Chapter Text
There’s no mistaking the footsteps shuffling through the door. Or the sound of a body sliding into the chair in front of us. Or the nailtap signal against the side of our (might as well accept the possessive) box. This isn’t a scavenger or an unknown schemer who has entered the room. Our Habbalite has truly returned.
“I’m back.”
“You’re back.”
This is as our [Mariah’s and my] normal routine dictates, but we find the repetition odd, given recent developments. We half-expected that she’d immediately move our crystal back into her chest cavity. After all, last time she didn’t put us back here until the last possible moment.
“How were things down here?” Her voice is crisp and clinical, with no sign of previous chumminess in sight.
We sift our thoughts into approximately two piles: First, what we plan to tell Mariah and second, what we plan to keep to ourself for now. What goes into the first pile is the news we’ve volunteered to pass on as part of our ‘host/hive’ situation. This is mostly auditory descriptions of who had been there and what specific drawers they had run through. An off-hand comment about laser sounds. A bit of harmless gossip about office romances. An recount of an incident with the demonlings who broke her printer.
(Well, broke it more. We’re not sure this building actually contains a 100% fully-functioning printer. If one does exist, it's not kept in this room.)
The second pile is more fraught and mostly regards the schemes of her coworkers as they could apply to her. The way that the demons down here still poke and speculate about our cage. The ominous talks about future Game audits and blackmail material. About a quarter of us feel bad about our omissions. After all, that information is probably more relevant to Mariah’s well-being than, say, a recount of who took the experimental super-glue. The rest of us explain that first, none of the information we’ve heard regarding any ‘schemes’ has gone beyond vague right now; second, saying anything before we’ve heard any concrete plans would only serve to make our Habbie paranoid (more paranoid), and third, a just-in-time warning may be more beneficial to our own schemes than an early one would be.
Also buried in the second pile: Anything to do with Mariah’s having been seen at the Central Lab. We almost do. That detail clearly matters somehow. The storeroom gossip network spent too many hours talking about it, through the unabated supply raids.
But we know also know we’re missing an important nuance because it was significant to them that Mariah was specifically seen at the Central Lab and not some other random lab in Tartarus. No one sounded afraid or envious of the implications, either. We interpret that to mean that whatever Mariah did there (or had done to her there) won’t show off our Habbie in her most admirable light.
(What kind of light would that be? A lava lamp, maybe.)
(Or maybe the whole Central Lab thing was some obvious joke being made at Mariah’s expense, that just flew over all of our metaphorical heads. We’ve noticed a lot of those get made when people get chatty.)
Mariah taps her nails against the table, in sequence. “Is there anything else you need to say, Kira?”
If we could trust Mariah to not flip out, we could simply ask her about her last trip upstairs. She might give us enough context—either voluntarily or through the gaps of what she doesn’t tell us—to figure out what happened. If only we didn’t have that Habbie ego to contend with. Like most of her Band, Mariah absolutely refuses to expose anything in herself that might be interpreted as weakness. So, while asking would be useful, we can’t broach the subject until we have enough information to assess the risks and put it to a vote.
(There’s no room for us to speak freely with Mariah. Our continued presence here is part of a project, self-imposed as it may be. We have to keep that in mind. We [Mariah and I] are not friends. We don’t just ‘hang out’ together for social reasons. Even if we find Mariah more sympathetic than any of the other servitors here, we’re [I’m] only friendly with Mariah because doing so is necessary for our objective. That is all.)
“No, nothing else.”
Any phrasing that came readily to Helltongue came with a dissonance gathering twist. We have to say that in Angelic. It’s a very precise and socially awkward set of tones to indicate, ‘Yes, there is a topic’ and also ‘We’re not ready to discuss.’
Mariah goes quiet. Her silence leads us to wonder how much of the angelic tone nuance she understood. Is it more than we think? Or is she just expressing a dislike of the language? Somehow, with this interaction, knowing Mariah better only leaves us feeling more puzzled. We know something happened to Mariah while she was out. We know it influences her behavior towards us right now. We just don’t know why.
What aren’t you telling us, Mariah?
—
Time passes, and we’ve spent it listening for clues in the silence. If we can narrow down the type of silence, then maybe we can figure out its reason.
Type of silence actually proves rather easy once we settle in and focus some minds on the issue. A true lack of sound is rarer than people might imagine. For example, even when we’re the only sapient being in here, this room is never completely silent. Even when the radio is off, there’s still the hum of machinery, and a buzz from (we presume) the lights above. Noise constantly carries across the other sides of the walls, or it passes in through the vents. Occasionally, when someone downstairs has reason to be particularly passionate, the noise comes up through the floor.
