Hlaeth Chapter 55 – Adventuring Properly is a PITA

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Of course, my friends at home and students here didn’t have to be the one tasked to read through a plethora of old, old books, many of them trapped, Cursed, Warded, enspelled, and otherwise full of tricks and traps that consistently annoyed me with their attempts at subtlety. They were also in so many languages I had absolutely no basis in, which meant that even with translation spells, trying to frame the crap in context was a truly massive headache… and they liked to write in codes, too, as a form of intellectual one-upsmanship! Complete idiocy… and I was not a formally trained code-breaker.

On top of all that idiocy, they had nothing at all resembling an honest filing system. It was all a pure memory test for the lorekeepers and librarians, another way to make their jobs secure and show off their brains and impotence, er, importance.

And the personal journals, libraries and spellbooks and suchlike that were gleaned from the Warded and trapped personal chambers and laboratories filled with misshapen horrors, guardbeasts, more golems, and so forth?

Let’s just say the things insane undead psychopaths come up with after a few centuries of being confined to one tiny little buried city to relieve their boredom and try to justify their existences was stuff that largely had to be burned to nothingness. The stuff I was going to have to put into the Black Room of the Inquisition I had to wall off in a section of my mind and close the door on. Not secrets that would shake the world, but things that could make it a very, very bad place, indeed.

Two of my grimmer thoughtstreams were not-so-politely already making to subvert, thwart, counter, and destroy some of the levels of Evil in those damned pages...

Then there were the secret chambers, cubbyholes, labs, extra-dimensional hidey-holes, and ancient storage facilities. Gah, I was stumbling over them every half-step, it seemed. I had to forcibly re-align the Wards of the school three times to get rid of the non-Euclidean juxtaposing and overlay, which not coincidentally helped pump more power into the natural anti-Yellow defenses they’d been draining off. You thought Harry Potter had secret chambers? I swear the secret passages took up three times the area of the School proper!

One of them seemed to be a testing labyrinth with some creatures in there that should never have existed. Others, they were Summoning chambers occupied by entities that never should have been caged.

Celestial creatures. Good creatures. Summoned, somehow, from the Empyreal Realms, bound and tortured mercilessly. Or perhaps, the last of their kind on this world, ‘protected’ by their confinement when the last of their kind were slaughtered across the land.

A Rainbow Serpent, plumed wings cut from it and iridescent hide peeled away, bits and pieces of it fed to the Great Owl, mad with induced hunger, the Serpent mutating wildly from being exposed to concentrated doses of the Yellow. The noble Shedu and lordly Lammusu, cut in twain and sewn together, back to back, babbling endless streams of incoherent wisdom and lore at one another, great minds forever shattered by the assaults on their knowledge and abuse of their bodies. A Golden Sphinx, emasculated, shorn, his glorious roar forever silenced, subjected to an unending chorus of diabolic, will-smashing doldrums to crush the soul and drive a bestial King to animal-like savagery and worse.

And now I faced a great Angel, who was screaming at me!

It was a Planetar, one rank below the Solars, the World-Angels. These were the marshals of divine armies, the aides of lesser gods, the lieutenants of the Solars themselves. They were incredibly powerful, boosted Seventeens, Twenty-equivs on the Scale, with a depth and breadth of power that reflected the centuries, millennia, eons of struggle and achievement it took to reach such status. This was the first one I’d ever seen in person, as their duties typically did not include dealing with mortals, even the most powerful. Such things were usually done by the Devas, Archons, or other lesser Celestials.

It stood about two and a half meters tall, perfect in form without really having a gender. By design, I couldn’t tell, because it was covered with scars of flame… pure diabolic hellfire, vile Runes gouged into it like carving into stone, searing and burning and subjecting the Angel to unending agony.

Angels were their souls; they were one and the same, flesh and spirit as one. This one’s wings of silver had been cut away, its accoutrements were gone, and the jeweled eyes were spitting out bursts of the devilshine that had been forcefully imbued into it. Glowing blood was dripping from the scars, burning away in the hellfire that clawed at it, its own Fast Healing consigning it to eternal torture. One arm had been forcibly removed, and it was racked on a spiked cross that had been brought from deep in the Pits for this very purpose, bound and shackled on accursed metal as undead psyches had experimented on the great angel to whatever ends they’d determined for themselves to justify such actions.

I doubted they’d broken its mind and convinced it to give up the secrets of the Heavens, being only capable of mortal powers. But it was equally apparent the magi had involved other Powers in their tortures, and this Planetar was no longer pure. It had not fallen to Evil, but so much Evil was infused into its nature now it could no longer be called an agent of the Celestial. Hellfire and angelfire warred about it, feasting and flaring and fighting, red and black raging against the silver and gold in a seething vortex of endless fires bound to burn anyone and anything that ventured close to the shackled Celestial being.

