Scorn of Angels (4 page)

They had lost. Persephone had been cut down and Nyx, though she had made it to Lucifer’s palace, had been crushed by Tribunal, the Son of God, whose power outweighed hers as Nyx’s power outweighed any human warrior’s.

After having suffered what she’d put humans through for a thousand years, Nyx understood her grief over Epiphenia differently now. It was the same pain, but it had more depth and resonance as she experienced a sort of empathy with human mothers. The Angel had been her daughter—the only daughter ever born to Angelic kind. She belonged to Nyx, and Tribunal had taken her, had killed her. The agony of that was something new to Nyx. It was worse than anything Hellstone could do to her.

I will not let them win. I will find a way to destroy them. I swear it.
Nyx drifted along the bottom of the Lake of Hell, her body writhing in agony, her mind filled with the pain and suffering she had caused others to feel.
The only question is, how?

She was not in a position of strength. She was alone in Hell, and Lucifer had an army of Descended Angels to fight against her.

While she had been Tribunal’s lover, he had poured power into her body, giving her strength beyond imagining so that she could survive using the WORD to create Epiphenia. She had used all that strength in her battle through Hell to rescue her Angel. When her small force had been destroyed and she was all that was left, Nyx had used the WORD once more to clear a path. All the power that she had been given was ripped away then, when she’d used the WORD in battle, and afterward she was no more than herself. When she had finally faced Lucifer she was only Nyx.

Against Lucifer, that should have been enough. She had fought him before and she had broken him. Nyx would have done the same again had not Tribunal, Son of God, part of God, and an embodiment of God, used his power to crush her.

The bastard. The betraying, monstrous son-of-a-bastard. How the fuck am I going to fight
Tribunal
?

Wrong question,
Nyx decided.
Too soon. First, I have to get out of here. I need to escape Hell. Then I can take on
Tribunal.

So how do I escape
Hell?

Angels could sense each other’s presence, whether in Heaven, Earth, or Hell. If Lucifer decided to search for her, he would be able to track her down easily enough. The thing was, if he wasn’t looking for her, Lucifer would know she was in Hell, but not where, no matter how close she stood to him.

As long as he didn’t recognize whoever stood beside him as Nyx.

It would not be enough to take another form. She would need to build an entire life inside herself, for when Lucifer looked at her, he would look beyond her physical self and into her soul. He would see the true form of her being long before she came close enough to drive her sword into him.

Unless it isn’t my soul he’s
seeing.

Nyx stopped letting the currents drag her and crawled along the bottom until she fetched up against one of the walls of the Lake of Fire. From there she began crisscrossing the lake, moving as fast as she could, and hoping no one would notice her movement reflected in ripples of Hellfire above.

She ran into, grabbed, examined, and discarded a hundred souls as she crossed back and forth across the lake. None of them would do. She also ran into a hundred Angels, chained to the bottom of the Lake of Fire and driven mad by it. As soon as she touched these, she shied away. None reached for her or seemed to recognize her. All were too wrapped in their own torment.

Lucifer’s doing. Probably they were loyal to me despite
him.

She considered helping them break free but knew that it would do no good. If she released them, they would be caught and tortured until they told Lucifer how they escaped—which would fuck up her plans—and then they would be chained again. So she left them in their agony. When she had Lucifer’s still-screaming head dangling from her fist, she would have time to bring them out of the lake and let them regain their senses.

Finally, on the bottom of the deepest part of the lake, she found the Hellstone box in which she had been imprisoned.

It was more than just a box. It had been chained shut with great Hellstone chains, made of links as thick as her arm. Each chain ended in an enormous Hellstone boulder, large enough that it had sunk into the bottom of the Lake of Fire.

Each link, every stone, and the box itself were made from the remains of tortured human souls. All Nyx needed to do was find the right one.

More hours passed. Nyx poured what power she could into the box without risking succumbing to the Hellfire again. Not healing, this time, but seeking.

