Work Text:
It’s amazing what survives hellfire.
Zerxus burns. The mace, his armor, the name stone clutched in his hand, and the locket alongside it, all come with it.
While his every nerve is scorched in unending agony, the skin charring off his bones and regrowing, fat liquifying, his eyes melting out of his skull, bones cracking and blackening— the necklaces survive. Clenched in his cooking fist, the stone and the locket, Laerryn’s second-to-last gift, stay intact.
They ought to shatter in the heat, melt and splinter, meld into his flesh. Instead they remain cool as starlight, a single shivery point anchoring his mind as he’s cremated over and over.
This torment goes slow. He can feel each lick of flame against his cheek, sense that time has once more gelatinized. Maybe a hundred years have passed by the time Asmodeus pulls him out. Maybe it’s only been a few minutes.
A portal opens beneath him. He drops onto barren black stone to see his master, his god, looking down at him, one foot on his chest.
All the cooling off time in the world could not have allayed the rage now directed at him. An invisible force pops his heart inside his chest, then, as his brain begins to gasp for oxygen, rebuilds it. To make sure the point sticks (or perhaps for his own personal satisfaction), the Lord of the Hells does it again.
“Your stunt… has made things very difficult for me,” Asmodeus growls. A child’s tantrum, Zerxus thinks, and feels the cool pulse of the locket against his sternum. Elias had better manners at three.
The pressure on his chest eases. The Father of Lies steps away.
“Well? Get up. You’re still my champion. A deal is a deal, Zerxus Ilerez.”
He expected to be like Vespin, a broken, chittering, shadow of a man. Instead he finds his mind is still his own, even as his limbs aren’t. As he kneels he can still glower.
Asmodeus crouches in front of him, grabs his chin, and rips his lower jaw off like he’s pulling beard hairs. “There’s that pride,” his voice is soft now, almost human. The tender, vulnerable voice he used to reel Zerxus in. “We’ll break that.”
After that he kills. And he kills and he kills and he kills. When he’s drenched in the blood of three innocent towns and even Evandrin’s face is fading from his memory, Asmodeus takes him to see what became of his homeland.
The plume of ash stretches for miles above the sea. The ocean is stained black. Tsunamis have ravaged the shards of land that remain. Nothing is left but bare mud, glowing lava flow, flotsam floating in the sea.
Domunas is barren.
It was a small continent, smaller than Wildemount or Gwessar. Cathmoira and Avalir were by far its largest cities; but not its only ones.
Notin of the bright glassware. Brumehollow with its deep mines. The dances at Toma, the sky shipyards of Knossos, Avalir’s dozen loyal trade partners who recieved no warning but a rumbling from beneath the earth and then…
They might not have even woken up. Is that better or worse?
Those three town, the blood of unarmed men covering his armor (he did his best to slow down, to drag it out, to buy with brutality time for others to escape) is nothing compared to whole civilizations.
He did this. He did this.
Asmodeus curls an arm around his waist and watches his face, like a starving man seeing a feast. It’s pathetic. It’s hatable. And Zerxus is frozen.
The namestone, warm against his skin. The locket jingling.
As the Calamity progresses he realizes why his mind is still intact.
The Lord of the Hells doesn’t want his will overridden the old-fashioned, quick and dirty way. The Gods are older than mortality and so far above it. Once they have their claws in someone their personality is no longer their own, subjugated by the stronger divine influence working through them. To have a god is to surrender yourself utterly.
Zerxus knew this when he chose, he walked in with open eyes. Yet he finds himself mostly unchanged. At least—he thinks he is unchanged.
His temper is shorter, he’s not sure if it’s the pain and exhaustion and stress or hellish influence. His instincts tend towards violence, it’s the only thing the creatures now under his command respect. And when orders are all but impossible to refuse he often gives into the mindless bliss of being the Lord of the Hells’ thought and word. It’s easier that way to detach from what he’s doing, to remain whole in this bloodbath. He cannot fully stem the guilt, nor would he want to. But he cannot let it consume him either. He cannot—he cannot—
If he wavers for a moment he will be lost.
The necklaces pulse against his chest more rarely these days, an odd beacon in the searing haze of pain.
There are moments of freedom though. He is ordered to raze a temple to the Changebringer and he does just that; he tears down every stone, he salts the earth. In his single minded devotion, some of the priests—light footed creatures who walk many paths— escape. His orders regard the temple, not the templars. He slaughters a refugee camp, every person inside its walls. Those that escape…
He’s never been good at loopholes or wordplay. By necessity, he learns.
