Location: Nektar’s Cauldron, Kra
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year
I returned from Iztak with the particular hollow satisfaction of a man who has successfully patched a leaking hull while entirely uncertain whether the ship still has a hole in it somewhere he hasn’t found yet. The immediate crisis was contained. Praxus would carry my counsel to Hanbull, the eastern muster would find new purpose rather than simple dissolution, and an entire priesthood’s worth of cowardly superiors would spend the coming weeks wondering why their god had chosen the lowest of them over the highest. That much, I could set down with some satisfaction.
The rest of it, I could not.
I retreated to my chamber to think it through properly. My bed there is vast, canopied in a silk I had specially woven from the harvested webs of Kra’s largest spiders — a detail I mention only because I still find it deeply satisfying, and because the spiders in question are not, strictly, spiders, but that is a tale for another chapter entirely. My pazzierra pillows, stuffed with the dried, fragrant leaves of the pazzierra tree — plundered, if I’m honest, from the very Amorosi forests whose people I’ve spent this entire chapter quietly stirring trouble against — sit arranged in a decadent heap against the headboard, upon which I am rather fond of reclining with the particular self-satisfaction of a creature who has earned every stitch of his own comfort through five centuries of exquisite suffering. A wall of shelved skulls — trophies, mostly, though a few are simply decorative, purchased rather than earned, and I shan’t say which is which — lends the room what I consider a tasteful gravitas. The braziers along the far wall burn not with common flame but with a captured sliver of my own borrowed hellfire, banked low and blue, which lends the whole chamber a permanent, flattering twilight I have never once found reason to improve upon.
I settled myself properly, poured something considerably gentler than the vintages that had fueled my earlier despair — a decent four-century red, nothing showy, purely medicinal — into my favorite chalice, carved as it is from the femur of a particularly stubborn leper who gave me rather more trouble in the harvesting than the honor of becoming my stemware ought to have warranted, and reached inward, the way I had taken to doing rather more often than I cared to admit, toward the handful of tethers still trailing out from my own chest into the wider world.
Nothing.
Not nothing in the sense of confirmation that harm had come to them — I would have felt that, I think, the same sharp absence I’d have felt at the loss of any soul in my collection. Nothing in the sense of simple, maddening silence. The smuggler somewhere on the Stairway of Infinity, or beyond it, or nowhere at all. The trio in Ramos, still presumably haunting Inanna’s gilded halls, offering up nothing I could parse into anything resembling a report. I pulled at those threads for longer than dignity strictly permitted, sitting alone in my own chamber like a fisherman working an empty line, and got nothing for my trouble but a headache that had no earthly business afflicting a being without the blood vessels to produce one.
I set it down. Not happily. But a god who spends himself dry chasing threads that refuse to answer is a god who has nothing left when a thread finally does.
For another day, I told myself, and meant it rather less than I’d have liked.
What remained, then, was the larger question — the one I had been circling since Praxus’s own bewildered honesty first confirmed what Keldar’s report had only suggested. Someone had gotten into my Well. Someone with theology enough to nearly pass, and not quite enough to actually succeed. I settled into my chair with a fresh glass and gave the matter the full weight of my own considerable intellect, because if there is one thing I have never been accused of, it is failing to think a problem through properly once I finally sat down to do it.
I began, as any properly rigorous mind does, with the unlikely and worked my way toward the plausible.
Pan I dismissed within a single breath. Whatever else might be said of that wild, fertile creature, patience has never numbered among his virtues, and a scheme requiring months of consistent, careful theological forgery is simply not a garment Pan’s attention span was ever built to wear. He’d have grown bored of the Well by the second pronouncement and wandered off after some new conquest, mortal or otherwise.
Oceanus took even less consideration. I could conjure no plausible reason the Lord of Waters would trouble himself with a landlocked mountain fissure and a people who’d never once paid him tribute. Wrong domain, wrong temperament, wrong everything.
