Chapter Text
Khepri, Archifiend of Obstinacy (Worm / Solium Infernum)
"'obstinacy,' whereby man hardens his purpose by clinging to sin"
From the Summa Theologica, II-II 14.
"We're s-so very small, in the end."
I awoke choking on burned air and churning ash.
It was hard to see through the storm surrounding me, and harder to think over the pain and the ceaseless howling of the biting winds. But I appeared to be laying down on black sand, my arms stretched out before me –
My arms. I blinked, trying and failing to clear my vision, my eyes remaining stubbornly devoid of moisture. I shook my head, and despite the spiking migraine this cost me, the gesture cleared enough grit from my eyes for me to see that, yes, I had two arms now. That hadn't been the case before, had it ? My mind was a cracked mirror, a broken kaleidoscope of half-glimpsed memories and thoughts so alien they might as well have belonged to someone else – and perhaps they did.
But I was fairly certain I hadn't had two arms for some time. And even when I had, they hadn't looked like this. The ones in my field of view now were too long, and covered with a smooth white material. My hands were covered in the same, and ended in five claws. Tentatively, I flexed my muscles, and both extremities closed around handfuls of black sand.
Then, I realized I could feel the grains of sand pressing against the shell-like material, albeit in a muted fashion. This wasn't cloth or armor : this was my skin. Distantly, I understood the realization should have disturbed me a lot more than it did, and wondered why I wasn't as freaked out as I felt I should.
Slowly, I pushed myself off the ground, and turned my head so that I looked up. The sky was black, full of wrathful clouds that weren't made of water but smoke and ash. Crimson lightning flashed within the occasionally, casting a baleful illumination over the wasteland, and burning figures were falling down like raindrops, gesticulating wildly as they plunged down. I could see the titanic energies raging in the heavens with painful clarity, and caught glimpses of shapes in the darkness beyond the clouds, immense and terrible.
Wherever I was, this wasn't a nice place. I tore my gaze away from the sky and looked down at myself instead, to find that only my torso was visible : everything beneath my waist was buried in the ground. My upper body was covered in the same white material as my arms.
The realization that I was trapped stirred something deep within my fractured psyche, and I started to dig myself out, clawing at the sand and throwing handful of the stuff away. Before I could make much of a dent in my burial, however, I heard a voice call out, dry as the sand and dripping with malevolence :
"Well, well, well. What do we have here ?"
I looked up, and saw … something, stalking over the sand on four elongated limbs. Its skin was corpse-white, and its head was lacking half of its skin in seemingly random patches. Its lower jaw hung low, too low, as if it'd been broken, and yet it had been able to talk.
Whatever this being was, it didn't look friendly. But it was the first other creature I'd seen since waking up, and since it could talk, the only source of information available to me.
"Where … where am I ?" I asked, my own voice sounding strange to my ears.
It laughed, a hideous sound that made its jaw shake as if it were about to tear itself free.
"Oh, I always love that part," it said, in a voice that was like nails on chalkboard. Its limbs bent and creaked so that it could lower its head closer to mine. I nearly flinched back, but instinct made me block the impulse, to avoid showing weakness. "It's so much fun seeing the look on people's face when they realize. You are in Hell, girl." Without breaking eye contact, it gestured upward with its head, to the raging skies, and its smile grew even wider. "I don't know what's happening in the mortal realms right now, but we're getting a lot of fresh damned falling from Upstairs. The Archfiends will be pleased with the harvest, oh yes they will be."
I barely heard the later half of its speech, too shocked by what it had already told me.
Hell. I was in Hell. I knew it wasn't lying : I could feel the truth of it in my bones, in my soul – and now, I knew for certain that it existed.
Of course. Of course I would end up in Hell. What else had I expected ? I had known this would be my fate long ago, one that I had rightly earned –
Wait. I had ? When ? How ?
