn't have too much trouble in the Swamp of Rot."
Her army, arrayed with halberds and shimmering glass, let out a quiet chuckle as some of the tension diffused. The nightmare bearing Puzak cantered around and then before his heavily armored snake-women. His drama-mask shifted around, and showed the one with a joyous, rapturous expression. "Ahhh, you're Lord Arral's pet angel. How are you liking Hell? Not too disordered for you?"
"It could stand for some improvement in infrastructure," Cae called out, her voice dry.
Puzak's helmet spun around – and horror dominated. "What do you know?" His head swirled around again, joy once more taking its place. "Ah, yes, the watchtowers we marched past." Swirl. Fury. "You thought to slow us down with supplicants? With pathetic mewling worms, grubbing for that putrescent rotting husk you call a Baron!" Swirl. Joy. "We will make a much better home for him, ha ha!"
Cae shook her head. Shale muttered. "Panic never knows his mind one day to the next, they say. It seems it was closer to one second to the next…"
Cae snorted.
"If you, if we, wish to make this easier-" Flames swirled and fury showed once more, replacing joy. "We will rip your wings off, one by one! Fear! Fear and damnation has come to your lands, Heaven-bitch!"
"Creator above, do you people never have a new insult," Cae called out, keeping her voice even. She could feel it, deep in her muscles, in her bone: That voice, that erratic, jangling voice. It was at once nasly and distinctly male – and, yet, also, every thought she had ever heard in the back of her mind during battle, watching cavalry form up, watching winged beasts swirl in vast, coruscating swarms. She knew it was the voice every mortal heard, in the moment when things required them to be at their steadiest, when their hearts screamed to run...to run! To run! It was the voice of Panic, and the only reason that Baron Puzak wasn't having his forces charge was that he thought every single syllable he uttered from his flaming lips would fill her forces with more and more of that urge. To break. To run. But Cae knew the same, simple mortal trick that every leader that had ever faced down an army in battle knew.
If you acted like you were not afraid, your men would believe it.
If they believed it, they would feel it.
And if they felt it, then they could do the impossible.
"It's always heaven's bitch this, angel-cunt that, can you at the very least find some measure of critique for my generalship? My sword-skills? In Her name, you could at the very least find something snide to say about my heraldics – I always thought Heaven smiths were a tad gaudy, I mean…" She lifted one arm, grinning as sunlight glittered off her armor. "Gold pauldrons, silver runes, with iconography in bass relief along every armor plate? Do you think that might be a little much?"
Puzak's faces had begun to spin once more – but Fury was the one that shrieked out. "You insult me at your peril!" He turned, then thrust out his hand. "Implosion balistrey! Pepper them!"
"Shields," Cae said, her voice pitched just so – loud, not panicking.
The wagons, hidden by the bulk of Puzak's army, had finished their unpacking and their preparations. Though Cae could not see them, she could hear the humming whirr, the crackle, and the twhung-crack! of the massive torsion bows being loosed, the implosion balistrey loosing their charged lightning shards into the air. Crackling blue sparks arced up, deceptively slow, lazily creeping towards the exact midpoint on a parabolic arc. By the time they reached it, Cae's army had thrown up their shields. The heavy wooden frames were reinforced with some fire runes, courtesy of Baron Citri.
The blue sparks stopped in the air, then transformed from sparks into bolts of lightning, which strobed and pulsed, shooting down, each one going in a perfectly straight line. The balistray didn't quite have precision accuracy – instead, the beads it fired were simply let to pepper a circle roughly a mile wide. The only problem was that they did not simply pierce through when they struck! Each lightning bolt punched a hole in the world which swelled with blackness and then collapsed back in on itself, sucking up everything in a several yard radius, exploding upwards into swirling, toadstool clouds that quickly choked the air of the battlefield with pals of dust.
Each lightning bolt that struck the enchanted shields, though, did not pierce through. They instead rebounded off, skittering and striking the ground yards and yards away as their energy gave out, ripping holes there rather than in the ranks of the army. Some lightning bolts slipped past shields and demons screamed as they were ripped from their formations. The lucky ones at the edge of the interface point between hole and the rest of the world were merely yanked off their feet by the vacuum collapse. Those who were less lucky, who stood closer to the hole, simply ceased to be.
Cae evaluated the bombardment.
Ineffective. Her lines remained steady and the majority of the damage was in gouging craters out of the ground ahead of her forces. But then she saw that the mercenaries were advancing – and before her eyes, a knot of them dropped into one such crater...and it turned out? A slithering snake-woman could simply go down then up again while maintaining their formation, their muscular snake-trunks easily pushing through dirt and debris as if it was barely there. She saw, immediately, why Puzak had paid so much for them, they paired well with his indiscriminate and vicious weapon.
She called out. "Archers! Glass them!" She thrust out with her hand and the archers, their veils fluttering in the whip-crack wind that blew through the formation with every implosion, ducked their heads forward. The hovering glass orbs they used rather than arrows whined as they arced up into the air.
The ssviath women raised their shields. Glass orbs shattered against them, whining as their fragments, guided by the will of the archers, tried to find weak points in the snake's armor. But while their tails were unarmored by artificial means, they remained clad in the thickest scaling of the ssviath's bodies. The glass found no purchase, save for when it managed to slice and cut into their hoods. The women remained steadfast and Cae frowned.
"Heavy infantry advancing into archer fire wins every time," she grumbled. Creator above, what she wouldn't give for just ten Centurions from Heaven. She ignored it. The snakes were getting within range for a charge, and a second bombardment had just been weathered by her troops. She forced her gaze away from the mercs and towards the cavalry. The nightmares had moved almost entirely to the right flank, swinging wide. She could see the plan: They would thunder down the gentle slope of one of those skulls…
The archers were in position and arrows, almost unnoticed in the din, had begun to fall.
Cae nodded quietly. "Any second now."
She had, unfortunately, no way to signal to the cavalry when precisely they needed to act. She just had to hope their commander had a good head on his shoulders.
It transpired…
That he did.
The floating islands behind the Baron of Panic's lines lifted up with a grinding creak, earth shifting against earth. From the darkness came the cavalry: death monarchs, their wings glittering with steel shod edges, swept up and out of their hiding spot. While they could not fly, they could hover, maintaining their distance between earth and sky. And yet, fly they did, fly across the battlefield, as cavalry had since man first rode upon the back of horse, scorpion or chariot. Their lancers let out the war cry of their realm: "By rot! By ruin!" And their lances plunged into the backs of the demons serving the implosion balistrays. Cries of fear, of pain, of...panic filled the army of Puzak. His nightmare reared, flaming hooves kicking the air, sending up sparks as his multi-masked head spun in the swirling flames that served as his neck.
Horns blew. Infantry wheeled. Archers fired. But it was too late, the death monarchs were in the backline of the enemy. From her vantage point, Cae could see that those shod wings were not for show. A lancer would aim straight for a mass of infantry, spur their butterfly mount into motion, and glide across the battlefield, like ice dropped onto a pan that was scalding hot. Skittering forward, their edged wings would slice, gouting up black blood as they carved into the lightly armored infantrydemons they flew down. And while the wings worked, the leechlances would do their own merry business: Tips dragged into pools of blood, soaking into the organic lattices of the lances, making them engorged with dark red promise. Thus stiffened, the lances were thrust again and again, plunging through armor, and sending more demons sprawling to the earth.
The enemy wavered in this hammer blow.
"Archers! Far aft!"
Cae's bellow redirected their fire. Glass globes whistled up and above the mercenaries that had nearly reached her lines, and began to shatter into the light infantry and the cavalry that Puzak had planned to use as the hammer to his bought anvil. Without the balistray providing fire, her archers were able to loose globe after globe in whistling, screaming volleys.
Convulsing, the enemy army broke, and the death monarchs drank deeply of their blood and their panic. The only fragment of the army that remained intact was Puzak's nightmare cavalry, who formed up around the Baron of Panic, shields held aloft. Glass glittered around them as the archers directed fire upon their fleeing formation – but their armor was heavy enough, and their steeds swift enough, that only a scant few actually fell under bombardment. This left the heavily armored mercenaries in a small circle. They had fallen back, locked shields, pressed tail tip to tail tip, and glowered around themselves.
Shale and Cae both walked towards them and stopped a firm distance off, regarding the snakes curiously.
"So, do...we hire them?" Shale murmured quietly.
Cae clicked her tongue. "Not a bad idea," she said, her voice quiet. "Not a bad idea at all."
She stepped forward a few more feet, wings flaring wide. Her hand took hold of her helmet, tugging it off, so the snake-women could see her face. She called to them. "Fair warriors, you have fought as well as your coin and spirits might be asked – do you now seek to lay down your arms and...perhaps...take new commission? The Realm of Ruin is in sore need of noble and brave warriors such as yourself – and we have resources to offer that might make what Pestilence seem a paltry offering indeed. What say you?"
There was a short pause, then a hissing voice called out.
"Sssssuck my eggssssss!"
"I do not believe they're inclined to the offer," Shale said, while Cae snorted.
"It seems a pity to spill the blood of mortal women whose only crime was to take the coin of the Baron of Panic," she called out.
The snakes shifted and one of them emerged. She was the largest of the women, taller and broader, her snake-tail scarred by many a battlefield. Her green scales had been buffed and polished before the battle, but were now streaked with rust-red dust and dirt, blood scoring several thin gashes along her sides. Her hood was pocked with several impacts, and a bleeding cut dripped along the edge of her left curve. Her armor was ornately made, with broad pauldrons and lamellar plates that interlocked over her bust, terminating at where a normal woman's legs would begin. She had the traditional blade of her people in one hand – a curved kopesh sword – and her other held a shield that had been struck several times by incoming glass globes, leaving it scratched, pitted, but not dented. Her eyes were the same warm orange-gold of the desert during sunset.
"We are the Shields of the Sun. We never break a contract – if a mercenary company gets known for breaking a contract, well…" She flicked out her tongue, tasting the air. "They stop being a mercenary company faster than you can imagine."
"Seems that if you are cut down to the last woman, you'd stop being a company even faster," Cae said.
"True," the commander of the Shields of the Sun said. "We offer, instead, surrender. We will be your prisoners, under parole, to be ransomed back to the city of Sevethketh once they are made aware of our survival. We are contracted to them before any other. They will pay for us."
Cae lifted her chin, frowning. "And if we're attacked again?"
The snake woman shrugged. "We can dig. We make entrenchments. Or, if you prefer, we can remain in the stockade."
Shale frowned, stepping to Cae's side. Her voice was soft. "We don't have a stockade."
Cae regarded the mercenaries, frowning. Rather than answering the problem of heavy infantry and their need for it, the snake-women had instead tossed into her lap half a dozen more problems. She let out a slow sigh, shaking her head.
"...then we'll have to make one," she said.
The snake women relaxed, subtly. Their shields lowered.
The bloodletting was done for the day.
But Cae was terribly aware that the headaches had only just started.
TO BE CONTINUED
"Hey, Dragon Cobolt, why is this chapter half as long as normal?"
This week was very busy! I got as much done as I could manage, I'm sorry!
So, thoughts after taking for longer than a day to forget about everything I remember reading scattered spoilers on your twitter (curse my brain's spicyness): This story has a ton of neat details and investigation. Combat exists, but ultimately as a puzzle, and a tertiary one to interpersonal relationships and exploring the structures of this universe/collection of them (I refuse to use the m word), which seriously juxtiposes what Diablo & Darkstalkers are regularly 'about' (even though I've liked Diablo 1, 2, and 4's stories).
Each discovery Caelel makes has its own unique rewards, both in understanding herself and figuring out what she actually wants to do to better the everyone's lot in their respective worlds (and also better her own lot by exploring who she truly is). Anyway, can't wait to see where this goes.
So, thoughts after taking for longer than a day to forget about everything I remember reading scattered spoilers on your twitter (curse my brain's spicyness): This story has a ton of neat details and investigation. Combat exists, but ultimately as a puzzle, and a tertiary one to interpersonal relationships and exploring the structures of this universe/collection of them (I refuse to use the m word), which seriously juxtiposes what Diablo & Darkstalkers are regularly 'about' (even though I've liked Diablo 1, 2, and 4's stories).
Each discovery Caelel makes has its own unique rewards, both in understanding herself and figuring out what she actually wants to do to better the everyone's lot in their respective worlds (and also better her own lot by exploring who she truly is). Anyway, can't wait to see where this goes.
Thank you! I did worry a little if I was getting the 'balance' between romance and the generalship that is the ostensible hook and plot of the story...right, but also, it's a romance novel called BY RUIN REDEEMED, I figured there's slightly more kissy/feelings than swords and sieges, that's forgivable.
An exemplary chapter as always!! I love the infantrydemon's conundrum at the start, and the butterfly cav in the middle, and the ssviath mercenaries at the end!! I adore a good snake lady!!!!
Thank you! I did worry a little if I was getting the 'balance' between romance and the generalship that is the ostensible hook and plot of the story...right, but also, it's a romance novel called BY RUIN REDEEMED, I figured there's slightly more kissy/feelings than swords and sieges, that's forgivable.
Author's note: My first day at the post office is done! It was orientation - so, it all gets harder from here...then easier??? hopefully!
The Baron of Rot laid in swampy marshes and decayed – bones showing, mold growing, empty eyes staring off into space. The image of his skull, half exposed with the terminus between black skin, red tissue and pale white bone turned into a fuzzy line of swarming insects, struck to Cae's heart as she stood at the edge of the pond that she found him in. She had come, with so many things to tell him. The enemy forces had been turned back, and the mercenaries that Puzak had brought to bear were captured and now a future resource to be turned to the aims of the Realm of Ruin. More, she had come with questions to ask him. Ruti had been a master of transformation and transition, as he had demonstrated in one of their earliest conversations.
