“Light was the beginning; Infinite and Eternal.Within Light, Thoughts formed.Yet Light was unaware.”
- Ain Soph Aur, Codex of Creation
There's no such thing as young anymore. Traditional, maybe. But what was considered traditional was changing and, with it, there was a shift in power in which both Heaven and Hell couldn't quite cope.
No one had time for tradition. No one gave time for tradition.
"The elegance is gone." her boss had said disdainfully, recently, or perhaps ages ago, looking down on the milling masses at Woodstock. "You'd think I would be ecstatic about those who say they embrace the devil, but they simply give me a bad name."
Ix was young then, but she was also young now. She'd been young for ages, looking on to Lily and those who had been here since the dawn of man with a sort of fascination. She had only recently been formed from the blackness and mire that was the human condition, or so she'd been told. Not as recent as recently. But still recent.
She'd walked on the city streets of New York in the seventies, finding stiff competition in the humans surrounding her. She'd illuzed herself to represent every possible fetish and found herself up against women and girls who were readily doing the same thing for practically free. No soul required. This place she called home no longer struggled to feed itself, but those coming in had surpassed the levels of darkness that the boss himself considered tenable.
It flustered Ix then. And it flustered her now. While these were only moments, really. Just moments from what she considered recently. It was effort to keep pace and then to catch up with the descent of humanity. Snatching souls was hard work, after all. Research, time, and effort to mark those souls with this destination. There were soul taxes to pay and a contract to fulfill, but even those demands had waned as the blackest of them were passed over for those more precious and unique that were of a lighter gray.
It was ironic, to say the least, that Hell had lost its fury. Ix supposed it had while she looked at the others jammed into the paper white walls of the conference room with its acoustic tiles and flickering fluorescents. The man who had illuzed this reality had been greatly influenced by the starkness of soulless businesses. Those businesses that drove their anonymous drones to do themselves in either by the long way, or the short way.
Brezzelrath was powerful, and his power unique, but the packaging was simply horrible. Everything he did took hours from you without budging a second. It was said that you had to practice your art, it was true, but the eighties and nineties had passed and this was merely a figment of a fading reality. Although, you couldn't tell him that. You shouldn't and wouldn't. His patience was incredible while as he leeched your time from you.
Ix curled in on herself during the lecture, she could illuze her age at will, but she preferred the edgy teen. The kind whom you never knew was either too young or too old. She'd overheard the delightful conversation many times as men, and sometimes women, goaded each other on. And she knew all of the ways to keep the illusion going by talking about high school or how she lived with her parents. Those were the casual games of cat and mouse; her favorite. Then after the deed was done and she sat crying, make-up streaming down her cheeks, watching them sweat with the guilt of it all and the decisions that had led them there.
"Those were the days." She mused to herself blissfully.
If they didn't believe that they were doing wrong, it wasn't good enough. It was important that they knew and, even more important, that they felt guilty about it. That was the the thing with these recent times, guilt had faded as belief and the fear of damnation was fading. With each passing decade, the walls crumbled a little more. The contractual agreement that were the foundations of of above and below slumped further into disarray.
"Faith is being lost. Our purpose is fading as humanity decides to follow their own whims. Even the our leader has said that humans have fallen farther; fallen faster than us!" The dumpy looking Brezzelrath shouted. He reminded Ix of a pudgy corporate drill sergeant, wearing a white button up shirt with thin black lines making patterns of squares. His look of hot disdain poured over the mixed audience.
This group was the one hundred eighty-fourth that he'd spoken to. You could tell by the clock on the wall that continually ticked back and forth between 3:04PM to 3:05PM. Time stopped for each meeting and there was literally no end in sight.
The dumpy man pushed up his thick, plastic rimmed glasses. There were sweat circles spreading gradually with a yellowing grease line forming where the sweat evaporated.
"Hell shouldn't be hell for those running it." Ix thought, disgruntled.
She popped her illuzed gum loudly, sending a ripple of protest from some of the classically devised demons sporting the usual: fangs, horns, goat heads, cloven hooves, and inverted pentagrams. They're ensembles had faded into little more than side-shows. There were better imagined versions of themselves in the movies on screens recently. Much more recent than recently.
