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[b][u][center]Heaven Damned 12

By Blade or Horror

For DuskCypher

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

The meeting hall had been turned into a rounded prison, though if any of the Seven had been free to act, the thirty cultists wouldn’t have been nearly enough to hold them. All of them were bound to the curse in their weapons and the celestial poison in their veins, making it impossible to move and more impossible to resist.

Death glanced around, his skeletal form still shaking, still managing to maintain a standing position with the strength of his scythe. He hissed with lungs that were no longer there and vocal cords that had completely disappeared with the transformation, but he refused to bow or break.

Not like Pestilence.

Not like the others.

Two of his fellow council members had already submitted themselves to the rulership of Heaven. Pestilence had been the first to fall, too weak and took lacking in pride to hold back, while the other had seen the way that the wind was blowing and gave in for the sake of keeping what power they had. He imagined that they would fool themselves into thinking they would eventually get their revenge for this slight, far off in the future.

They were fools. This ‘God’ was a trickster, yes, but Death could feel his power. Anyone that had the power to keep [i]him[/i] from lashing out and force the remaining members of the Seven to their knees was too powerful to defeat by stealth, nor by trickery. This ‘God’ had the might to paralyze them as destruction ran through their realm, and would be more than powerful enough to keep their new minions from rebelling once the seals were properly placed upon them.

He breathed slowly, taking one breath after another as he watched his fellow Councilmembers tremble. The two that had surrendered had disappeared, dragged off into another plane of existence. He could barely feel them, but he knew that they were being given their marching orders and being educated in what they were going to be from now in. This ‘God’ was going to humble him and all the other gods that had served the Nephilim Theocracy, break them down so that they knew who was at the top.

And that it wouldn’t be the Seven.

Death took another breath, pushing past the fire that burned through veins that should not exist. He reached out, pushing through the galaxy, feeling every life that he could. Babylon was as familiar was ever, the lives that surrounded him not yet aware of the great pain that was coming, but as he reached further and further abroad, past this solar system and into the others, the pain and the prayers that came for Death grew louder and louder.

The skeletal cat heard every word, ever plea called out for him. Some called for mercy, that he come and take those that were already dying. Others called for him, asking for him to spare those that were in danger. Still others called for the Reaper to take revenge for them, to call down fire and worse on their enemies and show them the folly of challenging the Theocracy.

It was a comfort for him, to hear their faith and know that the power of death was still respected. Even when he was not the one dealing it out, they knew who held the power of the scythe. Brother Grimm’s legend was strong enough to –

The skeleton groaned as he felt the next surge, one of the planets at the edge of the galaxy burning brighter than ever. He saw their lives burning, their souls flaring, only for them to disappear, fading away as if they had never been. The ‘star’ of the planet’s souls was gone, consumed in that one attack, and Death gritted his teeth as he felt the support of their faith fade with them.

[i]Bastards…[/i]

War wobbled where he knelt. The red eagle had his hand on his blade, but clearly suffered from the same problems as Death did; he was poisoned, and little by little, his determination to fight back against the Christians and their God was faltering. The eagle’s grimace had already grown past his sneer, and Death doubted that he would last for much longer.

[i]Focus…focus…[/i]

There had to be a way to fight back. He was Death. Not War, not Pestilence, not some other power that could be thought through or fought off, but [i]Death.[/i] He was the Reaper, the Brother Grimm, the great power that was the final piece of every part of existence. There was no God that could stand before him if he could just…

And yet, his hand would not move save to squeeze tighter around the haft of the scythe. Just one moment, just one brief moment, and he was sure that the powers that had invaded the Theocracy could be swept away, but he was not given that moment.

Another shadowy figure of the Council fell, guided away and shimmering into wherever God was taking them as they fell. He could hear the faint laughter in the distance, and God’s power, deceptive as it was, burned in him once more, casting searing pain upon his body for delaying the seeming inevitable.