And now…
He was dead.
Cae stepped into the water. It sloshed and burbled around her golden greaves, the cold edge of the swamp dribbling into her boots and soaking her feet through in seconds. It was strangely quiet. Even the buzzing insects seemed to be silent. Cae dropped to her knees, water lapping around her knees as she looked down at Ruti's pathetically small body. Her wings mantled, then spread as she reached out, fingers quaking within her gauntlets – metal clicking softly.
"No," she whispered, softly.
How?
How could this have been?
Balati.
The name exploded into her mind in a flash. The Baron of Murder. A creature that had once hunted her in these very swamps, and who she had driven off in shame. Had he crept in, lurking and waiting for a chance to avenge himself upon General Caelel Silverhawk? Had he been too cowardly to face a proper battle with a war-angel of Heaven, and instead, sought a weaker target. Cae's fingers slipped beneath the waters and she gently lifted Ruti from where he floated in decay and death. His left arm jutted out in rigor mortis, while his right had been gnawed off by some scavenging beast. She closed her eyes, feeling a great shame and fury building within herself.
"Nooooooooooooooo!" She shouted to the heavens, trembling as she held Ruti's corpse to her chest.
Her voice echoed off the trees – a promise. An oath. She would find who had done this. Who had-
"Mmm?"
Cae blinked tears from her eyes. She looked down at the noise. Had it…
The skull-face, the ruin-face, the death-face of Baron Ruti had shifted around, peering up at her. One eye, shot through with wriggling maggots, focused. "Huh?" He asked, his voice raspy and creaking. "Sorry, I was-"
"You live!?" Cae exclaimed.
Ruti groaned. His head cocked to the side and, before her eyes, flesh grew across the skull, the eye socket. New tissue stretched, grew firm. Bugs scattered into the air, hissing and squirming into the woods around them. His left arm creaked, cracked, and then flexed like new as his right arm stretched from the ragged stump that the scavengers had left. His fingers pressed to her cuirass and he lifted his head up, blinking eyes that were once more their remarkable, living hue.
"Of course I'm alive," he said, sounding exactly like...well, like any man might, roused suddenly from sleep.
"Your skull was showing," Cae said, setting him down into the water hastily, her cheeks blushing bright silver.
"Well, yes," he said, sighing. "I was quite tired from all the energies flowing through my swamp – channeling up an entire cadre of cavalry so quickly, arming and equipping them...it took a lot out of me, even with the villages so eager to help." He smiled, wanly, his thin shoulders slumped. "I simply took a deeper rest than normal. It takes some time, even for the swamps, for rot to really set in – more than a few hours, at least. Well, there's some, I suppose, but I'm not shocked you didn't notice last time."
Cae opened her mouth in shock, then closed it. "W...Wait, are you telling me when you sleep, you begin to rot?" She asked. "Immediately?"
"Of course," Ruti said, smiling at her with a crooked amusement.
Now that he mentioned it, it did make a great deal of sense.
Cae repressed a horrid shudder.
Ruti sighed and then shifted back in the muck, leaning against a tree and rubbing his back against the bark, to itch. The water sloshed around his distended belly as he smiled at her. "So, I take it the news from the battlefield goes well?" he asked. Cae nodded, and resigned herself to being somewhat damp. She had knelt in the waters. And besides, she was fairly sure that the runic enchantment would keep out the leeches. She squared her shoulders.
"The Baron of Panic rode his troops into another one of my clever little traps," she said, her voice soft. "The next one is either going to need to be another level of magnitude more clever, or it won't work. Fortunately, I believe that we're no longer going to be quite so far on the backstep. Our army is well practiced at working together now and...well, the House of Pestilence hired mortal mercenaries." She explained about the snake women, their capture, and Ruti nodded, his lips pursing. "The end result...I think we can get them to sign on with us, if we just find the right inducement. That will give us a cadre of heavy infantry. That combined with our already existing forces and we'll have an army that can route anyone that comes for us."
She frowned. The temptation tingled on her tongue to bring up the real reason why she had come here.
Instead, she continued: "The issue is, well, I'm not entirely sure how we win these wars. We can drive back the Barons, we can route armies, but the House of Destruction and Pestilence can both recover and send back. Unless we destroy either or both House, the war will go on forever. And I don't know about you, but I want to do more than to just be the...the General of House Ruin."
Ruti nodded. "You do have to get back to Heaven. To win the war against all the Hells, right?"
Cae opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked aside. "I don't know. I don't know what I want to do anymore." She smiled, sadly. "But it's not just this."
"Is it?" Ruti asked.
Cae flushed silver. She probed her own soul, like a tongue questing a shattered tooth. And yet...despite her fears...she felt it. A solid certainty. There was no doubt that she cared greatly for the demons she had met here, despite her nature as an angel. But there was also no doubt that she knew that she was needed elsewhere. But the truth of that lurked in why she had come here. She couldn't evade it anymore, not so long as the questions hung unasked. She breathed in, her wings lifting and then settling.
"You are a master of transformation," she said, quietly.
"I am," Ruti said, at ease with the sudden change in conversation.
Cae looked him square in the eyes.
"I...learned the truth," Cae said, her voice halting. "About you. And Arral. And Citri and Degi. All of you. I know how you and Arral are part and parcel of the same thing – you are all of Ruin in the same way my errant thoughts are a part of my mind, given flesh and form."
"Oh," Ruti said. He shifted in his seat of muck and black water. "Does...it upset you?"
He sounded so nervous. How could he? How could he think she would see the amazing truth of demonic selfhood and turn away from it? But...well, as Degi was a part of Arral, Degi was also a part of Ruti. And Degi, the Baron of Despair, could surely imagine all the twisted ways someone might see truth and turn it into disgust. That was part of the purpose of despair. That poison now surely flowed between Ruti's ears. Cae could already picture the words: Unnatural. Grotesque. Wrong. But she shifted in the water, letting it slosh around her, moving to his side. Her metal clad hand cupped his hand, squeezing gently as she sat next to him, looking down into his eyes.
"It's the most remarkable thing in the realms," she murmured, quietly. "It's why I can't stay."
"It is?" Ruti asked.
"Angels…" She sighed. "We are trying to complete the great work of the Creator – to bring the universe into alignment with her plan. And yet...I...I can't believe that something like you and Arral, Citri and Degi, Shale, all the other demons here...I refuse to believe that it is anything but what the Creator intended. She can't have wished to shatter such beauty. It would be like casting a stone through stained glass. Like toppling a temple, out of spite. Like burning a forest, to curse the thorns." She squeezed him and could not feel his hand through her gauntlet. She wished she had taken it off before trying to comfort him.
Ruti smiled, a bit lopsidedly. "But we demons are made by defiance. The Creator made us to be one thing. We're another. We're many things."
Cae flushed. "No, I don't believe that," she said.
"It's the truth," Ruti said, shrugging his narrow shoulders. "We don't just...say this, Caelel, we know it, we act it, we have it...here." He tapped his chest, gently. "Defiance is a part of being demonic. If we ever stopped, we'd become mortals again."
Cae blushed even harder. Her wings mantled. She bit her lip. "But…" She shook her head. "You're wrong."
Ruti shrugged once more. "Maybe. Maybe not."
Cae slipped back onto her haunches. She frowned and then lifted her head up. "The Creator can't be wrong, though," she said, quietly. "She made everything."
"Mm. Maybe." Ruti sighed. "So, you wanted to ask me about defiance?"
"Um. Not quite." Cae felt unsettled. She had not expected the questions to go so quickly against the grain. She sighed and leaned back against her own tree. It creaked against her weight. "I...realizing this...I…" She paused. "I split into two. A me and a me who hesitated. It was a tiny difference, a fraction of a difference. Because the me that hesitated still wished, very badly, to kiss Arral. And...we both did." She blushed hard, as Ruti nodded contemplatively. "But then we...we somehow came once more into true. We were together again, and...and...Creator above, Ruti, it was the most spectacular thing and the most frustrating thing – I can remember knowing and understanding, being something greater than I had ever been and and and…" She reached up, dark swamp water dripping from her golden fingers. "And I cannot explain it. Even to myself."
Ruti tugged on his lower lip with his thumb and forefinger. His brows furrowed and he harrumphed softly. "That is quite a transformation," he said, quietly. "Caterpillars become butterflies – and they remember what they learned. But I suppose, a butterfly that becomes a caterpillar cannot remember the lessons it learned while flying." He shifted and then stood. Water sloshed around his calves as he paced in the swamp, fireflies dancing around his shoulders and his scalp like a halo. "We must see if we can get you to pupate again."
Cae blushed. "Oh. Well, I...how?"
Ruti turned and gave her a wry little smile. "I...could…" his hand dipped down to the soaked loincloth he wore. For a moment, the twinkle in his eyes was downright Citri. Then he withdrew his hand, and his shy reserve once more returned. "N-No that wouldn't work. No hesitation there."
Cae bit her lip, hard. She whispered. "You are quite right."
His shoulders hunched.
"But…" She stood. Water splashed around her as she got to her feet. Her gauntlet clad hand settled on his shoulder. She squeezed, ever so gently. "But not for the reason you think. I would not hesitate to be with you, my sweet Ruti."
"B-But I'm...I'm not…" He stammered, turning to face her. "Look at me."
"I'm an angel?" Cae asked, then chuckled. "Do you think I'd be as shallow as this puddle? And as soulless?"
Ruti actually blushed. It was subtle, hard to spot on his ebony black skin, but when he looked down – down at his emaciated thin arms, at his greyhound frame, at his distended skin – he looked even more unsure. "W-Well, a lack of hesitation from disgust or a lack of hesitation from open mindedness still nets us the same issue."
"Well, um," Cae said, considering. "You are the master of transformation. You could take on another form?"
Ruti blinked.
"You...that...is a very good idea," he whispered.
Ruti takes the form of a death angel - an ironically named mortal creature of decay, death and rebirth that looks very H.R Geiger-ish and makes love to Cae using all sorts of kinky means...only for her to not hesitate again at any point. But when Ruti says that he loves her, her saying i love you back causes hesitation, then fusion into the strange thing she was before - and Ruti divines what it means before her energies collapse with a flash.
Cae smiled and crossed her arms over her chest. She wondered, for a moment, what form Ruti might take. There were many possibilities – he had a mastery over all things of rot, decay and putrescence. But it would need to thread a very thin needle. Yes, he could become, if he wished, a rotting corpse, with mold and mildew and maggots. But that wouldn't produce the hesitance that he was looking for, now would it? He could become a-
Ruti began to change. The back of his neck peeled, rippling slightly as the skin was tugged back, as if by invisible hooks on tiny threads. The bone glistened with a thin dusting of red droplets, blood that wicked away before her eyes. He groaned huskily as the skin tore with the moist sound of lovemaking. His spine wrenched itself free from his skull and he let out the sharp, harsh sigh of a man stretching before the dawn. Now, the transformation took two different shapes, and both drew Cae's horrified fascination: the skin peeling up towards his skull started to smoke. No, not smoke. Thick lines of spores were dusting off his skin as it transformed into the cleft of shelf fungi. His skull was growing beneath the mushroom, moving to form the same shape as it. The skin peeling down towards his lower back and buttocks was tearing more fiercely, pulling apart muscle as well, revealing hard white bone and glistening gore. With a quiet, happy grunt, his leg bones were pulled free and sloshed into the water. He fell forward into the brackish water, the mushroom shelf of his head bubbling beneath the waves, leaving a thick musk in the air: Pungent and tingling in the back of Cae's nose.
She blinked several times, her jaw hanging open. The water was too thick to show anything – but still, signs of transformation continued. Water sloshed, burbled. Bubbles popped and something caressed along her ankle – the bony protrusion of it feeling like vertebra. Or a tail. The edges caught against the thin seam between boot and greave, teasing her through the thinnest part of her armor. She jerked backwards, heart in her throat, lumping like war drums.
Cae wished that she could speak to Ruti, right then – to croak out a single word: Please stop. This was too much. It was too frightening. Too…
Demonic.
But the word choked in her throat. She couldn't move her lips to form the sounds – her tongue felt heavy and her mouth felt utterly dry. She gulped again, her wings spreading. Her hand dropped, then jerked up, before her fingers could quite touch the hilt of her flaming sword. The bubbling ceased as the waters grew still. Quiet. Cae's heart felt as if it was the only thing that moved in the entire swamp. She could not even draw breath.
The water surged and a clawed hand emerged, grabbing onto the shore. Water dripped from hardened chitin, rivuleted along an armor-plated bicep and shoulder. The flesh between chitin was ropy and black and faceted with complex whorls of almost fungal shapes and patterns. But the claws were the claws of a predator, black razors that dug into tree bark and moss, wrenching through it as if the thick trees that surrounded the brackish pools were kindling. The arm pulled and a figure stood. It was taller than she, but more slender. A creature of bladed darkness and edges, with an elegant curve to the spine and hips, which flared bonelike around narrow legs. It had a long, segmented tail, tipped with barbs and razor sharpness, and its head was the triangular crest of some terrible insect monarch, eyeless and pitiless. But as it turned, she saw that whatever Ruti had become...it had terribly human features.
Lips. Black on black, they were the lips of a mortal, made to laugh and smirk, to kiss and caress. They were utter incongruity, on that eyeless horror-face. They did not belong to those claws and that chitin. The creature turned to face her, and she saw the second human feature: A pair of heavy, swaying balls, contained in a sleek, rubbery black scrotum that gleamed and dripped with the brackish water they had been soaking in. When her eyes swept back up to the eyeless face, she saw the third. The curved chitin supported and presented a pair of quite feminine breasts, giving the strange narrow waisted, sharp hipped creature a strong feminine curve to her.