He doesn’t realize until the thirty third incident that Asmodeus is toying with him. Every time he struggles, the noose tightens. His escapees are dragged back and executed in front of him or thrown to fates far worse than death. His orders grow more specific, until he can’t find any way through the web binding him. And the whole time the Father of Lies watches, a cat playing with a mouse, a child squishing ants one by one when he simply drown the whole ant hill.
His new god wants him shattered at his feet but he wants him. Him, not the unmade unman he could twist of him. He promised to remember Zerxus Ilerez. It seems he wants to preserve him too. Asmodeus would have him tormented and broken but still sane enough to realize it. And he would have him come willingly.
Zerxus can work with that.
The Mace is a vicious artifact. Xartaza’s whispers have become background noise to him, an endless litany of delight in suffering and hunger for more. Most of the time she’s impressed with his work, which is itself disappointing. Her rapturous sighs at the sight of blood are… they grow wearying after a while.
It’s worse when she’s upset. Asmodeus can’t micromanage his every moment but she can. Every soul he turns away from earns him shrieks of outrage. Every inefficient sundering gets him tattled on by his own weapon. Sometimes he gives in just to avoid her retribution (he always regrets it later).
Other times they sit among the ashes and talk. Her philosophy is shallow, shaped mainly by the whims of the one who wrought her. Goodness is what delights the Lord of the Hells, power is what offers value to him, and if that’s a moving target then so be it. He tries to explain what it means to be autonomous, she counters that free will is overrated.
Pretty champion, honorable champion, her voice slithers. What have those thoughts the gods filled your head with done for you? Just made it more difficult for you to submit. If you give in the world becomes so simple, so beautiful.
She makes a compelling point. He tosses the mace, a massive thing but not too heavy to flip in the air, and feels the leather bound haft come down in his palm.
Do you think he wants me to be like you? There’s a surplus of mindless undead, squashed souls, and lesser demons wandering the world. Hells, at this point enough people have given up and started worshipping the Betrayers, he could replace Zerxus with a more loyal cultist if he truly desired.
Xartaza hesitates. I… cannot hope to know his intentions.
Really? He’s so easy to read, once you know the key.
There is nothing the Lord of the Hells hates more than kindness.
He hides it well, of course. Snapping at every extended hand like a rabid dog is a good way to get put down. Over the years he’s clearly developed ways of responding to the condescension of beings he sees as lower than him, taking advantage of their weakness instead of rejecting it outright. Instead of gnashing his teeth he swallows down whatever’s on offer, a greedy black hole to never be filled, a poison viper in the garden.
But Zerxus knows him now. Asmodeus wears his face, when he doesn’t wear his husband’s, it’s impossible not to notice his well-disguised fury.
Every day the world ends a little more and Zerxus is so tired. That thread of hope that sustained him as his body burned is now thin as a spider’s web (a true spider, not one of Lolth’s monstrosities). He should have died when Nydas offered it. The stars have never been so distant.
His only spiteful refuge is acts of grace. There is such little charity one can offer a god, still, he finds ways. He brings him Tiamat’s lieutenant’s heads unasked for. He steadies him, a hand on his shoulder, warm spell effects he didn’t even know he could summon anymore leaping unbidden to aid the King of Deceit. Healing words, a touch of hope. Asmodeus rages, mostly in private, sometimes, if he misjudged their audience, on the spot.
“What do you think you have to give to me, you pathetic—“ he tears off an arm at the shoulder then reaches in, snapping ribs to pull out a lung. The next few sentences of the rant get lost in the haze of pain. When Zerxus regains consciousness his god-of-circumstance is staring him down, waiting for an answer.
“My loyalty,” he gasps, coughing up blood as his wounds heal. Someone needs to teach this spoiled brat to stop breaking his toys—none of Zerxus’ lessons thus far have stuck. “My help punishing those who hurt you. Isn’t that what I offered?” He blinks, as innocently as he can with gluey blood in his eyelashes.
Asmodeus grabs him by the hair and drags him to his feet. “You cannot hope to lie to me.”
Even now, even after seeing all that he has done, there is something plaintive in his voice. Evil he might be but he is still so very lost. Zerxus looks into his eyes, amber, a mirror of his own.
“I do not lie. I wish to help you.”
The Lord of the Hells looks back, just as hungry and hatred, uglier than any battlefield or mutilated corpse or twisted pit-creature of this unending war, warps his face.
Then it passes, replaced by a perfect placidity.
He kisses Zerxus gently on the lips.
“Champion mine, you are helping. Just looking at you reminds me not to show a single miserable creature in this place mercy.”
This is a lie.