The skeletal cat refused to bow to the pain. He grimaced, he growled, and he huffed from the sheer agony that was visited upon him, but he refused to bow. Even as the deaths across the universe robbed him of their faith in him, their final fate still fed into his existence. It was a different sort of power, but it was power nonetheless. He held tight to it, keeping it burning in his chest as a reminder of what he was supposed to be.

[i]He is afraid…He…fears….me.[/i]

If there was one thing that he would remember, it was that God did not come to him as an enemy on the field of battle. He had not come as some enemy that could be fought fairly, or with any confidence. This bastard had come to him as a sneak-thief, poisoning him so that there was no way for a fair fight to happen. That meant…

Death shook his head, squeezing tighter around the shaft of the scythe. So hard to think through all the things happening around him. Death and destruction were right there, all the way at the edge of his awareness, and with every planet struck, he could feel it growing. Time passed in a strange way, no longer entirely sensible as it leaped forward through the periods of pain. The great spikes of it when a planet was completely destroyed shattered his concentration and semi-meditative moments, reminding him of the consequences of inaction, but how long between each planet dying?

A long time. A long time indeed. He looked at the lamb that had been the speaker for the group. She was older now, much older. A decade, at least, and a system of planets had died. Their God’s war was inexorable, inevitable, but it was not instant. Not even now. They had taken out one system, one solar system of many, and –

“Nnngh…”

Death slumped against his scythe, his legs shaking for a moment before he managed to stiffen them once more. So close, that time, so close to falling as the pain grew. His arms were burning, his legs feeling as if the bones themselves were on fire, but he still held out. How many –

Not enough. Not enough of the Council remained to fight this off even if they broke free of the poison right then and there. War and one other remained besides him. Too many taken, too many surrendered. He shook his head as he looked at War once more, the eagle looking back at him as he fell further, one arm on his blade and the other on the ground. He was all but shattered, his once proud plumage sagging, one eye bleeding, the rest of his face ravaged with the pain of the poison running through his veins.

It was a rare moment of admiration for another. He had assumed that War would be overcome, but the eagle was giving as great a fight as his namesake suggested he would. He was trying.

He would fail, but he was trying.

The lamb, aged and wrinkled compared to her once motherly appearance, strutted around the table. She leaned right in his face, smirking.

“You see now, do you not? God is the greatest power in the universe. His might strikes down all that stand before him.”

“…”

“You should just give in. Why do you bother standing against him?”

“…”

“Heh, you can’t even talk anymore. Pathetic. Your weak little magics have never stood a chance against the one true God. He looks down on you. He sees you for the fools that you are, and without this scythe, you’d already bend the knee to him. Why don’t you just let go and get it over with already?”

[i]Because…he wants me to…and I do not bow to anyone,[/i] he thought.

He gripped the scythe all the tighter as the lamb circled him, his breathing shallow and his fury matching the pain pulse for pulse. The cat couldn’t follow, couldn’t turn without risking falling to his knees. If he did, he knew that he’d never be able to rise again. All he could do was try and outlast it with the hope that the poison in him would eventually run out. If God’s power had some sort of limit to it, then perhaps there would be a moment –

“Just give up!”

Then the lamb made the stupidest mistake of her life: she grabbed for his scythe.

He watched her lunging for it as if in slow motion, a tiny little smile gracing his skeletal features as her fingers made contact with the bony, stiff weapon. No sooner had she touched it than her fingers turned to dust, holding the simple shape of her digits for a moment before flesh, fur, and wool began to break down, losing cohesion, life going out of her and reducing her to nothing more than a standing pile of ashes. Compacted down to her shape, it almost looked like she had been petrified for a split-second.

And then, the moment passed. A stiff breeze blew through the hall, and the lamb broke apart. Her arm drifted away, then half of her head, and then the rest followed, a gray breeze that soon disappeared into nothingness.

The rest of the Christian cultists stared, their eyes wide and more than a few with jaws agape. War smirked for a split-second before he grunted again, his eyes closing tight against the agony.

“Do not…touch…my scythe…if you value…your life…”

[i]None of them do, but…[/i]

But they might have nudged it, even slightly, and it was precariously balanced as it was. The last thing that he needed was to go tumbling down because one of them managed to put just enough pressure in an inopportune spot and send him falling to their knees.