The details shook her from her numb horror.
And she recognized it.
"A...a death angel," she whispered, quietly.
Those human lips parted in a smile that was neither knowing or deadly. It was the sheer, joyous shock that dear Ruti always had when she knew something that surprised him. "You know them?" he asked, his voice still his, even if it reverberated and buzzed like it was being spoken through some stringed instrument.
"I...uh...read a lot…" Cae said, taking a half step back as Ruti took a half a step forward elegant legs drawing through the water. "T-They're...they're named, uh, despite not being angels or demons, for...for the...the fact they're…" She gulped as the death angel took another step closer. "They are to humans as bleed wasps are to the humble honey beetle, y-yes?" She asked, her wings brushing against tree. "They mimic human voices from the dark, to lure the careless to death, so they can use their corpses to make more eggs for their larvae…"
"Mmmhmm." Ruti's lips had shifted from joy to dark amusement. "But the truth is, death angels can use anything that walks and breathes for their young. They kill to live, and live to kill. They live in rot. They are beings of terrible transformation...they are...not my creation. But they do enjoy my swamps." His claw pressed to her throat. It was so sharp that even this gentle touch beaded a thin, bright red droplet. "Do you hesitate now?"
"I, uh…" Cae whispered, quivering slightly.
She did not split in twain. There were not two Cae's. Instead, she stood there...and blushed. Hard.
"...oh my…" Ruti whispered, his resonant voice sounding surprised.
"N-Now, listen here!" Cae stammered. "It cannot help that I know it's still you! If you were a real death angel, then, I would...uh...shut up!" She glowered. Somehow, despite having no human features save black on black lips, Ruti looked as if he was trying his best to not burst into laughter. Cae never felt more humiliated. She put her gauntlets over her face, covering her bright silver cheeks. Through armor and palm alike, she muttered. "I am learning new and most unfortunate things about myself every day."
"For instance, you want to make love to an ambulatory wasp that breeds in human corpses," Ruti said, his voice buzzing with delight.
"Only when it's you!" She almost wailed.
"Mmm, sure," he said, quietly. "Only when it's me."
"You're letting some Citri into you…" she grumbled, then gasped, feeling cold edges of sharp, sharp talons rasping against the seams of her armor. He was finding the connection ports and tugging at them, as if he knew precisely how to...to...strip her. Which of course he did. He was Citri, as much as Citri was him. The implications was still unfolding inside of Cae's mind as her cuirass hissed, then fell forward, revealing her sweat soaked underclothing and her achingly hard nipples – silver jutting against white. She slid her gauntlets away from her eyes, just enough to see those dark lips, looming above her. He looked down into her face, eyeless and yet still meeting hers.
"Do you complain?"
"I don't know…" she said, then shivered as his head tilted lower. Lower.
"I am sorry you didn't, ahem, split," he murmured.
"We'll find out if-" Cae let out a soft mewl as his mouth smothered hers. A death angel, it turned out, tasted of copper and blood. His tongue, a cool black tentacle, swept into her mouth with a strength and urgency that felt as if she should be fighting it. She struggled, squirmed, her hands scrabbling against his shoulders – but his fingers wrapped around hers, claws long and sharp and oh so very deadly. He yanked and her gauntlets came free. His hands were then all over her. Sometimes, he pulled armor off. Sometimes, he simply slit leather, cut fabric, peeled. Moist, warm air blew against her sensitive breasts, and then she was pressed against the wall harder as Ruti's death angel body mashed against her. His breasts...her breasts? The gender question confounded her – and Cae knew that every female demon in the Realm of Ruin was also Citri, Ruti, Degi, and Arral.
She couldn't breathe around his tongue. For he wasn't just kissing her. His tongue was fucking her throat, writhing down and then drawing back, then pushing down, then drawing back, then pushing down...again and again, it was as if she was being face fucked again. Her eyes rolled back into her head as her brain filled with a warm, red fog.
Cold black fingers cupped her breasts. Her skin tingled as his bladed claws threatened to slice deep. But he managed to only lightly nick her, each stinging kiss making the warm pleasure of his fingers tugging her jutting, achingly hard silver nipples hotter. When Ruti drew his mouth back, his tongue remained down her throat, a thick, glistening black tentacle that stretched lewdly between those oh so human lips and her own opened mouth. Her throat bulged, quivered...and finally, he jerked his tongue free, the narrow tip of it dripping warm spittle onto her soft breasts. Gold skin glistened with his arousal, and the tangy touch of it made her skin almost burn. Cae panted and tried to get numb lips to work. "Wuh...hu...huh?"
"If you were mortal, and I were a true death angel, you'd be very dead right now," Ruti said, his voice soft. Gentle. "But you are neither mortal, and I don't quite wish to go so far. The toxin is merely a paralytic, not a nerve interrupter."
His fingers traced down from her nipples to her still armored hips. More armor plating fell, cast into moss and water with splashes and thumps. His head ducked forward and his long, long tongue tasted the air for a moment.
"Just as my cum isn't quite as...acidic…"
"Guh…" Cae mumbled. Her head was spinning with oxygen deprivation and the stunning gaps in her knowledge about the death angel. She tried to sound questioning. "Huhhu?"
"Those parts of their biology didn't get written down. Not many...ahem...who could take notes about such things could live to write about them. But they came to me, women and men who felt the call of it...of…" He paused. "Death angels live in the worst places in the world. They come from the most terrible places – the magical seepage of factories, the misery of a thousand thousand slaves working in mines seeking out mithril and adamant and cheriak…" Those dark lips quirked slightly in the saddest smile that she had ever seen. "They call, like sirens, from the darkness...and I think most of the women, the men, the people, that go to them...I think they know that their honey words are just parrotry. A death angel doesn't have the same mind as a mortal, not really. But they go because they know, when their heart ceases, it will cease...as they feel true, real pleasure for the first time in a long, long time. And their body will not be reanimated by some cheap necromancer, it will not be processed into some component for the machines they work for. It will become a death angel. And it will probably kill some guards before it's put to the sword."
Cae nodded, her lips tingling and her tongue feeling bloated, sluglike. She didn't feel sexy, with her face smeared with paralytic toxin. She felt puffy and smudged. And yet, the look on that eyeless face was one of raw, ravening lust. "That rot is what calls out to the desperate and the destitue. It's what I offer in my realm. Rot, rebirth, and revenge."
"Mmhuh…" She mumbled.
He leaned forward. That black tongue of his swept along her breast, leaving tingling numbness. He looped up to her neck, slathering her with a thick layer of glistening spittle. Her knees trembled and she found she couldn't move her head – her neck muscles simply refused to move. Her wings beat in a nervous tattoo, but Ruti's spiked tail looped around her back, drawing her in close. His massive black cock ground against her belly – and she couldn't even look down to see how aroused he was. He ground against her with a slow, subtle buck of his hips, his nipples and hers teasing one another. His voice was quiet.
"Shh. Just let it happen, morsel. You're mine." His tongue darted out, licking along her cheek. She groaned, unable to even make so intelligible a sound as she had before. And yet...and yet...and yet...she felt herself falling into him. Her eyes bored into the eyeless sweep of his face and she tried to see anything but pitiless murder in the black smoothness. The fact that she couldn't...got her so fucking wet she couldn't believe it.
Ruti pushed her back onto moss and flowers, her wings fluttering weakly as she tried to move. But every part of her that wanted to move, to squirm, to wriggle? He pounced. His tongue lashed and more of that freezing toxin seeped into her skin, glistening, leaving her dripping as if she was oiled. One of her arms was locked above her head, the other locked to her side, and her body felt as if it was contained in a warm, blazing caul of ice. Her nipples were so hard, she was sure that if the death angel were to caress her, it would be his chitin clad palms that would be sliced, not her skin. And yet, Ruti kept stroking her. His talons rasped along her skin and she could almost feel their sharp points through the freezing.
"Nnhhh!" she groaned. Creator. Oh Creator. I can't move. I can't even twitch. I can't stop him.
Gushing arousal dripped along the cleft of her ass – her pussy was so soaked, so wet, that she was fairly sure she could serve a blacksmith as a quenching medium.
Ruti knelt his head down. His clawed talons slid along her inner thighs, spreading her nerveless legs, lifting them up and posing them – her frozen muscles kept them there. She felt a faint ache, a burn under her skin. The wash of his neurotoxin swept it away as he lapped at her skin once, twice, three times here and there. Then he leaned in. Those cool, cool lips pressed to her heat and he slid sharp metal teeth along her clit. Here, he had not licked. Here, her skin was as sensitive as it had ever been, her bead positively aching with anticipation. She wished she could bite her lip...but her lips were unable to form coherent words, she was unable to stop herself.
"Huhhh! Hnnh! Hghhhngha...guh! Guh!"
She sounded like an animal. A brute. It was humiliating. The blazing heat of her humiliation mingled with the need of her sex, the tingling of her body, and drove each faster and farther. It was like she was a horse being spurred, the blood dripping down her flanks in the form of sizzling embarrassment and raw confinement, and she couldn't get enough of it. Her head was spinning despite laying on her back – and then her glazed eyes became shadowed as Ruti clambered atop her. His death angel body glittered under the thin sunlight that peeked between shifting branches, the highlights glittering like steel at dawn. His head ducked forward and those cool lips traced a thin line along her neck.
"I could rip your throat out and you would bloom new flowers within the day…" He whispered.
Cae came.
The only noise she let out was a tiny gurgle at the base of her throat, and she was unable to buck or thrash. But still, she came – her juices squirting up in a fine thin line, splashing against his chitin covered pelvis, soaking that exotic cock she had not yet seen – she had only felt it grinding against her skin, teasing her flesh with every strange protrusion.
He chuckled. "Discovering new things about yourself every second. Aren't you?" He kissed her throat. Then licked, slowly. Then...his teeth pressed right to her jugular. She whined as best as she could, her eyes half closing as she trembled...and didn't try. She didn't push her muscles to move. She didn't even manage to wriggle. She simply laid there and breathed shallow, fierce, desperate breaths. He hesitated and then nipped her, so gently that she almost didn't feel it. "Destroyer, I need to be inside your cute silver pussy." His hand grabbed the underside of her knee, pushing her frozen leg up a bit. "I dreamed of doing this the first night we slept in the same room – did you know that?"
"Huh...hgnnh…" She groaned out. "Unnhhnhh."
"Mmm. Did you see my arousal then? Did you ever dream it was this?" His lips skinned back on those glittering metal teeth. She hadn't. She hadn't had the solitary idea – Ruti was so sweet and...innocent. And yet, Citri had been more romantic, and Arral had been more gentle. The juxtaposition left her dizzy – and deeply pleased. The realization smote her, like a hammer blow to her sternum: He would never truly do it.
She had a feeling if she truly said no, if she desperately wanted this to end, that Ruti could feel it, as easily as he could sense his own transformations. After all? He was the master of transformation – why wouldn't he hear it when yes yes yes became a desperate no, stop, stop! She wished she could test that, but...well…
Any attempt to form the true will melted as his midnight black, murderously thick cock ground against her cunt, teasing her folds.
Fuck I'm going to die, she thought dazedly. Of pleasure alone, even without acidic spunk.
Ruti, as she was learning, had an eye for torment that would have made the Baron of Pain take notes. He did not plunge into her, despite his words, despite his position. He simply bumped the tip of his cock against her clit, making her throb and buck gently. He teased her up and down, up and down, while his spined tail caressed along her nerveless wings. He teased her glowing feathers with the bladed tip of his tail, then slid that barbed edge against her cheek. Against her lips. Against her tongue. She felt the point dimpling as he purred quietly.
"If only you could beg, I'd be inside you…" he whispered.
"Hheese!" she groaned against his tongue.
"Mmm, I can't quite understand, angel," he crooned. "Was that a please? Please what?"
His tail withdrew, flicking back and forth above her nose, cutting sharp lines through the air. He was almost touching her nose with it. She tried, desperately to buck her hips against his cock – to force him into her. But her locked still body was able to only shift subtly. The tiny movements themselves were a statement as loud as war drums and heralds, declaiming her desperation to no one but her Baron. Her Ruti. Her death angel master. His only human feature, his dark lips, twisted into the most wicked smile she had seen yet.
"Heese...hese...uhhk...hukk…" She struggled.
"Please fuck?" He thrust his claws into the moss above her head, crunching through leaves and earth, digging up a smell of rot – musty, well turned earth, tingling in her nose as she hyperventilated. Her blood felt as if it was oxygen starved. If she was a human, she was sure she would have passed out by now. Ruti drew in closer and closer. His eyeless brow pressed against her forehead, and that empty plane of a face bored into her eyes as he started to ease into her. As in all things, Ruti had a handle on her: He did not thrust with the wild passion of Ruti, or Arral when he had lost his control. No.
No.
Like creeping fungus, like spreading spores, Ruti eased into her, spreading her folds and slipping inch after inch into her. His cock was ridged, notched every inch, so that she felt the pressure and push of those inches as he stretched her wider and wider. It felt so good. Then it began to hurt – aching subtly, then fiercely. He was so big. So impossibly big. She groaned low in her throat, her eyes screwing shut. The pain and the pleasure started to mingle together. As captivity felt like true freedom, as his cruelty felt like purest love, his cock stretching her cunt to the breaking point felt like bliss. Her eyes closed tighter and she groaned.
"Hesssssssssss!"
He pushed one last inch in, hissing a low, feral sound. His tail lashed so hard that the bladed tip slashed a branch off a tree, sending it splashing into the water behind him. His hips and hers met, chitin drawing fine white lines on her golden flesh.
