A violet devil stood before a horizon of the desolate one-alabaster outpost of his enemies.
Victory. Burning, sulfurous victory.
The city would be theirs if there was a people or city yet still on that tan stretch of cracked-mud wasteland.
The setting red suns gleamed from behind his array of onyx horns and a sillouette affixed to his frontside. A stiff and hot breeze drove his black wings to life like a tattered old cloak.
And yet, the young devil squatting before him could see that his right arm was bent at the elbow, suggestive that such a umbra concealed greater secrets than shadowplay could withold.
"Come, Sig."
One of the stars dipped painfully beyond the reach of sight like an injured starship. The others became maroon in hue but lingered, solemnly, in grim anticipation of an equally yet unique fate.
Every evening sets like this, although once upon a not-so-distant time the landscape was beautiful.
Sterile, guarded, and beautiful.
The younger one, Sig, had been poking at insects. A particular nest had interested him once he discovered that the tiny venomous beasts had a certain tang to their stingers.
"This, Sig, is what we came for," the devil Malsaf purred. His voice was flat of intonation not for lack of appreciation but for a near-reverential respect for the tiny object between them.
The frail and pistachio-grey figure staggered to the devil. Sig hesitated and dusted off his posterior.
"Come. See. It is ours now. Don't be reluctant again today of all days."
"What is it?"
"It's a surprize."
The last sun remained. The others had slipped in to their sepulchural orbit beyond the ruins.
A few skyscrapers fell like sand castles. The crumbling stone growled like thunder.
Sig glanced behind Malsaf at the thousands of tiny dark specks swarming, spiraling upwards as they chased the last few glowing city occupants away.
"I don't like surprises. Sometimes they hurt, and sometimes I don't always come back to the same state I was in before."
"Pain. Disability. Dis-ease. Misfortune. I had raised you better than that. You are better than that."
Sig gripped his left arm absent mindedly. "I've been through more than you know."
His eyes drifted westward towards the mountains as he flashed back to tutelage under a certain Turasa, a troll hag of the Outer Hills with a certain penchant for brutal yet brilliant methods of instruction.
He remembered one of the worst nights with her when she left him by the riverbed, riven with parasites and torn from predators, as he limped back to her hut.
No Siggy, she crowed, you mustn't come near. You are infected, she would cackle, you can not come in to my beloved house!
And with that she would bark 'do svidaniya' and her quaint little hut, of which seemed like a beacon of pungent herbal-stink and warm glow of the fireplace, hopped up on a pair of reptile legs and lumbered hundreds of feet away.
He tripped. He stumbled and scraped his dirt-and-blood smeared face. The dark parasites clutched at his organs and clamped upon his bones, some as large as his arm, as he had lurched towards the only one cure on that tiny lump of drifting mountain far above Turasalands that could save him.
"No, Siggy," she barely whispered above her rasping chuckle, "you must endure.
"You must continue until dawn.
"You must cry and you must climb until your tiny, delicious little fingers are but bloody nubbins and your feet are no more.
"And if you give up, and there is any bit left of you from the wolves and serpents and children of Lelenlel claim your skull as a piddling souvenier for their troubles, I would cook you into a pie myself.
"Do it, laddy. Defeat the outside world that wants to take everything away," she said just out of arm's reach. For a moment he thought he could see a tear as she mouthed; don't give up.
But quickly her empathetic face of worry dissolved frighteningly back into the wicked sheila-na-gig scowl and tongue as she screamed more cackles and the hut lept up the sharp crags.
The lessons had been used on giant children for generations, in one hundred hundreds variations.
Millenia of giants had been subjected to these trials by nature, yet as far as living memory was concerned (and giants have long lives) no devils nor faeries had ever survived the ravages of the wild Outer Hills in the years of Gaia-Mortem let alone had been subjected to them deliberately.
Casualities of the land, sure, but as a test?
It was a test designed for weeding the strong from the weak, no matter the cost.
Without strong Turasa their peoples would have lost to the warriors of Aas long, long ago.
But Sig survived.
Some how, and some way.
He had been conflicted within himself before her lessons. The taunting by faerie children against his devilishness and abuse by devils for fey-ness seemed mild in retrospect, but HOW had he survived, and why was there no memory of that fateful dawn?
Yet still afterwards, life seemed clear and sharp in every way, as if pond sediment of perception had finally settled and all was visible to the bottom.
