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174: Basically, Sir, We Now Have a MUCH Clearer Picture of the Fact That We Have No Idea What’s Going On
🕑 Added 2025-12-02 03:37:06 +0000 UTC“This is a lot to take in,” said General Matthews.
They were sitting in a conference room back at headquarters. It had taken a great deal of explaining, re-explaining, and correcting each other, but they’d filled him in on everything they’d learned from Dazel’s interrogation.
Ashtoreth nodded. “We haven’t really had much time to process it ourselves, to be honest.”
“Let’s start with Dazel himself. You say he used to be human. How is that possible?”
“The Pits of Hell convert any soul that stays in them into a demon,” Ashtoreth said. “And not a hybrid of their former race, either—just a demon. Whatever happened in ancient times, Dazel probably wound up in one of the pits. Actually… I think it might have been intentional on his part.”
Matthews eyed her. “Why intentionally become a demon?”
“I’m not totally sure, but the thing is… over the course of thousands of years, there’s no way he hasn’t had chances to escape by now. He’s too competent. All it would take is one summoner underestimating him and he could manipulate or force someone into helping him escape. And he’s pretty easy to underestimate.”
“Plus,” Frost said. “There was his companion. Nadir. It sounded like they hadn’t seen each other in a while—but she came to help him as soon as she heard his voice in her head. He could have gotten her to help him any time.”
“So you think it’s intentional because that’s the only real possibility, but you still don’t know why,” said Matthews.
Ashtoreth nodded. “Yep! Though it might have just been to lie low. Transmuting your soul like that is probably the best way to hide out from anyone trying to track you down, and demons of the Pits are weak, but their malleable souls mean they’re almost invincible when you get down to it. When they die, they just return to their pit and lose all their power. It’s part of what makes them such good summons—low levels, but with a lot of knowledge and experience.”
Matthews considered this, then nodded. “And in that possibility… he’s been waiting for Earth all this time.”
“He wanted a human when I first summoned him,” she said. “He was surprised by me because he knew he was supposed to be on humanity’s side—what he called the losing side.”
“And now you think that’s because he wanted someone who would be easier to manipulate.”
“A day-one human,” Ashtoreth said. “A summoner who wouldn’t understand just what they were getting into with a demon companion. Someone he could easily use. Not me.”
“Am I missing something, or does it seem incredibly unlikely that you two wound up together?” Matthews asked.
“Missing something,” Ashtoreth said. “The system has something called the Arbiter that pairs a summoned entity to a summoner for companion abilities. While everyone debates exactly what values the arbiter actually has, and why it pairs two given creatures, it’s pretty clear that there’s a certain intentionality to the thing.”
“And the Arbiter gave you Dazel, or Dazel you.” Matthews frowned in thought.
“Yeah,” said Ashtoreth, seeing his expression. “It’s hard to read any one plan out of our pairing, though. Were they helping me? Earth? Dazel? Honestly… I really think it could just have been a matter of how formidable we were, given our knowledge. I was the most effective combatant on Earth’s side, and Dazel was the most effective familiar. We don’t need to make up an intent when we could just say that the system has a sense of fairness.”
Matthews nodded. “That alone is a lot to think on. Still—nothing seems to be certain.”
Ashtoreth gave an apologetic shrug.
“Do we know the timeline, here?” Matthews asked. “Dazel was Emperor of some pre-existing version of humankind, yes? The elves haven’t mentioned knowing of any cosmic human empire.”
She bit back the urge to suggest they might be lying. “When we made the plan to ask other immortals whether they’d known any humans, Dazel said that we ought to check back about five thousand years. The dragon we spoke with, however, implied that we should look back further.”
“The Eldunari Alliance is actually only a few hundred years old,” said Matthews. “But they’re an amalgamation of several civilizations that go back much further. I don’t know if any of the elves are older than five thousand, but their knowledge of history has to go back even further than their lifespans. The prospect of an ancient human empire that nobody knows about is… it just seems doubtful.”
“The timeline would have to be much longer than five thousand years,” said Frost. “But is there any reason that’s not possible? Dazel said he created Ashtoreth’s species.”
“That’s closer to ten thousand, from what I know,” said Ashtoreth. “But Hell’s history is whatever my father says it is.” She gave Matthews a significant look. “And erasing collective memory is probably easier than you might think. You humans can do it across a single generation—it’s not about making sure nobody knows the truth… it’s about making sure that anyone who does know doesn’t matter, and doesn’t have the power to legitimize what they know.” She shrugged. “My sisters and I were never really trained in it, but I know my brothers get training on how to rewrite history—it’s just another tool.”