"Angels...together at last…" He crooned, his rubbery black balls resting against her ass. He drew back, inch by inch, and if he had felt like mingled pleasure and pain entering, emerging? Emerging felt like his cock was engineered to wring from her every bit of orgasm it could. His ridges bumped against places that she hadn't even known were sensitive. Before he was even half out of her, she was clenching upon him like a fist, quivering as she came, forcing him out and trying desperately to keep him in at the same time.
Oh Creator, oh Creator, oh Creator! She thought, hazily, as he pulled back, then thrust into her with brutal strength – combined, of course, with that languid, lazy speed. The wet plap of their bodies meeting again echoed off the walls of the swamp. Cae quivered and tried to fuck back harder, faster – but she remained frozen stiff, able only...to take it.
And by the stars and their wheeling course, by the Creator's eternal hymn, by the golden throne of Heaven itself...Ruti could fucking give it. He fucked her with the raw confidence of a man who could feel a swamp abiding – he moved with a kind of tireless eternal energy. With the pace plants and growing things, not the frantic, frenetic need of animals. And something in what he secreted, be it his tongue or his prick his the barbed tail that he would caress along her tail, caused a strange change to come over Cae's mind. It felt as if time had become unmoored. As if she herself was dead, and in death, knew only the pace of things growing within her.
But it wasn't flowers.
It was pleasure. It was bliss. It was raw, fierce heat. She moaned in time with his fucking as the sun shifted hues overhead and still, Ruti fucked her. His finger found her clit, teasing her, drawing from her hoarse throat more desperate moans. He leaned down and kissed her breasts, then ground his own chest against hers, squishing tit to tit, teasing her nipples with his own. He licked her neck and, still, he fucked her. His balls slapped against her aching ass, a drumbeat, a heartbeat. And she felt his seed sloshing within, waiting to be spilled.
He fucked her and he fucked her, and she grew like an exposed nerve, quivering and tingling, unable to even comprehend her brain or her body. And at last, when taken to this vast precipice, something that she was terribly afraid of – a mindless eternity of pleasure, coring her brain out and leaving her as nothing but one of those ants that waved and waited for birds to pluck them up...at last, he started to move faster.
In this animal mode, her mind snapped back to attention. The heat of his movement burned away the freezing venom that had encased her so long. Her hips began to roll against his. Her lips formed words. "Yuh-sss! Yush! Yes...yes! Yes! Yes! Oh Ruti, yes!" She moaned. Her hand, so long trapped above her head, reached up, then down, caressing his muscular buttocks. She felt the biomechanical complexity of the join between tail and spine, before reaching down. She gripped his balls and squeezed him with firm insistance. "Cum in me, fuck me up, fucking kill me, fucking destroy me, fuck, fuck, fuck!" She groaned roughly, thrusting back.
Ruti snarled, his hips driving faster and faster now. His tail slammed into the tree above her head, splintering bark as his teeth bit sharply into her shoulder, digging deep into muscle. She grunted low in her throat as blood spilled down her shoulder.
And then.
After an epoch of waiting.
He came.
His seed filled her with a blazing heat. Not quite as hot as Citri. But oh. Oh it was warm. And it was plentiful. Seed spilled around his massive cock, soaking her thighs, her buttocks, his balls. And still, his balls twitched in her palm. Cum splashed her fingers and dripped along her knuckles as she gripped him, squeezing every last drop out into her. Her belly swelled, as if she was already heavy with child – even if she knew, as an angel, such a fate was impossible for her.
And…
At last.
Ruti eased back and slid from her. His softening cock dipped low and he sighed out a long, slow, happy sound. He thumped to her side, completely spent. His hand caressed her belly as his cum almost spurted from her chest – gravity and her tightness working together to make her most shamefully...expansive. Her cheeks burned as her wing cupped up under him, holding him against her side as they lay in wordless, filthy ecstasy – smeared with mud, dripping with blood, slathered with spittle and sweat, oozing spunk. And yet, in Ruti's arms, it felt as natural as clean silks and linen.
Cae sighed.
Ruti smiled, his dark lips gentle. "Love you," he murmured.
Cae blinked at him.
And another Cae mumbled, sleepily. "Love you too."
Both Cae's sat up, her wing jerking him onto his back as they gaped at each other.
Cae and Cae looked at one another – and the only sensation they could feel, beyond shock, was the purest, most agonizing mortification.
"Oh no," they both said, their voices harmonized in shame.
Ruti blinked as he looked at the two of hers. "Oh," He said, as his body sloughed his death angel form, the chitin and flesh falling away like leaves cascading off a tree in autumn. Underneath was the same Ruti she had first felt affection for, regarding the two Cae's with his fingers tucked under his chin, his lips pursed slightly. "Well, we did finally get you to hesitate at least…" He said, his voice guarded.
"I would have said it too!" Cae exclaimed.
"Yes, she would have," the other Cae said, nodding. "...right?"
Cae blushed. "How could you ask me that!?"
"I-I…" The other Cae blushed. "Well, because now I'm...second guessing myself, oh...it's just, love is a lot!" She exclaimed to Ruti, who held up his hands, placation clear.
"I understand," he said, simply.
The two Cae's moved to either side of him, scrambling despite their fuck-wearied bodies. Their wings brushed against one another as Cae put her hand upon his sweat-slippery thigh, the other Cae stroking his shoulder.
"I'm sorry," the other Cae said.
"Generalship is...easier than the heart," Cae said, nodding. Ruti coughed, and the two angels noticed that having two perfectly identical war-angels, nude and dripping with cum and sweat, cuddling up against him, breasts mashing to his shoulders, hands upon his body...were having quite the effect. His member, as big as he was as a death angel (though less ridged) was once more at...well, half attention. Cae bit her lip. The other Cae licked hers.
Ruti coughed. "W-We should, ahem, focus upon what matters. The transformation. How did you two fuse together again?"
Cae and the other Cae exchanged a glance. They both blushed. Cae gulped. "Well, uh. Lets...lets try...the, the, uh...same thing…" She whispered. She crawled slightly past Ruti, her knee half skidding off the marshy reeds and into the water. She took hold of the other Cae's arm, tugging her in close. Their breasts pressed together, nipple to nipple, their lips almost touching. The other Cae breathed out a soft, sweet smelling sigh, then leaned in. Their mouths pressed together, and their tongues began to play, one with the other.
Ruti was now at very full attention.
Cae and Cae moaned into one another's mouths and Cae swept her hand down, cupping her double's ass. Good god, was her ass really this fine? She felt a momentary and very fierce and non-angelic flare of pure pride at that. Then she and her double broke apart, panting and whimpering softly, their lips connected by a thin line of spittle, their eyes hazy with lust.
"It's not working, is it?" Ruti asked.
"T-This worked last time!" The other Cae stammered. "We're not just doing it for...fun. Mostly."
Cae blushed and averted her eyes. She had somehow not moved her hand from her double's ass. Curious, that. She blushed, then shook her head. "We have to go farther!" She said, then pounced. Her wings beat and she pushed her other self onto her back. Their lips met once more, but this time, with even more passion. Cae felt teeth, and her hips shifted, squirmed, thighs spreading – there! Their cunts pressed together and she felt the warm pleasure of the contact exploding in her. But still, that...connection seemed to twitch elusively around.
What was missing?
Was it Arral?
Was it...was it…
She paused.
Then…
She drew back. Her breath panted as she rolled her hips – and wrung from her double a mewling gasp. "Oh Creator, I didn't realize this felt so fucking good!" She moaned.
Cae looked down at her double's face. Softly, she whispered. "Stop thinking of Ruti. Stop thinking of him. Stop...stop trying to impress him. Focus on me. On my voice. On my eyes. On my cunt." She licked her lips. Her own pleasure was growing as she forced herself to forget how attentively Ruti was watching, how eagerly hard he was. Because that was it. During the night where she had changed...there had been a moment, where there had just been her and her – touching. Marveling at the…
A glowing light filled her. She leaned in and completed it, kissing herself.
The light grew brighter still.
She threw her head back. Her four wings flared wide, glossy black and glittering. "Oh yes!" Cae moaned, and that pure knowledge flared inside of her once more. She knew herself, and she knew the world. She knew everything! It blazed so brightly in her mind that she could barely look at it. She panted, looking back over her shoulder at Ruti, who was sitting back, watching her intently. Her wings flapped – and the fourfold pattern of them meant that a single flap was more like a complex intweaving of limbs, the wings intersecting and spreading once more. She grinned. "Come here, you…"
"No," Ruti said, shaking his head.
Cae blinked. She rolled around onto her rump – and noticed she was clean. Her golden skin was glowing with an inner light, a furious radiance.
"No?" She asked, then spread her thighs as she lounged back on the ground – and despite laying in a swamp, filth seemed to refuse to stick to her. She scowled at him, almost imperiously. "Ruti, look at me. How can you resist?"
"Shh…" He whispered.
Cae gaped at him. "I'm-"
"Shhh!" He held up one finger.
Cae's wings flared and she actually began to float up into the air. Her black feathered wings shimmered – and the eyes began to open upon them. She could see him in every field of vision. He glowed and crackled with an aura, and was threaded through with beads of orange, black, and red. Thin threads swept away from him, reaching towards the Manor. The whole swamp was bright with similar threads, and glittering auras jacketed every tree, bit of moss, chunk of dirt and rock, the ants, the moths. She staggered back in the air, wings beating.
"Yes...yes, oh by the Destroyer!" Ruti stood. "Cae! I know what you are!"
"I…" The auras were too much. Her eyes narrowed – both on her face, and covering her wings. "I can't-"
"Oh it's slipping, it's-" Ruti took a step forward.
Cae groaned and then shattered. Her body exploded – and snapped together in the same moment. She fell to her knees, steam gushing around her knees and thighs as she lay in the mud, boiling away water with her touch. Her wings, bright blue, flapped raggedly as her head wobbled from side to side. Her head hurt as if she was being hammered by the smith-gods of some pagan religion. She coughed, and smoke drifted from her mouth.
"What happened?" she mumbled.
Ruti knelt to her side. "Come," he said. "Lets dress and get cleaned. The whole manor will have to hear this."
"Okay…" Cae mumbled, her eyes half closing.
Suddenly? She felt very, very, very tired.
***
Cae felt significantly better and more settled with a large cup of something warm and chocoalty, provided to her by Shale, who gave her a wink and a little elbow bump that reminded Cae somewhat suddenly that her private time with Ruti was far from private considering the nature of demonic souls. She blushed, hard, as she took a sip and adjusted the thick fluffy robes she was dressed in. She had taken a very warm bath, scrubbed herself down, and was now feeling almost like she was ready to hear Ruti's description of...whatever had happened. She sat in the large meeting chamber that Arral preferred to take his meetings in. Ruti was already standing at the end of the table, waiting. Degi had arrived first, then Arral, then finally, Citri. Citri grinned as he walked up behind her.
"Don't ask me for the bondage stuff," he said, teasingly.
"Citri!" Cae exclaimed.
"I prefer my women to fight back," Citri said, his grin broader still.
Cae shifted her robe just so and flapped her left wing out, smacking Citri directly in the face. The Baron of Fire stumbled, laughed, and took his seat, lounging expansively, as he always did.
"Now," Arral said, his impressively deep voice drawing attention like the ground drew plunging arrows. "Ruti. What was it you found?"
Ruti coughed. "W-Well, uh, after inducing the same transformation that Lord Arral managed...I have determined the precise mechanics. It requires a hesitation in our general, a hesitation and a heightened level of emotions, to excite her soul and draw forth the splitting we saw. But afterwards, if she is to then accept herself...to...know herself, in every sense of the word, her soul once more merges. This is where things get rather interesting." He coughed, softly. "Normally, an angel soul is extremely static, and extremely powerful. That is why the relatively small hosts of Heaven have stymed the more expansionist of Hell's elements, even in the face of our immense numeric superiority when our souls are able to duplicate ad infernum infinitum."
"Make sense so far," Citri said. "What's the backdraft?"
"The unexpected surprise, Baron," Ruti said, coughing. "Is that her soul became more powerful."
Everyone sat up. Cae blinked and mantled her wings.
"By a factor of four," Ruti added.
"How could you possibly measure that!?" Degi snapped.
"Because she taught me how," Ruti said, gesturing to Cae. "Heaven is extremely good at measuring specific amounts of soul essence and tracking its flows – it's part of their...ahem...orderly paradigm." He smiled, slightly.
Cae realized, quite suddenly, that he wasn't stammering anymore. She had grown so used to his stammering that she had filtered it out of her hearing, merely listening to what he actually said – but no, everything that he had said so far had been said with the clarity and certainty of a professional giving a briefing. She wondered...was it the monumental nature of what he had discovered, shocking him into speaking with clarity, or...was it the carnal moment they had shared together? Had a tiny bit of Citri been caught into his breast as he took her as a death angel? She didn't know. But she found herself unsure if she liked it – she had started to fall for Ruti's gentleness, his softness, his shyness.
And yet…
Could she say she had despised him confident, when him confident had wrung dozens of orgasms from her whimpering body? Cae blushed, looking away.
"Are there any angels four times stronger than our Cae?" Citri asked.
"No," Arral said, frowning. "The strongest of the war angels, the famous Proctor, is only stronger by a measurement so fine that it must be weighed with the most expert instruments. The true difference in them is...skill, correct?"
"That's quite true," Cae said, focusing herself. "The Proctor could easily best me in personal combat because he's two thousand years old and has spent every moment of that time learning, improving. Training. Readying himself." She bit her lip. "What does this...mean?"
"I don't know what it means. I merely know what it is," Ruti said, quietly.
