FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

[b][u][center]Heaven Damned 14

Under a Dark Heaven

For DuskCypher

By Draconicon[/center][/u][/b]

Cthulhu’s law office was often as cold as the poles and the depths of the sea, and deliberately so. Many of the case records were frozen in stasis, impossible to shift due to the sheer skill of the lawyer that had argued the case, and most of the Shoggoths that worked in the office didn’t need to be fed or cared for if they were kept at a sufficiently low temperature. The only time that it warmed was when the boss himself came in to work or talk to a client, and that happened seldom enough in the last thirty years.

The purple-skinned, tentacle-faced eldritch being sat in a chair carved of stone dragged from the sea-floor, arms cushioned by tendril-shapes that made it more comfortable for him to lean back than simple lines would have done. He dragged old papers along his desk, reading through the old accounts that would soon be rendered impossible to collect, balancing souls that had been offered and waiting for one of the Shoggoths to bring him some form of caffeine. Tea, coffee, or something stronger would all have been appreciated.

What the lawyer had not quite anticipated was the opening of a portal to his small world, and he arched an eyebrow as he watched it open and spill out a visitor that he hadn’t seen for quite a few thousand years.

“Cthulhu,” Jehovah said.

“Esquire, please,” the attorney said. “Good to see you again, Jehovah.”

“Mmm. I suppose it is.”

“Can I offer you a seat?”

“Please.”

It wasn’t hard to tell that the tiger was in a bad way; he didn’t wobble the way that some might have done, but the normal brilliance of his clothing was dampened, and the arrogance that he remembered the godling carrying himself with was not quite so present as it had been on past meetings. Something had happened, and something intense.

He had a guess as to what it was, as well. However, he would allow the tiger to talk in his own time. That was common courtesy for a client.

As one of the Shoggoths appeared with his coffee of space-time – improperly blended, of course, but coffee was coffee – another carried a more standard armchair in for the other god. Cthulhu sipped at his drink as Jehovah sat down and crossed one leg over the other.

“Quite a few things have happened of late,” the tiger said.

“I’m sure they have. Things have a way of doing that.”

“Mortal things, in particular. Too quick, too…hectic.”

The octopus hid his smile behind his face tentacles. Trust someone like Jehovah to consider a few thousand years of progress and life to be too much change, too quickly. Then again, he imagined that Heaven had been a static realm for a very long time; this god had little in the way of creativity, provided that he got what he wanted. If everything remained the same and the tiger remained content from that, what care would the ruler of Heaven have for progress?

“I’m sure that you’ve heard of the war in the Begotten.”

“I’ve been aware of some souls being quite…traumatized, yes.”

“Well, the mortals had been breaking the rules for some time. You know how it is. One has to discipline unruly children.”

Cthulhu said nothing. He looked back down at the papers on his desk once more, drawing a finger along the account lines. The number of souls that had been traded to him over the last millennium had seen a sharp uptick in the last hundred years, and that spike had gone up further still in the last thirty. Desperate men made desperate bargains, and the desperation of the war had made many fools of the Begotten that knew how to contact those with power.

[i]Five souls here, a hundred there…[/i]

“Am I boring you?” Jehovah asked.

“Hardly. Please, continue.”

“…As I was saying, I had given them time to sort themselves out, but really, a few million years should have been more than sufficient for them to come to the realization that they were doing the wrong thing. And keeping an Eternal Council above me –”

“Such is the nature of free will, I suppose. One makes the decision that one will, and has to suffer the consequences.”

“Hmmph. As if the Council allowed them any freedom.”

[i]As if you would offer any more,[/i] Cthulhu thought, but kept himself from shaking his head or showing judgment. [i]What are you after?[/i]

“Anyway, I gave them time, and when it became clear after millions of years that they wouldn’t change, I decided to take matters into my own hands.”

“By…”

“By removing the instigators of the whole thing. After all, I’m not heartless; I will at least place the blame where it belongs.”

Jehovah was really testing his ability to keep a straight face, even with all the tentacles that made that little deception slightly easier. Cthulhu kept his head cocked to the side as the tiger continued.

“A few little agents here and there, a few mild sacrifices from my followers – they have dedicated their lives to my cause, I’m in the right here, I’m sure?”

