Location: Nektar’s Cauldron, Kra
Timeline: Present Day
I imagine you’ve noticed I’ve been rather absent.
Oh, don’t bother pretending otherwise — I can feel you nodding, there, wherever and whenever you are, smug in your little certainty that you’ve caught me out. Six sections. Six. An entire book’s worth of parchment devoted to a trio of mortals wandering from one poorly-lit dungeon to the next, squabbling with serpents, weeping over horses, falling in and out of love with the persistent regularity of a tide — and where, you might ask, was I? Azazel. Shaitan. God of Death, architect of the Sixth Age, the single most consequential mind ever to walk, fly, or otherwise smolder its way across this flat little world of yours?
Apparently making the occasional cameo in a summary chapter and then vanishing again like some overworked stagehand.
I’ll admit — and mark this well, for such admissions from me are rarer than an honest word from Gwar — that this arrangement has chafed. A’H, in Its infinite and largely humorless wisdom, saddled me with this Apocrypha as the price of my eventual redemption. Tell the truth, It said. The whole truth, It said, glowering down at me with that insufferable serenity of Its, as though eons of watching me squirm hadn’t taught It that I find “the whole truth” about as comfortable as a hair shirt. Share your history with the mortals, Azazel, so that they might learn from your failures and save themselves from repeating them.
A noble goal. A worthy goal, even, if I’m being charitable, which I try never to be. And do you know what it’s gotten me? Section after section of narrating other people’s triumphs while my own machinations sat, unremarked, off the page — as though I were some indulgent grandfather content to watch the children play, rather than a god with a five-book hunt for a dagger literally designed to kill me finally, finally concluded in my favor.
I have had Dagaal in my possession — in my hand, against my own black heart, mine — since the ninth section of Book V.
And I have told you nothing of what I’ve done with it since.
Shameful. Truly. I’d blush, if I still possessed the circulatory apparatus for it.
So let us correct the record, shall we? Let us return, at long last, to the only narrator this Apocrypha ever needed — because here is the truth I suspect A’H, in Its eagerness for me to look properly humbled, would rather I skip past: my absence from these pages was never an absence at all. It was merely your inability to see where I actually was.
You’ll forgive me a moment of context, for those of you joining us late or simply too dim to have retained it — yes, I mean you, in the back, still asking who Baal-Zebub is. Long ago, in the War in Heaven, I sided with Ze against A’H, believing — correctly, I maintain, whatever the outcome — that the old order deserved toppling. We lost. I was cast out, along with Lucifer and the rest of the fallen, and for eons I served him and Ze both, plotting, scheming, building empires of my own within the cracks of their larger war. And now, having failed to seize the throne I still believe was rightfully within my grasp, I find myself once again bent beneath a master’s yoke — A’H’s, this time, rather than Lucifer’s — dangling the carrot of redemption before me like I’m some particularly stubborn mule. Tell your story honestly, save humanity from itself, and perhaps — perhaps — It will let me back into the fold.
I despise it. I want that understood, clearly, in case my narration has been too subtle on the point. I despise the leash, I despise the sanctimony, and I most especially despise being made to sound grateful for the privilege of my own confession.
But I have no choice. So: onward.
Now. Time. Let us discuss time, because I don’t believe you mortals grasp it properly, and it colors everything about to unfold.
You have been watching, by my estimation, somewhere in the neighborhood of two years of your fragile little lives pass across these pages — Emcorae’s boyhood grief curdling into purpose, Nathily’s slow unraveling of her own gifts, Barkla’s descent into dungeons and back out again bloodier and wiser. Two years. To you, I imagine that feels like quite a lot — enough time to fall in love, to nearly die several times over, to watch a kingdom totter toward ruin under a snake-eyed fool’s crown.
To me, two years is barely long enough to properly cultivate a grudge. I have grudges older than your entire species. I have held resentments through the rise and fall of continents. Two years, to a being such as myself, passes with roughly the urgency of a yawn.
Which is precisely why, dear reader, while you were breathlessly following a trio of mortals across half a continent, I — with considerably more patience than any of you seem capable of imagining a god possessing — was doing what I actually do.
