Chapter Text
Hell.
Three weeks before the Second Coming.
It wasn’t uncommon for residents of Hell to live under rocks. For some, the housing arrangement was a perk of eternal damnation, and it was usually paired with hellfire, a nearby tree with unreachable fruit, an underfed hellhound, or some combination of the three. For others, namely demons, it simply felt nice to lay under the crushing weight of a boulder on occasion. Those that had fallen the furthest tended to find the pressure therapeutic.
Regardless of their reasons for living under their respective rocks, even the damned that had crawled out from under them recognized the snakeskin boots that sauntered through the concrete halls of Hell. Even they gave the man-shaped being with the sunglasses a wide berth. Yes, even the damned that lived under rocks knew and feared the demon that had survived execution by holy water.
And if that wasn’t enough to scare them, the air around him pulsed with the gravity of immense unholy power.
A pair of sharp-heeled shoes clicked rapidly in pursuit.
“Crowley!” Shax called through a smile so tight that, had she been in the habit of keeping coal between her teeth, could have produced diamonds. “I thought we had agreed that you would stay on Earth.”
The demon she tailed didn’t slow or even glance in her direction. “Change of plans. I’m re-applying for a job down here.”
“If you came for the position that opened with Lord Beelzebub’s retirement, you’re too late. The Dark Council just closed submissions.”
“I was thinking of something a bit higher on the managerial ladder.”
“There isn’t anything higher!” Shax’s stiff, short strides fought to keep pace with his long-legged, boneless gait. “Where do you think you’re going?!”
Crowley stopped in the middle of the hallway, his reputation ensuring that the flowing black sea of shuffling damned remained parted around them. He tossed his head over his shoulder to grin at the marquis. His smile was thin, flat, and dark, much like the lenses that covered his slitted pupils.
“To relieve someone of their post.”
Shax opened her mouth to ask which unfortunate official he planned on murdering this time when it occurred to her that he intended to take a position higher than that of the former Lord Beelzebub's. Of which there was only one.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“You wouldn’t. You can’t!”
“I can, and I very much will. You can watch if you like.” And with that, he continued his descent to the ninth circle of Hell.
Behind him, the masses of the damned began to swell back into the middle of the hallway, shoulders bumping into the gaping, motionless demon left in his wake.
Mayfair, London.
Earlier that day.
“You want me to do wot?”
The angel in the blinding-white constable costume wrung their hands (he’d never realized that angels wrung their hands so much, maybe that sort of thing was just easier to see when you were lying on the floor) and repeated their request. “Could you please stop being drunk? I have very important news—”
“Sorry, ’fraid I can’t sober up in front of company. It’s, erm…” Crowley fished around in his alcohol-addled brain for something that might scare the naïve little ray of sunshine out of his flat. “Reeeeaaal ugly. Vomit and blood, and, uh, demonic essence spewin’ all over the place. For miles.”
“That sounds terribly painful. Is that why you’ve been, um, lacrimating?”
“I have not been la... lacquer… I haven’t been crying!” Where were the damned sunglasses when he needed them?
From a corner in the far reaches of his psyche, a blurry memory meekly raised its hand and gently pointed out that he’d thrown them out his office window in a fit of drunken rage. “Fuck off,” he told it.
“Oh.” The angel—what was their name? Something to do with the smell of God—Muriel! Yes, Muriel. What about Muriel? He didn’t remember. But it seemed important that he should, since their voice shook with dammed-up tears. He hadn’t meant to— “Well, I… I’m just going to have to deliver the news anyway.”
He weighed his options. On the one hand, he could send the angel away and hurt their feelings. It wouldn’t be difficult. He already had a head start. Expert feeling-hurter, him. On the other hand… he tried to think of what was on the other hand, but after an indeterminant amount of time spent glaring at a wall, he gave up.
“Fine.” He shifted on the hard, unforgiving concrete to prop himself up on his elbow. The room gave a small lurch. “Let’s hear it.”
They gave him that glowing angel smile, and for some reason that made him want to sob his way through another ten or so bottles of very red wine. Luckily for him, the smile abruptly vanished and was replaced by an anxious frown and watery eyes. Probably the fact that they were smiling at a demon. Who happened to be surrounded by a legion of empty wine bottles. In the dark. On the floor. Under a statue of himself “wresting” with the current CEO of Heaven. Not to mention the puffy, red-rimmed eyes from a week of on-and-off “lacrimating”.
