Amdirlain’s PoV - Deep planes

  Her insight-fueled refinement had continued to cascade from the thought that had set it in motion. The primordials she’d left to ambush her foe were ripping each other apart in their clash. Their unrestrained destructiveness echoed past her concealed location, invoking memories of the flux of the Far Chaos. Images of tiny realm seeds floating beside the imploded shell of a realm that had fallen to heat death danced through her meditations.

  Though part of her awareness had remained on alert for the approach of foes, she only took in the full extent of the shifts once her attention turned outward again. It was then she felt the balance of the forces that had altered through her, and the next set of natures her plan had called her to gain. Creation and destruction spun in balance within her, their continual loop inside her modelled after the Yin and Yang energy transformations of the Jade Court. She could feel that the constellations and nebulae in her eyes had shifted their patterns, influenced by the primary focal points she’d acknowledged within her trance.

  [Natures gained:

  - Creation

  - Destruction

  - Transformation

  - Energy

  Note: It seems Maker had some tricks to share.]

  First goal achieved, but I’m going to have to balance this set evenly, or I could allow one of them to overpower the others and throw off my path forward. Destruction is transformative when harnessed right. The realms are continually destroying the Far Chaos to create souls and places for the mortals we shelter. I wonder how Danu would feel if she thought of the Far Chaos as a forest. Would she find it acceptable that we’re doing slash-and-burn agriculture? Or is it permissible since it benefits her? Either way, we’re fighting an uphill battle with frequent reversals.

  A blob on the ground before her shifted between elements and states in a random pattern as Kháos regarded her.

  “It’s okay, Kháos. I prefer to make this trip alone.”

  “Yet you might not gain as much out of it without my causing you headaches for you to grow past.”

  “Maker has multiple training paths to help me.”

  “But what’s wrong with some extra minor challenges?”

  “Kháos,” Amdirlain grumbled. “If I give you something to do, will you keep it secret?”

  The blob transformed into a pair of giant bunny ears. “All ears, no mouth.”

  “Yet you still speak.”

  “It’s as close to a commitment as I can get. I might change my mind as soon as my form changes. Plus, we both know that Gideon already knows whatever you’re about to ask me, as soon as you came up with your task.”

  “Well, since you don’t want to know how to eat an Eldritch, that’s on you.” Amdirlain yawned and stood up.

  “Eat?” Kháos chirped. “Weren’t you supposed to be doing a planar alignment before taking care of Balnérith, eroding the patch?”

  “I’m finding the right place to plant my feet, since I’ve got my fulcrum and lever.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Amdirlain rubbed between Kháos’s ears, and they turned into a rabbit. “You don’t need to know, since it doesn’t involve you.”

  “Are you going to tell me about the Eldritch eating?”

  “Sorry, the moment has passed.”

  Kháos melted into a puddle and spread across the rocky ground. “So mean.”

  “I could give you a fun game instead.”

  “You want me to work. Don’t you?” An image formed between them, of Ori floating in a void with lines of golden ichor streaming from her as a galaxy formed. “She said that was the most fun ever.”

  “I haven’t got that memory yet, but if you don’t want to be a part of my plan, just tell me.”

  A tendril waved reprovingly. “That isn’t what I said. Tell me what you want.”

  “You could say I want you to knock a ball off a table.”

  Bubbles popped and frothed around them, and a pixelated version of a black hole formed.

  “Just push it anyway?” The words echoed with Kháos’s frothing form.

  “Towards the gates of Hell. Then, when they link through the closest Portal to Gehenna.”

  “Why?”

  “Reasons.” Amdirlain crouched before Kháos, and they reformed into a black cat and head-butted her knee. “I know you’ll have fun watching them scramble.”

  “Alright then, just this once.” Kháos dissolved through the floor and was gone.

  “The purpose is the fireworks,” Gideon projected.

  Amdirlain straightened and let her leg heal, rather than reforming it.

  Yep, as far as Hell goes, it’s not to hurt them at all. Fireworks look pretty and they distract from life’s troubles, and Hell could do with some distraction. I can imagine their minds spinning in circles of double-guessing, plotting, or ignoring it as an assault that was a gigantic failure, but that won’t matter. What they make of it doesn’t bother me. I need to restore the original planar structure they manipulated, but its shift has nothing to do with them.

  “Nothing to do with them yet! Anyway, you know Kháos will come back here whining that you didn’t tell them how to eat Eldritch.”

  Yes, I suppose you’ll have to put up with some really annoying attempts to pry an answer from you. That someone might annoy you for a change, shock!