“Contractually, at least.”

“Yes, yes, I know.”

[i]No, you didn’t.[/i]

“Anyway. They carried a bit of Heavenly power to the ancient weapons of the Council, and ensured that they would be brought low as soon as they made contact. Just removing them from power, giving them punishment. Discipline.”

Jehovah enjoyed that word. It was one of the ones that he had always thrown around, even back at the start of the whole mess. Discipline. Nobody seemed to have it except for him. Nobody had self-control except for him. Nobody understood how the universe was supposed to work, except for him.

Cthulhu looked down at the accounts again. Yes, yes, all payments were cleared. Everything was on the up-and-up, despite the near-destruction of the Begotten in the war. Which he was sure that they were about to –

“I even managed to convert most of the Seven into my personal assets over time.”

“You converted them? I doubt that they decided to follow you willingly.”

“I…corrected them,” Jehovah said. “And that was also well within my rights. Those that have served as tormentors to my followers can be brought up for punishment, should I decide to invoke that right.”

“Provided that the god of the realm where your followers are being oppressed agrees to this, yes.”

“Ah, but the Begotten has no god, save me.”

“…”

“Unless there has been someone new, filing paperwork to take that from me? I am, after all, its co-creator.”

“There hasn’t been, no,” Cthulhu agreed.

“Then I’m allowed,” Jehovah said, smirking slightly.

He was getting more solid. Slowly, yes, but that light was slowly growing brighter and his strength seemed more sure of itself. Cthulhu imagined that it was partially confidence and partially whatever the tiger had left his underlings to do in Heaven. Doubtlessly something was going on up there to repair all the damages that had been done in –

“Of course, one of them was…hardly agreeable. Thirty years, that war dragged on, and he refused to accept his punishment. He fought against me in pride and sin, believing that he knew better than I did how the universe was supposed to be run. Oh, the punishments that I had to rain down – but we don’t have to go into that. No, no, we don’t have to go into that.

“He finally seemed to bow to his fate, but you know how mortals are. Always looking for a loophole.” Jehovah chuckled. “You understand that better than anyone, I’m sure.”

“Perhaps.”

“Ah, perhaps not, but as a lawyer…Anyway. I ordered him to finish the job. Mortals had proven themselves completely unsuitable for self-governance, and I believed that it was time to…turn back the clock, so to speak. Start over. I told him to kill them all, and…he took that literally. He swiped his scythe through all the Begotten and killed nearly every mortal, every angel I had dispatched, and most of the Ophanim. The damage that I have taken has been nearly impossible to quantify, and I may actually find some way to push others for damages on that.”

“A tricky case.”

“Yes, almost as tricky as what happened at the very end of the war. Now, this is where I was rather confused, and I was hoping that you could explain this to me.”

[i]Ah, now we get to the crux of the issue.[/i]

He’d known they were getting somewhere sticky, somewhere tricky, but he hadn’t been quite sure where until now. The sheer civility that Jehovah had held to – even while gloating – had been jarring; the tiger had never been one to hold back his disgust and disdain for the eldritch attorney during years past. When one of them had built an entire realm of power as an altar to their own ideals, and the other had made a simple little law office, it was clear which one of them had the higher opinion of themselves.

But this time, he had come with some sense, some reasonableness, and that meant that he was not only weak, but trying to be crafty. Cthulhu kept his voice neutral.

“And what would you like explained?”

“The reason why the Republic was able to repel the Reaper.”

“Is that so impossible?”

“Yes. Yes, it is [i]completely[/i] impossible,” Jehovah said, a barely suppressed snarl entering his voice. “And you know that. You’re no fool; these are mortals, and the Reaper was the closest thing that they had to a god of their own. If he called for them to die, they should have died. And instead, they cast a spell.”

“Mortals have, as ever, a startling number of resources.”

“This spell would have been impossible for them to learn on their own. They made a Covenant with this one.”

“Did they, now?”

“Yes…one with the biggest Blood Price in the history of the Begotten’s existence. And one that only one person would be able to transfer properly.”

“…”

“Why did you help them?”

