Eighteen days bring them to the wonder of a sunken portico peering out of an underground lake, and a great circular bowl of tiles in aquatic blues. Rays of sunlight through a few holes in the cave ceiling meet the water and fill the chamber with shifting sparkles. Vaestreth dives right in, laughing and squealing and splashing–and when Kordanath refuses to join it at first, it picks its moment and then pulls the other demon right in after it.

Nineteen days bring them to the moment when Vaestreth gets around Kordanath’s guard for the very first time. The blunted tip of her branch whistles by the bigger demon’s cheek, just missing her as she dodges. Not quite a touch, but the promise of one.

Little beats nothing.

Twenty days bring them to Vaestreth, stifling a purely-aesthetic yawn as she hauls some supplies from a nearby village back to the latest of the many caves they’ve chosen to rest in. Celebratory wine–bought in exchange for some carnal favors to a cute little caravaneer–sloshes in a sling-bag over one shoulder. She picks her way through the rust-red, winding tunnels towards the big two-level chamber full of stalactites and stalagmites where they’ve tossed down bedrolls.

She’s deep in thought, so there’s no sentence to fall limp when she walks in. The time it takes for her eyes to pick out the last dim glows in the volcanic blood all over the walls is, well… is just long enough that she’s taken another step and fully entered the chamber.

Entered it to see the radiant eight–winged figure bobbing with ethereal rhythm above the charred, broken-limbed, disemboweled ruins of Kordanath. One eye, no longer golden-fire, just dull piss yellow, stares in frozen fear from the mangled heap of her skull.

The angel has six arms and no legs. A speckle of seven blue eyes turns to fix many-circled pupils on her, the only clear forms in the mouthless, lipless divine light of its oval face. Its rays burn hotter than any fire, hot enough to make her skin prickle.

“Ah.” The angel’s voice reverberates, drills Vaestreth’s ears, fills its mind with the maddening endless chorus of his god. “You are not one of the demons I’ve been sent to track. Please wait a moment while I retrieve your identity.”

And Vaestreth does the only thing its panicked mind can conceive. It flails its soul out, across the empty paths, reaching for the most powerful thing it knows of.

And a blue flare answers, and Kairlina rises from a pulse of nova between it and the angel–who then speaks again.

“Vaestreth Nastangali,” he intones. “You are innocent in the eyes of the Lord. Go in peace. It is well that you have brought this creature before the servants of the Almighty. She is known to be guilty of many grievous sins. I thank you for the role you have played in bringing her to justice. You may stay and witness the wrath of Our Father if you wish.”

Kairlina sags. She casts an exhausted glance at Vaestreth.

“I…” Vaestreth says. 

“Kairlina Haduwig Dämliebe,” the angel says, speaking over her.

“That name isn’t yours!” Kairlina yells, sounding more like a panicked child than a demonic slayer. “I haven’t told the rest of it to anyone yet, you don’t have the right–”

“You typed the full name into a Word document on Earth, under the eyes of Heaven,” the angel interrupts. “In placing it outside your mind, you gave the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and all their servants the right to witness it.”

“It was priv–I never shared…” Kairlina bites back her words.

“The laws of heaven permit you to have your final say, within measure,” the angel continues, “for the edification of this innocent soul, that she may be armed with knowledge to protect her from the worst of her kind.”

“I knew it,” Kairlina snarls. “I knew you bastards would make this pivot!”

“There has been no pivot,” the angel says, his radiance only growing. “The Father loves all his children, demons too. Heaven has never hated demons for being demons. The wrath of the Almighty was only turned against them in days past because no demon had chosen the path of righteousness. Now that has changed. Our Lord, the ever-loving God, is overjoyed to share his light with all demons who do not act for evil.”

“H-hey,” Vaestreth says. “Look, it’s just a misunderstanding, I only summoned her because I thought… I didn’t want to call her here for you to… she doesn’t deserve…” It trails off, struggling for words. “She had a really bad moment. She wants to do better… why?” It breaks down, weeping bloody tears. “Why did you kill Kordanath? She was good, she was helping me, teaching me, she was my friend!”

