date: late in the first week of the new moon
location: tridium temples, azazel’s private quarters
closed for @columbadei
A man was dead. Not simply a man, a leader, and a beloved one at that, Judas needed remind himself — and he needed remind himself often, for what ever could a mortal with a garden-variety heart and no tooth or nail ever be but a simple man? It didn’t matter; being greater would’ve made him no less dead. In his deadness, Judas reasoned, Cador now had all the time of an immortal — a gift, some would argue; thus, he’d surely feel no ill will towards Judas for spending his first first moments in the Holy Land not paying respects to the departed, or consoling those who’d held Cador dearest, but paying due tribute to his moon.
Great black feathered wings folded tired on his shoulders, he approaches the doors to Azazel’s private chambers. While the majority of his things remained in tow with the outstanding caravans, but few objects of value had made the journey at Judas’s hip to ensure safekeeping. Amongst them, he holds a circlet — platinum, encrusted in ancient opal and diamond, a relic said to have been plucked from the brow of a slain angel who’d cried as they fell for a God who could hear no more prayers. It weighs comfortably in his pocket, nested safe in a velvet-cushioned wooden box, primed to be presented to Hell’s crown princess herself. In sixty years of diplomacy with the Holy Land, he’d never been fool enough to arrive at Azazel’s temple without tribute. He’d be twice the fool if he allowed the proceedings of a humdrum mortal’s funeral to stop him from doing so this time.
She’d have been his first stop either way, gift in hand.. peculiar circumstances, or not. Years in the art of diplomacy brought many invaluable lessons; amongst them, a cornerstone — the people cannot be trusted with the whole truth. It falls to the skilled lips of the politician to reveal and omit, to shape a truth the people can embrace. That, it seemed, Azazel had learned well. The story she and Gabriel told of the Stars’ fall was folded crisply at its edges, trimmed in ivory lace, topped with the curl of a ribbon — a politician’s expertly-woven tapestry. This was not all there was to know. The air in the temples hung just a breath too heavy on his shoulders for this to be the truth of all truths. Behind private walls, surely, she’d throw the fantasy to the wind and brief him as if he, too, governed alongside the Sun and Moon. That was why she was there. He needn’t remind her.
He knocks twice, and announces himself with a loud, deliberate calling of “Azazel,” before he inches the door forwards and lets himself in, as if the authority instilled in him by his kingdom simply transcends jurisdiction — as if he can come and go inside the Tridium’s temples with the very same authority as the ruler he visits. (Ruler. It’s an endearing honorific on Azazel, and it fits just about as well as a child playing pretend, insisting on being addressed as Doctor as they don their dress-up gloves. It makes her smile, though, and keeps her loyal, so who does it harm to play a little pretend?) He greets her with a warm gaze and a wide embrace, body still in aches from the journey, but a practiced smile of wonder and awe ready for her all the same. As he pulls away, one hand settles on her slender shoulder and with a light turn, he meets her eyes. “Azazel,” he repeats, and this time, he sees her. “How I’ve missed you. By whose divine hand do you grow more beautiful each time we part?” A hand dips from his side into his pocket, pulling the dark wooden box from his cloak and presenting it to her. “For you,” he nods, with an upwards tug of his lips. “I can imagine its beauty on no one but Infernum’s pride.”
A veil of black silk, spun like the diaphanous web of a spider, still falls demurely over her eyes, and Fenrir, her monstrous companion, rests his white jaw at her knee. She runs her fingers distantly through his fur, her attention curiously captured not by the sharpened teeth of a beast breathing at her side, but by the display now arranging itself at the foot of the Temple. Azazel leans forward in her chaise to get a closer look. Upon tighter examination, she learns it is nothing out of the ordinary: a drove of mortals lamenting the loss of the Stars; Cador, who had faded abruptly, and quite inexplicably, from the black blanket of the sky. Nevertheless, she watches on perplexed as they begin to arrange themselves around the keystone, bowing their heads in supplication as if worshipping beneath ancient altars. Azazel smiles wryly as they begin to invoke Cador’s name, spoken with the faith of a man who believes in the holy powers of enchantments and blessings, cupping the candlelight in their hopelessly temporary hands. They turn themselves into sculptors, carving out mournful elegies with their scalpel-like tongues, and they do so with such ferocity that Azazel wonders for a moment if Cador might peer down from the next world to lend his ear and listen.
They wash over his fleshless, departed soul with love of the earth.
She is not a creature that has ever been forced to acquaint herself with the feeling of having something taken from her—true enough, circumstance had willed it so more than a hundred centuries ago. No. Her decadence is a tomb, and she has always been perfectly content to lay herself to rest there.
She watches the pallbearers with distant curiosity, yet feels no desire to know their loss. How fortunate, then, that she has something to distract her.
Cador was dead, by somebody else’s hand. That was an important distinction; one that separated the esteemed Sun and Moon from the scores of civilians, already taking to the streets to grieve. It was a secret they had mutually agreed to hide away, tucked away into the shadows like a loose thread at the end of a sleeve. Buried beneath the shadows.
But do not things grow in the dark? Hadn’t she?
As if roused by that thought alone, she is stirred by a gentle rap at the door. Then, a word. A name. Azazel. She knows well who hides behind the door long before he swings it open; she thinks she understands why he has come. Azazel uncrosses her legs and rises from her chaise, careful not to disturb Fenrir’s half-slumber, before making her way towards him, her movements the very image of sumptuous polish. “Judas,” she mimics, entirely unsurprised by his familiarity, the word like velvet in her mouth. She softens at the sight of him, as a child does when it sees its mother, and then by some frightening twist of nature she smiles wickedly, her eyes darkening in such a way that they never do in the company of any beast but the Great Betrayer. “By whose divine hand? Why, my own. But of course, who else is more divine?” She offers Judas a swordplay of her own. “Are you so intimately involved with your own schemes that you cannot sniff out the ploys of others? I must make artifices of my own, no?”
She settles herself back on the chaise, patting gently at the space beside her, inviting Judas to sit beside Fenrir. She continues: “I must, else you might leave me here, alone. You might forget me, leave me to become unimportant; unloved. I wouldn’t like that.” She chooses to play the role of a neglected child, spoiled by her pampering, ruined by her indulgence. It is not a role she plays particularly convincingly. Who could forget Azazel; the Dove of God, the Cherub of Hell, Judas’s own arcane shadow? There is so much of her in him, and so much of him in her—neither one of them can look in a mirror without being reminded of the other. “No, I am only being foolish. You could never forget me.” It is a statement that refuses to beg for assurance. There are no illusions.
It is then that he retrieves the dark wooden box from his pocket, and even before Azazel lays her eyes upon its contents, her throat hums in appreciation. Even before she can pray witness to its beauty, she has forgotten his designs in coming here. She flicks open the box and her eyes glow like two infernal embers, illuminated by the beauty of such a thing. Ancient and primal. Shiny, like satin. Of course, she cares nothing for the myth affixed to the circlet, cares nothing for the bloodied angel who might have passed on with prayer attached to their lips. All she cares for are the jewels fixed at its centre, and the way they shimmer against the twilight of her hair. She picks the diadem delicately from the box, smoothing her thumb over the precious stones, before moving toward her looking glass and placing it upon her brow, the mulberry smoke of her wings mirroring her step—like phantoms, like ghosts. She smiles contentedly at her own reflection before spinning elegantly on her heel, meeting Judas’s gaze. “It looks beautiful on me. Doesn’t it?”
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