Chapter Eighteen: The Mad King's Summons

Chapter Eighteen -The Mad King's Summons

“Damn it, Azadiel. You reckless fool!”

Living in the Hells hadn’t tempered the man’s audacity one whit. Levistus crumpled the note, its hasty script a testament to impulsive folly, and tossed it into the frigid blue flames of the hearth. The parchment blackened, curled, and vanished into ash—an ephemeral, inadequate erasure of the evidence. Azadiel had gone, chasing a ghost, a whisper of a lead on Lucifer’s whereabouts that was likely centuries old. No plan. No counsel. Just the sheer, bull-headed arrogance of a warrior who still believed his righteousness was a shield.

In Benzosia, Levistus mused, such rashness held a certain dangerous charm. In her brother, it was a nuisance at best, and at worst, a liability that could doom them all.

With a sigh that plumed white in the frozen air of his receiving chamber, Levistus knew his next move. This brand of idiocy required a contingency plan, and there was only one other player in this game with the power and pragmatism to be of any use. He tore open a portal, the air ripping with the sound of fracturing glaciers, and stepped through.

The oppressive heat of Avernus slammed into him, a physical blow tasting of copper and scorched iron. The sky, a bruised canopy of angry reds and churning black smoke, was perpetually scarred by fireballs arcing across the horizon—the distant, unending artillery of the Blood War. The ground was a wasteland of black, volcanic rock and shattered war machines, littered with the bones of countless fallen demons and devils. This was Zariel's domain: a realm of eternal, grinding conflict.

He followed the sound of throaty female laughter to a door that was slightly ajar. Pushing it open, he stopped dead. The scene before him—Zariel, unapologetically entangled with her pit fiend lover—was a tableau of raw, carnal power. For a disorienting beat, the air in his lungs seemed to freeze. An image of Benzosia, fierce and pure, flashed through his mind, and a sudden, unwelcome heat coiled in his gut. He had seen millennia of depravity, yet this unexpected intimacy felt like a violation of some law he hadn't known existed.

What would Benzosia taste like? Honey and salvation, the treacherous thought surfaced, sharp and unwelcome.

He took a deliberate, silent step back into the corridor, his movement fluid, betraying none of the chaos churning within him. He cleared his throat, the sound a sharp, deliberate crack in the humid air, a formal announcement of his presence that gave them a moment to compose themselves.

There was a rustle of fabrics, a murmur of whispers and more chuckling before Zariel finally acknowledged him. “Levistus. What an unexpected… visit?”

He turned back around to see her perched on her dainty throne, the pit fiend now standing to her right, hand resting on the pommel of his sword. They were, at least, respectable.

“I do apologize for not announcing myself.” He offered a quick but courteous bow, showing Zariel the respect he carried for her. “I have some timely matters to speak to you of.”

“Oh?” she leaned forward, beckoning him closer, to which he obliged, not wanting their conversation to travel farther than this room. “Do tell.”

“Azadiel,” his eyes darted to Vesarius, “found a lead of sorts.”

“Vesa, leave us,” Zariel said, her tone losing its mischievousness. “Walk with me.” She eyed the mirrors along the wall of the room, gesturing for Levistus to follow as she walked towards a darkened hall.

Neither of them spoke until they were surrounded by nothing but stones and torchlight.

“What lead did our dear Azadiel find that none of us could have unearthed in the many, many years we’ve been searching?”

“He’s found a fading lead on Lucifer’s whereabouts, left without plans or even speaking to me of it.”

“Typical little Morningstar. He always was a brash one.”

“Yes, but in the Heavens, he had the power to back him. Here…” Levistus shrugged, a gesture of profound inadequacy. “It’s hard to say what power he retains, and none of it does him any good when he doesn't know the lay of the land.”

“So what’s our move then?” Zariel cut straight to the point.

“At this point, I have no choice but to let him learn the hard way. When he returns with the proverbial tail between his legs, I will need other, better leads for him to follow.”

“Spoken like someone with firsthand experience of Michael,” Zariel said, her gaze sharp. “So what do you need of me?”

“I require someone to follow him. Keep him out of trouble when he finds it—and he will find it.”

“The great Michael causing trouble, who would have guessed,” she quipped, a flash of her earlier humor returning.

“Azadiel is no longer Michael,” Levistus corrected, the distinction vital. “He left the trappings of his name and became ever more feral since his fall. He has no one to answer to anymore, no one to keep him in check.”

Zariel offered a cheeky grin. “Well, that’s your job now, isn’t it, Lord Levistus?”

The realization sank like a stone in his gut. In binding Azadiel to him, he had shackled himself to the archangel’s untamed, grieving heart.

“Damn it all.”

“I can assign someone to oversee him, keep him from the worst the hells have to offer, but we’ll need big brother back to take the Morningstar siblings in hand,” Zariel mused, a dangerous light in her eyes.

“That,” Levistus said, his voice grim with the weight of their impossible task, “has always been the plan.”

Scurrying footsteps echoed down the hall, silencing them both. They watched as an imp rushed forward, its arm outstretched, offering a missive sealed in wax.

“For the lady of the first.” The imp handed it off with a deep bow, then with a swish of its hand, dark smoke coalesced into another scroll. “And the lord of the Stygia.”