There is room for mercy even at the end of days. At least… Zerxus calls it mercy. Asmodeus thinks of it as just another, more complex sort of torment.
It starts with the children.
There are four of them, lost and alone on the road between here and there. With their tousled hair and filthy clothes it’s clear they’ve been living alone for a while, more lost victims of this age of eschaton. The eldest is perhaps fourteen, gangly, old enough to shepherd the younger ones, find food and water. Old enough to try to fight, throwing themself in front of their cowering siblings as the first devil advances.
They’re half elves, with Laerryn’s curls and Patia’s hooked nose and Evandrin’s freckles. They’re as old as Elias was when Evandrin died, as old as Elias was that night amid the bargains and smoke. Maybe as old as Elias still is—it’s impossible to judge time in this endless apocalypse and who can say how it passes in the Astral Sea.
“Stop!” Zerxus bellows and the fiends stop. “Leave them be.”
The lower-ranking creatures obey unthinkingly. Those higher in the pecking order, aware that his agency is itself one of Asmodeus’ cruel little jokes, have the wherewithal to talk back. He can destroy them for the impertinence but his displeasure is a very small threat compared to the Lord of the Hells’ wrath.
(Xartaza, of course, is already screaming at him to tear the children into pieces, bind their souls, and set their corpses to haunt this road—she has a limited repertoire.)
“We were told to scour the shrine to the Dawnfather up ahead and leave no worshipper alive,” a devil large enough to batter down a castle gate with his skull offers so timidly.
Zerxus sighs, gestures to the children behind him. “Do they look like they worship anything except their next meal?”
The denizens of hell shake their heads. The children, smartly, stay quiet. Good kids. These ones might make it out.
“They’re nonentities,” Zerxus asserts, with enough confidence that he thinks he might get away with it.
A sudden influx of heat, like opening a door to a broiler room. A hand of his shoulder, spinning him like he weighs nothing. A muffled scream from one of the children behind him, just as quickly shushed by her older sister.
“What is that, my champion?”
Zerxus keeps his eyes on Asmodeus. “Abandoned children don’t worship any god. They give your enemies no power. If anything they aid your cause, they’re a drain on resources, a complication for others passing through.”
He looks like Evandrin today. It’s still unclear if it’s an active choice on his part or a passive reflection of the viewer’s emotional state—either way it’s wielded for devastating effect. “Oh, but they have that nasty habit of turning into grown soldiers. And faith changes,” he tugs on Zerxus’ beard, “Yours did, didn’t it?”
Less than you’d think. Zerxus holds his tongue. This is not the time for pride. “My lord,” that catches his attention. “Surely, in your creativity, you can come up with some better fate than death for such potential servants. If raised right, they would love you.”
Isn’t that all he’s ever wanted? To be adored, wholeheartedly, by his siblings and creations, no matter what he does to them. The demons Asmodeus made thank him when he rips out their hearts. There has never been a creature in the world more pathetically desperate for love.
The oldest girl is cleverer than he counted on. She’s already on her knees, dragged her weeping siblings (eleven, ten, and seven, by his estimate) with her. Though she’s shaking too and in no state to speak, the fact that she can move less than a foot from a Betrayer, an untrained wild child, speaks well to her potential.
He’s offering them up on a platter to a monster. Anything to buy one more chance, however slim, at redemption. These are such desperate times.
Asmodeus follows his eyes to the children, then goes back to staring at him. He traces Zerxus’ lips with the tip of one nail, moves up to the round shell of his ear, and settles on the horns curling out of his skull, the ridged black keratin.
Scrape.
“If you beg, I think I can come up with a use for them.”
So he begs, on his knees in the dusty road, the fiends averting their eyes out of terror if not politeness. It’s no worse than anything else he’s done, all those atrocities on his name. Compared to these innocent lives what use is his soul, his pride?
After a flat minute of pleading, Asmodeus is sated. He turns on the children—they’re so small and he can’t help but see Elias in their place. Bending over them, using his lying voice, he asks, “And you, little mortals? Do you agree to this bargain my champion has struck on your behalf?”
Behind his back he cuts open his hand with one claw and from the blood forms four long dark pins.
A jerky, anxious nod from the eldest, a whispered “yes” from one of the middle two, hiding their face in her shoulder.
“Good,” Asmodeus reaches out, picks a stray leaf from the youngest’s hair, replaces it with one of the iron pins. “I won’t force you, after all.”
From the child’s skull, amid the dark curls, erupts a horn, curling around her ear. Too terrified to cry out, she only holds tighter to her sister with hands slowly flushing sunburnt red. A shade brighter than Asmodeus’ skin, more crimson than hemocrit. Still, the resemblance is… uncanny. Especially today, when the Lord of the Hells looks like Evandrin.