He didn’t answer. Not at first, anyway. He looked down at his paperwork one last time, tapping a finger against the lump sum of billions of lives that had been transferred to him for the sake of the contract. Was it required to get so many at once? Had he needed to demand that many souls for the sake of protection? He could almost hear the questions from the echoes of the souls that had been transferred to him.

“You helped them,” Jehovah said. “You had no right.”

“No right?”

Cthulhu looked up, chuckling. Little by little, the writhing limbs that made up most of his body wriggled, pushing him out of his chair until he stood with all his height, looming over the tiger and smiling in the way that only many facial tendrils allowed, a dozen or more grins that made his already surreal existence all the harder to rationalize. He reached down, taking the cup of coffee by the handle, little suckers keeping it from falling as he walked with undulating ‘strides’ around his desk.

“No right, Jehovah? Please, do not insult my intelligence. There is a certain amount of right that I am [i]completely[/i] allowed in exchange for not building such a large realm of my own. Including taking offers and payments from far more realms than you can,” he said, shaking his head. “And if I wished to indulge the mortals by allowing them to pay what they did for protection, then I am completely within my rights in the business sense.”

“They couldn’t have made that covenant if you hadn’t interfered,” Jehovah said, shaking his head. “Since when do you care for them?”

“I don’t.”

“Then why –”

“I don’t care for the mortals. In fact, in some ways, I imagine that I despise them even more than you do, considering that I have to talk to them. I hear their stupidity. I wallow in their abject misunderstanding of the world around them. I am inundated with their cruelty, their ignorance, their utter determination to believe that things work the way that they believe and no other way, and I have to deal with the fallout of that again and again.

“But I [i]do[/i] care for the world. Do you know why?”

“…”

“Because of Lilith. Because of my [i]daughter.[/i]”

Jehovah flinched, as well he should. Millions of years had passed, and Cthulhu still remembered the day of her death like it was yesterday. She had been hurt, had fled to Hell, and he’d never had the chance to see her before she went. He hadn’t even been able to go to her grave since Lucifer buried her; Hell was all but closed to him under the new administration.

“You were its co-creator. I cannot argue your rights in that fashion. But when she died, she left behind more than a mere child for you to abuse. She left behind a piece of herself. And while I stood by and let her make her own decisions while she was alive, I will [i]not[/i] let you rip away what I have left of her.”

“You’re breaking the rules.”

“Hardly. You know me, Jehovah. Would I have dipped so much as a toe into this mess if I wasn’t completely sure that I was completely in the right?”

The tiger had nothing to say to that; they both knew the answer.

“I did not [i]save[/i] the world. I gave them a choice. As my daughter would have, I gave them the chance to choose just how much their lives and freedom meant to them. She gave it for free to her demons; I let them show me how much it mattered.

“And they gave, Jehovah. They gave more, and more, and more. If they had ever said for me to stop, if they had ever demanded that it wasn’t fair, then I would have had to make a decision. But they gave all the blood and lives that I asked for, and only stopped when I did. To them, this was worth it. To them, giving up almost everything to survive and spit in the eye of fate was worth it.”

He could have stopped calling for more at any time during the ritual. He could have told them that it was enough, that he would protect them for the cost of a few million rather than the billions that were sacrificed. Lilith would have done it far earlier, granting them protection against the oncoming wave of slaughter at a far cheaper price than he had.

But more than anything else, he had needed to know something. He needed to know whether her world, her people, valued themselves enough to be worth protecting. They were willing to sacrifice as many as needed to keep some remnant of themselves alive, willing to take the chance that it might kill all of them and not be enough, just for the chance to save some tiny portion of them.

It was worth it to them, and so it was worth it to him.

“I’ll sue over this,” Jehovah said. “I…I will sue over this.”

“You, sue me, over a genocide in a realm not your own?”

“It [i]is[/i] mine!”

“No. It was [i]made[/i] by you, and through that, you have certain rights. But as it was co-created by you rather than solely created by you, those rights are split, and the greater right of the universe in question goes to the mortals living within it. While they will make mistakes and do a hundred things wrong, that is their prerogative, and all [i]I[/i] have done is make a business deal. Steep, cruel, but nonetheless completely legal.”

