Location: Nektar’s Cauldon
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd year, Spring
You’re wondering what I’ve been up to since my last visit to Ramssee when my pawn dared to assault me with The Grim? Let me fill in the blanks for you…
The sulfurous mists of Nektar’s Cauldron usually smelled like home—a comforting blend of rotten eggs, toasted brimstone, and the sweet scent of souls being slowly marinated in despair. But now? Now it smelled like failure. It smelled like the bitter, ashy remains of my own misplaced trust.
I shifted my weight on the Divan of Eternal Ennui, a piece of magical furniture upholstered in the tanned, buttery-soft hides of a few particularly litigious tax collectors from the southern reaches of Gor who once served under Garrick of the Golden Hand. They had been insufferable in life, but they made for a surprisingly ergonomic lumbar support in death.
I languishing again in one of my favorite rooms – Death’s Study, a place designed to be a sanctuary of intellect but which had devolved into a cluttered museum of my own neuroses. The walls were constructed of weeping basalt—stone that literally bled a slow, rhythmic trickle of salt water, creating a perpetual, damp “plink-plonk” sound that was supposed to be meditative but was currently driving me toward a very stylish insanity. The floor was carpeted in the abandoned feathers of my fallen angel brothers (I always knew saving them was a good idea) and provided a soft, white contrast to the black, oily soot that coated every other surface. And then there were the towering shelves of petrified driftwood from the Stormy Seas – the planks groaned under the weight of forbidden grimoires, most of which were propping up half-empty jars of pickled kraken eyes and discarded scrolls of failed poetry (I thought they were good rhymes at the time but whenever I read them now I knew they were pedantic at best).
I avoided looking at myself – I knew it wasn’t a pretty sight. Not feeling myself worthy of my normal Grim Reaper appearance, my current physical manifestation was in a state of advanced disarray. I let my current body’s skin take on the grey, waxy hue of a cheap funeral candle. The hair I chose was a tangled nest of silver and shadow, and stood out at manic angles, looking as though I had recently survived a lightning strike or a particularly heated argument with a whirlwind. I also allowed dark circles to hang beneath my eyes—hollow, shadowed pits that reflected the flickering green flame of my eyes like twin emerald graveyards. Even the kingly robes I put on, woven from the silk of abyss-spiders, were stained with wine and ash, hanging off my pitiful frame as if they, too, were exhausted by my existence.
My head throbbed with the rhythmic intensity of a Drokka war-drum from Hacktor Derkillez’s once famed army. I’d alread been through three bottles of ‘Vintner’s Regret’—a wine made from grapes grown in the weeping shadow of a willow and fermented in a vat of pure, unadulterated spite—and yet I was still awake.
Still thinking.
Still feeling the feels.
“It isn’t fair,” I muttered into my chalice, the tarnished silver reflecting my haggard visage back at me. I looked like a deity who had forgotten how to god. “I’m just a simple, misunderstood divinity trying to consolidate the totality of existence under my benevolent heel. Is that so much to ask? What is so wrong with that? I’m providing structure! I’m giving the universe a focal point! I’m practically a philanthropist!”
I reached for a fourth bottle, my fingers trembling. The cork groaned as it came free, a sound that felt entirely too loud in the weeping silence of the room. I tried pouring another cup but only ended up spilling half the bottle.
I looked at my hand. It was shaking – that’s probably why I spilled the wine. But what was my hand shaking so much – ah there’s the question. And I knew the answer.
He had it. Ramssee, that slithering, two-faced, silk-wearing excuse for a middle-manager, had the Grim – MY Grim.
“Nobody gets it – I nearly died, for Baal’s sake!” I got up from the table and whispered to a bust of myself that sat on a nearby shelf and looked far too judgmental for a piece of stone. “Ramssee held the Grim to my heart. He looked at me with those serpent eyes and he saw… he saw weakness.”
Of course, “nearly died” might have been a slight, tiny, microscopic exaggeration. I was in a spectral form after all and Ramssee was in a closet. But the intent was there! The flash of that black blade, the way the light died around its edge… it was the Grim. It had to be. Why else would he be hiding in a secret alcove like a guilty child with a stolen sweet?
The audacity! The sheer, unmitigated gall of a creature I made out of swamp-mud and snake-spit to hold a god-killing dagger to MY metaphorical throat!
“I’m too soft,” I lamented, wandering back towards my chair but accidentally kicking a footstool carved into the shape of a terrified faun. “I’m a victim of my own compassion. I give them life, I give them magic, I give them a lovely plague to keep them occupied, and how do they repay me? With regicide! With deicide! With… with rudeness!”
