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As mortals reckoned time, this one battle had been raging for some seventy-two years. The wider war itself had consumed centuries, further worsening the disconnect between The Jewel and Its Facets. In his brief respites from this lunacy, he had heard some whisper of the potential consequences of this.
Concerns for the post-victory epochs, he reminded himself, as a section of the line before him collapsed under the pressure of a Perversion. My concern should be mere survival.
His opponent approached swiftly, melting through the dracolich between them and leaving the titanic undead to dissolve into a bubbling morass. Its feathered wings suggested this was an angelic Perversion. This was especially concerning, since it would mean that this one had survived at least one engagement in a Heaven in order to travel to this place. Unlike lesser creatures, apparently able to spawn freely in an occupied territory, higher-order Imitations always manifested in the midst of battle.
An ever shifting claw-like appendage, barely real, struck out from the Perversion's central mass. His tail moved to parry. Fragments of Barathean steel, expertly alloyed by Nemuxite shapesmiths, fell away. For a fraction of a moment, there was no division between them, though mercifully he was not cut. His ichor roiled even so, confirming the incursion point of the Perversion.
Now he knew how to kill it. He stepped back, feigning weakness so that it would press its supposed advantage. Its feathers reached out for him on tendrils of pink flesh. From beyond them came a terrifying glimpse of the Perversion's body, still mostly obscured by its other pulsating weapons. As with all Imitations, it was merely a suggestion of the original, in this case a solar - one of Aeron, to judge by its faintly animal features.
It would be an Aeronite Perversion which breached into Barathus, he thought sourly.
He let his shield drop into the hungry feathers. They twisted inwards reflexively, ripping the shield apart, and thus triggering its magic. Chillflame enveloped the Perversion, causing no appreciable injury, but slowing the horror in its attack. Not much, granted, but enough to justify Mephistopheles' continued requisitions.
More importantly, enough to keep it from lashing out at the wave of lemures which fell upon it, dying by the hundreds upon contact to distract it just a little longer. One of the few advantages they had in this war was that Imitations could not differentiate between things that could and could not injure them.
The lemures had surrounded it, so the Perversion now turned all its focus onto them. This gave him the briefest, the most fleeting of opportunities. He let his spear drop, for it was of no use here. Instead, he braced himself for the pain and plunged his arm into the twisted flesh-like mass behind the deadly feathers. His armor disintegrated at once, but his scales did not. Such a mercy could not be.
Between his fingers he could feel the unbeating heart that granted life, for all that it was an organ bereft of artery or vein or vitality. He reached out, grasped it, squeezed. Without a sound, the Perversion folded into itself, crumpling out of existence like parchment in water.
Perhaps that specific individual had been enough, or perhaps critical mass had been reached elsewhere. As reserves moved in to replace the fallen and at least attempt to shield him from further harm, he saw that the legions were retreating. Their witless hordes, incapable of perceiving defeat, would no doubt continue to hurl themselves to suicidal ruin for some months yet.
For only the third time in this apparently unending war, Marchosias, Archdevil Primaris and Duke of Dudael province, clutching at the ruined stump of his arm, beheld a victory.
♢♢♢♢♢
The Incursion From Beyond was inexplicable. It made no sense. The structure of reality and its planes was not merely known, but described and mapped by the same gods whose first war had molded the universe - and that most precious Jewel at its heart - and who warred now in its defence.
Marchosias had personally witnessed Heshtail the Merciful emerge from his fastness to smite the Travesty of Caelestin and its attendant Caricatures. He had been discorporated as well, naturally, as had every other fiend within several miles. Even so, that had ended with a humiliating defeat.
Across the planes, a bloody stalemate was the best that could be reasonably achieved, and it was nonsensical. It was antithetical to reason. Even the continuation of the Ontological War was theoretically understandable. The Heavens against the Hells, primarily, but then the Neutral Powers would get involved, and everything would most likely come to a final and futile end through total and eternal mutual destruction.
That was something Marchosias could accept, could conceive of. But the Incursion From Beyond was not such a thing. The armies that massed against all reality were not such things as even immortal minds could grasp. It injured him to think on their impossible origin, the sheer cosmic abhorrence implied.
Beyond the Cocytus is Ontological Infinity, he reminded himself. The Boundary River shields the Facets, from Barathus to Aeron and back, from those annihilating purities. Not even the gods cross to the Far Shore, for that is their end also.
In the early days of the war, that mantra had helped. Now it did nothing for him. Marchosias could not help but accept that something profound was missing from their understanding of the universe, an admission that was inimical to him, yet undeniable.