“…You will pay for this. I swear by all that exists, you will pay.”

“Perhaps, if you ever get a case.” Cthulhu laid his cup back down on his desk. “But until then, get the [i]fuck[/i] out of my office.”

The door to Heaven opened again, and the tiger beat a hasty retreat through it. The attorney watched him go, and kept watching until the door slammed shut behind him. Once the view of another world was gone, he shook his head.

[i]Lilith…I hope that this was enough to let you rest in peace…[/i]

If nothing else, the shield spell would maintain itself for a thousand years or so, long enough for the mortals to spread across the planet once more and start building themselves up. It would take time for Jehovah to start playing his games on the Begotten once more, and that should give them time to make a different, better society.

But it would be up to them. He was a lawyer, and he knew the rules better than almost anyone. Without a Covenant or some other way for an arcane practitioner to reach out to him, he could not touch the mortal world, nor could he do anything to shape it. And the cost of that shield was…high.

The mortals would lack magi for a long, long time. He doubted that they would get their power back for thousands of years, if ever, and when they did, it would be a far cry from the Republic from which they had descended. They would have to find other ways to inflict their will on the world, but they would do it. They were resourceful.

#

Death woke from the deep sleep of exhaustion to find himself chained. Not harshly, not like before, but enough to know that his time of resistance was gone. His scythe had been taken from him and he could not sense it, which meant that most of his power was gone, as well. The silver-furred cat looked up from the ground –

“Finally.”

It was the one that called himself ‘God.’ The tiger was drained, clearly, but angry, and he sat with narrowed eyes as he rested his head on his hand. The bigger cat shook his head.

“You caused me so much trouble, and yet, you didn’t finish the job.”

“Oh?” Death chuckled. “I left a few of yours alive?”

God glared, and the pain came back. Without his scythe, Death was driven to his knees, slumping down and hissing through clenched teeth. For a few split seconds, it felt as if even Death might die.

Then it passed, and he was allowed to breathe again.

“You failed to kill all of the mortals. Some few in the Republic survived, and none of my angels can touch them for…far too long,” the tiger said. “But you…you have fallen. And now, without your weapon, you can be controlled.”

“…”

“I will save you, just like I’ve saved the rest of the Seven. You’ll be useful in the future if I need greater weapons than the Ophanim. For now, however…I will have you rest. Rest and wait…there.”

God pointed to a great stone block adorned with seven seals. Each one was laid out differently, the seals themselves about the size of one’s hand. They were layered, and his was near the center.

“Go.”

The power of God laid heavy on his shoulders, pulling him forward with stronger hands than he had ever felt before. The Reaper was dragged along, grunting with every step as he tried and failed to fight the tiger’s power.

And yet, he still smirked. It hurt him, it pained him, and he knew that there was no reason to feel cocky and arrogant any longer, but knowing that he had kept this God from being able to do what he wanted meant the world to him. It meant that he had kept his own pride as the Reaper, and that at least one of the Seven had stood as a god should.

Then he touched the stone, and the world faded. He did not sleep, he did not dream, he barely existed. For Death, there was nothing but the emptiness, nothing but the shattered feeling of frozen time, jagged and jarring and picking at him with each unpassing second, waiting for existence to resume.

#

“I summon thee, Brother Grimm…”

The words passed Dusk Von Doom’s lips with an air of ceremony he didn’t know he was entirely capable of. They reached for the cracking seal and finished the job, a second split filling the air of Elysium. Like the roll of muffled thunder, the sleepy air parted, and where once there was nothing stood a silver-furred cat, one that stood a foot shorter than himself, and who looked disoriented, barely awake, but furious nonetheless.

The glowing figure of God blinked, staring with his mouth wide open, only to collect himself. The tiger chuckled.

“A nice little parlor trick, and one that I suppose might have worked against one of my archangels. But against me…”

Dusk’s arms ached, but that was an improvement. They ached from the position he was in, not from exhaustion. Something had shifted in the sleeping fields of Elysium, and that meant that something was already turning in his favor. The silver-furred feline that he’d called to his side rubbed his face with one hand while the other grasped for something unseen as God continued.