  Gideon huffed. “Some forces have learnt you’re in the Outlands. They had their spies looking for signs of your return.”

  With all the patrols escorting souls, it’s no surprise that one saw my Domain and passed word along. Are you allowed to be more specific than ‘some forces’?

  “If I’m specific, your preparations will be too narrow. Now that some have found out about you, they won’t be the last.”

  They’ll be the challenges that drive my daughters to grow stronger. Battles leave less time for a song to build, as the Anar and Lóm? learned to their regret.

  In the Domain, her Avatar passed the information along, and the former Lóm? started adding new layers to their planning. Her growth had caused the Avatar’s capacity to double, and it made interactions with them and her daughters faster. She used the Avatar’s location in her Domain as a guide. Amdirlain separated energy for another Avatar, its base form modelled after the Taur? body she’d used to farewell Verdandi. It would take a few days to complete the formation, but starting it was a ‘just in case’, not through any immediate need. However, having a spy to stick her nose into Livia’s problem worlds carried a particular temptation.

  Since days had passed, she double-checked the memories that had trickled in to see if her avatars had missed anything obvious to her. Time spent with her family felt fragile and precious against the years she’d spent studying with Maker. Through her Avatar, she’d learned more of the celestials’ individual quirks and her Avatar’s limits. Interestingly, time with the Enyali? choirs had shown that the limited capacity of the avatars proved helpful in fine-tuning the efficient use of powers and skills. Similarly, on Yúla, the cautious approach the new speakers and Cén? took to the group’s presence amused Amdirlain, even though it was understandable.

  They’re waiting to see if our presence actually brings about a worthwhile change following the disruption we caused in our initial days. I need to do something besides shifting sand and teaching Affinity attunement on Yúla; maybe I should go hunting to stretch my Perception and other skills. Should I have chosen the weaker avatars to challenge myself?

  The battle behind was still ongoing. With the fight unplanned, the ambushers struck at each other as much as the Primordial who’d blocked Amdirlain’s path. Her senses now stretched further, and the route ahead to the next Plane showed clearly. An exercise of will smoothed the erratic energy flows that had prevented the Sisterhood from teleporting or plane shifting between locations. The cavern’s end looked like a deformed bowl, further mutilated by a twisting impact that drilled through it. With no ground in sight beyond the threshold, she slipped across, poised to reply to any ambush. Entities that matched the strength of the others who’d challenged her opted to move away. Throughout the planes she’d crossed, the density of the Primordial energies pushed against her, yet the thick corruption that dominated in the Abyss’s upper planes was absent.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Even after she passed the depth she needed for leverage, she continued onwards, driven by a desire to see the realm’s wound before she tackled another task. Throughout her descent, she passed primal beings who couldn’t see through her concealment. Some beings greater than her sensed a nascent Destruction nature and shied away from testing her strength once they were sure her course avoided their domains.

  Ori instinctively had a safer nature; everything expressed as music meant emotions were just another form of energy, not influential in my overall direction. This route means I have to mind my balance.

  A dozen odd planes later, she paused before a threshold that restrained a thick, clinging darkness. The metaphysical weight that pressed hungrily against the threshold blocked her senses and devoured the light from the forest of green luminescent mushrooms that surrounded her. With her fingers crossed, hoping that only the watery Plane she expected awaited, Amdirlain stepped forward. Her fingers almost touched the barrier when a warning from the Outlands prompted her to calculate the transition across hundreds of planes.

  ? ? ? ? ? ?

  Lilith’s PoV - Gates of Hell

  The actual gates of Hell were artificial defensive constructions, one on either side of the watery Portal that allowed passage to the Plane. For millennia—since a planar change—the Portal had connected to Hades instead of Gehenna, and the forces that had manipulated the planar connection were still unknown. A sense of eager anticipation had drawn her from a lover’s thrusts to hover above the mountain cleft in which the Portal to Hell was nestled.

  Covering the top of a vast, shallow area thousands of kilometres across, its size was still hard-pressed to handle the troop movements. With her dress reformed, she watched on while troops flooded into it. An almost hurried withdrawal before a light-distorting mass that now rolled towards them across the grey plain of Hades. Effused with the energies of a destroyed Domain, it had been an inconceivably distant phenomenon eating up Hades.