He had focus, and become immune to some of the worst hazards of the Realms Saal, the spheres of which Gaia Na and once-Earth became like just another home to him.
But oh, what a gruesome treasure lay beneath that murk of the mind, once clear and fresh as a newborn wellspring. Truth, indeed ugly.
The present moment grew upon him like flash-freeze and memories once so sure and solid gave way to the uncertainty of the present, the cringingly split possibilities of the future.
Sig looked back at Malsaf.
Malsaf coughed a dust-choked laugh. It sounded like a stone grinding on sand.
"And I deeply regret leaving you in the lands of your mother's family for as long as I did.
She may have made some unwise decisions concerning your care.
We'll discuss the matter later. For now, I want to make it up to you."
Malsaf made a blurred motion against his pants. "But hurry Sig! I will not wait for you as I have before, back in. The Pandemonium calls to us now. Everyone is withdrawing."
His hand half-presented something hintingly yellow to the boy from beneath his palm.
"We did not have capacity nor legality to occupy this outpost of faltering Lempan today. Perhaps, not ever. We must always be cautious.
Now come, Sig."
"Lord, what is it? Why won't you tell me what this was about?"
Dusk came quickly, or perhaps they had talked longer than expected.
The devil swarms crammed the sky now like towering thunderheads, infusing the air itself with the eldritch sparks of the gating rituals.
Smoke from the collapsing city had spread from horizon to horizon with but a tiny splinter of green-blue in the distance, yet more cities. Cities and peoples, but not on the agenda.
Ambient night glow revealed something round and glimmering in the devil's hand, but only at some angles.
Sig's natural tendency for rational, passive observation became overcome by his mother's inclination; the compulsive faerie curiosity, both flaw and advantage riddling the entire collective genome of fey peoples.
"This is yours. You've won it fair and square," Malsaf laughed. "Remember the time that you challenged me to Dualstaffing? That one, blazing duel after "
"Yes, but-"
"No. I was giving you my best."
"No! Why? You were the master of our moon. Our region Lord. You should have won."
"But I didn't. It's time you stepped up, boy. I'll even give you any staff of your choosing. You may have this gift, but only under one condition."
Sig glanced at his father's eyepatch on the left eye. The right eye was smiling with impish glee even as his mouth was compressed into stoic
"One request from me. To you. Accepted unconditionally."
He paused.
"One. Last. Request."
'Request' was Malsaf's word for a directive. A command.
Sig gripped his scalp and grimaced. The object was still half-hidden by Malsaf's dark claw.
He had learned centuries ago that every gift came with a price.
The greater the gain, the greater the sacrifice.
What would it be this time?
Yet another mission?
Yet another punishment for accepting a gift out of greed, or gluttony, or revenge as in the past?
Sig heaved a sigh and regained composure.
Malsaf turned his wrist quickly prone and opened his fingers.
Sig bopped the devil's knuckles with his palm, sending the shining golden orb upwards.
In one motion he hastened it away in his own claw and brought it to light.
It was an apple.
A modest, geometrically perfect, ideal golden apple.
The boy's eyes locked upon it. He could not move.
"Would you prefer a banana? I can make it a banana for you.
No? Perhaps grapes, then. I like grapes. Do you?"
This object. Legendary.
The fruit that never dies, and furthermore grants that very same permanence upon the devourer.
Now, and here, in his mongrel palm.
He knew the tales. Every spirit within Sol knows the tales for they had been told for nearly half a million years.
Those very same years of lore through to this very moment came weighing down upon him as if every one of his ancestors had placed a hand on his thin, pale shoulder, and pressed downward in barely concealed urgency.
Malsaf, in his usual archaic stance and crossed arms, seemed either apathetic to or oblivious of Sig's turmoil, "Oh, I see. You're allergic to golden apples of immortality, is it?
You always did seem to have a knack for exotic allergies, if anything."
It was Sig's binary decision right down to his very Seat of Ka, and even as his heart and chakras rebelled against the very concept that such-
... Sig bit a massive chunk out of the top, chewed, and nearly choked on it. His eyes watered from the strain but he pushed once more and succeeded.
He gripped the apple as if it were his own soul but he did not feel any change.
Immortality, it seems, is a longterm investment.
Unless, ah, unless this was just another trick.
Malsaf grinned, which was an comfortable sight to many due to its scarcity and made even more atrocious by his viscera-shredding foreteeth.