That is the tidy version of my excuse, at any rate. And I’d be lying to you — which, mark this well, I have been expressly forbidden to do, on pain of A’H withholding the one prize I actually want from this whole miserable arrangement — if I let you believe it were the whole of it. A god has time enough that two years needn’t trouble him, yes. But time alone doesn’t explain silence. Silence, when a creature like myself indulges in it, more often means there’s something he’d simply rather not say. And I will confess, since apparently confession is now my permanent occupation, that a fair portion of what I’m about to relate does not flatter me. I am not in the habit of volunteering my own humiliations for public consumption, and I resent, deeply, that this is precisely the portion of my history A’H seemed most gleefully insistent I not skip over. It would appear that my discomfort is, in Its estimation, rather instructive for the rest of you. I find that logic tedious. I find it necessary, given my present circumstances, to comply with it anyway.
Let me disabuse you of a particular fantasy first, because I suspect some of you have pictured me these past six sections lounging on some obsidian throne, twirling Dagaal idly between clawed fingers, plotting the fall of gods with nothing else on my docket. Charming image. Entirely wrong.
Do you have any conception — any conception whatsoever — of what it actually takes to be a working god? Not the storybook version, not the thunderbolts-and-proclamations nonsense your priests love to peddle, but the actual, grinding, unglamorous business of it? I run a kingdom, in case that detail has slipped your minds entirely between one dungeon escape and the next. Kra does not administer itself. The mines beneath my Cauldron do not fill their quotas of ore through sheer divine inspiration; someone has to flog the Derkka into productivity, has to settle disputes among my Myz taskmasters, has to review — I promise you this is real — harvest projections, because it turns out even a god’s slave-farms suffer blight if left unmanaged. I am, among my other titles, apparently something of a divine middle manager, and let me tell you, there is precious little glory in adjudicating whether Outpost 61 or Outpost 74 gets first claim on the season’s grain stores.
And that’s before we even reach the Life Labs. Creation does not happen on holiday. Every Viperz, every Myz, every wretched experiment that later goes on to have delusions of heroism or villainy in your little mortal dramas — every one of them began on a table in my Cauldron, under my hands, over years I don’t imagine you’d have the stomach to hear about in detail. Two decades alone, I spent marrying the humors of snake and man into something worthy of being called a Viperz. Two decades! While you were, what, learning your letters?
And the Necronomicon — ah, the Necronomicon, that most patient and thankless of my domains, where I have spent literal centuries dragging the dead up from the Morgue by the thousands, one shrieking spirit at a time, sifting through a mountain of corpses for scraps of information that ninety-nine parts in a hundred amount to absolutely nothing. Do you know how tedious it is to interrogate a dead soldier’s ghost for the fortieth consecutive year and learn, once again, that he knows nothing you didn’t already know? I have wanted, on more than one occasion, to simply burn the entire chamber to cinders and retire somewhere with better wine and considerably fewer bones.
So spare me, please, the implication that I’ve been idle. I have been running an empire, cultivating an intelligence network spanning continents, conducting necromantic research spanning centuries, and personally overseeing the deaths of every mortal soul on this entire flat earth, because in case it has also slipped your minds — I am Death. That job does not take holidays either. While Emcorae wept over his grandfather’s grave, I was, in some sense, there, in the way I am present at every single death across this world, cataloguing, weighing, judging. It is exhausting, thankless, and utterly without applause, and I have done it without complaint for longer than your civilization has had a written word.
Well. Perhaps a small amount of complaint.
But amid all that — the grain quotas, the ghost-interrogations, the endless tide of dying mortals requiring my personal divine attention — I want you to understand that I was also, this entire time, moving pieces you could not see. Dagaal did not simply sit in a drawer. My own oldest and most carefully tended deceptions did not go unexamined merely because I trusted them too completely to look closely. I will not pretend to you, however, that every piece I moved landed where I intended it to. Some did. Some, I am rather less proud to report, did not — and I’d ask you to remember, when you reach those particular passages, that I am telling you of them at all only because I have been given no choice in the matter. Gwar remains a debt still owed, not yet collected. Inanna remains a suspicion still held, not yet confirmed. And Illusia — Illusia remains precisely where I left it, waiting on a reckoning of my own choosing, on my own timing, and I will not be rushed toward it merely because you are curious. Even a god has blind spots. Mine, as it happens, have a rather particular shape, and I promise you shall hear more of them, in this book and in others yet to come, when the telling finally suits me rather than you.
But I get ahead of myself. That is, I’m told, rather my besetting sin.
So. Let us begin where I ought to have begun this entire miserable book — with the dagger that was forged to kill me, now finally resting, however uneasily, in my own hand.
Let us talk about Dagaal.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 