  Now it was a threat for which they hadn’t prepared. With the mass of dozens of galaxies, it chewed at the fabric of dimensions. She could sense it swallowing the demonic armies that minutes earlier had been besieging Hell’s outer fortifications. It rolled closer until the leading edge of gravity shaved stones from the first wall, only for it to execute an impossible sideways roll suddenly. With the leading edge barely brushing the first wall, it pulled in rocks and snatched free abandoned equipment, but its underworld energies reached further still.

  Hell’s Portal shivered and bent beneath the planar energy within that mass. Though the leading edge of the black hole was still thousands of light-seconds away, it had come close enough to set hooks deep into the Portal. Now, as the black hole continued to move along the course of the outer wall, the pressure within the connection between Hades and Hell torqued higher. While others celebrated their close call and watched the mass destroy more demons, Lilith listened to Phaedra’s desires echoing through Kháos. The Aspect, untouched by the temporal dilation within the black hole's depths, felt extremely gleeful and filled with a desire to meet Phaedra’s goals. That desire allowed her to understand its course had never been the gates of Hell. She turned her attention to its actual target, another Portal that had fallen into dormancy over the same aeons that the Gates of Hell had sat here.

  Lilith fed her touch through Kháos’s desires. “If you agree to await my signal, I’ll show you how to subvert the rules of gravity to maximise Phaedra‘s gain. Though I’d need you to keep going with your current fun until then.”

  “Her name is Amdirlain now, and Mother permitted us out to play! Though I suppose you can join in too, so okay.” Through their temporary link, bright, erratic thoughts signalled an acceptance from Kháos. She provided the knowledge required to unleash the accumulated mass and then broke clear from their painful psyche.

  With less finesse than a bull in rut, Kháos ran the phenomenon into a Portal between Hades and Gehenna. The limits of the Portal flexed and tore, and as the mass dropped through, the planar boundaries of the lower planes returned to the pattern they’d had aeons ago. With Hell shunted sideways and the Portal already hooked, it was taken for the ride. As its energies vanished, the troops entering it were torn into bloody chunks.

  Kháos even acknowledges her, and yet so many want to pick fights. It will be interesting to tally those who let their desire for power get them killed once the dust settles. Should I stay on the sidelines?

  She snorted before reappearing a few light-years away from where the route to Gehenna emerged and still had to deflect turbulence from the Plane’s undulations. A hidden entity with a feminine feel projected a mental image of the Portal’s new location to Kháos, but the power of the connection caught Lilith’s notice. Before she could project a query to the distant awareness, it flawlessly disappeared through dimensional and planar boundaries. She tried to seize the being’s desire to remain unknown, only for its name to still slip from her grasp, its will deflecting her own.

  Some aspects are more elusive than others.

  A Planar Shift delivered her near the image she’d caught, and she took in the state of Gehenna.

  Though there were planes in both Hell and the Abyss that contained echoes of it, the landscape here was one of fiery fury and rage. Volcanoes, rivers of lava, and molten melts stretched out as far as the eye could see, indeed, further than even the senses of Lilith’s body could reach.

  The black hole now sat still, its gravity field belligerently chewing on volcanoes larger than stars, having already sucked in millions of relative foothills the size of gas giants.

  The Portal to Hell now sat atop a divot in a lava field, from which the surrounding heights provided perfect vantages for the natives to slaughter newly emerging devils.

  Asmodeus is going to have to unbind some rules before a second Portal can be formed.

  Despite her interrupted congress, a sated purr rolled over Lilith’s lips, and she contentedly stroked the spots where her lover’s teeth had tried futilely to breach her skin.

  A fine-featured, muscular Human male appeared beside her. Crimson-skinned, he was clad in loose black pants that matched the curtain of hair down his back, and the cloven hooves that capped his feet. The slight distortions from the Human norm only hinted at the twisted perversion that ran through his essence.

  Asmodeus’s handsome features contoured with icy menace. “Are you here to gloat, Lilith?”

  “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Lilith crowed, waving her hands at the change the wandering black hole had caused. “Millions of kilometres of walls and armaments are now defending a cleft mountain, while your Portal sits exposed to these volcanoes. Are you going to set up a throne behind the old gates on Hades so you can claim you wanted a personal meditation spot? Certainly, it must have been you who planned the Portal’s relocation.”

  “You’d be wise to tread lightly,” Asmodeus cautioned.

  “Or what? You’ll try to eat my eyeballs as you did your daughter’s? Control, malice, pride—your fourth nature should be stupidity instead of Law. Did you not notice we’re in Gehenna at present?”

  “This cannot stand unanswered.”

  “Stop.” Lilith laughed. “Are you going to practise a speech for whoever you’re sending out to commit suicide?”

