The Power of Ten

Chapter 18-463: Dark Places

The demon princess Erichidnea was a daughter and servant of Ruilvei, her portfolio one of scorpions and spiders.

I frowned, and sighed. They werent undead-focused, so the Shroud hadnt centered on them, despite having a concentration of demons. Exactly how many succubi? I asked calmly.

Twenty-five.

Any advanced ones?

Three, at Ten, Eleven, and Twelve, they reported grimly.

A similar amount of diamonds floated out of my Masspack, ignoring the slipstream of wind coursing by at 300 mph just inches away. I spent the Binding magic on them, aligning them towards Lust and turning them rosy pink as I did.

The gems floated into Legions Vest pockets, creating no bulges as they did. What were your expectations? I asked neutrally.

We may be able to save some of the children, they said slowly. It isnt quite as bad as the dragons bloodline, yet. Their crown-like frill pulsed with hypnotic lights and fires for a second in arrogant sureness of the fact, and if the swirling center of the two highest horns happened to look like eyes gazing out scornfully upon the world, I was sure it wasnt a coincidence.

I nodded. Cough the succubi up into the Stones once you have their Truenames. They dont know it, but they are bound to the Shroud, and as Sinborn they will be drawn after it even if it recedes, I have been informed by the Shrouded souls. They arent slaved to a Shroudlord yet, but if they get brought to a fully fallen world, it is inevitable. I may have another option for them.

And the rest? she asked quietly.

They have to go. I leave the method to you. Save what children you can. I will speak to the lves about adopting them as potential haror. The Silver Queens favorites are not to be given short shrift.

They nodded, frowning slightly. There are a lot of them... they said softly.

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The choice is yours. Do as Heaven allows.

They could kill them all or Consume them, as they wished. They had pointed out the protector demi-goddess, likely just a hopped-up Greater Feyri, was a Pact Patron to make sure I realized the point.

Death was just sending them into the Shroud, consigning them all to Demonium if and when they ever got out, if they did, and if werent used as fuel for some nightmarish magitech instead.

I certainly wasnt going to tell Legion what choice to make. Taking in even more demon-bloods was going to be a lot of Sin, and it was going to be hellaciously painful burning the edges of it away, likely putting them out of commission for days.

Hellfire burned on Sin, but it was basically made to harvest it, like mining it from souls, piece by piece. Heavenly fire was made to burn Sin, period. Combine the two, and you could literally burn the Sin right out of a soul rapidly, not needing to stew someone in the pits of Hell like a tenderizing dumpling for centuries.

However, it hurt. It hurt a LOT, and theyd all be sharing ALL the pain of that happening.

We... we will need to ride with you, they whispered.

I nodded against their back. I will get Sleipner ready, too. Wait until after the solstice.

They nodded, fractionally relaxing as it was deferred, and not something to worry about for now.

Hellfire and heavenly fire burning them, what was new about that? It was just a question of how much burning they could take together, knowing that it would not, could not actually kill them, only make them burn, and how much of that pain they were willing to take on.

Quite notably, in the afterlife, it wasnt about willpower at all. You Burned, and it was one in a million or billion souls who could take that pain and retain even a semblance of their mortal identity. The rest were just wiped away, soul energy to be absorbed by the plane and eventually leaked back into Creation in an endless cycle... or agglomerated and transformed into minions in a merciless kind of reincarnation, starting from the bottom of the ladder and working their way up as they became the limitless numbers of Sinborn, created from the Sins and Evil souls from all of existence.

One of the side projects Legion, I, and even Shvaughn had collaborated on was what exactly the Fiendish afterlife was about. The different Lower Planes all harvested Sin and Evil souls, having the same motivations, only differing in the discipline and methods of how they went about it.

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The Rewards of Sin was the title of the resulting book. It was a very precise account of what happened to Evil souls when they died. Queen Rayetizvisha, another succubi, and two erinyes were the centerpieces of the story, but the creation process of divs, dreggals, demodands, daemons, asuras, kytons, and oni, as well as demons and devils, was all laid out within.

In short, if you were very Evil, and very high Level, maaaaaybe a deity or Patron would enable you to skip the process of harvesting Sin and go right to Soulborn status... but you had to do some incredibly nasty stuff to get to that status, which was going to get you offed that much faster in mortal life.

Queen Rayetizvisha had NOT been one of those, and had clawed her way to the top of the succubi with politics, murder, slaughter, sex, corruption, favor-trading, betrayal, ruthlessness, degradation, and revenge in an up-and-down cycle of bloodshed and mayhem that had spanned thousands of years. The things shed done on the mortal plane had been comparatively mild and fun compared to the ruthless competition of the demonic realm, and Evils completely uncaring and pragmatic ongoing sifting of chaff from elites.

The Lower Planes were basically just slaughterhouses into which were fed unending streams of Sin and Evil souls. Since Sin washed down to them from the higher Planes as part of the cleansing process, all of Creation basically fed them, even as Virtues, Obeisance, and Choice flowed to their own extremes of the Aligned Planes.

She called herself Queen Rayetizvisha, but in the Pits of Demonium, she was just another greater demon. Sure, lilitu were one in a thousand or more succubi, but there were still basically infinite numbers of them, spread out across the souls tied to different realities and worlds. She represented the combined power of at least a thousand other succubi slain and their power stolen to get to the status of lilitu, trading favors with more powerful demons and doing whatever needed to be done to survive... even, in the end, giving up her Truename to be Bound and Sealed, rather than die forever.

