Location: Nektar’s Cauldron, Kra
Timeline: Sixth Age, 51st Year and beyond
I did not stay in the dark forever. I want that understood plainly, and rather early in this chapter, because I suspect you’ve just watched me at my very worst and deserve the reassurance that it did not last — that whatever else may be said of me across the whole of this Apocrypha, I have never once, in the entirety of my existence, remained broken for long.
What roused me, in the end, was not pride, exactly, nor even ambition in its purest form — it was something closer to spite, which I have always found a far more reliable engine than pride in any case. I could not break the Firmament. Fine. I would not be the first would-be conqueror in the history of creation to discover his first weapon insufficient to his first target. But insufficiency is not the same as defeat, and I had not clawed my way back from a thousand lesser humiliations only to let this one be the story’s final word.
There is Another
I reasoned it through, once I was capable of reasoning at all, and I confess the reasoning itself did more to restore me than the weeks of drink and sulking combined — there is nothing quite so revivifying to a mind like mine as the sensation of a puzzle clicking back into shape. 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 meant, I began to suspect, that it had failed against the Firmament for the simplest possible reason: the Firmament was never Ze’s work to begin with. It is A’H’s, through and through, built from a power my rib had no claim upon and therefore no purchase against, however much fury I hurled at it.
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.
Not Dagaal alone, then. Not the Grim alone either, 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. I want that reasoning understood clearly for what it was: a theory, arrived at in the wreckage of my own worst humiliation, that felt to me — and I mean this entirely sincerely, with none of the doubt that had swallowed me whole only days before — 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 still was, nor how much further even that combination would eventually 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, climbing at last out of my own wallowing and back onto my own two feet, was this: I no longer merely wanted the Grim. I needed it, with an urgency that had nothing left of theory in it and everything of purpose. 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. And a god with a clear obstacle and a clear plan for removing it is a rather different creature entirely from the one who spent a fortnight smashing his own trophy wall in the dark.
I was, by the time I finally emerged from my library and back out into the light of my own mountain, entirely — perhaps a touch too entirely — certain that I was once again exactly where I needed to be. The Firmament had been a false start, nothing more, a single failed opening move in a game I still fully intended to win. I had my rib. I had my theory. I had, above all, my own considerable self, restored now to its usual insufferable confidence, and that, I have always found, is quite enough to be getting on with.
And a god who has just talked himself back into believing the universe is his for the taking does not, I discovered, simply sit back and admire the theory. He gets back to work.
So I set myself two more modest tasks, in the weeks that followed, neither one so grand as shattering the boundary of creation, both considerably more within my actual reach, and both, I am rather pleased to report, considerably more successful.
Does it have ANY Power?
First, I wanted to know, at the very least, what the blade in my hand could still do — even if it could not do…Everything.
I had carried the theory of Dagaal’s power for centuries — Lucifer’s endless taunting, Lilith’s gloating asides, the ancient half-memory of a weapon forged to unmake gods — and if I could not use that power against the largest possible target, I told myself, I could at least confirm it against a smaller one, if only to remind myself I had not simply traded one form of impotence for another.
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, and I drew Dagaal — with rather more caution this time, and rather less blind confidence, than I’d carried it to the edge of the world.
It was, I will admit once more, 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 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.
I stood there afterward, Dagaal still humming faintly in my grip, and I did not merely feel relief. Relief is what small creatures feel when disaster passes them by. What moved through me in that moment was something considerably larger, considerably louder, and considerably less dignified — a great roaring exhilaration that started somewhere in my chest and simply would not be contained. I laughed. I whooped, an unbecoming sound I am fairly certain no god has made since before the founding of your species, and then I did something I have not done in an age I could properly number: I danced. Alone, atop my own obsidian dais, with the unraveled remains of a lesser divinity still settling into ash around my feet, I spun and stamped and threw my arms wide to the sulfurous sky and simply reveled, because here — here, at least, was proof undeniable that I had not lost everything at the edge of the world. My rib had failed against the largest target creation had to offer. Fine. It remained, against anything smaller, every bit as magnificent as promised, and I intended to celebrate that fact with the full, unrestrained enthusiasm it deserved.
I summoned my Derkka up from the pits that very night and declared, with a grandiosity I shan’t pretend was anything but sincere, a second triumphal procession — braziers lit, horns blown, considerably more of my own cellar sacrificed to the occasion than strictly wise, given how recently I’d already burned a portion of it in despair. I toasted myself. I toasted Dagaal. I believe, at one particularly enthusiastic juncture, I toasted the unraveled construct itself, for its noble sacrifice in service of my own restored confidence, though I confess the goblins seemed rather less moved by that particular gesture than I’d hoped. Which meant, of course — beneath all the noise and the horns and the second bottle of something I probably ought to have been saving — that anyone I turned Dagaal upon would suffer precisely the same glorious fate. I was, once again, and rather more loudly than the situation strictly called for, magnificent.