"Well, then, we have a grand new weapon!" Citri said, warmly. "We just need to figure out how to trigger her and keep her around-"
"It might be dangerous," Degi cut him off. "Sundering souls, recombining them – and I saw Cae when she returned, she was nearly dead."
"I wasn't...that bad…" Cae said, at the same time Citri laughed.
"I think that was because Ruti let himself completely go wild," he said, grinning.
Degi shot Ruti a look. Ruti coughed, rubbing the back of his neck. "I, uh...m-mma….mayy have, uh, uh…"
Cae, her cheeks burning, snapped. "I felt more fatigued after I became...whatever I was than when I was finished with Ruti."
"Wait, you didn't turn into a four-winged angel during the sex?" Citri asked. "When did it happen?"
"The hesitation can involve things other than sex," Ruti said, trying to once more sound professional.
"...oh god, you said you loved her, didn't you?" Citri asked, sitting up. "Ruti, you...you can't just let that slip! I'm the one with the loose tongue, not-"
"Please stop," Cae said, her palms pressing to her face.
Lord Arral frowned. He leaned forward in his chair. "I will not risk the life of my finest and only general in this...this...risk. However, Ruti, you have witnessed the change. Take everything you have learned to Citri and Degi. Each of you have your own talent. I want you three to examine every pore the transformation, learn what you can. General Silverhawk...Cae…" He blushed, turning to her. His antlers glinted in the lamps hanging from the walls. "I want you to rest. There will be a great deal of work soon, and even with your bath…"
"I understand," Cae said, then sighed. "I will have to begin working on those...snake women. We have to get them into the army. If we can get heavy infantry-"
"I know, Cae." Arral's smile was gentle. "Go. Rest. Sleep."
Cae nodded. She stood, and to her annoyance, her knees wobbled. She blushed and tried to walk straight, holding her robes around her. As she strode to her bedroom, Shale walked to her side. The flame spirit was smiling slightly. "Well, it sounds like things are afoot," she said, her voice amused. Then, quietly. "So, uh, what form did Ruti take? A coyote?"
Cae blinked, turning to her. "A...a coyote?"
"Yes, a coyote, but humanoid," Shale said, her voice amused. "He loves to take more bestial humanoid forms when he's, ahem, letting loose." Her grin flashed. "Possum is another good one. Once, he took the form of one of the walking fungal growths from the underhollows of Ci-Thar…"
Cae blushed. Hard. "Well, uh...has he...he ever taken the form of a, uh…" She groped for the doorknob as she walked backwards away from Shale. She found it. They were at her room.
"Yessss?" Shale asked, leaning in.
Cae once more regretted that she was who she was and that lying hung so heavy on her tongue. She blushed and turned her head aside, her wings mantling under her robes. "...death angel."
Shale almost choked on her own breath as she gasped. Then she shook her head, then stepped close. She took hold of the collar of Cae's robes, shaking her gently. "Y-You were mistaken, you have to have been. The skeletal shambler can look rather like a death angel, if-"
"It was a death angel!" Cae exclaimed, shocked. "What is the matter with you, Shale?"
Shale's jaw had dropped. "A death angel…" She put her hands to her brow, brushing them back along her hair, letting it lay flat against her horns. "A death angel."
"Y-Yes," Cae said, flushing as she was forced to remember every inch of him. She bit her lower lip despite herself, looking away again. Her hand took hold of the knob and she idly turned it, half thinking she should duck into her room – and maybe play with myself, an errant thought buzzed in her brain. "Why?"
Shale sighed. "Lady Ruin...that was her favorite form of his."
The door swung wide as Cae collapsed against it, stumbling. "W-What!?" She exclaimed.
"I know, kinky?" Shale muttered.
"How did she survive!?" Cae spluttered.
"I never asked," Shale said, blushing brightly. "It was mostly her and Ruti's business, wasn't it?"
"She's...mortal! It was...it...it cums acid!" Cae stammered.
"I mean, did Ruti…" Shale's eyes flicked down.
"N-No, but...I mean…" Cae shook her head. "I need to lay down. This is...this is...I need to lay down." She stepped into the room. Shale waved as the door closed – blocking her off and giving Cae some freedom. She wobbled to the bed, then flung herself face first into it. Her face mashed into the pillows and she groaned quietly. "Her favorite form!" She wailed – and the image of that gorgeous, dusky skinned woman, face scarred and bared with pride, writhing underneath-
She jerked her head up.
A sudden realization had struck her, smiting into her with a blazing crackling bolt of clarity.
She flailed, then scrambled on the bed to her nightstand. Hanging half off the bed, her robes tugged down around her belly by her motion, she flailed her hand into the drawer, then withdew Lady Ruin's journal. She rolled onto her back, carelessly naked upon her bed, then held the book up before herself. She looked at the blank page, then murmured.
"Angelic soul...four times more powerful," she whispered, quietly.
The journal swirled, came to a stop…
And the room bled away around her.
Cae saw nothing but blackness. Then, torchlight flickered on the walls and into view came a shrouded, robed figure. They surged past where Cae sat, then hesitated. Glancing back, the torchlight fell upon the dark brown cheeks of Alia, the future Lady Ruin – for this was from before she was burnt, and her cheeks remained unscarred. Her face was grim and she looked intent. Her voice was soft as she whispered a quiet spell – a subtle one. Cae saw it...and then didn't see it. She shook her head, looking closer.
It was…
It was a spell of unnoticing. A spell of gentle forgetting. It was the kind of cantrip a gifted child might use to play a game of hide and seek, the trifling of youth to be left aside when one graduated to spells of greater grandeur and power.
Ah, but Alia. Alia, Alia. Arrogant Alia. Mortal Alia. Beautiful Alia. She did not cast aside a toy for children. As Cae watched her descend deeper down the dark tunnels and the hard stone pathways that the journal showed, she could watch the spell weaving and recognize that this simple cantrip was being whispered with the grace and power of a true sorcerer. Simple? Yes. But cast with such raw talent that the Creator herself might glance over Alia.
At least...for a moment.
But Cae also recognized something else.
Alia was in Heaven. It was a gut feeling at first, but grew more and more certain within Cae's belly as she saw that these 'natural' tunnels had the orderly geometric patterns of Heaven, despite showing no sign of being worked or chiseled. Only in Heaven could such order be created and maintained. And that made her wonder...was this what had infuriated the Proctor, in that earlier vision? She bit her lip, leaning forward as Alia came, at last...to her destination. Her torch flickered as she held it above her shoulder...and Cae whispered.
"Yes, of course! She had to use a torch, all her spellcraft was for the cantrip!"
...the light of the torch fell over black steel bars. Thick. Carved with heavy runes. Glittering with a soft, magical light. Cae leaned over her shoulder and, mutely, read them. She recognized them – they were a similar craft to those that covered her armor, save that their direction faced inwards, not outwards. They did not ward off blows. They sealed force within. Something was buried, deep underneath Heaven, and sealed away by the mightiest artifice of the forges of the angelic host. Cae felt a cold fear starting to gather in her belly.
Part of her wanted to close the journal.
But the rest of her kept watching.
Alia frowned, intently, then shook her head. "Angels," she said, her voice quiet. Resigned. Almost...amused.
Then she ducked, shifted to the side, wriggled through the bars, then stood again. Cae blinked. The bars were narrow enough to stop any angel, unless they cut off their...wings...she put her hand over her face, sighing quietly. Every spell to keep it in. Nothing to keep anyone out. Of course.
The view shifted forward and still, Alia stepped deeper into the depths of Heaven. Ahead, Cae could hear a masculine humming. Deep. Resonant. Echoing. Torchlight fell on golden skin. Obsidian black wings – the very thing that Degi himself had said was false, a lie, a myth made up by the angels of Heaven. No Heaven had ever fallen, he had said. Four wings shifted as a head lifted, eyes glowing like the morning light of the sun, looking upon Alia. She whistled, slowly, as she stood before the war angel.
He was gloriously perfect. His abdominal muscles could cut glass, his shoulders were graceful and elegant. Even the blood, oozing slowly from deep cuts in his wrists from where ancient chains shackled his arms to the wall, even the way that his feathers were tattered from misuse and lack of use, even that was more achingly beautiful and sad than horrible. His lips, so kissably fine and full of life, twisted into a warm smile.
"Well, hello there," he said quietly.
"It's true," Alia whispered. "You're...him. The archangel."
The angel chuckled. He shifted, subtly, and Cae saw that he was completely nude. His cock, as with the rest of him, was pure perfection.
"I am he, yes," he said, warmly. "Lucifer Morningstar, at your service."
Cae slammed the book shut so hard that she almost fell off the bed.
Listen, only the fact that I was too tired to spend more than a few minutes thinking about it prevented me from making some sort of fluid based innuendo.
Caelel Silverhawk sat on her bed and peered, through the artifice and magic of what might be the most potent wizard to have ever walked the realms, at the mortal wife of Arral, the Lord of Ruin, as she knelt in a deep and secret part of Heaven and spoke to an angel...that should not exist. The levels of winding implausibility beggared Cae's mind – the idea that this book might be penned as a journal for the wizardess Alia, and that she might delve so deep and discover a secret so utterly impossible, and that the book would then be found by her, possibly the only creature in the vastness of Hell that might grasp the profound importance of it?
If Cae had not ardently believed in the will of the vast and omnipotent Creator, this would have surely convinced her.
Unfortunately…
It also made her begin to think maybe the Destroyer had as much sway in the realms as his divine opposite.
Lucifer Morningstar.
The Dawn-Bringer.
The Shining One.
Lucifer Morningstar was one of the most famous angels in the annals of Heaven's vast catalog of martyred heroes. His exploits remained spoken of by Proctors and Scholars alike, telling newly born angels of the heights they might accomplish. But they were old legends. Old stories. Old heroics. His stories were respected, yes. But the age made them glow less and less, even in the eternal glories of Heaven – as newer, brighter sparks caught, flared, and then dimmed in turn. Cae had only passingly paid attention to his stories, more fixated on mortal heroics and mortal skill – but she could still remember the most notable events.
He had saved an entire realm by luring a demonic army from the ever duplicating House of Betrayal into the edge of the Eversea, where the sun set every day, and brought the sky down upon their heads. The boiling steamwall still marked the edge of mankind's dominion on that world. He had once faced the demon known only as the Time Tyrant by cleaving between falling raindrops with his wings to smite the beast with his spiked mace, the Dawn. He had once matched wits and wills with the Queen of Sharos as her world boiled into prismatic vapor under the weight of her overset and uncontrolled magics, and after three days and three nights of debate and discourse, he had ushered her and the realm of Sharos into a five century golden age.
But, like many of Heaven's heroes, he had died valiantly in battle.
Only, as it seems…
He had not.
Cae did not dare move. She did not dare breathe. She did not risk even fidgeting her wings – anything that might disturb Alia's journal was to be avoided. She leaned forward, watching as Alia rapped her knuckle against her chin, her eyes hooded and focused as she peered at Lucifer Morningstar. "I have read a lot of books," she said, quietly. "And I have asked a lot of angels a lot of questions. And none have managed to answer the most important one."
"Oh?" Lucifer asked, his voice amused.
"What the hell even is an Archangel?" Alia asked, shaking her head as she snapped one finger to conjure a small and comfortable chair from glittering sparks. The wood had barely formed from the ether when she sat down upon it, leaning back and cocking her legs to the side, assuming a pose of such pure comfort that it startled a laugh out of the bound and nude Morningstar.
"I have not the foggiest," he said, his voice amused as his lips skinned back – his teeth glowed, as much as his eyes did, as if the light was trying to escape from him. "They called me it – for a time. Until I was cast down here."
"And why was that?" Alia asked.
"They learned how I did it," he said, quietly. "How I became like this. And once they knew the truth, the only answer was to un-know it. To un-learn it."
Alia leaned forward. "So, you know a truth that the angels don't?" she asked. "I've been meaning to ask about the origins of the universe – all their historical epics are woefully short on mathematics and awfully thick on florid prose and grotesque metaphors about jizzum."
This startled another laugh from Lucifer. "Who are you?"
"Alia," Alia said, simply.
"That is all?"
"Do you want my titles? They've been applied to be my a horrendous string of horribly bloated would be lovers, sycophants and supreme sovereigns, each as useless and meddlesome as the last." She flicked one hand, shaking her head. "They describe me roughly as well as your name – Morningstar, really now, name the angel that glows in the dark after a star? But I did meet an angel named Hawkdive, and...would you believe it, he had the wings of a hawk and he enjoyed diving." She sighed. "I think more mortals should visit Heaven, it would shatter enough illusions that we might have some genuine progress in the mortal realms for once in the past thousand years."
Lucifer was silent for a moment. "I didn't glow," he said, his voice amused. "Until I became the archangel."
"Ah," Alia said.
"And yes. I would like your titled, if only so we might have something to make mirth with over," Lucifer said, smiling at her. "I admit, this is me trying to prolong the conversation. When you've been trapped in an isolated cell for...what is the year?"
"It is the 5th year of the Suzerain of the Comet," she said.
"Huh. Six thousand years," Lucifer said. "Seemed shorter."
Alia chuckled. "So, the origins of the universe, as you are six thousand years closer to it than any other angel I've met…" She arched an eyebrow.
"I don't know," he said, simply.
"You don't know?" Alia asked, sitting up in her seat. "How in the Fundament can you not know?"
"Because those poetic histories were just as bloody useless back then as they are now. Because they're not histories. Heaven loves to crow about ten thousand years of unbroken history, of an eternal vigil over the Creator's creation. A place for everyone and everyone in their place, down to the last T. It's absurd on the face of it – you can't have a continous chain of knowledge and history while fighting an eternal, constant war against an infinite enemy and half of everything tha tis ever learned is declared a secret, to be kept only in heads that are so easily seperated from the shoulders of their bearers. It's shocking we know even half as much as we do!" He sighed, sagging back in the chains. "...sorry, I was a bit of a historian in my day."