The eldest girl wrestles with her horror for a moment, then grits her teeth and whispers. “Me next, my lord. So they know not to be afraid.”
Asmodeus laughs, tucking a pin behind her pointed ear, infernal change spreading from his fingertips. The red of clotted blood mottles across the teenager’s skin in patches, a paler pink for one of the middle children, a venous blue for another. Their horns are less prominent than their baby sister’s. “Zerxus, she’s looking to replace you.”
“If that’s your wish.”
“No.” Asmodeus’ upper lip pulls back, baring teeth. “My wish is for you to get on with your work. Leave these little mice— and all their kindred, for I think we might make more of them. That will wake the Dawnfather, won’t it? Little devils amid his preciously tended flock.”
Then he’s gone. They leave the children in the road with nothing but a chance.
(There’s something curling around their fluttering infant souls, infernal writing on the iron pins already burrowing into their scalps—but their eyes are their own. They still hold each other tightly.)
But later, the Lord of Hells tells him, “I’ve altered the standard contract for our arch devils. We’re seeing an influx of infernal pacts, mortals grasping for safety. If only a tenth of children born to those making deals are hell-touched, it will still spark paranoia in their ranks. As for the children themselves—“ he yanks back Zerxus’ head, forcing eye contact at the cost of his spine, which cracks like a falling tree. “They’ll be loathed.”
He can’t heal straight until Asmodeus lets go of his scalp. Until then he’s left mostly paralyzed and wheezing. “They’re children. Everyone will realize that they’re children.”
It may take a few years for the initial panic to wear off. Mortals aren’t quick on the uptake in cosmic matters. There may always be a fearful bias held by some sector of the population; regressive xenophobia is a vice civilization can’t shake.
But there will be joy as well, and kindness. Asmodeus doesn’t realize yet that someone will kiss a child in his image and teach them how to share. Lolth’s experiments in mortality spun out of her control within decades. Zerxus gives it maybe fifty years before hell’s children do the same.
His lungs aren’t working now so he keeps that prediction to himself.
“They’ll stone them in the streets, smother them at birth.”
They’ll laugh and cry, get married, save the world.
Finally he’s allowed to collapse, straighten his spine, recover. When he looks up, the Lord of the Hells is holding several dozen pins, spiraling iron, black as night, in his outstretched palm.
“A present for my champion. Next time you find strays, if they’re young enough for the change to take, don’t hesitate. Save them, if you think this is salvation.”
He digs a shard of the hells into the flesh of a refugee toddler who grabs at his thigh, leaves them sobbing and changed next to their parents' corpses. Live well.
A clever young halfling begs for their life in the wreckage of one of Sarenae’s orphanages. It’s so helpful when orders contradict each other. Zerxus has never wished the gods on anyone but he respects the Everbright on a professional level. He leaves the tiny tiefling curled in a ball and hopes they remember their patron.
Most of the ram-horned babes he sees are born in the infernal light—there are so many mortals willing to sell out their kin; covens across Issylra, the dark survivors of Ghor Dranas. He adds to their number here and there, shepherds them where he sees fit.
A girl with skin like an overripe plum and cloven hooves, working in the scullery of a temple to Pelor. Old scars on her hands, on the back of her neck. She backs away from him, into a wall—understandable, he’s covered in grit and the blood of the priests who raised her.
Very softly, he advises, “You ought to get out of here. They’ll hurt you if they find you survived.” It’s been long enough (years? some of these little tieflings are full grown) that he knows the truth to Asmodeus’ lies. These poor children are loathed, resented, scapegoated, in places, at times.
The commander of the last little village battalion he fought had four horns chiming with silver jewelry and black eyes without sclerae or pupil. She wore a talisman of a local god and a lover’s knot next to it; Zerxus saw them clearly as he rent through her armor, caved in her chest. As he gutted her, her soldiers wailed. They dove for her body and he let them drag it away.
The split-plum urchin grabs at his arm, unafraid in the way only cornered animals are. “Is it true? Am I evil? You wouldn’t let me live if I was not!”
Xartaza tells him to nestle her against their Lord’s bosom, to make a tool of this desperate creature. He shakes off the suggestion with only a little effort (he is so lonely, wouldn’t it be nice to drag someone down to his level?)
“It suits my master to spread discontent,” he tells her. “You are just a grain of sand he cast in his enemy’s eye. No one cares for your morality or the contents of your heart, order them as you see fit. Now go.”
