idolpro | TEMPTATION OF ANGELS, which is named KHRYSAOR: A Heart Game (I)

Both of them turn to towards you. The woman tilts her head a touch, as though interested but unsurprised, but does not answer immediately.

The man's voice is heavy as stone. Like stone, it is hard, but not in a way that is unkind—simply in a way that does not compromise itself for anything as irrelevant as social niceties.

"This is Chancel Leli."

On the air, you think you can hear something like a melody.

[ she turns her head slightly, like she might hear that song better—what is it? ]

Is there a girl—

...no, a sword. Is there a sword, here? Though she might not look like one.

You listen more closely to the song. And you hear it—an impossible melody, and nearly as impossible to describe, though if you tried, perhaps you would say this:

Hell is always with you. 

You won’t realize that until you’re looking back—until you’re in a dark and empty time, a hurting time, a ruined and compromised time in your life. You won’t realize it until you understand one day that you’ve failed, that you’ve wasted yourself and your opportunities. Then you’ll look back and you’ll see that Hell was always there.

It was with you when you made excuses.
 It was with you when you didn’t bother to care. 
In your self-righteousness and your laziness and your willful stupidity; in your casualness with the things you cared about, in your willingness to give up your own good fortunes in order to hurt somebody else; in your pettiness, in your rushes to judgment, in every mistake you regret and will always regret.

God wasn’t with you, then, if He even exists. Cneph, the closest thing to God we have evidence of, the will that made the Ash and flame from nothingness—Cneph wasn’t with you. Not Heaven. Not the Wild, not the Rules, not even, probably, the Game.

In those times when you were your most petty and small and twisted, only Hell was there.

Hell is what loves you even when you’re wrong. Hell is what loves us even when we’re bad.

And it’s fire and brimstone and poison and rotting things, too. It’s a punishment ground and torment-realm at the base and bottom of the Ash. It’s corrupting the Fallen Angels, turning them into monsters, and the human souls that wind up there aren’t any too well off themselves. But that isn’t the core of it. That isn’t the heart of it. It’s just the price we pay to have something like Hell in the world at all.

For loving the monsters were the folk of Hell condemned. 
For standing up for Caligula, for Pol Pot, for the tarantula hawk wasp ... did the Fallen Angels fall. 
Therefore it is that we are never without our witnesses, no matter how terrible it is that we may be. We are never without something to look upon us and give honor to our suffering and our mistakes. We may tumble to the bottom of the Ash, forsaken of and by all other things, and still we will exist, and still we will not fall into the Not, because there is a Hell.

You may take that as a comfort or as a horror. Most likely it is both.

There are times in your life when you’d like to cradle despair against your heart, when you want the 𝓝ot, the nothing, the emptiness of the world, anything to stop the pain. And then it’s a cruel joke that you can never be alone, that you can never get away from Hell and its poisons and its flames. But there are also times when you are lost in the darkness, and longing for the brightness, and the goodness, and you cannot find them; and in such times, there is, at least, a Hell beside you in the dark.

It is the baseline of the world. It is the darkness that reaches upwards towards the brightness. It is the fire that longs to embrace us all. It is the final company for all of us, at the bottom of the Ash;

The work of Hell is holy, in this life.

The pair don't answer you right away and instead wait for you to approach, a choice that could be considered either an indication of patience and discretion or else faintly bored indifference.

The woman speaks first, this time. Up close, you can see that her skin is olive-toned, but with a strange sort of sheen to it at certain angles, like starlight or like the way light refracts through morning new.

"Right, you must be one of Kiri's." She has an alto voice and with a tone set to "no-nonsense" as default. "I suppose she's taking after you, Harlowe, if she's bringing home Treasures."

You can definitely hear the capitalization, there.

[ it takes her a while to process the song, anyway. that's what Hellfire means by Hell—and, to an extent, she hates it. she has to hate things that love the monsters.

but there's a wideness in God's mercy like the wideness of the sea, and it's not so different a feeling, is it?

but then, sharply, at the woman's words: ]

I don't belong to anyone.