“The only true measure of one’s soul is what they do in their worst moment,” the angel answers, placid and matter-of-fact. “Kordanath’s worst moments were long ago, true, but she could never be trusted not to return to them. They were not the worst I have seen, but they were foul enough that only one punishment would answer.” His eyes shift to Kairlina. “This one’s worst moments are as wicked as any that have ever been.”

Kairlina’s body answers where her words do not. Eyes squeezing shut. Hunching in shame. Her right hand’s talons digging oily black blood from her pale palm.

“You are not, of course, aware of this…” the angel’s radiance pulses, shrinking and expanding its thousandfold hateful spokes in time to the rhythms of his voice’s too-perfect serenity. “... this creature’s other sins, besides those done upon you.”

“Please, don’t.” Kairlina’s left hand clenches her sword by the scabbard. Her right hand, clawing, rises up towards her mouth. Steam rises from her skin, making prismatic cascades in the stark rays of the midday sun. “Please just kill me, I don’t… can’t bear the…”

She can’t even push the final word out. But everything from the agonized wideness of her eyes, the hunted hunch of her once-proud figure, to the branching patterns moving back and forth across her boiling flesh screams it: 

Guilt.

“During and in the immediate aftermath of the psychosis which led to her suicide,” the angel continues as if the spasming demon didn’t say a word, “it frequently failed to contain its paranoid impulses and the results of its pain.”

While he speaks Kairlina drops to a knee and begins to wretch. Every word makes her keen, moan, and quiver. Veins sieve open on her horned brow, spilling black blood down her face and throat. “The shockwaves of trauma it sent through many worlds, full of all the perverse power it honed against the ancient demon Seurchraig, caused unspeakable devastation to many innocent lives–even those of Earth’s gods.”

Kairlina’s other knee gives out. She vomits strips of flesh and long translucent filaments–slowly wriggling worms, horrid in their hooked, barbed lengths of slim squirming. And still the angel continues his recitation. “Gods many of whom were sympathetic to the creature’s plight, and yet, she destroyed them in the midst of a crazed hallucination, imagining schemes and manipulators where none existed! Yea, it is known now that even this thing’s wounds are self-propagating.”

Kairlina begins to burn. Her own blue fire hisses and cracks from within her skin. Vaestreth feels the ripping presence of her agony, cold-burning hooks latching into its own psyche and cutting and clawing and scything. It snarls, clutching its head.

“You must control your trauma,” the angel tells Kairlina. “Do you not see? Do you not see how you are hurting this innocent being, which remains solely from pity for you?”

 

He finishes, gravely, “That all this was unintentional, an accident or a disaster, is irrelevant. She was the source. She is responsible for billions of deaths, and over a hundred souls annihilated utterly, never to return. No amount of remorse can change this.”

“WHAT DO THEY WANT FROM ME?!” Kairlina screams. She bites through her tongue over, and over, and over again, shearing off lengths of glistening, forked, blue-black shadow onto the sands as she shrieks at the sky. She loses the cadences of human-learned speech, going on and on and on without a pause for breath as only a raving demon can.

“THEY KEEP TELLING ME TO DO BETTER BUT THEY KEEP TELLING ME I DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO BETTER SO I TRY TO DO BETTER BUT I DON’T BELIEVE I CAN BECAUSE I HAVE TO START BY TRUSTING WHAT THEY TELL ME AND THEY KEEP TELLING ME NOT TO BELIEVE IN MYSELF AS SOMEONE WHO CAN DO BETTER SO I CAN’T FUCKING DO BETTER!!!” 

Her talons blaze again and again with cobalt nova, slicing bubbling black-blood trenches through her cheeks and jaw and nose. Burning, melting strips of devil-flesh and charred bones of silvery metalloid fall, making heaps. She rakes faster, faster, faster, carving her eyes and her breasts and her clit and her womb to ragged masses of gore over and over again. Still, still, she does not die. “JUST TELL ME WHAT TO DO! JUST TELL ME WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO DO!!!”