My headache spiked, and images flashed in my mind's eye. I remembered people, laying down and afraid. Me, forcing their submission through fear, and knowing that I was damned for this, even though I thought I'd good reasons for doing it –
Suddenly, the pieces of my past slammed together, revealing the puzzle's overall picture.
I screamed. In grief, in horror, in revelation, I didn't know. It was all too much. I screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and never seemed to run out of breath.
I had been dead, and now I … lived ? No. If I was in Hell, then I was still dead. But compared to my fusing with my Passenger after unlocking my power's full potential through Panacea's intervention, I certainly felt like myself again, despite my physical transformation.
My renewed sense of self brought no relief with it, which was probably par for the course, given I was in Hell. I remembered all that I had seen, all that I had gone through, and most terrible of all, all that I had done. I remembered stripping hundreds, thousands of people of their free will and forcing them to move according to my design. I remembered sinking deeper and deeper into cold, pitiless madness, as the veil between me and my Passenger grew ever thinner, until it and I were one and the same.
I couldn't feel my Passenger's presence in my mind anymore, but that was no mercy, for with its absence came clarity, and the absolute certainty that I deserved to be here, in Hell. I had wielded fear and suffering as my tools; I had deceived those I considered my friends; I had tormented the innocent; I had murdered a child; I had enslaved my peers. The list of my sins went on and on and on, and all my good intentions meant nothing, not when I'd known all along just which path they'd paved. Even if it had all worked out in the end, even if I had saved all the worlds from the Golden Dawn of Scion's rampage across the multiverse, the choices I had made meant that I deserved to be here.
After all, what was the alternative ? That I didn't deserve to be in Hell, yet had ended up here anyway, because the afterlife was just as broken as the rest of the cosmos ? If nothing else, that would be even worse. If I was to be damned, then it would be because of my own choices, and nothing else.
And then, I realized what else the creature had told me. It had spoken of a rain of souls falling into Hell. I knew what those were : Scion's victims, the billions of people who'd died as the being who'd poisoned my world with powers threw a cosmic temper tantrum and took out his anger on Humanity. With so many dead, it made sense that there would be a sudden influx of damned souls into Hell.
Who else was here, I wondered, raining down from the burning skies ? Had anyone I knew ended up in Hell too ?
The question was enough to make me stop screaming. I wanted, I needed to find out, but I wouldn't be able to if I stayed here, half-buried and trapped.
The sand around me had been shaken by the strength of my scream, enough that with a mighty push, I was able to tear myself free of my prison. Slowly, unsteadily at first but with growing confidence, I rose on eight spider-like legs that I knew exactly how to use thanks to the uncounted eight-legged creepy-crawlies I'd controlled over the years, towering above the creature that had stumbled upon me in the storm, and had recoiled from the strength of my scream.
I saw myself, reflected in its terror-wide eyes. I was some kind of spider-centaur, with the lower body of an arachnid and a humanoid torso. My face, though now cast in the same white material as the rest of my body, was identical to the one I remembered, with the long hair that I'd kept throughout my career as a reminder of my mother. Here, the sight of it only made it hurt more, which I suspected was why I still had it, and why it was the only part of my body which hadn't been turned bone-white by my transformation.
"You … who are you ?" the wretch asked, trembling in terror as I towered over it.
That was a good question, and I paused, pondering. I wasn't Taylor anymore, and I hadn't been for a very, very long time. Skitter didn't fit either, and Weaver wasn't even worth considering.
But I had been given another name, I remembered. I had heard it whispered through the ears of my thralls when they passed near the unpowered witnesses to the apocalypse, felt its echoes in their minds as I puppeted them in battle against a false, monstrous god. It was the name of a monster, but here and now, I could hardly argue that I wasn't one.
"I am Khepri," I said, and the stormy skies boomed with infernal thunder, as if responding to the name.
"And you," I continued, staring down the demon (for that was what it must be), "are going to tell me everything you know about this place."