Content warning: This chapter is story focused and contains no sex.

She stood at the gates for almost an hour after they had asked her business. At first, she thought that she was waiting for the gears of leadership to grind as each person in the chain of command asked the person in charge of them what they should do. It wasn’t every day that someone claiming to be a fallen angel came to the gates requesting sanctuary, after all. 

Eventually that excuse paled, though. This wasn’t about the chain of command, or even about uncertainty. If they were afraid of letting her in then they would have already sent out their elite warriors to kill her, or beat her into submission. No, this was about humility. They wanted her to know her place. 

On the bright side, that meant that they were probably going to let her in, but the downside was that with an attitude like this she doubted that they would be as much help as she’d hoped.

 Just because they were going to make her wait didn’t mean that she was going to leave. She needed this bad enough to show them the humility they craved, and patience was a virtue that she was trying to restore, her recent orgy not withstanding. So she knelt in front of the gates and waited. 

She stayed like that for the rest of the day, and all through the night. The hard part wasn’t the stiffness in her limbs or the sheer levels of boredom, though. It was about the way her pussy tingled, or her nipples hardened, whenever she looked at the guards. They were every bit as handsome as the woodsmen she’d taken advantage of so recently, in a rugged sort of way. If she had the chance, she’d gladly fuck them in shifts as they came on and off watch, but something told her that behavior like that wouldn’t help her gain entrance to the fortress. 

So she waited, and bided her time, alternating between prayer and fantasizing to keep her mind occupied. 

Finally, a little over 24 hours after she’d arrived, the gate’s opened and a tonsured monk wearing the gray robs of a senior brother with the maroon  sash of the martial order came out to meet her. 

“Is it true,” he asked after studying her long and hard, “An angel so fallen that it is no longer even a man?” 

“It is,” Laurelai responded seriously. “I—”

“You know that if you are a succubus or other strange creature attempting to play a strange game with us, you shall be found out and tortured at our leisure, don’t you?” The monk interrupted. 

“I do,” she answered solemnly. “I am exactly—”

“If you wish to flee now is your last chance,” the man interrupted again. 

This time Laurelai waited quietly for him to finish, and eventually he finally said, “Well - have you nothing to say for yourself?”

“I am eager to tell my story,” Laurelai said simply 

“Very well then - rise and leave your weapons with the guards. Foreigners of any kind are not allowed to be armed on hallowed ground, and make no mistake angel, every inch of this place is as holy as anywhere in creation.” He insisted on making the whole speech, even though Laurelai had disarmed halfway through. She knew the drill. Even when she’d come here as Laurus they had insisted on confiscating his holy blade, not that any one of them had the purity of soul to touch it. 

One that was done, the postern gate was opened, and they walked inside. The monks might describe it as a fortress, or a fortress monastery, but it was a city of brick and stone that had grown from humble beginnings into a thriving place of more than 10,000 souls. On her last visit. From the looks of things they might well have doubled that number again in all the decades since, but even with all that growth, it was still far from crowded. 

The most dominate features inside the walls were a series of terrace farms that slowly climbed the mountain behind them, the cascading rivulets of melt water that slowly coalesced into the river Fabek that cascaded down to the valley below, giving them drinking water that was as cool and clean as any in the world, and the large central building that was the monastery proper. Even in the shadow of the walls they had built, the original building had lost none of it’s martial history. It was a tiny fortress unto itself, and she could very easily end up locked away in one of their dungeons if she didn’t have good answers for the questions that awaited her. 

Or at least the questions she thought had awaited her. It took a few minutes for her to realize that that’s not where they were headed. 

“I thought you had questions,” she asked uncertainly.

“Well, of course we have questions,” the monk scoffed. “But before you can answer a one of them, you must be ritually purified. You stink of the fallen world outside.” 

Laurelai blushed at that, not sure if he could actually smell her arousal, or the scent of the men that had used her so recently. Instead, she said nothing and followed meekly as they approached the roaring river. 

After that, Laurelai was forced to strip, though the monk with her respectfully averted his eyes. Then she was forced to bathe in a pool of water so frigid it made her teeth chatter. It was exactly the opposite of her time in hell. She noticed how uncomfortable her nudity made the monk though, so she took her time, ‘accidentally’ turning around whenever he started talking again to give him a quick glimpse of her breasts. 

When she was finally shivering so badly it became impossible to hide, she climbed out of the water and was given a set of plain white robes to cover her nakedness with. The thin cloth did little to warm her, but it made the monk much more comfortable, and that seemed to be all he cared about. Even with a cut-out for her wings, though, the flimsy robe barely fit her, and she thought she looked much lewder than she had in the armor she’d been wearing previously. 

