Location: Nektar’s Cauldron, then The Firmament
Timeline: Sixth Age, 51st Year and beyond
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.
I will grant you, if you’ve been with me since the beginning of this very book, that I did not spend the whole of that stretch in noble contemplation. Some of you may recall a rather undignified morning I described early on — a hangover, a graveyard of empty carafes, a spoon mistaken for an assassin’s blade, and a pounding head that had me questioning whether godhood was worth the trouble at all. That was simple celebration. Indulgence, nothing more sinister, the ordinary excess of a god enjoying his own freedom rather too enthusiastically after an eternity denied it. I promise you I felt no shame in that one. What I am about to relate to you now is a rather different, and considerably less flattering, class of hangover entirely — and I’d ask you to remember the first one fondly, because by the time we reach the end of this chapter, it will look like restraint.
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.
And it was in that laughter — in that first giddy, unfettered breath of a god who had just realized no one on any plane of existence could drag him back into a cage — that I understood, with a clarity I mistook entirely for wisdom, precisely what I was going to do next.
I was going to break the Firmament. I was going to march home to Illyria at the head of an army the likes of which had not been assembled since the War in Heaven itself. I was going to find Michael — smug, radiant, insufferable Michael, who had looked down on me with such tedious moral certainty since before your species learned to walk upright — and I was going to make him kneel. I was going to find Mindos, that preening little sliver of divinity the Drokka worship without ever knowing his true name, and remind him precisely how small a “god’s son” looks when the actual power in the room belongs to someone else. And then, at the very last, I was going to stand before A’H Itself, upon the very throne from which I had been cast down, and I was going to take what had always, always been rightfully mine.
I want you to understand that I did not think of this as ambition in that moment. I thought of it as inevitability. The pieces had simply, finally, after eons of patient suffering, arranged themselves in my favor. I had my rib. I had my freedom. What, precisely, was left to stop me?
I did not even bother to pack.
I traveled — and here I shall not tell you exactly where, even now, for some secrets a god keeps even from his own confession — to a thin place in the world’s fabric where the Firmament’s presence could be felt pressing close against the Middle Plane like a held breath, close enough that I fancied I could hear, if I listened carefully enough, the distant, mocking chorus of angels on the other side, blissfully unaware of the reckoning about to descend upon them.
I should tell you, if you have followed my Apocrypha from its very beginning, precisely what this barrier is to me, because I suspect the weight of it is lost on anyone who has not sat with the whole of my history. This is the very same Firmament Michael sprang upon us in that first, humiliating trap at the dawn of everything — the barrier that sealed Zebub, Lucifer, myself, and every last one of the fallen into that small, wretched corner of the Void from which this entire sorry tale of mine has unfolded. I have spent every page of every book since that day, whether I said so plainly or not, working toward this single barrier. Every scheme, every war I engineered among mortals too small to know they were my pawns, every dagger I hunted across five centuries — all of it, in the end, was always in service of standing exactly where I now stood, with exactly the tool I now held. It is not an exaggeration to say that the entire Apocrypha of Azazel has been building toward this one moment. I want that understood before I tell you what happened next, so that you feel the fall the way I felt it, rather than merely reading about it.
I stood there, alone, at the very edge of everything, and allowed myself — just this once, just for a moment, before the doing of the thing itself — to savor it.
Picture it as I did, because I intend for you to feel the full height of the fall I am about to describe, and you cannot do that without first standing beside me at the peak. Picture the barrier splitting like rotten fruit beneath my rib’s edge. Picture the shockwave of that rupture rolling backward through every plane of creation at once, Illyria’s court startled from whatever insufferable harmony they’d been humming, Michael’s blade half-drawn a heartbeat too late. Picture Lucifer, wherever he was skulking in that miserable little dimension he’d built for himself, feeling the leash he thought he still held simply vanish — and understanding, all at once, exactly what that meant for the balance of power he’d spent an age arranging in his own favor. Picture Ze, freed at last from Its own prison, looking upon me — me, not Lucifer, not any of the other simpering fallen who’d merely followed where I alone had truly led — as the architect of that liberation. And picture, above it all, A’H Itself, forced at last to acknowledge that the “failed” rebellion It had spent eons congratulating Itself on suppressing had simply been biding its time, waiting for the right hand to hold the right blade.