But Matthews was shaking his head. “What about the archaeological record?” he said. “Either Earth isn’t our homeworld, or it is. If it is, how do you erase evidence of an advanced civilization, no matter how old it is? And if it isn’t, why does the biological record clearly show us as having evolved here, from neanderthals?”
“Hold up,” said Kylie. “Wasn’t there a missing link, or something?”
“I don’t think it undermines his point if there is,” said Ashtoreth. She furrowed her brow in thought. “He couldn’t have lied, though… not unless his mind has been tampered with, like me or the soulweaver.”
“Somehow, all of this has to fit together,” said Matthews. “But right now, I’m not sure it does. Do you think what he said about Earth has something to do with it?”
“He said he’d ruled Old Earth. Many kingdoms, he said. He said that every realm was like the petal of a rose, but that they were all together as one pale blue dot.”
“And the last bit is a reference to Sagan,” said Matthews. “Or seems to be.” He shook his head. “It feels deliberately misleading,” he said. “As if he said that to make it sound like Earth without having to directly say so.”
“He couldn’t have,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“It would have sound forced and pained if he’d been trying to avoid telling the truth. And if he’d been trying to deliberately mislead me with the truth, he wouldn’t have been able to say it all. I think he was just being kind of pretentious.”
“You’re absolutely sure about that?”
“Pain tolerance doesn’t let you circumvent a contract,” Ashtoreth said. “The only reason he or I could delay telling the truth when we asked each other was because composing a sentence actually takes thought, and we can resist that part while the contract compels us.”
“So there are other realms that are a part of Earth? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yep.”
“And we expect that one of them is called Pinnacle?”
“Seems likely. My guess is that old humanity lived in a place that was a bit like the Circles of Hell—an artificial network of realms. Maybe the other realms are where the archaeological record is, and this is just… I don’t know, their national park.”
“Earth—the whole planet—a wildlife preserve.”
“It’s a big cosmos,” she said. “If they were strong enough to wage war on the Authority of Heaven, I’m sure they could afford a nice planet like Earth.”
Matthews considered this, then nodded. “The most sensible theory I can come up with, then, is that Dazel suffered some horrible loss in the distant past. Earth was sent into the outer realms and deprived of the system, and magic. He laid low by becoming a demon in Hell… and has waited for it to return for a long, long time. Longer than our entire history.”
“Seems like the most obvious answer,” Asthoreth said in agreement.
“Can he get back here?” Frost asked. “Can Dazel come to Earth despite your filters?”
“I’m not sure,” said Ashtoreth. “If he stays my familiar, then absolutely. He has the same immunity to the filters that all of us have on account of the antithesis shard. After he severs his link to me, though, I don’t know if that will change. And if there are other realms attached to Earth, he might be able to reach them because I won’t be their monarch. I think we should try to keep him out… but assume he can get in.”
Matthews sighed. “More bad news,” he said.
Ashtoreth winced. “Sorry!”
He glanced over at her, unamused. “We were in a good position,” he said. “Sure, we’d joined the Eldunari in a semi-cold war with Hell, but compared to how things could have gone, it felt like you’d given humanity a miracle.”
“Uh. Thanks.”
“But now? We’re not out of the woods. Not even close. Some ancient king with a fallen angel in his back pocket has apparently decided he knows what’s best for Earth so much that he’s withheld all of us, kept us in the dark all this time—and that’s if he actually cares about Earth or humanity at all. And then there’s Heaven.”
“I really hope the elves know something on that front,” said Ashtoreth. “Because I’ve got nothing. Nobody can make war on Heaven. We don’t even know where or what to attack.”
“Is it reasonable, then, to assume that whatever empire Dazel had command of was more powerful than present-day Hell?”
“Maybe not?” she said. “Whatever they were up to, he lost.”
“And the only intervention we’ve seen from Heaven so far has been the archangels posing as the four horsemen… which might not have been Heaven at all.”
“Heck, it could even have been Dazel,” she said. “Though I doubt it. He wants me alive, after all.”
“That’s another thing to cover,” Matthews said. “As personal as it may feel for you… we are going to need to know absolutely everything about whatever attack Dazel was planning on your kind.”
“By sacrificing me.”
“Yes.”
Ashtoreth sighed. Of all the things she wanted to do, advertising to the Eldunari-influenced human high command that there might be an extraordinary utility in sacrificing her was not one of them.
But she was Earth’s monarch. She had a job to do.
And if she was willing to sell her sisters to do that job, well… she should probably be willing to die for it, too.