"You were?" Alia asked, sounding curious. "I always assumed angels had no jobs. Hence why they appear to come pre-assembled with internal rectal scaffolding."
Lucifer chuckled. "Oh, a few of us have things we enjoy. I know…" His face fell. "I...knew...an angel who once gardened."
Alia nodded, tapping her knuckle against her chin, fascination burning on her features. "So, the history Heaven teaches is a lie?"
"To a lie, they'd need to know they're wrong. More...a guess."
"Remarkably charitable, for someone chained up for six thousand years," Alia said, her voice dry.
"Again. It seemed shorter." Lucifer smiled and ducked his head forward, his hair the glossy black of a raven plunging through darkest night. The bangs covered his glowing eyes, but their light still shone along those plush, kissable lips. "I admit, it will seem quite long, once you take your leave, my title-less Alia."
She shifted in her seat. "...one of my titles was The Incomparable Apple," she said.
"Delicious," Lucifer crooned.
Alia, her cheeks showing two dark spots of a blush, shook her head. "No, ahem, in the culture of the Suzerain, where I was so named, calling a woman an apple is another way of calling her...a bitch." At Lucifer's expression, she continued. "Beautiful, delicious, but my seeds are poison."
Lucifer tilted his head, his grin growing whimsical. "...so, delicious?"
"You are a very silly angel," Alia muttered, those spots growing across her cheek. She was pointedly looking up at his wings, not down. She leaned forward, steepleing her fingers against one another like a vizier of old. "N-Now, not to get distracted, but what you've said begs repeating: there is no concrete history of the universe's origins? No actual documents? No records? No memory stones?" At each question, Lucifer shook his beautiful head, his glowing smile thin and amused. Alia sat back in her chair, frowning as she flattened her palms against her thighs. "Well, damn."
"I'm sorry that your quest needs to end in failure," Lucifer said.
Alia sighed, slowly. Her eyes thinned to slits and she closed them.
"...assuming, of course, it was knowledge you sought," Lucifer said, his voice faintly edged – a catch in them, like a notched blade rasping against a whetstone. The note caught on Alia's ears and she jerked her head up, frowning at him. Their eyes met and for a moment, suspicion darkened the air between the two of them – Cae leaned forward, her breath catching, her own body so forgotten that the faint throbbing of her buttocks from sitting with her legs crossed and settled onto the edge of the bed was a mere faint annoyance. She bit her lower lip, thinking furiously as she did so. What was it that Lucifer was worried about? Was it his own personal power?
Had others come, seeking that power?
What was it that Ruti had said? That she had been four times more potent when-
"I am not some mortal servant of the Proctors, if that's what you're worried about," Alia said. "How often have they come down here, trying to wring power from you? It doesn't take an expert in transmogrification to see that your soul essence is nearly overwhelming." She cocked her head slightly. "I thought you had been put down here to be forgotten. That's not entirely true."
"Heaven is nothing but secrets and lies, at a certain point," Lucifer said, his voice dry. "Just as Hell is remarkably honest in what it desires – the House of Betrayals, for all that they are...renowned…never truly deceived me for I knew every word they said was a falsehood. They could no more tell the truth than I can fly from this chamber. Destruction cannot help but destroy. Pestilence cannot help but spread plague. Ruin...must fall. They cannot help it." He shook his head. "Angels have a choice, when they do things for the greater good."
Alia frowned. "Why did they imprison you? Truly?"
Lucifer sighed, slowly. A thin, glowing fog seeped between his lips.
"The Creator left us in charge of the universe – we exist to protect Her grand plan. Correct?"
Alia nodded.
"And yet...in the farthest reaches of the most distant realms, beyond Heaven, beyond Hell, I found a place where...the worlds themselves started to bleed away into something that was worse than nothingness." He leaned forward, chains clinking and clattering against the wall, straining against those glorious, muscular arms. "Nothingness returns, you know? The darkness of death leads to new life. Birth and rebirth. Even angels and demons can be reborn, as mortals once more – you see it, if you have as long a time as I to stay. But there's something out there, a true...unreality. An unmaking of things. I think of it as an echo, for the Creator spoke us into being. And the echo comes back, distorted." He sighed, softly. "And it was there, looking at this echo...that I realized something."
"What?" Alia sounded as if she had never listened to something so intensely in her life. Cae felt herself mirroring the future and former wife of Lord Arral, her body tingling. She wondered fiercely at the holes in Lucifer's story – why had he gone so far? What had driven him?
Lucifer frowned at her. "That I could stop. Not return to being a mortal – not become a demon. I could end. And...there...for a single fleeting moment, heard it."
"Heard...what?" Alia whispered.
"The same thing you do, when you walk upon the roof of a tall building, or peer into rushing rapids. The voice that sings to you, when you contemplate the edge of a blade. The song of Thanatos. The call of the void itself." Lucifer bit his lower lip, his eyes somber. "I had walked every Realm. I had fought every demon. I had done good...and great evil, in the name of that good. And for a moment, I wanted...to jump."
"What happened then?" Alia asked, almost sliding off her chair in her attentiveness.
"I hesitated." Lucifer chuckled. "And it was then I learned the truth about myself. An angel's soul…" He started to explain – and as Alia learned what Cae already knew, Cae herself...felt a ringing bell deep in her chest. Many different facets of knowledge, small and large, were whirling about inside of her mind – and they were coming together. Snapping into place. An errant word here. A vast revelation there. The cliff that she had stepped near...and drawn away from. Siren like, the void called to her, and she plunged into the realization as Alia took the notes that would lead her to being exiled from Heaven, and then, to understand Hell. The notes that would lead her to becoming the Lady Ruin...and Cae realized, if there was a plan, that she had been seeing the vitality of it backwards. The Lady Alia was not important – not truly. Her great power and her wisdom, her sagacity and her beauty, all of it was of a secondary nature to the true goal.
To bring this knowledge to Caelel Silverhawk. To give it to her at a moment where she had at her hands the might of a demonic army.
She couldn't turn from it, from the terrible realizations.
Heaven claimed that the Creator had a plan.
And yet…demons and angels were two breeds created by two different divine forces. They were, instead, merely parts of the same singular continuum. Two end points along the same line. A mouth, clamped around a tail, an ouroboros that endlessly rotated. Order. Chaos. Mortality. Endlessly reborn and killing itself.
Heaven claimed that they protected the Creator's plan. That they enforced Her will.
And yet...their histories were mere pagentries. Poetic allusion to things no angel remembered, inference. Guesswork. The next best thing to lies – and oh, how many other lies had the High Ones kept behind their tight lips? They had said angels fell...and yet, not a single angel had fallen, according to Degi. Yet, the description of those fallen angels were of black wings and honeyed words. They had described not a breed or type, but a single man: Lucifer Morningstar. They had feared a second following in his stead. And why?
Because it was the chink in the armor. The hole between the rhetoric. The revelation.
The truth.
Cae whispered, very softly. "The Creator didn't plan for this," she breathed.
"What?" Alia asked.
For just a moment, Cae thought that she was looking right at her, that their eyes were meeting in the face of history and magic. But then Alia continued. "I hear footsteps. I should go."
"Will I see you again?" Lucifer asked, curiously.
Alia licked her lips. "Maybe. I will need to speak to...others. I have to test all you've told me." She flickered a smile. "I...be...I…" For the first time in her life, it seemed that Alia, the Lady Ruin, the most potent wizardess that had ever walked the many realms, was taken aback. At a loss for words. Instead, she put her dark fingers to her lips, then gently placed them against Lucifer's brow. Even that touch caused a thin hiss and a tiny puff of steam to rise, as if he was boiling hot. Yet, Alia did not flinch away, even though her fingers did clearly sting. She turned and started to go – and the world hazed away, the journal entry coming to its natural end. At the last moment, Lucifer's eyes closed as he resigned him once more to solitude.
To silence.
Cae laid back in the bed, staring up at the ceiling.
Heaven claimed to know the Creator's will.
They didn't.
"The Creator wanted us to do this," she whispered, quietly. "To question. To grow. To be more than we were. She wanted us to...to...be. To breathe! To live! To love!" She was almost hyperventilating, her breath coming fast and fierce. "We grow – she made us to grow!" She put her hands to her face and felt that vast weight of hers slip away. She was not sinful. She was not wrong to be here. Her feelings for Arral, for Ruti, for Citri, for Shale, for Degi, even for Degi, they were not mistakes, they were not aberrations! Lucifer Morningstar had gone to the edge of time and found himself – she had fallen to the depths of Hell, and found herself.
What could Heaven do, if her angels could all do likewise. If they could all be more?
Her eyes flashed and she laughed quietly, her wings rustling against the bed. "Yes...yes!" Her voice echoed with a shimmering resonance – but only for a moment.
She sat up, then, her wings mantling, spreading and flapping in her excitement. She opened the book and spoke, eagerly. "Lucifer, second meeting."
The pages remained still...and for a moment, Cae worried that there had been no second meeting. That Lady Alia had tested her theories, been caught by the Proctor, then been chased from Heaven. But then the pages began to twirl and flip forward, whisking forward, then settling. The world began to melt away as Cae eagerly lifted her gaze up – wondering what revelations she might see now. She doubted it would be anything as shocking or world shaking as the truth that the world she lived in had been shaped by lies and misunderstanding for thousands upon thousands of years.
She saw darkness.
Then…
Again.
She saw light.
It shone along the Lightbringer's body, glimmering from a gentle palm held aloft above him. Alia whispered, quietly. "The angel's body appears to still require sleep – the fundamental truth that only the Creator needs no dreams seems to be the case… "She shifted her hand around, quietly dictating as she shone the light along glittering pectorals with skin that shone with pearlescent highlights. Her fingers almost brushed against his shoulder as she swept her hand up to the restraints. "The restraints are remarkably crude, considering the nature of the being being constrained – mere mana dampeners, with moderate levels of structural enhancement." She pursed her lips. "I think…"
Her fingers sparked with magic. A bolt came free – and then the other hand, the one still lashed in chains – swept out. It caught her wrist and Lucifer drew her close against his chest, his chains clinking and rattling as he used every bit of their give to draw her close. The hand that had been so suddenly freed cupped the small of Alia's back. His eyes flashed as he growled. "Did you ever think that if they were so easily removed, that I might have reason to keep them?"
Alia, her slender body pressed fully to the naked archangel, the fallen angel, gasped quietly. His broad palm rumpled her wizard robes, and her feet peeked from underneath – dainty and clad in simple slippers.
"This may shock my compatriots…" Lucifer mumbled softly into her hair, his breath a brilliant steam that left her cheeks flushed as if she had run half a mile. "But I do not actually wish to...kill...any of them…" He chuckled, quietly, as Alia nodded mutely. "Bruise a few, perhaps."
The calm reserve in that voice made Cae feel quite shameful. He had waited, patiently, day after day, hour after hour, for the moment that his movement might matter. And she had barked and snarled at her chains in a few simple days? But then her eyes widened as Lucifer's wings rasped and shifted and the hand he still had bound wrenched free of the chains with a spray of sparks. His lower left wing cupped around, and a few glittering beads of bright iron flecked on the feathers. A twitch of it sent them skittering away from Alia.
She chuckled. "I, uh, cast a heat protection spell. That is why, ere now, I don't scald, touching you, Fallen One."
"Ah, well, my graciousness has been thrown in my face," Lucifer murmured.
"What are you doing?" Alia asked as his hand reached up, brushing bright white fingers through her dark, dark hair.
"I said I wouldn't wish to escape, lest I wound my fellow angels. I never said I had no heartbeat, that I was laid as dead as a pile of bones in a sepulcher," Lucifer murmured. His mouth, devouring and skillful, pressed to Alia's lips and her own muffled sound of surprise sounded sweeter and more fiercely eager than dewdrops beading on the edge of rose petals. Her body squirmed, and those four wings of his swept around, cradling her, lifting her as if they were other limbs, while his two human hands did what only human hands could: They gripped, and they tore. Her brilliantly dyed and expertly stitched fabrics came apart in his fingers like leaves caught in a hurricane gale, and her toned, tight little peach of a rump was almost immediately cupped, then smacked by one of his hands. Her dark cheeks jiggled fetchingly and Cae watched with wide, wide, wide eyes.
Is this...no, this was before she met Arral, so… Cae blushed.
So it is! Cae watches and enjoys the show - and learns that it was Lucifer who actually suggested to Alia that she investigate Arral next - thus, he is responsible for their marriage and love. Also, they have sex for several days straight thanks to ~magic~
Despite the utter absurdity of the thought, it couldn't leave her mind she was watching Alia be unfaithful to her husband. She chided herself for such foolishness – as this Alia had never even met the demon that would later be her husband. She did break the kiss, a thin line of spittle connecting their desperate lips, their lustful tongues. Her breath came ragged and eager. "Have you ever...I thought you angels were all virgins…" She panted, squirming, grinding her modest breasts against his muscular chest. Cae wondered how her nipples might feel, against that chiseled perfection.
Then she remembered her own aching pleasure, at being squished into bed by the mighty wall that was Arral. Her cunt was getting more and more moist by the second. She pressed her thighs together, her cheeks burning as she watched, unable to tear her eyes away as the Fallen One casually swept one palm beneath Alia's buttocks, lifting her up, his other hand cradling her back, so that when she bent backwards, she was given support enough to be quite comfortable. She giggled and laughed, a gay, eager noise that did not befit this dank and dour cell...but by now, Lucifer was glowing brilliantly enough to cast away all shadows, exposing the perfect beauty of Alia's dark brown skin.