Copycats lined the rows as well. There were at least a dozen stooped girls with mangled black hair who turned to look at her with various liquids dripping from her eyes. Each gave Ix a jagged half-smile to which she rolled her eyes and faced forward. Each and every creature here was a variation on theme that had been adopted and eventually mastered by the same humans that they were designed to torment. Ix grimaced as she looked to the podium and met the fiery gaze from the presenter who was now focused on her. Her grimace deepened.
"Ix! Do you have something to add!?" Brezzelrath's passionate anger shot out with a fine dusting of spittle.
Even worse, he knew her name. She shrugged from her slouched position, leaning back and spreading her legs provocatively with the tight leather shorts. Under those she wore ratty fishnet leggings that covered her fleshy legs. She had rested her deadly looking stiletto heels on the back of the seat in front of her. This made the demon now sharing space with those heels—a demon who looked like a member of a boy band—squirm uncomfortably. To complete the image, she wore a white mesh top and a black bra. It wasn't her usual ensemble, but it played well to her mood here. Especially here.
"You're on contract here, just like everyone else! If I don't have your attention, I'll keep us all here for as long as I want!" He shouted to the air in her direction, his wispy hair jarring from it's combed over position.
"Good hell, he's abrasive!" She thought, looking toward him with disgust.
She continued to her chew her illuzed gum and looked up at the ceiling so she didn't have to see his angry, frothing mug anymore.
"Better than failing out there, right?" Her voice floated toward the ceiling, but the mockery was directed toward him. And he felt it. Oh yes, he felt it.
His face was beat red and that wisp of hair danced like it had a mind of it's own now.There was stirring and the noise from the thousands crowded into the room started to erupt. The speaker saw that he was going to lose control of the meeting if he didn't do something quickly.
"This is a mandatory meeting! If not now, then I'll do it personally with you and the boss himself!" He threatened.
Ix chuckled. She knew, first hand, that He didn't had the stomach to sit through this.
The presenter stretched out his hand and dramatically called on a dark portal that licked greedily at the paper white wall behind him. The fluorescents flickered and spat sparks to reinforce the drama. Besides the tasteless subject matter, he was very good at the at being atmospheric.
"I'm officially reprimanding you. We'll be talking soon and forever about this mandatory training!" He bellowed across the room. Black tendrils reached out of the dark portal and wrapped around Ix, lifting her from her seat and drawing back through the air to the portal. She was angry at the scene he was making, but her flat look of annoyance was unchanged. As she was pulled toward the portal, she freed her right arm from the tendrils and extended her middle finger toward the sweating man which elicited an impassioned shout as she disappeared into the quiet blackness of the portal.
As the darkness enveloped her, that feeling of strangling, prying, and ripping that used to induce panic was little more than a massage. She landed with an unceremonious thud in a series of dark hallways that Ix recognized immediately. She was back in the Staging Area.
This place was meant to inspire one before going out into humanity. There were walls dripping with bile and blood, inverted crosses and goats heads with demonic symbols etched into the bones. Ix sighed and shook her head as she balanced on her heels and straightened herself. This place she was forced to call home had become a laughable mockery of itself, attempting to perpetuate a fear of something that no longer had a grasp on modern human society.
Ix began the long walk back to her room. As she roved the halls of the Staging Area, a gristly floating eye found her and began to follow her along. A tendril wrapped around her neck and burrowed under her flesh, finding it's way to her spine and temple.
"Why do you have to do that?" Lily spoke, in a hushed tone.
Ix could see through the telepathic connection of the seeing eye. Lily was looking in a mirror, naked from the waist up. She was pushing her breasts together, looking for non-existent signs of aging.
Ix grinned to herself at the sight, it made her chuckle when demons got wrapped up in any one of those lovely seven.
"Talk about practicing what you preach." Ix thought whimsically.
"You know that He's going to want to talk to you? You are one of his maidens, he's responsible for your actions."
"He's responsible for everyone in Hell, isn't He? And, honestly, who is He responsible to? C'mon, sister. Who do you really think is in charge?" Ix said, ignoring the pulsing pain that the seeing eye induced.
