Location: Nektar’s Cauldron, Kra
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Spring to Fall
Freedom, I have discovered, is a rather disorienting thing when it arrives after an eternity of not having it.
You’d think — and I certainly thought — that the moment my rib clicked back into its ancestral cradle, the moment that gnawing, pathetic hunger for Lucifer’s hellfire simply withered and died inside me, I would know precisely what to do with myself. I am Azazel. I have plotted the fall of kingdoms in the time it takes a mortal to blink. Surely a god such as I would greet his own liberation with the swift, decisive brilliance for which I am so justly renowned.
Instead, for a rather embarrassing stretch of days — weeks, if I’m being scrupulously honest, which I try never to be — I simply stood atop my volcano, Dagaal thrumming warm and strange beneath my robes, and did absolutely nothing at all.
Do not mistake this for weakness. Even the mightiest of us, upon having a chain removed that we had worn since the dawn of our own existence, requires a moment to remember how to walk without its weight. I had built my entire self-conception, across eons, around the fact of my dependency — the humiliating pilgrimages to Illusia, the groveling, the performance of penance I never felt. Remove that, and what remains? For one dizzying moment, standing at the crown of Kra with the sulfur winds tearing at my robes, I did not entirely know.
Then I laughed. Long, and loud, and utterly without restraint, until the Derkka goblins toiling in the pits below me dropped their tools and cowered, certain their god had finally lost what remained of His mind.
Let them think it. I had never felt more lucid.
So. What does one do, upon discovering oneself unleashed for the first time in all recorded existence? One gets drunk on it, of course. Not on wine — well, not only on wine — but on power itself, on the sheer intoxicating fact of possibility. And I, ever the methodical madman even at my most delighted, decided I would not squander that intoxication on empty gesture. I would test it. Three times over, in three different directions, because a god worth the title does not simply believe in his own strength — he confirms it.
First: I wanted to know what Dagaal could actually do.
I had carried the theory of the blade for centuries — Lucifer’s endless taunting, Lilith’s gloating asides, the ancient half-memory of a weapon forged to unmake gods — but theory is a poor substitute for demonstration, and I have always preferred demonstration.
I selected, for my experiment, a creature of my own making that I judged expendable enough not to mourn and significant enough to matter — a lesser spirit-construct I’d built decades prior in the Life Labs, a thing of stitched souls and borrowed divinity, meant originally as an early, failed prototype for what would eventually become the Viperz line. It possessed a fraction — a mere sliver — of true godly essence, siphoned in the making. Close enough to divine to serve as a proper test. Not so close that I’d grieve the outcome.
I had the Derkka bring it up from the pens and bind it to the obsidian dais at the mountain’s crown, where I do so love to conduct my more theatrical business, and I drew Dagaal from beneath my robes for what I believe was the first time I had ever willingly, rather than fearfully, held my own rib in my hand.
It was — I shall admit this once, and only once, so treasure it — beautiful. That corkscrewing spiral of bone, that impossible point too fine for mortal eyes to properly resolve, caught what little light my mountain’s perpetual gloom allowed and seemed almost to drink it. I felt the blade’s hum travel up through my arm and into my chest, into the very socket from which it had once been torn, a resonance like recognizing one’s own voice in an echo across a vast canyon.
I pressed the tip to the construct’s borrowed divinity — just beneath where a heart would sit, had it possessed one — and pushed.
I will spare you the more grotesque particulars, though you know by now I rarely spare you anything. Suffice it to say the construct did not simply die. It unraveled — divinity and all, back into whatever raw stuff of creation it had been assembled from in the first place, as though Dagaal did not merely kill but un-made, reached backward past the fact of a thing’s existence and erased the premise entirely. The spirit-stuff I’d siphoned to build it didn’t scream so much as simply cease, mid-thought, as if it had never once occurred to the universe to make it at all.
I stood there afterward, Dagaal still humming faintly in my grip, and felt something I can only describe as reverent terror — an emotion I do not often permit myself, given how poorly it suits a god of my stature. For here was proof, undeniable and visceral, that the thing Lucifer had tormented me with for eons was every bit as lethal as promised. Had he ever actually used it on me — properly, with intent, rather than merely brandishing it as a threat — I would not be narrating this to you now. I would simply not have been.