Her nipples, a pair of dark, eager, jutting points, thrust out as she arched her back, and lifted one arm up, draping it over her brown, as if to say: Oh, what will an angel do to little old me?
Lucifer was oh so very eager to show. His mouth, roiling with that energetic steam he seemed to release with every breath, closed around one nipple. He sucked greedily, his hand squeezing her buttocks fiercely enough that Alia let out a quiet hiss, then a gasp, then a most wanton moan of pure pleasure. "Oh...Lucifer…" She groaned, squirming and bucking her hips gently against his gripping hands. But still, Lucifer didn't hesitate – didn't slow. Didn't stop. He kissed between her breasts, to her other nipple, which he sucked upon with the same lavish attention he had given the first. Alia's cunt dripped down his wrist...she was leaving a puddle at this rate.
Mortal juices didn't glow, not like angelic eagerness. Cae blushed and wondered...how had Alia tasted?
Lucifer, it seemed, wondered the same question.
His mouth, his questing tongue, started to trace a path of wet, glistening fire along the golden-brown dawn of her belly. His tongue traced the lines of her softness, down, down, to her prominent little hip bones. His tongue traced, then, to the small snarling curl of pubic hair above her sopping wet human pussy. There, and only there did Lucifer slow in his eager questing. His breath drew in and he whispered huskily. "Oohhh yes, yes…" His tongue thrust out and up, and he lapped from the base of her cunt to the tip of her clit, and the motion caused her entire body to undulate in time with his slow lapping gesture.
"Creator…" She moaned. "Oh Creator."
"I think that she made women like this because she did so dearly love you. Us males? We climax but once and need to rest. Or fall asleep, if we're uncouth…" Lucifer's grin was close enough to her clit that every breath had to spike excitement along her spine. Alia bit her lower lip as Cae's own hand dipped down between her thighs. She felt some shame, like some reflexive action, some half-cast off chain. She squared her shoulders, then plunged her hand down between her thighs, jostling the book with her wrist – but fortunately, not closing it. She leaned in as her own fingers brushed the tufted feathers above her cunt, then down to her folds. She slid her fingers lazily around her lips, not quite ready to fully touch herself. She was stoking her fire – and it was growing hotter and hotter by the second as she watched.
Lucifer's mouth closed around Alia's clit. His left hand slid up to her shoulders, while his right swept down to her hip, holding her firmly in her place as his wings fluttered gently. Her legs looped around his shoulders and she let her entire weight fall against his face – and the archangel was oh so very eager, so very ready, to accept the burden of her. Of course, he could have carried a ten ton boulder with one hand. A human woman's slight weight against his lips? It was nothing. And so, he was more than happy to focus his attention not on the trails of keeping her aloft, but instead on plunging his glowing tongue into her snatch.
"Oh Creator! Creator!" Alia moaned, her hips bucking as she rolled her head back, her long raven black locks spilling down towards the ground – a waterfall of pure obsidian, glossy and black, that Cae wished so very badly to bury her nose into, to breathe in her scent. She finally gave herself her own pleasure: Two of her fingers, knowing only where to go thanks to Citri, Ruti and Arral's own questing, plunged into her tight, greedy cunt. Cae bit her lip, hard enough to nearly draw blood, her ears perked as she watched as eagerly as Alia did – for Alia had tilted her head a bit, so she could watch down the slender line of her body. Her eyes and Lucifer's locked, and the fallen one did not look away as his tongue worked within Alia.
Cae could not see him.
But she could remember how Ruti had…
How Cae had…
How...oh…
"Oh!" She moaned, unable to stop herself.
Her two fingers crooked. Her thumb rubbed her clit. The pleasure that had started as a blazing furnace was beginning to rock through her body, reverberating through her bones, her muscles, tingling along the inside of her skin. She clenched on her own fingers, watching through hooded eyes and lust hazed vision as Alia's back arched and she screamed incoherently, her hair swaying as she bounced and rocked. Warm, frothing girl-cum splashed around Lucifer's lips as he drank and drank from her, drank from her like she was the only oasis in a vast and dry desert. And still, he didn't give her a single moment of respite – his hands held her firmly as he drew his mouth back. Warm girl-juices splashed onto the ground and his lips closed around her clit. He sucked on her and drew from Alia an almost pained whine. Her body was wrung so fiercely of pleasure that it was beginning to ride into over stimulation...and still, Lucifer pushed on. He went back to lapping her cunt, watching her through bright, amused eyes. Alia gasped and moaned and squirmed, then started to whimper aloud. "I...too much! I-It's too...to...ah…"
Cae's thumb rubbed her clit fiercely. That warm reverberation in her body had hit a plateau – and yet, watching this, she was able to drive it up more. Her other hand held the book in a quivering grip as she drank in the details as greedily as Lucifer had drunk Alia's cunt.
"I...stop, I...I'm losing my mind!" Alia moaned and gasped, her back arching. She was cumming again – or maybe for the third time? Or fourth? Cae was not sure – but as she watched, more of her juices splashed onto the eager Fallen One's lips, his chest, soaking him with her arousal as he continued to lick her out mercilessly. "I'm gonna become...addicted to this, oh Creator!" Alia's moans bounced off the walls. "D-Don't stop! Don't stop! Don't-"
Another climax, and this one was caught within Lucifer's mouth as he opened his lips. When he swallowed, his grin was most wicked. "I do pride myself on my skills. Feeling quite incoherent?"
"Um...uh...hu...buh…" Alia panted. The cold and stern and oh so very powerful sorceress seemed to have lost her ability to make sounds intelligible to anyone who spoke the Common tongue. Then Lucifer...spun her about. He caught her with the easy grace of someone used to maneuvering the weaker, then set her down. Alia's arms crumpled as she was placed on her hands and knees – her limbs too weak to support her trembling body...but her knees managed to remain locked more by chance than anything else. This left her peach thrust into the air, her dripping pussy...right there…
And Lucifer, showing that he had no mercy, no pity, and no hesitation, leaned forward, took hold of her hips, lifted her a few more inches, and began to feast upon her once more. Alia moaned in purest bliss, her eyes glazed over with raw pleasure as his tongue lashed her cunt now, ferociously. He was not eating her. He was devouring her. He was driving her to ruin, and Cae couldn't tear her gaze away. Her two fingers had been joined by a third, her thumb pressing to her own golden clitty as she panted raggedly. She hissed between clenched teeth. "Y-Yeah, yeah, yeah, fucking ruin her, yeah…" She moaned.
"Guh! Huhh! Ah!" Alia moaned, her cheek mashing against the ground, making her sound stupid and slurred as an animal in raw heat. "Never...never gonna fuck a mortal...again!"
"But of course," Lucifer purred, drawing his lips back just enough to free him from the folds of her snatch. "You have a body deserving of every pagan god and wicked devil in the darkest pits of Hell, of every Angel in the Hosts of Heaven. I am merely accustoming you to what you so richly deserve, my Lady."
"Mmm...got...ah...sugg-estions!" Alia asked, her voice rising in pitch and volume, ringing off the walls as Lucifer started to gently tongue her pert rosebud – teasing her anus as his large, glowing finger plunged into her dark cunt. He fingered her and tongued her anus in equal eagerness, wringing from her low, animal grunts as she bucked her hips fruitlessly against him. Cae, her cheeks burning...realized she wanted a cock in her ass.
She wanted it very badly right now.
Lucifer pulled back, his glowing tongue emerging last, lewdly, like a wicked tentacle from Alia's rump. He flicked the air with it, then chuckled. "There's a young Lord of Ruin, I recall. Arral Darkspear is his name. Quite a handsome fellow for a demon. A tad...melancholic."
"Mmm...is he hung?" Alia asked, sounding drunk.
"Like a leviathan of yore," Lucifer said, amused. "Though it's not all about size."
"Says the man with a...ah...fucking dragon betwixt his legs!" Alia called back over her shoulder, giggling with amusement.
Lucifer chuckled quietly. "How alarming." His voice was amused as he caressed along her spine, then smacked her rump with one broad palm. She rocked forward, panting softly, while Cae fingered herself slower now – pacing herself. She bit her lip hard once more, her wings mantling and spreading as she watched...Lucifer prepare himself. He shifted around and then pulled up the weighty, long spear that he had between his legs. It smacked down against Alia's buttocks – and the tip dripped warm, eager pre-cum, glowing brilliantly against her shoulder blades. Her head snapped up and she gulped.
"I...have internal organs-" she started.
"Trifles for a miracle like mine," Lucifer said, his voice amused. "Though, I could stand to have some lubrication."
Alia managed to work her hands under her. As she pushed herself up to hands and knees, her rump ground up against his cock, slipping it between the cleft of her ass cheeks. She moaned, her eyes half closed. "G-Good gods of the old world…" She whispered, roling her hips in slow, languid movements, as if she was trying to explore Lucifer's vastness. She then managed to get one of her hands up enough to snap her fingers. A jug of brilliant porcelain appeared and from it poured a warm cascade of slippery oil that spilled first along his tip, then his shaft. The byproduct sloshed along the small of her back, along her buttocks, spilling down her hips, her thighs, beading along her belly.
Cae was so struck she actually stopped even fingering herself.
She had had no idea that...applying oil like that would turn human skin from merely beautiful to a glossy perfection that beggared her brain. Then…
Then Lucifer began to reach down. His broad palms swept along Alia's body, spreading the oil, rubbing it into her. From the view of a third party observer, all Cae could see was the effect it had – she felt nothing, she smelled nothing. But by the Creator's empty throne...the sight of it made her jaw drop. Alia had transformed into something more real than real, more alluring than alluring. Her skin glittered and beaded with the fresh oil, while Lucifer took great care to rub plentiful amounts into her modest breast. He squeezed and his hands naturally slipped along her slicked up skin to her dark, achingly eager nipples. She bit her lip, turning her face to the side, her lips twisted into a mask of pleasure so intense it was nearly pain, while Lucifer tugged upon those nipples, drawing her tits taut, then releasing them – the release jerking from her a soft, eager gasp.
"Oh Lucifer!" she moaned.
"Mmm, now you are ready, I think," he said, quietly. "But how shall I-"
"Buttfuck me," she whispered, her voice a husky croon.
"How romantic," Lucifer said, quietly.
"It's...because it is not romantic…" Alia said, her voice growing a bit more quiet. "I...when I was young...I was told the only thing I had of value was my hymen. It has broken of its own accord – riding horseback will do that to you." She sounded wryly amused. "But still, the purity of my cunt was the only thing my father and uncles ever thought of. And so, now? It is mine and mine alone. They have all given up on me...seeing me as nothing but a wayward escapee from their control, ruined beyond compare. But I know...when I lay with the man who I will spend my life with, I will give my cunt to him." She chuckled. "And so, until then...buttfuck me." Her grin was feral-fierce and bright as she looked over her shoulder.
Lucifer smiled, wryly. "This is not true love at first sight, then?" He murmured. He drew his cock back and back and back, each inch grinding against her ass.
"No…" Alia looked away.
His hand reached forward. Fingers gently drew three lines of glistening oil on her cheeks, then touched her lips. She licked it from him – and moaned softly.
"Do not feel shame," Lucifer said, quietly. "If it were, I'd have to break your heart. I do it to all the beautiful ladies. Lilith, Asterioth, Carone…" His lips quirked. "But never once did any of them ask me to fuck their ass quite so literally, oh my Alia."
Alia chuckled, opening her mouth to speak – but before she could form a single solitary word, Lucifer began to thrust into her. His cock plunged into her anus without mercy or hesitation, and yet...there was no sign of pain. The oils she had summoned, his supernatural skill, and...Cae had to admit...her level of practice combined to allow his member to ease into her until he paused and she, her head hanging forward, her hair completely shrouding her face like a curtain, groaned a husky, husky groan. "Oh Creator I feel...I feel more full than I've...ever felt in my fucking life, oh fuck!" She panted. "How can it all fi-"
She had lifted her head, her face a mask of pleasure.
And then Alia froze as she saw what Cae had already born witness too.
Lucifer was a third of the way into her.
"Oh fuck meeeeeeeeeeee!" Alia wailed, her voice drawing the moan into an elongated wail, which bounced down the corridors of the prison – and Lucifer pushed into her, groaning low. His own face was tightened into an expression of pure concentration, as if nothing he had ever done mattered quite so much as buttfucking this mortal woman. With his cock at the halfway point, Alia gasped and whimpered. Tears glittered at the edges of her eyes, while her fingers gripped onto the rocky ground. She gasped, her modest breasts heaving...and the undulations of her body were accentuated and underlined by the oil that had been rubbed into every part of her. She was like a creature of living bronze, and Cae had never before felt the call of sapphism quite so intensely.
Lucifer bent forward. His hips were still not entirely against her ass, but his balls swayed within a hair's breath of smacking her sopping wet snatch – and his body bent almost in twain as his four wings fluttered and spread even further. His lips kissed the nape of her neck, then licked her as he purred in her shoulders. "...almost in," he whispered.
"Y-You are...impossible!"
Alia gasped as he pushed the last few inches in – and before Cae's eyes, she saw Alia's belly distend slightly, revealing the shape and length of his cock. She quivered and spurted warm juices as she orgasmed yet again, her head rolling back as her tongue lolled out of her lips. Before, Cae had thought that Lucifer's ministrations had rendered Alia entirely insensate...but now? Now she saw what being mindless looked like. The light of intelligence had been snuffed from behind Alia's beautiful, dark eyes. In their place was a ravening, blazing fury of pure, animal lust. Her tongue swayed as her entire body rocked in tune to the massive, plunging thrusts of Lucifer as he obliterated her with his titanic cock. His hips smoothly drew back and then plunged down and his massive cock thrust deep into her, stretching her body in ways that a mortal should have died from – but every brush with death instead bloomed new pleasure in Alia. She squirted and came with every single thrust, her hips rocking back manically as she moaned in incoherent, pure pleasure.