  “This has the Songbird’s touch all over it, and its very existence before you would provide you with insights.” Asmodeus grabbed for Lilith, but she slid tauntingly out of reach. “You will tell me what you know of her.”

  “I’ve no desire to play Cassandra. Find a fool to prattle truths you’ll ignore.”

  Asmodeus grabbed for her again, and with a smirk, she flowed away again.

  “I could have your cities levelled,” Asmodeus growled.

  “If you wish, level the buildings and destroy every being within them.”

  Her nonchalance gave him pause. “You’ve not opposed me before.”

  “I’ve more concern for Phaedra than all my children combined.”

  His frown turned into a scowl. “She isn’t the same person you remember.”

  “To your understanding, perhaps. Yet, curiously, I currently have no desire to share any knowledge with you.”

  The annoyance disappeared as his gaze narrowed thoughtfully. “I’m sure you have an agreement held in reserve that you need me to support.”

  She flipped him a memory crystal, her will protecting it from being yanked away. “No negotiations; you either accept this in total or you get nothing more offered from them.”

  In a moment, he’d scanned through the millions of lines within the contract before he smiled at Lilith. “You’re only blocking me from acting against her.”

  “Oh dear,” Lilith drawled. “How could I have missed that? I’m sure you’ll figure out which of your current underlings can bring her into their control yet not betray you.”

  Which would set every rival at Tingeth’s throat because of the stupid favouritism you show her.

  “Some are obsessed with bringing her to heel and caging her.”

  “A benefit of a structured hierarchy is that the next rank knows the position to which it can advance.” A knowing smile curled her lips as Lilith turned back to the black hole, which started sucking up lava from a nearby volcano. “And you can have more daughters.”

  “I’d want more than the knowledge of how to break that thing.”

  “Do you believe they don’t know the location of her Domain? How long have they—has she—kept secrets from you, among other preparations? Would she grasp at such a weapon against a loving father?”

  “You’re seeking to play me?” Asmodeus drawled curiously.

  “Them. You, I want to step aside.”

  “She brought us here to keep the demons in check. With this disruption, how are we supposed to stand against them?”

  “To fuel her desired changes, she already intends to burn the corruption from the Abyss.”

  “That would cripple the growth of demonic armies.”

  “Have you considered that this is her putting us on notice that going after her will end badly?” Lilith asked. “Ask yourself, do you want to be someone she views as having fulfilled their role, or a problem to remove?”

  “You have it in proper contract form, I take it.”

  A stack of enchantment parchments hovered between them, and after Asmodeus reviewed all the terms, they signed the documents with a simple application of will.

  He vanished with another crystal to recruit those needed to disrupt the black hole. With his agreement to step aside in dealings with Phaedra, ancient contracts slipped into Lilith’s grasp, and soon the draw of gravity pulled their ashes from her hands. Kháos correctly took it as her signal, and a spatial reversal sent a stream of matter from the black-hole towards Hell’s still-stabilising portal.

  “Kháos. It needed to be to one side to funnel troop movement, not directly on top.”

  “Too bad, so sad.”

  The stream of matter waved from side to side, burying the volcanoes and rivers of lava that criss-crossed this region of Gehenna.

  Kháos has as much strategy within it as a little Mortal boy pissing into a trough.

  Though now multiple planes away, Asmodeus’s desires caught Lilith’s attention, and she used them to track him as he sent out more instructions. However, even his more subtle attempts to avoid her traps fueled the conflicting desires that Nüwa had spent millennia seeding throughout the hierarchy. The discrete loopholes she’d left channelled his efforts where it would hurt unity rather than the forces directly; without support, their effectiveness would be crippled.

  Now she’ll only face groups acting in isolation instead of the united forces of Hell. That’s the worst-case scenario; the best is that Nüwa’s scheme turns them against each other.

  Lilith’s route out of Gehenna took her via the twisting course of the River Styx. As it slipped between planes, it skimmed past a Portal that delivered her atop a ledge midway up the spire. A route unsuitable to armies, though she knew spies and scouts for many of the dark powers frequently used this one and others like it. The pictures she’d purchased included a series of landmarks, and teleporting between them, she soon sensed a Domain ahead that matched the reports.

  “Phaedra, are you home, dear one?”

  Lilith waited to see if she’d been heard, keeping her senses clear of the Domain’s border. As she started to consider moving closer, a rift flickered in and out of existence. Phaedra’s arrival through it carried chaotic ripples of a Plane that was unlike any Lilith had travelled to, and she shuddered in distaste.

  She was always a strange child.