He lets the First Knight of Avalir, a man long dead, slip out at the last, imbuing his words with command.
The child flees.
He hopes she’ll live. It’s an awful gift to give, but none of the hells’ presents are kind.
When he sees Vespin Chloras in the halls, Zerxus steps in just close enough to make the fiend shriek and heals him. It can’t be comfortable, walking around with a raw and skinless face.
(He’s lucky their master likes his face unaltered, if only so he can use it to look wretched.)
The spell never stays long, he’s flayed again within seconds. They never speak of what passed between them in that moment of frozen time. He’s not sure Vespin remembers. Still, he offers his crumbs of thanks.
Chloras runs from him so quickly after each encounter, ducks away from him in the throne room. He’s not sure his recompense is wanted, still he perseveres.
He can’t say it’s generosity anymore. He can’t even say it’s gentle. But he can’t stop.
The kisses can be gentle but more often they’re brutal. Asmodeus only bothers with softness when he wants to twist the knife.
Tonight is a night for knife-twisting. He’s had another one of his spats with his siblings—“brother” he calls them and “sister”, even as they all stab each other in the backs, unable to recognize what is rotten within them, unable to acknowledge that they want the love they had before the Schism back.
With deep furrows still open in his bare back from Bane’s flail, the Lord of the Hells reasserts control the only way he knows how; by subjugating someone lower than him.
He starts off rough, pinning Zerxus to the wall, biting through his lip, clawing at his arms. It’s easy to submit to that, he’s had a lot of practice. Go open and limp, don’t fight back, it’s worse if you struggle.
When his armor is yanked off by invisible hands the necklaces go too. He’s learned not to panic over that. There hasn’t been a twinkle of power from them in years but they still find their way back to him.
Then suddenly his god’s demeanor changes. The nails digging into his forearms loosen, the punishing kiss subsides.
Asmodeus looks up at him with confusion, eyes wide and sweet.
“Where, where am I? You’re mortal—why was I—“
He drags his fingers over Zerxus’ wounds, baffled and alarmed, healing as he goes. “Did I do this? Why would I hurt you? Who hurt me?”
The oozing canals from shoulder to hip are already closing, muscle knitting first, then skin. When he first came home you could see his bones poking through, pearly white beneath raw red meat. When Zerxus makes sure the injuries are still mending the Father of Lies winces away from his touch.
It can’t be true. He knows it’s a lie and Asmodeus knows he knows and they’re both caught in this recursive net of possibilities. Because while he knows it’s a lie he also cannot look away from a chance at redemption, however small. Not as his own chances grow slimmer by the day.
And Asmodeus knows this as well and somewhere beneath that beautifully crafted expression of innocence he’s probably laughing. Or seething. A little of both, possibly.
“It’s a very long story,” he says, hoarse and hurting. “Here, let me help you.”
“Let me help you,” Asmodeus insists, and then he’s kissing him again, tender as spring, soft and chaste. As his lips brush Zerxus’ cheek, his scraped nose, the ear Asmodeus tore off hours ago, the base of his horns, he feels himself filled with comfortable warmth. There’s been plenty of hellfire, he’s grown accustomed to agony. It’s been a long time since he’s felt the soft glow of restoration.
It’s been a long time since he was whole. There’s always some injury his master prefers to let fester or the burning of the hells unabated. Nothing that would reduce him to uselessness, but a baseline of suffering.
Now every scratch zips closed, the weight in his limbs lifts, the awful heat subsides. He’d think it was the name stone, Evandrin’s blessing, if it didn’t lie across the room. Seeking kindness, for he is nothing if not weak, he kisses back, runs his hands across Asmodeus’ shoulders and heals him in return.
“Thank you,” the Lord of the Hells gasps in the moments when their lips are apart. “Thank you, thank you. It hurts so much.”
“It doesn’t have to,” Zerxus reminds him. Reminds himself.
Asmodeus pulls away again, earnest befuddlement on his beautiful face.
“Doesn’t it? Isn’t this relief so much better for what came before it?” He mouths at Zerxus’ jaw, no teeth tonight, and mutters, “Would you have ever wanted me if you weren’t broken from the start?”
Lies deserve honesty just as violence deserves peace. “No.” He holds this betrayer close. “No. You’re right.”
The soft tone doesn’t change even as fangs nip at Zerxus’ skin, lover-gentle. “There we go, pet.”
Is this a kindness anymore? Impossible to say. It becomes harder and harder to tell if his efforts strike true or if they’re just the last flailings a of a falling man, arrogance disguised as compassion.
He's so tired of burning.