They didn’t approach, nor did any of them cast any further mockery at him. He was satisfied with that…and with the information that it gave him.

God, if he had the power to protect his followers, hadn’t bothered to protect her. That meant that either their master didn’t care about his followers – something made abundantly clear with all the death and destruction across the universe – or it meant that there was something about Death that their God couldn’t entirely manage. There was power in the scythe that God couldn’t keep from his followers.

[i]I just need…one…[/i]

He slumped his head against the shaft of the scythe, silently begging for a single moment of clarity, just one micro-second where he could access his power and use it without being held back. Nothing came.

[i]Why…[/i]

“Because this world has outlived its usefulness, and so have all those that live within it.”

It was a new voice, and one that wasn’t spoken by anyone that stood near him. No woman’s voice, this, nor any mortal’s, but something that lived on a different plane.

[i]God…[/i]

“Yes. The only one here with a right to that name.”

[i]You…Mmmph…[/i]

“You haven’t learned just how far this will go. Not yet. Ten years might not have been enough suffering for you. Don’t worry. Time will tell.”

The echoing voice of ‘God’ faded away, leaving him alone with the torture that wracked him from head to toe, leaving his bones scorched and his body drained. As he looked up at the stars, he wondered just how long this would go on for, and how long he and War would be able to last.

#

At his best guess, it was another ten years when God came to him again. Only he and War still resisted being sealed away, and War was barely there. He had been drained again and again by the constant executions in the far reaches of the Theocracy, though the fires were coming closer. The monsters of the other world had pushed past their borders and were in new systems, and over a third of the Theocracy’s population had been crushed, obliterated in the twenty years of slaughter.

That time had not made Death stronger, but it had given him all the more resolve. God – or at least his forces – were not all-powerful. Perhaps invincible to the clergy and all the other lower-level parts of the Theocracy, but they were not all-powerful, nor did they move with the speed of gods. They had limitations, and took time to get to their destinations. They couldn’t do everything.

And it was irritating the voice on the other end. God spoke with him again, and he could hear the strain in the other voice.

“You have held on for a very long time, now. I imagine that you have seen all the death I have unleashed.”

[i]Yes.[/i]

“And you still think that this is the best choice. I say it again, you are no god.”

[i]I am what I am.[/i]

“A pathetic little creature is what you are, and what you will always be before me. There is nothing that you can do to stop the inevitable. [i]I[/i] am that inevitable, unstoppable, ineffable force. If you value anything that you have left, you will bend the knee and submit yourself to me. There is nothing that you can do to stop me now.”

[i]…[/i]

“Why are you silent?”

[i]There’s nothing to say to someone that won’t listen.[/i]

“Look in the mirror, pathetic little thing. I will come to you again, soon. God is, ever all, not without mercy.”

[i]Your daughter holds no interest to me.[/i]

The voice stopped instantly, disappearing from his mind. Despite the gravity of the situation, Death allowed himself a small smile. It gave him some small cheer to startle something so powerful like that.

[i]When you speak to any mind…make sure that yours is closed…[/i]

He had seen a tigress in his head, a curvaceous one that would have made him ill to look upon compared to the great men that he had serving him in the years past. He imagined that some of them were past their prime now, if they weren’t flat-out destroyed from the lack of care that his absence would have created. But that was neither here nor there.

Seeing her in God’s mind during their conversation hadn’t been all that he’d noticed. He’d felt the annoyance, even disgust, that God felt towards the other feline, and how she had been seen as something useful, perhaps even necessary, but without any love, without any affection.

Of course, Death could only judge affection based on what he had felt from mortals, what he had seen them give each other, but there had been none of that between this God and his daughter. Whatever Mercy was to that far-off deity, she was not something loved, nor something that he cared to spend time with.

And someone that hated mercy had no reason to grant any.