I permitted myself, briefly, to wonder whether some fallen thing I’d simply lost track of over the centuries might be responsible — there are more of us scattered across this Middle Plane than I trouble to keep proper accounting of, minor lumenarcs with grudges and ambitions of their own, names like Kokabiel or Shamsiel that I hadn’t heard spoken aloud in an age. It is entirely possible, I will grant, that some obscure fallen thing with nothing better to occupy an eternity decided my Well made for interesting sport. I filed the possibility away as unlikely but unfalsifiable and moved on, since a hypothesis I cannot test is not one worth dwelling on.
Alyssa gave me rather more pause, and for a reason I confess took me a moment to properly land on. She has never once stopped scheming since the day she and Pan and Oceanus struck their bargain with Michael and traded my old master’s leash for A’H’s, and I do not doubt for a moment that she is capable of precisely the kind of patient, long-game manipulation my Well had suffered. And there was, I realized, turning the matter over, an angle I hadn’t considered at first — Alyssa’s old, foolish, entirely unrequited devotion to Rhokki himself, a devotion the real lumenarc never once returned, given how thoroughly his own heart remained lost to Gaia across every age since. It is not so great a leap to imagine a besotted goddess stirring chaos in her old beloved’s name purely on the theory that enough noise, enough crisis, enough desperate priestly prayer might finally coax the real Rhokki out of hiding and back into her arms. Gods have done considerably stupider things for considerably less love than that.
I sat with the notion longer than I care to admit before I set it aside — not, I will confess, purely on the strength of better candidates, though I found those too, but because I could not, in the end, credit Alyssa with the sustained cunning the scheme would have required. She has always been rather more heart than head, that one — lovely to look at, forever the belle of every court she’s ever graced, but never once, in all my centuries of watching her, the sort of mind capable of five hundred years of patient theological forgery. She’s a blonde, after all, and I mean that rather more literally than kindly. I set her aside, satisfied with my own reasoning, and did not trouble myself to examine whether that reasoning said rather more about my own blind spots than it did about hers.
Which left, uncomfortably, the Illuminati themselves — and I confess this line of thought cost me rather more composure than the others combined.
Michael I could dismiss with something close to genuine relief. Whatever else might be said of that overwhelming creature, subtlety has never numbered among his gifts. Michael does not forge. Michael does not infiltrate, does not patiently mimic a rival’s cadence across months of careful theological study. Michael arrives in thunder and issues ultimatums and departs again, exactly as he did the day he offered Pan and his fellow rebels a bargain I still resent them for accepting, exactly as he did the day he descended upon the whole trembling lot of us and demanded Rhokki’s contrition in a voice that shook the ground beneath our feet. Whatever had gotten into my Well had done so with cunning, not with a sword. That is simply not how Michael conducts his business.
Raphael I dismissed rather more quickly still, and I want that admitted plainly, because I have had occasion since to wonder whether I gave him quite the consideration he deserved. A healer. A protector. The angel who faced down Asmodeus in the wilderness with nothing but mercy and a rather good sense of humor, and who has never once, in all the history I’ve catalogued of him, shown the slightest inclination toward deception of any kind. What use would the Healer of A’H have for forging a rival’s voice in a mountain fissure? None that I could construct in the time I gave the question, which was, in hindsight, rather less time than I gave nearly anything else that evening. I moved on. I am not entirely convinced, narrating this to you now, that I was right to move on quite so fast.