Oh Someone, maybe it really was time to sober up.
He considered it briefly, made a few rough calculations, and estimated that he would need to spend at least two to three additional decades in a drunken stupor before he was ready to face reality with fully operational synapses.
“Heaven has assigned me to watch over you.”
“Isn’t that just lovely. ’S that all?”
“Not exactly.” Muriel looked as though they were holding their breath, which was odd, because they didn’t need to breathe. “I’m going to get in so much trouble for this,” they told the floor.
“Prob’ly shouldn’t do it, then.” Just to spite the rebellious string of thoughts that suggested that this was serious and thus his cue to sober up, he miracled up another bottle and took a long swig.
“I need your help!” they blurted. “Heaven and Hell are going to end the world in less than a month.”
He rolled his eyes. “Eh, go figure.”
“We have to convince them to… to put it off, or something!”
“Sounds like you oughtta talk to 'Supreme Archangel Aziraphale' about that, not me.”
“I did! Mr. Fell—I mean, Supreme Archangel Aziraphale—I asked him, and he... something’s gone wrong with him.”
“Nothing I can do about that. Already tried, ’n’ look where it got us.”
“But you’re his friend! You have to stop him!” The angel’s hands flew to their mouth. High Treason. If all the brain cells in Crowley’s head hadn’t been hammered into tiny neural flapjacks, he would’ve been proud.
“Shtop—stop him?” He offered them one of his rare, slow blinks.
“I know he loves this planet. I understand why, now. But he’s…” Muriel clenched their hands at their sides and winced, as if he would punish them for what they would say next. “I think he’s gone insane.”
He blinked again. Twice in one day. He hadn’t blinked this much since… since a really long time ago. Did crying count as blinking? It couldn’t, because no one counted sleeping as blinking, and you had to keep your eyes closed just as long for either one. But then, sleeping was also a lot like one long blink. Unless you were a snake, and then sleeping was just being still for a long time.
What had they been talking about? Probably nothing important.
A transparent glass rectangle shoved itself right up in his face, radiating bright blue light like a fucking laser straight through his FUCKING retinas. He hissed and wriggled away from it, banging the back of his head on the statue that he regretted ever even thinking of commissioning, and then...
Aziraphale. That was Aziraphale's voice, and suddenly the room was completely empty, nothing to look at but the angel on the screen.
“—may be aware, I will be assuming the Archangel Gabriel’s former post. And, as my first act as Supreme Archangel, I will begin guiding the Heavenly Host in the preparations for the Second Coming, which we will be Heralding in one month.”
Offscreen, an audience applauded politely, as if Aziraphale had announced that with just one solid putt, the end of the world would be on par for the last course in the tournament between Good and Evil. Meanwhile, the archangel smiled brightly into the ethereal camera.
“Looks like he’s doing well,” Crowley muttered. Nothing to be surprised about there.
“But he isn’t! Look at his face!” Muriel fidgeted with the screen and… well, they didn’t exactly shove it back into his face so much as gently push it there. He forced his eyes to focus on the enhanced image.
The Archangel’s smile looked a lot more maniacal when it was zoomed-in on.
“Mmmyeah, I take it back, he’s gone absolutely nutters. Still, can’t do anything about it.” And to be sure he couldn’t do anything about it, he finished off the wine in his hand before his imagination could go rogue and give him ideas.
“Please, isn’t there something you can do? You snuck into Heaven—you’re cleverer than anyone I know! And… and I just got here! There are so many books, and people, and I’ll never—they’ll all be gone!”
“Yeah, nothing lasts forever. But hey, you can go off somewhere, y’know, with your books.” He gestured vaguely at the ceiling with his empty bottle. “Hear Alpha Centauri’s nice. Ev’rybody’s goin’ there, seems.”
Muriel looked uncomfortable. And significantly further away. At some point—determining the interval at which they’d accomplished this feat of speed was beyond him—they had backed themself up against one of the cold stone walls.