“The Reaper is nothing but a plaything of mine. I suppose that you have unshackled him, somewhat, by breaking his seal, but that is nothing in the grand scheme of things. None of the Seven are worth anything without their weapons, and he was sealed without his. Without the Scythe of Death, he is still nothing but a pawn.

“A respectable effort to break free, I’ll grant you, but I was hoping for something a little more sensible, Dusk. Does your desperation to defy me know no bounds? I would have thought that…wait…”

God’s eyes narrowed as Dusk smirked. The chains of sleep were weakening in the presence of the Reaper; the black cat had hoped that the presence of Brother Grimm would bring at least a semblance of death with him, and it seemed that it had, killing sleep and bringing something else in its wake. He managed to stand, and as he did, the shimmering tool at his waist came into view.

God and Death alike stared at it. The former gasped, his eyes widening again, and the latter smirked.

“Finally…”

The silver cat laughed. It was a low, impossibly growling sound, but it grew in strength and volume with each new ripple of sound. The dreamers of Elysium groaned in their sleep, trying to preserve their oblivious ease, but some were already waking. Eyes were parting, staring out of dream for the first time in who knew how long, and Dusk himself couldn’t help but join in the laughter.

It was a mad thing between them, growing stronger and more unhinged the longer that it went on. The two cats leaned against each other, one in exhaustion, one in eternal stiffness, but the more that they laughed, the more that they recovered. They were coming back to life in a way that should have been utterly impossible.

“You couldn’t – how –”

“Let’s just say…Cthulhu…had some good advice,” Dusk said between his guffaws of laughter. “And now, [i]you[/i] get to pay the price.”

“You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for someone to let me out…or how long I’ve been waiting to pay him back for that…humiliation,” the Brother Grimm muttered. “I could [i]hear[/i] him in there. I could [i]hear[/i] all the things he was saying…all the lies…all the self-delusion…”

Dusk blinked, looking back at the other feline. He hadn’t been sure just what to expect from the Grim Reaper, but someone that sounded that fed up – and almost mortal, for that matter – was not what he had anticipated.

“Lies?” Dusk asked.

“He lies [i]all[/i] the time,” Death muttered, shaking his head. “He didn’t save anyone; he tortured me until I would agree to kill them for him. There was no great effort to pull his faithful from the universe; he set me to kill them as well as everyone else. And now? Now, I’ll just bet that he’s getting ready to do it again, faithful or not, so he can have his little ideal world.”

And Dusk had thought that Mercy was bad. At least she had been forthright with the things that she would do to the world if she got half a chance. Her father, it seemed, was so wrapped up in his own lies about himself and had re-written history to such a degree that he couldn’t even recognize how far he had fallen.

They looked back at God together. The shining tiger had taken a step back from the pair of them. Despite the glow around him, despite everything, the balance of power had changed. The light of Heaven glowed through Elysium, powerful yes, but not quite natural to it, not entirely welcome.

“Give me the scythe,” Death said. “I have missed it…”

“Not yet.”

“Why not? It’s [i]mine.[/i]”

“You’re still weak…and you can’t take him alone.”

“You couldn’t take me together,” God said, shaking his head. “This is not the plan. This was [i]never[/i] the plan. You were supposed to give in, just like Death did all those years ago. There wasn’t a loophole this time; I made sure of it. There was nothing, nothing that should have let you get free of this. This…this…”

“Isn’t fair?” Dusk asked.

“No.”

“Death is always fair. [i]I[/i] am always fair,” the silver-furred cat said. “Every insult you throw comes from you looking in a mirror for inspiration.”

“Neither of you understand. I am [i]God.[/i] I am the creator. I [i]made[/i] your world, and Heaven. I [i]own[/i] Hell. What can either of you do against that? How can either of you come close to understanding what it means to actually manage entire realms of existence? You are nothing but –”

“I know [i]exactly[/i] what I am.”

Dusk stepped between Death and God. He might have been shorter than the tiger, but he stared up at him with all the determination, anger, and confidence that a life of hell could give. In that moment, he re-lived every hardship, every success, every goddamn stupid idea that had paid off with costs that he would never entirely be able to pay off. The weight of alcoholism and black magic and betrayal and bond that he had accumulated through his short life against all odds pulled at him, and he pushed back.