Gabriel troubled me rather more, and would not be dismissed nearly so easily. Here, unlike with Michael or Raphael, the shape of the crime and the nature of the god fit disturbingly well together. Gabriel is not merely capable of voice — Gabriel is voice, the very instrument through which A’H’s own will has always been spoken to the rest of us, melodious and resonant and impossible to properly describe even now, all these centuries later. A being whose entire nature is the perfect conveyance of another’s authority would hardly find it taxing to counterfeit a lesser voice’s cadence, however many centuries of doctrine that cadence had accumulated. And Gabriel, I was forced to recall with a discomfort I did not enjoy, has old and personal history with the very identity I’ve worn all these centuries — it was Gabriel, after all, who once found the real Rhokki broken and weeping at the foot of the Firmament and offered him a path toward redemption I made quite certain he never completed. Should Gabriel ever have cause to wonder what became of that unfinished quest, what became of the lumenarc he’d once shown such mercy to, my own five centuries of borrowed worship would make for a rather uncomfortable discovery. I could construct no proof that this was his doing. I could not, try as I did, construct a version of the evening that ruled him out entirely either, and I confess that particular uncertainty followed me rather further into the night than I would have liked.
I considered, too — because a thorough mind considers everything, however unpleasant — whether the real Rhokki himself might finally have stirred from whatever eternal sulk had kept him from his own worship for centuries beyond counting. I could not quite make myself believe it. Too many centuries of silence to break now, over this, in this manner. If he’d ever meant to reclaim what I’d stolen from him, I judged he’d have done it with rather more fury and rather less clumsy theology than what Praxus had described to me.
That left, at last, the two names I had been circling since Keldar first planted the whole wretched question in my mind: Lucifer and Lilith.
I want to be honest with you about how seriously I weighed them, because they deserved rather more consideration than the others, given how much either of them might stand to gain from unsettling my oldest and most carefully tended lie. But I talked myself out of it, and I want you to understand precisely how I did so, because the reasoning felt sound to me at the time, and feels rather less sound to me now, narrating it from the considerable benefit of hindsight I lacked that evening. Lucifer, so far as I knew, remained entirely ignorant that the leash between us had broken at all — why would he trouble himself meddling in the affairs of a servant he believed still fully his to summon whenever he pleased? And Lilith, whatever her ambitions, has never once in all the centuries I’ve known her favored anything so roundabout as five hundred years of patient priestly forgery. She strikes directly, or she strikes not at all. I dismissed them both, and moved on, entirely satisfied with my own logic.
I did not know, sitting in that chair with my glass slowly emptying, that both halves of my reasoning were built on a floor I’d simply never thought to check.
Which left me, at the end of a very long evening’s deliberation, with two names I could not shake loose no matter how I turned the puzzle.
Inanna. Patient. Cunning. Proven, across centuries, capable of exactly this kind of long, invisible game — and possessed, I had every reason to believe, of fresh motive besides, given what I already suspected of Kaoz’s growing infatuation with her court. Chaos between Drokka and Amorosi served no purpose I could immediately name for her, but Inanna has never once required her schemes to make sense to me before she set them in motion.
And Mindos. A’H’s own son, with old and legitimate claim upon Drokka religious life through poor Hef Fastuz and the blade that bore his own inspiration. A god who might have any number of reasons — theological, territorial, simply curious — to test whether the deity his father’s rivals prayed to was quite what he claimed to be.
I could not choose between them. I will confess that plainly, since I have promised you nothing less than the whole, unflattering truth of this section: I sat with both names for a very long while, and neither one would yield to the other, and I found myself, for the first time in longer than I cared to admit, genuinely uncertain rather than merely performing uncertainty for dramatic effect.
I might have sat with that uncertainty longer still, might have pressed the question with the full weight of attention it deserved, had I not been, if I am entirely honest with you, rather more consumed that same evening by a considerably older and more personal anxiety.
You will recall — or perhaps you have simply been too swept up in my recent misadventures with Firmaments and Wells to keep proper track — that I had, some while before any of this began, dispatched my finest creation yet, a Viperz built specifically to succeed where his predecessors had failed, north toward Orkney with instructions of admirable simplicity. Kill the defective viperz named Ramssee. Dismantle the witless beast called Kaoz. Bring me the Grim. Without delay. Without excuse.