So it went in all the Lower Planes, where everyone preyed on everything else to survive and get stronger, and if you didnt, you were eventually food for something elses rise.

It held true even in the Domains of the Evil Divinities, where the goal was to eventually subsume the souls of the dead and be absorbed into the Realm of the deity itself, becoming a non-finite trope and idealization of one of the Aspects of an Alignment. How the Evil deities went about grinding out individuality and collecting that power varied, but it was all ruthless, pragmatic, uncaring, and very, very effective.

You had Free Will and value right up until you died, and then you were just raw material for the afterlife to make into something else. The Soulborn were the natural way souls were processed; the Divine took and added personal touches. Amusingly enough, the more powerful and better a servant you were, the less likely you were to ever merge with your deity, as being dispersed by a violent death meant being absorbed by the Realm, not your god.

Little things in the afterlife to worry about, if you made the wrong decisions while living.

The Neutral churches had not been happy when The Rewards of Conflict came out, either, likewise covering Obeisance, Choice, and Balance.

The ultimate end of Obeisance to Axiom was always a Hivemind or Swarm-mind, where the individual was either subsumed to the collective, or the lessors were absolutely obedient to their superiors, with no ego to clash with them at all. If you went for Law, your fate was to become a cog in the machine, until your job was you and nothing else, the machine and system was all, obeying what came down from higher up without emotion or hesitation.

If you followed Imprus, you would eventually find a pigeonhole place in the Perfect Kingdom, totally dutiful servant to the God of Kings. Likewise, follow Tempus Primus, and you would be a monitor of Time, making sure it was properly allocated and moving smoothly through Creation, self-will lost in the smooth functioning of the cosmos.

Pure Anarchy was much the same, where it was all Choice against Choice, and who had the stronger Will prevailed. There was no organization, no ranking except relative strength and desire, and you were either lost in the conflicts of so many Wills, or you dominated them and got stronger. To obey another blindly was to lose your dreams and ambitions and be devoured by the Will of the Plane itself, and so Chaos was always fracturing as those who did not want to lose themselves were always taking different courses to keep themselves individual and unique. The Rule of Individuality dominated from the depths of the Pits to the grand heights of Olympia, and it was why the Chaotic Realms were, well, chaotic.

Hurn waged endless War against all comers, and endless champions competed to stand out from one another in those battles. Mhyst displayed endless worlds of wonder and illusion, all ephemeral and passing like dreams, reality just another canvas for Her followers to impose their Will upon. Jynxs faithful pushed their luck in feats of daring and fleeting glory, always looking for the next thrill in defying the odds.

There was a Neutral area in the Outer Planes, where no Alignment dominated and plenty of beings who didnt want to be ruled or defined by them existed. Many were Elemental or Primal forces and deities, concerned with Nature and Creation and caring little for anything else, while others considered other aspirations, such as Knowledge, or were Creator Gods of Races or thought Magic was the be-all and end-all, and so forth and so on. There were gods of War and gods of Healing, gods of Nature and gods of Death and Fate there.

They were preyed on mercilessly from all sides, naturally enough, as they simply could not optimize against all the Alignments. Their high-minded and noble souls were pulled away by Heaven, their obedient and disciplined ones lured by Axiom, their wild free thinkers found kindred souls in Anarchy, and the more ruthlessly pragmatic and depraved inevitably fell to Sin, who embraced them happily.

Being Neutral was in effect making yourself the centerpoint of the Alignment conflicts, constantly pulled at from all sides, and then fighting as an enemy against most of them. Whirlwind diplomacy, intrigue, battle, and trade at the crux of contention was the fate of the afterlives there, as armies of all the Alignments worked at the edges of the Domain as the souls there tired of seeing foes on all sides and finally joined one of them.

Trying to leave the Alignment War behind didnt mean it left you, and Neutrality always collapsed before the infinite clashes of the Alignments, it was only a matter of time. Be it Conquest claiming new ground, War seeking worthy foes, Sin desiring what it did not have, or something as quiet as Hope saying there was a better way over here, the Alignments came in and took their tolls on those who stood in the middle. The Realms of Conflict fought and wheeled and dealed to retain their existences in the face of the implacable Primal forces all around them.

This was often illustrated by Strife, the True Realm of Conflict. All Primal conflicts, be they Aligned, Elemental, Divine, or whatnot, fell into Strife in the end, taking chunks of other planes with them as they did. These bits and peices were fought over and over, chewed up into random lands interspersed with one another, and then sifted back off into the rest of Creation, recycled as trans-infinite war raged eternally there.

Invade Heaven? Only for a short time, and then the battlefield fell into Strife. March on the Pits? Ends up in Strife. Crusade against Hell? Contest against War? Declare a Grand Hunt of daemons?

It all ended up in Strife.

It wasnt that the Afterlife was a constant battle for souls. The conflicts were Divine in nature and scope, and some Realms might exist for millennia without suffering suffer invasion or fighting, while other Realms were devoted to nothing but that, attracting the attention of other fighting forces to them.

But, your strength in the afterlife was built on the strength of your belief, and the strongest believers were those that were willing to fight for them, in one way or another. That might mean the souls of several caring healers merging together to form a White Mother and going off to heal the wounded, or artists combining together into a Lillend Muse, their music inspiring those in combat and showing them what they were fighting for.

Those who were not willing to fight eventually lost their individuality to the Plane they were on, fading away to join with their deity, or the energy of their souls was returned to Creation to begin the process anew.