I Rusted away its cross with one spell, but expected no mercy or recognition for the task, as clearly it was beyond the normal limits of sanity even for something of Eternal and Heavenly status. It promptly leapt at the Thaumaturgic Circle confining it, and the entire room shook as it tested the limits of the confining Diagram. The Circle was wrought of the bones of slain multitudes and the blood of other Celestials, and was powered by balefire and hellfire and the still-beating hearts of lesser Angels. There were implements and proofs of objects steeped in Sins, dripping so much wickedness they had to be almost legendary in their own right, or had been present at the sites of legendary Evils. Combined, their power was enough to imprison even the maddened Angel, and so it screamed at me, seeing an outlet for its pain and vengeance, pounding fruitlessly and endlessly on the magic of the confining Thaumaturgic Circle.

The only way for it to be free of its madness seemed to be death and reincarnation back into the Higher Realms. Yet, while it couldn’t reach out at me, I certainly could reach in at it.

The Feather of the World-Angel of Terra, Urlhmenuus, burned with golden angelfire as it hung from Mortus Dius. I prepared to do my duty, as I had done it for the other Celestials. Final mercy was yet mercy, and I did not do this for myself. With it slain, I could destroy the implements and magic and relics of Sin here safely and painstakingly.

Except the Runes that had been carved into it would remain even if it were reborn, would they not? And flare anew with hellfire. What could it do, save live in the seas of blessed waters, to stop the endless pain?

Like it or not, I had to heal the Angel, even as it screamed and raged at me. Thank the Heavens the depravity and wickedness present in the chamber was all being channeled into containing the wrath of the confined Angel, or I wouldn’t have been able to get into the chamber at all without destroying everything within.

---------------

The tools of Evil were around me. The axe that dripped the blood of innocents, the coins that had paid for a thousand murders, the jaws that had tasted the flesh of their own family, the treasures that had driven mortals wild and murderous with gold lust. More and more of the same; they all quivered in the air at the power I was unleashing. Had not their power been locked and drained away, doubtless the hovering horde of Sin-cruxes would have converged on me in reflex and anathema. As it was, an unholy moan seemed to waft from them and break over my soul, and I ignored them and every story they attempted to tell me and make me experience.

Three white-hot beams of Light, wrapped in vivic mercy and angelic purity, speared through the multiple layers of the containment Circle, slicing through hellfire and balefire empowerment as the wails of the Damned massed to stop it, and they failed.

Phoenix fire sliced precisely into those graven Runes, one short line, and the other two crisscrossed it perfectly. Vivic fire sank into the emerald flesh of the Angel, and it screamed anew at the pain… and the shock of release as incoming Healing energy warred with the corrupting influence of hellfire. Phoenix flames disrupted the structure of the Rune-forms empowering the hellfire that was assaulting the angel.

One single line, no more than a hand long, but the Rune had been cut and marred, and now it sputtered and died, its own perfection broken, as the Planetar reeled back. A line of black smoked impotently as the crossing white scars glowed and steamed on the broad emerald chest, etching mercy on Hellish perfection and ruining it.

Again.

Shards to Orb to Rays, Assay ramped up to punch unerringly through the Planetar’s resistance to magic. I could hear the distant beat of Urlh’s wings, the musical dance of the Phoenix, wind rustling in the choral leaves of the Ahren forests, the tireless worship-hymns of the Archons, and the Baneskull of the Crowned Horned Devil Gorgriespiel was wailing atop Dius, shivering the Sin-cruxes about me with anathema and the True Death of Fallen Angels.

The Planetar writhed in the confusing grips of pain new and old, of the searing wash of purity and stillness where agony once had radiated. I Concentrated, a million choices devolved to one, and Rays of Mercy leapt out again, carving into the Angel, one hand-span at a time.

I drove the burning figure across the Thaumaturgic Circle, etching across and ruining Runes of Ruin, pumping Holiness into them and scarring the scars, rendering them impotent and useless. The cyclone of competing flames about the Planetar began to dim and yet enrichen as the gold and silver whelmed. The great Angel shuddered and cried out in a voice undimmed by a million screams… and now, you could hear the distant music of its soul, making the Cruxes of Sin shudder in the air at the hint of true glory there.

I smiled grimly and kept at my task of forever scarring an Angel.

-----------------

It would never be perfect again, but the screams had stopped.

The Cruxes about me were almost rustling, straining to constrain the power that was slowly ramping up within that Circle of containment, its power no longer being expended against hellfire. I smirked at them, the semi-sentient manifestations shivering at the slowly rebuilding power of highest Good that was being cleansed and purified before them.

I was hosing the Planetar down with pure blasts of vivic fire now, driving the unwhite fires deep into it, raging for the devilshine that had been infused into it. The tainted power was being forced out in cinder-flaming tears from its mouth, eyes, nose, and ears as the vivic flames chased it down. It gathered on the floor, and angelfire consumed it in searing explosions of spatter-crack Wrath about where the Planetar was kneeling, the ripped stumps of its wings still bleeding golden fire.

“Enough.”

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