(We rarely hear anything from above us. Maybe we’re on the top floor? Or the upper floor is just more effectively soundproofed?)
And that’s just when it’s empty (except for us). When other people are here, there are even more sounds to interpret, a couple dozen people we can identify—not by their name or face, but by their manner of talking and the sounds they make just by existing. Of all those, Mariah’s sounds are the ones we know best. We’ve heard Mariah in a number of states by now. So, we can tell when she works and loses herself in the tasks the Damp Mop Djinn gives her; we can tell when she leaves the room and comes back burdened under the emotion of her Bandmates; and we can tell right now that she is anxious.
She keeps turning the radio on and off. She changes the station back and forth between the one she likes and the disco station. She sits at the computer and does short bursts of data entry, none of it lasting longer than a single song. She paces. She sits down in front of us, and doesn’t say or do anything except tap her nails idly.
Mariah wants to talk.
We wait and listen and wonder which of us will break the silence first.
—
“It’s not fair that Elohim are the ones who get Heaven.”
Mariah suddenly shatters the silence with her apparent non-sequitur. It’s the first time she’s spoken to us since we delivered our report to her. The majority of our attention shifts towards her.
“They’re the weak ones, and they should be down here instead of us Habbalah.”
We could argue, but we instead give Mariah space to ramble. She’s on this rant for a reason, and eventually she’ll get to it. Maybe.
“They are too easy to resonate, and they’re not used to riding through strong emotions. Their actions are far too bound up in how other people will react to them. They should stay in Hell until they evolve into Habbalah and realize that it’s much more effective to decide how people will react. Then, they’ll get to Heaven and deserve it.”
We were not expecting this topic to open up so soon. Perhaps, that explains some of her dodginess. We cautiously venture out a few metaphorical butterflies. “Would you even want to see Heaven?”
“No!” Mariah’s denial comes too quickly. “It’s just unfair that Elohim get Heaven, and us Punishers are stuck in Hell with the demons. We shouldn’t have to sacrifice ourselves and become lesser just to get the same opportunity. We should at least get the ability to visit when we want to.” She takes a deep breath. Her fingers thump hard against the case in unison. This is one of those Habbie sore spots, and Mariah isn’t immune to it. (She’s not immune to any of them, not really, but this is a sorer spot than most.) “It’s because we’re not allowed in Heaven that no one from there understands we’re actually angels. Even you don’t Kira. You’re smart enough not to say so, but I know you don’t. And you should, since you’re also an Angel who serves in Hell.”
(Are we serving in Hell? Only in the sense of seducing a little Habbalah to the bright side in a completely platonic manner. There’s also a big gap between ‘serving in Hell’ and ‘serving Hell’. That ‘in’ carries a lot of weight for such a little word.)
That’s not useful to think about right now. What is useful is figuring out why Mariah chose to break the silence with this topic specifically. The Elohite rant isn’t exactly new. It comes up any time the possibility of Redemption gets mentioned in any context. What is new is that Mariah initiates the conversation. It changes the context.
“Have you ever talked with a Power?” This question of ours isn’t new either. It’s a standard question we ask at the end of one of these rants. The standard answer is “No.” But, well, no standard lasts forever.
(Some Archangels in Heaven might wish that were the case. But no. Even they have to accept the inevitability of change.)
Mariah goes silent. Then, she starts again, her voice quiet and close like she’s taking us into her confidence. “I ran into one last time I was on the Corporeal. I caught someone he knew, and he and his friends wanted it back. If I’d had enough essence on me, I’d have given him something to feel.”
Finally, some context! That could explain the oddity.
“What happened instead?”
“He offered to let me come back to a Tether with him and work for his Archangel. I told him ‘no’ of course. I don’t want to be an Elohite. I’m proud to be an angel who serves in Hell. I like what I have here.” She pauses and grazes her fingernails across our case. Her voice goes soft. “Who I have here.”
By ‘who’ she means us, and the sentiment is almost sweet. But when Mariah says ‘have’, she doesn’t merely refer to our company in the way that someone has friends over to visit for a few days. She means ‘have’ in the sense of personal ownership in the way that one has a dog chained-up in the yard. It would be surplus of imagination (delusion) to seriously consider otherwise.