I would not merely win. I would be owed. Every fallen thing in every plane of existence would understand, in that instant, precisely whose cunning had finally broken what a thousand lesser schemes had failed to crack.
And I want to be entirely plain with you here, because I suspect some of you have been generous enough, this whole Apocrypha long, to imagine my ambitions ended somewhere short of the summit. They do not. Let every godling on this world and every lumenarc in the next understand, before I go one sentence further, the true shape of what I intended in that moment, and intend still. I did not merely wish to see Gwar and Inanna and Alyssa and Rhokki and Pan and every other preening rival bow before me — bow, and then be discarded the instant their usefulness ended, unmade as thoroughly as anything Dagaal has ever touched. I did not merely wish to humble Michael, or to see Mindos put in his proper place. I intended — and this is the part I imagine even Lucifer, in all his grasping ambition, never quite dared to say aloud even to himself — to see Ze cast down as well. My old master. The very power in whose name I fought and lost the War in Heaven to begin with. And beyond even Ze, at the very last, the true and final target of everything I have ever done: A’H itself, unmade, unthroned, un-worshipped, so that when the dust of that final reckoning settled, there would be exactly one god remaining upon any plane of existence, in any dimension, on either side of any Firmament that had ever separated one realm from another. Myself. Alone. Not first among equals. Not a favored son restored to his father’s good graces. The single, sole, uncontested God of All — of every soul, every stellarone, every world Zebub and Lucifer and I ever cobbled together, and every realm neither of them ever dreamed of reaching.
That was the throne I stood at the edge of the universe believing myself a single heartbeat from claiming.
I drew Dagaal from my ribs.
The sound alone was worth savoring — that wet, grinding pop of bone leaving bone, a sensation I doubt any creature besides myself has ever felt or will ever feel again, followed by the low resonant thrum that had become as familiar to me now as my own pulse, a voice recognizing its own echo across some vast and ancient canyon. I held it before me, that impossible corkscrewing spiral catching what little light bled through from the thin place around us, and for a moment I simply let myself look at it — my own rib, wrenched from Lucifer’s grip after five centuries, about to become the instrument of the single greatest act any god had attempted since the War in Heaven itself.
I thought, in that moment, of every step that had led me here. I thought of the Stairway of Infinity, and the thousand and one days I’d climbed it toward a sliver of light that turned out to be nothing but the beginning of an even longer road. I thought of Hacktor, and the Ghast I’d lost to my own master’s greed. I thought of the Children of Mu, and the centuries I’d spent hunting a relic Lilith herself had hidden from me as bait. Every scheme. Every war. Every mortal pawn who had lived and died without ever knowing they were merely stones on my board. All of it — every last drop of it — had been building, whether I said so plainly at the time or not, toward this single, thin, shimmering nothing at the edge of everything.
I raised the blade.
My whole body sang with it — every fiber of my being, every ancient and aching joint, drawn taut as a bowstring about to loose. The sulfurous wind that ordinarily bracketed my every waking moment seemed, for that one suspended heartbeat, to still entirely, as though even the elements themselves understood they were about to witness something that could not be undone. I could feel Dagaal’s hum climbing now, no longer content to simply thrum against my palm but rising into something closer to a shriek, a sound with no business existing anywhere within my own hearing, and I welcomed it, fed it, let every century of humiliation I had ever swallowed pour down my arm and into that impossible point until I was not at all certain, in that instant, where my own fury ended and the blade’s began.
I pressed the tip against that thin, shimmering nothing where the world ends and the Firmament begins.
Break, I told it — and I want you to understand that this was no idle command muttered under my breath. I roared it, with the full and terrible voice of a god who had waited five centuries and eons before that for precisely this moment, a word that tore itself loose from somewhere far beneath my own throat and echoed out across the thin place until I half expected the very stars themselves to flinch at the sound of it. I threw the whole of my rib, the whole of my rage, the whole of every version of myself that had ever groveled before Lucifer or bent his knee to Ze, into that single, absolute, world-ending word.
BREAK!
Nothing happened.
I want you to sit with the size of that silence, because I have had rather a long while to sit with it myself. I had built, in the space of a single held breath, a moment so vast it should by rights have shaken creation loose from its own foundations. And creation, in response, did not so much as blink.