Which meant, of course, that anyone I turned it upon would suffer precisely the same fate.
Delicious.
Second: I wanted eyes and ears where I had none.
A blade, however magnificent, is only as useful as the intelligence guiding its aim, and I had spent quite enough of my existence reacting to the schemes of Gwar, Inanna, Alyssa, and the rest of that insufferable godling rabble. It was time, I decided, to start anticipating them instead.
My first instinct — and I’ll admit it here, since I promised you honesty rather than dignity — was simply to do what I have always done: summon a fresh brood of Viperz, whisper my will into their reptile minds, and send them slithering to every corner of TerrVerde to listen at doors I could not myself reach.
I had actually begun the working — had two of my finest half-formed on the Cauldron’s tables — when the memory struck me like a blade of my own making. The Venom of the Viperz. My own gift, five centuries gone, traded to Inanna for her theft of the Ghast, and turned since into the very leash by which she’d bent my own creations to worship her instead of me. Ramos was closed to me. Had been for longer than I cared to admit. Any Viperz I sent within a hundred leagues of that wretched Goddess of Lust’s silk-draped throne would return to me not as my spy, but as her thrall — assuming it returned at all, rather than simply vanishing into her bed and her service forever.
The two Viperz I did finish, I sent where Inanna’s magic held no sway. Ophion, sharp-eyed and patient, went north, toward whatever battlefield Gwar happened to currently be reveling in, for the God of War, whatever his failings, has never once in his existence been difficult to locate. And Selket I sent east, toward Illusia’s borders — not to enter, never to enter, merely to linger at the edges and listen for whatever gossip drifted out from that wretched realm regarding my former master and his queen.
But Ramos remained a problem no Viperz could solve for me. And it was there, brooding on it, that I hit upon what I still consider a rather elegant solution — though I will grant you, dear reader, that “elegant” and “comfortable” are not always the same word.
I would open my own chest.
I keep — as you well know by now, or ought to, if you’ve been paying the attention I deserve — every soul I harvest trapped within the hollow of my ribcage, swirling and shrieking in that glorious black expanse where my own missing bone once sat. Or rather, I keep them until Lucifer takes them from me.
That, I should remind you, was always the other half of my master’s cruelty. Baal-Zebub, unlike myself, was never a mere Harvester — he was a Soul Eater, and every time I was forced back to Illusia to beg for enough hellfire to sustain another thousand years of my existence, he stripped my chest bare as the price of it, devouring whatever collection I’d spent the intervening centuries so lovingly assembling. Millennia of harvests, gone in an afternoon of his gluttony, leaving me to stagger back to the Middle Plane with nothing inside me but my own black soul and the cold resolve to start collecting all over again. I had done this, without complaint — or rather, with a great deal of complaint that changed nothing — for longer than I care to number.
But I no longer needed his hellfire. Dagaal had seen to that. Which meant, I realized with a fresh jolt of that same intoxicating vertigo I’d felt upon first laughing atop my mountain, that whatever I had collected since my last visit to Illusia — since that miserable hundred-and-three-year captivity in the forty-fourth year, the one that had left my chest hollow and my temper foul — was mine now. Truly mine. Not merely mine until my master’s next audit, but mine to keep, to hoard, to grow without limit, for the first time since before your kind had learned to write your own names.
It wasn’t, I’ll grant, an especially vast collection yet — nine years is a pittance against the millennia I’d once have counted my hoard in, and my chest held perhaps a few hundred souls rather than the millions I’d have boasted of in ages past. But it was mine, uncontested, unaudited, unstolen, and I confess that fact alone made every one of those few hundred spirits feel more precious to me than entire centuries’ worth of collections I’d surrendered to Lucifer’s appetite without ever once being asked. So when I went looking for three souls clever enough in life to slip unseen past Inanna’s charms, I was drawing not from some bottomless vault built up across the ages, but from a small, hard-won, still-growing treasure I had only just begun to realize I’d never have to give up again.
And among that collection, I reasoned, there surely existed souls clever enough in life, cunning enough, invisible enough, that Inanna’s flesh-and-desire magic would find nothing in them left to seduce. A ghost cannot be tempted by pleasures it no longer has a body to feel. A spirit already bound to me, already mine down to the last screaming fiber, has nothing left to offer another god’s charms.