When they finally spoke, their voice was small and wobbly, like the tip of a candle flame nearing the end of its wick. “Yes, but this is the only planet in the universe with humans on it. And besides, I think they mean to destroy the whole material plane. I don’t…” the little angel sniffed back tears. “I don’t think it will help to run away. I’ll still wind up in Heaven, and they’ll be mad at me, and, and—please! There must be something! They say you thwarted the first Armageddon. Isn’t there anything you can do this time?”
They sounded so much like his angel, the one that had left him to crawl in this planet’s dust alone. It was so hard to say no to his angel. And besides, something about the words they’d used itched like scales that needed shedding. “Say that again?”
“Isn’t there anything you can do?”
“No, no, before that bit. The thing about the first Arma… Army… grrrn, the end of the world!”
“You thwarted it?”
“THWARTED! YES!” On the opposite end of the room, something shattered. He noted absently that he was no longer holding an empty wine bottle. No matter. “You’re asking me to thwart Aziraphale.”
“I guess so,” Muriel said in a very small voice.
Oh, this was a bad idea. It was a really, really bad idea. It was a let’s-raise-the-Antichrist-together kind of bad idea, but much, much worse. The kind of bad idea that would probably earn him “extreme sanctions”, or at the very least eternal torture in the deepest pit Head Office had to offer. But then, the world was ending soon, anyway. A wide, snakish smile spread across his face. What the Hell? If you were going to go out, you might as well do it in style.
“Right, I’m going to sober up.”
Muriel covered their face with their hands. “Maybe I should go—”
“Blegh. Miracled wine has the worst aftertaste. The humans do it so much better.”
He got to his feet and grimaced. The only good thing about magicked-up alcohol was that you didn’t have to get up off the floor to get it. And, for that matter, he’d definitely started off with human vodka (nasty, sterile-tasting stuff he reserved for occasions that merited something stronger than whiskey), but the fermented potato juice he’d eventually started summoning up had slowly morphed into really bad red wine. The intermediary bottles were scattered among the rest, oddly shaped greenish links in a hazy chain of alcoholic evolution. No wonder his mouth tasted like Death’s robes.
Thankfully Muriel couldn’t tell the difference between bourbon and apple juice, because if Azira—if anybody with Earthly experience had seen him the way they had, lying in a pile of miracled vodka-wine, under a suggestive statue of himself and his…
The safest course of action, he decided, was to pretend very hard that nothing was wrong. In fact, nothing had ever been wrong. Heartbreak? Never heard of him. No, Crowley had simply felt a random urge to get very drunk very quickly, and to stay that way for the rest of eternity. Or until the world ended, whichever happened to come first.
He banished the mess of mostly unlabelled bottles into the ether, smoothed his hair out, and turned back to Muriel, who peeked out from between their fingers. “Not drunk anymore, Muriel.”
“Oh! Um, of course. I knew that.” Their smile faltered, and their brows, which didn’t seem used to questioning things, were doing their best to draw together in consternation. “Before, about the alcohol—you lied!”
“’M a demon. Demons lie.” Without the alcohol, miracled or not, there was no buffer for the acid that roiled in his chest when the words left his lips.
“Hm. Okay! One moment then, I’ll need to add something for that on the contract.”
The acid vanished and was replaced by something similarly turbulent but slightly less corrosive. “The contract?”
“Yep!” They produced a small scroll from a too-small fold in their uniform. “Do you have a desk?”
“Erm. It’s through the revolving wall, down the hall.” He had hazy memories of conjuring most of his things out of the metaphysical storage unit and pulling them back into the frame of reality. He was fairly sure that his desk had been one of those things, if only because one of those memories involved him picking up the box full of letters he kept there and chucking it out the window (he’d apparently chucked quite a few things out the window), only to frantically teleport it back.
Come to think of it, Muriel must have miracled themself in if they hadn’t passed his desk. Funny, he didn’t remember sensing them enter by occult means. But, he supposed, the point of getting drunk in the first place was to ensure that he didn’t remember things.
The little angel thanked him, beaming. They broke into a run in the direction of the desk, then remembered their dignity (or something equally annoying that Heaven drilled into them) and slowed to a tightly controlled walk. Upon reaching the gilded desk, they gently tapped the scroll, let it unfurl to their knees, and draped the parchment over the red marble. Crowley followed, trying his best to stay in the present while pieces of a scheme gathered like thunderclouds in his mind.