#

War disappeared a year or so after that talk, and Death was alone. The Christians were starting to die off, either through age or because things were changing with whatever had protected them at first. The clergy of Babylon had started to make noise outside the meeting hall, some few of them trying to reach their gods, while the Christians were losing faith. And those that lost faith?

Well, they died. Quickly.

He looked at the bodies that had fallen around the meeting hall every so often, rising from the pain and his meditations to see how many were left. Of the original thirty or so that had come to the meeting, less than half remained. Fourteen – no, thirteen judging by the body count, and removing one for the one that had died from touching his scythe.

Time flowed on. A year? Two? Ten? It was never easy to tell, but every time he came back to the moment, there were less of them than there had been. No sign of his people, but it was hard to remember them.

The universe held his attention between those moments of wakefulness. He saw the Theocracy as only Death could see it. Each of the Seven had their own visions of the universe, seeing what fell within their purview as far out as space reached. Their power waned at a distance, of course, but their sight had no such limits.

He could not see disease, nor could he see war. He could not see the greed in the hearts of mortals, nor their lusts, nor anything that some of the others might have claimed to see. What he saw, instead, was the light of their lives, and the moment when those lives went out snapped things into clarity. All across the universe, if he so chose, he could [i]see[/i] that, though it hurt him to do so.

It was a different hurt to the torture, though, and that was more than sufficient for him. He held to the pain of knowledge, seeing the passage of war through the stars, of slaughter and destruction. He saw the deaths of planets, and even stars when the monsters of heaven dove within them and destroyed the stars from within to speed things along. The supernovas and the black holes that the power of Heaven brought upon the systems of the Theocracy were so potent that they ripped through space itself, causing greater and greater damage.

And the voice of God was, for a time, silent. Death imagined that he was waiting for Death to call out to him, to be the supplicant, to beg for mercy. He would never do that. A cat would never bow his head, and Death was the most cat-like of all felines.

The longer he suffered, the more aware he was of life in all places. Anything that was not greater death and destruction as what God delivered was a distraction, serving as something that made hurt less, and he seized on anything that he could find.

He felt the pure disdain for the Theocracy that had to be God himself in the great beyond, seen through holes in the galaxy from time to time. More, he felt the lesser versions of the same that came from those like him. Never good, but at least it was something different, something that was only sneering rather than torturous.

He felt the occasional passing of vibrant lives, like God, going through the Theocracy to somewhere else, passing into it and then out of it without comment or occasion. They, too, were powerful and distracting, but never lasted long. He almost wished they would; they would have, at least, been something more engaging than the fire in his bones.

But most interesting of all, to the Reaper, was the feeling of something deep down, something hot and fiery and furious beyond anything that the Theocracy had ever witnessed. Even at the heart of War’s greatest pushes, nothing had set fire to souls like this.

They were like the mortals beneath him, and yet unlike. Carrying souls that burned redder than the endless blood spilling across his universe, the strangers came from elsewhere, a different elsewhere than the angels, and they came with fury and fire that burned the nose as much as the flesh. The Reaper felt them passing through holes that were rent rather than merely opened between his universe and theirs, and where they passed, they [i]killed.[/i] For the first time, some few forces on the other side fell, though the strangers never lasted for long.

He heard their words and eventually knew their names. Demons they were, demons from Hell, and they came in rebellion to their master. Not to fight and save this universe, but to save some chosen few, passing through the holes to get what they could, while they could, and hope that it would be enough.

Yet, despite their selfish goals, they still fought, and they still claimed lives. He heard names, names of Houses of power. They spoke of Greed, Lust, Gluttony, and more, each pushing for recognition from both the angels and the mortals that they encountered. Where they walked, God’s forces had to fight harder than ever before, and for that, he would have thanked them.

He would have reached out, if he could. The Reaper felt a faint kinship with the creatures that came from Hell, and could all but taste some common ancestor from them. It would have been interesting, perhaps even life-saving, if he could have.

But over time, they came less and less, until all signs of the demons disappeared. The holes rent between their universes were patched over, and he knew that their aid was done. Whatever rebellion they had offered, whatever alliance might have been made, had been stopped before it could have begun.

