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Benedictum of Nonamoira for the Demon Loge Haderaa

Ah, there it is. I wondered where I'd dropped that spindle. We gods don't see quite everything, you know—some things cloud our vision, even for old women like my sisters and I, who have seen very far for a very long time. Like the machinations of the mortals who dance on our threads... or the waters of the River Lethe, where this old thing must have rolled. It seems it's still a little wet. Perhaps, while it dries, I'll spin you a tale...   My sister Atropos cuts the threads of mortals short, you see, and I know she cut yours many moons ago. But sometimes, for those such as yourself—who have not lost yourselves nor finished your tasks—I find my fingers spinning new threads, fine and dark as deepsilk, describing your path in the world beyond. Let me read yours for you, if you have time to spare and sit a while.   Loge, for better or for worse, Crowley is true to his word through the ages. The contract that binds you does not quickly end. You spend eternity upon eternity in Pandemonium. It's a forbidding place: rock spires jutting out in impossible directions, caverns with no logical geometry to speak of, deep red-violet skies through which fly creatures made of oozing ichor and writhing tentacles and fire. And always there is wind—vicious, howling wind over which you must shout to be heard. The place is noisy and maddening, like nothing you've ever seen before. But Loge, you are adaptable as always, and in the noise and the chaos I know that you eventually find some semblance of home.   Your earliest tasks have been fairly mundane, for one with your gifts. You fetch this or that for Crowley, sort through calls from desperate souls, refuel his car. Perhaps you return a lost spindle to an old woman at her spinning wheel. Soon, he will give you a passel of damned souls to torture, maybe a dozen or so. The moment you look into their helpless, pleading eyes, you will know that the good in you has not yet been squandered. You will hide them away from other demons, deep within an impossible cave. They may not have much, but they will have shelter, and they will have each other. Crowley will not ask you to torture mortals again.   After that, sometimes, you will be sent to do battle with more devils, and on the battlefield you will feel yourself change. Your horns will spew fire, your legs will fuse into a snake's tail, your arms will split into two—three—four pairs. You will sprout a second head and feel it rage against your own will. You will charge through the Abyss, Carceri, Hades, and you will fight devils on the grand battlegrounds of the Lower Planes. You will never be quite so successful as you were against Nick Shadow, but you will learn to love the taste of devil's blood on your forked tongue.   Crowley, to his credit, will not push you into anything. He will make it clear that he knows how much you've sacrificed. He still looks at you with longing in his eyes, at times, but you will never be forced to be his concubine—merely his trusted assistant. I cannot see whether or not you ever embrace him again. Those futures are yours alone to spin.   And one day in the Courts, as you sit taking dictation for the Bailiff of Darkness, you look across the aisle to see another stenographer sitting beside the Bailiff of Light. There is age on their face and weight on their frame that you do not recognize—but you know them all the same. Loge, they do not chase you after seven years, but seven times seven. They grow old. They will look at you across the room with equal parts grief and hope in their time-creased eyes. Whether or not you embrace them again, too, is not for me to see or to decide.   My sisters do not apportion the threads of immortals, nor do they cut them. But after a point, they do... fray. Strand separates from strand, again and again, trailing out until my old eyes lose track of them. Since my spindle is still damp, let us pull one possible strand together, and see just where it might go.   After quite a while in your new role, finally, you are allowed a modicum of freedom. On some errand or another, Crowley will lend you his car and send you up to the Liminal Planes. It is quiet again, for the first time in countless ages, as you enter a desert you recognize all too well. There is an urchin standing there—a dark-haired human teen—arguing with a demon who looks rather like he could be your kin. For the first time in countless ages, a mortal memory strikes you. The voice of a mentor from long ago rings through your head.   "You know… it's odd. I've only ever met one other green tiefling, and he wasn't even a tiefling. The Chaperone. He's the demon who guides you through the bus stop to hell, so to speak, if nobody else will claim you. But he's a fucking dick. I actually like you."   Now, here the strands separate again. There is a path where you drive on. Inaction is always an option. But an old immortal meddler like me knows another when she sees one, and I doubt that is the strand you pick up and follow. Perhaps you take your fellow demon's side, and warn the young rebel of the danger their smart mouth may lead them into. Perhaps you try to charm the book of their days from the Chaperone's hand, and find some corner of the Lower Planes that might be kinder to the youth whose thread my sisters cut so short. After all, you still remember being young and angry and alone, a runaway with no gods nor masters willing to claim you at the end of it all. And perhaps, once the situation is resolved, you too move on... but perhaps you return, and one day stay, in the Chaperone's stead. After all, he does not understand the dead as you do. He was never mortal.   Ah, but here I go again, following the filament too far out from the wheel. Perhaps none of this comes to pass. You could toil away forever in Pandemonium, you could be sundered in the Blood Wars, you could rise as a Prince of Darkness and snare mortal souls for your own. Those futures are yours alone to spin.   But out there in the orange sands of the Liminal Planes it may well be, Loge, that after countless ages you find your true immortal home. It may be centuries—millennia, even—since you made your sacrifice. But someday, the flawed souls of the Material Plane might end their mortal journeys at your feet. The souls that no god claim see your face as they step into the next phase of their journey. And you will gather them up, sing them into the dark, and load them into the car before stepping on the pedal and driving them over the horizon, towards their final home.

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Oct 19, 2023 11:17 by az

it is 7am on day one of this conference and i am unable to get this out of my head. just. the IMAGERY!! i can feel every description so viscerally, it's like i'm there myself!   seven times seven years... i'm sobbing. they lived, they did it. aaaaaaaa   "But an old immortal meddler like me knows another when she sees one, and I doubt that is the strand you pick up and follow." YEAH,   "After all, he does not understand the dead as you do. He was never mortal." absolutely losing my ***ing mind at this oh my god. just???? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA   i gotta stop reading this before i cry into my mask LMAO but that last paragraph hits so hard. ***. thank you so much for this piece and this campaign.