“Alright, section one, clause nine…” they pulled a fountain pen out of another fold in their uniform. “Additionally, thou shalt not attempt to deceive while bound by this contract.”
“Deceive the Angel Muriel. Best to be specific.” Sata—Someone, why was he helping?
“Of course!” They waved a hand, and the words on the parchment shifted to make room for them to scribble in the proposed edit.
“Do we really need a contract? I mean, physical evidence and all. Would be rather incriminating. Probably better to make a verbal Arrang—” Something bitter lurked under that word. Something that whispered nasty reminders of a certain incident involving hellfire. No, this could not be an Arrangement. In fact, there couldn’t ever be another Arrangement.
“Muriel, go back to the bookshop. Burn this." He thrust a finger at the scroll. “And don’t come back. I’ll deal with Aziraphale.”
They looked up from the contract, eyes wide. “I—no.”
“No?! Wh—you know what? I don’t have to sign anything.”
“Yes,” they said quietly, “you do.”
“And why do I, exactly?”
“Because I was assigned to watch over you. And… and if that’s not enough, you owe me! You tricked me into letting you into Heaven, a-and I’ve been reading, and according to human literature, if a person does something terrible to another person, they owe them.”
Crowley swallowed. Something terrible. He’d made it quite clear that he had manipulated Muriel, and surely the Higher-Ups had noticed that. Otherwise, he’d been on his best behaviour. He hadn’t even vandalized anything. Had Heaven really punished them for that? Well, actually, they were probably at the stage where their Head Office sent a “strongly-worded note”. And they’d still gotten the promotion to Earthly ambassador. Still, it made him feel very un-demonically regretful. Almost like he should apologise.
But what made him feel infinitely worse was the fact that he wanted Muriel to stay in spite of it all. This angel sounded so much like his angel. If he said no now… some pathetic, greedy part of him wanted to keep whatever piece of Aziraphale it could sink its claws into, and it threatened to tear the remainder of his heart out with its teeth if he sent the little sunbeam away. Another part, probably the demonic one, was doubled over laughing at the ludicrous amount of pain and suffering his selfishness would undoubtedly cause for them both.
He sighed, then decided mid-sigh that a groan would sound less vulnerable, so he turned it into a groan.
“Can I at least read the contract before I sign it?”
He could’ve sworn the angel was glowing. “Absolutely!”
The thing about contracts—or any celestially-binding document, really—was that you had to pay attention to the little details. If one sentence was too vague, your freshly bespoken star could turn out inside-out (although it was tremendous fun to watch, and Crowley had done it on purpose once or twice before Upstairs sent him a rude note about the conservation of matter and whatnot). If one sentence was too specific, you could wind up bound so tightly to a stuffy angel’s morals that you wouldn’t be able to do much of anything, such as enact the epic thwarting you were planning for their new boss. So, naturally, they had to go through the whole thing.
The contract was practically flawless, at least from a structural standpoint, and Muriel looked… well, joyful. Like an angel doing the thing they were made for.
Crowley wanted to pay attention. He really did. But the gears in his mind had already been set in motion, and he itched to do what he had been made to do—plan, and scheme, and start the engine on the whole thing and watch it explode into a life all its own. Details flashed in his mind, quick and brilliant like lightning: the look on his former boss’s face, snippets of the speech he would make on the Fields of Megiddo. Oh, it would be risky, but if it all went right, things would go back to nearly the same as before, and as a bonus he could stick it to some of his former coworkers.
“So it shall be, as signed by our hand and—how do you prefer to sign?”
“Crowley.”
“Sorry, a contract requires your true name. I meant, any particular appendage?”
“Oh, ah, also hand.”
Muriel thought for a moment, then erased the “and” and tacked an s onto “hand”. “Alright, any more amendments before you sign?”
The contract, in true ethereal fashion, was unnecessarily complicated. In summary, it would last until Aziraphale and the Second Coming were properly thwarted. In the meantime, the little sunbeam wanted to keep the humans out of it; no temptations and no human blood rituals without express consent. That would be problematic later, but he supposed it was a fair ask. He’d tried not to be offended when they read through the sections prohibiting him from murdering anyone—the angel was fresh out of Heaven, they were bound to have a few biases—and he couldn’t figure out why for the eternal life of him there needed to be a paragraph forbidding him from committing adultery. They’d included other fun little tidbits such as “thou shalt not set foot within one-hundred metres of a heavenly gate” and “thou shalt not be a prick”. He chalked that last one up to Earthly naïveté.
