Chapter 10: Chapter 11: The Lady Beguiles an Angel of the Lord

This is not going as expected.

"Well," the Nameless Terror of the Forsaken Reach whispers, playful tendrils of sound-heat running in your cheeks. "I do hate to say it, but you're late. Party's over, cherry. Where is your god, anyway?"

You can hear the lower case. It itches. You were told what to expect: a maelstrom laden by the collapsing corners and screaming dreams of broken worlds. A push through its mind-scything cyclic winds to the vast blue plains and the bladework city, then the sanctum at its core with the six-horned silhouette upon her silvery throne before the stolen nova.

But you're already on the blue plains, and there's no city in sight beneath the binary stars--the azure and the amber. Only brief impressions of pillars and balustrades hardening out of mist-gusts and collapsing away again.

And Her--no, her. Just her. Hiding from you.

"Didn't you read my dance card on the way in?" the Lady laughs. "I said that each angel must be chaperoned by their god. Though of course, I was very generous, and let each god oversee as many of their angels as they wished. Most of them brought all their highest."

"Enough of this!" you say. "Face me!"

"Face me!" The Lady echoes your voice back to you from within your manifest breast. She giggles, and the vibrations tickle your throat. "But I am, dove. You're standing in me and I'm breathing you in--or is it the other way around?"

A drifting, a warp, a sickened wave of coronas at the edges of your sight. You turn and cleave the air with a sword of heavenly fire.

"Which of the manifold derivations do you serve?" she asks. "Oh, silly me. Your sword has crosses right there in the flames. The master pattern.~" She emerges at your elbow from the negative space behind your blade, all weight and warmth and supple clawed hands clinging coyly to your arm. "And you've been told that I'm a stowaway from the Garden of Eden. Fallen, but of the same hierarchy."

Conditioned response has your mouth open to speak already. Except... her words stir something... cold. Creeping.

The rattling you felt whenever you answered the prayers of a preacher who called you to smite other children of the Most High. An off-note, a--

--she laughs at you. "Aww, cherry, it's just a little dissonance! You can call it what it is.” She reaches her hands from inside your sight to press your cheeks. You reach up to pull her accursed talons away, pull them out to free yourself of their soothing heat like a summer dream, but she is touching you while you're touching yourself. Her hands are not in yours. Your fingers don't pass through hers. They're not in the same place, but they are parallel to it.

"What... what is this..." you stammer.

"This? This is a parlor trick," the Lady laughs. "My, my... dear heaven-dove. If you can't handle this revelation, you'd never have lasted."

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Blue in the corners. It's tinting the fire in the blade of your sword.

"Last through what?" you demand.

"The great battle, the war of a thousand years and a single heartbeat that will be written of in a thousand tomes too sacred for a single person to read," she says. "I was in such fine form, too." A pout enters her voice. "As I said, you're late to the party. Gods and angels beyond counting came here to dance with me. Instead, they danced FOR me. But I'm afraid they didn't have the endurance, dove--not one-one millionth. It's just you left."

And you are the visions of their ending, you are the last glint that will ever pass through shards of stained glass from the shattered cathedral before they splash into the murk of the ever-sea--

No. No, you will not be these things. You refuse. This is an empty blue plain.

"She is empty," the Lady sighs, echoing your thought before you think it. "And your next words would be, 'Then where are the signs of these broken hosts? Any demon can claim she has the power to do these things. Any demon would.'" She scoffs. "Any demon would not, but go on."

You keep your peace. Oh, that's good, dove! You're learning! No, I'm not mocking you, here in the tingly little center of you. You just want me to be. It's less dangerous if I'm mocking you.

"But I'm not," I say, cupping your cheeks. Here I am, facing you. Like you asked. "Do you know what makes the power of a god?" I ask. This dizzying heat you feel is a little something called lust. The tendrils creeping from my clasping hands through these lovely feather-tuft cheeks into your brain, making a brain in your little angel head for me to creep into, the blue fire of Machrae Diir in your halo--also lust.

"The divine tautology. The god’s power to say that it is the power of a god," I answer for you. "And you can stand under it and think it could only ever be a god's power. But I've learned how to say otherwise. I, too, am that I am. I will be what I will be. And you?"

You expected many things. You didn't expect me to look so simple.

A full diamond face, snow-white skin, blue crystal runs and spirals to frame it. Sigils glowing on my six horns, and such a charming blue rose in the gently-wavy locks of my jet-black hair holding starry night.

Your god, especially that god, so afraid of the lower case He tells you he must always be God... he's such a creature of appearances. I don't appear like a threat, so it's too late now.

"And you," I repeat, "will be mine." The black glisten on my lips?

Oh, that's corruption.

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