It was somewhere in the giddy, wine-soaked small hours of that celebration that I found myself wondering, with the particular reckless curiosity of a god three cups past sensible restraint, what else my newly-proven rib might be capable of. Not merely unmaking. Surely a blade with that much power humming in it could be put to gentler uses too, if a mind clever enough — mine, obviously — simply thought to ask the right question of it.
What Else can it do?
For my next trick I wanted eyes and ears where I had none — a far more modest ambition than conquering Illyria, but one I could actually accomplish before the week was out, and one that, in my present mood, I was rather more inclined to attempt with flourish than with caution.
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 — a considerably smaller ambition than dethroning A’H, but the sort of small, achievable ambition a recently humbled god rather needs.
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 abandoned the notion almost as quickly as I’d had it. The memory of the Venom of the Viperz was still far too fresh — my own gift, five centuries gone, traded to Inanna for her theft of the Ghast, turned since into the very leash by which she’d bent my own creations to worship her instead of me. Ramos was closed to any Viperz I might send. But the more I sat with the problem, the less it seemed worth building living spies at all, when I already possessed something considerably better suited to the work. A Viperz can be seduced. A Viperz can be caught, tortured, turned. A Viperz has a body, and a body is always, eventually, a liability. What I needed were eyes with nothing left to lose, ears no one could bribe, and creatures that could go where no living thing — mine or otherwise — dared show its face.
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, whatever else it had failed to do for me. Which meant that whatever I had collected since my last visit to Illusia — since that miserable hundred-and-three-year captivity 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 was here, still riding the last warm edges of my celebration, that the idea properly took hold — the notion that Dagaal itself might have a part to play in this scheme beyond simply proving itself capable of murder. My rib sits, after all, in the very socket from which I draw every harvested soul, closer to my collection than any other part of my anatomy; would it not stand to reason, I asked myself, with considerably more enthusiasm than rigor, that a soul drawn out past the blade’s edge, rather than simply lifted free of my chest by the usual means, might carry something of Dagaal’s own nature out into the world with it? A trace of that same power that had just unmade a lesser divinity in a single stroke, tempered down to something gentler — not enough to unmake the soul itself, obviously, but enough, I reasoned, to armor it. To blur it at the edges. To make it that much harder for another god’s wards, or another god’s hunger, to properly take hold of. I liked the idea rather too much to examine it as closely as I ought to have. It felt, in the moment, less like a theory and more like a certainty, which ought perhaps to have worried me more than it did, given how recently my last certainty had ended with me screaming into an indifferent void.
I tried it first, that same night, on nothing more than a passing scrap of stray spirit-stuff drifting the tunnels below my Cauldron — drew it briefly against Dagaal’s flat rather than its edge, the way a smith quenches a blade rather than swings it, and watched the wisp of it shimmer faintly silver for a moment before settling. It seemed, to my admittedly generous eye that evening, to hold together rather more solidly than it had a moment before. Good enough, I decided, for a god three cups deep in his own vindication. Good enough to trust with rather more than a stray wisp.
It wasn’t, I’ll grant, an especially vast collection yet, so soon after my return. But it was mine, uncontested, unaudited, unstolen, and I confess that fact alone made every one of those precious few spirits feel more valuable 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 souls clever enough in life to do what no living creature of my making safely could, 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.
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 — even small, chastened ambitions, freshly rebuilt from the ashes of a much larger one, and even more so when that god has just convinced himself he’s discovered a rather elegant new trick for keeping his sacrifices safe. So, with considerably more hand-wringing than I care to admit, but with rather more confidence than the hand-wringing alone might suggest, I set about choosing who among my hoard would earn their temporary freedom, and drew each of them, in turn, past Dagaal’s flat before I let them go — my own private little quenching, my own small ceremony of unearned certainty.
The first was simple enough. I drew out a single soul — a hunter in life, patient and unhurried, the kind of man who could sit motionless in a blind for three days waiting for a single shot — tempered him against the blade, and sent him 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. A ghost draws no eye on a battlefield already thick with the newly dead. He would fit right in.
The second undertaking required rather more of me. I selected three from my collection this time: 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. And among that collection, I reasoned, there surely existed souls clever enough, cunning enough, invisible enough, that Inanna’s flesh-and-desire magic would find nothing left in them 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 — and tempered now, freshly quenched against Dagaal’s own flat, I judged them armored against whatever residue of her magic might still try to cling to them regardless. 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, ran each briefly along the blade as I had the hunter before them, 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.