I want you to understand what this cost me to consider, because I shan’t pretend it was a simple decision made lightly, whatever brave face I wore about it at the time. I do not share my collection. I do not lend it. Every soul in that chest is mine the way a miser’s gold is his, the way a court’s crown jewels are its sovereign’s — hoarded jealously, counted and recounted in quiet moments of self-satisfaction. The very notion of releasing even a handful of them back out into the world, unsupervised, at risk, felt rather like plucking coins from my own vault and mailing them to strangers. And this vault, mark you, was the very first I had ever been permitted to call entirely my own.
But ambition demands sacrifice, even from gods, and so — with considerably more hand-wringing than I care to admit — I selected three: a merchant’s clever wife who’d once run a smuggling ring beneath the noses of an entire city guard, a court spy who’d died with a dozen secrets still unspoken on his lips, and a thief so accomplished in life that even I, Death himself, hadn’t caught wind of half her crimes until she was already mine. I drew them out from the swirling dark of my chest one at a time, watched them coalesce, trembling and disoriented, in the dim light of the Cauldron, and gave each their instructions along with a promise I meant rather more sincerely than I expected to: return to me, and only to me, and I will see you rest more comfortably than any other soul in my collection for it.
Then I sent them south, toward Karkemesh and the Pleasure Palace, to haunt Inanna’s gilded halls and her silken pillows alike, and bring me back what no living Viperz ever could.
I will confess — and this part rather surprised me, given how little sentiment I generally permit myself — that in the weeks that followed I found myself unable to stop checking. Reaching inward, again and again, toward the space where those three had been, the way one might prod at a missing tooth with one’s tongue, unable to leave the absence alone. Were they well? Had Inanna somehow found a way to unmake them that I hadn’t accounted for? Had some rival necromancer snatched them up along the road? I caught myself, on more than one embarrassing occasion, muttering aloud to the empty dark of my own chest cavity as though the souls still resident there could offer comfort about the ones who weren’t. It is, I admit now, rather absurd behavior for a god to indulge in — fretting over three stolen spirits like a mother hen over chicks scattered by a fox. I would deny it under torture. I am only confessing it here because you, dear reader, are rather less threatening than torture.
I will confess I do not yet know, as I narrate this to you, precisely what any of the three eventually learned, nor even — and this needles at me rather more than I’d like — whether all three have yet found their way home. That is a tale for chapters still ahead of us, when their information, and hopefully their persons, finally make their way back up my mountain to matter.
Third — and here I overreached rather magnificently, though I did not think so at the time — I turned my attention to the Firmament itself.
You will recall — or, if you are new to this Apocrypha, allow me the condescension of reminding you — that the Firmament is the great barrier A’H erected at the close of the War in Heaven, sealing away Illusia, sealing away the fallen, sealing away, ultimately, myself and my ambitions from the throne I still believe was rightfully within my reach. I had spent eons regarding that barrier the way a caged beast regards the bars of its cell: with hatred, certainly, but also with the dull, resigned understanding that the bars were simply there, immovable, a fact of existence rather than a problem to be solved.
Freedom, it seems, makes a beast forget the shape of its cage.
I traveled — quietly, and I do mean quietly, for even drunk on my own liberation I retained sense enough not to announce this particular excursion to anyone, mortal or divine — to a place I shall not name in detail even now, a thin point in the world’s fabric where the Firmament’s presence could be felt pressing close against the Middle Plane like a held breath. I brought Dagaal. I brought, if I am honest, an absurd and entirely unearned confidence that a blade capable of unmaking a lesser construct might, with sufficient will behind it, do something — anything — to a barrier erected by the Great Creator Itself.
I pressed the blade’s point against that thin, shimmering nothing where the world ends and the Firmament begins, and I pushed with every ounce of newly-unleashed strength I possessed.
Nothing happened.
Nothing at all. Not a crack. Not a shudder. Not even the satisfaction of a barrier that resisted, that fought back and gave me something worthy to rage against. Dagaal’s hum simply died against that surface, swallowed whole, as though I had pressed my rib against the edge of the universe itself and the universe had not so much as noticed the gesture.