We [Mariah and I] fall quiet. We [Mariah exclusive] stay quiet because this topic of conversation calls for a level of care we can’t give it while processing the new information coming in and figuring out what exactly she’s not telling us (we don’t think she’s lying, but she’s clearly skipping over a crucial detail or two). And Mariah, we realize, stays silent because she wants to hear our response.
It’s a specific response that she wants, too. Mariah doesn’t share this information out consideration for us. She’s not looking to clue us in, and she’s not seeking our perspective either. She’s fishing for a line we can’t give her: “You don’t have to lose me. We could be together in Heaven.”
Our minds pause all at once. Is that all it would take to get her to run?
We know Helltongue well by now. We could TWIST those words to sound sincere, and Mariah might even believe us this time. She knows how far we’ll go—have gone in the recent past—to avoid untruths. This could be the fib worth taking the risk for. If she believes us, then our freedom is all but guaranteed. However, if she doesn’t believe us it’ll be proof (to her) that we’re unworthy of her, and she can do what her delusions of holiness tell her to do and leave us here to whatever unhappy ending we deserve.
But even if she does believe, we would know deep down. More importantly, the Symphony would know. We’d still get one more note of dissonance, either way.
And, still, some of us are tempted by the chance.
We consider the situation. Maybe staying with Mariah would be plausible. Could we convince ourself of the plausibility enough to avoid the dissonance itself, if not the icky feeling that always happen when we just barely manage to skirt that line between truth and lies? We map out a scenario. Maybe we drag Mariah over to one of our [Creation’s] tethers and round up our Archangel long enough for him to explain the truth to her. Then, Mariah would become an Elohite, and, if so, we might stick around for a bit and show her the ropes.
(Assuming Creation would even be the right Word for her.)
It’s not impossible. Even if most of us feel sick at the thought of having to stick with our captor even after our hypothetical escape from Hell itself, we could probably stand it. We think. Maybe that would be the best possible ending. She becomes an Elohite of Creation, and we show her around. We could introduce her to our friend Cole, who could sympathize with any adjustment pains she’ll have.
(Assuming Cole didn’t hate her on sight for, well, this.)
We might not even have to stick around for long. Elohim (those we’ve known anyway) prioritize their social contacts differently from Habbalah. There are surely logical reasons why sticking with us post-redemption would be a bad idea, starting with Mariah’s need to find her own path in Heaven and ending with the conflicted feelings she’d sense coming off of us. It’s feasible that Elohite Mariah might just leave us on her own.
Maybe.
But, no matter how that situation works out, Mariah can’t have us in Heaven the way she currently does in Hell. She owns us here, and Heaven doesn’t work like that. One angel can’t belong to another on such an intimate, involuntary level. We (angels) belong to an Archangel, in the sense that our Heart resonates to their Word. We owe them our service, but they don’t ‘own’ us. We [I, specifically] were made as a reliever by our mother. She then raised us to the full nine-forces. In that sense we might belong to her as a member of her family group. Even then, however, we could never be owned by her the way Mariah does here. She couldn’t just lock us away in a box and hide us from the outside world.
(Not that she would have ever wanted to. Children grow up and move on. She understands that.)
No, what Mariah wants would still be a lie. And yet, some of us ask, “What’s wrong with a second note of Dissonance?”
(It’s an added brush stroke on a painting we don’t want to complete.)
This won’t last forever. This imprisonment. This chance to get out. Both credited to this terrible adolescent Punisher who waits for us to say something. Someone will confiscate the box. Mariah will get caught by the Game, or by Vapula himself, or by angels who won’t just let her run back to Hell. Every bit of hope we can grab onto down here is fragile and tenuous; every possibility we have for freedom balances on thin and fraying threads. Something will break.
If something has to break, then let her redeem without us. That would be best, but that would also leave us here, without any chance for escape. And we are, we think, a bit too selfish to wish for that just yet.
Maybe the dissonance would be worth it.
(We keep coming back to that thought.)
We’ve lingered at one for years now—the one we received for learning Helltongue, which we can regret in principle but not in practice. And now we have the one lie that, if we can speak it convincingly enough, won’t require a repeat. Except not quite half of us believe in it, and the parts that are willing to take dissonance are still in the minority.
In the end, none of us have anything useful and true to say. So, we don’t.
So, Mariah sits in silence to wait for that lines her pet won’t say, and we sit in silence to wait for Mariah to realize that we won’t say those lines, and we know the realization has hit when we hear the sound of Essence releasing into the Symphony.