"Right." The man sounds vaguely bored. "You're here, though, aren't you? And you've got her marks."

He nods his head, indicating those new scars that appeared on your body.

"That's Treasure."

That's not—

...they were just there. After I—

.........you were the one who broke her.

"I can only kill with an axe."

He says this like it's an explanation in and of itself—though in fact there's a subtle extra emphasis there: only kill.

"It's what Leli wanted."

...she's talked about Leli before. Like she loves her. Why did she...

"That's how it's done."

The woman has her chin angled as she considers you in a way that's very obviously an assessment. She seems like the sort who expects most things to disappoint her, but there's still an edge of sympathy in her voice as she cuts in—or maybe that's just the fact that she seems to have any investment at all in diplomacy that you're hearing.

She goes on, a touch more gently. "When an Imperator like Leli wants to make a new Noble, there are only two ways she can place a shard of reality inside whoever it is she's chosen: either they've got to eat a human heart, or they've got to die."

A beat. "And we couldn't exactly feed anything to a sword."

[ there's like

a really long pause while she processes that information and "eat a human heart." ]

On second thought I'm really quite glad I didn't have to re-live the experience of eating a human heart.

So it's a... re-forging, of sorts.

"Harlowe and I went through the same thing."

The man—Harlowe, evidently—grunts an acknowledgment, and continues to fix you with his stony gaze.

"But yes, I suppose you could call it that. Maybe it's no wonder, either, why Kiri stayed... cracked like that—" The woman's expression goes a little distant. "—considering the shard Leli gave her."

She shakes her head a moment, as if forcing herself to focus on the here and now.

"I'm Adalet, by the way."

[ contemplative, for a moment— ]

Well, I'm glad of someone available to answer my questions. I'm Hope, which everyone seems to take issue with, but—

A shard of reality, as you said before? What was it?

For the first time, Adalet seems to struggle with her words. "....Scars. Afer Leli... Fell... she made Kiri into Scars."

Harlowe is silent beside her, staring past you, thin lines showing on his face where he clenches his jaw.

Hellfire—Kiri said she was "of Hell," but—

You mean to say, Leli is a fallen angel.

Both their faces go hard and distant.

"...Why are you here."

Oh, don't look at me like that, I have the same question.

Kiri seems to be in some sort of trouble. Having... a bit of a crisis, perhaps? And, well—

We...

[ her phrasing hovers on the tip of a word, and then— ]

...care for her a great deal.

"...A crisis." Adalet echoes the word, voice softer than before.

There aren't just aconite and lotus growing here, actually. Here and there, you can see little clumps of white flowers: snowdrops—the upturned, six-petaled variety that some call Star of Bethlehem. Nearby, a wild rose briar has begun to grow up around a fallen log. (Were those roses there the last time you looked?)

"Yes. Yes, that's a word for it."

It's lonely to feel like there is no place in the world where you fit, even if the place you've landed is a friendly one. It's part of the makings of greatness, I suppose, but all the same.

...does she like flowers?

"She likes killing." This unapologetic bluntness is apparently typical for Harlowe.

"But we all know some Botany. That's what you're seeing, with all this." He jerks his chin in the direction of a clump of aconite and star of bethlehem.

[ squints ]

Like the science?

Harlowe looks at you like you've said something blatantly stupid.

"No. Flower magic. Use the meanings, you channel the flower like it exists in Heaven."

Oh—

"As above, so below."

A nod.

"Like that. And here's the situation: you can only stick so much Destiny in one soul. Two flowers." He holds up two fingers, for emphasis. "Not four."

Harlowe pauses, then meets your eyes very deliberately. "But there is always a choice."

Aconite, lotus, wild rose, star of Bethlehem—

There's too much. So she has to decide which ones she ought to be?

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