“Fear not,” the angel says, finally addressing Kairlina directly. His seven rainbow eyes soften with beatific sheens. “For the Lord of Hosts is still your Father, yea, even demons remain His children, and your Father will give you what mercy He can. Glory, glory, glory to God the Merciful! He has sent me to be your Angel of Death. I will free you from the impossible torment of your existence.” 

His uppermost right arm, jointed with wheels of white fire and shaped of golden plates, arcs out and draws forth a long, broad, razor sword of divine light and a cruciform hilt.

“I lost my first children too,” Kairlina whispers, chill razor words in the stillness of the cave. “Why did they have to die for my sins?” In this one thing, her tear-broken voice holds no pain. Only sorrow, and an aching, wrenching yearning. “Doesn’t that mean something?”

“It means that your sin is that much deeper,” the angel intones. “Nothing more.”

Kairlina tenses. Blue-light ripples run along her horns, and she groans as she gets one knee under herself again. “Maybe so.” She spits a little more bile into the heap of slaughtered selves at her feet. “Still… saintly things should not speak of sin. You don’t know it. You don’t feel it.” She wipes black blood from her mouth, smearing a white wrist. “You have no right.”

This is justice, technically. Vaestreth should want it.

It doesn’t. No matter what Kairlina's done, it didn’t want to see one of its kindred destroyed this way, stripped of all her pride and dignity and every ounce of self-love.

But here it is, happening anyway.

“Don’t worry about it, okay, kid?” Kairlina says, far too lightly, as she staggers to her feet and forces a hand all but thrashing with tremors to her sword’s grip. She widens her stance, talons plowing furrows in the sand. “I will accept this for my atonement. It’s more than I usually get, for second chances and for closure. I’m not ungrateful for that.”

“No no no, wait!” Vaestreth rushes between them. “I-if I’m innocent, then I can extend a wish for redemption to her, right? That’s how these things work! I can believe she’s been awful in the past but I really don’t think she’s that person anymore! She’s getting better, we had a plan to help–”

A wave of blinding radiance and brazen howls of war-trumpets drown out its words.

“It does not matter.” The blazing angel brandishes his eye-scalding sword. “This thing has gone through the same cycle many times. Its remorse begins sincerely. In time, as it comes to feel jilted that its efforts go unwitnessed and unrewarded, its base nature inevitably wins out. It starts to scheme and plot, tying more and more threads until it gets entangled in its own manipulations, is found out, cast out, and rightly condemned.”

Kairlina answers with a cold glare.

“So far you’ve been completely right,” she confesses. A flick of her eyes to Vaestreth‘s. She frees the first inch of her sword. “But I’m not going to stop trying.” Her brows crease. “No… wait a minute…” A little spite enters the set of her lips. A glimmer of a bared fang. “Cheap, angel. Letting my self-hatred do the distorting for you. I’d expected better. Last time I didn’t get to the scheming and the threading. I admit the approach I chose proved to be terrible, but I genuinely believed it would help. It was just…” 

She grimaces. “Just a really bad misread.”

“Your intentions do not matter.” The angel advances. “The outcome was still evil. Your actions will always cause evil. Therefore, you will be purged.”

Vaestreth grits its fangs. Balls up its fists. And hurries to the side, knowing it can’t help. It stops just as it’s about to pass by the devil in the blue gown. “Kairlina, I’m sorry. This summoning was a mistake. I panicked. I didn’t mean…”

Didn’t mean to make you die again.

The young outer devil doesn’t look back. Doesn’t dare break line of sight to her enemy. But in profile as Vaestreth finishes, a single tear escapes her. “It’s okay,” she breathes, her voice quavering. “I-I’ll get through it. I always do. You had no way of knowing the angel wasn’t here for you, he… he probably waited to speak, hoping you would summon me. It’s not your fault you got played. Wh-what were you supposed to do, trust Heaven’s mercy?”