A specific shade of Desolation runs through straight into our Forces, like watercolor on good paper. It’s a sharp stab of never-to-be-requited love and the deep betrayal of rejection from someone we can’t run away from. We ache to reach out to Mariah and tell her we’re sorry and of course we can be together. We’d do anything to stay with her.
(We know the feelings aren’t real. We know the words wouldn’t be any less a lie if we speak them now. That doesn’t make keeping our mouths shut any more bearable.)
We know we’ve hurt our beloved Mariah, and now she offloads that pain onto us.
Our emotion-clouded minds can’t help but think that’s only fair.
—
The Desolation has come and gone, and we’re ready to talk again. However, Mariah has slid back into her silent treatment. If our hearing were less finely-tuned, we would have seriously considered the possibility that Mariah had gone back up to the Corporeal without notifying us. What she would do up there (another quota, gone Elohim, gone Renegade) would be left to our speculation.
But we can still hear her specific sounds—her too hard pencil scratching against her notepad, the loud clacks as she types away at the keyboard, and her shuffle that always falls between Habbalite and Djinn movement. She’s not as restless as she was earlier. These are the more usual sounds we hear from her. The only sign that her thoughts still linger on us is is the hesitant way her fingers slide against our case, like she can’t decide whether she wants to talk to us or continue to pretend we don’t exist. The Damp Mop Djinn comes in twice to pass on a new assignment, and Mariah accepts them quietly.
(The Damp Mop Djinn mutters about how lucky Mariah is that they’re well-supplied right now. But otherwise, she doesn’t seem too bothered by—whatever has caused this change in her minion.)
Mariah comes and goes, but never long enough to bring in demons to eavesdrop upon. She’s probably doing her usual, going to the cafeteria or to view the angels in the secured area. We’re pretty sure she’s left to use the Paper Shredder at least once.
(We wonder if we can somehow convince it to destroy our prison…)
All the while, that itch of a missing nuance grows stronger.
What isn’t Mariah telling us?
—
We’re still puzzling over what we might be missing when the next message from our mother comes in via Celestial Tongues. We always find them little bright spots in the metaphorical darkness here (nothing is dark from a visual perspective, just blank) even when the messages themselves don’t say much of substance. We are neither dead nor fallen. We need to hang on. We can’t give up.
This next message comes in blazing with neon-bright significance.
Cole saw your Heart. It’s talking with the Warriors. Don’t give up.
If we could move our eyes, most would have widened at that.
Sometimes, all it takes is one line in an unexpected place to bring the whole picture together.
—
The final clue is “the Warriors,” which implies a certain sequence of events. Who learned about what first, and who passed the information to whom and some such.
Cole checked our heart and talked to our mother. But how did Cole know to check our Heart?
Sure Cole could have asked our Mother about our whereabouts, and Mother would tell it what she could (both in terms of absolute knowledge and permission from Judgment). That might be enough to make Cole seek it out, and report back to our mother. However, if the flow of information had come from that direction, there would be no reason for Cole to mention talking with Warriors to our Mother. War does not share its battle plans with most other words, even less so with Judgment, and that habit has definitely spread to Creationers in War’s service. The ones we’ve met anyway.
Which means the information must have come to Cole from the other direction. Not Judges, but Warriors, and it must have been someone who could identify the common link between Mariah and Cole well enough to seek out the Ofanite.
Which means that the Elohite Mariah met was most likely an Elohite of War. And if the connection was made between Mariah and Cole via their common acquaintance (us), there was at least one more angel involved in the conversation.
(Or two more, considering the escaped Kyriotate.)
We already figured out that Mariah hadn’t triumphed against the Elohite. She would have bragged about it, if she had, the way she does about anything that proves her right. But neither did she actually tell us the whole story. Habbalah don’t volunteer weakness. She refused his offer, and that was that. If anything else happened, how would the Kyriotate in the box even find out?
Except that gossip gets around.
Mariah was seen at the Central Lab. Central Lab, as in the facility at the center of Tartarus, the inner domain of Vapula, where the Hearts of his servitors are stored because demons don’t get to keep their own Hearts in the way actual angels do. Mariah wasn’t just seen at the Central Lab, the way that a demon on an assignment might be seen somewhere. Mariah was seen at her Heart, specifically and no one doing the gossip could predict when she would be getting back.
Which means, there’s more to the story, and we need to talk to her about it. Or maybe she needs to talk to us about it. Either way, Mariah can’t bring the topic up herself. Her Habbie pride won’t let her. She needs us to figure it out and do her this one favor.