"I don't know, but I know who I'd like to put in charge!" Lily said with her lilting passionate voice, "Whoever devised this thing. God, it makes me look sexy!"
Through Ix's connecting she could see that Lily had put on the black bra she'd brought back very recently. Human's innovation had put their own to shame. She'd mimicked Lily's proportions while getting fitted making the store clerk wide-eyed as she measured Ix's proportions. Lily had always thought bigger was better while Ix preferred subtlety. It was one of the many ways that Ix and Lily differed.
"Yes, they're natural." Ix had said with an alluring smirk as she had leaned into the measuring tape.
Of course, she hadn't been working at the time, but she couldn't help herself. She loved her job. When she was allowed to do it.
"Have you tried your wings, yet?" Ix said aloud, still meandering through the staging area. She'd passed at least three clipboard wielding demons who were arranging for others to take on their various contracts.
"No! Really? Does it work?" Lily breathed out in wonder.
"Yup, the strap is low enough. It's incredibly sexy." Ix muttered with a smile, keeping her voice down as she passed yet another clip-boarded sort.
There was a sound as Lily's leathery wings unfurled. There was a squeal of delight that made Ix smile widely.
"Where are you?" Lily settled back in front of the mirror with a smile and then a look of disgust crossed her face, "Oh, I despise that place."
"I can never find my way out." Ix mused loudly, "Did they turn on the never-ending maze again? Whoever thought it was a good idea should be infinitely cursed."
"We had to, the minotaur kept trying to escape." Lily said, looking a little sheepish, "I remember that, but I'm not sure many do. We do so many things to try and fix little problems."
"Until you end up with one big problem." Ix finished the thought and scoffed.
Ix stood at a wall and waited. She made sure no one was watching as she counted to ten and stepped through into the blank fluorescent lit gray hallways. These were also supposed to be mood enhancing and were likely the work of Brezzelrath himself. She looked behind her into the darkness of the staging area beyond and shook her head.
"It's a good thing you know that." Lily said, "We've been unable to tell the new formlings because the minotaur has become something of a sphinx, riddling them into submission."
Ix sighed at Lily's recollection of time, looking absently at the unending grey walls.
"How long do you think I've been around, Lil?" Ix was annoyed.
Lily gave a small shrug as she pulled out a white bra.
"Why does white make me feel downright naughty?" Lily cooed rhetorically.
"Why did we decide that these blank gray walls were better than the rocky tunnels?" Ix asked, "Those were classic!"
"Don't get me started." Lily said with a throaty chuckle.
Ix rubbed at her temple unconsciously, feeling the seeing eye's tendril and wanting to get rid of it. This conversation was done anyway.
"I'm going to see if I can get a pass and try to get my hands on some other things I was talking with you about. Humans, love to hate 'em." Ix said as she wound her way through the gray halls.
"About that, you might want to lay low for a while. Brezzelrath, has already had words with Him about your behavior." Lilith said with a slight frown, but now she was focused on her lips, seeming to be determined that there were wrinkles where there weren't. "If he's had a minute with Him, he's had days, remember."
"Oh, I remember. And I'll be fine." Ix said, smiling, even while knowing that Lily couldn't see her face, she knew a smile could be heard just as well as seen.
The tendril released, worming its way back out of Ix giving her a painful twinge as it exited and floated off. The wound sealed up as quickly as it had appeared, it was one of the perks of immortality.
While Ix may be disruptive, she was always clever about it. Ix knew the He was always interested in ways of solving the problems He faced. These perpetual meetings were part of that and they seemed to be doing more harm than good. They were definitely doing her more harm, and this was something that Ix would not abide.
His passion had waned, He had even told her as much in the quiet times they had together. The grip of terror that He once held over so many had simply been distilled down to enforcement of contracts and union negotiations. All the fiery passion had been sucked out and turned into simple processes. The terror that He now relied on was that a contract would be eliminated, whatever that meant. She had never seen a contract revoked, but everyone spoke with a hush about it. Ix was one of His maidens, thought, and she knew she was a long ways from anything like that happening.