The third was the one that gave me real pause, and I’ll not pretend otherwise. Gwar’s battlefields and Inanna’s court are, whatever their dangers, still firmly of this world — mine to navigate, mine to understand. Illusia is not. You do not simply walk down the Stairway of Infinity uninvited; the descent is built, by design, for immortal feet alone, and a mortal soul — however clever in life, however loyal in death — is not, strictly, immortal in the way that stairway demands. It is bound to me, yes, tethered by whatever thread connects a harvested spirit to its harvester, and that thread, I gambled, might be enough to carry it where an unclaimed ghost could never go. And now I had Dagaal’s own temper besides — a fresh, untested confidence that a soul quenched against a blade capable of unmaking gods might carry enough of that same borrowed strength to pass, however briefly, for something a great deal closer to immortal than it actually was. I will confess, setting it down now with the full benefit of hindsight, that this reasoning owed rather more to the wine still warm in my veins and the glow of my earlier triumph than to any experiment more rigorous than a single drifting wisp in a tunnel. I did not test it twice. I did not test it on anything remotely comparable to what I was about to ask of it. I simply wanted it to be true, badly enough, on that particular giddy evening, to proceed as though it already were.
And even granting that the descent itself could be survived, the In-Between through which that stairway winds is no empty corridor. It is thick with lesser demons, wandering baals, and rather worse things besides, any one of which might recognize a stray soul for what it was and — for sport, for favor, for no reason better than boredom — drag it before Lucifer himself as a gift. A captured spy is a poor sort of intelligence to have gathered. A captured spy who can be made, under sufficiently inventive torment, to reveal whose hand sent it, is very much worse. I sat with that risk longer than I care to admit before I finally chose my candidate: a woman who had spent her mortal life as a smuggler of rather more delicate cargo than the wife I’d already sent south — contraband across three hostile borders, never once caught, never once suspected, a soul built, in life, entirely out of the art of not being noticed. If anyone in my collection could slip along the edges of that dreadful stairway carrying nothing more than a fresh coat of borrowed divine temper, I judged it would be her. I drew her out, ran her the length of Dagaal’s edge with rather more ceremony than I’d afforded the others — some part of me, I think, hoping the extra flourish might make the technique more true — and sent her east.
I gave her no instruction to enter Illusia itself. Only to go as far as the In-Between allowed, to listen at whatever fringes a clever ghost could reach, and to come home the instant the listening turned to danger. I do not know, even now, whether that instruction was heeded, or whether it could have been heeded even if she’d wished it. That is a fear I carried with me for rather longer than I let myself admit at the time.
The Suspense is Killing Me, I Hope it WIll Last
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 spaces where those five 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 the three I’d sent her? Had Gwar’s hunter been caught in the wrong crossfire? And the smuggler — my clever, quiet smuggler, somewhere on that endless, terrible stairway — I checked on her most of all, and liked the not-knowing least of all. 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 five stolen spirits like a mother hen over chicks scattered by a fox, and stranger still, perhaps, that this small anxious tenderness came so soon after the largest, coldest ambition I have ever allowed myself to feel. I would deny it under torture. I am only confessing it here because I’ve been left no honest way to avoid it.
I do not yet know, as I narrate this to you, precisely what any of the five eventually learned, nor even whether all five 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.
So there you have it — the whole of it, or nearly, exactly as A’H insisted I relate it, and not the version I would have chosen to tell you left to my own devices. I stood at the edge of the universe and believed myself a heartbeat from godhood. I was wrong — more thoroughly and more publicly, in my own private accounting at least, than I have been wrong about anything in a very long while. I will not pretend that particular humiliation didn’t cost me a fortnight of my dignity and a wing of perfectly good trophies. But I want to be equally plain that by the time I emerged from my library and set these two smaller schemes in motion, I had filed the whole Firmament business away as precisely that — a single failed opening move, an early miscalculation of scale rather than of substance, the sort of thing a god of my standing is entitled to shrug off once he’s proven, to his own satisfaction at least, that his methods still work exactly as well as promised on any target properly sized for them. I did not dwell on it further. I had a second dagger to hunt, an empire to run, and — as you are about to learn — considerably more pressing matters closer to home demanding my attention. I was, by the end of these two small victories, entirely convinced I remained precisely on the course I had always been meant to walk.
I chose, in the midst of all this — the crash, the recovery, the small victories I built to paper over the large defeat — to say nothing of any of it to Lucifer. Not the leash. Not 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.
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 is a later scene — and I do so love to make you wait for the good parts, even after admitting, as I just have, that not every part of this particular story is one I’d have chosen to tell you at all.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 