“I am Dusk Von Doom. I carry the Doom that you laid on the world all those millions of years ago. I come from the same cursed line that you set to wander and be plagued all their lives.”

“You –”

“I studied my line. I know the history. I know what happened to every damned Von Doom that has existed since the time of your son. And I know what you expected of them. You expected them to die in abject pain, misery, and horrors, regretting every decision that they ever made.

“And I’m breaking that cycle.”

As Death stood beside him, the two housecats reached for the scythe at the same time. They touched it together, and the power of Death flowed through both of them. Rather than killing Dusk, as it had every other mortal that had laid hand on it since the beginning of time, the weapon worked with him, channeling both Death’s powers and his memories. For a moment of frozen time, Dusk saw what the silver cat had once had. He saw the palaces of Babylon, saw the harem of Bishops, was among them to take the pleasure that they offered and feel the worship that they gave.

He felt what Death had been, and he knew that it could be that again.

More than that, he felt the power of the scythe, of Death, and of himself. The black magic that had always been at his side was still there. The power of the dream was all around him. And in him, bound to not just his soul, but to him, in a way that could never be completely erased, was the Doom that God had laid on his line all those millions of years ago.

“I might have that mark. I might be a Von Doom. But I am not doomed. From now on, God, consider this a warning. Your number’s up. We’re coming for you, and there’s nothing that you can do to stop us.”

“You can’t kill me. You don’t have the power.”

“Not yet,” Dusk admitted. “But we can kick you out of here.”

“Impossible.”

“For one of us? Maybe.”

“But for both of us…”

They stepped forward, and each of their paces pushed God back by one until the tiger was leaning against the glowing, soft walls of this small pocket of Elysium. The taller feline grunted, looking over his shoulder to see that he was pinned, then turned around to see both Dusk and Death steadying themselves with the scythe between them.

“You can’t do this. I am [i]God![/i] I –”

“Am not welcome here,” Death said.

“I’m taking it back. I’m taking it all back. Now, get the [i]Hell[/i] out of my house.”

Dusk and Death leaned back and kicked the tiger in the chest with all their might. The feline slammed back against the wall, and then further as Death, magic, and perhaps a little bit of something more slammed into Heaven’s ruler with thousands of years of pent-up rage and humiliation. The golden tiger disappeared, leaving the pocket of Elysium dark and quiet once more.

And yet, the realm itself continued to tremble. The long sleep had been shattered with Death’s arrival, and the soft, lulling aura that had been there was gone. Those that were still asleep might still stay that way, but those that had woken were forced to face reality.

[i]As they should,[/i] Dusk thought, shaking his head. [i]You can’t hide from it. Might as well embrace it.[/i]

“Well…that will probably serve as a declaration of war,” Dusk muttered, shaking his head as he let go of the scythe. “And he’ll be more than happy to take it up once he starts telling himself that he can win.”

“Can he?” Death asked.

“Maybe. But it’s not so certain. I think that we have a few tricks that we can pull that he’s not ready for.”

“He destroyed a Theocracy that stretched across the stars far further than you have, from what I can see, and he did it in thirty years. Can you hold out when you have just one planet?”

“We’ll have to find out.”

Dusk smiled despite himself. Was he on the back foot? Most definitely; he had less of his powers than any time since kicking Lucifer into the pit, and he was trapped somewhere well away from any and all of his constant allies. Some would likely believe that he had lied to them and abandoned hell, and others might believe the lies of Darith and the other demons that had taken over from him. Not to mention what God would do when he had recovered from the shock of a lifetime.

Despite all that, he smiled. As long as you were free, you had a chance to turn things around. And he had freed himself from God’s greatest trap yet, despite the Doom on his soul. And now, he was the one pushing things. As long as he could keep up his momentum, he had a chance to take control again.

It was his turn at the wheel, and he wasn’t going to waste it.

[b][u][center]The End[/center][/u][/b]

Summary: A wrapping up of the old times, and bringing us back to the modern ones.

Tags: No Sex, Anger, Cat, Death, Reaper, Tiger, God, Cthulhu, Blood Price, Series, Fantasy, Modern Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Arc Done,