Xerxys had been gone for some time now, and I had heard nothing.
I want you to understand what that silence cost me, because it cost me rather more, in the privacy of my own thoughts, than any mystery at the Well ever did. I had already learned, through the Eye’s own patient threading of the fates some while before, that my “Project Fubar” had gone thoroughly off-script — Ramssee’s years of scheming and stalling, a doomed prince groomed toward ruin, a poisoned king, and a myz grown volatile and unpredictable enough that I no longer trusted either of my original pawns to see the job through cleanly. Xerxys, at least, I trusted to end it properly — bring me the Grim, still waiting, so far as I knew, exactly where I’d always believed it to be: sealed within the Deepest Depths of Akka, patient and unclaimed, precisely as it had sat for centuries before I ever set my pawns loose to fetch it.
And yet I found myself, that evening, checking on that particular thread with a frequency that would have embarrassed me had anyone been present to witness it — considerably more often than I checked on the Well’s mystery, considerably more often than I dwelt on Gwar’s unrest or Keldar’s dangerous new wariness or any of the half-dozen other loose ends I have spent this entire section confessing to you. The Grim has been the true engine of my ambition since the very hour I discovered Dagaal alone was not enough to break the Firmament. Every scheme I have set in motion since — the released souls, the tempered spies, even, if I am honest, my own patience with Ramssee’s years of failure — has ultimately been in service of that single, consuming need. And here, at the one moment I most needed my full attention for the mysteries multiplying around me, I found that need pulling harder than any of them, dragging my focus north toward Akka and whatever fate had befallen my newest and finest creation, rather than toward the questions properly in front of me.
I did not yet know whether Xerxys had succeeded, or failed, or simply vanished into the same maddening silence that had swallowed my soul-spies. I did not know — though I suspect some part of you has already guessed it long before I ever will — that the blade waiting in Akka’s deepest chamber was never the one I actually needed at all, that the true Grim sat, unrecognized and unclaimed, in hands I had never once thought to examine closely enough, hands that had nothing whatsoever to do with any mountain or any mine. That particular ignorance, I have come to understand since, may prove the single most expensive mistake of my entire existence. But I did not know it then, and this Apocrypha has never once pretended to give you more wisdom than I actually possessed at the time I’m describing.
What I knew, sitting alone in my chamber with an empty glass and a mind full of unresolved threads, was this: I could no longer content myself with waiting on proxies. Not for the Grim. Perhaps not for any of it.
I had spent this entire cursed section of my own history delegating — souls sent out to listen where I could not, a Viperz dispatched to finish what lesser tools had botched, a Wyze One elevated to carry my counsel where I would not personally tread, Keldar left to manage a kingdom I hadn’t troubled myself to properly oversee. Every single one of those delegations had returned to me incomplete, uncertain, or silent altogether. I am, whatever my failings, still a god who believes his own hand accomplishes more than any tool he might send in its place, and I had, across these past months, rather lost sight of that fact in my eagerness to test my restored freedom by other means.
That would change. The Well’s mystery would keep — Inanna and Mindos would still be exactly where I’d left them, in my suspicions if nowhere else, whenever I finally had leisure to return to the question properly. Gwar’s unrest would keep too, a debt I fully intended to collect, in my own time, once matters of rather more consequence were settled. Even Illusia — even Lucifer, even the reckoning I had been so carefully saving for a moment entirely of my own choosing — could wait a while longer yet. None of it, when I set it all side by side and weighed it honestly, mattered half so much as the one thread that had been quietly consuming me all evening beneath every other consideration.
Akka. The Deepest Depths. The Grim, waiting exactly where it had always waited, needing nothing more than a proper hand to finally come and claim it.
And that hand, I decided, with a surge of purpose that swept away every last trace of the evening’s uncertainty in a single glorious instant, would be my own.