[i]Curse you,[/i] the Reaper thought. [i]Whoever you are, whatever you told them…curse you.[/i]

And without those brief incursions to slow them down, the angels marched implacably on.

#

Time passed. Eventually, the voice returned.

“And I thought that demons were heartless. It seems that half-demons are so much worse than their full-blooded counterparts.”

“…”

“You have a chance, you know. A small one, but a chance.”

Death tilted his head to the side. The remaining cultists cowered behind the far side of the table.

“For what is God without mercy?” the voice of the far-off deity whispered in his ears. “I am sure that you can feel the pain that this world is in. The Begotten is far from whole any longer. The pain that my armies have inflicted on your subjects, surely you can feel it?”

Death could. Pain that led to death was as instant as it was overpowering, and there was so much of it. The lives of his subjects were fleeting, and he still cared little for them, but the sheer amount of devastation was beyond anything that he had ever imagined. He leaned harder against his scythe for a moment, feeling the raw exhaustion of decades of concentrated pain weighing on him more than usual.

“You can end it. Right now.”

“…”

“You can end it for them. I will allow you the chance to give them mercy, to let them die at your hand rather than mine. One sweep of your scythe to end all mortals still standing in the universe.”

“…”

“Perhaps you think that this is too much. Perhaps you think that this isn’t mercy at all. But think about it. My power had already seized the rest of your Council. There is nothing left that can stop me, not even you, and my forces are already moving deeper and deeper into your Theocracy. I have destroyed enough that I can send a portion of them towards the edge of the universe, right to the little Republic that has been a little thorn in both of our sides for far too long.

“Do you want them to die in fear and suffering? Are you so meager a godling that you can’t even imagine giving them this mercy?”

Despite it all, Death smiled. He wished that he had the air to chuckle.

So, that was it. God was tired of waiting, and wanted to have someone else do the job for it. God wanted it all done so that he could…what, precisely? What would someone else want with an empty universe? Nothing good, he knew that much. Even he had never reached out and ended things on more than a local basis before, knowing how long it would take to recover. Practicality, not compassion, had stayed his hand.

“And what…what would it cost me?” he asked.

“Obeisance,” God said. “Fall to your knees and submit yourself to the one true God, the only one worthy of the title, and I will let you take the pain from all those that still live. I will allow you to be the bearer of mercy, rather than the bearer of pain, for the first time in all your existence.”

It would have been tempting if he hadn’t already realized what God really wanted out of the deal. Not merely to stop the burning, but to feel…that…

But the Seven were still the Seven. Death had no obligation to God, and he refused. He tightened his hand on the shaft of his scythe, shaking his head.

“I will not.”

“You…will not?”

There was such a note of incredulity that Death almost had to laugh. He lacked the energy, so he wheezed instead, chuckling through his teeth as he shook his head.

“You can take your offer and throw it into the nearest star for all I care. If you want death, then I choose life. Whatever you desire, I’ll take it from you.”

“You can’t stop it.”

“I can slow it down. If it makes you angry, then it is [i]more[/i] than worth it.”

The pain in his body suddenly surged, and he knew that he had done more than touch a nerve. He had spiked it. Death almost lost his balance, stumbling, slumping against the meeting table. It was almost enough to break him…almost.

The voice of God roared in his ears.

“I give you an offer to bend the knee, to accept your fate, and this is how you repay me? Worthless little half-breed. Do you think that you actually [i]matter[/i]? Do you think that you’re allowed any decisions in this world of mine?”

Death couldn’t answer; the pain had ripped what little air he had from his lungs, and his existence had become pain itself. Every bone in his body felt like it was being snapped apart, fused together, and broken again, swollen and jagged. He could not breathe, speak, or move. All he could do was suffer as God shouted at him.

“I offered you the chance to be the hero of your time, to end it all before they could suffer, and you throw it back in my teeth. I allowed you the illusion of choice. Now, let me take that illusion away. You, Death, [i]will[/i] destroy them. You will raise your scythe against the people of this world, and you will reap them. Under your touch, everything will fall, and nothing shall remain.”