Now she does risk a look back. A look full of pain, and regret, and the manic sadness of false hope. “I’m s-sorry I wasn’t strong enough to…” Her turn to grind sparks from her metal fangs. “No. I’m sorry I didn’t choose to be kind when I answered your summons. I’m sorry I chose to treat you the way I keep choosing to treat myself.” A nod, as cobalt glows ignite under her skin, and scorch plasma-streamers form the air cresting her shoulders.

“Good luck out there, little kindred.”

And her sword screams a wake of amber sparks and blue fire as she draws it, charging straight at the angel.

In its heart, Vaestreth knows from the very first move that Kairlina will not win this fight. The angel has only a modest advantage in overall speed, but he reacts instantly. When Kairlina opens with a spiral cage of shearing blue, the angel splits himself apart before the cuts even reach him. The blurred shapes of his eyes and arms and sword pour through the gaps between the strokes and converge in an arc of blinding shear that splits the devil in half. Tendrils of burning flesh and boiling blood spray out behind her.

She reforms and whirls into a blue-white arc following the curve of the angel's scything flight. In a single blink he splits and doubles back, a golden thrust spearing the devil from each prong of him before she has time to finish her own doubling to counter. The impact drags her along the floor, smashing through stalagmites, two sacred wings searing her skin and burning her hair to keep her pinned against the stone all the way.

Vaestreth runs to its halberd, leaning against one wall, and fumbles twice in the process of snatching it up. Twice on the way there, it’s spun about by the blazing trails of the still-accelerating duel–wakes of power dappling the air around them with cuts, thrusts, and oh so much demonic blood. Not a single speck of divine light joins those black spatters.

It plants its feet, grinning and manic with terror. It tries to follow the speed of the duel with the point of its polearm. Tracing each twist, halt, and double-back: Kairlina missing the bind for a counter-thrust by a hair-thin margin and taking the angel’s sword through her throat. Kairlina outmaneuvered in her lunge for a grapple and sent spinning by a ducking low cut that sprays her burning entrails behind her.

It’s when the angel disarms her with a severing cut to her sword-arm, and she teleports after the weapon to retrieve it, that she sees Vaestreth quaking in place and making ready to throw itself into the fray. “Vaestreth! Please!” she screams. It tenses–”Please don’t! I am begging you, don’t throw yourself away trying to save me!”

Kairlina teleports back and forth. This one thing, the angel struggles to emulate. This alone buys the ragged devil a few precious seconds. Each time she surges into being she sends a network of cuts out from her instantiation to split the air. The whistling, tinny-humming slashes come as close as a meter to hitting the angel.

The next time she teleports, the angel’s radiance condenses and blasts out in a long, continuous beam. He whips it right into the building blue of Kairlina, burning a gouge of raw void through the demon’s manifesting form.

She’s already reeling from the shock when she coalesces. The angel descends on her instantly with a non-stop storm of thrusts from every angle, a colossal gilded cage of warped space and heavenly bladeworks. No need for artifice once his foe’s too staggered to fight back. Just piercing away, puncture after puncture after puncture making her twist from side to side, severing tendons over and over so she can never raise her sword, never gather her footing, never catch her bearings enough to think of a way out.

The fight ends the same way as the recitation of Kairlina’s sins: with the demon on her knees in a puddle of her own gore, swaying with delirium and pain.

The angel settles down before her and strikes her head from her shoulders with a single thundering blow of his cruciform-hilted sword. Golden rays blaze out beneath the demon’s skin, burn her eyes from her skull, and ignite all the ends of the black hair that comes to rest like a tide of fire-kissed oil flowing from her severed head.

Vaestreth sinks to its knees, quaking. At first he pays it no mind while he flies about the cavern. He seems mostly concerned with vaporizing every single patch of gore left behind from Kairlina’s execution. It’s slow work. Even now the devil-meat resists, needing a few seconds of intense blasting before it disintegrates.

“I thank you again for your aid,” he says, making Vaestreth jump in place and shriek. The angel, as ever, continues without a care for her emotions. 

“This creature was a stimulating challenge. Better than a demon has given me in many centuries. The Lord had hopes that she might prove a valuable asset, and her defeat of Seurchraig is still a mystery we must study. This one meant to be the start of a new species. I am glad to have prevented this.” He arrives at the pile of carnage Kairlina made of herself when he exposed her sins. “If she had a few more years to grow, I might not have been able to defeat her. Her exponential power gain is another mystery Heaven must still solve.”