It was, to put it with as much restraint as I can currently muster, a bit of a letdown.
I want you to understand that I did not, even then, take this as an answer. A god of my caliber does not accept a single failed gesture as the final word on anything, and so I did what any properly resourceful deity would do in my position: I escalated.
I spoke the Old Words next — the true names of unmaking, the syllables Zebub Itself once used to peel apart the fabric of the Void before there was a Terra to stand on, half-remembered fragments I’d hoarded across eons precisely for an occasion such as this. I will confess, in the spirit of the honesty I’ve been so relentlessly forced into, that I did not recall all of them cleanly, and at least one syllable I am fairly confident I simply invented on the spot, trusting that sufficient conviction might carry a god through a gap in his own vocabulary. It did not. The Firmament remained exactly as indifferent to my improvised grammar as it had been to my silence.
I tried invoking Ze directly — reaching backward through Dagaal’s own nature, through the old bond of service that had once bound me to the Evil One’s will, demanding that whatever fragment of that ancient power still lived in my own rib answer my call and lend its full weight to the blow. I felt something stir, faintly, deep in the blade’s marrow — the first flicker of response I’d gotten out of the entire enterprise — and for one glorious heartbeat I believed I had found the missing piece.
The flicker died. Nothing followed it.
I abandoned subtlety entirely at that point, and I shan’t pretend otherwise to spare myself the indignity. I shed my usual form and let the whole of my true self unfurl — every span of skeletal wing, every inch of the towering, black-boned horror I generally have the courtesy to keep folded away for polite company — and I struck the Firmament with the full monstrous weight of it, again and again, roaring in a voice that shook loose actual stone from the cliffs a mile behind me. I called down what remained of my own borrowed hellfire, the last dregs Lucifer had ever granted me, and hurled it at the barrier in a conflagration bright enough that I half expected the mortal shepherds three kingdoms distant to mistake it for a second sunrise. I do not doubt, in hindsight, that I made for a rather magnificent spectacle. I have no doubt whatsoever that the spectacle accomplished nothing.
It was somewhere in the midst of all this — mid-roar, mid-flame, mid-fresh-invented-syllable — that I had, for one brief and rather desperate instant, the thought of my own hoarded relics. The Amulet of Zyphor, chief among them — an ancient thing, a power over matter itself that had survived the very War in Heaven this barrier was built to commemorate, tucked away in a secret vault only I have ever known to look. Surely, I thought, surely a power capable of reshaping matter itself might finish what my rib alone apparently could not.
And then, in the same breath, came the considerably less flattering realization: the Amulet was sealed away in a hiding place I myself had chosen precisely for its distance from anywhere convenient, days of travel even for a god at full urgency, locked in a vault I’d built to keep it safe from everyone, myself at my most impulsive included. I could not simply will it into my hand. I would have to fly for it, fetch it, return — and somewhere in the whole of my magnificent five-century scheme to reclaim Dagaal and finally seize my throne, I had apparently never once paused to consider that “days” was not a line item my own hubris had budgeted for. I thought, too, however briefly, of the Eye of Seraphiel, safe and close at hand in my own library — before recalling, with a fresh wave of embarrassment, that the Eye shows a man his fate, not a path through a wall; a scrying-glass has never once in its existence broken anything, and would have done nothing here but watch me fail in rather better detail. A further, rather more inconvenient thought followed close on its heels: beyond that single, useless consideration, I had brought nothing else with me at all. No grimoire from my own library, no other artifact, not so much as a single prepared working from the Necronomicon’s darker registers. I, who plan every scheme with such famously meticulous care that I once spent two full decades merely perfecting the humors of a single Viperz, had marched to what I believed would be the single most consequential confrontation of my entire existence carrying nothing but a rib and my own considerable self-regard, on the theory — never actually examined, merely felt, with the particular unexamined certainty of a god thoroughly drunk on his own freedom — that the two of those together would obviously be sufficient for anything the universe could possibly ask of me.
I want you to sit with that for a moment, because I certainly have had cause to. Five centuries of patient, meticulous scheming to recover a single dagger, and when the moment finally came to use it for the largest purpose I had ever conceived, I did not think to bring so much as a spare candle.