Every one of the souls was vile. There were rapists and murderers, pedophiles and poisoners, wicked men who cheated others out of their livelihood, and evil women who used their wiles to destroy others’ lives. Nyx looked into each soul and left it where it was. None of them would suit her needs. Then she found it, the right one.

It was a woman, a mother driven to desperation by cold and by hunger, living in a brutal community that would give her neither help nor support. She had watched her youngest child die first, starving and freezing, and watched as rats swarmed over a body that no one would bury. Her other children were on the brink of death when she decided she would give them all a last bit of warmth before they died. Gathering the mauled body of her dead child and dragging her two cold, starving children with her, she had snuck into the community hay barn. There, shivering with the frigid cold and watching her desperate children trying to eat hay to fill their swollen, starving bellies, she had taken up her only possessions—a flint and a striking iron—and applied them to the hay piled around her pitiful family. Then she pulled her children, living and dead, close to her and felt warm for the first time in years before the smoke and fire overcame them all.

Her children were in Heaven, Nyx was sure. The woman was a cursed murderer, and Lucifer had placed within her a driving compulsion to be forever hungry, forever cold, and forever searching for the children she had killed. She had wandered Hell for a hundred years already, searching.

She would do nicely.

Nyx carefully applied her power to the Hellstone, not to heal, but to separate. Bit by bit she peeled the woman’s soul from the box and took it into her hands. It came off in a jagged chunk.

Nyx took the stone in her hands and began stretching it. She could feel the agony of the soul within, could sense the unending torment and pain. Because Nyx was at the bottom of the Lake of Fire, she herself felt the pain of what she was doing to the woman.

She ignored it.

She reshaped the soul until it became a thin, flexible sheet. It wasn’t thin enough, but Nyx knew she couldn’t do more before putting it where it needed to go.

The interesting bit will be seeing if I can do it and still stay
sane.

With one taloned hand, Nyx ripped open her own belly.

Hellfire flooded in, and for a moment the pain nearly drove Nyx back into madness. She clung to her sanity with a will stronger than the Hellstone box she had been caged in. Moving as quickly as she could, she slid the sheet up inside her body, under the rib cage.

Now… for the tricky… bit.

She focused on the soul. Since she couldn’t use her hands, Nyx used the force of her mind alone to stretch the thin sheet that was the woman’s soul around the inside of her ribs, encasing them, top and bottom. It would cover her heart, which was the seat of the soul, so that when Lucifer looked inside her body, all he would see was the child-murdering woman. It was a start, but she needed to do more.

Yeah… because that… didn’t hurt… enough…

Carefully, Nyx reshaped the soul further, spinning it like thread, and sending a thin line up her spine and into her own skull. The touch of it was agony of a peculiar kind—wretchedness, weakness—and Nyx convulsed.
How do they bear being themselves, these lowly
souls?

Still… hurts less than being in that
box…

Nyx stretched out the soul of the murdering mother even more—a slow and delicate process that made the woman shriek and Nyx shriek with her as she accepted each pathetic remnant of the woman’s being into her own Angelic core. When Nyx was done, the woman’s soul also buffered Nyx’s mind inside her skull. Now, any Angel looking inside her mind or soul would see only that of the woman, suffering as she was meant to.

Nyx’s Angelic flesh healed the hole in her belly, and the pain of having Hellfire inside her stopped. The pain of having another soul woven into her flesh became a dull ache, one that Nyx could manage as long as she simply did not care. The outside of her body and her mind still burned with the punishing pain of the Hellfire, but it was nearly time to end that.

And now I get to see if this will
work…

Nyx examined the soul inside her more closely. The soul, conscious for the first time in years of something other than loneliness and pain, cowered beneath the scrutiny.