“’M not sure about the ‘interference’ clause. Specifically the ‘thou shalt make clear thy intent to the Angel Muriel before enacting thy demonic will’ part.”
“In any Good relationship, communication is key,” Muriel recited with a touch of pride. The audible capitalization of “good” didn’t fit naturally into the sentence. It reeked of Gabriel.
“Miss your old boss?” he sneered. He couldn’t help it. It wasn’t in Crowley’s nature to hate people; he hated Gabriel. Crowley might’ve been the only demon in Hell with an aversion to murder, but if that high-and-mighty prick ever showed his face in London—Hell, if he even showed his ugly mug on Earth—Crowley would rip his intestines out with his bare hands, then light the end like a fuse and watch the bastard go up in hellfire. He had no idea where these feelings came from. He’d parted with the former archangel on relatively good terms. He didn’t care. He hated him.
The angel blinked. “I still work under Saraqael.” Right. Muriel was a low-class Scrivener—the lowest, if he remembered correctly. They had probably only seen Gabriel once every few millennia, to say nothing of talking to him. “It’s actually something Maggie told me. The human from the shop with the, ah, black music discs? She’s been very kind, helping me with the bookshop and adjusting to human customs, and that was her advice for the contract.”
Ah, so that was it. The little sunbeam had made a human friend, and now the “destruction” part of testing humanity to destruction hit a lot closer to home.
“Look, I’m sure it’s great advice, but I’m going to need full access to my miracles at all times. Stopping the world from ending requires a lot of improvisation, and I’m not going to have time to chat about the pros and cons of my demonic will to stay alive every time the need arises.”
“I see.” Muriel fidgeted with their pen, as if nervous that acquiescing to his perfectly reasonable demand would break yet another rule. Then they visibly steeled themself and put on what Crowley suspected was their bravest face. “Then you will meet me at sunset every day to discuss the deeds of the day and our plans for the next.”
Crowley mulled it over. A decent amount of wiggle room, though it sounded a bit too much like Hastur’s management style for him to really be comfortable with it. “And if I don’t?”
“Then I’ll have to report you to the heavenly authorities and arrest you in earnest.” The reply came laden with the gravity and seriousness that could only be conveyed by someone who had recently read a manual that confirmed that they could, in fact, have Crowley arrested.
He wondered why the angel thought this was a good idea, considering that any attempt to turn him in to the folks Upstairs would likely result in an interrogation of Muriel, and they already seemed terrified of the judgement the self-same heavenly authorities could exact on them. He cocked an eyebrow but played along.
“How do I know you won’t report this to Upstairs anyway?”
“You have my word,” Muriel told him with as much confidence as they could muster.
He smirked, using the expression to hide his struggle against the bile rising in his throat. Damned corporation had gone mutinous. He’d have to give it a good talking-to later. But unfortunately, he agreed with it—this was a bad plan. A really, really bad plan.
“Where do I sign?”
Shax trailed Crowley from the perfectly courageous distance of as-far-away-as-possible, Furfur in tow.
Furfur protested at first but had since quieted his irritation to a low grumble. There was no arguing with Shax, especially not since Lord Beelzebub’s retirement. One measly bookshop raid and suddenly she expected to be treated like royalty, title or no. Only when they reached the turnstile that marked the border of Pandemonium, the outer rim of the ninth circle, did he try to pull back in earnest.
It was no use. Duke Hastur and Lord Dagon marched with them now—or rather, marched with Shax, as Furfur was being dragged rather more than being marched—along with a small horde of lesser demons. If ever a window of opportunity had cracked open in which he could tempt Shax to reconsider, that window slammed closed with the arrival of the rest of Crowley’s audience.
“Before, well, did what he did to Ligur, I always thought he was soft,” he heard Hastur mutter to Dagon. “Never once killed anyone on Earth, pretty sure he didn’t even discorporate anyone in the Revolution. And then he pulled that stunt with the... you know. You think he’ll really try it with…?” With Satan, Furfur finished. Of course, none of them dared complete that sentence aloud; certainly not him. He had enough paperwork to go through as it was.