Zariel broke her seal with a sharp crack of a manicured nail, her eyes scanning the missive with terrifying speed. A low hiss escaped her lips. "The Mad King summons his court," she said, her voice tight with annoyance. "Immediately."

Levistus broke his own seal, the scent of brimstone and Asmodeus's power clinging to the parchment. His eyes narrowed as he read the curt command.

"Perhaps Beelzebul's screams weren’t enough to satisfy his wrath," Zariel continued, pacing now. "What new madness has seized him?"

“You don’t suppose he’s found out about our search?”

“Let’s not catastrophize.” Zariel strode back towards her throne room, swiping her hands down her skirts. “Shall we? You’re presentable enough.”

“I should arrive from Stygia, lest he connect us—”

Zariel waved her hand. “You’re fooling yourself if you don’t think that imp has already run back to report where he found you. More suspicion would arise if you went to Stygia first. Let’s be on our way, he did say ‘immediately’.”

The moment they crossed the threshold into the Malsheem, a subtle shift rippled through the hall. The architecture of Nessus was a nightmare of impossible geometry. The throne room wasn't a room so much as a vast, open wound in reality, a cavern of staggering size suspended over a chasm that fell away into absolute, starless nothingness. The air itself was thin and sharp, tasting of ozone and pure, undiluted power. Conversations didn't just quiet; they were severed mid-word. Hundreds of eyes—ancient, hungry, and deeply intelligent—pivoted to fix upon them. It was the silent, collective turning of a nest of vipers sensing new prey. Levistus felt their scrutiny as a physical weight, a thousand threads of calculation and suspicion weaving a net around him and Zariel. At the head of it all, of course, was Asmodeus, his calculating gaze a spear point of ice in the suffocating heat.

As soon as Levistus was settled and could no longer feel the chill of that scrutiny, his eyes sought out his queen. Honey and salvation. How his mouth watered just at the thought of it.

Her back was rigid, a queen’s posture carved from ice, but he saw the faint tremor in her hands, the stark pallor of her skin beneath the infernal torchlight. Her eyes, when they met his, were wide with a horror so profound it felt like a physical blow. What has he done to you? The thought was a venomous whisper in his mind, a cold, possessive fury coiling in his gut. She looked away, but the fleeting image of her anguish was seared onto his soul, a brand of failure. He had let her return to that monster.

Asmodeus stood, commanding the room to silence with his presence alone, the smile on his face congenial – almost genuine. Unease trickled down Levistus’s spine at the sight of it.

“My master alchemists have been working non-stop to discover a way to store the large influx of mortal souls the Hells have been blessed with,” Asmodeus declared, raising his hands.

The trickle of unease that nagged at Levistus bloomed into gut-churning nausea. Right. That had been him and Azadiel, hadn’t it. Whatever mad scheme Asmodeus had hatched, it could be lain at his own feet.

“As you may be aware, the number of souls flooding into Avernus has glutted us. The power of the Hells has never been stronger.” Asmodeus continued, Levistus looking over to Zariel for confirmation – was there that many? Her slight nod confirmed his fears.

“As your king, it is my responsibility to ensure this power can be stored for the leaner times.” Asmodeus paused dramatically, taking the time to make eye contact with each of the rulers of the individual realms. “The solution we’ve come up with is soul gems.” He held up a faceted ruby, the light reflecting from it causing ominous red shadows to dance across his face.

“You’re storing mortal souls in stones?” Mammon’s voice, usually dripping with avarice, was sharp with a rare note of genuine alarm. “The Almighty will not see this as resource management. He will see it as theft. As blasphemy.”

“You are not tossing a gauntlet at the Heavens, Asmodeus,” Dispater added, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that cut through the silence. He rarely spoke, and when he did, the court listened. “You are declaring a war you expect us to fight.” His gaze flickered around the table, a silent, assessing challenge.

Asmodeus scoffed, looking directly to Levistus, over his shoulder, his eyes narrowing at what he didn’t find. Azadiel. Of course Asmodeus would think that with the falling of one of Heaven’s greatest warriors, his taunting would go unanswered.

“Perhaps then, we should be prepared for war,” Asmodeus said, tone flat, then waved his hand across the table in a dismissive gesture. “The stones will be allotted according to need and the number of denizens in your realm.” He sat, and the servants bearing food swarmed the table.

Levistus took the chance to look over to Benzosia, expecting fear, even sadness – what he saw was rage. Unmistakably so. The hand that held her fork trembled, her lips tightened, the tic of her jaw visible from where he sat, four seats down from her. She met his gaze, her azure eyes flashing, mouthing the word garden before quickly checking to see if Asmodeus had noticed their brief exchange.

He hadn’t. He was deeply involved in feeding his new Herald, a morsel offered from his own fork. The gesture was grotesquely intimate, a public marking of territory. Basileus accepted it with a practiced, demure tilt of his head that made Levistus’s stomach churn with contempt. The pet, rewarded at the master's table. He saw the boy for what he was: a weapon of convenience, his loyalty as shallow as his pretty face. A weapon Asmodeus would one day aim at Benzosia. The thought was a shard of ice in his gut.

Eat something, wait for some of the others to leave first, then meet her by the garden. The plan formed, cold and clear, a beacon in the chaos. For the first time in centuries, a conspiracy felt less like a path to power and more like a desperate act of salvation. Her salvation. And through it, perhaps, his own.