I was on my feet before I’d fully finished the thought, glass abandoned, robes already swirling with an energy I hadn’t felt since the giddy, glorious hours before my own catastrophic appointment with the Firmament — though I assured myself, quite firmly, that this time would be different. This time I had a target sized precisely to my own strength. This time I would not make the mistake of marching anywhere without proper preparation.
I began, accordingly, to prepare.
I summoned my chief Derkka steward from his bed at an hour he did not appreciate being summoned and informed him that Kra would require a regent for however long my errand required — a task I settled, after some consideration, upon a suitably terrified overseer whose competence I judged adequate and whose ambition I judged insufficiently dangerous to leave unsupervised for long. I dictated, in rapid succession, no fewer than fourteen separate instructions regarding grain quotas, mine productivity, and the proper handling of any further “shrine business” that might filter up from the western pass, all of which I am fairly confident went entirely unrecorded by a scribe too frightened to ask me to slow down. I made a private note to check on Selket and my other listening threads once more before departing, decided against it on the grounds that I had already wasted enough of the evening on silent tethers, and packed the Eye of Seraphiel — properly this time, wrapped and secured, not left behind in some fit of overconfidence — along with a rather more modest selection of necromantic supplies than my full library might have tempted me toward, on the theory that a god traveling to retrieve one dagger need not also bring an entire mobile mausoleum.
I considered, and very nearly indulged, the urge to send instructions ahead to Ramssee, warning him of my imminent arrival. I decided against it. Some reunions are best delivered as a surprise.
I selected robes. I want it on record that I gave this rather more consideration than strict necessity required, but a god arriving to reclaim the object of a five-century hunt owes it to the occasion to look the part, and I settled at last on black shot through with a deep violet thread I’d been saving for precisely such an occasion, the exact shade, I am reliably told, of a dying star. I considered my full monstrous form and decided against it for the journey itself, reasoning that Ramssee’s villa was hardly built to accommodate wingspan of that magnitude, though I fully intended to make an exception the moment introductions were no longer strictly necessary.
I thought, briefly and with genuine warmth, of what I might finally do with two Daggers of Destiny properly in hand — Ze’s power and A’H’s power both, mine at last, mine to wield as I had spent this entire miserable section dreaming of wielding them. I let myself enjoy that thought rather longer than was strictly productive. I have earned, I think, the occasional indulgence.
I do not entirely recall finishing the preparations. I recall the particular joy of a god with a clear purpose again, a destination, a prize within reach after five centuries of patient, maddening pursuit — the same giddy, unstoppable certainty that had carried me to the edge of the Firmament, though I assured myself, again, that this time the certainty was earned.
Akka waited. Ramssee and Kaoz, whatever their fates, waited with it. And I, Azazel, God of Death, Soul Harvester, once and future King of All Creation, was finally, at long last, going to go and collect what was rightfully mine.
I had meant it to be a departure worthy of the occasion — a single dramatic sweep of black-and-violet robes into the mountain dark, unseen and unheralded, the way a god ought to vanish when he has somewhere magnificent to be. What actually happened, if I am to hold myself to the honesty this whole miserable confession has demanded of me, is that I caught my hem on the very same loose flagstone outside my own chamber that I have been meaning to have repaired for the better part of a century, stumbled with considerably less grace than the moment called for, and startled a passing Derkka badly enough that he dropped an entire crate of turnips down three flights of tunnel stairs behind me.
The turnips, I am reliably told, made quite the racket.
Let the record show, then, that the God of Death’s grand departure for the Deepest Depths of Akka — the culmination of five centuries of patient hunting, the beginning of the reckoning I fully intended to bring down on the heads of every last soul who’d wronged me across this entire wretched section — was heralded not by thunder, nor by trumpets, nor by any fanfare remotely befitting my own magnificence, but by the sound of root vegetables cascading down a mountainside in the dark.
I chose to interpret it as an omen. A good one. I was, after all, still due one of those…
The End of Book VI
The Apocrypha of Azazel 