I decided I needed a change of scenery. I couldn’t stay in the Study, all those books were too stodgy for me.
After stumbling through the halls on a few levels, I ended up my Acoustic Alcove, where the Harp of Whispered Secrets stood—a towering instrument strung not with gut or wire, but with the silver-thin vocal cords of legendary spoil sports whose souls I had long since ingested.
“Oh, why not, old boy?” I laughed as I sat down and plucked a low G-string, and the air filled with the muffled, frantic voice of a Meridian Duchess from three centuries ago confessing her affair with a stable boy. I dragged my jagged fingernails across the higher registers, creating a discordant mashup of a Derkka merchant’s conniving schemes and a former myz leader’s hidden fear of spiders. It was a cacophony of mortal frailty, a rhythmic tapestry of petty lies that always made me feel so much more… put together. I began to hum along, conducting the invisible choir of the long-dead with my fingers. There is an exquisite, campy joy in remixing the shames of the past; it’s like a puppet show where the puppets provide their own script…of failure.
“Listen to them,” I chuckled, a manic glint returning to my hollow eyes as I struck a chord that sounded remarkably like a corrupt Atlantean cleric pleading for a second chance. “So busy, so frantic, so tiny. And they think my drama is excessive? At least I don’t hide my wine in the baby crib, Lady Elara!”
When the song finished, I took a deep, theatrical bow to the empty room, feeling a sudden, sugary rush of superiority. Being the God of Death has its perks; the entertainment is literally eternal, and I never have to worry about the neighbors complaining about the noise—mostly because I turned those pesky neighbors into the harp strings.
Unfortunately my good humor didn’t last – probably because I couldn’t stop drinking.
The next day started with me descending the Grand Staircase—four hundred steps of translucent bone that groaned musically with every footfall—and made my way toward the upper level wine cellars. If I couldn’t find peace in breaking through The Firmament, I would at least find it in a bottle of 400-year-old ‘Mersian Nightshade’.
These cellars near the top of The Cauldron were a marvel, really. A nearly limitless racking carved directly into the cooling lava rock, kept at a perfect, shivering fifty degrees by the enslaved breath of a minor frost-giant I created back in the Second Age.
After stroking under the chin of the giant and tossing him a few turnips for his trouble, I strode down the aisles. Naturally I bypassed the common stuff—the blood-reds and the pale-whites—and headed for the ‘Special Collection.’ I found a dusty magnum of ‘Final Gasp’ and bit the cork off.
“They have it,” I laughed gleefully after taking a sip of the heady vintage. “My pawns have the prize. My plan is working! I’m a genius! I scared them so badly that they’ll be scurrying back here any second, tails between their legs, offering me the blade on a silver platter.”
I took another long swig.
Maybe it was a bit much – because the euphoria I felt lasted exactly three seconds…and then the paranoia kicked in, “But what if they don’t?”
I started pacing the cellar, my heavy robes dragging through the dust. “Ramssee is a liar. He’s a Viperz. It’s in his nature to bite the hand that feeds him. And Kaoz? Kaoz is a dumb beast. He probably thinks the Grim is a very shiny toothpick. What if they realize they can use it? What if they’re at a tavern right now, laughing at me? ‘Oh, look at Azazel, he fell for the old hidden-dagger-in-the-alcove trick! What a buffoon!'”
I threw the giant bottle of priceless win against a wall. It shattered – the dark liquid staining the stone like an ink blot test of my own mounting insanity.
“They’re going to betray me!” I slumped back against one of the racks. “I just know it. Everyone betrays me. The world is against me. It’s a conspiracy of the mediocre against the sublime!”
I needed to be inspired. I needed to remember that I wasn’t just a depressed shut-in with wine-stained robes and a grudge; I was the architect of the end. I dusted the ash from my sleeves, smoothed down my electrified hair as best I could, and swept out of the cellars. My mood was swinging from suicidal depression to megalomaniacal fervor like a pendulum caught in a hurricane.
“Get thee to the Gallery!” I commanded the empty corridor, raising a pale, trembling hand to the ceiling.
The Gallery of Unholy Death—my glorious throne room—sat on the main level of the palace, roughly halfway up the gargantuan height of the mountain. The Grand Entrance was a masterpiece of psychological warfare, specifically designed to make visitors feel small, insignificant, and prone to spontaneous bladder failure. Perhaps that’s why my social calendar has been so light these last few centuries. The entry itself was a soaring arch nearly three hundred feet high, flanked by colossal statues of yours truly that I’d commissioned during my more… “self-assured” eras. They featured me in various heroic, if slightly embellished, poses: Azazel Conquering the Void, Azazel Inventing the Hangover, and my personal favorite, Azazel Looking Pensive Near a Waterfall.