"Well done. You've made a very wise, cautious choice my boy. You make our people proud. But look-" he pointed southwest to a particular black whirlwind of devils that had finally formed the gargantuan runic insignia of their clan, a simple violet abstraction of wicked thorns and a twisted letter "M".
"Now we leave, for here comes the Benu."
No sooner had the devil lord spoken when the blade of a tremendous and ornate silver sword pierced the sky from above so quickly that the clouds fled in terror.
The lucky devils were parted like gnats while an unlucky few hundred became pulp, or worse, beneath its mass.
"Father. Here." Sig rasped from the sore throat, pushing the dimunitive appled back at Malsaf. Malsaf reluctantly accept it back but seemed preoccupied by the new arrival, a scant half-mile from them and their rotating clan.
"At first I thought it was a B.D.O. orbiting this moon, but no.."
"B.D.O.?"
"Big Dumb Object. A thing meant to inspire awe out of sheer size but no real purpose, like the statues of old Earth of the Ka'Meu'Nesta peoples. You know, the ones with red flags."
"I know the ancient history lessons. But what about this apple?" he pleaded, brow furrowed against the biting gale and flesh-grinding sands, "Will you join me in eternity?"
Malsaf looked back at Sig, one of his lesser hybrid sons, with amazement and puzzlement. "Sig, you have grown much. I've never heard any of my children ask such a lofty favor of me. But no, not for me. Look here, the Benu came all the way from Suthen with this... thing... as easy access to one of their allies. Who "
"Why won't you just bite the fucking apple!" Sig shouted, even as rainbow-speckled clouds of shining figures gushed forth from the cycoplean blade's marrowlike notches and patterns.
Every speck was a trooping Eshi of the old elves of light, or the disturbingly archetypal-human angels, the Benu. With overwhelming numbers, three out of the 5 devil clans fell into disarray, their ritual slowly erroded. Many devils fled to the two nearby column gates finally formed, both the Clan Malsaf gate and a brilliant lime-green one, but the glowing armies stuck to the firey darks like a mockingbird harasses a crow.
"Look, Sig. They dare to breath the same air as us, to risk infection just to stop us. Their mistake was in making this Lempan world an 'autonomous zone' and for that they will always be the cop to us robber. We act, they react, but always too late... although perhaps this time we might not get away with it."
Malsaf squinted his one good eye.
"You will see a sight like this once more in your life, boy, but this shall be the last for me."
"No! Lord Malsaf! Eat the apple. You can fight them, I know you can. Summon your Dualstaves! I will do mine!"
"Not this time Sig. This is the end for me, but not for you. For me to continue in this little game would not be... cautious."
"Then tell me what in Hells is your last request? The one I traded for this gift? Lay it on me," he knelt and beat his knees in panic, "Now!"
"Don't talk sass to me, faerie boy. I'm still your father for these last few minutes."
Sig wept. It had all been for this moment. Every loss, even now, as their tribes were smitten by the most powerful enemy in the Sol system. They were too powerful, too many, too pervasive and omnipotent to ever challenge.
This immortality would be the shortest there ever was in the history of sapience.
It just. Wasn't. Fair.
Malsaf gripped Sig's chin. It was the first time he had lain skin upon him since the beatings centuries ago, or the long millenium of regret and distance between.
"This last request," he said, "Isn't for me-"
"No," said Sig. It was entirely unlike this devil to behave in such a way. It didn't make sense. He knew what came next, somehow.
"Yes. It isn't for any of us but you. Not our people, not our clan, not me. It's for you, Sig. An unconditional gift. All you must do is-" he said firmly, and they felt the future come crashing down into a finality as quantum possibility narrowed to only one outcome.
"Survive."
With his last breath a spear as bright and as hot as a star split Malsaf's scarred, ancient body right before Sig's eyes.
The young half-devil flopped on his back, fist squeezing the apple reflexively as if it were his own soul.
When the dust cleared and his father's remains ceased to fume and sputter with dispersed essense, he snapped a shell-shocked gaze skyward into the clouds of dying, falling comrades and servants.
Floating like a rock island in the sky was a Benu commander of some sort.
It stared serenely back as if it had succeeded in slaying a wild boar after a sustained pursuit. A new spear began to form between its silver-veined alabaster palms, flurries of brilliant wing-like tendrils eviscerating the devilguard that quickly peregrinned to their fallen lord's belated rescue.
It locked eyes with Sig, that tiny and frail thing below.
Sig locked eyes with the impending doom, their ancestral foe.
It looked upon the spoiled holy apple with frothing rage.
