Work Text:
It is not easy to kill a devil. We can only be killed on our home plane, and my residence was deep in the Nine Hells. Very deep.
Not all The Hells are places of fire. My domain was Cania - eighth of The Nine. A land of unfathomable, unnatural cold. Ice is a thick crust on the surface, where glaciers move as quickly as flooded rivers, and avalanches are so frequent that the sound of tumbling mountains of snow is a constant din. The cold is all-penetrating. It’s in my veins.
The Lord of Cania, Mephistopheles, favoured me, and I lived to please him. He’s witty, charming, and powerful. Why wouldn’t I? He’s perfect.
He particularly liked my devilish methods: Drop the souls unfortunate enough to end up here in the permafrost for a few decades. Chill them to their cores. Then bring the fire.
I’m not the strongest devil, but I’m clever. When you are cold, hot things feel hotter than they truly are. My frozen victims could have been consumed by the flame of Asmodeus himself by the way my hellfire made them scream.
Tides were shifting in The Eighth: I was poised to take the seat of Arzis, Mephisto’s Inquisitor. His waffling about the rise of hellfire and non-ice demons in Cania was discordant among the court, and Mephisto wanted it snuffed out. I was a perfect replacement. Another century and the seat would have been mine. In the lap of Mephistopheles. The thought made me shiver like the cold never did.
It made me prideful, or more prideful than usual; I overstepped where I could, because I knew Mephistopheles would allow it. One day I persuaded him to give me a job. It was above my abilities, but I knew he couldn’t say no to his favourite. To his Zila.
I was to go to the plane of Arcavios, to a school called Strixhaven. The headmaster held a special interest in The Nine Hells, and he was making a book. The book contained our names, our residences, maps of the hells. He got the information in a multitude of ways - deals with lesser devils, collating information from older books, even a few trips into the upper circles. His means were irrelevant, it was simply too much information about Cania in one place, and Mephistopheles desired it gone.
My job was simple: Kill the headmaster, retrieve the book. I had convinced myself it would be easy.
What a fool I was.
I lost of course. We wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t. I didn’t die, for our battle did not take place in The Nine, but my body was left on Arcavios, in the possession of an expert on Devils. Only spite for me could have driven the man to deface my corpse as he did. No purely academic dissection could be so cruel.
Though my soul had returned to Cania, I still felt every incision, every drag of the knife and peel of the skin on my body in Arcavios. He tanned my skin to leather, and bound his precious book with it. I thought my torture methods were ingenious, but compared to him, they were paltry. Some dark invocation was inscribed on my tanned flesh in the book-binding that ripped my weakened soul, unable to resist, from Cania, and imprisoned it in the book. As the book was bound, so too was I.
He tried to use me, to force information from me when I wouldn’t give it. Agony was all I knew for years, only getting worse as he became desperate in his old age to finish his Magnum Opus, by prying my knowledge from my head. One doesn’t reside in Hell for millenia without knowing pain. I am a master in dealing it, it is only natural that I can suffer it. I would not fail my Mephistopheles further. He died desperate.
There’s another thing that 1,000 years of working your way up through the ranks of Cania teaches you: patience. Heads of Strixhaven came and went, the nature of my book slowly becoming lost to them. Eventually I was put into the restricted section of their library, and left alone. My will almost faltered a few times, when I wondered if I would just sit here, gathering dust until the end of time.
I never gave up though. My thoughts eventually returned to Mephistopheles. My longing for his gaze. I would raze this school to the ground for his smile.
He was probably angry at my failure. He could have rescued me any time, but probably saw my binding as adequate punishment. That is how I began to see it. When I am free I will return to Cania and let him know how sorry I am. That I will never fail him again.
If it takes another millennium, I shall again prove my worth and become his inquisitor. After all, I am now intimately familiar with the most comprehensive book ever made of our plane. I have information about our rivals that could shift the power balance of The Hells in Cania’s favour. I will make myself absolutely indispensable to Mephistopheles.
Over time, I learned I had a measure of influence over my prison - It being made of my own flesh gave me an affinity for it. I caused the bindings to decay unnaturally quickly, loosened my pages, and eventually managed to tear a page out, and some of me with it. I was free. Somewhat.
I hadn’t much power. Enough to vaguely flutter in an intended direction. Many times I was picked up, crumpled into a ball, and disposed of, but I was patient. I unfolded myself and continued on.
I wandered as a page for a long time. My paper became worn, the ink smudged. I was looking for home, a way back to Cania. I thought I had found it one day, for I felt an unnatural cold that curled the edges of my page, but what I saw was just a house. Maybe I was just curious, or maybe I was particularly homesick, but I decided to go in.
The cold inside was invigorating, A feeling as sweet as I have known in centuries. The house disagreed though. Wooden bannisters and floorboards were irreparably warped, wallpaper peeling, windows cracked. I flickered past a dusty painting of three Eladrin, two men and a child. The plaque below read ‘Arteloth, Wilstan, and Glorian Clarifort’. They were all golden-skinned Eladrin, Forever captured radiating the heat of their summer forms. I thought it ironic, as here was the coldest place in the entire house.
Beneath the painting, foetal, lay a winter eladrin with similar features to the child in the picture. They were frozen, encased in a thick layer of ice like a living statue. Barely conscious. It reminded me of my old victims back in Cania a little, but more so of myself. I could feel the desperation, the grief, coming off the eladrin, vulnerable as they were to their own emotions.
I had felt the same in the first few years of my binding. Desperate. Willing to take any deal bar betraying Mephistopheles if it meant my freedom.
Joy like I had never felt washed over me for I had found my way out.
Slowly, I began manipulating the remaining ink on my page into a message. Only short, for I was very weak, and much of the ink was gone.
My page fell against the icy crust of Glorian’s shell, and their eyes opened weakly to behold my message.
“Hello Glorian, I have a deal for you.”