The massive iron wrapped doors stood open, and as I marched toward my kingly seat, my boots clicked across a floor that was a cartographic marvel. It was a sprawling map of the entire Flat Earth, meticulously inlaid with precious gemstones and the bleached, polished bones of forgotten kings. At the very center hummed the nexus of Gaia—a stolen bit of the world-soul’s essence that I’d pilfered aeons ago to give the map a literal, magnetic pulse. I’d even updated the perimeter recently, adding the Mylar ice wall rings to ensure the geography was current. But these minor details were mere background noise to my singular mission: parking my backside upon the throne I had so painstakingly birthed before time had a name.
My seat was a spectacular ivory cathedra that gleamed with a blinding, predatory white light. It was hand-carved from the complete, singular skeleton of a gargantuan that had ruled the primordial world long before mankind was even a flicker of a bad idea in my mind. The four main legs of the throne were formed from the creature’s massive, curved ribs. Two of the largest bones swept upward twenty feet into the air to form a daunting backrest, while a pair of shorter, six-foot femurs acted as the front posterns. The sitting area was a complex weave of smaller vertebrae and phalanges, their sharp tips carefully angled downward, away from the cushion of fine, silver-gray pazziera leaves from the Arbola Forest.
I sat down, the cold resonance of the bone biting through my silk robes, grounding me. I reached into the deep folds of my robe and withdrew Dagaal, the Bone Dagger. The corkscrew blade pulsed with a faint, sickly light, as if it were breathing in the gloom of the room.
“Soon, my precious,” I cooed, stroking the blade. “Soon you will have your brother. Together, you will be the keys to the kingdom. Not just this plane-t but to all of creation.”
“First,” I said, pointing the dagger at various spots around the map on the floor before me, “the rival gods of TerrVerde. Gwar, Inanna, Alyssa, Pan, Rhokki, and their ilk. Those petty little spirits who think they’re so grand because they can make a flower bloom or a mountain shake. I’ll prune them like weeds. And then…”
I cant my gaze down through the bowels of the mountain – past the volcanic core, down the insanity that was The Stairway of Infinity, to the gates of Illusia. “Baal. Lilith. All their little demon children. They think they’re so safe in their infernal towers. I’ll bring the war to them. I’ll turn Illusia into a smoking cinder. I’ll even feed Evil Zebub to Itself!”
The excitement was a fire in my chest now – and I dared to looked up, through the vaulted ceiling of the palace, past the clouds, through The Firmament, toward the invisible realm of Illyria.
I could see it all. The Firmament breaking like a sheet of cheap glass. The golden gates of Illyria being kicked off their hinges. I could see Michael the Mighty, that golden-boy archangel with the perfect hair and the insufferable ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude, begging for mercy at my feet.
“I’ll pluck the feathers from his wings to make a new quill!” I stood up and shouted, my voice booming through the empty hall. “And the Great Creator? A’H? It’s been silent for so long, It won’t even see me coming. I’ll take out Meree and Mindos and then push A’H aside too. The other lumenarcs won’t stand a chance. I’ll be the God of ALL. Every stellarone soul in creation, from the highest angel to the lowest maggot, will then worship me. Not out of love—love is messy and unreliable—but out of absolute, shivering necessity!”
I was laughing now, a wild, manic sound that set the bone chandeliers rattling and caused several of the Map’s precious rubies to vibrate out of their mountain sockets. I got up from my throne and began dancing around the room. “It’ll be perfect! I’ll be the center of everything! No more loneliness. No more feeling like I’m the third wheel at the cosmic dinner party. I’ll be the dinner party! I’ll be the table! I’ll be the wine! I’ll be everything!”
I laughed so gleefully, spinning in a dizzying circle atop the Rhokkium-inlaid North Pole, that my vision sparked with purple stars. The sheer, concentrated genius of my own plan overwhelmed my humors, and in my carelessness I tripped over my own feet and tumbled forward, coming to rest in a heap on the floor, right on top of the tropical islands of the South Seas. I was out cold—a divine fainted mess.
Silence reclaimed the Gallery for a time before a cluster of mismatched eyes peered into the gloom. Although my bodily form was out cold, I could still see what was happening in my mind’s eye. Leading the charge was a Derk goblin named Snot-Eye, who was holding a mop. Behind him cringed a handful of human slaves in tattered tunics and three Amorosi elves—poor, beautiful creatures who had been lobotomized so thoroughly they now spent most of their time trying to eat their own hair.
