This is literally the most bomb-ass D&D story I’ve ever read in my life oh my god.
Holy shit ._.
Some RP sessions have better stories than actual fiction. I mean, goddamn.
For those having trouble reading the text:
We had a campaign in D&D where we assembled a steampunk-ish time machine. After many sessions travelling through time, uncovering mysteries and learning harsh lessons about changing history, we had to stop a time-travelling cult from destroying the gods, and therefore the world. We failed.
Our machine crashed, we were stranded earlier than we had ever been able to travel. We found the Gods, but only a few of them were present - it was as if some had never existed. Then we realised - we had to become those Gods. Our party was entirely divine (Cleric, Paladin, Avenger, Invoker), and each of us was a worshipper of a god who had been unmade - and we were the only people in existence with enough knowledge of the forgotten deities to assume their roles.
But two of the players were worshippers of Io (in his twin forms of Tiamat and Bahamut, who would of course form later after Io’s ‘death’), and only one could become Io. The other would have to be the un-created Asmodeus.
So the most just, honourable and dedicated Lawful Good paladin I’ve ever seen roleplayed became the god of tyranny and evil. If he hadn’t, the gods would never have defeated the primordials, and the world would never have been completed.
In our setting, Asmodeus is every bit the epitome of evil you would expect him to be. Nobody but the gods who abide his presence know him as otherwise. He adheres to his role because he knows he has to - and that in doing so, the world can exist. He can never tell anyone his duty, and no-one who knows can ever discuss it.
In the farthest recesses of the Nine Hells, in a chamber sealed tighter than any other in existence is a pocketwatch of finest gnome craft with a photo of his family in it - his wife, son, and little baby girl.
They were killed by an orc army marching under the orders and banner of Asmodeus. Their deaths are what drove him to become an adventurer.
Goddamn
Imagine the other end of it tho.
Imagine that time has passed almost back to where they had begun. Asmodeus knows the date—of course he does—and watches as an orc army destroys all the loves of his life. Again.
He cannot, of course, go and comfort his former self. That would be the temporal-mechanics equivalent of sticking a fork in a toaster and would probably set the universe on fire.
But what becomes of the souls of the dead here? Most particularly, that of his wife, who, one presumes, loves her husband, and for whom a good afterlife would of course include the promise of him being restored to her?
I can think of two possibilities. One, that she is brought to the Paradise of Io, and asks after her husband’s fate, and watches as he becomes an adventurer, travels through time, and meets the fate he must shoulder to right the universe—at which point she would, trembling with some sort of hope mixed with fear, depart from the halls of Io to go and confront Asmodeus, whom she now knows to be her husband.
The other is that Asmodeus claims the three of them (or the one of them? perhaps she bargains for the release of her children to Io’s halls), and gives them comfortable quarters in his palace and shows up for dinner every night, and she is frightened and angry and grieving but unharmed, and she asks him why she is here, why is she in his power, why is she comfortable and not tortured, et cetera. And he answers things like “this is as it must be,” and when she presses further he asks if she will hear a story.
It may be some time before she agrees, but he will not tell it before then.
He tells her about a man, a follower of Io, who became an adventurer after the deaths of his family by a follower of Asmodeus. He tells her about that man’s adventures, about time travel, about a threat to the world and how that man and his companions met it and failed. And he tells her of the burden demanded of them, and the most terrible fate which one of them, the bravest of them, the best of them, shouldered: to become him.
The understanding that he is talking about her husband grows slowly in her, and the understanding that he who stands before her is her husband dawns more slowly than that, and the understanding that even though he is her husband, the man she knew and loved for his kindness and goodness, he is also everything Asmodeus is and can never again not be, comes upon her great and terrible like the advance of a glacier, and he stands up, not to approach her, but to unbar the door.
This path leads to the halls of Io, he tells her. She is more than deserving of paradise, he tells her. He will never bar or hinder her; she may go where she will. (This is a tweaking of the Rules, perhaps, permissible only because Io holds a claim on her for her own faith. Or perhaps, because his orders have killed her, it is his prerogative to do what he wants.)
She looks to the door, and she looks back to him. It is as heavy a choice, in its way, as his at the dawn of the universe, but with no press of duty in a singular direction to ease the making if not the consequences. He waits.
They say, afterwards, that Asmodeus the Lord of Evil has a wife. Nobody knows how, nor why, for she is kind and sweet, yet she is no captive, and she loves him. They call her the Lady of Mercy, or sometimes the Lady of Hope, and alone of all the universe he is said to raise no hand against her. They say he has a son, and a daughter, but these have yet to make themselves known. Sages and philosophers make much over the argument of whether Evil can love, but it is pointed out that Good can hate, and anyway, the other gods do not destroy Asmodeus when surely they must outpower him, but suffer his existence.
Asmodeus listens to their conversations sometimes, and perhaps smiles a bit as he continues his dread work. His Lady listens too, and smiles perhaps a bit more, and lays a soft hand over his, and they continue, jointly, to endure that great and terrible burden by which the universe may exist.