“Please.”
Nyx heard the woman begging from her Hellstone prison.
“Please, let me go. I need to find my
children…”

Her name was Aleyd. Her children were from three different men she’d fucked in exchange for food and a place to sleep. She’d stolen food from others like a dog stealing bones. She’d managed to keep herself and her children alive for half a dozen years before the situation in her village became so desperate that no one would give them food or a place to stay. It had been mid-winter when, driven mad from grief and hunger, she lit the fire that killed them all, and burned the feed for half the village’s livestock. Her actions had resulted in the deaths of twenty other people.

“Please?”

Nyx winced at the soul’s desperate plea only for an instant. With an effort of will, Nyx crushed the momentary empathy she felt for Aleyd, a woman who had done as Nyx herself had done—who had risked eternal suffering for the chance to save her offspring.

Not the same,
though Nyx, and so she answered the soul’s plea for mercy by allowing it to share in all the pain the Lake of Fire was inflicting on her.

The soul screamed and collapsed in on itself.

“Speak to me again,” Nyx lied, “and everything I do to you, I will do to your children threefold.”

Aleyd fell silent.

And now for the last
step.

The transformation of her body was simple enough, but reshaping the soul she was holding inside her took more effort. At the end of it, though, she had the appearance of a large-eyed, emaciated woman, whose breasts, once full, were now flat and hanging down from years of starvation. Nyx made sure to create mortal organs inside her, and made sure her blood was red.

It’s
time.

Nyx let go of the bottom of the Lake and let the currents carry her. They pulled her body toward the shoreline and buoyed her up until she broke the surface.

Nyx screamed and flailed her head desperately.

It was a human scream of agony that did not even come close to expressing the amount of pain Nyx was in. But then, that wasn’t the point. Nyx kept screaming as long as her head remained above the Hellfire, and took the time to have a good look around. A hundred demons were on the nearest section of shore, surrounding a dozen of the Descended. The Descended were fishing, using a barbed Hellstone spear on a chain to catch souls and pull them to shore. Nyx screamed a little louder, then allowed herself to sink into the waves again.

The spear slammed into her flesh, impaling her and sending Hellfire into her body. Both she and the soul trapped inside her jolted with the pain, then again as the chain on the spear went taut, hauling her backward through the Hellfire toward the waiting Angels and demons. Nyx kept up her screaming and writhing as they pulled her to the shore. Rough hands grabbed her and hauled her out of the lake, throwing her five hundred meters from the shore. The demons raced after her and the Angels laughed.

Nyx hit the ground hard and let her body break as a mortal body would. Bones snapped and blood spurted. The demons howled in delight and fell upon her, biting and clawing and tearing away flesh. One of her breasts was ripped off immediately. The demons began fighting amongst themselves for the right to eat her, and Nyx crawled away, letting her body show Aleyd’s terror and pain.

The nearest Descended—a brute named Andromalius—picked her up by the leg and smashed her against the ground, destroying her face and spattering her blood and guts everywhere. Then he drew his flaming whip and applied it to her body, ripping the already-torn flesh as he yelled, “Get up, sinner! Get up and be judged! Get up or I’ll cut your legs off!”

After what Nyx had been through, it was no worse than mosquito bites. Still, she put on a proper show, screaming and struggling to rise, knowing that Andromalius was deliberately making it impossible for her to do so.

“I’ll teach you to do what you’re told!”

His sword came out and hacked through both of Nyx’s legs just below the knee. He grabbed her hair and pulled her upright, forcing her to walk on the bloody stumps of her knees. “You’re going to see Lucifer now, bitch. And if you think this is bad, wait until he gets done with you!”

Nyx/Aleyd cried, and Nyx forced her body to slow down its healing so it wouldn’t give the game away.

It was a half-mile to Nyx’s palace by mortal terms. Andromalius whipped, cut and beat her every step of the way. Demons scampered in and out, tearing at her flesh, never giving her a moment’s freedom from pain or suffering.

But then,
thought Nyx,
that is the whole purpose of Hell, isn’t
it?

They came to the line and Andromalius dropped her to the ground. The rocks cut into her flesh. He stopped beating her and drove the demons away. “You should be whole when you meet Lucifer,” he said.