“Why can’t I wear my own clothes,” she asked in annoyance as she tried to tie the sash a little tighter to reign her breasts in.

“Because, just like you, they are unclean. You can have them back once they have been properly cleansed, if the meeting with the council goes well.” he answered, trying hard to maintain eye contact. 

Laurelai sighed, and accepted that answer. At least this was progress of a sort. Once she was dressed, they started walking towards the abbey proper. On the way, she saw sisters in their dark habits almost as frequently as brother’s in browns and grays. In a proper, no, she corrected herself. In a traditional order, there would never be this much mixing between the genders, but then there would be no sex either. Not even under the strict rules for procreation and child-rearing that the Malchanens observed. 

It was a small but interesting detail, and Lauelai devoured all the facts she could as he led her down a long and winding set of stairs into a basement room where four old men and a wizened old nun awaited her. 

Laurelai started to bow, but when she felt her robe start to give as her breasts shifted, she stopped and said “Thank you for seeing me,” instead. She supposed that was why women curtsied instead, but she had no idea how to do it. It was one more thing she would have to learn. 

One of them gestured to a cushion on the floor in front of them, and Laurelai proceeded to sit, noting that the monk that had brought her here did not follow her in, but instead locked the door behind her. This was probably what he meant about being tortured at their leisure. There would be no way out of this room without satisfying the people in this room, and she had no doubt that some or all of the monks here had mastered the strange weaponless fighting styles that the Malchanens tended to favor. 

“We are told that you have a story to tell us,” a bald man asked finally. His face was ageless, but what little hair he had around the fringes was steel gray. 

“I do,” Laurelai answered. “I just wasn’t sure if you had questions or…”

“You can start wherever you want, and when we have questions we will ask,” The woman answered. Her voice was grandmotherly, but there was nothing soft or kind in her eyes. 

Laurelai swallowed. This was usually the part where someone said they would know if she was lying, not that she had any intention to. These people weren’t threatening her, though, because they didn’t have to. She was in their place of power, and as strong as she was, she wasn’t sure how much of a challenge she could be to people that had spent their who lives training for the end of the world. 

So she told her story. She started at the beginning, and she was perfectly honest. The only details she left out were the particularly embarrassing ones, but each time she omitted something, someone stopped her and forced her to tell it again. It was like they saw right through her. 

When they got to the part about the crest, they made her show them, and Laurelai stood there for several minutes blushing fiercely while each of them studied her pussy and the blasphemous markings above it. 

By the halfway point, she no longer even tried to leave anything out. Not with the angel or even the hellhound. She was an open book to these people, and she sensed that honesty would help her here more than any one detail would damn her. With all the questions it took hours for her to finish, and when she was done recounting her tale, they all sat there quietly, until the first man to speak said, “We’re finished here,” and the monk that had led here, unlocked the door. 

“Please gt our guest some tea while we discuss all she has said,” the bald monk said. Her escort nodded, and lead her away to a quiet room to wait on the second floor. Outwardly, Laurelai maintained her calm, but inside her heart sank. If she wasn’t there to offer anything in her own defense, she had no doubts that it would go poorly. 

When the steaming tea was finally brought to her, she looked at it like it was poison. It was a real possibility. It could just as easily be another test, though. Angels weren’t supposed to eat or drink anything, so it was possible the right answer was to ignore it. On the other hand, it could be seen as rude, or possibly even a lack of trust to let it go to waste. She sat there watching it cool, and ultimately made the decision to have a sip. She had no idea what was right or wrong, she just knew that she was cold and needed something to warm her up. 

Over an hour later, her escort returned, and brought her back to the basement meeting room that she was is before, leaving the now empty cup in the room above. 

“We will help you,” a third man said finally, when she was seated. He had long white hair that flowed past his shoulders and looked almost as old as the woman. “But it will be a long, hard road to redemption, if such a thing is even possible.” 

“Of course,” she agreed, smiling. The hard work hadn’t even begun. She was just pleased that someone was willing to help her after all, this time.  They sat for a while after that, and the assemblage of elders laid out their expectations of her, and how they would proceed. She would be staying in a cave on the cliff above the farms that was usually reserved for penance and contemplative hermits seeking to get closer to the divine. It would give her all the solitude that she would need to be shriven and seek forgiveness for the many wrongs she had done, and for the many wrongs that had been done to her. 

“The slide down into hell is the easy part,” the old man said. “It’s the long climb out that is the real challenge.”