Lucifer fucked her that way for what felt like an hour. An eternity. And the whole time, Cae fingered herself, moaning as she watched through hooded eyes. Her own pleasure built and built and then bloomed around her fingers. She set the book, hesitantly, to the side – and found so long as it was open, it projected the images. This freed her other hand to paw at her shift, tugging it up, tearing it into tatters once it got too difficult. With her full golden breasts displayed, she was able to cup herself, squeeze herself. She tugged her own nipple as roughly as Lucifer had tugged on Alia, and imagined herself to be so resoundly buttfucked.
She had never even imagined anal.
Now she craved it with every part of her body. She panted as Lucifer drew out of Alia's gaping anus – but rather than finishing on her...he slapped her hip. She fell to the side, rolled onto her back...and then mewled in quiet bliss as his wings swept under her, forming a cushion and holding her slender body against him as once more he thrust into her. Now, he fucked her face to face, nose to nose...and despite the fact Alia's body, mind and soul were not in any state to resist...Lucifer did not take advantage of her sopping, desperately eager cunt.
Alia, she was sure, would have loved it if he took her virginity there.
But no.
Lucifer remained within her ass. He fucked her on her back and within the enfolding embrace of his wings, whispering quietly. "Do you know what my time is?" He chuckled as she shook her head, unable to form words – but able, it seemed, to at the very least understand them. "Six months." He grinned, wickedly. "The Queen of Sharos was far easier to convince than she was to satiate." He started to fuck her then with a slow, casual pace – a pace that reminded Cae faintly of the...thrusting style she would use if she was in phalanx with other war angels. The pace and patter that her training masters and Proctor had taught her, to ensure that her divine muscles would not tire, even in the face of endless demonic hordes.
Just…
He was using a…
A much…
A much nicer spear.
Longer too, Cae though, a bit hazily – and more than a little inaccurately, as the spears used by war-angels in phalanx were easily twelve feet long.
Alia whimpered. Her knees almost touched her tits as she was folded into the ground and fucked most resoundingly. His balls clapped against the small of her back, while her juices glittered along her belly as she spilled her own pleasure onto her body. Her tits jiggled and she gasped quietly.
"T-They...might...ah...notice!"
"I assure you," Lucifer said, grinning. "They will not."
Cae blushed, hard, as the vision...started to bleed away. It was the end of a day? She bit her lip, hard, as the room returned to her. Then she whispered. "N-Next day, please."
In the next vision, Alia was in chains. For a moment, Cae was shocked – but then she saw Lucifer stepping up behind her. His cock pressed to her anus and he thrust into her with an eager grunt, wriggling to fully fit his titanic cock into her as her wrists strained against the chains that had her bent forward and facing the wall that Lucifer had been chained too. Alia's voice was faintly hoarse as she gasped and moaned in pleasure in time with the bucking, fucking thrusts of Lucifer. Cae, her cheeks burning, and her skint tingling, took a glance away from them – and saw a small summoned meal that had been quickly finished.
"...next day?" she asked.
Alia was riding him on this day. Her back faced the fallen angel as her hips drove her up and down. Her cunt dripped juices onto his balls as she leaned forward, letting her hair sway as she gripped onto his ankles to root herself. She groaned huskily. "Creator, you're gonna fill my tight little mortal ass up again, aren't you?" She panted. "Fuck, I'm so-"
"Next day…" Cae whispered.
Alia moaned and gasped as she was glazed with cum. Thick ropes of it spurted from Lucifer's tip as he stood above her, stroking his cock as he sighed. Alia looked as if she had already been filled once, since her belly swelled as if she was already heavy with a child, and warm cum dripped from her tight, cute little ass. But the cum splashing her face, her breasts, left her glittering, golden. Glorious. She licked her lips slowly.
Cae kept watching, her fingers teasing her clit as she flipped through the days, marveling at their inventiveness and their stamina. She had no idea how many spells and wizardries that Alia wove to keep herself...mobile and alive as she rode the first archangel, the fallen one, the Lightbringer himself so much that he was almost as raw and exhausted as she was. Cae herself came again and again as she watched, marveling in the Creator's blessings. Born a woman, she could wallow in this decadent pleasure as long as she wished...and unshackled by fear, hesitation, and doubt? She was able to enjoy it all with such sweetness.
Finally, on the last day, Alia was dressing herself in magic, her knees quivering – and the same wry expression that Cae was so used to seeing on her was once more on those lips that Alia had seen desperately sucking on warm, salty angelic balls, and begging for debasements and humiliations that now tingled in her brain like tempting treats. When she brushed her hair straight, she said: "If the angels arrest me the moment I leave, I will blame you, you know?"
"Mmhmm," Lucifer said. His voice had been rubbed somewhat raw by his groans, growls, and moans. It had even robbed it of some of the reverberating timber that Cae it normally had.
"...so…" Alia said. "What was the name of that demon you said I should...speak too?"
"Lord Arral. House of Ruin," Lucifer said, smiling warmly.
The door to Cae's room rattled. "Cae, you in there?"
Cae yelped, fell from the bed – and through the illusion. She scrambled to the door and flung it open after having thrown a sheet over her shoulder and flipped the book shut. The selfsame infantrydemon that had found her with Lord Arral stood there, his jaw dropped, his eyes wide as he goggled at her nearly naked body.
"Yes!?" Cae snapped, her cheeks dusky bronze with her blush.
"T-The, uh...the...uh, the...Lord Arral…" He stammered.
Cae shut the door as swiftly as she could. She did not try to be polite.
***
Lord Arral, Citri, Ruti and Degi were out in the brilliant sunlight and looking, as one, upon the stockade that had been constructed in the old, ruined tower that had once been Cae's prison in what felt three lifetimes before. Citri turned to face Cae as she advanced, wearing a new shift and leggings, her body having been quickly scrubbed down in a cold bath before she arrived. His warm smile nearly rendered the chill irrelevant as he jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
"The prisoners are ready for your inspection, General."
"They're looking restive," Degi said, his voice worried.
Cae stepped up to stand in the shadow of Lord Arral and managed to resist the urge to bury her face against his side and breathe in his scent like a grounding drug. Instead, she regarded the stockade. New wood had already begun to peel, with fresh paintjobs turned to something dusty and old. Planks were beginning to rot through, and the tattered shrouds that were tossed over to provide shadow for sleep had become threadbare overnight. But the snakes didn't seem to mind – the mercenaries had cast off their armor and...their…
Their clothing.
Cae's cheeks burned as she watched two snake-women lay together, their bared breasts showing that their belly scales were as gold as their back scales were green. But their prominent and quite firm breasts were so very soft looking, despite their scaled coverings. The inner edges and majority of their tits were gold, but the sides were bright forest green, and their nipples were the same green, grinding one against the other as their tails wrapped around and around one another. The two snake women were kissing one another, one reaching up to brush her fingers gently along the sensitive hood of her lover. A few snakes to the side, one snake was rubbing oil into the exact midpoint between snake tails and humanoid hips, where, if one cocked one's head, one could see an almost human rump. She used her thumbs to massage the oil into the other woman's scales, while the first sighed in pleasure. Other snakes were tending to the camp, some cooking, some catching rats. All of them were...gloriously naked in the brilliant sunlight.
"They seem comfortable," Citri said, grinning as Ruti shrugged.
Cae coughed. "S-So, ahem. Uh. I...I need to...to, uh…" Her eyes widened as she watched one of the more slender snake women emerging from the bathing stall that had been established with wood and buckets, her scales glossy and clean. She caressed her hands along her breasts, her belly, down to the humanoid slit that was tucked right where her thighs would spread, had she had legs. "I...to...lick some…"
"Cae?" Arral asked.
"I need to speak to their leader!" Cae stammered, her wings tightening against her back.
When she came to the stockade, the leader of the snakes was waiting for her. The Shields of the Sun's commander had been intimidating when she had been clad in steel and bore a sword. When she was naked, her scares and her beauty equally on display, she was downright terrifying. She sneered at Cae as Cae approached. "You call this a stockade?" she asked, working hard to control the sibilant hiss of her native accent. "My sisters could build a better one without tools."
"It was better when it was first made," Cae said. "You are in the realm of Ruin, after all."
"Hurmph," the leader turned, glowering at the threadbare sheets. "My name is Tsivka. You are Caelel Silverhawk. As your prisoner, I will tell you, we shall not seek to escape if we are treated well, if we are ransomed back. But if you have come to turn me against my masters-"
"I did not. I came to offer you a secondary contract," Cae said, smiling ever so slightly.
Tsivka turned her bright, slitted gaze upon Cae. "A secondary contract?" She asked.
Cae snapped her fingers. Shale, whom she had told earlier to be prepared, flew down. She landed, set forth a table, then set forth some fine foods she had packed into a traveling case. Within moments, the table had a feast far better than anything the Ssviath had managed to create for themselves, with a table perfectly high for a snake-woman to lounge beside. Cae waited until Shale had provided for her a small cushion, which she lounged upon herself. It was remarkably comfortable, and allowed her and the snake to meet, eyes to eyes.
"We will not take a contract against Pestilence or Destruction," Tsivka said, clicking her tongue and hissed quietly. "Or any other demon. We know not who aligns with who – you may say that we will fight one demon, yes? But then we end up fighting against an ally of Pestilence, and before one can say hawkspah, you have your swords and shields set against those we have sworn contract too. No. I will not do it!"
Cae nodded. "I understand your concerns. I share them. I also know they are not relevant."
"Oh? You seek to war upon the mortal realms? Have you fallen so far, angelic one?" Tsivka asked, smirking slightly.
Cae leaned forward.
She knew what she was going to say.
She had known it for some time.
"We are going to attack Heaven and dethrone God," she said, using the archaic word for highest angel, as the Creator was not there to be dethroned..
Tsivka sat there in complete silence.
Arral, Degi, Ruti, and Citri, all gaped from their sidelines. There was not a sound – even the snake women who had been grinding against one another had jerked their gazes around, and gaped at Cae. Cae, though, did not tear her eyes from the snake woman commander. She saw in those eyes shock. Yes. Fear, of course. But she also saw a flash of curiosity. She shifted back onto her own tail, her heavy tits swaying. Her scarred, muscular arms crossed, shelving those delicious examples of female flesh, adding to their raw perfection with some support. Her tongue flicked out, tasting the air.
"Are you insane?" she asked.
"No," Cae said, evenly.
Tsivka hissed. "What makes you think you can win."
"We will be attacking Heaven," Cae said. "Demons have attacked the moral realms – they have spread corruption. But they've never attacked Heaven."
"It would be suicide!" Tsivka snarled.
"Not when one knows every part of their defenses," Cae said, quietly.
"The House of Ruin is weak! Only three barons!"
"Which is why…" Cae said, reaching down and plucking up a slice of fruit from the table. She popped it into her mouth and truly enjoyed the warm rush of flavor that bloomed along her tongue, tickled down into her mouth, as sweet as feasting upon Alia's cunt, she was sure. She swallowed and licked her lips, reveling in the raw sensation of the moment. "...we will not attack alone."
"You are insane," Tsvika said, quietly. "One mercenary band shall not overturn Heaven. No matter our skill."
"Oh no," Cae said. "You are for the honor guard."
"The honor guard?" Tsvika asked.
"When I go to the House of Destruction and sue for alliance," Cae said, casually enough. "You will guard my back, and show that it is no conquering force from Ruin – not a demon there to capture any villages and siphon soul energy. Nothing but an out of place angel and mortal soldiers whose only skill is putting swords and spears through people. Strong. But not an existential threat." She cocked her head. "Once we have convinced the House of Destruction to our banner, Pestilence will be happy to have you back. And then, well...if we can get more allies, we will."
Tsvika frowned, slowly.
"Why?" she whispered.
"That...is my secret. For now." Cae said, nodding. She didn't know if...if what she had seen would make sense to anything but Arral, or Alia, or another angel. Aloud, she said. "But Heaven is rich. You know the saying, that it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter heaven? Why do you think all those burial goods go, exactly?"
Tsvika's eyes widened.
Cae grinned.
"We need one thing, before we can decide," Tsvika said. "This is no contract. This is a death-bond. A war that has great risk, great reward. The only way a death-bond can be sealed is with a charkook." She clicked her tongue. "Will you perform the charkook?" she asked.
Cae frowned. She had read a great deal, but even her reading had missed that. "I need to know what it is, first."
Tsvika called out words in her strangely sibilant and yet guttural language. Two snakes jerked in surprise, then slithered off. They returned, bearing wrapped bundles. One was opened, revealing a sleek, bronze blade. The edge glistened as if it had been oiled. Tsvika took it up, holding it in one hand. "In the ritual of the charkook, both are armed with the char, the serpent's fang." She grinned, slightly. "It is edged with a lust poison. It will burn within you and trigger the mating urge. Your hemipeen shall engorge and you will shift from play to mating. The loser is the one who loses one or both of their shafts, or the one who allows the other to impregnate them."
Cae blinked.
"I...don't...have a...the…" She gestured, blushing hard.
Tsvika clicked and the other bundle was unwrapped, revealing that it had two rather impressive weapons. One was, of course, the char. The other was a bright, sleek, well carved phallus that bifurcated exotically and was attached to an intricate set of straps and harnesses that looked made to fit around a woman's hips.
"We have had to deal with improperly equipped outsiders before," Tsvika said, firmly. "It is a mixed blessing – harder to impregnate you, but easier to cut the dicks off." She grinned.