The angel goes mercifully quiet for a little while, focused on the stubborn heap. But finally it burns away, and he goes right back to talking. “As it stands, this has surpassed all our most shining hopes. Defeating the inventor of phase-dueling using her own techniques will go down in history as a proud moment for Heaven, and a beacon of joy to the children of the Most High.”

“Her own techniques?” Vaestreth echoes.

“Indeed.” The angel sounds just the tiniest bit… smug. “The devil, in its greed, was coaxed by some mortals it had bewitched to write out a depiction of this art in one of its books. The forces of Heaven are quite comfortable reading the works of our enemies, with proper guidance to make sure we do not stray from the path of grace, and since the devil was still locked in human flesh at that time, we had both a head start on practical application of her theories, and the advantage of our superior resources to move beyond what any one being could create–save the Lord himself, of course.”

Vaestreth thinks back to that strange, sudden moment of joy: Kairlina’s tail frisking as she talked about her work on the halberd. Just happy to see someone appreciating her craft.

“So you see, it is true what was written of old,” the angel concludes, coming to a hover above the fallen demon’s head and slumped-over corpse. He raises four wings, radiance making a network of points across the tip of every shining feather. Lines of blinding brightness jump from one to the next, branching out, converging towards each wingtip. “Even the works of the devil can be redeemed to the glory of God.”

Vaestreth dares, despite every instinct screaming at her, to lift her eyes to accuse the angel. “They had names. Their names were Kordanath, and Kairlina.”

“Yes,” the angel agrees. “Those were their names.”

A massive scorching ray explodes from his wingtips and washes Kairlina’s remains. The cave floor boils molten beneath it, so fast and loud its frothing sounds like a distant howl. When the angel lowers his wings, nothing remains but smoke, fire, and melted earth.

“The Almighty will permit you to retain the gift the Carag gave you, if you truly wish,” the angel says. “But take care that it does not twist you to her ways. It is the last piece of a future that was never meant to be. Remember this.”

He folds his wings around himself, every tip aiming skyward. “And you would be better off getting rid of it.”

He explodes in an upward beam, brighter than the sun, burning a hole through the cave roof and out to the faded blue of the skies beyond.

Vaestreth sits on the cave floor for a long time, unable even to cry. 

Finally it rises, still clutching the halberd, and it walks.

It dares not return to the lands of its own people, for it fears the reception awaiting a deserter who fled from the Queen’s last battle–if any of its people even survived. It dares not summon a new teacher, for all the pain and fear in its soul scream that they’ll just die too, and it’ll be alone again anyway. So it wanders the desert alone, for years on years. 

It fights strange plated beasts and ancient specters in forlorn crypts. 

It plunders the relics of lost civilizations, having no care for the march of history. No one will remember its name, just as no one remembers the names of its murdered kin.

And it takes its little pleasures with humans, now and again, when it’s grown too tired of listlessness to spend another night alone.

It grows hardened, quick and keen, and no matter how strong it grows the Carag-crafted halberd is always equal to its might.

It grows to meet a night in a well-packed tavern, with a sandstorm whistling outside, when one more figure staggers in from the storm and pries herself out of her sand-crusted facewrap. A half-demon girl with long black hair and a short plump body.

She gets ale, water, and stew, and where does she choose to sit but at the table where no one else wants to sit? Because that’s where Vicious Vae is posted up with its big, shining, eerily-perfect halberd. The girl sits, nervous and quiet, taking spoonfuls of rich herbal stew.

And Vaestreth watches her, sipping imported liquor with a dry stare in its eyes.

“That weapon looks like it has a story to it!” the half-demon blurts.

Vaestreth looks the half-demon up and down: little red face, little black wings, little one-fanged overbite. Big golden eyes. She’s a little cute, at least.

“Kid,” Vaestreth says, putting its legs up on the table, “you have no idea.”