Very well, Mariah. After all, in a manner of speaking, you are our host.
—
We’ve done brief experiments in echolocation here in Tartarus, which have succeeded somewhat in relieving some of our boredom, and not at all in helping us construct actual images from bouncing soundwaves. There’s too many variables to account for, and too few ways to distinguish one input from another. However, there is one tangential skill we’ve picked up on as a result of those experiments. Occasionally, it even has a use.
Tchk-tchk-tchk-tchk. Tchk-tchk-tchk-tchk. Tchk-tchk-tchk-tchk.
Mariah hasn’t actually tapped our case again, so strictly speaking, it’s not safe for us to speak. But we can finally make machine noises convincing enough that demonlings don’t try and figure out who could be in the room with them. It’s even fooled actual fledged Demons, who have dismissed it as random radio interference.
But Mariah, who is doing data entry across from us and still pointedly ignores our presence, knows this isn’t a machine noise.
We do it again. Tchk-tchk-tchk-tchk. Tchk-tchk-tchk-tcck. EEEeeee.
That last screech is keyed to match the frequency and tone of a typical Vapulan deadline alert in the same way that a cat’s meow is tuned to mimic the cry of a human baby. It is meant to stick in the mind, catch the attention, and be very, very annoying if left unacknowledged.
We’re preparing to do the call a third time when her chair legs slide across the floor towards us and away from the computer. Her voice is irritable, as though we’ve pestered her for hours. “No one’s here, Kira, you can just get to the point.”
Okay, then. Might as well do what she asks. What she’s been waiting for, even if she doesn’t realize she’s been waiting for it.
“You weren’t able to get away after turning down the Elohite’s invitation, were you?”
We hear the sound of the chair turning around and her nails scraping against the box. We slide forward in space, we realize that she’s clutching us to her—not as part of her, like our crystal in her chest—but like an embrace.
“No,” Mariah admits. “The Kyrio had at least one Force left over, they were able to lead a rescue party to the location—the Elohite, plus a Mercurian and a Malakite. They ordered me to release it, and I did, really, but they weren’t going to leave it at that.”
No, not with a Malakite, they wouldn’t.
“And that’s when the Elohite gave you an invitation to serve their Archangel?”
Nails tap from behind us. “The implication being that they would drag me to a Heavenly Tether regardless, but I could choose to serve their Archangel instead of simply burning up.”
“So why did they send you into Trauma instead?”
Mariah goes silent, and we can feel that this is what she needed to talk about.
“The Mercurian and the Elohite saw you in me. Whatever you’re doing to me. And I don’t know what exactly that is or how you’re doing it, but it’s changing me. From the moment my Forces came together, I’ve had the voice of God in my head telling me what to do, who to punish, how to punish them. And even after everything else I’d gone through, the Discord, the experiment, the assignment change, it still spoke to me loud and clear. It told me to take you and make you mine.”
All of us fixate on her, like a flock of starlings moving in unison. Not a single mind listens to anything but her. Does Mariah know how completely our focus falls to her now?
“But now, when it comes to you, that voice contradicts itself. If I was willing to go backwards and become an Elohite, I could have left with them, but I didn’t because that would have meant leaving you behind and never getting to be with you again. And I can’t have that…and I. Don’t. Know. Why!” Her palm hits the table, and then the Habbie takes a deep breath.
She sounds more composed when she speaks again. “After I freed their Domination, they tied me up in a motel room and voted on my fate. The Malakite and the Kyriotate wanted to burn me up in a Tether locus, but the Elohite and the Mercurian saw our connection deeply enough that they advocated for sending me to Trauma instead. They sent me back to you.”
There’s a tension in the room that almost reverberates through our crystal. It’s as close to physical sensation as anything we’ve felt since that one mistaken possession attempt that trapped us here in the first place.
“And you know, it’s funny. I know you’re changing me except I can’t tell if you’re making me stronger or weaker; if you actually want to help me or if you’re just manipulating me for your own benefit. Maybe it doesn’t even matter. But I realized, you’ve made yourself part of me now, and whatever happens to me will happen to you too. Just know that, Kira.”
And with that, she drags her chair back to her computer and starts typing like the whole conversation never happened. Mariah finally seems to have said what she needed to say to us, and we’re left alone to dwell on her words.
We can’t tell if she means that last bit as a promise or a threat.
We’re not sure she can either.