* * * * *
They left the Shrine together for the last time, and as they exited, Lilith could not help but wonder if Sargatanas had not brought her there as a last effort to get her to change her mind. He pulled the thick door shut and then turned to her and her suspicions were confirmed.
"You can change your mind, Lilith. If I do go back, it will mean that the way is clear for others. You could—"
She reached up and put a finger to his mouth.
"My love, this is the way it must be. As much as it will pain both of us."
He nodded and, as she watched, the beginnings of his armor blossomed forth in the manner of demons and angels alike, coming up from his skin like rising white magma, smoothing and shaping itself to conform to his body.
He shook his head and took her hands.
"Why, why do I reach for Heaven when it's already in my grasp?"
"Because the Heaven you reach for will give you that which you desire ... a world of sublime tranquility. Beatitude. That I cannot offer you."
Lilith paused to see his reaction. The pale armor continued to exude from within him, encasing his head and shoulders. He did not say a word but looked at her, the inner turmoil obvious. She almost felt that a single word from her could dissuade him from his path, halt the assault on Dis, and keep him in his city, in Hell. But she did not utter it.
"You are a seraph, Sargatanas. The highest of angels. You can never be anything else, no matter what shape you take. No matter where you are. You'll never be content unless you are back where you belong."
He let her hands slip out of his and she knew, then, that there was no turning back for him.
His new armor was nearly fully formed, its congealing surface swirling and blending and smoothing. When Lilith stepped back to look at him she saw a mountainous figure of power and intensity, unquestionably heroic yet almost physically unrecognizable to her save for his unchanged face. His sigils suddenly flared to life upon his breast, flanking the dark hole where his heart should have been, piercing the shimmering steam that wafted in curling sheets that were denser than normal from the armor's formation.
"We must go," he said. "Zoray awaits his Elevation. And then ..." The demon's voice traded off and Lilith tried not to think about the future.
"Yes, and then."
As they walked the darkened palace corridors toward the Hall of Rituals, Lilith realized that, even with her sadness at Sargatanas' imminent departure, she was actually eager to see the ceremony in which he raised the Demon Minor to the status of a Demon Major. An Infernal mirror of angelic Risings, it was not a commonplace event, and while she had heard about the ancient rite, she had never witnessed it in either Dis or Adamantinarx. The city was to be left in his hands and Sargatanas wanted his former Foot Guard commander as well equipped for the job as possible. She was relieved that Sargatanas had not chosen her; while she felt capable of governing Adamantinarx, it was a task best left to someone who had been in the city since its founding. He and Andromalius, the new provisional General-in-Chief of Adamantinarx, would be able officers of their posts.
Lord Zoray was, as Sargatanas had predicted, awaiting their arrival clad in the ornate symbolic six-winged trappings of the occasion and surrounded by his staff. Some of them would, as a result of his Elevation, be carried upward in station as well, and they fidgeted and shifted in anticipation. Zoray's eagerness, too, was undeniable, and when Sargatanas strode ahead of her Lilith watched the soon-to-be governor kneel and prostrate himself. This was to be Sargatanas' last official duty and, as she watched the heavily armored figure begin to fill the air around and over Zoray's form with line after line of fiery glyph-script, she began to formulate plans for the time when she would be alone.
BEELZEBUB'S INNER WARDS
For two weeks the Second Army of the Ascension swept across the gray fields of Hell with all of the incandescent savagery of a surging sheet of lava. Opposition during the long march had been minimal, but when small armies of the Fly had been chanced upon Hannibal had watched as Sargatanas' legions had flowed over the enemy, the encounters barely slowing the advancing souls and demons. He had no time for the niceties of negotiation, nor did the enemy seek it. It was a time of change, and the Soul-General felt proud and honored to be a part of it. Finally, his eternity had some meaning.
The landscape outside of Adamantinarx was something largely unfamiliar to those souls who had not been in the first great battle, and even those veterans who had grown quiet when they passed the limits of familiar territories. Their march took them past the Flaming Cut, where they saw the great cairn, and on into the wards of the enemy, and Hannibal saw that the closer they drew to Dis the more hostile the terrain became. It seemed as if Beelzebub, creating a first line of defense, had imbued the very ground and peaks and blood-rivers with his own anger. No town or outpost had been left standing, a curious fact, Satanachia had remarked, in light of the Fly's historical reluctance to let go of his territorial possessions.
Whenever the vanguard of the army approached the blasted remains of happened-upon outlying settlements, demon sappers were called forward and the rubble was immediately demolished. Any freed souls who were whole enough to spring unaided from the resulting piles of brick and who were not immediately amenable to joining the army were destroyed on the spot, but, Hannibal always noted, with little surprise and a thin smile, they were few.
When, eventually, there were more of Beelzebub's wards behind them than in front, demons and souls alike saw the air ahead, heavy with haze, suffused with a red-gold lambency, and Satanachia informed his generals that, due to its location, the source of this effulgence was most probably the Keep.
A scouting party was sent forward and after a day came back to the gathered general staff with news of the city ahead. Or, more properly, with news that the capital, in its familiar form, was no longer and that most of its buildings, like those of Adamantinarx, were gone. In the brief weeks since the battle of the Flaming Cut, Beelzebub and his Architect General had not been idle. The Keep still stood, surrounded by its ring of lava, but its mountainous form was now encased in an immense and featureless wall. And waiting at its base was an army nearly equal in size to that of Sargatanas.
None of this was comforting news, and the generals' silence reflected their inner misgivings. Hannibal, too, struggled to find something in the report that might point to a weakness in the Prince's stratagem. Every advantage seemed to lie with the Fly. Only Satanachia seemed unaffected by the circumstances, and he did his best to bolster his staff.
On a high escarpment just outside Dis' immediate outskirts, Put Satanachia sent the order aloft for Yen Wang's Behemoths to form up in multiple wedges in the host's front ranks. With this first battle order the Second Army of the Ascension would descend upon the vast plain that had once been Dis and, however the battle went, the fate of Hell itself would be decided.
ADAMANTINARX-UPON-THE-ACHERON
She saw him from afar, from a window in the tallest turret left in his palace. Standing upon the high parade ground, he was a white figure in a sea of ranked deep-olive flyers. Eligor strode at his side, as did Barbatos, each, she imagined, receiving his last orders. The wind, furious and steady, whipped at them almost as if they were already aloft, and Sargatanas' ivory flight skins flowed around him, billowing dramatically. The time had come and in moments he would be gone. Gone from Adamantinarx, gone from her existence. And soon, in all probability, gone from Hell.
Lilith turned away and walked back into her chamber, heading toward the area she had devoted to her sculpting. From the open window the sound of rank after rank of flying demons taking to the air suddenly filled the room, a loud roar of wings accompanied by a steady wind that rattled her sculpting tools on their small table. She would not stand by the window and watch him ascend into the clouds. She did not want the sight of him disappearing into the dark clouds to be burned into her memory.