She stopped walking, watching a slimy, clawed menace moving toward the staging area.
"What are you supposed to be?" Ix asked the menace, curious.
"Ruvecraffian." The creature paused, it's many eyes blinking at the her question.
"Whoah, OK." Ix said, stepping back and putting her hands up.
She dabbed at the spittle that now dotted her face. The creature shook its head, clearly already despondent and continued moving down the hall. She looked at the creature taking its sad long walk to the staging area.
"Wait." Ix called after it then she clicked hurriedly along the floor with her impossible heels to face the creature.
"You can change shape. I won't tell anyone." She said, glancing down the hallway in either direction.
At least four of the disparate eyes that were focused on her narrowed briefly. The mass of teeth subsided to reveal a normal human mouth from which a moan escaped. It was a painful transition that she knew very well.
"What d'ya want?" A deep, defeated male voice said with a thick cockney accent.
Ix listened closely, reading the tortured soul underneath.
Self-loathing. She thought. Very likely an overdose.
The term emo was modern, but it likely fit. Whether it was one those who got lost in the opium dens or a millennial junkie, it all fit the same criteria. She'd been watching humans for a long time, now. Her part in all of this was a little more personal than the other demons. It was part of the reason why she had been so successful. And, yet again, why she wasn't allowed to work.
"So, what are you?"
"Lovecraftian 'orror."
To punctuate the point, a slimy tentacle flopped to the floor and slowly retracted into it's body. The eyes fluttered around sheepishly.
Ix gave a small smile. She'd often had that reaction from men.
"And, how do you fulfill your contract?"
"Fuck all, if I knew." A few of his eyes went to the floor, "I wander th'sewers, moan a bit, et rats, maybe et a person'r two."
"You're an evil presence. It's important work." Ix said, reaching out to pat the moist mass, but then thought better of it. "You inspire dread. Which inspires ... what?"
Ix was trying to discern the expression from the hapless shape.
"Th'campus loves me. They go on 'unts n' find me in th'sewers. Take pictures with their bleedin' iPhones."
Ah, the iPhone, or every mobile phone with a camera. This was even more recently than some of these other recent events. There's been more than a few meetings about this new human bred technology. People had come to accept the weird and horrifying and had remarkably less fear because of it.
"You haven't said anything to anyone about it?" Ix asked with concern.
"What 'appens if I do? They'll do some stinking 'orrible things to me!" The misshapen hulk shuddered.
Ix wondered what could possibly be worse than being ... that.
"Bloody hell." A smattering of slime and drool fell from the human looking mouth, "You're one of 'is maidens. Why don't you tell 'em? Fuckin' untouchables."
This surprised Ix. Her expression sent the wandering eyes of the hulk darting in different directions with the impression that it may have said too much. It began to shuffle backwards and Ix let him go without further questions.
"Unrest in the masses." She thought to herself.
There was a saying that flitted through her head: "As above, so below."
Among many other things, it had been explained to her from the pastor she'd engaged with as a way of explaining that the social structure of humanity was a reflection of the social structure that was in heaven.
"Ah, those cerebral sorts. How they talked themselves all the way into her." She chuckled at the thought.
Of course, humanity didn't know how wrong they'd gotten it. They didn't know that both above and below borrowed heavily from humanity. Humans were allowed lateral movement to explore things that neither side would ever allow. This experiment that was put in place had gone horribly wrong.
But, by degrees, both sides had fallen into the same maze of words that trapped all beings bound by certain laws and decrees. She'd seen it personally. Ix watched the frustration as He Himself signed his own soul away. Truly, it was only a mortgage, but it didn't matter, he was now bound to a contract just as every soul here was bound to His. It was shameful, but there had been extenuating circumstance that needed to be dealt with.
She thought carefully, "There had to be, right?"
It was a question she'd never been able to answer. One of the only questions that she was afraid to ask.
Ix continued along the gray corridor, carefully avoiding the illuzed slime-slicked trail of the cockney monstrosity that had started to evaporate as that essence returned to it.
The big boss would be looking for her. Perhaps, she'd let herself be found.