The cat’s ears would have flicked and twitched at those words if they existed while he held the scythe. Was that –

“I will not allow you to defy me for a moment longer.”

God’s power wrapped around him like a crushing fist, and Death’s scream came out as a bone-rattling wheeze, dragged from him by the sheer power of something so much greater than anything that his world had ever seen. No other power had ever reached out and damaged the Council like this. Nothing else had shown a strength comparable to what the Christian God had at his disposal.

“Kill. Them. All.”

The voice disappeared, but the pressure continued. There was no smile on Death’s bony face, but there was a chuckle deep in the depths of his mind. A simple one, and a trifle mad, but it was there nonetheless.

[i]…Fool…[/i]

Kill them all, God said. Well, that was something entirely different from the first order, and he could already feel the scythe itching beneath his fingers, his body wanting to move to carry out the command. The bone-cat looked past the scythe to the mortals that still remained, at the fearful Christians that had managed to maintain their faith in their God for so long despite the plan being waylaid for nearly three decades. Thirty years, a full generation of time, and God was still ravaging through the universe, breaking planet after planet, and trying to force a little cat to do the job for him.

Kill them all, God said.

‘All’ was such an open term. He nodded, and the pain eased as he started to bring his scythe up.

“Kill them all,” he repeated, lifting his scythe over his shoulders and tensing his muscles, savoring the lack of pain while he had it. “Kill…them…all.”

No mortal could have made that decision. It took a mind that had been shaped by hedonism and no humanity, a mind that had been distorted by immortality and selfishness for thousands of years to see the quadrillions of lives still remaining and decide that their death was just fine. A perfectly reasonable exchange, as a matter of fact, for what they would get in return.

He saw them in the distance. Not just the mortals, but the angels, and the monstrous wheels that they marched with. The horrors of heaven were as alive as everything else around them, and in this world, at the very least, they were just as subject to the inevitabilities of Death as anything else. One just needed the right weapon to bring to bear against them.

For a split-second, Death reached out across the entire universe. He saw star upon star, system upon system, and he saw the glittering lights of all the lives that still remained. Past them, he saw the darkness of ravaged planets, of empty holes in the once immense Theocracy, and the small cluster of lights and lives that lived in the yet-to-be-touched Republic.

He saw it all…and he cut it.

The wave of the scythe spread out from him, and the cultists were the first to die. They fell, as ashen as the lamb so long ago, and the wave continued to grow. Babylon went dark in an instant, the lives of his followers and those that remained of his clergy cut short. He felt them, felt the diminishment that came with their deaths, but at the same time, he threw his head back and laughed.

“How does it feel, God?!” he screamed at the heavens. “How does it feel…to know that this…is your fault?!”

He laughed as he saw the light go out in the universe, the wave of the Reaper’s power spreading further and further, blacking out planets as it went. The system of inhabited planets around Babylon went out, but the wave had no sign of stopping. It moved faster than starships, faster than the powers of heaven. Unlike the war, his touch did not need decades or even years to wipe out the entirety of the universe. The Reaper was under no such restriction, for his power could touch anything when it was not restrained.

It would have stung his ego to admit that his power was enhanced by God’s order at any other point, sped along with the command of a God that was greater than him, but it was enough for him. For now, to know that he would have his revenge was enough.

[i]Come for me, God. Come when you know what I’ve done. Come and take your revenge, but know that you’re going to lose [b]everything[/b] that you sent. Mutual annihilation, God. We both lose.[/i]

Death fell to his knees as his view went dark, and as he finally fell unconscious for the first time in over three decades, he dropped with a smile on his face.

Nobody won. Everybody lost. As ever, he was the great equalizer.

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

Summary: The Reaper is pushed harder and harder to submit to God, but he manages to hold out for a long, long time compared to the rest of the Council. God, however, does not want to stand for this.

Tags: No Sex, Torture, Anger, Cat, Tiger, God, Death, Reaper, Aging, Magic, Sci-Fi, Apocalypse, Series,