His mind was brought back to the present as pain again flared in his missing arm, and he resisted the urge to rend the nearby flitterers. The sole surviving lemure of his battle with the Perversion automatically squelched forward, sensing his mood, but Marchosias held it back with a thought.
Their beatific passivity was even more offensive to him than their stinking sanctity, but the archdevil could not deny that the lowest of angels was far more skilled at healing than the highest of his devils. Besides, he needed his arm back if he was to return to the front. So he settled for baring his fangs at these serene celestial pigeons, a delightful acrid vapor seeping out, and they smiled compassionately at him in return.
"Enough," he growled at last, on seeing his elbow remanifest. "The rest will come soon and I have other matters in need of my attention."
The angels twittered impotently at him, but Marchosias brushed them aside. With a thought and a word, he stepped from the battlefield's wreckage to the antechamber of his mobile fortress some two thousand leagues distant. He had been advised to set up camp further back from the front lines, but as that advice had come from Dispater-- via the coward's most recent and most ambitious little mouthpiece, the upstart Tytyvyllys-- he had disregarded it outright.
He noted distantly that he had brought the lemure with him. The mindless blob of hell-stuff squidged obediently behind him. The sole instinctive desire of its kind was to miraculously excel in the eyes of a superior and thus be promoted, placing them in near-eternal debt to their sponsor.
All devils started out this way. Nearly all. A very few were either so old as to predate the system altogether, or were cosmically unlikely chance emergences from other events of evil significance. Marchosias himself had been slowly working his way up since the end of the Ontological War, in which he assumed he had fought as a lemure. If he'd had a sponsor, he did not know them - perhaps they had died before his promotion was completed - and he himself had never deigned to sponsor a lesser fiend.
Strange that I should think on this now, he said to himself. Oh, wonderful. This epoch just keeps getting better and better.
Beneath an animated fresco stitched from the souls of blackguards, those vilest of paladins who had not merely forsworn their vows but died unrepentant of then living in opposition to them, the Keruv Israfel awaited him in stony silence.
♢♢♢♢♢
"Adramelech was asking after you," Marchosias said, squinting against the holy light which flashed from Israfel's eyes. "Domestic problems again?"
The Keruv seemed to become fire, incoherent syllables of liquid hate dripping from his lips. Then his better nature asserted itself. He stood tall and proud again, a model of celestial virtue. Lesser fiends often confused virtue for weakness. Lesser, not because of their rank or power, but because of this and other such misapprehensions.
"We are all engaged in a greater struggle," Israfel said sternly. "Petty grievances must be set aside for a time."
"Minions, attend us!" roared Marchosias, deliberately taking the opportunity to set aside his own petty grievance that the Keruv represented.
Recognizing the insult, Israfel stiffened even further. All Keruvai were warlike at heart, but Israfel stood apart from the rest. There were some who whispered that the Ineffable Host of Efferenus answered to Israfel first and to Bestra second, for the Lady of Goodness was too pure and kind a being to truly command the Heavenly army.
The archfiend settled down to think on this, stretching out with devilish sensuousness on a great fluted divan irritatingly devoid of its typical cushions. They, like most luxuries in this age, had been repurposed for the war effort. He already missed the self-pitying moans of the souls from which they had been fashioned. Marchosias vaguely recalled they had been the founders of an ascetic elven secret society, who had naturally indulged their hedonistic whims whilst exploiting their gullible converts to harass or even persecute those who were just having harmless good fun.
Thirteen imps now scurried around him, polishing his scales, applying cursed unguents to his arm, celebrating his achievements, cooing over his majesty, and generally acting as proper servants in the presence of their master. Marchosias let one eye roam critically over the photically bright but personably dull archons which were accompanying Israfel in their grim, predictable, stoic, self-righteous way.
He could feel making him more boring just by their presence - even though he knew full well that was not something which could happen. His eye landed on the lemure again, which had placed itself between him and the celestials as though it stood any chance against them. In fact, it was at far greater risk here. Within a standard tenday, all the lemures killed by the Perversion would reform themselves. If this one died to a celestial attack however, it was permanently dead, the same as any of the higher fiends killed on their native plane.
"The Siege of Morg continues," Israfel pressed on. "Tiamat felled thirteen Distortions before the trap was sprung. A pair of Subversions, straight from Malebolgia. She is recovering even now, but it was too close. The Dragonslaughter Peaks are almost entirely lost."
Marchosias smiled. "Those poor demons. What torments and struggles they endure! That I should live to bear witness to such dark days at long last come to pass."