Dagon pressed their lips into a firm line. “We shall see.”
As the horde neared the cold, dead heart of Hell, the constant swarm of the damned thinned to the occasional straggler. Some of the lesser demons’ knees began to shake. They weren’t afraid—they’d come to watch the legendary Crowley meet his end, possibly as a smear on a nearby wall. Their knees shook because that was what demons’ knees did when they get too close to the massive, throbbing reserve of unholy power that was Satan himself, Ruler of the Nine Circles, King of Hell, First of the Fallen, Leader of the Glorious Revolution. One of them collapsed. The horde didn’t spare a glance for their fallen comrade, nor for the others that dropped to their knees after. Soon there was only Duke Hastur, Lord Dagon, and Shax. And, of course, Furfur, whose knees wobbled dangerously.
Crowley never so much as looked in the direction of his pursuers, so the demons, through an incredibly effective exchange of glares, resolved to be as silent as possible so as not to alert him. Despite a lack of supporting evidence, Furfur sensed that Crowley knew he was being followed, and by whom. He had seen the snake demon perform stranger miracles, and sometimes things beyond miracles. For the first time in a long time, he found himself missing his desk.
At last, Crowley stood before the great blackmetal doors to Satan’s throne room. He grinned as if amused by their enormity, or perhaps by the fact that they looked as if they belonged on the vault of a heist movie's antagonist. Furfur got the impression that Crowley was the sort of demon who would appreciate that comparison (he himself had indulged in several Ocean's 11 films before his supervisor caught him and had Amazon Prime banned from his circle’s internet). Then Crowley turned to them, and Furfur decided that, no, the grin was most definitely not due to the appearance of the doors.
“What’s this? A watch party? For little ol’ me?” he said. The bastard looked giddy.
Well, that’s a disappointment, thought Furfur. He would’ve at least preferred Crowley to have clung to a few dregs of sanity when they put him away for good. As things were now, the fellow was probably too cracked to be really, honest-to-badness tortured.
No one said anything. Hastur’s face twisted, and if he had been warm-blooded, Furfur suspected his face would’ve been burning with a rageful flush. Shax opened her mouth to say something, then glanced at the Dark Council members and decided against it. Himself, he didn’t have anything to say. If Crowley really did have it out for the King of Hell, he didn’t want to get discorporated as a warm-up. Nor was he particularly inclined to incur the wrath of the Dark Council.
Eventually, Lord Dagon broke the silence. Furfur expected their lips to form an answering smile, for their tone to drip with the usual venom, but their features remained uncharacteristically linear and their voice uncharacteristically flat. “Cease this nonsense. Return to Earth immediately, or we will be forced to—”
“Forced to do what, Dagon? Try the holy water bath again? Thanks, but I already showered today.” The snake demon glowered at the party, and Furfur shuddered, partly from the proximity to their Lord and Master and partly from the unshakeable sensation that, behind those dark lenses, Crowley was sizing him up, evaluating him. “You all should sit this one out. Wouldn’t want anyone to die, now, would we?”
He threw open the doors to the throne room and strode through. Shax immediately moved to follow. Crowley smirked (ominously, if Furfur was any judge) over his shoulder and snapped his fingers. The doors slammed closed with a heavy, resounding clank before she could even get close. She groaned, rolled her eyes, muttered something about “dramatic types”, and snapped her own fingers. Then she snapped them again. And again. Nothing happened.
“These chambers are impervious to certain occult means of transportation,” said Dagon. The grim set of their scaled face spoke volumes, all of them closed to the public.
Shax yanked at the door handles, snapped, and yanked again.
Dagon's eyes narrowed. “You won’t get in. And he won’t get out. Crowley’s locked in there until Satan chooses to open the doors himself.”