“Is Shaitan… finally popped?” Snot-Eye whispered, his voice echoing in the three-hundred-foot vault.
The group shuffled forward across the map, careful not to trip over the mountain ranges as they approached. I was sprawled across the map, my tongue poking out slightly, my silver hair fanned out across the blue of the map beneath me.
“Looks dead,” noted one of the humans, poking my ribs with a tentative finger. “More dead ‘an usual. Check ‘is breath?”
“Shaitan don’t have breath, dunce,” the Derk hissed, leaning in so close his mossy breath nearly made me gag awake.
One of the Amorosi elves began to clap slowly at a nearby statue of me Looking Pensive, while the others just stared at my boots.
“Bury ‘im?” a slave suggested hopefully. “In a deep hole. With a heavy lid.”
I chose that exact moment to let out a long, rattling snore. The entire group shrieked and scrambled backward. Snot-Eye tripped over a giant statue of my foot, the humans collided with the Elves, and within seconds, the Gallery was empty again—save for the retreating sound of frantic footsteps and the occasional thud of a goblin hitting a wall.
I remained there, dreaming of a world where I was the ruler of all creation.
The next day I was so energized that I decided to go down to the Dungeons to gloat to the prisoners. A god-king needs an audience, even if that audience is currently chained to a damp wall and covered in moss.
The path to the dungeons on the lower levels was a winding tunnel that bypassed the lava vents. It smelled of wet iron and very old laundry. I passed the ‘Standard Torment’ wing and headed for the ‘High-Security Irony’ block.
Once there I first stopped in front of a cell containing a former High Priest of Ramos – one Ssu-Ra Val’Khaz – he’d given me some bad intel a while back so I brought him here later and kept him animated at the edge of death.
“You!” I barked, rattling the bars. “Did you hear the news? The Grim is coming home! The world is about to end, and I’m the one holding the match!”
The priest king didn’t answer. He was technically dead, but I’d enchanted his soul to remain in his ribcage so he could appreciate my wit for all eternity.
“Typical,” I sighed, moving on to the next cell. “No one listens. No one appreciates the artistry. I’m a misunderstood genius, trapped in a world of mindless mortals.”
I sat down on a stone bench in the middle of the dungeon corridor. The adrenaline was fading, replaced by that familiar, heavy blanket of despair that quickly took hold of my inner core.
“But what if I DO become the God of All?” I asked the damp walls. “Then what? I’ll have to listen to everyone’s prayers. ‘Oh Azazel, make it rain.’ ‘Oh Azazel, heal my gout.’ It sounds… exhausting. Honestly, the administrative overhead alone is enough to give a deity a migraine.”
I leaned my head against the cold rock. “I’m just trying to live my life. I’m doing my best. I’m taking the initiative, I’m being proactive, I’m showing leadership. Is it my fault the world is so poorly constructed that I have to destroy it to make it work? No. It was a good design but that dimwit Lucifer didn’t follow the plans. And now I’m the victim here.”
I felt a tear—a single, black, oily drop—trickle down my cheek.
“I’m so lonely,” I whimpered. “Even my creations hate me. Ramssee tried to stab me with a fake dagger. A fake one! He didn’t even have the respect to use the real Grim. He just grabbed the first thing he saw in the ‘Everything’s-a-Gold-Coin’ bin. It’s an insult to my professional standing.”
I stood up, wiping my face with my sleeve. “I’m going back to the bedchambers. Maybe I’ll have another bottle of wine, a few pipes of ‘Grief-Weed,’ and I’ll stare at the ceiling until the sun—which I really should have made purple, honestly—comes up again next century.”
I trudged back up the stairs, past more statues of my own glory (I probably had too many of those), and feeling like the most persecuted being in all of existence.
“It’s not fair,” I muttered as I climbed into my bed again. “It’s just not fair. I’m the God of Death. I should be the one having a good time. Instead, I’m the only one in this entire volcano who knows how to properly worry.”
I pulled the blankets up to my chin.
“But tomorrow,” I whispered to the dark, “tomorrow, well, there’s always tomorrow, and it’s only a day away.”
I paused, feeling a rumble in my tummy.
“Hmm, I wonder if the Derkka chefs have any more of those little honey-cakes in the pantry? Destabilizing the entirety of existence always makes me so hungry.”
The Apocrypha of Azazel 