I stood there for a long while afterward, in the cold and the dark, turning the failure over in my mind the way I turn over any problem — not as a defeat to mourn, but as a puzzle demanding a better key.
And I believed, standing there, that I had found the shape of that key.
Dagaal is a blade of Ze’s making, wrought from my own bone while I stood in service to the old order — it carries Ze’s signature in its every twisted coil, which is precisely why it could unmake a lesser divine construct built partly from that same lineage of power, and precisely why, I reasoned, it had failed utterly against a barrier that was never Ze’s work at all. The Firmament is A’H’s, through and through. Of course my rib, however magnificent, could not so much as scratch a wall built from a power it had no claim upon.
The Grim, I remembered then — the Grim was inspired not by Ze, not by any power I had ever served, but by Rhokki and Mindos. And Mindos, whatever quaint title the Drokka gave him, whatever small and provincial god he might have seemed to the armsmaker Hef Fastuz who forged his blade — Mindos is A’H’s own son. A sliver of the Great Creator’s own authority, made manifest, made bladed.
Here, I was certain, was the answer. Not Dagaal alone. Not the Grim alone, whenever I finally laid hands upon it. But both — Ze’s power and A’H’s power, my rib and my rival’s relic, wielded together in the same two hands, the only combination with any hope of prying open a door built to keep every fallen thing in creation exactly where it had been put. One blade to unmake what stood before it; the other to touch what Dagaal could not. Together, I reasoned, they would not merely knock upon the Firmament. They would unweave it.
I want that reasoning understood clearly for what it was: a belief, arrived at in a moment of thwarted pride, that felt to me at the time like the last and final piece of a puzzle five centuries in the solving. I did not know then — nor will you, for some while yet — precisely how wrong I was, nor how much further even that combination would leave me from my throne. That reckoning belongs to a much later chapter of my history than the one I’m presently telling you.
What I knew, standing cold and thwarted at the edge of the world with my rib in my hand, was this: I no longer merely wanted the Grim. I needed it, in a way I had not fully permitted myself to feel since losing the Ghast all those centuries before. Whatever piss-ant mortal or scheming godling currently stood between me and that second dagger had, without knowing it, become the single greatest obstacle left standing between myself and the throne of all creation.
But I did not let any of that stop me from proclaiming the whole of my design regardless — for what is ambition, if not stated before it is achieved?
So hear it plainly, then, dear reader, since I am compelled by my present servitude to be honest with you in ways I was never honest with anyone during the events themselves: I intend, and intended then, to see every single one of my fellow godlings — Gwar, Inanna, Alyssa, Pan, Rhokki, every last preening one of them — bow before me or be unmade as thoroughly as that pitiful construct on my dais. I intend to see Lucifer and Ze themselves brought low, made to understand precisely what it means to have kept a god as their servant rather than their equal. And beyond that — beyond all of that — I intend, still, even now, even shackled once more to A’H’s own service, to see the Firmament itself broken, to see Meree and Mindos and Michael and the whole insufferable Illuminati humbled, to see every stellarone soul in this universe kneeling before me, and not before the throne that cast me out.
That was my ambition, standing cold and thwarted at the edge of the world with my rib in my hand. It remains my ambition now, narrating this to you from beneath a leash of an entirely different sort.
You may draw your own conclusions about how well that ambition has served me since.
I chose, in that moment, to say nothing of Dagaal’s return to Lucifer — and said nothing, either, of the collection now growing uncontested in my chest. Let him go on believing the leash still held. Let him go on savoring whatever cruel little fantasies he still entertained of dragging me back to Illusia the next time my hellfire ran dry, of stripping my hoard bare all over again the moment I groveled back into his presence — a reckoning that would never come, not for centuries yet by his own reckoning, and never at all by the terms he imagined, because there was no hellfire left to run dry, because I no longer needed a single drop of what he offered, and because everything I gathered from this day forward would remain mine, and mine alone, until I chose otherwise.
He would learn the truth eventually. I intended, in fact, to show him myself, at a time and in a manner entirely of my own choosing, and to savor every last flicker of his expression when he finally understood.
But that reckoning, dear reader, is a scene for later in this section — and I do so love to make you wait for the good parts.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 