“Bastard’s out of his fucking mind,” Hastur growled. Furfur had to agree. During the miserable trek here, he’d reasoned that, while surely Crowley was dangerous, he couldn’t possibly compare to the primordial force that was their Infernal Master. Crowley might’ve been on the Dark Council once, but he didn’t even have a title. The natural course of events, therefore, would be as follows: Crowley, despite his best (and frankly insane) efforts, would be thoroughly discorporated at the hand of Satan. Afterwards he would be reincorporated, and the Dark Council would determine his eternal punishment. Hopefully something in one of the deeper pits. Then, on days when he was feeling particularly oppressed by the slow drip from the broken pipe over his elbow and his desk-job existence in general, Furfur would check in on Crowley via the camera network and smile.
He was in the midst of a daydream in which Crowley was being prodded with a red-hot poker (a clever human misconception that he wished Hell would adopt) when a booming voice pulled him into the present.
“Crowleeeyyyy.”
Raw infernal power radiated from the blackmetal doors. They began to glow, red-hot like the poker in his fantasy. His knees gave out. Shax went down with him, and the Duke and Lord met them on the smooth, damp concrete a moment later.
“I offered you mercy once. You dare betray me once more?!”
Another voice slipped under the hairline crack beneath the heavy blackmetal gates. “Yeah, something like that.”
“I will crush you. I will tear you apart until your very atoms cry out. You will have no more mercy from me. Only suffering. Eternal suffering.”
“Hail Satan,” Shax grunted. It would have been delivered with gleeful exaltation and the customary salutes, but under the circumstances a grunt was all she could manage. Furfur made a similar noise in agreement, as his face was being crushed into the cold, hard concrete by the weight of their Master’s strength. A muffled groan was the best he could do. Equally strained voices echoed the sentiment. Despite the unideal physics of the situation, the excitement in the air was palpable. Crowley, the unrepentant demon-murderer, and, in Shax's words, arch-traitor, would finally get what he deserved.
“See, that’s great and all, but I honestly don’t think you could if you tried.”
“WHAT?!”
Shax and Hastur snarled in unison at the floor. They were good demons, Furfur thought, to instinctively come to the defence of their Master even when they were powerless to fully witness the threat. Not that Crowley was a real threat—stark raving mad, maybe, but not a threat. Furfur wondered if whatever heavenly pact he had made that protected him from holy water also gave him the ability to stand under the force of Satan’s wrath, or if his face was also being ground into the Fallen Age stonework behind those massive doors. If the latter was true—and surely it was—then the prick was certainly good at projecting his voice. Even the smirk was audible.
“I said, you can’t. Not. Even. If. You. Tried.”
A tidal wave of unholy power surged through the doors, grinding their bodies into the grooves of the designed carved into the stone tiles. Furfur was going to burst. He was going to burst from the pressure, and his essence would spill out like jelly from a popped eyeball, and then that too would be crushed until it burst. Not at me, he thought desperately. At Crowley. Satan help us, direct this at Crowley. Destroy Crowley. Not me. If he got through this, he would never leave his desk again.
A deep, bellowing roar echoed through Pandemonium. Possibly all of Hell. Unseen lighting crashed, flashing white and purple through the crack under the door, through the hinges, at times crackling through the nearly-melting metal of the doors themselves.
Without warning, the pressure lifted and the lightning ceased. The great gates sizzled and darkened like dying embers. The demons peeled themselves off the concrete, got to their feet, and looked at one another. The silence that followed was deafening, so Furfur filled it.
“Well, I’m glad that’s over. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be going back to my des—"
The doors swung open.
On the central stone tiles of the throne room, a massive black soot stain sent up a stream of smoke so thick it obscured the back half of the room. A dark, pulsing presence lingered behind that smokescreen, so incredibly vast and evil that it surely could only have been one being—Satan himself. Then Satan grumbled in an unusually human register and a finger snap echoed through the stone hall. The smoke cleared.
Furfur had never actually seen Satan’s throne before. He’d seen Satan himself once or twice in the early days, and he’d seen photographs (which he’d been told to shred and then burn) but he’d never seen the throne room or the throne. The honour had always been above (or, he supposed, below) his station. Satan’s throne, he noted, was large, though not large enough for the giant blood-red form that the Archfiend piloted on trips to Earth. No, it was a large throne built for a human corporation, a wiry minimalist monstrosity topped with wrought-iron spikes. And draped across its arms was Crowley, head adorned with a crown of ten horns, face split with a maniacal grin.
“Dagon, fetch the intercom, will you? I have an announcement to make.”