Break, I told it, one final time, quieter now, the roar gone out of my voice along with most of my remaining conviction. Please.
Nothing happened.
Not a crack. Not a shudder. Not even the dignity of a barrier that fought back, that gave me something worthy to rage against. Dagaal’s hum simply died against that surface, swallowed whole, as though I had pressed my own rib against the edge of the universe and the universe had not so much as noticed the gesture, the fire, the roaring, or the increasingly threadbare vocabulary of my own improvised sorcery.
I do not know how long I stood there afterward. Time, as I’ve told you, means little enough to me under ordinary circumstances, and these were very far from ordinary circumstances. I know only that at some point the last of the flame guttered out and the last of the roar died in my own throat, not because I chose to stop, but because the fury that fueled it had simply burned itself out and left something colder and considerably more wretched in its place.
I had been so certain. That is the part I find hardest to relate to you honestly, and the part I suspect A’H most wanted told. Not the failure itself — failure, I could have borne, had I expected it. What I could not immediately bear was the memory of my own conviction in the moments before, the sheer unclouded joy of believing myself only a heartbeat from everything I had ever wanted, and the vertigo of watching that certainty collapse into nothing more substantial than the fantasy it had always been.
I will not entirely spare you the worst of what followed, though I’ll grant you the mercy of a summary rather than a day-by-day accounting, since I suspect even my most devoted readers have their limits, and I have my pride to consider even now.
I did not return to Kra as a god renewed by his own freedom. I returned as something considerably smaller, and I want you to understand precisely how small, because I don’t believe a mere “I sulked for a while” does the episode justice.
I drank — considerably more than dignity allows me to specify, and considerably more than my own cellar was prepared to survive, as it turned out, given that I set fire to a portion of it on the second night in a fit of pique whose precise cause I can no longer reconstruct with any confidence. I dismissed my Derkka overseers from my presence for days at a stretch, unwilling to be seen, unwilling even to perform the confidence I’d spent millennia wearing as armor — though I’m told, by those brave enough to whisper it to me weeks later, that I was seen regardless, wandering the upper tunnels at odd hours muttering imprecations at a barrier I could no longer even reach, as though sheer proximity to the memory of the thing might somehow finish what my rib had failed to. I destroyed, in a single spiteful afternoon, an entire wing of trophies I had spent centuries assembling — skulls of rivals long forgotten, relics of wars I’d once been rather proud of winning — smashing each one with my own hands for no better reason than that they had witnessed my triumphs, and I could no longer bear to be reminded that I had ever believed myself capable of a triumph larger than any of them. I am told the Derkka spent a full fortnight simply sweeping up the wreckage. I did not apologize to them. Gods do not apologize to goblins, whatever the goblins may privately think of that policy.
I sat alone, more often than not, in my library at the Cauldron — the same library where I once fumed about wasting my brilliance on trifles while hunting for this very dagger — and I found myself, for what may have been the first time in my entire existence, genuinely uncertain whether I possessed the strength to want anything at all, ever again. That is not a sentence I ever expected to write about myself, and I confess it costs me something even now, safely on the other side of it, to set it down in ink for you to read.
I tell you this now, so many chapters later than I ought to have, because I understand — however little I enjoy the understanding — precisely why A’H insisted I not skip past it. You are meant to see me here, at my very lowest, precisely so that whatever follows carries its proper weight. A god who has never doubted himself is merely a boast. I will let you sit with me in that doubt for as long as this chapter allows, because I did not have the luxury of skipping past it myself.
I did not know, in the depths of that ruined fortnight, precisely what my failure at the Firmament had set in motion elsewhere. I did not know that the tremor of it — faint as it must have been, a mere ripple against a barrier that had not so much as acknowledged my existence — had nonetheless been felt by at least one set of ears I would have given a great deal to keep entirely deaf to my business. I did not know that a message was already traveling, quietly, through channels I had no power to see, toward a god I trusted rather less than I trusted anyone, carrying implications I would not begin to understand for a great many chapters yet. I was too busy smashing my own trophies to notice that the universe, indifferent as it had been to my grand ambitions, was not nearly so indifferent to my failure.
But that is a thread for later. For now, I was simply a god in the dark, surrounded by broken skulls of his own making, wondering whether he had anything left in him worth salvaging.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 