His imp attendants sniggered dutifully, though honestly. Israfel's archons more properly repressed the sardonic smiles they wanted to wear. Israfel himself was unamused.
"We are losing too much of Malor for mere strength of arms to reclaim," he said. "And I see mere Perversions are bringing about a more literal situation here."
Now it was the turn of the Duke of Hell to stiffen, to resist his impulses, to take the insult and move on. He could always point out that a hellish Perversion would not have been such a danger to the archfiend, that the war was progressing in the Hells and not regressing as in the Heavens, that Israfel had himself never faced anything more deadly than a half-crippled Deviation. Better to keep such truths for a later time when the damage they would cause would not place Marchosias himself at risk.
Setting aside petty grievances indeed, he thought, but aloud he said: "The best I can do is to dispatch Amduscias to reinforce Ephialtes at...is he still at Solers?...and from there push out to the Mons Modrunus."
"I can request additional armaments from Lord Aknor if the Hellknights are sent out," Israfel considered the options. "Only token forces, almost wholly Mockeries interspersed with the occasional Digression, have been assaulting Gelumatrixia. Supply lines are unobstructed. We may even be able to launch a pincer attack."
Marchosias leaned forward, suddenly very interested. "The Deluges?"
Israfel nodded. "Astarte sent a report claiming to have secured the last of them. I am to confirm this after I am done here. If Concordia is truly cleansed, we have a chance to bring in reinforcements. A single success is all we need."
This was certainly true. For whatever reason, the Incursion From Beyond had not been able to penetrate the Liminal Sheath. The last reports sent by Abzu and his jengu before their most recent discorporation suggested that the movement of the Imitations was limited by the Five Rivers, specifically the Cocytus. With the exception of the Lethe, only their planar echoes flowed through Erebus itself, and no further - and so too was the advance of the Incursion From Beyond halted.
The Jewel had been totally spared. Its Inner Facets - Erebus, Tanis, even Concordia by some reckonings - had suffered only mildly. The Outer Facets had been almost totally consumed by the war. However, until Concordia itself was fully secured, all the forces trapped in either Penumbra or Feywild were useless to the war. But beyond that...did they have the strength to ensure the plane was fully purged?
Marchosias came to a decision.
♢♢♢♢♢
The pit fiend shifted uncomfortably in place, a grim foreboding creeping through him. He knew well enough that this was a terrible idea. He had said nothing, of course, for the last devil to occupy his position had been relieved of it as a result-- Marchosias the Soulstitcher was not known for his tolerance for impertinent underlings-- but instead merely devised scheme after scheme after scheme for his survival if this endeavor failed.
Behind him, as modified as he for total silence, the legion of his peers awaited. That too was humiliating. A proper pit fiend was supposed to be an awe-inspiring colossus of muscle and talon and fury and hate, able to intimidate even greater demons and bring elder celestials to their knees with but a glare of promised torment.
Instead, their mouths had been sealed away for total silence. Their talons were embedded in a thick pelt of soft fur. Their tails were lashed to their horns or around their necks, forcing stillness. They were crawling on all fours! Not even a magical aura of silence about them lest there was a Distortion nearby to sense it.
Worst of all was the knowledge that it had not been necessary for he himself to be here as part of this insane gambit. A single pit fiend, the most pathetic and worthless of them all, undeserving of the hellish majesty that came with the station, had been ordered to stay behind and administrate on certain matters. For such a position of authority and influence, no matter how temporary, to be given to that lowly Belial of all devils...
In his mind, in all their minds, the orders of their master sounded again. Geryon put aside his myriad dark thoughts for a moment, shifting his main attention back to the mission. It would not do to fail, for Duke Marchosias was personally leading the assault.
The plan was simple. Infiltrate the Spheres of Malebolgia. Eliminate the weak Imitations at their heart. Draw all the power they could to strengthen themselves. Proceed to upset the delicate balance of this war in their favor. Ride the wave of triumph long into the future.
What could possibly go wrong? Geryon asked himself. This has been tried before. We only lost Argus then. A scion of Nij and kin to Asmodeus himself, ripped to pieces along with his army.
They pressed forward in the silence and in the dark. Technically, the first part of the plan was already completed. The Imitations had some limited capacity for thought, if they had more advanced entities in their ranks, but such complicated matters as patrol routes and sensor spells were beyond them. The Incursion From Beyond was so successful despite this for the simple reason that they were apocalyptically lethal to the denizens of the planes. Sending Argus on the mission had proven to be its fatal downfall, for his colossal bulk was not intended for stealth.
