Chapter 21: The Machine of Unmaking

                                    

                                          
25 minutes before the end of things
Azerath's Cell
"What a touching display," said Belzifer. "What a sickly sweet scene of devotion."
Azerath, poor Azerath, had gone quiet again, his eyes glazed with despair. "Let her go," he whispered hoarsely. "I'll do anything—"
"I wasn't talking to you."
Lazily, Belzifer strolled toward us. I wondered how he was so unaffected by the glaring whiteness of the chamber, then saw the mana that sparkled about his eyes. 
"Thank you for waking Azerath," he said. "I was starting to think I'd permanently broken him. It's good having him back. He is more fun awake, and quite a bore when I can't reach him.
"It took you long enough, you know," he added, with the easy, unaffected jollity of a wildcat trapping a shrew. "Though I suppose it is to be commended that you made it here at all."
That was when I knew this was a trap.
I think some part of me had known, or at least suspected, that my presence in Hell couldn't have gone unnoticed. The farther I got inside the Dark Prison, the more targeted the traps had seemed. At the time, I'd thought the different levels were spelled with some sort of dark magic that peered into your psyche and identified what scared you most. 
I'd been wrong. 
"I knew all this time you were down here," said Belzifer, confirming my worst fears. "Wandering the Dark Prison, sliding through the various circles of Hell, hopelessly searching for Azerath. I gave you some marvelous challenges, didn't I? How truly eye-opening they must have been for an angel of your delicate sensibilities." 
I stared at him mutely. There was nothing more to say.
He slithered toward me across the flagstones, his evilness pressing in on me like a vise. "I know it's been getting to you, the things you've seen here. You didn't even want to write them all down in your little book. Which for you must mean the world is ending." He glanced down at my diary with a sneer.
I said, "Let Azerath go."
"Do you want to know what happened to Ishtar?" Belzifer continued, as though he hadn't heard a word I'd said. "In the end, the Archangels found out about her and Azerath's sordid affair. They knew she was in love with a demon, but they didn't know which one. Azerath—at the time, his name was Tammuz—brought her to Hell, thinking she would be safe here. But I found her, Nirael. I twisted her. I had her do things no angel would ever do, all in the name of trying to protect him.
"She thought Hell was getting to her. She thought Hell was turning her evil, that she didn't deserve to be an angel anymore."
Azerath made a funny little noise at the back of his throat, a sound of mixed horror and pain. 
"So in the end, I planted the seed in her which led to your Mind-Wiping. She turned herself in to the Archangels voluntarily, of her own free will. A happy coincidence that in doing so, the Archangels passed on the identity of her demon lover to Hell and Azerath was Memory Wiped as well." He chuckled quietly and leaned closer, cupping my chin with his hand.
"Here's what happens next, little angel. I'm going to give you an offer, the same offer I gave you before. Agree to be Unmade, and Azerath walks free. He'll be allowed to leave his cell and do as he sees fit."
"If you do that," Azerath said, with a hopeless sort of hollowness, "I will go away and not wake up again."
Belzifer ignored him, his dark eyes fixed on me. "Or," he said, a funny smile playing around his mouth, "you can walk out of here, leaving him at my mercy, to Unmake or enslave as I see fit. With the knowledge that you could have saved his life, and didn't. A selfish choice, but not the first I'm sure you made in your... travels."