You've heard this song before, in someone else's memory. And now, you hear it for yourself:
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;
It's the woman speaking first. 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. Her voice is alto, and no-nonsense, though there's something bone-tired in her too.
"Sounds like you know her pretty well, if you're calling her that."
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. You can recognize him, actually: the man with the axe—the executioner. The one who had been called "Harlowe."
"Or else you're here for an abhorrent weapon." His hand rests, deceptively at ease, on an axe that hangs from his belt.
The man's expression doesn't change, but hand no longer looks quite so ready to grasp that axe—though someone like that is never really unarmed. You know the type.
"She'd be right about it. You're more her Familia than us, now."
Adalet's expression darkens, her voice taking on the kind of carefully controlled quality of someone who is only speaking neutrally through conscious effort.
"Gave all our Shards to different Imperators. Without hers, Kiri was... just shattered pieces of metal. And apparently Lord Entropy wasn't interested in repairing an abhorrent weapon."
She meets your eyes. "We fucked up. Familia Leli doesn't exist anymore."
Your hands brush the blossoms, and for a moment you feel yourself breaking— —no, Falling—
There was a moment when all of it changed. For her; for you. A break as sharp as the cutting edge of a sword; as lasting as a scar. And all the World could only be, then, a before and an after. Or perhaps you should instead say: you see the World in a way you could not have seen it, before.
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Re: CHANCEL LELI
On the air, you think you can hear something like a melody.
Re: CHANCEL LELI
This is...the chancel, isn't it?
1/2
Re: CHANCEL LELI
It's the woman speaking first. 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. Her voice is alto, and no-nonsense, though there's something bone-tired in her too.
Re: CHANCEL LELI
also they kind of hate it.
the stand there for awhile, silent as their ears bob up and down, and then: ]
Where's Kiri Hellfire Cut Through All Foes Khrysaor, Temptation of Angels?
Re: CHANCEL LELI
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. You can recognize him, actually: the man with the axe—the executioner. The one who had been called "Harlowe."
"Or else you're here for an abhorrent weapon." His hand rests, deceptively at ease, on an axe that hangs from his belt.
Re: CHANCEL LELI
Of course I know her well. She's a member of my pack. Or - I suppose she'd say I'm part of her familia.
Re: CHANCEL LELI
"She'd be right about it. You're more her Familia than us, now."
Re: CHANCEL LELI
Re: CHANCEL LELI
Adalet's expression darkens, her voice taking on the kind of carefully controlled quality of someone who is only speaking neutrally through conscious effort.
"Gave all our Shards to different Imperators. Without hers, Kiri was... just shattered pieces of metal. And apparently Lord Entropy wasn't interested in repairing an abhorrent weapon."
She meets your eyes. "We fucked up. Familia Leli doesn't exist anymore."
Re: CHANCEL LELI
Re: CHANCEL LELI
You know what a person sounds like when they're in love.
Re: CHANCEL LELI
Maybe. Or maybe things just get worse, and you've only ever made them better. It's best to not decide things until they're decided.
Re: CHANCEL LELI
"For this version of us, everything has changed."
And star of bethlehem snowdrops blanket the grass around you.
Re: CHANCEL LELI
[ they kneel to touch the flowers. ]
1/2
—no, Falling—
Re: CHANCEL LELI
Adalet pauses as you touch the flowers, waiting patiently.
"So. What do you think?"