Wait, no, that's not right, Geryon thought. Argus was not part of the attack. He was already here. The Spheres were his responsibility. The Hundred-Eyed One kept watch over all. He was allowed access, lured in by apparent emptiness, and then killed by...
From around them came the unmistakable sounds of Caricatures. Vast and terrible, they rose up in anticipation of another glut. Marchosias was a mere archdevil and no Godsliver Fiend, but he and the pit fiends would serve to take the edge off their hunger for a short while. And if Caricatures were present, that could only mean somewhere beyond them, no doubt basking in the very center of the Spheres, would be the Travesty of Barathus itself. This enterprise could only end in failure.
Geryon reverted to his standard form instantly, and not a moment too soon. From the walls emerged Deviations and Digressions, their shapes faintly familiar but offensively different. The Deviation nearest him was a lurid green hue, vibrant yellow-red splotches marking its hide with chaotic patterns that belonged on no lawful being.
Reflexively, Geryon lashed out and by purest luck his claws avoided the monochromatic flesh. Though it looked soft and malleable, it possessed an adamantine hardness, and the angles were all wrong, obtuse behaving like acute, curves acting as points, parallel acting as perpendicular. The only way to injure a Deviation was to shear away at its essence from the 'inside out', using its own spatial abnormality against it. Now this one died, its body dividing to infinity and imploding outwards in a helical paradox.
Most of the other pit fiends were not so fortunate as he. Geryon bellowed a call to retreat, asserting his authority over the struggling devils. Their escape route out of the Spheres was blocked, but they could hide in the region for a time until an opportune moment came. It was not going to be pleasant, but they could survive by their wits - and if need came to it, carefully siphoning Ontological energy from a Sphere to empower themselves.
Enough fought their way to him to reassure Geryon that this plan could work. The last the pit fiend saw of his supposed master who had led them to this slaughter - no matter that he could not have known the Caricatures were currently present and would sniff him out-- was Marchosias in mid-leap, trident raised, wearing an expression of primal hate.
Then the Caricatures closed around him, and Geryon turned away.
♢♢♢♢♢
Truthfully, firmly, but very respectfully, Belial insisted: "I do not know what has become of Duke Marchosias. He ordered me to be responsible for certain duties here, then vanished. If I am to speculate?... yes, of course... then I would say he went to find that deserter Geryon and the rest of his traitors. They all left first. I knew nothing of whatever matter it was."
The pain washed over him once more, and for a brief moment Belial envied the souls that passed through the Hells. This was an agony they could not endure, but were subjected to to accelerate their decomposition into a purer form of energy, ready to be remolded into a new devil. But devils themselves could not escape - and Belial knew he would suffer under his lords for many thousands of centuries yet even under the most optimistic of scenarios.
At long last however, his honesty and submission adequately conveyed, the pain receded. Belial kept himself prostrate. He knew better than meet the eyes of his direct superior for fear of punishment. To meet the eyes of this higher devil would be to invite unimaginable calamity. Their gentle hissing voice filled him with dread unlike anything he himself could inflict.
"Continue as you were ordered to," judged Asmodeus. "And Dudael shall continue to meet quota. Ascend."
Belial felt his selves changing, expanding, from the merely physical manifestation he wore as a convenience to the spiritual truth that gave it motion and thought. His promotion was as swift as it was painless. Pit fiend no more, Belial stood now, his eyes still averted, though not so much as before. Instinctive understanding of his promotion, conditional though it was, informed his courage now.
Soon after, with certain further orders given, Asmodeus departed. Belial stood alone in the still, silent emptiness, pondering his future. After a time, he called for his imps to attend, and reclined upon the divan which had once belonged to the former master of Dudael. A solitary lemure undulated aimlessly around him, devoid of orders. Belial wondered why a Duke of Hell had deigned to have such a lowly specimen brought here, and reflected sourly that many had wondered similar of him.
A typically twisted thought came to him then. Certain documents were needed, and a small portion of debt incurred, but Dudael could afford those. And when it was done, a bearded devil with glaive in hand stood before Belial, awaiting confirmation of name and orders, in the submissive pose that the newest archdevil remembered and hated so well from his own millennia of unappreciated effort.
"You are Marchosias," Belial confirmed to the new devil. "Serve dutifully and in excellence, and you may yet continue to ascend. Take a knee, o Little Duke!"
Marchosias knelt, eyes to the floor, knowing better than to look his superior in the eye. He was the lowest devil here, and as was the natural way of things, already he yearned for the greater influence which would come with being an imp...